My Other Life

  The nun was still explaining as she led me around. But I was thinking of the strangeness of the place, and the word "leper." Leper, leper, leper.

  At the second building I saw the woman whom Simon had told me about, the mzungu nursing sister he had called Birdie. She was bandaging a leper's foot, wrapping it like a package. A cheap clock with a stained face of tin ticked on the wall.

  The woman was older than me, perhaps thirty, thin, with a sallow complexion, a yellowish pallor that serious mzungus acquired in the African bush. It was only the fools who sat in the sun; the rest stayed indoors or under cover, like this woman, and they worked at their jobs.

  I smiled while she wrapped the raglike bandage. She said nothing, she did not smile back, as though she resented the nun showing me around the hospital and interrupting the daily routine. A kind of pointless strictness was another characteristic of people in bush posts, as though such punctiliousness gave the day a shape and a meaning.

  It was unusual in the Africa I knew for strangers not to introduce themselves, so I said, "Hello, I'm Paul."

  "Linda," she said. "They call me Birdie."

  "That's pretty."

  "It's short for Birdsall. Everyone in my family gets it," she said. "Have you just arrived?"

  "I came on the train yesterday."

  "That train is scary."

  "I liked it. I guess I don't scare easily."

  "Then you came to the right place," she said. "Wouldn't you say so, Sister?"

  The nun smiled, but grimly. She had skin like parchment, very white and wrinkled, as insubstantial as tissue, and a bristly mustache, and wore rubber gloves.

  I hated myself for being a spectator here among these women who did this every day.

  Birdie was still holding the leper's bandaged foot, snipping and trimming the twisted ends of the knot she had fastened. A man in the next cot groaned. His hands and feet had been bandaged with strips of cloth. But his bandages were dirty and stained and some foul-colored liquid had leaked through and darkened his instep.

  "What will you be doing here?" Birdie asked.

  "Teaching English for anyone who wants to learn."

  Without replying, Birdie went to the next cot, where the leper was softly complaining. She took up one of his legs and began scissoring away his dirty bandages. Her silence made me think I had said something silly.

  The nun went to work on another man's bandages and said, "I'm sure your class will be very popular."

  Yet the mere mention of an English class amid this bandaging made it seem utterly frivolous. Birdie was cutting efficiently through the soiled bandages, using her sharp knife like a letter opener.

  "They make baskets," Birdie said. "They color the fibers with ink from old smashed ballpoints. The baskets are very ugly."

  "Years ago they mixed their own colors from berries," the nun said. "They were so lovely we used them at the church."

  "It seems such a busy place," I said.

  The nun said, "We have about four hundred lepers, and with their families there are about two thousand people altogether. Quite a number, and from all over the country. We have Tumbuka people from the north, Angonis from nearby, Sena people from the Lower River. Even some Yao Muslims from Fort Johnston."

  "You look after all of them?"

  "Oh, yes," she said, flinging the cut and stained bandages into a bucket. "Their villages turned them out. There is so much superstition and prejudice connected with this disease. Because for so many years there was no cure. People just suffered and were treated horribly."

  "But it's not very contagious and it's simple to cure," Birdie said. She too was discarding bandages and revealing a man's foot pitted with sores. "There's no chance of any of us catching it. Yet very few of these people will ever go back to their own villages, because they're scarred. A person with toes missing looks like he still has the disease."

  She held the evidence in her hand, but seemed unconcerned as she swabbed it with a damp piece of cotton. I wanted to ask her what had impelled her to do this work.

  "This is the last illness in Africa," she said, as though reading my thoughts. "It's all curable, and when it's gone the curse will be lifted and no other disease will be as bad. But there are other diseases."

  "I like Birdie's spirit," the nun said.

  "But you have them for life," I said.

  "More or less. Some are useful," the nun said. "The ones that are cured help us give out medicine and do the bandaging."

  "That guy looks really sick," I said. It was a skeletal man, with no flesh, only blotchy skin hanging loose on his bones and his knobby joints, his cheeks sunken, his eyes glazed and popping. He turned his face on me with that accusatory look that very sick people often wear when they stare at healthy ones.

  "Poor Malinki," the nun said. "He had all the symptoms of TB, and so we treated him for that. But he did not improve. We ran all the tests. He gets thinner and thinner. He can't hold his food. And his family doesn't want him."

  "So what are you giving him?"

  "Prayers."

  Birdie had moved to a different patient, whose leg was swollen like a club and was grayish and as rough as the bark of a tree.

  "This is snakebite."

  "Mamba akudya?" I asked him, mentioning the cobra whose bite was so venomous, the black mamba. He was clutching a porcupine quill.

  "Kasongo," he said softly, correcting me with a strange pedantry for a man in his condition.

  He had not been bitten by a mamba but by another black snake, as deadly as the cobra, but with a red crest. The hot regions of Malawi were full of huge poisonous snakes, and they were so feared that if a snake crossed your path it was a bad omen, and if you did not manage to kill the snake you were to return home at once and stay there until the following day.

  "His leg looks horrible."

