My Soul to Keep (45 page)

D
ECEMBER
31, 1999

The driver didn’t need directions. As soon as Dawit showed him the magazine story he’d torn out, telling him he was looking for the children’s clinic, the driver grinned with recognition and reached over to open the back door to his mud-caked Land Rover.

“You’re from Soweto?” the driver asked, peeking at Dawit in the rearview mirror as the car rumbled across a dusty road hedged by tall stalks of green sugarcane. A sun-faded Nelson Mandela victory button swung from his mirror on a leather string.

“No. From Ethiopia,” Dawit said after a pause. He could have chosen any nationality. He had as much right to North America as to Ethiopia, and belonged to Nigeria as well as Senegal and Egypt.

“You fooled me with your Zulu.”

“I study languages,” Dawit said tonelessly, forcing himself to look away from the smudged article he’d been carrying for days, the story about the children’s clinic he’d torn out of The Atlantic. The story about the clinic was a sidebar to an update on the new South Africa:
MIRACLE WORKERS
, the headline read.

“I have five languages: Zulu, SiSwati, Xhosa, Afrikaans, and English,” the driver said, veering so wildly that Dawit thought he was going to run over a boy pulling a wooden cart. Chickens flew out of his automobile’s way in the road. “How many have you?”

Dawit smiled. “Those, and a few others,” he said.

“What takes you to the clinic? You have a child in need of healing?”

Dawit blinked, his smile withering. He should have expected the question. It was the first time in two years anyone had asked him if he had a child. No, he realized. He did not.

He raised his index finger to the bridge of his nose, silent, weathering the paralysis brought by mourning.

“I have other business there,” he said at last. “What do you know about the clinic?”

The driver shrugged, turning on a cassette of American pop music, Michael Jackson or someone. Jessica had made Dawit listen to a few of Michael Jackson’s songs many years ago, in that long-past life just finished, and the singer’s childlike voice was difficult to forget.

“I’m a bachelor. No kids, so I just hear the stories,” the driver said. “You should hear the way the old women talk. Crazy things. They say you can take your children there, no matter what is wrong, and they will heal them. How many times have I driven whole families to this place? And all of them wanting miracles. One child, they say, came back from the dead. A boy.”

Dawit stiffened. “That can’t be,” he said.

“Hey, listen, I’m only telling you what I’ve heard. Don’t think I believe this craziness. I just drive. Soon, the way everyone is talking, there will be a paved road to the door. And camps for all the people waiting to get inside. You’ll see.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Dawit said uneasily, licking his lips. “Who runs this clinic? The government?”

The man laughed hard, slapping the steering wheel. He sounded like he would choke. “The government! Don’t talk crazy. The government clinic is to the east. The only miracle at that clinic is when they have enough supplies. Of course, it’s less crowded now because no one takes their children there. All the children go to the clinic run by the Americans.”

Americans!

The article in the magazine had been vague, not even including a photograph or mentioning the names of the people who had organized the clinic; it only said a new clinic had appeared within the past year, that it had the Zulu excited, that it was a folk symbol of promise among South Africa’s blacks.

“You’re sure they’re Americans?”

“Black Americans,” the driver said. “That’s what they say.”

Dawit closed his eyes, only now daring to believe that his intuition had good impetus to lead him all the way from Nigeria, where he’d been living quietly in a Lagos flat since leaving the States. He’d wanted to be alone with his sadness, yet he was still drawn to cities, where he could walk streets anonymously and be swallowed by crowds. For these years, he’d sat in his room in darkness, occasionally allowing himself the comfort of five or six jazz cassettes he’d bought. At night, he drank so he could plunge into a sleep that was, he imagined, like a sort of death. Someone, presumably an American, had left the magazine open on a bar counter, and he’d seen it, blurry eyed, by chance.

The magazine had led him to her.

“Just over that way. There it is!” the driver said, pointing.

The squat white concrete building, obviously built recently in a rural section still being developed, looked like it was large enough for only three or four rooms. As the driver had said, there were a few families sitting outside in the shade of newly planted fiddle-leaf fig and African tulip trees. A woman in a colorful headdress sat on the stoop, nursing a baby while two near-naked children played beside her. Nearly two dozen people waited outside.

