The Sweetest Dream (46 page)

‘We could build a reading room with that, or an infant's
nursery,' said Sylvia.

‘We must not look a gift horse in the mouth,' said the
priest.

‘I'm looking at it in the mouth,' said Sylvia. She was scanning
the list of books. Andrew had given her list to his secretary, who
had mislaid it. So she went to the nearest big bookstore and
ordered all the bestsellers, feeling complacent, and even sated, as
if she had actually read them herself: she did fully intend to start
reading soon. The novels were all unsuitable for Sylvia's library.
In due course they were given to Edna Pyne, who complained
continually that she had read all her books a hundred times. ‘To
her who has, it shall be given.'

The history of the hospital Andrew did not hear was this.

During the Liberation War this whole area, miles of it, had
been full of the fighters, because it was hilly, with caves and
ravines, good for guerilla war. One night Father McGuire had
woken to see standing over him a youth pointing a gun at him,
and saying, ‘Get up, put your hands up.' The priest was stiff with
sleep and slow at the best of times, and the youth swore at him
and told him he would be shot if he didn't hurry. But this was a
very young man, eighteen, or even younger, and he was more
frightened than Father McGuire: the rifle was shaking. ‘I'm
coming,' said Father McGuire, clumsily getting out of bed, but
he couldn't keep his hands up, he needed them. ‘Just take it easy,'
he said, ‘I'm coming.' He put on his dressing-gown while the
gun waved about near him, and then he said, ‘What do you want?'

‘We want medicine, we want
muti
. One of us very sick.'

‘Then come to the bathroom.' In the medicine cabinet were
not much more than malaria tablets and aspirin and some bandages.
‘Take what you need,' he said.

‘Is that all? I don't believe you,' said the youth. But he took
everything there was, and said, ‘We want a doctor to come.'

‘Let us go to the kitchen,' said the priest. There he said, ‘Sit
down.' He made tea, put biscuits out, and watched while they
vanished. He took a couple of loaves of Rebecca's new bread and
handed them over, with some cold meat. These things vanished
into a cloth bundle.

‘How can I get a doctor here? What shall I say? You people
keep ambushing this road.'

‘Say you are sick and need a doctor. When you expect him
tie a bit of cloth to that window. We shall be watching and we'll
bring our comrade. He's wounded.'

‘I'll try,' said the priest. As the youth disappeared into the
night he turned to threaten: ‘Don't tell Rebecca we were here.'

‘So you know Rebecca?'

‘We know everything.'

Father McGuire thought, then wrote to a colleague in Senga,
saying a doctor was needed for an unusual case. He should drive
out in daytime, not stop the car for anything, and be sure he had
his gun with him. ‘And be careful not to alarm our good sisters.'
A telephone call: a discreet exchange, apparently about the
weather and the state of the crops. Then, ‘I shall visit you with
Father Patrick. He has had medical training.'

The priest tied a cloth to the window and hoped Rebecca did
not notice. She said nothing: he knew she understood much more
than she let on. The car arrived with the priests in it. That night
two guerillas appeared, saying their comrade was too ill to be
moved. They needed antibiotics. The priests had brought
antibiotics, together with a good supply of medicines. They were all
handed over, while Father Patrick prescribed. Again the larder
was emptied of what was left while two half-starving young men
had eaten as much as they could.

Father McGuire went on living in this house that anyone
could enter at any time. The nuns lived inside a security fence,
but he hated it: he said he felt like a prisoner even going inside
it to visit them. In his own house, he was exposed, and he knew
he was watched. He expected to be murdered: white people had
been killed not far away. Then the war ended. Two youths came
to the house and said they were there to say thank you. Rebecca
fed them, when she was ordered to do it. She said to the priest,
‘They are bad people.'

