The Rowing Lesson (15 page)

You reach for the wine and this time my hand scuttles back into my lap. I’m not going to play games anymore. I promise.
Ja
, you turn and look straight through me, past me, out of the house and into the street, all the way across the railway bridge, through the Du Toit’s Kloof tunnel and over the mountain, all the way to Harrington Street and beyond. I am the tunnel, air quivering in front of you, a trick of the light, a phantom.

When you stand up, sniffing a plummy Pinotage from a second bottle, you give a little burp. I’m in my cups, Madam, you announce, the generality of the statement washing me backwards, into the sea with Ma. She’s settling down with the newspaper, a kind of house she builds for herself out of paper. It floats surprisingly well. She’s knee-deep in the section she calls Hatch, Match and Dispatch.

I’m in my cups, you tell us again, asking for a response. Ma crinkles the newspaper, Fear of Terrible Things Happening who likes to sit on the windowsill shrinks into his feathers.

Maxie’s dead. Best friend I ever had, you say to the wineglass. Dropped dead of a heart attack just like that. Don’t you think this wine has good legs, Betsy? You swirl the glass in front of me. Harry, Ma says, putting down the newspaper. You never heard from Maxie after you graduated. He sent letters, Stella, from Tristan da Cunha, the Bering Straits, Spitsbergen. Harry, they were postcards, once every ten years! I don’t care what you say, Stella. Those were the best years of my life, Stella. We were always laughing in my mother’s house! What years are you talking about, Harry? You’ve spent more years with me than you spent with your mother, with Maxie, with Gertrude, with Sonnie and Morry and Bunny and Wolfie and Maisie and the whole damn lot of them! That’s the whole point, Stella. Those years, I mean THOSE YEARS, George and the girls in the boat and medical school, Maisie before she got married, Dorothy May and Maxie and Mickey and the dancing, always dancing, those were the best years of my life. Even though we were poor, we had a lot of laughs. We danced in the moonlight at the Fairy Knowe Hotel. Hell’s teeth man, old man Dumbleton knew how to throw a party. And everybody would be there. I mean, everybody.

Your mother never stopped talking. She talked-talked-talked-talked. And what about
your
family, Mrs. Goddamn High-and-Mighty? Your crooked bloody . . . Harry! Don’t Harry me, I’ve had enough of you! You take another long sip from your wineglass.

Daddy! I pull the bottle away from you and suddenly your hands are on my chair, shaking me, shaking the chair, the whole room shaking. My head hits something wooden as I go down, my fingers grab at emptiness. The floor feels right, somehow, my natural place. Get up, Miss Teetotaller! Get up off the floor! When I stand up, you’re not much bigger than me, your eyes at my eye-level, burning black.

Get out, you whisper, a blast of wine-breath in my face. Both of you!

And then Ma’s voice coming from miles away. Betsy, look what you started. Are you happy now?

Chapter 12

The brand-new building, with its red roofs and cream-coloured walls, cost nearly a million pounds to build. Within two months after it opened in 1938, all of its 628 beds were full. The six-storey main block has wards with twenty beds in them, as well as smaller rooms, with one bed, or two or three. It’s supposed to be divided symmetrically and equally into White and non-White sections with the same treatment for all but everyone knows how many non-White cases pour in, and how few beds there really are for them.

It’s right here that you’re learning the world of difference between the body preserved in formalin, and the body alive, surging with juices, glistening, beating, demanding every ounce of your attention. The yellow-grey flesh clinging to quiet bones is suddenly dressed in scarlet, black velvet, green, orange, puce, and nothing is still. The shop doesn’t close, everything keeps moving across the factory-floor, blood, salt, water, waste and a thousand chemical compounds sweeping from one complicated structure to the next.

You were just getting used to
Grootouma
, who taught you about the worm in the brain and the circle of Willis, the intricate bundle of tubes and wires right in the centre. She lay still while you entered the vestibule of her vagina, the brightest of bright lights burning overhead. She didn’t flinch when you cut into her, making a nice straight line between her anus and her vaginal orifice. Another chap got to make the midline incision from your transverse one, up towards the mons pubis.

It’s nothing like that when people are broken, sick or crying. They twitch beneath your scared hands, breathing, moving and smelling like fish or fowl going
vrot
, a different, fiercer smell than the dead sweetness of formaldehyde. The surgeons don’t even go near the children’s ward because of the terrible smell of infected burns and osteomyelitis. You’re learning how to clean burns with one nurse or two or four, and you holding the burnt child who dreads fire and now dreads you. It’s your own tiny wriggling body there, except this one is scraped and scrubbed, all the loose, burnt skin removed until the wound is raw and red, the brightest colour in the world. Charlotte was in a house on fire only she wasn’t a car. She was not much older than Bertie and got burned up to her eyebrows. You’re the one who has to peel her skin back, and put on the gentian violet. She’s screaming and biting and you almost hit her, you’re so upset.

