S. Naudé - The Alphabet of Birds

Late afternoon she drives to Twilight Lodge, the new hunting farm north-east of Smithfield. It is a warm winter’s day, even more scorching here than at Dorrebult. She remembers this place, she realises when she enters the farm through newly built stone gates. She remembers a picnic here with her school friends decades ago, in a lush gorge, when the farm was still called Twyfelsand. Twilight Lodge lies outside Sandrien’s territory, but Xoliswe conveyed the message through Brenda that her sister lived there and was gravely ill.

The corrugated-iron shack stands on its own, away from the labourers’ cottages. When Sandrien stops, a dusty child points wordlessly to the shack and disappears. No other sign of life. Not a tree or blade of grass in sight. She has to crouch to enter, a fluffy Glo-fibre blanket hanging over her arm. The heat is hanging thick in the gloom. The woman, she knows instantly, is not from here, nor is she Xoliswe’s sister. She is painfully thin, with long bones and taut skin. Ethiopian, perhaps. Sandrien has difficulty breathing. The walls are black, the ceiling is black. Coal is burning ceaselessly in a drum. The bedding is black, the cast-iron pot on the floor is black. The water in the pot is black, so too the hessian hanging in the door opening. Apart from the bed and the pot, there is nothing. There has been no food here for ages, nor another human being. And the flies: the flies are the blackest of all.

All night the woman keeps making little animal noises. Sometimes Sandrien thinks there is a melody and sleepily hums along. At three o’clock the woman sits upright. A cold fire lights her up from inside. She laughs and hits Sandrien with the back of her hand, smack on the brow. When she falls back, she is dead. So it seems. But then she sucks her lungs full of air and starts singing or groaning until Sandrien dozes off.

A popping sound wakes Sandrien, a gunshot. Near enough to make the shack zing like a tuning fork in the dark. She looks at the black door opening in the black corrugated iron. Her heart races. An unambiguous warning.

Sandrien keeps her eye on the door until daybreak. She lays her hand on the woman’s sternum. Where there used to be breasts, there are now ribs. The woman is still breathing, but her feet are cool. It will not be long now. Sandrien must be in Venterstad for the morning clinic. On her way back, she passes a man. He is waiting next to his Land Rover, sunburned arms folded (the landowner?). She lifts a hand in a greeting, but he just stares at her. She looks in the mirror. Her hair is tangled. Next to her eye, there is dry blood.

Before reaching the stone gates, she looks down into the picnic gorge. She catches a glimpse of the new lodge with its complex angles: glass and steel, decks overhanging the gorge; the silver water, above the treetops, of a floating swimming pool. A further memory of Twyfelsand, of that school picnic of her youth, comes to her. After the picnic, she remembers, the children went hiking with the farmer. From the gorge, they wandered to a huge flat rock formation in the hills.

‘What would you say happened here?’ the farmer asked. The black rock was scattered with bones. Sandrien deciphered the zigzag patterns of the bones and put up her hand.

‘Is this where Bantus are fed to the vultures?’

‘No, girl,’ the farmer laughed, ‘where do you get that from? Years ago, lightning struck the iron stone and killed a whole herd of zebras at once. It is their skeletons you’re still seeing here.’

When the van exits the gates, Sandrien looks back fleetingly. A thin trail of smoke is trickling upwards. She could not say from where; she has lost her direction.

She has difficulty staying awake on the thundering dirt roads. She is not thinking of the nocturnal gunshot. She is pondering the riddle of the throw under which the coal woman was lying. It was drenched with smoke, but unmistakeable. It comes from the bed in which she herself slept as a child, in the Helpmekaar homestead. Ma Karlien used to come and tuck her in under this throw on winter evenings.

When she arrives in Venterstad, a little box is lying in the sun outside her office. She opens it and blinks in surprise. Ampoules of morphine. If only she had had them the previous night. The uninstalled basin has gone.

After her morning clinic in Venterstad, she drives to Colesberg. She sees the bank manager. It does not take long to increase their credit facility. Without fail, her parents repaid their debts to this bank over the years. So did she and Kobus. Two forms in triplicate and the money is available. She stops at their GP. She explains. He is reluctant. He has not seen any of the patients.

‘ I’ve seen them. I know their histories by heart.’ His face does not change. She goes on. ‘My father was your patient,’ she says. ‘My mother still is. Kobus and I are your patients. And my daughters. We have a history. And this is a matter of life and death.’

The doctor looks at her. She knows she smells. She can no longer get rid of the dust, no matter how often she showers, how she scrubs.

He relents. She gets a prescription on the condition that he would need to see the patients before the first month of treatment is over. She goes to the pharmacy and purchases antiretrovirals for all twenty-seven of her patients for three months. Then she goes home and sleeps.

Her cellphone wakes her. It is the first time ever that Lerato has phoned her. Lerato is overly friendly.

‘What are you hearing from Walter?’ she wants to know. ‘Mrs Nyathi tells me the two of you are talking.’

Sandrien tries to wake up properly. It is as if Lerato is talking to her through a cloud of dust.

‘He is the driving force behind the provincialisation,’ Lerato continues. ‘We have a big fight on our hands, meisie , a big fight.’

‘I don’t think it’s my fight, Lerato.’

‘No, no,’ she says, ‘you must help! The health of our people is important. You know that better than anyone.’

‘What are you talking about, Lerato? You’re unable — or unwilling — to even install one basin so that I could sterilise my hands—’

‘Walter has laid a charge against Shirley. It’s about money, lots of it. The government’s money. He’s got influence. The police are investigating it.’

‘What does that have to do with you, Lerato?’

‘Shirley Kgope is my cousin, surely you know that. And Walter ran to the police, telling them that she and I are in cahoots. She’s going to disappear to the US. And yours truly will stay behind to face the music.’

‘No, I didn’t know you were family, Lerato. All these connections make me dizzy. And I don’t know what my involvement is supposed to be.’

‘Wait, I’ll make you a deal.’

‘I have to go, Lerato, my patients are waiting. I don’t understand what you mean.’

‘It’s ARVs you want, isn’t it? Well, I’ll get them for you. As many as you want. It’s government policy, after all.’

At first, Sandrien is too stunned to utter a word.

‘What do you believe I can do for you, Lerato?’

‘You have to talk to Walter. You must go to him in PE, go spend a weekend with him. He’s got a nice, nice place. You know he fancies you rotten. Give him what he wants. And you have to convince him to let go of the corruption investigation. He’ll listen to you.’

‘By the way,’ Lerato says when Sandrien does not respond, her voice now as light as a breeze, ‘I hear you’re going outside your jurisdiction. And you’ve caused a patient to die there. You were told your area, you know the boundaries. There are grounds for disciplinary, even criminal, charges.’ She waits, lets it sink in. ‘Let me know what happens in Port Elizabeth.’

When she enters the house at dawn the next morning, Kobus is waiting for her. He is standing on the slate floor in the entrance hall, a bank letter in his hand. With her body and one of the last remaining Glo-fibre blankets she had kept another patient warm through the night. There was a moment, just before sunrise, when she considered helping herself to the morphine. She smells of vomit and ash.