Laurence will never come back. I know that now. But for the first few days, even though I was alone again in my room, it didn’t feel that way. Laurence’s clothes were still strewn around, hanging over the back of the chair and on the rail in the bathroom; his half-smoked cigarette lay among ash on the windowsill; all the signs indicated that he was just out for a while, on duty or somewhere, and he would be back in a moment.
But after a week or so, on an impulse one day, I tidied away all his things. I gathered together the little shrine he’d built on the windowsill, with the photographs and stones. I folded his clothes into a pile and put all of it into his suitcase – the one he’d been carrying when he arrived – and stored it under the bed. I wiped and cleaned away all the scuffs and marks, the shaving foam on the mirror, the cigarette stubs. I took his toothbrush out of the holder in the bathroom and, after reflection, I threw it away.
Things felt a bit better then. I was nearly alone again. And when one day, a week or two later, I had the sudden inspiration to move the furniture around, back to the way it was before he came, it was almost as if he’d never been there.
Though he had. I knew that too. And there was the other empty bed to accuse me.
Amongst the few papers he had, I found a letter from Zanele, on the back of which was a return address in Lesotho. I wasn’t sure if I should write, but then I did. Nobody else might’ve told her. This was a difficult job. I thought it would be simple – just a blunt statement of fact – but the facts themselves resisted me. I wrote down that he was dead, and then I sat staring at the word. Dead. It seemed to have a meaning that didn’t apply in this case. There was no body, no weapon, no clear set of events. In the end I wrote only that he had disappeared, under bizarre and extreme circumstances, and that I would explain if she contacted me.
She didn’t contact me. Maybe she never got the letter – she might have been back in America by then – or she may not have wanted to know more. I didn’t know what else I could do to follow up, and the truth is that I was relieved not to know.
I looked through his letters for a home address, but there wasn’t one. The envelopes that had come from his sister – who was really his mother – didn’t have a return address on them. I asked Dr Ngema if she had anything on file, and she told me that she had already attended to it. Again, I was relieved not to be involved.
Then his mother arrived one day. This was one or two months after he’d gone. She was a tall, gaunt woman in a black trouser-suit, chain-smoking cigarettes in a long holder. I couldn’t put her together with Laurence at all. There was something of the broad face that I remembered, but the manner and the looseness of her gestures were strange. She spent a good few hours stalking around the hospital grounds, peering into weedy corners, looking over the wall. She gave the impression of someone searching with calm determination in all the wrong places for something she had lost.
Eventually she came to sit in the room with me. Dr Ngema, who wanted nothing to do with any difficult emotions, asked me if I would see to her. ‘This is Laurence’s sister,’ she said hurriedly. ‘She wants to chat to you for a while.’ I didn’t mind; I was even curious, in a painful way. But when we were facing each other, she on his bed, I on mine, the way that he and I used to talk, there was suddenly nothing to say. Instead of an awkward scene, we seemed to have been brought together by a vacuum.
I took out his suitcase and the little heap of photographs and gave them to her. She picked through them listlessly.
‘I’ve got the keys for his car too,’ I said. ‘You’ll want to take that, I’m sure.’
‘Oh, no, no. Not now. I’m here in my own car.’
‘It’s just standing out there. I start it up from time to time.’
‘That’s good of you. I’ll come and get it soon.’ She looked around, her dark eyes darker in their pale saucers of bone. ‘So this is where …’ she said, ‘where …’
‘Yes?’
‘This was his room.’
‘He stayed here with me. Yes.’
She looked directly at me. She was a frail woman, who seemed almost to have been glued together, and only her smoke-roughened voice gave an indication of some of the harshness of her life. That, and something in her eyes.
‘You were his friend,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘He told me. He wrote about you often in his letters.’
‘Did he? I’m touched by that. But I don’t know how good I was as a friend.’
‘Oh, you were. Don’t run yourself down. I could tell by the way he spoke about you … He said you took care of him.’
‘Really,’ I said. ‘Yes, I suppose I was his friend.’
‘Thank you for being good to my … to my little brother.’
The whole act was absurd, and doubly absurd now. I couldn’t help myself. I said, ‘I know you’re his mother. There’s no point in concealing it.’
She didn’t flinch – just nodded calmly, puffing on her cigarette. ‘He told you, I suppose.’
‘Well, I … yes.’
‘That shows how much he trusted you. He would never have told you otherwise.’