Then there’s Frikkie, one of the osteomyelitis boys, whose left femur got infected by the raging staphylococcus aureus, Marcus Aurelius riding through his blood and attacking the longest bone in his body. You were there when the surgeon exposed the bone, cleaned out the infected and dead areas, drained the pus, and said, We have to pray, gentlemen.

Another stinking flower in bloom all over the children’s ward is empyaema, pus filling up a body cavity, a lung, a gallbladder. Antjie has pleural empyaema and she struggles to breathe through the pool of pus in her chest. She cries all night for her mother, in between breaths. One of the giants, Professor Osgood from Scotland, will operate on her one windy morning, entering her chest to drain the pus, and she’ll die on the table, his hands still inside her.

There’s draining and mopping and cleaning into the organs, cutting the bad bone, treating infection after infection as they rain down on you like a thousand different insects. You wear your white coat like a lucky charm, a magical barrier of brightness that’s supposed to keep the germs out, and your soul in. It doesn’t always work and here and there a white coat gets TB and has to go home. Most of them come back, after long months of bed rest and artificial pneumothorax therapy. They’ve crossed to the other side, walked with the sick and helpless and now they’re wrapped in white again, almost inviolate. You hold your breath and tiptoe between the staphs and the streps and the syphs, listening to the senior chaps talking about the patients in Latin, writing prescriptions in Latin, because what you don’t know can’t kill you.

The profs whisper Luetic Disease, the Great Imitator, and you’re supposed to learn all the colours of syphilis— primary, secondary, latent and tertiary—as you follow the Greats on their ward rounds. A chancre in the genitals is usually the first clue and then comes the rash. In non-Whites the rash is black. In Whites, the spots are pinkish, pale red. But rashes are legion, and you have to have an eye for the right spot, the right blotch, on the right skin. Sometimes you look at your own wrist, your thigh, and the top of your arm, for the mark of syphilis, the Destroyer. The
ghommas
were beating for you too, my boy, and Koeka wasn’t quite white. But the spots aren’t there, nor are the lymph nodes involved. (You’ve checked those too, feeling carefully in your armpits for swelling.) Of course it was years ago but there are always the marks you might have forgotten, the fever you missed. You could be latent now, mere months away from General Paresis of the Insane.

It’s all Mickey’s fault, the bugger who took you to the Blue Lodge. Mickey’s a rear-gunner now, bombing the hell out of the Italians in Abyssinia and Somaliland. When he comes home on leave, he has girls hooked on every arm and there’s even someone climbing all over his eyebrows. You’re making sure that your nose isn’t being eaten off your face while he’s sleeping with one girl in the afternoon, and a new one at night. The varsity girls are falling like leaves in an autumn wind. They flutter in the arms of the boys in uniform, in their organzas, their crepes and their taffettas. Maxie says they’ll even fall for you, when the soldiers go back to war. Let’s finish up what Mickey started. It’s open season.

Famous last words, you tell him, as you stare at a syphilitic spirochete on a slide under the microscope. The spiral shaped bacterium thrills you, in a nameless but chilling way. Be my guest, you say, as you offer Maxie a look at the slide. Pinta and yaws, he whispers, fondling the names of other terrible diseases caused by spirochetes. There’s nothing to stop the curling, curving, flat-headed, club-tailed, spiralling armies of bacteria from marching up your pants and eating you alive.

But it’s coming, he tells you, Mr. Maxie Bloody Know-it-all. Penicillin is going to save us all, if the Krauts don’t get us first. Never mind the arsenicals for syphilis, the emetine for dysentery, the quinine. A miracle is just around the corner. Maxie reads
The Lancet.
He’s light-years ahead of you, a true scientist in the making and a
feinschmecker
of the highest order. You call him F.S., for short. He says you’re a mysophobe, and you say a What? Someone who’s afraid of picking up an infection, he says, Sir Lancelot Lancet Reader and World Expert. Your nose sharpens, draws in on itself, and your eyebrows double knot in the middle. Don’t be so paranoid, old chap. I was only pulling your leg. You’re the one who’s paranoid, you mutter, but even the spirochete is ruined.

The bloody buggers are ruining the war too. The coffin in the ground and the shop on the coffin, Mum, Maisie and Bertie on top of the dead shop. Your dead father’s hands are locked around your ankles, holding you down, keeping you here while the other chaps fly around the world and back. You’re missing the greatest adventure of all time. Uncle Oscar won’t listen because you have to become a doctor. You know that, don’t you?

But right now you’re just a house officer learning to take histories at the bedside, watching the great Professor of Medicine, Professor Man-Bird, whose pointed questions can unravel a man’s life and chart the map of his sins, his habits, his desires. Often he makes his initial diagnosis by asking, and seeing, before turning the sheet back, and touching.

