The Sweetest Dream (43 page)

For someone like Rebecca, who had a little card of the Holy
Mother nailed on to the central pole of her hut, this ideological
argument would have seemed too silly to think about: but she
had never heard of it.

On the wall in Sylvia's room was tacked, straight on to the
brick, a large reproduction of Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks,
and some other smaller Virgins. It could be easy to conclude from
that wall that this was a religion that worshipped women. The
crucifix was a paltry thing in comparison. Rebecca sometimes sat
on the bottom of Sylvia's bed, her hands folded, looking at the
Leonardo, sighing, tears running. ‘Oh, they are so beautiful.' You
could say that the Virgin had slipped through the interstices of
dogma by the way of Art. Sylvia had not known that she cared
particularly for the Holy Mother but did know she could not live
without reproductions of the pictures she loved best. Fish moth
were attacking the edges of the posters. She must ask someone to
bring her new pictures.

She fell asleep on her chair, looking at Father McGuire's
insipid statuette and wondering why anyone could choose that if
they could have a
real
statue, a real picture. She would not dream
of saying this to Father McGuire who had been brought up in
Donegal, in a small house with many children in it, and had come
here to Zimlia straight from theological college. Did he not like
the Leonardo then? He had stood a long time in the doorway of
Sylvia's room, because Rebecca had told him, ‘Father, Father,
come and see what Doctor Sylvia has brought us.' His hands
folded together on his stomach, and enlaced by his rosary, rose
and fell as he stood there, and looked. ‘Those are the faces of
angels,' he pronounced at last, ‘and the painter must have seen
them in a vision. No mortal woman ever looked like that.'

Next morning, while Rebecca's wash dried again after its
dousing by the storm, Sylvia asked Aaron if he would ransack the bush
for wrigglers, but he said he was afraid he had to read his books
for Father McGuire.

She walked to the village, found some youths–who should
have been at school–and said she would give them money to
search the bush. ‘How much?'–and she told them, ‘I'll give
you a lump sum and you can share it.' ‘How much?' In the end
they were demanding bicycles, textbooks for school, and new
T-shirts. This was because they saw every white person as rich
and with access to anything they wanted. She began to laugh,
then they did, and it was settled they should have what she held
in her hand, a clutch of Zimlia dollars, enough for some sweets
at the store. Off they went, laughing in to the bush, and playing
the fool: the search would be a desultory one. Then she went to
the hospital where she found Joshua sewing up a long quite deep
cut.

‘You were not here, Doctor Sylvia.'

‘I would have been here in five minutes.'

‘How was I to know that?'

This was an issue between them. He now did sew up wounds,
and did it well. But he was attempting wounds that needed more
skill than he had, and she had told him to stop. They were both
watching the face of the boy, who was staring down at his arm
where the needle slid through wincing flesh. He was brave, biting
his lips. Joshua finished the stitching clumsily–Sylvia took the
needle from him and did it herself. Then she went to the lock-up
shed to measure out medicines. He followed her, leaving the reek
of dagga on the air. ‘Comrade Sylvia, I want to be a doctor. All
my life, that is what I wanted.'

‘No one is going to accept a man who uses dagga, for training.'

‘If I was training, I would stop smoking.'

‘And who is going to pay for it?'

‘You can pay for it. Yes, you must pay for me.'

He knew–and so everyone did–that Sylvia had paid for
the new buildings, was paying for the medicines, and for his wages.
It was believed that behind her was one of the international donors,
an aid organisation. She had told Joshua that no, it was her money,
but he did not want to believe her.

On an old kitchen tray, relinquished by Rebecca, Sylvia
arranged mugs of medicine, little piles of pills, many of them
vitamins. She went with the tray to the tree where most of the
patients lay, or sat, and began handing out mugs, and the pills,
with water.

‘I want to be a doctor,' said Joshua, roughly.

‘Do you know what it costs to train someone to be a doctor?'
she said to him, over her shoulder. ‘Look, show this boy how to
swallow this, I know it doesn't taste nice.'

Joshua spoke, the boy protested, but he took the potion. He
was about twelve, undernourished, but he had worms, several
varieties of them.

‘Then, tell me how much it costs?'

‘Well, at a rough guess, with everything, probably a hundred
thousand pounds.'

‘Then you pay, for me.'

‘I do not have that kind of money.'

‘Then, who paid for you? Perhaps the government? Was it
Caring International?'

‘My grandmother paid for me.'

‘You must tell our government to let me be a doctor and tell
them I will be a good doctor.'

‘Why should your black government listen to this terrible
white woman, Joshua?'

‘President Matthew said we could all have an education. That
is the education I want. He promised us when the comrades were
still fighting in the bush, our Comrade President promised us all
a secondary education and training. So you go to the President
and tell him to do what he promised us.'