He asked what had happened to the wounded man: he had
died. After that he saw them around: they were unemployed and
angry because they had believed Liberation would see them in
fine jobs and good houses. He employed one at the school as an
odd-job man. The other was Joshua's eldest son, who started
school in a class full of small children: he spoke pretty good
English, but could not read or write. Now he was sick, very thin,
and with sores.

Father McGuire did not mention these events to anyone, until
he told Sylvia. Rebecca did not speak of them. The nuns did not
know of them.

He had to keep an ever-enlarging supply of medicines in his
house, because people came to ask for them. He built the shacks
and shed down the hill, and asked Senga for a doctor to come:
Comrade President Matthew had promised free medicine for
everybody. He was sent a young man who had not finished his
medical training, because of the war: he had intended to be a
medical orderly. Father McGuire did not know this until one
night the young man got drunk and said he wanted to finish his
training, could Father McGuire help him? Father McGuire said,
When you stop drinking, I'll write the letter for you. But the war
had damaged this fighter, who had been twenty when it started:
he could not stop drinking. This was ‘the doctor' that Joshua had
told Sylvia about. Father McGuire, in a chatty letter to Senga,
complained that there was no hospital for twenty miles and no
doctor. It happened that a priest visiting London had met Sylvia,
with Father Jack. And so it had all happened.

But there was a good hospital planned for ten miles away, and
when that opened, this disgraceful place–Sylvia said–could
cease to be.

‘Why disgraceful?' said the priest. ‘It does good things. It was
a good day for us all when you came. You are a blessing for us.'

And why had the good sisters up the hill not been a blessing?

The four who had seen out the dangers of the war had not
always been behind their security fence. They taught at the school,
when it had still been a good one. The war ended and they left.
They were white women, but the nuns who replaced them were
black, young women who had escaped from poverty, dreariness
and sometimes danger into the blue and white uniforms that set
them aside from other black women. They were not educated
and could not teach. They found themselves in this place which
was a horror to them, not an escape from poverty, but a reminder
of it. There were four of them, Sister Perpetua, Sister Grace, Sister
Ursula, Sister Boniface. The ‘hospital' was not one, and when
Joshua ordered them to come every day they were back where
they had escaped from: under the domination of a black man who
expected to be waited on. They found excuses not to go, and
Father McGuire did not insist: the fact was, they were pretty
useless. Gentility was what they had chosen, not suppurating limbs.
By the time Sylvia arrived the enmity between them and Joshua
was such that every time they saw him they said they would pray
for him, and he taunted, insulted and cursed them in return.

They did wash bandages and dressings while complaining they
were dirty and disgusting, but their energies really went into the
church which was as pretty and well-kept as the churches that
had beckoned them to become nuns when they were girls. Those
churches had been the cleanest and finest buildings for miles and
now this one at St Luke's Mission, like those, never had a speck
of dust, because it was swept several times a day, and the statues
of Christ and the Virgin were polished and gleaming, and when
dust swirled the nuns were up shutting doors and windows and
sweeping it up before it even settled. The good sisters were serving
the church and Father McGuire, and, said Joshua, mimicking
them, they clucked like chickens whenever he came near.

They were often sick, because then they could return to Senga
and their mother house.

