‘We don’t even know where he is,’ she said. ‘I should have followed them. I didn’t think. It was all so confusing.’
‘How could you have known?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t have known. You don’t know until it happens. And something like this has never happened before.’
At eleven I went home promising to be back in the morning. An offer to stay had been declined. My route home took me through several checkpoints. Like so many others I’d ceased to see them other than a momentary inconvenience, that is unless your luck went against you, or you handled an exchange badly. Bullish behaviour provoked the soldiers. I wondered if something of the sort had unfolded between Julius and the men who came to the house that morning, that what began as some sort of mistake had escalated into something more for no good reason.
I nodded at the soldier manning the roadblock. He loosed the rope in his hand and eased the barrier upwards.
CHAPTER 20
Some names he knows.
Lamin says he worked colouring Easter eggs in a factory in Germany. He uses the occasional German word: Frau. Haus. Osterei. Diagnosed with dissocial personality disorder. Attila does not believe Lamin has ever been to Germany, Ileana tells Adrian. Lamin is making progress, Attila has allowed him to be unshackled from his bed, the chains remain around his ankles and wrists. Lamin shambles around in the sunlight, the mass of his chains gathered up and looped over one arm, like a bride’s train. He raises his free hand in salute to Adrian.
In the bed next to Lamin is Kapuwa. Adrian has read his notes. Paid a bowl of rice in exchange for twelve hours a day in a diamond pit. In the evenings the men curbed their hunger with ganja. The mines were overrun by rebel soldiers, who worked them just as hard, for less food. Kapuwa escaped, but left his mind behind. His family brought a healer to wash him and recite prayers once a week. His violent outbursts frightened his family, who kept him chained to a bamboo pole in the yard.
Borbor occupies the bed in the centre of the ward. Borbor is mentally retarded and epileptic. He turns his back to Adrian and bends over waving his backside, which Adrian can see plainly through the rent in Borbor’s trousers. Adrian pretends to be horrified, Borbor laughs and claps. The other patients complain Borbor is crazy. Adrian suspects Borbor is less demented than he would have others believe.
And then there is the Professor. One in every asylum, thinks Adrian. The mentally retarded and the brilliant, together in madness. The Professor is a manic-depressive, the walls around whose bed are covered in chalked words: poetic, nonsensical, obscene. The father of one of the new patients, a religious man, has complained. The Professor does not wear chains, and has the freedom of the grounds. Adrian recognises him as the man he spoke to at the front gate that first morning.
These four are long-term residents. Then there are the others, who come and go. They lie in bed all day, sleeping or in various stages of withdrawal. At night the sound of their deliriums upsets the other patients. Occasionally there is a ruckus. Many of them were once fighters, who faced each other as enemies. Now they lie side by side. The young man Adrian brought is one of them. They come and go. Come and go.
Today Lisa had called in the early morning to remind him of Kate’s eleven-plus exam. Adrian hung up and called back after ten minutes to speak to Kate. If his daughter was at all nervous, it had not shown. ‘It’s very sweet of you to call, Daddy.’ A careful, conservative child, six pounds at birth, petite and china fragile. Lisa had stayed home to look after her for the first year, and then a second, then a third, after which all talk of returning to work had ceased. Sometimes, it seemed to Adrian, he had difficulty telling where his wife ended and his daughter began, as if birth had failed to separate them. Secretly he wished Lisa would go back to work. Meanwhile Kate had grown into a child measured in thought and deed, whose transition to adulthood looked seamless, with none of the messy mistakes other children suffered.
On the telephone Adrian wished Kate luck. He was just about to tell her about the sunbird, when she interrupted him. ‘I’d better go now. So I shan’t be late.’ At times her poise unsettled him, as though she found his efforts wanting. It had not always been so. When Kate was two she’d been prone to nightmares and would insist he — not Lisa — sit by her bed until she went back to sleep. Later he would watch her sleep, wondering what such a tiny creature could possibly be dreaming about.
On the way through town he’d bought several packets of biscuits from a roadside seller. He gives them now to Kapuwa, who takes them to a table in the middle of the room, allotting them carefully among the residents of the ward. Those who can step forward do so quietly to receive their share. Kapuwa carries biscuits over to the chained men. Lamin shambles in. The whole affair is conducted with solemnity and in silence. Kapuwa moving along the line of bunks, the men raising both chained hands to receive the biscuit, followed by a nod or grunt of thanks. Adrian wonders what it reminds him of, then realises. Kapuwa looks like a priest giving communion.
And afterwards, passing through the ward, he no longer notices the smell. The sound of his footsteps reassuringly solid. Adrian feels happier than he has in many weeks, months. Years.
Today she is dressed in a patterned blue lappa and a T-shirt bearing a picture of a dolphin. The T-shirt is too big for her and slips from one shoulder, a slender bone to which flesh and skin cling. Her feet are bare. Forty-three. Two years older than Adrian, the same age as Lisa. Adrian thinks of the fine lines on Lisa’s skin. Agnes’s face is unblemished, she weighs no more than a girl. She could be twenty or she could be sixty. The years are carried not upon her body, but in the light of her eyes.
Today, too, another development. Salia, who must have been waiting for him to arrive, intercepted him within yards of the gate and handed him a gold chain.
She sits facing him, her forearms on the armrests of the chair. This time she looks less often at Salia. She is calm, her voice contains little inflection or emotion. Adrian has less trouble understanding. Time spent helping Ileana with her rounds in the hospital has familiarised him to accents and patterns of the language.
Agnes. She was born and married, she tells him, in a town to the north of the city; her husband worked at the government agricultural project raising different varieties of fruit and vegetables. Dwarf bananas, whose yield equalled and even surpassed the ordinary ones. Pawpaws, larger than the local variety. Guavas, limes, tomatoes and vegetables. He kept a few seeds back for her and she grew them on her own plot at the back of the house and traded them in the market. In time she began to carry them to the city once a week to sell outside the supermarkets to white women. She bore five children, of whom two returned. Both were boys. The girls all survived. Naasu. Yalie. Marian.
Naasu, the eldest, was a helpful child and clever. When she passed her school certificate they gave her a party with sweets and drinks of coloured water. As soon as she finished with school Naasu got a job at the department store in the city. By then, a bag of rice had become so much more expensive. And some months too, Agnes’s husband’s salary at the government nurseries went unpaid.
Sometimes Agnes visited Naasu at the store on days when she went into town to sell her produce. Naasu would leave the counter where she sold cosmetics and take her to the places she and the other girls had lunch, one place in particular called the Red Rooster. Agnes enjoyed herself although it seemed wrong to spend money on food cooked by somebody else. They ate the food out of paper boxes. Afterwards Agnes would collect up the boxes and take them home, though Naasu laughed and tried to persuade her to leave them. Other times Naasu brought home tiny bottles of perfume she said were for giving out to the customers. Agnes saved them to wear on special occasions. Ah, Naasu looked so fine in the clothes she wore to work, though Alfred didn’t like the way she painted her face. Naasu explained she must wear the cosmetics herself, so that the customers could see how they looked. However, in deference to her father, she left home with her face bare. She had to pay for the cosmetics out of her own money; for some reason this knowledge appeased Alfred.