The Sweetest Dream (65 page)

‘What did Father McGuire say?'

‘Oh, don't you worry. Everything's going on as usual.'

In fact, Rebecca had died, and so had her sick boy Tenderai.
The two children who stayed alive had been taken away by the
sister-in-law whom Rebecca suspected of poisoning her. It was
too early to tell Sylvia the bad news.

Sylvia ate, she drank what seemed to be gallons of water, and
she went to the bath, where the sweats of the fever were finally
swilled away. She was weak but clear-headed. She lay flat on her
little iron bed and told herself that the fever had shaken foolishness
out of her that she could well do without. One thing was Father
McGuire: through difficult times she had been telling herself that
Father McGuire was a saint, as if that justified everything, but
now she was thinking, Who the hell am I, Sylvia Lennox, to go
on and on about who is a saint and who isn't?

She said to Sister Molly, ‘I have understood that I am not a
Catholic, not a real one, and I probably never was.'

‘Is that so? So you either are or you aren't. So it is a Protestant
you are, after all? Well, I have to confess to you that in my view
the good God has better things to do than worry about our little
squabbles, but never tell them I said that, in Belfast–I don't want
to find myself knee-capped when I go on leave next.'

‘I have been suffering from the sin of pride, I know that.'

‘I daresay. Aren't we all? But I'm surprised Kevin never
mentioned it if you are. He's a great one for the sin of pride.'

‘I expect he did.'

‘Well, then, and now take it easy. When you are strong
enough, give some thought to what you are going to do next.
We have suggestions for you.'

And so Sylvia lay and took it in that she was not expected
back at the Mission. And what was happening to Clever and
Zebedee?

She telephoned. Their voices, so young, desperate: Help me,
help us.

‘When are you coming? Please come.'

‘Soon, as soon as I can.'

‘Now Rebecca's not here, things are so hard . . .'

‘What?'

And so she heard the news. And lay on her bed and did not
weep, it was too bad for that.

 • • •

Sylvia lay propped up on her bed, absorbing nourishing potions
while Sister Molly, hands on her hips, stood smiling, watching
forcibly while Sylvia ate, and all day and as far into the night as
was possible for Zimlia's early-rising citizens, came people of the
kind Andrew Lennox, or the tourists or visiting relatives or people
who under the white government had not been welcome, never
met. And Sylvia had not met them either until now.

She was being made to reflect that while places like Kwadere
existed in Zimlia, far too many of them, perhaps her experiences
had been as narrow in their way as those of people who would
not have believed that villages like St Luke's Mission could exist.
After all, there were schools that actually taught their pupils, which
had at least some exercise books and textbooks, hospitals that had
equipment and surgeons and even research laboratories. It was her
nature that had seen to it that she was in as poor a place as possible:
she understood that as clearly as she did that fretting over her
degrees of faith or lack of it was absurd.

On a level far from the embassies or the lounges of Butler's
Hotel, or the trade fairs, or the corrupt bosses at the top (referred
to by Sister Molly as ‘chocolate cake') were people who ran
organisations with small budgets, sometimes funded by single
individuals, who accomplished more with their money than Caring
International or Global Money could dream of, and who laboured
in difficult places to achieve a library, a shelter for abused women,
provision for a small business, or provided small loans of a size
that ordinary banks must despise. They were black and they were
white, Zimlian citizens or ex-pats, forming a layer of energetic
optimism which spread up to embrace minor officials and lower
civil servants, for there has never been a country that relied so
much on its minor officials, who are competent, not corrupt,
and hard-working. Unsung they are, and mostly unnoticed. But
anyone who understood, would go for help to some comparatively
lowly office run by a man or a woman who, if there were any
justice, would be openly running the country, and who in fact
were what everything depends on. Sister Molly's house and a
dozen like it formed a layer or web of sane people. Politics were
not discussed, not because of principle but because of the nature
of the people involved: in some countries politics are the enemy
of commonsense. If the Comrade Leader was mentioned at all,
or his corrupt cronies, it was as one talks about the weather–something that had to be put up with. A great disappointment,
the Comrade President, but what's new?