The test is the doctor, not a machine, and his dream of what’s inside a body racked and turned by sickness or accident. You’ve prostrated yourself before the all-knowing Man-Bird, like all the other house officers, and you’re hoping to learn what’s inside his fierce head, under the shining big top.

He’s got all of you around him this morning, all the lucky bastards in his firm. Dorothy May, you’re happy to say, is in another firm and with any luck she’s with the ladies and babies, where she belongs. A Coloured nurse, her white uniform lacquered onto her firm breasts, wheels in a patient from the non-White ward, a grizzled Coloured woman, her toothless mouth downturned with pain, a faded, rose-patterned hanky twisted between her fingers. Today Man-Bird is not asking any questions. He goes straight to the patient, and exposes her abdomen to the staring, sleepless group of ten housemen. He’s not doing the usual tap and shuffle about the art of medicine, the magic wand of beribboned words, Hippocrates here, and Sir William Osler there, telling you that it’s more important to know what sort of a person has a disease than to know what sort of a disease a person has. He’s not shouting about the olden days where anatomy students were sent to executions, so they could see what’s inside the body when it’s drawn and quartered, so they could watch and take notes when the four pieces were separated and the internal organs pulled out. He’s not screaming, You chaps have it easy! Too bloody easy!

There’s none of that today. He’s a lamb, his voice fallen and soft, his gestures small. It’s the most dangerous show of all. You know that, just as the other housemen do. You can smell the sweat that’s starting to prickle in armpits, palms, behind necks. Man-Bird palpates the woman’s abdomen and there’s a thick silence in the ward, as he draws the vast body of his knowledge into his fingertips. In your mind’s eye, you’re back in Gross Anatomy, lifting the lettuce leaf of the Greater Omentum and looking at what’s under the apron, rifling through the organs you named and labelled. This time they’re not out but in. They’re neatly packed and tucked into a Coloured woman probably from District Six, with roses looped between her fingers. You’re looking all over her for clues, at her sunken jawline, her swollen arthritic knuckles, the soft fabric that she’s teasing and kneading over and over again. You can hear the fish horn’s whine, and she’s selling flowers on the parade, her hands dipping in and out of big buckets of water. Nettie’s wiping your bottom. It’s raining in George and she says her knee hurts, and don’t be
onbeskof
, otherwise your mother will give you a jolly good hiding.

Man-Bird’s eye almost catches yours but then it washes past you and lands on Maxie. Maxie is summoned to the patient’s bed and now it’s his turn to palpate the organs, and feel all the treasures and horrors buried under the skin. Do you feel the spleen, Mr. Sloan? Maxie puts on his best palpating face. Yes, sir, I feel the spleen, sir. Posterior to the stomach, sir. In contact with the diaphragm. Not a big love affair, you’re thinking. A letter once a month, maybe a phone call on the spleen’s birthday.

Maxie goes back to the group and another houseman, Sam Katzenellenbogen, is summoned to the bed side. Sam is from the Orange Free State, a Jewish chap who grew up near the Big Hole and walked to school without shoes on his feet. He has a brown moustache and hooded eyes and Man-Bird makes a big fuss out of his name, Katzenellenbogen, Cat’s Elbow. Again Man-Bird asks, Do you feel the spleen, Mr. Cat’s Elbow? Sam’s hand crosses back and forth over the woman’s abdomen like a pale crab. The crab has dirty fingernails, and you’re hoping Man-Bird doesn’t notice. He’s looking away, thank God, and finally Sam’s crab-hand stops in the general vicinity of the stomach. Sam nods, Yes sir, I feel the spleen, sir. Man-Bird waves him back to the group.

Mr. Harold Klein! The whole ward just lurched, an ocean liner rolling on a tremendous wave. It’s a wonder all the trays and instruments and beds and patients didn’t roll down the shiny floor and land in a big heap against the wall. Now it’s still again and you walk the gangplank to the starched white bed, the soft, brown abdomen in the centre, its surface crosshatched with lines and folds. The belly button is saying something rude but you don’t listen. Your fingers have a life of their own as they press into the softness, rifling through the layers of tissue, hunting the liver, the stomach, the colon. You’re looking for jellyfish in the pitch-dark, diving for golf balls from the railway bridge and all you’re coming up with is a fistful of mud.

Do you feel the spleen? Man-Bird’s voice freezes the sweat on your upper lip, it locks your jaw. All you can do is shake your head and search. The woman in the bed raises herself a little, and then she sinks back. The hanky falls from her fingers onto the floor. For a hideous second, you imagine that you’ve killed her with your ignorance. The pages of your anatomy book whir in your head, next to an endless parade of the organs and ducts. Right, left, right colic flexure, left colic flexure, left, right, ascending colon, descending colon, right, left, jejunum, secum.