I don’t have them,” I croaked, still finding it hard to speak, as Commander Jesus rolled me toward the hospital’s front door. “You’ve been chasing me for nothing. I lost them in Marange a long time ago.”
“That’s not what Jamu told us,” said the Wife.
“Jamu doesn’t know anything, you stupid woman.”
“What did you call me?”
“Stupid—”
“Did you hear this little brat?”
“Shut up, both of you,” hissed Commander Jesus, walking rapidly toward the double glass doors. “You can have your family fight later.”
“She is no family of mine,” I retorted, feeling power return to my voice and clarity to my brain. Once they had me out of the hospital I would have no chance. I glanced anxiously around, trying to attract someone’s attention.
“Stay right where you are,” called out a familiar voice. The Wife and Commander Jesus stopped and looked around as Regis, Dr. Morris, and two burly hospital guards surrounded us. “You are not taking that boy anywhere,” said Regis.
Commander Jesus’s eyes shot toward the exit, as if he might try running for the door. However, outside, a South African police van pulled up with its tires screeching, and two policemen jumped out and dashed up the hospital steps toward us.
“I’m taking my boy home with me right now,” blurted the Wife, standing behind me and placing her hands on my shoulders. “You can’t stop me. I am Mrs. Moyo, and he is my son and I can prove it.”
“Patson is still under my care, Mrs. Moyo, and no one can leave this hospital without properly signing the required release papers,” added Dr. Morris calmly.
“I am not your son,” I said, shaking her hands off me and trying to rise out of the wheelchair. “My father might have married you, but you were never my mother. You abandoned my family a long time ago.” I snatched the crutches away from her, hooked them under my arms, and turned toward Commander Jesus, now full of the courage I needed to face him for the first time. “This is the man who blew off my leg and who killed my father,” I said loudly, so that everyone in the room, everyone in the whole hospital for all I cared, could hear me. The two policemen stepped forward, blocking any possible escape. “He is the commander of the Fifth Brigade of the Zimbabwean army who took over the Marange mines and murdered hundreds of miners there. He has been chasing me ever since I left Zimbabwe, because he thinks I have diamonds. Well, all I own in the whole world are these crutches and what’s in that bag. If you don’t believe me, ask her,” I said, and pointed straight at the Wife. “She searched everything in my room, and when she found nothing, they both tried to kidnap me.”
But as powerful and angry as I felt, I was still too weak to stand for long. Regis caught me before I hit the floor, and helped me back into the wheelchair. As he rolled me back through the hospital lobby, I glanced over my shoulder to see the Wife arguing with Dr. Morris and a policeman holding her arm. But the best part was seeing the hospital security guards hand Commander Jesus over to the police with their handcuffs at the ready.
“What will happen to him?” I asked Regis.
“The police in Cape Town have their own ways of dealing with men from other countries who attempt a kidnapping from a state hospital.”
“But how did they—”
“You mustn’t forget that Boubacar is a great soldier. He ordered me to stay here and watch over you. When I saw them taking you from your room, I called the doctor, who called security, who called the police.”
“Has he found Grace?”
“Not yet, but he will.”
Regis took me back to my room, where the nurse couldn’t stop apologizing as she reconnected my drip. “She told me she was your mother, and showed me her passport. I am so sorry, Patson.”
“She can be quite convincing. It’s not your fault,” I said, pulling up the sheets and resting my head against the pillows and closing my eyes while she fussed over me; I wished that she would leave me alone.
“Rest now. We’ll talk later,” said Regis. “I’ll be outside if you need me.”
Once I was alone I opened my eyes, and felt the trembling that had started in my hands work its way up my arms. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and reminded myself that I was safe in the hospital. Commander Jesus was no longer chasing me. He’d been arrested, hauled away by the police. I had stood up to him and accused him of the death of my father, and nothing had happened to me. I let out another long, slow breath, and this time instead of fear, I felt relief. I had defeated him. There would be no more running from Commander Jesus.
When I opened my eyes again, Dr. Morris was closing the door behind him. “Well, it’s been quite a morning, Patson,” he said, placing a metal tray at the side of my bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay, I suppose, although my throat’s sore, and I get a bit dizzy when I stand up.”
“Those are the normal symptoms of the anesthetic wearing off,” he said, checking my pulse and temperature. “By tomorrow you’ll feel a lot better.” And then he smiled as he sat down beside my bed. “I had a long conversation with Mrs. Moyo—”
“She’s not my mother,” I said abruptly.
“I know that, Patson, but you are still a minor and, legally speaking, she is responsible for you.”
“But that’s impossible! You don’t understand, Doctor,” I said, and all the reasons why the Wife was not fit to be my guardian poured out of me. “She abandoned us a long time ago. I don’t want to have anything to do with her. I don’t want to see her ever again.” She danced for Commander Jesus while my father lay in an unmarked grave. I could never forgive her for that. I didn’t realize how loud I was getting, until the doctor laid his hand on my arm.
“It’s okay, Patson, I understand. Calm down. The hospital’s security guards have removed her, and I don’t think she’ll be coming back. As far as I’m concerned, Boubacar brought you into the hospital, and he can be the one who signs you out. Is that all right?”
