The Good Doctor (27 page)

‘What rubbish.’

‘Yes. To you it is rubbish. To me it is real. But there is no point in talking like this.’

She bent over the papers again and the conversation slipped out of sight, into a pocket somewhere, like a hard little knife. But it had cut us both. We never mentioned it again and in our last
few meetings we were carefully nice to each other.

Maria had disappeared too, but then she came back. I had given up long before of ever seeing her again. Until one day a young black man, vaguely familiar, turned up at the
office. He could take me to what I wanted, he said.

It took me a while to understand what he was talking about. Then I remembered where I’d seen him before: in the village behind Maria’s shack, on the day that I’d gone there to look for her. He
was the one who translated my message for me, when I offered money in exchange for any help they could give me.

I couldn’t go with him then. I was on duty. And it would be a good few days before I was free to go. Then I went to get him and we drove together in my car, with him sitting next to me, pointing
out the way with shy confidence, beaming to himself. It was a long trip on back roads – on the network of dirt tracks that led off from the main route. The countryside here was wild and tangled,
giving way occasionally to one of those nameless villages that were just a spray of dots on Laurence’s map.

And she was in one of those dots, somewhere close to the line of blue hills on the horizon. The car struggled up the last stretch, up a terrible track that seemed to have been cut out of the
bush with a blunt blade just the day before. Up at the top of the hill was the straggle of huts and fields. Nothing to differentiate it from any of the others we’d passed, but the beaming young man
said, ‘Here.’

‘Here?’

He showed me where to go. One of the last huts at the edge of the village, a wall of trees behind. And outside, the white car.

I had always seen it in passing, from a distance. But when I walked past it now I could see that this car had nothing to do with the Brigadier. It was an old Datsun, rusted right through all
over the bonnet and roof. One door was hanging loosely and there was a crack across the windscreen. It was a poor man’s car.

So the puzzle, the picture that lay just out of my reach, was not complete after all. Or the pieces did not all fit together in the way I thought they did.

And the same, maybe, could be said about Maria. I assumed that she knew I was coming – that the young man, my guide, would have spoken to her, would have told her I was looking for her. But the
moment I saw her I knew that I had dropped out of the sky.

This was behind the little hut, in a bare patch next to the trees. When I knocked at the front door a man’s voice called out from the back and we went around. She was sitting down, but she
jumped up to her feet, a hand clapped to her mouth. Staring at me.

He was there too. This was the first time I saw him. The man. About my age, squat, with a round face and a checked cap slanted on his head. He didn’t seem the type to display much feeling, but I
could sense his astonishment, like a vibration through the ground.

So we were all standing there, looking at each other. Three of us transfixed by a kind of dismay, and the other one still incongruously beaming.

I said, ‘Maria.’

But it wasn’t even her name, not her real name. She turned sharply away from me, to her husband, and started speaking to him. Rapidly, in a high voice. I didn’t understand any of it. Then she
broke off, turned and ran into the house without a backward glance.

I don’t know what I expected: that we would sit around in a happy reunion, talking about old times. That somehow the man wouldn’t be there, as he had conveniently been absent while our affair
went on. Or that we would be miraculously restored to the square of sand in the shack, with darkness outside.

But it wasn’t going to be like that. This was a story without a resolution – maybe even without a theme. I was only here to learn again how much I didn’t know and would never understand.

The man was very angry. He came up and talked at me in a low, steady, pushy voice. His fists were bunched up at his sides but I didn’t think he would use them. Not yet. He was too surprised, too
unsure of himself still.

‘I don’t know what he’s telling me,’ I said.

‘He say,’ the young man translated, ‘what do you want here?’

‘I wanted to speak to Maria.’

‘He say, what do you want with his wife?’

‘Tell him nothing. Nothing bad. I am her friend, from before, from the shop. I wanted to find out if she is okay.’

‘He say, she is okay. He say you better go now.’

‘I am not here to make trouble. Tell him that.’

But my arrival here had made trouble. It had brewed up around me, like the fine dust being lifted by the wind. It was better to leave, without knowing what would happen behind me, and we did, a
minute or two later. All the long way home again, after a visit of two or three minutes.

‘But she is alive,’ I said aloud to myself. This was maybe half an hour later, as we sped along some arbitrary stretch of road. ‘At least I know that.’

‘Yes,’ my companion agreed happily. ‘She is alive.’

And that was something. All the rest of it I couldn’t know. She had sat at the core of my life, like a cryptic symbol, but to her I was just a background detail, bringing mystery and
disturbance. I would never see her again, but she was alive.

When we got back and I dropped the young man off, he hovered expectantly by the car. I was so preoccupied that it took me a minute to understand. Then I took out my wallet.

I had set out with the idea of giving some money to Maria, and this sheaf of notes was folded up, close to hand. After a hesitation I took the little wad out and gave all of it to him. It was a
large sum, more than I had ever given away before. I don’t know what I had in mind: to buy her back, or to make my final disappearance worthwhile.

He looked astounded for a second, then he quickly put it away. His smile was radiant.

Shortly before the cancer finally took him, my father told me he wanted to come up and visit me. I think it was his way of showing approval. When I told him I’d become head of
the hospital at last, he said, ‘Oh, thank God.’ He was imagining a different scenario to this. I didn’t enlighten him and it was a relief, in the end, that he was too weak to make the trip. He went
thinking that I’d finally turned the corner, that I’d arrived somewhere. And on paper I suppose I have.

Things are different now, in lots of obvious ways. For one thing, I work in Dr Ngema’s office. Instead of the dart board and the hours of boredom there is a desk and paperwork in front of me. I
don’t feel much like a doctor any more; I have become an administrator.

The hospital is in trouble and it is my job now to save it. Letters and phone calls go back and forth. The Department wants to close us down and I spend a lot of time explaining why that is a
bad idea. We are doing vital work in poor rural communities, I tell them. Ironically, I have had to use the example of the two clinics that Laurence ran to bolster my own argument.

We are not running any field clinics now. We are not doing very much of anything, in fact. There are only two doctors left, the same number as the kitchen staff – one cook for each of us. And I
don’t know how much longer Jorge will stay.

So we have had to scale down on all fronts. We have become, in effect, a day clinic, open for a couple of hours every morning. Mostly we dispense medicine and advice. Any serious cases, or even
not-so-serious ones that would involve an overnight stay, are referred elsewhere.

So the situation is dire and the prospects not good. But still – although I can’t logically explain it – I am content. Maybe this is only the false peace of resignation. But I feel, somehow,
that I have come into my own.

This might be just because, after seven years of waiting, I have shifted about twenty metres away, into Dr Ngema’s room. A small event, but it means a lot to me. A new room, bare and clean and
empty: a good place to start again. I spread my things around and bought a few cloths and pictures to hang up. Anything to stamp myself on to the blankness. And now my life has taken root again. I
know I won’t be stuck here for ever; other places, other people, will follow on.

A whole new sense of the future, because of one tiny change. Which makes me wonder if all of this might have happened differently if I’d never had to share my room.

The homelands of South Africa were impoverished and underdeveloped areas of land set aside by the apartheid government for the ‘self-determination’ of its various black
‘nations’.

I am grateful to the National Arts Council of South Africa for supporting me as writer-in-residence at the University of Cape Town during the latter half of 1998.

Many thanks are also due to my agent Tony Peake for his honest eye and unwavering support; to Lyn Denny for helping me with a few stray facts; to Alison Lowry and Clara Farmer
for their editorial input; and to Riyaz Ahmad Mir for keeping me company.