Sylvia was being presented with a dozen possibilities for her
future. She was a doctor, people knew she had created a hospital in
the bush where none had existed. She had fallen foul of the
government, too bad, but Zimlia was not the only country in Africa.

A sentence in our textbooks goes something like this: ‘In the
latter part of the nineteenth century, and until the First World
War, the Great Powers fought over Africa like dogs over a bone.'
What we read less often is that Africa, considered as a bone, was
not less fought over for the rest of the twentieth century, though
the dog packs were not the same.

A youngish doctor, a native of Zimlia (white), had returned
recently from the wars in Somalia. He sat on the hard upright
chair in Sylvia's room and listened while she talked compulsively
(Sister Molly said this was a self-cure) of the fate of the people at
St Luke's Mission, dying of AIDS, and apparently invisible to the
government. She talked for hours and he listened. And then he
talked, as compulsively, and she listened.

Somalia had been part of the sphere of influence of the Soviet
Union, which set up its usual apparatus of prisons, torture
chambers and death squads. Then by a smart little piece of international
legerdemain, Somalia became American, swapped for another bit
of Africa. Naive citizens hoped and expected that the Americans
would dismantle the apparatus for Security and set them free, but
they had not learned that lesson, so essential for our times, that
there is nothing more stable than this apparatus. Marxists and
communists of various persuasions who had flourished under
the Russians, torturing and imprisoning and killing their enemies,
now found themselves being tortured and imprisoned and killed.
The once reasonable enough State of Somalia, was as if boiling
water had been poured into an ants' nest. The structure of
decent living was destroyed. Warlords and bandits, tribal chiefs
and family bosses, criminals and thieves, now ruled. The
international aid organisations, stretched to their limits, could not cope,
particularly because large parts of the country were barred to them
by war.

The doctor sat for hours on his hard chair and talked, because
he had been watching people kill each other for months. Just
before he left he had stood on the side of a track through a
landscape dried to dust, watching refugees from famine file past.
It is one thing to see it on television, as he said (trying to excuse
his garrulousness), while he stared at her, but not seeing her, seeing
only what he was describing, and it was another thing to be there.
Perhaps Sylvia was as equipped as most to visualise what he was
telling her, because she had only to set in her mind along that
dusty track two thousand miles to the north people from the dying
village in Kwadere. But he had watched, too, refugees fleeing
from the killing troops of Mengistu, some of them hacked and
bleeding, some dying, some carrying murdered children: he had
watched that for days, and Sylvia's experience did not match with
it and so it was hard to see it. And besides there was no television
in Father McGuire's house.

He was a doctor, and he had watched, helpless, people in
need of medicines, a refuge, surgery, and all he had had to aid
them had been a few cartons of antibiotics which had disappeared
in a few minutes.

The world is now full of people who have survived wars,
genocide, drought, floods, and none of them will forget what
they have experienced, but there are, too, the people who have
watched: to stand for days seeing a people stream past in
thousands, hundreds of thousands, a million, with nothing in your
hands, well, this doctor had been there and done that, and his
eyes were haunted and his face was stricken, and he could not
stop talking.

A woman doctor from the States wanted Sylvia for Zaire, but
asked was Sylvia up to it–it was pretty tough up there, and Sylvia
said she was fine, she was very strong. She also said that she had
performed an operation without being a surgeon but both doctors
were amused: in the field, doctors not surgeons did what they
could. ‘Short of transplant operations, and I wouldn't actually go
in for a by-pass.'