“Thank you, Doctor. Thank you so much.”
“Now, I need to talk to you about your leg. The operation we performed early this morning is called debridement, and that means we cut away all the damaged tissue and infection around the wound so that it will heal properly. Thankfully, there was no sign of gangrene and I was able to stretch the skin around the wound to make a healthy stump that will hold your future prostheses nicely. You are a strong boy, Patson, and with physiotherapy and, later, regular exercise, I know you’ll get your full strength back in your upper leg. How does it feel now?”
“Whatever you did, Doctor, Stumpy has gone all quiet. That horrible pain is gone.”
“That’s good news, and what I have here may make you feel even better,” he said, picking up the metal tray. “Part of the debridement procedure is to remove any foreign objects embedded in the wound. And as yours was caused by a land mine, it was possible that there were shards of metal, dirt, even pieces of your clothing or shoe still inside. So I did a meticulous cleaning of the wound, and, I have to say, I was quite surprised at what I found. In fact, no one in the operating theater had ever seen anything like it before.”
He handed me the tray.
My three girazis sparkled up at me. The anger-stone, the rain-stone, and the dream-stone lay shining and bright in the corner of the tray. I picked them up one at a time, amazed to be holding them again. Their familiar size and shape hurtled me back to the mud between my toes, the water around my knees, the sun on my back, and the repeated action of sieving, sieving, and sieving.
“Your diamonds caused quite a stir around the operating table when they came out one after the other from your leg.”
The doctor smiled at me, but I was too bewildered to respond. I was back in the photocopying room with Arves holding me down; his granny boiling my girazis in her pot; the red-hot iron glowing in the dark. She had hidden the stones in the wound of my leg, the one place she was sure no one would find them.
“You didn’t know they were in your leg?”
“No, I didn’t,” I answered, and let them fall back into the tray.
“I thought so. I knew you were telling the truth in the foyer, Patson. Of course you didn’t have the diamonds. They were with me,” he said, smiling. “Whoever put them in your wound knew what they were doing.”
“It was an old lady. People called her Dr. Muti. She worked with the soldiers in the bush war,” I answered, stunned, staring down at the stones I had for so long prized above everything else, stones I believed were lost, and stones that caused me so much trouble. But now my girazis had come back to me. I didn’t know why or whether I deserved them, but there they were, lying in the corner of the metal tray, each with its own history: the first because of the angry words of Banda, the second dislodged from the bank by a downpour, and the third, the most beautiful one of all, sent to me in a dream by my shavi. I remembered the flickering candles, the smell of herbs and burned blood, and the tinkle of diamonds boiling in an oil pot. “All you need is within you, Patson,” the old woman had said, and now I understood. She was telling me, even as she was putting those stones inside me, that I would have to rely on something far deeper than anything diamonds could provide.
“Take them away,” I said quietly, handing Dr. Morris the tray. “I don’t want them. I don’t want to see them ever again.”
He looked surprised. “These are your stones, Patson. Didn’t you find them?”
“Yes, they’re my stones. My father and I worked together on Banda Hill until Commander Jesus took over the mine and called it Mai Mujuru. My father was shot by Commander Jesus’s soldiers and I found these—” I stopped. My words were all wrong, as if finding the stones had been some sort of compensation for losing my father. “No. That’s not what I meant. My father was shot by the soldiers simply because he was a miner. And all I have from my time at Marange are…” I couldn’t go on, my voice had turned to stone in my throat.
“Then they do belong to you, Patson.”
“But I don’t want them,” I said. “You take them. Use them for your hospital or something.”
Dr. Morris looked down at me and waited. And even as I was wishing he would take them away, I felt the desire to hold them building up inside me again. In that very same instant, I hated them and prized them. I wanted nothing to do with them, but at the same time, I wanted everything they could do for me. I realized I had to make decisions about them, good decisions that would benefit other people and not just myself. Then I understood that owning these stones was a responsibility, and one that I was not yet strong enough to deal with.
“Please, Doctor, take them away.”
“Okay, Patson. I will keep them in the hospital safe, and later, together, we can discuss the matter with Boubacar. You trust the man who brought you here?”
“With my life.”
“Very well then, but now it’s time for you to rest and grow stronger. I’ll ask the nurse to give you a mild sedative, and I want you to sleep as much as you can,” he said, pressing the nurse’s call button. “And no more adventures for you for a while. Okay?”
“It’s my pleasure, Patson. I want to see you up and about. That’s all I care about.”
The doctor left as the nurse came in to give me the pills. Once I was alone, I closed my eyes and felt my body sinking into the bed. My mind was racing, my thoughts spinning out like a spider’s web. I lay there thinking about how I had carried the stones in my leg the whole time, completely unaware of their existence, and the pain they caused me on the journey each time they reasserted their presence. And as I closed my eyes I remembered the last words my father said to me.
Never let the stones become more than you, Patson.
“I won’t, Baba. I promise you,” I mumbled out loud, remembering again how I had turned my back on my father, pretending to be asleep, on the last night we were together.
Rest now, son. That’s the most sensible thing to do in these circumstances. The body needs time to recover. You will be strong again, but first you must rest.
My father’s presence in this room was overwhelming: You’re right, Baba. You were always right.