There was no sign identifying the building as a clinic. The only sign was printed in Zulu, hand-painted and posted to one of the trees:
UNCULO UTHOKOZISA ABADABUKILEYO
. “Singing makes all the sad people happy because it is the voice of happiness,” it said.

In keeping with the sentiment, Dawit saw three adolescent girls leaning against the building, singing words in Zulu in a soft harmony that reminded Dawit of an American spiritual. Africans had taken their music with them to America, black Americans had ushered it back, and now there was no separating it, Dawit thought.

“You picked a good time. There aren’t many here today.”

Dawit’s hand shook as he gave the driver a handful of crumpled rand without counting the amount, climbing from the car. “Thank you,” he said. “Wait here. If I’m not back in a few minutes, you can go.”

“With this, I can afford to wait all afternoon!” the driver called to Dawit as he walked up the path carved in the grass.

Dawit excused himself, passing the nursing woman, and went inside, where three large white ceiling fans swirled above his head. The floor was unvarnished, uncovered concrete, and the only real light was from the sun streaming through the large picture windows. Metal folding chairs lined the wall, all of them occupied by women and children talking, sleeping, or simply rocking in their seats, obviously ill. One young shirtless boy gazed up at Dawit with such hopefulness that it haunted him. He would see those eyes in his sleep, he imagined.

“Yebo,” greeted a pretty Zulu woman, who sat behind a simple wooden desk at the rear of the room, beckoning him. “We’re out of chairs. You should try to come early, before the crowds. We may not get to you just now. There are twelve in line before you. Fill out this paper and say what’s wrong with your child. You came from one of the cities? Jo’burg?”

“Much farther,” Dawit said. “I’m here to find a woman I knew in America. Jessica Wolde. Is she here?”

The woman shrugged. “Only Doctor Alex is here.”

“Yes,” Dawit said, his heart surging. “Alex is her sister.”

“Doctor Alex’s sister?” the woman asked, and a wondering expression passed across her face. “Yes, I know of the sister. She lives in the house just behind the clinic. But she doesn’t take visitors. Only her relatives, and the children.”

Dawit rested one palm on the desktop to steady himself, feeling his strength leaving him. She was here, after all!

“I am a relative,” he said, finding it difficult to speak. “I am her husband.”

The woman’s eyebrows jumped with her obvious surprise. More than surprise. Dawit wondered, for a moment, if she had heard stories about him. He was certain he felt curious eyes on his back from onlookers in the chairs. A wiry boy who looked ten, dressed in a white dress shirt and navy shorts—a school uniform— peeked around the corner at him from one of the hidden rooms.

Dawit swallowed, uneasy beneath the woman’s gaze. It was not quite fear he detected in her eyes; it was something else, more like wonder, reverence.

“May I see her?” Dawit asked when she didn’t move.

“You, the husband, are the one the same as her?” the woman asked, sounding embarrassed, as though she should not ask.

“The same … ?”

Dawit made a slight turn, shifting his eyes to the onlookers behind him. An older woman with a smooth mocha face was gazing at him with tears ready to fall. Seeing that Dawit watched her, she smiled a toothless smile.

“Sipho,” the receptionist said, startling Dawit as she called to the uniformed boy, “take the master to the house.”

Instantly, the boy’s hand was inside of Dawit’s, squeezing. “Come with me, master,” he said in English. “Come to the back.”

Before the boy led Dawit to the courtyard outside the sliding glass door, Dawit heard the old woman say something to the child sitting beside her, a single word.

Magic, he heard her say.

In the large courtyard, chickens pecked at seed hidden in the overgrown grass, and six uniformed girls and boys shrieked and ran, trying to hit one another with a red ball. “Sipho! Sipho!” a slightly older boy called, poised to throw the ball to him.

Urgently, annoyed at the boy, Sipho shook his head. He looked up at Dawit with apologetic eyes. “They were sick, master,” the boy told Dawit, as if in explanation. “Like me. Doctor Alex likes us to play here. She wants the sister to hear us laughing.”

All of the windows and doors to the large two-story house twenty yards behind the clinic were open, and a child occasionally ran out with an orange or a can of soda. It was as though the house belonged to them, Dawit thought. Hearing the laughter, surrounded by the children’s energy, Dawit blinked back tears.

Kira should be here, he thought.

