Testimony

Stephanie Bane

Disease, so distant, brings all of us home, all of us together.

I barely knew Helene before her son died. She fluttered around the edge of the family, slavishly devoted to her older cousin Yvette.

Yvette ran a health clinic. We sat together in the shade of a mango tree one hot afternoon, talking about health issues in the community. Unasked, Helene brought us a tray of hot sweet tea. She served Yvette with her head bowed. The tea was sticky with sugar. In Chad, the sweeter the tea, the greater the sign of affection and respect.

“Why don’t you sit down with us?” Yvette offered.

“No, thank you.”

Helene turned to me, a very serious expression on her face.

“Yvette saved my life. I love her like my mother.”

The remark was unexpected; I thought I’d misunderstood. Before I could ask the obvious, Helene walked away. I looked to Yvette.

“I got her out of a terrible situation in the city,” she said vaguely. It was the only explanation she would offer.

Yvette was the first wife of Thomas, the village chief. Thomas had four wives, three in our household and one in a neighboring town. He took care of them all financially, and all of their children. But Yvette was the wife of his heart. He considered her his partner in the development of the community. He would do anything for her. So when she asked that her adult cousin Helene and her toddler be allowed to come live with them, it was done. Never mind the expense of supporting them, or the shame Helene clearly carried with her. He even paid for her to go back to school.

Helene was humble and shy. At school, though she sat near the front, she never spoke. In the crush of ninety students, it was weeks before I even realized she was in my class. Then I would see her, watching me with wide, clear eyes, taking everything in.

When she occasionally found courage to make conversation with me at home, her French was beautiful, much better than my own. But that was rare; she would send her son David to see me in the afternoons, an emissary between us. He would totter back and forth while Helene labored over the evening meal and I wrote anxious letters to my mother, who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Yvette was out of town, or it would never have happened. Helene would have told her David was sick, and she would have done something about it. I didn’t see it myself, even though I spent time with him. He would bring me a mango or some other treat that Helene asked him to deliver. He wasn’t afraid of my white skin. He leaned against me if he was tired. I gave him a taste of whatever I was eating and listened to him chatter if he had something to say. I never understood a single word. He was only three, and he spoke to me in N’Gambaye. I answered him in English or French. Mostly we just smiled at each other, easy companions.

The morning of the day he died, I saw Helene holding him. He was dehydrating rapidly. He looked shrunken, like an infant. She had mixed some honey with water, hoping he would drink more.

As the day wore on, the older women in the village heard what was happening, and gradually came into the yard. They sat around Helene, not saying much, just keeping her company. I didn’t understand. I was getting ready to attend a school play with one of my students when I heard Helene start to wail. I ran out of my hut and saw her holding David close, crying out.

Terrified, I stayed where I was. The old women sat quietly, letting Helene cry until she was spent. Minutes passed. Another old woman entered the concession. She must have been waiting outside—for the commotion then the calm—before she entered. She was the woman who prepares the dead for burial.

Helene started screaming when she saw her. She screamed over and over and clutched David to her chest. She wouldn’t let her take him. The old woman, loving and awful, pried David from her arms.

As swift and cruel as it was, letting Helene linger over David would have been worse. It was not long after two o’clock and the temperature was high. It was easily over 110, probably over 115. He’d been dying for hours, and the smell of it was already on him.

I retreated into my hut. I sat at my desk on my wooden folding chair, staring at the wall. The heat was unbearable, but I had nowhere else to go.

It was quiet outside. I could hear the low voices of the old women as they cared for Helene. I listened to the murmur and slosh as they bathed her in buckets of cool water. She sobbed quietly, and cried out once or twice.

Eventually, I heard more noise and shuffle. I went to the door and saw that the women had placed several mats together in the shade of a nearby mango tree. They led Helene, who was faltering and could barely walk, to the center. They’d dressed her in someone else’s clothing; the outfit she’d worn every day I’d known her was gone. She sat upright with their assistance; when they let her go, she slumped to the ground. They began to seat themselves around her. More women came into the yard and joined the group on the mat.

I turned back inside, panicked. I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t know what was expected. The person I could have asked was prostrate with grief outside my door. Most of my friends in Chad were men; I wasn’t part of the rituals of women. I wasn’t sure if I was welcome. Sweat dripped down the backs of my legs, and I prayed intensely that whatever I did next would be the right thing. I decided to join the women on the mat.

The few yards I had to walk from the doorway to the mango tree were long. Everyone but Helene turned to look at me; she lay motionless, eyes shut. I‘d never met most of these women—they weren’t educated, didn’t speak French, and had no reason to socialize with the white schoolteacher. I braced myself for a negative, suspicious reaction. The women shifted slightly to make room for me as I took off my sandals and sat down. They turned their attention back to Helene.

We sat together for an hour or more.

Helene was in shock, still and silent. The women wept on her behalf; most were mothers, most had lost children. I cried with them; the sorrow of it was terrible.

At dusk, a man came to let us know that preparations were complete for the funeral. We stood up and made our way slowly to the graveyard. Thomas joined us, together with the men from the village. He nodded in greeting, but did not speak. He was pale, and his face was grooved with pain.

The men sat on rough wooden benches in the open air. We sat in front of them, still clustered around Helene on a mat. The service and the singing in N’Gambaye were brief. David’s little body was swaddled in the familiar cloth of his mother’s skirt. The grainy light of the evening passed; when it was over, we walked home in the dark. It had only been five hours from the moment he died until we put him in the ground.