  "Snake venom has an enzyme in it that helps the snake digest its food," Birdie said. "That's what meat looks like when it's swallowed. A mganga sold him the quill—it's good mankhwala. Glad you came?"

  "What about that guy?"

  It was another man, with bandaged arms and head.

  "He was hacked by his neighbor. An argument over a woman."

  Men and women were staring at us through the window.

  Birdie nodded towards them. "They are lepers. They're supposed to be working. They don't care."

  Another nun came into the ward, carrying scissors and a knife, looking businesslike.

  "This is the new English teacher," Birdie said to her, and it sounded like sarcasm.

  After I left the hospital, I cut through the village, aware that I was being stared at by everyone, and went back to the priests' house and prepared my English lessons.

  The evening meal was the same, nsima and beans and boiled spinachy leaves. I asked Brother Piet more questions about Amsterdam, but his answers were the same as those he had given me last night. Father Touchette glowered by the window, listening to the racket from the village.

  "Deal the cards," Father DeVoss said at last, and Brother Piet obeyed, chattering in Chinyanja.

  Father DeVoss was my partner, Simon was Brother Piet's; Father Touchette clutched his breviary and suffered, looking vindictive. We played six hands of whist and then went to our separate rooms. I read Kafka's Diaries by candlelight, no longer rationing them, for now they seemed self-pitying and faintly ridiculous, like the whining of a high-strung child. It was another language, another world, remote from this one at Moyo.

  3

  "You can use the old bandaging room in the leprosarium for your English class," Father DeVoss said, and I thought how striking the remark would have been as the first line of a poem. "It's just a banda, but it's got tables," he added.

  Where the lepers used to lie, I thought, my students would now sit.

  But there were no hidden meanings for these priests and nuns. This leper colony was not a metaphor to them, not a microcosm of the human condition. It was reality, a community of Africans, some sick, some
well. It was not subtle. It led nowhere. It was a beginning and an end. It was their life—the lepers and their families, the priests, the nuns. When Father Piet said he never wanted to go back to Amsterdam, it was his way of explaining that he intended to die here at Moyo. They would all die here.

  This was the whole of their reality, their entire world. The leper colony did not lead anywhere else. No one, not even the priests, expected more than this. Their house—and most of the buildings—were bare: no books on shelves, no pictures on the walls, nothing but the simplest chairs and tables. Except for the hymns in the church and the drumming in the leper village, which began after dark and continued until eleven or so, there was no music. In this atmosphere, Father DeVoss's deck of playing cards, especially the picture cards, seemed highly colored and evocative, and I found myself lingering and discerning expressions on the faces of the jack, queen and king—mockery, haughtiness, defiance.

  The games of whist were to pass the time. At Moyo there were no other games of any kind, no exploitation, no work, no play. There was what you saw and nothing more. No wanting, no desire. The melancholy of it, I thought; but that was my feeling, not theirs. It was not heaven, not hell, but earth as limbo for those who believed in limbo.

  There was no talk of the past in the priests' house. The other world was so remote in time and space that it had no features. The leper colony had replaced all other realities, and so no one reminisced. The talk was of practical matters in the present. And though Africa was their reality, neither African politics nor African culture interested them much. Everyone spoke Chinyanja except Father Touchette. They had no vanity and yet they were inward, even a bit shy. When they were not being silly—in front of me they always talked in a jokey way—they were solemn. They did not talk about the future, though they occasionally mentioned death, or eternity.

  Their clothes were dusty and dirty, but even so, that did not make them seem poor. On the contrary, it gave them a sense of serenity, made them seem indifferent and unworldly and spiritual.

  One night while I was making notes for my class, sitting at the dining table, where the only Tilly lamp stood, its brightness making me see double, Father DeVoss walked behind me, hesitated, picked up the English textbook, Foundation Secondary English, then examined it—looked it over rather than read it—and set it down. He did the same with Kafka's Diaries, which was also in the stack. He might have been picking up a pair of shoes, to look at the soles and the stitches. There was nothing inside these books for him. He was utterly uninterested, as though the books were mute objects without any function, like worn-out shoes—and this was, I was beginning to think, precisely what they were: dead weight.

  I felt the priests were humoring me about the English class. They were going along with it. I was not dismayed by their low expectations. That they helped me in spite of their lack of faith meant they liked me, and that pleased me. I found them congenial, even nervous Father Touchette.

  The two worst fears of an expatriate going to a new place in the African bush were that the weather might be awful and the local people unfriendly. This was a manner of speaking. "Awful weather" might mean deadly ninety-five-in-the-shade days and suffocating nights; "unfriendly" might mean murderous. It was hot here in Moyo, but bearable; and all the people I had met were friendly—the priests, the nuns, the lepers, the woman named Birdie. I was glad that I had come, and for the first time since arriving in Africa I did not want to be anywhere else.

  ***

  I had put up a sign on the dispensary wall, where medical calls and bandaging times were announced. My note, lettered in Chinyanja, said there would be an English class on Wednesday afternoon at five. It seemed to me an appropriate time. The lepers spent the morning lining up for medicine. It was too hot after lunch for a class. Life in the leprosarium resumed when the sun dipped below the treetops and the shadows lengthened. In the hottest, brightest part of the day, when the sun was overhead, life came to a stop and there was no one to be seen. People withdrew into their huts, where the dirt was damp and cool.

