S. Naudé - The Alphabet of Birds

‘Sit,’ says Lerato. She points to the chair.

‘People are lying out there, dying,’ Sandrien says from where she is standing, ‘like dried-out hides. Where are my ARVs?’

‘I have told you,’ Lerato’s face is hard, ‘we can only do what we can do.’

Sandrien hits her open hand on the desk, so hard that small clumps of earth fall out of a plant pot.

‘No!’ Sandrien pulls in her fists against her stomach. ‘We can do more, much more!’ We can find the divine fibres in our weak flesh, the undiscovered grace in our entrails! she wants to add, but she has said enough.

Lerato gets up with less effort than might be expected of her bulky frame.

‘Out,’ she says in a deep, cold voice. ‘If you can’t show me respect, then you may as well go to Scandinavia. If you don’t like your job, don’t think we need you here.’

When she returns, Kobus is sitting in the dusk at the dining table. He has spoken to her oncologist. ‘So, now you’re going to sacrifice yourself for this cause with which you have burdened yourself,’ he says. ‘You’re now going to obliterate your body.’

‘It’s not me, it is the course of the disease. I’ve tried treatment. Whether I want to endure further interventions is surely a personal choice.’

He swallows, peering into the dark corner of the room. He wipes his eyes. She does not say anything. The line of his chin hardens.

‘What sense does it make to surrender everything for the sake of a struggle within a system that despises you?’

‘The system is irrelevant, it’s about the victims. They are my struggle. I don’t want to reduce what’s left of my life to the parochial sorrow of the privileged cancer sufferer.’

It is now almost completely dark.

‘Do you remember,’ he says, ‘how a hunter’s dog once got its paw stuck in a jackal fence here on the farm? When I got there, the leg was so infected that the dog would not allow me near it. I could let him suffer or could let myself be torn apart. I shot him through the head. In this way I brought relief. It affected me, but this was what I could do.’

She looks at his outline. The light glints on his eyebrows.

It is her turn. ‘Do you remember the time when a dog made its way into the sheep-pen? How cruelly dogs play with trapped sheep? How we disinfected cotton thread and spent all night in the kitchen sewing up — no, weaving back together — shredded stomachs? How raw our hands were? How we didn’t stop until they were whole again?’

She keeps her eyes fixed on the furthest point in the dirt road. She notices that when she keeps up the speed she stays awake. She keeps getting stronger. From here in her cab, her control room, she will be able to keep everyone safe. Soon she will be able to carry all the dying. She will hold them in the palm of her hand, the ill of the Eastern Cape — no, of the entire scorched hinterland. When she enters one of the game farms, she notices how the Americans with their shiny guns observe her from their Jeeps. Probably a pitiful sight in her dust-smeared van and soiled uniform. Probably just a matter of time before the owners forbid the mad woman with the wild hair from entering their land.

She is dizzy when she arrives at Shirley’s office. She is now watching over her patients at night. She drips water through dry lips, lays damp cloths on hot foreheads. Now and then she takes a moment for herself, gulping fresh air outside, bathing in the cool flood of starlight. Then she stoops again, entering under low corrugated iron or reed-and-mud ceilings. Next to drums in which coal hisses, she sings shy songs she makes up to bring a little peace.

Shirley looks Sandrien up and down when she steps onto her office carpet. There is a voice on her speakerphone. She picks up the receiver, brushes over her pencil skirt as if it has dust on it too. She cups one hand over her mouth, cuts off the phone conversation.

‘I’m afraid,’ she says to Sandrien, ‘our biggest donors have started shifting their funds to prevention. And in future, the emphasis will be on abstinence campaigns, rather than condom use. The distribution of antiretrovirals may well be phased out.’ She shrugs her shoulders in an exculpatory fashion. ‘These are the values of Middle America: we’re talking faith-based organisations. Those are the ones now holding the money. And the donors elect our board. We have to move with the times.’

‘On a personal note,’ she continues, ‘I’m on my way back to the US. Been offered work in Houston. I’ve been outside the laboratory for too long. Yes, probably less excitement than here. But Houston has good steaks, so I hear.’

She smiles unaccountably. Sandrien is certain the voice on the phone earlier was Lerato’s.

Next to the television a woman is standing in the dark. It is her goatskin wristband on which Sandrien focuses. On the hissing television screen: electric snow. It is the first time in weeks that Sandrien is visiting the Helpmekaar homestead. It is six o’clock, the winter afternoon heat over, the curtains all closed. She was relieved to find her mother asleep. While searching for Brenda, she heard something in the erstwhile guest room. Then she encountered this stranger. And she knows what that wristband means.

‘What are you doing here?’

Apart from the television, the room is almost unfurnished. There is a small soft hide (hare?) on the floor.

It’s Brenda who answers from behind Sandrien: ‘She has come to give medicine.’

Sandrien turns around.

‘Who gives you the right to bring a sangoma here? What do you want to do to my mother?’

‘Not your mother.’

‘What do you mean? She’s still my mother, even though you’re caring for her, and irrespective of how often I come here.’

‘What I’m saying, is that she’s here for my mother. She’s here for Grace.’

Sandrien’s eyes flash. Now, only now, the fury is causing blotches to spread on her neck.

‘If you so much as touch Grace, if you give her anything …’

Brenda steps right in front of Sandrien, looking her fiercely in the eye. ‘She is not yours. What are you doing for anyone anyway? Everyone you visit dies. They die like animals, one after the other.’

They stare at each other.

‘She doesn’t belong to you,’ Brenda says again. But without conviction. She shrinks back.

‘So, when are you coming for a visit? Port Elizabeth is waiting for you.’

There is static on the line. As if a sparrow were sitting on the line, somewhere between Sandrien and the sea. She closes her eyes, imagines the little bird drying out and being scorched clean. In her mind’s eye she blows off the skeleton with a single breath.

‘I’m calling because I need something. Painkillers. Something stronger than the aspirin I get from the municipal authorities. Much stronger.’

Or perhaps an insect on the line, the feet of a gnat.

‘Tell you what. Send a photo. We can always deliver something to your seniors over in Aliwal. Let’s start with that. View it as a small investment. When you come to visit, we’ll continue the conversation.’

‘I want to have it in Venterstad, couriered to me directly. I know how influential you are after all, Walter. You are at the helm over there, aren’t you?’

The line is rustling with the secret language of the most insignificant creatures, the little insects that are scattered by the wind.

‘Hmm, it’s tough. Medical protocol, legal implications … you know.’

‘Do you want a picture or not, Walter?’

‘Yes, yes, send it. I’ll do what I can.’

‘Give me your email address.’

She scans an old family photograph, taken from Helpmekaar’s veranda. She trims it, cuts off Kobus, her mother and the two young daughters (not yet steady on their feet). Only she remains. She is young and her shoulders are bare. Her hair is glowing in the sun. Behind her the landscape is dry and bright. She enlarges the picture until her laughing features start disintegrating into pixels and then she sends it off.