 • • •

Joshua sat all day under the big acacia tree while sunlight and
shadow sifted over him, and watched what went on at the hospital,
but often through eyes that distorted what he saw. He was smoking
dagga almost continually. His little boy Clever was always with
Sylvia, and then there were two children, Clever and Zebedee.
They could not have been further from the adorable black piccanin
with long curly lashes that sentiment loves. They were lean, with
bony faces where burned enormous eyes hungry to learn and–it became evident–hungry for food too. They arrived at the
hospital at seven, unfed, and Sylvia made them come up to the
house where she cut them slabs of bread and jam, while Rebecca
watched, and once remarked that her children did not get bread
and jam, but only cold porridge, and not always that. Father
McGuire watched and said that Sylvia was now the mother of
two children and he hoped she knew what she was doing. ‘But
they have a mother,' she said, and he said no, their own mother
had died on the violent roads of Zimlia, and their father had died
of malaria, and so they had become Joshua's responsibility: they
called him Father. Sylvia was relieved to hear this history. Joshua
had already lost two children–another had just died–and she
knew why, and what the real reason was–not the ‘Pneumonia'
that was on their death certificates. So these two were not Joshua's
by blood: how useful, how painfully pertinent that old phrase had
become. They were both clever, as Joshua had claimed for Clever:
he said that his brother had been a teacher and his sister-in-law
had been first in her class. The little boys watched every movement
she made, and copied her, and examined her face and eyes as she
spoke, so they knew what she wanted them to do before she
asked; they looked after the chickens and the sitting hens, they
collected eggs and never broke one, they ran about with mugs of
water and medicines for the patients. They squatted on either side
of her watching when she set limbs or lanced swellings, and she
had to keep reminding herself they were six and four, not twice
those ages. They were sponges for information. But they were
not at school. Sylvia made them come up to the house at four
o'clock, when she had finished at the hospital, and set them lessons.
Other children wanted to join in: Rebecca's, for a start. Soon, she
was running what amounted to a little nursery school. But when
the others wanted to be like Clever and Zebedee and work at
the hospital, she said no. Why did she favour them, it wasn't fair?
She made the excuse that they were orphans. But there were
other orphans at the village. ‘Well, my child,' said the priest, ‘and
now you begin to understand why people's hearts break in Africa.
Do you know the story of the man who was asked why he was
walking along the beach after a storm throwing stranded starfish
back into the sea, when there were thousands of them who must
die? He replied that he did it because the few he could save would
find themselves back in the sea and be happy.' ‘Until the next
storm–were you going to say that, Father?' ‘No, but I might be
thinking it. And I am interested that you might be thinking on
those lines too.' ‘You mean, I am thinking more realistically–as
you put it, Father?' ‘Yes, I do, I do put it like that. But I've told
you often enough, you have too many stars in your eyes for your
own good.'

 • • •

The Studebaker lorry, an old rattler donated by the Pynes to the
Mission, to replace the Mission lorry which had finally met its
death, stood waiting on the track. Sylvia had told Rebecca to say
in the village that she was going to the Growth Point and could
take six people in the back. About twenty had already clambered
in. With Sylvia stood Rebecca and two of her children–she had
insisted they should have the treat, not Joshua's children, not this
time.

Sylvia said to the people in the back that the tyres were very
old and could easily burst. No one moved. The Mission had its
name down for tyres, even second-hand tyres, but it was a forlorn
hope. Then Rebecca spoke in first one local language and then
another and in English. No one moved and a woman said to
Sylvia, ‘Drive slowly and it will be okay.'

Sylvia and Rebecca jumped into the front seat with the two
children. The lorry set off, crawling. At the Pynes' turn-off they
were waved down by the Pynes' cook who said he had to get
into the Growth Point, there was no food in his house and his
wife . . . Rebecca laughed, and there was much laughter at the
back and he climbed up, and fitted himself in somehow. Rebecca
sat beside Sylvia and turned to watch the back–where they were
laughing and teasing the cook: there was some drama Sylvia would
never know about.

The Growth Point was five miles from the Mission. The white
government had created the idea that there should be a network of
nuclei around which townships would grow: a shop, a government
office, the police, a church, a garage. The idea was successful, and
the black government claimed it as theirs. No one argued. This
Growth Point was still in embryo but expanding: there were half
a dozen little houses, a new supermarket. Sylvia parked outside
the government office, a small building sitting in pale dust where
some dogs lay asleep. Everyone piled out of the lorry, but
Rebecca's boys had to stay in it, to guard it, otherwise everything
would be stolen off it, including the tyres. They were given some
Pepsi and a bun each, with instructions that if anyone at all looked
as if theft was planned one must run and tell their mother.