Читать книгу The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Memoir - Aminatta Forna - Страница 12

A few months after our clinic opened a battered bush taxi drew up in front of the house. There were quite a few people crammed inside; at first it was difficult to see exactly how many. They struggled out, among them a woman so emaciated and feeble that she couldn’t walk, as well as a boy of around eight or nine who looked as if he were unconscious.

Our father came out and helped carry them into the surgery; it was obvious he was upset and angry: ‘Why do you bring them to me when it’s too late?’ No one replied. And he knew the answer: they had nothing, there was no way to pay a doctor.

The woman was close to death. The boy, who was perhaps her son, had died in the back of the car a short while before: his body was still limp, no signs yet of rigor mortis. My father asked the family about the woman’s and the boy’s symptoms. Were there others? They nodded. Yes, they replied, there were many others in the village, too ill to make the journey.

My father didn’t have a laboratory but it took him less than a minute to reach his diagnosis: what the people described was a cholera epidemic. He took his bag, swept up armfuls of drugs, threw them all onto the front seat of our Austin and left. The family sat in the back giving him directions to their village, cradling the body of the small boy wrapped in a sheet.

My father didn’t come back until much later that night, until after he had traced the source of the contamination and persuaded the village headman to stop people using the water. It was never easy; there was often only one well or stream; people didn’t understand the basic principles of infection, spread and cure. Outbreaks of disease were almost always blamed on witchcraft. He taught them how, at the first sign of diarrhoea they should shake the gas out of a bottle of Fanta or Coca-Cola and drink it at room temperature. It was a simple trick: the equivalent of sugar and salts. But it was a life-saver.

When my mother was alone in the city and our father was in the regions planning the clinic, a measles epidemic gripped Freetown. In Britain measles is an ordinary childhood illness; in Africa the same virus kills as recklessly and easily as a child tumbling a tower of wooden blocks. That year hundreds of children died. At Connaught Hospital they didn’t have space to admit any new cases. All three of us children were infected; spots even erupted down the inside of my brother’s throat. My father wasn’t due back for many days and there were no telephones up-country, no way to reach him. So my mother nursed us at home, letting us sip flat Fanta when we were too weak to eat anything else.

Eventually a colleague of our father’s was reached and he drove over to see us. He put my brother on a drip and told my mother she had done just the right thing. She was so relieved when we began to improve after ten days that she ran across the road to Patterson Zochonis, the expensive and only department store in Freetown, where she bought us absurdly expensive Swiss maraschino cherry ice cream, and spooned it down our tender throats one by one.

In Koidu there was so much to do and no other doctors with whom to share the load. The building of this clinic was the realisation of a simple dream for our father. Many of the western-trained doctors preferred to stay in Freetown and work in the larger hospitals. With a modest private practice on the side within a few years they could own a Mercedes and be waited upon by servants wearing white gloves, like Dr Panda and his wife. But our father had a vision that one day there would be a network of cottage clinics across the country. The success of our clinic was important to him and his motives were plain.

When our father was a child during the war, a vaccination programme was announced. Scores of families left their villages to make the trip to the mission hospital. They settled on the rows of long wooden benches under the sun in the courtyard, alongside patients who arrived with other complaints. When the benches were full, the line continued along the walls and encircled the building. My father sat for hours on the ground, his back against the wall, listening for his name to be called. In front of him in the queue was an old man. When the Fornas appeared, the old man asked for help going to the toilet and he gave my father some cola nuts in thanks afterwards.

The hours passed and when at last his name was called the old Pa seemed to have fallen asleep, so my father leaned over and shook him lightly. The man slumped over sideways and lay face up, blue cataract-filled eyes reflecting the sky. A few minutes later the orderlies pulled him up by the arms and carted him away. They were used to it: the old ones who died before they made it to see the doctor.

Following Ndora’s death our father left the village to live with Teacher Trye. Soon after he left, a second tragedy struck his tiny family. A letter arrived in Bo, written by a hired letter-writer, informing Mohamed that his elder brother Morlai had died ‘of a headache’. He lay down one afternoon saying his head hurt and simply never got to his feet again.

We never, ever turned a patient away. And if someone couldn’t pay, we treated them for free. It was hard to imagine, given the principles that governed our father, that the clinic was making money but remarkably it was.