‘I see that you have faith in the promises of politicians,' she
remarked, kneeling to lift up a woman who was weak from
childbirth and who had lost the baby. She held her, feeling the black
skin that should have been warm and smooth, rough and chilly
under her hands.

‘Politicians,' said Joshua. ‘You call them politicians?'

She saw that the Comrade President, and the black
government–his–were in a different place in his mind from
politicians
,
who were white. ‘If I made a list of promises your Comrade
Mungozi made when the comrades were in the bush fighting,
then we could all have a good laugh,' said Sylvia. She gently laid
the woman's head down, on a folded bit of cloth that kept it from
the earth, muddy from the rain, and said, ‘This woman, does she
have some relative to give her food?'

‘No. She is living alone. Her husband died.'

‘What did he die of?'

AIDS was just entering the general consciousness, and Sylvia
suspected that some of the deaths she saw were not what they
seemed.

‘He got sores, and he was too thin, and then he died.'

‘Someone should feed this woman,' said Sylvia.

‘Perhaps Rebecca could bring her some soup that she is making
for the Father.'

Sylvia was silent. This was the worst of her problems. In her
experience hospitals fed their patients but here if there were no
relatives, then no food. And if Rebecca brought down soup or
anything else from the priest's table there would be bad feeling.
If Rebecca would agree to bring it: a struggle went on between
her and Joshua about who should do what. And, thought Sylvia,
this woman was going to die. In a decent hospital, she would
almost certainly live. If she were put in a car and taken to the
hospital twenty miles away she would be dead before she got
there. Sylvia had in her store some Complan, which she did not
describe as food but as medicine. She asked Joshua to go and mix
up some for the woman, thinking, I am wasting precious resources
on a dying woman.

‘Why?' said Joshua. ‘She will be dead soon.'

Sylvia, without a word, went to the shed, which she had
incautiously not locked, and found an old woman reaching up to
a shelf to fetch down a bottle of medicine. ‘What do you want?'

‘I want
muti
, doctor. I need
muti
.'

Sylvia heard those words oftener than any others. I want
medicine. I want
muti
. ‘Then, come to where the others are waiting
for me to examine them.'

‘Oh, thank you, thank you, doctor,' giggled the old woman
and she ran out of the shed and into the bush.

‘She's a bad skellum,' said Joshua. ‘She wants to sell the
medicine in the village.'

‘I didn't lock the dispensary.' She called it that, with an inward
mock at herself.

‘Why are you crying? Are you sorry for me because I can't
be a doctor?'

‘That too,' said Sylvia.

‘I know what you know. I watch you and I learn what you
do. Perhaps I would not need much training.'

She mixed the Complan and carried it to the woman who
had gone past the need for it: she was nearly dead, her breath
fluttering away in little gasps.

Joshua spoke to a little boy sitting with his sick mother, and
said, ‘Go back to the village and tell Clever to dig a grave for this
woman. The doctor will pay him.' The child ran off. To Sylvia
he said, ‘I want you to teach my son Clever, teach him, he can
learn here.'

‘Clever? Is that his name?'

‘When he was born his mother said his name must be Clever
so that he will be clever. And he is, she was right.'

‘How old is he?'

‘Six years old.'

‘He should be at school.'

‘What is the good of going to school, when there is no
headmaster and no books to learn from?'

‘The headmaster will be replaced.'

‘But there are no books at the school.' This was true. Sylvia
hesitated and Joshua attacked with, ‘He can come here and learn
what you know. I can teach him what I know. We can both be
doctors.'

‘Joshua, you don't understand. I don't use more than just a
little part of what I know here. Don't you see? This isn't a proper
hospital. A proper hospital has . . .' She despaired, turning away,
shaking her head from the enormity of it, in exactly the same way
as Joshua would, it was an African gesture; then squatted down
and picked up a bit of twig, and began drawing a building in the
soft wet earth. She was wondering, What would Julia say if she
could see me now? She was squatting, knees apart, opposite
squatting Joshua, but he sat lightly and easily on his thigh muscles,
while she was balancing herself with one hand down beside her.
With the other she drew a building of many storeys, and looked
at Joshua and said, ‘This is what a hospital is like. And it has
X-rays–do you know what X-ray is? It has . . .' She was thinking
of the hospital she had trained in, while she looked out at grass
roofs over the reed mats, the dispensary shed, the hut where
women gave birth, on mats. She was crying again.

‘You are crying because this is a bad hospital, but it should
be me, it should be Joshua crying.'

‘Yes, you are right.'

‘And you must tell Clever he can come here.'

‘But he must go to school. He cannot be a doctor or even a
nurse without getting his exams.'

‘I cannot pay for him at school.'