  Wednesday came. At breakfast Father DeVoss said, "You don't have to hold your class today. If it doesn't work out, there's always Friday, or next week."

  Time has little meaning here, he meant. But it was for my sake that I needed to make my English class seem urgent; otherwise, I would lose interest in it. I had been in Africa long enough to understand that to survive I had to impose a shape on the long day—break it into three parts—even if it was all a pretense.

  So I needed the class. I needed the certainty of the old bandaging room. The priests had their rituals, to deliver them from the days of harsh light and the nights of drumming and darkness.

  The bandaging room was a large, open-sided shed with a sloping tin roof and a large water butt at one outside corner under a rusty downspout. At one time, this water butt must have been important, perhaps a source of water for drinking or washing. But there were standpipes in the leper village now and so this big barrel, murky and haunted by breeding mosquitoes, was unused.

  Several men were waiting for me at five. I knew they were lepers from their walking sticks and their bandages. Seeing me approach, some other men got up from under a tree and came over. That made eight. Then an old woman shuffled in, guided by a young girl. It was clear that the old woman was blind. One eye looked as though it had been badly sewn shut—an illusion of the lashes—and the other distorted and as glazed and marbled as an agate. This old blind woman and the young girl were the only females in the class. The girl was in her teens, barefoot, wearing a wraparound and a purple scarf on her head that made her seem exotic. She led the blind woman to a bench, then sat beside her and whispered while the blind woman made passes in the air with her damaged hand like a clumsy blessing.

  "Please write your names on this piece of paper," I said.

  This caused a commotion. Some of them understood, others didn't. Three of them could not write, and these did not include the blind woman, whose presence baffled me.

  One man with a full set of teeth and scars on his forehead that seemed more an accident than a design rattled the paper and began to laugh.

  "Do you want to learn English?" I asked him.

  He paid no attention.

  "That man is sick in his head," a man in the back said.

  The other men laughed at this. They had big, misshapen feet and bruised legs and had brought into the room that earthen odor of sickness and dead flesh.

  I ignored them and said to the man, "My name is Paul. What is your name?"

  "Name," he said. There was a dribble of spittle in the corner of his mouth. He seemed very innocent and helpless, almost childlike in the way his face was about to crumple, either into laughter or tears.

  Some of the others laughed, and the man in the back laughed the hardest, commanding attention.

  "Why are you laughing?" I asked.

  "Because he is foolish," the loud man said.

  "Please stand up."

  He did so.

  "What is your name?"

  "You can read it for yourself on the paper, Father."

  "But I want you to tell me," I said.

  "My name is Johnson Magondwe and I am very well, thank you."

  "You may sit down."

  "What is your name, Father?" he said, folding his arms and still standing, as though defying me.

  "I've already told you that."

  "No. You were telling that foolish man your name, but you were not telling us." He grunted "Eh eh" and looked around at the others in the room in triumph, believing that he had been superbly witty.

  "My name is Paul. Please sit down."

  "I am having one more question, Father."

  "You can ask it later."

  But he kept his arms folded and set his jaw at me, and I saw that the other men around him were giggling with a sort of submissive fear.

  I turned my back on them and spoke to a silent man in the first row, hoping that he was not the simpleton he seemed.
r />   "Hello. How are you?"

  He looked terrified. He sucked on his tongue and said nothing.

  "He is not understanding, Father."

  "Mont, bambo," I said.

  "He is deaf in his ears, Father."

  "Muli bwanji?" I asked.

  "And foolish, Father."

  That was Johnson Magondwe, calling out from the back of the room. I ignored him, but I felt weary in anticipation. So far, one woman was blind, one man was crazy, and another deaf. Several others obviously spoke no English at all. And Johnson was a bore and a bully.

  The young girl in the colorful turban was twisting her fingers, looking anxious.

  "Do you speak English?"

  "Yes, I do speak," she said almost in a whisper, lowering her eyes.

  "Who is this old woman?"

  "She is my granny."

  "What is your name?"

  "My name is Amina."

  Then she bowed her head, but even so, I could see her long lashes and clear skin, and her shoulders shining. She was thin, but sturdy. Her neck was long, her fingers slender. She had full lips and large eyes. I loved her for my being able to see the suggestions of her bones beneath her flesh, in her face and her hands, her shoulders. She was young, though not so young in African terms. Many girls her age—sixteen or seventeen—already had several children.

  The men in the room were surprised that she spoke English. Of the ten Africans in the room, only five spoke English. I wrote some lines of dialogue with chalk on a smooth plank that was painted black. Johnson and the man next to him, Phiri, could read the words easily, and so could Amina; with my coaching, two of the others learned them. While this went on, the blind woman grunted, the simpleton drooled, the deaf man rocked back and forth.

  I was tired yet they seemed oddly rested and calm. They were not eager, but curious, watching me, waiting for me to teach them, the way they stood at the dispensary with their hands out, empty palms upward, expecting me to pass them medicine.

  "Repeat after me," I said. "It's a dog."