In the town there were a small number of extremely wealthy diamond dealers. They operated cheek by jowl with the Sierra Leone Selection Trust, who paid the government millions to exploit the country’s reserves, as well as the Diamond Corporation, a holding of the De Beers empire, who held the rights to buy the lion’s share of gems. Some independent dealers bought government permits allowing them to mine restricted quantities of gems. Others dispensed with the law and sent teams of their own men to dig illicitly in the restricted area. Many did both.

After dark on most nights just outside Koidu hordes of young men and some women scaled the fences, easily avoiding the single SLST helicopter that patrolled the area with search lights. In the early morning they wriggled back under the wire, gritty brown diamonds wrapped in small pieces of cloth tied round their necks. The dealers paid their illegal diggers a retainer to bring the gems, which they then sold on through the official government offices or shifted illegally on the black market. The world of the dealers was a closed one, a tightly run business controlled by a few men who maintained a private code of honour designed to hold on to their monopoly and increase the sum of their wealth.

The men who risked their health and liberty to dive hundreds of times to the bottom of the river bed and bring up pans of silt had no option but to sell the gems they found to their patron at the price he chose to give them. There were frequent accidents: several times we were all roused in the middle of the night or early morning because there had been a drowning. Sometimes the illegal diggers were caught and prosecuted – they were the only people who ever were. If their patrons couldn’t bribe the judge to let their man off, well, he’d be well compensated for doing time on behalf of the boss. In Koidu everyone knew their place.

Regularly men would arrive at the clinic bearing notes which simply stated to whom the final bill should be sent – inevitably one of several Lebanese dealers: After my father had treated their ailments and given them drugs, he sent the bill through to my mother to prepare and he instructed her to charge the dealers at the highest rate. At least eight out of every ten people who passed through our clinic paid nothing, even for their medicines, which my father fetched from the dispensary in the house and handed to them; people who could afford it were charged at the regular rate; and between them the diamond dealers paid for the healthcare of the rest of Koidu and the surrounding villages.

Almost always people who had not been charged came back on another day with something in return: a pair of live chickens, a sack of oranges or a basket of yams.

Late one night we were all woken up by a frenzied rapping on the door of the house, so loud it sounded as though they were trying to hammer their way in. When our father undid the bolts, there on the step was a young man, sweating and teetering on the edge of hysteria: ‘Oh, Doctor, I say do ya help me. I get syphilis.’ He babbled in Creole, fidgeting and jumping, utterly unable to contain himself. ‘I able feel am crawling pan me skin.’ He shuddered at that. We all did. ‘I need tchuk.’ He made the motion of giving himself an imaginary injection in the left arm. Our father, still half asleep, led him through to his surgery and treated him then and there. When the young man confessed he had no way of paying, our father waved him away.

A few weeks later my mother was out at night She had been to a dance at the Diamond Corporation, alone because my father was working. On the way home she drove over a pothole and burst a tyre. The road was dark and empty as the DiaCorp compound was some way out of town; dense elephant grass grew up on either side to well over seven foot. She couldn’t see a single light and within a few moments she began to consider her predicament: a woman, in an evening gown and high heels, without a torch on an empty road in the African bush. She had been there some time when she saw a car’s headlights in the distance. Conflicting thoughts occupied her mind and she prayed that this was someone who would help her, perhaps someone else on their way back from the party.

As the car came closer she saw that it was dented and old, obviously belonging to a local because no European would drive a car in such a state. It drew alongside, slowed and stopped next to her. My mother could see that there were several young men inside.

‘Na de doctor een wife,’ someone announced. It was ‘Tchuk’. He jumped out grinning and proud, evidently in the best of health. Within a few moments Tchuk and his companions changed the punctured tyre and saw her away.

By the time we had been in Koidu a year our father’s name and reputation had spread for miles. As with my mother, everywhere he went people greeted us, yelled and waved at the passing car. Yet to me at that time he was a distant figure.

My days were spent in the house, playing with our dogs Jack and Jim, and being guarded by Big Aminatta. I say ‘guarded’ because that is just about what she did: she pursued her many chores around the house, of which I was just one. Her task was to make sure I didn’t escape or run into trouble. She kept me within the confines of the compound by telling me of the devils lurking in the elephant grass beyond the screen of trees that marked the compound boundary. Devils with faces like gargoyles just waiting for the opportunity to feed on a child like me. At night she got me to clean my teeth with stories of cockroaches that crawled onto pillows and feasted on the crumbs left at the side of a sleeper’s mouth.