Two or three days later, Thomas summoned me to speak with him. We sat together outside of his office. He still wore the devastated expression I’d seen on his face at the funeral.

“Did she tell you how sick he was?”

“No. She didn’t. I didn’t know until the afternoon that he died.”

“Me neither,” he said. We sat in silence for a long time looking at the dirt, our feet, our hands.

“I have a truck,” he finally said. The hospital in Moundou was only an hour away.

“I have money,” he said.

“I do, too.”

“I don’t know why she didn’t ask us for help.” He shook his head. He looked up; our eyes met. Neither of us would say it out loud, for fear the truth would come alive and find its way to Helene. To know it right now would break her. It was only dysentery. David didn’t have to die. We were too rich for that.

The week after the funeral, one of the older women in the village asked me for money. They were all chipping in to buy Helene a new outfit, to replace what David was buried in. I knew they were struggling to come up with enough, and I could easily have paid for the all the cloth and tailoring myself. But they wanted to give her something. So I gave enough for the cloth, and left the cost of tailoring to them.

Helene missed school for the next two weeks. The heat was still brutal, and she was listless and barely functional. She lay motionless on a mat during the afternoon hours. She lost weight, her skin looked yellow.

She showed almost no emotion until Yvette returned. When Yvette walked into the yard, Helene leapt to her feet. She let out a miserable, ululating cry and ran to her. Yvette let out the same cry and opened her arms. The rest of us clustered around. Someone pulled together several mats under one of the mangos, enough for the whole family. Yvette sat in the center, with Helene at her feet.

Thomas joined us and gave a speech to welcome Yvette back home. He talked about what had happened in her absence. He told us he was shocked that death could come to the family, that he had believed his wealth would protect them. I cried, and so did Thomas’ second and third wives. We had all been grieving silently, along with Helene, and it was good to share it again.

Yvette told us about her trip. She had been summoned to the capital by the wife of President Idriss Déby. She waited at the presidential palace for weeks but was never received. She bitterly regretted that she’d been gone, and for nothing, when David got sick.

The household resumed a normal rhythm, though Helene decided to drop out of school. She had missed too much to catch up, and she was exhausted. Yvette fussed over her, urging her to participate in the life of the family. Slowly she started to engage, preparing meals again and helping the older children with their homework.

For me, life in the family and the village got sweeter. The women relaxed around me. Wherever I went, I was more welcomed than before.

The heat finally broke; the first rain of the year swept through the village. It happened one night at dinnertime, and it was a torrential downpour. I usually shared a meal under the stars with Yvette, but the rain forced us into our huts.

I heard a knock at the door; it was Helene. She had a tray of food.

“I asked Yvette if I could eat with you tonight,” she said. She was nervous.

“Come in,” I said. “This’ll be fun!” I hoped I sounded enthusiastic; doing this was hard for her.

I cleared off my desk to make room for the food. We ate together in the lantern light. The rain hammered on the roof. It was so loud we had to raise our voices; for the most part we sat in silence. It was cozy.

After we finished eating she gestured toward the letter I’d shifted onto the floor when she came in. “Who are you writing?”

“My mother,” I said.

“Do you miss her?”

“Yes, terribly. It wasn’t so bad when I first got here, but now she’s been diagnosed with breast cancer. I’m worried about her all the time.”

“Breast cancer!”

Helene was shocked. Breast cancer is something Chadians don’t talk about. But I wasn’t going treat it like a shameful disease. I was very direct.

“Yes. She had a mastectomy. Her entire right breast was removed.”

Helene was silent. The expression of shock was gone, and she didn’t look judgmental. In fact she looked happy. Excited.

“I want to show you something,” she said.

Instantly she lifted her shirt up to her neck. I tried not to look surprised.

“I had breast cancer,” she said.

There was a long raised scar above her right breast. She touched it.

“I had a tumor, and a surgeon in N’Djamena removed it. I’m cured now.”

We both looked at the scar for a minute.

“How scary,” I said. She nodded. Breast cancer doesn’t often get treated in Chad. There’s too much stigma, and there just aren’t the medical facilities.

“Did you have to have any treatment after surgery?” I asked. “My mom is going through chemotherapy because her cancer might spread.”

Helene looked at me blankly. She shook her head. “I’m cured.”

I regretted asking. There was no chemotherapy in Chad, whether she needed it or not.

She was still holding her shirt up, reluctant to cover her scar now that it was out in the open.

“I’ve got this scar, but it’s nothing to complain about. I should have died.”

That was the situation Yvette had saved her from. Helene didn’t share the details, but I could guess. Her husband might have refused to let her seek medical care. Perhaps he shunned her because of the disease. He clearly didn’t want her anymore, even after the operation, or she wouldn’t be here with us. She wasn’t likely to remarry, and now her baby was gone.

Slowly she pulled her shirt back down over her breasts.

“Do you want some tea?” I asked.

“I would love some.”

We talked about other, easier things as I made tea over a Bunsen burner near the doorway. I put all the sugar I had into the pot.

Stephanie Bane was in Chad from 1993-95. She currently works as an Account Planner in an ad agency, and is getting an MFA in creative writing from Pacific University in Oregon.