In the end she agreed to go to Somalia, as part of a team
financed by France. Meanwhile she had to go back to the Mission
to see Zebedee and Clever, whose voices when she spoke to them
over the telephone sounded like the cries of birds caught in a
storm. She did not know what to do. She described these two
boys, now no longer children, but adolescents, to Sister Molly
and to the doctors, and knew that one, who saw children like
these every day of her working life, thought that both were
destined for future unemployment (but she would keep a look out,
perhaps they could be found work as servants?), and the others,
with their minds full of starving thousands, endless lines of poor
victims, could only with difficulty bend their imaginations to think
of two unfortunates who had dreamed of being doctors but now
. . . So what's new?

***

Sister Molly had to drive out fifty miles beyond Kwadere to
resume work interrupted by Sylvia's illness. She had arranged that
Aaron would collect Sylvia from the turn-off. Her complaints
about the Pope and the churchly male hierarchy were interrupted
by the sight of six great grain silos along the road whose contents–last season's maize–had been sold off by a senior Minister to
another drought-ridden African country, the proceeds pocketed
by himself. They were driving through hungry country; for miles
in every direction stretched bush dry and starved because of the
overdue rainy season.

‘I wouldn't like to have his conscience,' said Sylvia, and Sister
Molly said that it seemed some people had not yet understood
that there were people born without consciences. This set Sylvia
off on her monologue about the village at the Mission, and Sister
Molly listened, saying, ‘Yes, that is so,' and, ‘You are in the right
of it there.' At the turn-off Aaron was waiting in the Mission car.
Sister Molly said to Sylvia, ‘Well, that's it, then. I expect I'll see
you around.' And Sylvia said, ‘Fine. And I'll never forget what
you've done for me.' ‘Forget it.' And off she drove with a wave
of the hand that was like a door shutting.

Aaron was vivacious, eager, on the verge of a new life: he
was going to the Old Mission to continue his studies to become
a priest. Father McGuire was leaving. Everyone was leaving. And
the library? ‘I am afraid the books are not many now, because
you see, with Tenderai dead, and Rebecca dead and you not here,
who was to look after them?'

‘And Clever and Zebedee?'

Aaron had never liked them, nor they him, and all he said
was, ‘Okay.'

He parked the car under the gum trees and went off. It was
late afternoon, the light going fast from gold and pink clouds. On
the other side of the sky a half moon, a mere whitish smear, was
waiting to acquire dignity when the dark came.

As she arrived on the verandah the two lads came running.
They stopped. They stared. Sylvia did not know what was wrong.
While ill she had lost her sunburn, had become white as milk,
and her hair, cut off because of the sweats, was in wisps and fronds
of yellow. They had only known her as a friendly and comfortable
brown. ‘It is so wonderful to see you'–and they came rushing
at her, and she put her arms around them. There was much less
substance to them than she was used to.

‘Isn't anyone feeding you?'

‘Yes, yes. Doctor Sylvia,' they hugged her and wept. But she
knew they had fed badly. And the bright white shirts were dingy
with dirt because Rebecca was not there to do them. Their eyes
through the tears said, Please, please.

Father McGuire arrived, asked if they had eaten and they said
yes. But he took a loaf from the sideboard, and they tore it in
half and ate hungrily as they went down to the village: they would
return at sunrise.

Sylvia and the priest sat in their places at the table, the single
electric lightbulb telling him how sick she had been, and she that
he was an old man.

‘You'll see the new graves on the hill, and there are new
orphans. I and Father Thomas–he's the black priest at the Old
Mission–we're going to set up a refuge for the AIDS orphans.
We've got funding from Canada, God reward them, but Sylvia,
have you thought that there will be perhaps a million children
without parents, the way we are going?'

‘The Black Death destroyed whole villages. When they take
pictures of England from the air they can see where the villages
were.'

‘This village will not be here soon. They are leaving because
they say the place is cursed.'

‘And do you tell them what they should be thinking,
Father?'

‘I do.'

The electric light suddenly failed. The priest lit a couple of
emergency candles, and they ate their supper by their light, served
by Rebecca's niece, a strong and healthy young woman–well,
she was now–who had come to help her dying aunt, and she
would leave when the priest left.