Then Dawit saw someone he recognized, an older man squatting outside the door with a bucket, washing paintbrushes. At first, he could barely remember where he knew him from. But as the man stared at him, slowly rising to his feet, Dawit remembered him; he was Bea’s gentleman companion named Gaines. Dawit detected the same expression—not anger, but mere wonder—on his face.

Sipho sensed a hesitation in Dawit’s step, and tugged Dawit’s hand with a laugh. “She is in here, master. The sister. Do not be afraid. Come inside.”

Gaines stood in the doorway, a giant. He was an old man, but he looked conditioned and strong without his shirt, probably from labors. The sun had made his face look hard, and he did not smile. “That’s far enough, Sipho,” Gaines said in his West Indian English. He held Dawit’s eyes, as a man. Then he cocked his head toward the house’s cooler interior, extending one arm. “Let’s go, David. This is the way. She’s upstairs.”

He was welcome in Jessica’s home? Would Jessica welcome him as well? Dawit’s mind swam with a sense of unreality. He had not expected to come this far, and now that he was here, what next?

Crying wildly, a toddler in an oversized T-shirt with short, curly hair ran into Dawit’s path as soon as he walked inside. Dawit felt small fingers grasping his trousers. Gaines lifted the child into his arms, cooing. “What happened?” Gaines called to someone over his shoulder.

“She won’t listen, and she grabbed the broken glass in the kitchen. Her finger is bleeding,” a teenage girl said, running to Gaines. They examined the child’s hand, and Dawit saw a trickle of blood snaking around her tiny index finger. “You see how she’s cut? There, there, little one. Let me wash it in the sink.”

The toddler howled and squirmed as Gaines passed her to the girl, but Dawit forgot her as soon as he saw a shadow at the top of the stairway. He watched with anticipation, and then Jessica appeared. She seemed to glide rather than walk, her step was so graceful, and she wore a striking white head wrap and long white dress, probably provided by a local dressmaker. He had never seen her look this way. He was awed by her sudden sight.

“What in the world happened?” Jessica called down. She sounded newly awakened.

“She cut herself, madam. I’ll wash her finger.”

“Jessica,” Gaines said, drawing Jessica’s concerned gaze away from the child. “There’s someone to see you.”

For the first time, she saw him. He saw her clasp the railing with her long fingers, but she still looked regal, untroubled. No wonder they worship her, he thought. He, too, wanted to drop to his knees before her. He could not find words to greet her. Jessica bowed her head, as if struck, then turned and hurriedly walked back to the room she had come from without speaking. Hungrily, Dawit watched her every movement until she had vanished.

“Guess you better go on up after her, David,” Gaines said.

Jessica’s was the third upstairs room, at the end of the hall. It was furnished sparsely with a white wicker bookshelf, a desk pushed beneath the window, and a wicker armchair, where Jessica sat with her hands folded. A colorful mosaic of Zulu beads hung on the wall, but nothing else. Dawit heard a meow, and Teacake settled himself in Jessica’s lap. A second pair of eyes stared at him.

Dawit did not move from the doorway, since he was not certain he should enter. It would be an invasion, he believed, just as his very presence felt like an invasion.

“I knew you’d come one day,” Jessica said, speaking first. Her statement was a fact, stated with neither joy nor malice.

“You’ve never been more beautiful,” Dawit said, the only words that seemed appropriate. Had he won even the slightest smile from her? He could not say from where he stood. “And this … what you do here … I am amazed.”

This time, she did smile slightly. She seemed to relax, leaning back in the chair while she stroked the cat. Her smile, very soon, took a wistful turn. “Sipho probably brought you back here. We have to force him to go to school. He never wants to leave. When his mother brought him, his leukemia had progressed so far that everyone thought he was dead.”

“My driver said something about bringing children back from the dead,” Dawit said, and was immediately sorry. At that instant, he saw Kira’s framed kindergarten photograph on Jessica’s desk. He was transfixed by the suddenness of her smiling image. Since he’d been stripped of his possessions at the morgue and had no photographs of his own, this was the first time Dawit had seen his child since the night in the motel room, when her eyes had been filled with fearful tears. No, even worse. His last sight of her had been in cold death, when he found her naked, sallow corpse. The memory was an indictment. Dawit looked away from the photograph.