At that time we had two Old English sheepdogs. With their heavy coats they were hopelessly unsuited to both the humidity and the ticks that burrowed into their flesh, but they seemed to manage all the same. Given to us as puppies in Freetown, they were at first presumed to be mongrels until they grew into apparently full-blooded Old English sheepdogs. My mother called them Jack and Jim and they were the only pedigree dogs I ever saw or have ever seen since in Sierra Leone. I spent my days tumbling with Jack and Jim in the yard and kissing them on the nose, playing in the dirt until I contracted enormous tropical boils, which my father lanced for me from time to time, and generally ingesting enough germs to give me a lifelong immunity to hepatitis. In the evening our father came back long after we were all in bed. He literally worked every hour of the day.

Mornings, when our father went to the bathroom for his early constitutional, was our quality time together. The three of us followed him to the bathroom, carrying our colouring books, toys and stories. We sat on the floor around him, chatted, finished our drawings, showed him the work we had done the day before or persuaded him to read aloud to us. At some point I suppose he sent us on our way. I don’t remember that, only lying on the lino colouring a picture of a princess for him.

From my three-foot-high perspective, my strongest memory of my father is from the waist down: mid-grey slacks, open sandals. I remember the exact shape and hue of his toenails, his strong, muscular thighs and rounded bottom, but the face on the top remains a blur on top of a vaguely light-coloured, short-sleeved shirt and stethoscope. He had a beard at that time, but my memory of him only truly begins when he shaved it off a few months before we left Koidu for good. Most of the time our worlds barely collided, and those moments when they did were the most memorable.

A deranged woman was brought to the clinic. I guess she must have been in her forties, although she looked much older. She snatched at the lappa she was wearing and at her blouse, screamed and started like a mare, and behaved as though unseen hands were pinching her or, I thought, tickling her armpits and squeezing her sides like my uncles did to me in a way that both hurt and made me howl at the same time. The more I shrieked the more they thought I was enjoying it and continued. The family said she was bewitched and they couldn’t look after her any more, so our father put her in one of the rooms in our house, I think with the intention of sending her or driving her himself down to a mental hospital in Freetown. Later the same day I wandered past the window of the room where she was being held and saw her face staring at me behind the mesh of the fly screen. She shouted and her eyeballs reeled. I fled back to Big Aminatta.

Some time later in the afternoon she escaped. Nobody in the house knew how or when, but she couldn’t have been gone long. My father raced to the car and the three of us leapt in behind him, standing on the plastic seats and blaring at the top of our voices that we were off to look for the madwoman. My father drove at speed telling us to keep a look out; he seemed to be enjoying the adventure as much as we were. Everyone was making a riotous amount of noise and we felt no fear.

We hadn’t been gone long when we saw her. She was standing at the side of the road, on the balls of her feet with her back pushed hard against a tree. Her shoulders were drawn up high and she was shrieking. Above her the tree was in flower, decorated with splendid fleshy, coral heads framed by thick petals that grew upright, like hands reaching to the sky. The orange and pink colours made the flamboyant tree look as if it were alight with burning candles. From a distance I could see the woman was staring at a branch from the tree that was lying in the middle of the road. She seemed to be fixated on it, as though it were alive. When we drew nearer I saw the branch wasn’t what I thought at all, but a snake.

The car went straight over it, I felt the bump under my bottom and thighs. A moment later we were in reverse. My father kept going, changing gears backwards and forwards, until after a while I couldn’t feel the point where the snake’s corpse lay on the road any longer. When we were certain it was dead we felt like heroes who had vanquished a dragon.

In my mind’s eye the snake had been enormous, stretching the entire width of the road. As I grew older I thought perhaps I imagined it: no ordinary snake could really be that long. Now, I realise it was almost certainly a twig snake – six foot long, yes, but absolutely harmless. It wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with the madwoman except perhaps to get past her up the tree to lie in peace on its favourite branch.

We drove home with the mad lady now sitting quite calmly between us in the back. The next day she went off to Freetown. I wasn’t there when she was taken away, and when I discovered she was gone, I missed her.