I didn’t know how to answer that. I wished she would go, but she seemed to have taken root here in the room. A silence spread while she puffed and puffed, and then she said suddenly, ‘I don’t understand how this happened.’
I felt a quickening in myself, as if all the pretence was finally dropping.
‘It’s a very complicated set of events.’
‘So you do understand.’
‘No, I … Not really, no.’
‘But he’s disappeared.’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s not dead. He’s disappeared. That’s not the same thing.’
‘I’m not sure that I follow you.’
She was still calm and imperturbable; I watched as she dumped the old cigarette out of the window and fitted a new one into the holder. ‘What I mean is,’ she said, ‘he may come back.’
Her voice was level, and I thought she was making a statement. But her eyes stayed fixed on me and I realized that it was a question.
I thought about it for a moment, then I said, ‘No. I don’t think so.’
And she started to cry. It was astonishing: that long, passionless frame, yielding up so much jagged emotion. She dropped her face into her hands and sobbed. I went to sit next to her and put an arm around her. It tore something in my heart and I was sorry that we’d arrived, after all, at this moment of genuine feeling.
Laurence was gone. He’d disappeared. And in a certain way she was right: that is not the same thing as dying.
Other people went away later. They disappeared, but not like Laurence: they went off into the labyrinths of their own lives. After a few months the soldiers were posted somewhere else and Colonel Moller went with them. One night they were there around the pool table, drinking and swaggering, and the next night it had all gone quiet.
Then Claudia Santander went back to Cuba. What had happened with Laurence was somehow the last straw for their marriage. There was no more fighting through the wall, but the silence instead was heavy and colourless. It was obvious that they weren’t speaking to each other any more and then, at one of the Monday meetings, it was announced that she was leaving next week. So the rupture came at last. When she was gone it was just the two of us in the passage, Jorge and me, and the hours of duty became very long.
Dr Ngema left at almost the same time, back to the city and the post in the Department she’d been wanting. This was supposed to be a good departure, for her and for me. And of course it was. But there was a final conversation with Dr Ngema that I can’t forget, which seemed to rise up out of nowhere.
It was in her office, on one of the last afternoons before she left. She was showing me what the job involved, the reporting and auditing and filing. At one point she was telling me how to go about applying for funding to get extra staff to replace the people we’d lost. This was a crisis for the hospital, obviously, that had to be dealt with urgently. But it reminded us both of more personal feelings and in the middle of some long, dry explanation she went abruptly quiet. Then she sighed and said, ‘Poor Tehogo.’
‘What?’
‘What happened to him was terrible. It was a terrible thing.’
I could have left it; I could have let it go. But something turned in me. As she went back to her papers I said: ‘And Laurence?’
She blinked, looking startled. ‘Yes. And Laurence too.’
‘Tehogo is still alive,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Laurence is alive.’
She put the papers down slowly and looked at me. The air between us had thickened.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.
‘I mean Tehogo is one of them. They came to get him so he wouldn’t talk. But they won’t harm him.’
‘ “They”,’ she said. ‘Who are “they”?’
‘His people.’
‘Tehogo didn’t have any people. He was alone. If you want to know, I think the soldiers took him. He saw something they didn’t want him to see.’
I clucked my tongue in disbelief. ‘He wasn’t a victim,’ I said. ‘Why must you believe he was?’
Now she smiled, but without a trace of amusement.
‘You never liked Tehogo,’ she said slowly. ‘You had it in for him from a long time ago.’
‘That isn’t true.’
‘I’m sorry, Frank, but I think it is. You wanted him out. You wanted him gone. You couldn’t deal with him. Well, now he’s gone.’
‘He hasn’t. He’s out there somewhere.’
‘You’re very sure of everything.’
‘I know who Tehogo was. He was a thief, I saw what he did. I was disappointed in you, that you protected him.’
All of this was spoken very coldly and politely between us, as though we were discussing some abstract point. There had been a lot of times lately when Dr Ngema and I had talked sharply to each other. But this wasn’t like those times.
‘That young man,’ she said, ‘that young man had a very hard life. A very difficult life. Much more difficult than yours. None of your chances, none of your advantages. Doesn’t that count with you?’
‘Not in this case. No.’
‘No. I can see it doesn’t.’ She was looking at me, but also past me, at something beyond me. ‘I can see you have no idea of what it means to be a black person in this country. Only your own life is real to you.’
‘That’s true of everybody. You can only live one life.’
‘Black people live many lives.’
‘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 how all this might have happened differently – in another life where the door never opened to let a stranger in.