Sylvia was paying fees for four of his children, and for three
of Rebecca's. Father McGuire paid for two of Rebecca's, but he
did not get much money, as a priest.

‘Is he one of yours I am paying for now?'

‘No. You are not paying for him yet.'

In theory, schools were free. And they had been, at the
beginning. Parents all over the country, promised education for their
children, helped to build schools, their labour free, their most
heartfelt devotion building schools where no schools had been.
But now there were fees, and every term they were higher.

‘I hope you aren't going to have any more children, Joshua.
It's just silly.'

‘We know it is a plot by the whites, to stop us having children,
so that we become weak and you can do as you like.'

‘That's so ridiculous. Why do you believe that nonsense?'

‘I believe what I see with my own eyes.'

‘The same way you see a plot by the whites to kill you with
AIDS'–he called it Slim. ‘He's got Slim,' people might say; he,
she, has the disease that makes you lose weight. Joshua had taken
in all she knew about AIDS, and was probably better informed
than members of the government who were still denying its
existence. But he was sure that AIDS had been deliberately introduced
by the whites, from some laboratory in the States, a disease created
to weaken Africans.

 • • •

The Selous Hotel in Senga had been inter-racial, earning much
obloquy, long before Liberation, and now it was a comfortable
old-fashioned place, often used for sentimental reunions of people
who had been imprisoned under the whites–whites by whites–or been banned, or Prohibited or just harassed and made
miserable. It was still one of the best hotels, but the new ones, of
an international standard, were already racing up into the sky like
arrows into the future–a remark by President Matthew often
quoted in promotion brochures.

Tonight a table of twenty or so people stood prominently in
the centre of the dining-room, where lesser guests told each other,
‘Look, there's Global Money.' ‘And there's the Caring
International people.' At the head one end was Cyrus B. Johnson, who
was boss of the section of Global Money that deal with that Oliver
Twist, Africa, a silver-haired much-groomed man with the habit
of authority. Next to him sat Andrew Lennox, and on the other
side Geoffrey Bone, Global Money and Caring International
respectively. Geoffrey had been an expert on Africa for some
years. His enterprise had caused hundreds of the latest most
elaborate tractors donated to an ex-colony up north to lie rotting and
rusting around the edges of as many fields: spare parts, know-how
and fuel had been lacking, quite apart from the agreement of the
local people, who would have liked something less grandiose. He
had also caused coffee to be planted in parts of Zimlia where it
instantly failed. In Kenya millions of pounds disbursed by him
had vanished into greedy pockets. He was disbursing millions
here, in Zimlia, which were suffering the same fate. These errors
had in no way set back his career, as might have happened in
less sophisticated times. He was deputy head of CI, in constant
discussion with GM. Next to him was his ever-faithful admirer
Daniel whose shock of red hair was as much of a beacon as it
ever was: Daniel was rewarded for his decades of devotion by a
starry job as Geoffrey's secretary. James Patton, now Labour MP
for Shortlands in the Midlands, was here on a fact-finding trip,
but really because Comrade Mo, visiting London, had run into
him at Johnny's, and said, ‘Why don't you come and visit us?'
This did not mean that Comrade Mo was now a Zimlian, more
than a citizen of any other part of Africa. But he knew Comrade
Matthew–of course, as he seemed to know every new president–and when he was at Johnny's he would issue invitations as
from some generic Africa, a benevolent burgeoning place with
ever-open arms. It was because of Comrade Mo and his contacts
that Geoffrey had reached his eminence; because of Comrade
Mo's remark to some powerful person that Andrew Lennox was
a clever up-and-coming lawyer, and he knew him well, ‘had
known him since he was a child', Global Money had headhunted
him from some rival enterprise. Other people around that table,
among them Comrade Mo, had been habitués of Johnny's:
international aid was the legitimate spiritual heir of the Comrades. At
the other end of the table from Cyrus B.–as he was affectionately
known by half the world–sat Comrade Franklin Tichafa, Minister
for Health, a large public man with a capacious stomach and a
spare chin or two, always affable, always smiling, but his eyes these
days had a tendency to wander away from questions. He and
Cyrus B. were more splendidly attired than anyone else here,
but not more pleased with themselves. These people, with an
assortment of representatives of other charity organisations,
scattered tonight around other hotels, had spent some days
driving all over Zimlia, staying at towns that had acceptable hotels,
and fitting in visits to beauty spots and some famous game parks.
They had all agreed at lunches, dinners and on coach trips–which
is where the decisions that affect nations are really made–that
what Zimlia needed was a rapid development of secondary
industry, already established if sometimes only in embryo, but there
were problems with President Matthew who was still in his
Marxist phase, which was thwarting all attempts to make a modern
country of Zimlia, and a great many people were manoeuvring
themselves into positions where they could be nourished by the
lively flood.