Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

— Septicaemia … the blood leaked into the body’s cavity, you see. — The lowered tone of confidential gossip. — Of course, he should have had himself admitted the moment he had symptoms. Dosed himself with brandy instead … But I’m telling you, at least he hasn’t gone down, he’s fighting, we’re pleased with him.—

The nurse came to Lazar with the packet of fruit. It was become evidence of their foolish ignorance, his and Mrs Stark’s, of the nature of the ante-room in life to which they had been directed; of this retreat for those upon whom violence has been done, where their colleague had entered as one enters an order under vows of silence and submission. By contrast, the uninitiated are clumsy and intrusive and have only the useless to offer. — Oh no, keep it, won’t you.—

A giggle of pleasure. — Oh thanks, aih. Lovely grapes!—

There was an official roster of Foundation colleagues taking turns to visit the hospital every working day. At weekends others felt they had a right to disappear into their private lives; Mrs Stark was older, there were surely no urgencies of family demands, love entanglements, waiting to be taken up, for a woman like her. She joined the trooping crowds of relatives and friends who filled the hospital on Saturday and Sunday. Out-of-works, beggars and staggering meths drinkers officiously directed cars and minibuses searching for parking, sleeping children were slung round the necks of fathers, there were girls adorned and made up to remind male patients of their sexuality, Afrikaner aunts in church-going hats, bored young men gathered outside for a smoke, Indian grandmothers sitting in their wide-swathed bulk like buddhas, popcorn packets and soft-drink cartons stuck behind the pots of snake plant and philodendron intended to distract people from bleak asepsis, the smells and sights of suffering, the same plants that stand about in banks to distract queues from their anxiety, in the power of money.

The first Saturday and Sunday, and the second. Oupa, the body that was Oupa identified by the mute face, lay as he was placed, on this side or that, sometimes on his back. And that was something to stop the intruder where she stood, entering the cell that was always open. No privacy for that body. On his back, totally exposed. Once she asked if there could be a sheet to cover him and was dismissed with impatience at ignorant interference: he was kept naked because every bodily change, every function had to be monitored all the time, nurses coming in to observe him every fifteen minutes; he was kept naked to fan away the heat of infection raging in there, see the flush in his face, the purplish red mounting under the black. When she was alone — with him but alone — she carefully (he must never know, even if he were to be aware of the need for the small gesture it would humiliate him) drew the piece of cloth between his legs over the genitals that lolled out, ignored by nurses. Sometimes he seemed asleep as well as unconscious. The breathing changed; the men she had slept with breathed like that deep in the night. She wanted to tell him she — at least someone — was there yet it was a violation to touch him when he seemed so doubly, utterly removed. At other times she stood with her hand over his; it was the gesture she knew from other circumstances. She fell back on it for want of any other because nobody knew what he might need or want, they believed he had no thirst because salt water dripped into his veins, they believed he did not feel vulnerable in his nakedness because fever glowed in him like coal. Whether or not the people he shared One-Twenty-One with came to see him she did not know. And moving away from the black townships he had lost touch with neighbours and friends there, most did not know where he lived, now, in a building among whites. Very likely they would not have been allowed in to see him if they had come; the sister in charge made it clear that visits were to be restricted to his employer since it seemed he had no family.

Of course he has a family — but who knew how to get in touch with the plump young woman sitting among all the women who are left behind in veld houses put together as igloos are constructed from what the environment affords, snow or mud. No one had an address; as an employee and as a patient Oupa had given his permanent residence as One-Twenty-One Delville Wood. The Only way to reach her was to retrace the journey from the turn-off at the eucalyptus trees — could someone from the Foundation be spared to drive there? Mrs Stark knew the way but her husband, supported by her son out from London on a visit, absolutely forbade her to revive the trauma of the attack in this way.

During the week Lazar Feldman and others tiptoed in and stood a few minutes, afraid of closeness to what the familiar young-man-about-the-office had become, the grotesque miracle of his metamorphosis. One of the clerks who had meekly suffered because she was too plain to attract him, wept. They went away and some found excuses not to come again; what did visits help a man, said to be Oupa, who did not know there was anyone present, did not know that he himself was present.

Vera glanced at her watch and set herself the endurance of twenty minutes. But she forgot to look at the dial again. What was a presence? Must consciousness be receptive, cognitive, responsive, for there to be a presence? Didn’t the flesh have a consciousness of its own, the body signalling its presence through the lungs struggling to breathe with the help of some machine, the kidneys producing urine trickling into a bag, the stool forming in the bowels.

An insect settles on a leaf and slowly moves its wings.

She sat and watched.

The Fat Nurse and the Thin One, the Chinese and the Black (nurses are known by rank and the most obvious features, they seem to have no names) came and went, marking the passing of time ritually as the tongue of a church bell striking against its palate where traffic is not yet heavy enough to break the sound waves. How ignorant, how far away from this, she had been curious: what’s it like. This is what it’s like; an anatomical demonstration that spares nothing. When, in church between her mother and father, she heard about that moral division, the soul and the body, and grew up unable to believe in the invisible, what the priest really was talking about and didn’t know it, was this: what he called soul was absence, the body was presence. It was swollen now, not only the hands: one day when she walked in there was the young man’s flat belly blown up, the skin taut and shiny, a version in a fun-fair distorting mirror. To look for identity in the face was to be confronted by an oxygen mask. The Chinese gave it a touch to make it what she judged would be more comfortable, if one could feel. The Black used a little blood-sucking device to draw specimens from a huge toe pierced again and again. The Fat One cleaned the leaking anus. If one could feel? The dumb creature that is the body cannot tell. It is an effigy of life ritually, meticulously attended. Outside, in between times, the acolytes eat grapes, arrange on the counter flowers left behind by dead patients, and whisper forbidden telephone calls to children home from school and boy-friends at work.

Vera no longer imagined the plump young woman down the turn-off from the eucalyptus trees and phrased what she ought to be saying to her. Ivan, back at the house where he was conceived, disappeared from her awareness as if he were still in England. The wheeze and click of machines that now breathed for the body and eliminated its waste chattered over its silence. Remote from her, within that awe, a final contemplation was taking place — isn’t that what it is — what it’s like? — the years on the Island, night study to be a lawyer in what the politicians promise to be a new day, freedom the dimensions of a flat in a white suburb, a box-cart pulled through the dust by children— who knew what the final contemplation must be? In that silence she saw that the certainty she had had of death, Zeph Rapulana’s death among nine at Odensville, when he was, in fact, to appear before her alive, was merely a mis-sort in time, a letter first delivered to the wrong address: the certainty belonged to her where it reached her now, in this place, in this presence.