The Rowing Lesson Page 15

  It’s all Mickey’s fault, the bugger who took you to the Blue Lodge. Mickey’s a rear-gunner now, bombing the hell out of the Italians in Abyssinia and Somaliland. When he comes home on leave, he has girls hooked on every arm and there’s even someone climbing all over his eyebrows. You’re making sure that your nose isn’t being eaten off your face while he’s sleeping with one girl in the afternoon, and a new one at night. The varsity girls are falling like leaves in an autumn wind. They flutter in the arms of the boys in uniform, in their organzas, their crepes and their taffettas. Maxie says they’ll even fall for you, when the soldiers go back to war. Let’s finish up what Mickey started. It’s open season.

  Famous last words, you tell him, as you stare at a syphilitic spirochete on a slide under the microscope. The spiral shaped bacterium thrills you, in a nameless but chilling way. Be my guest, you say, as you offer Maxie a look at the slide. Pinta and yaws, he whispers, fondling the names of other terrible diseases caused by spirochetes. There’s nothing to stop the curling, curving, flat-headed, club-tailed, spiralling armies of bacteria from marching up your pants and eating you alive.

  But it’s coming, he tells you, Mr. Maxie Bloody Know-it-all. Penicillin is going to save us all, if the Krauts don’t get us first. Never mind the arsenicals for syphilis, the emetine for dysentery, the quinine. A miracle is just around the corner. Maxie reads The Lancet. He’s light-years ahead of you, a true scientist in the making and a feinschmecker of the highest order. You call him F.S., for short. He says you’re a mysophobe, and you say a What? Someone who’s afraid of picking up an infection, he says, Sir Lancelot Lancet Reader and World Expert. Your nose sharpens, draws in on itself, and your eyebrows double knot in the middle. Don’t be so paranoid, old chap. I was only pulling your leg. You’re the one who’s paranoid, you mutter, but even the spirochete is ruined.

  The bloody buggers are ruining the war too. The coffin in the ground and the shop on the coffin, Mum, Maisie and Bertie on top of the dead shop. Your dead father’s hands are locked around your ankles, holding you down, keeping you here while the other chaps fly around the world and back. You’re missing the greatest adventure of all time. Uncle Oscar won’t listen because you have to become a doctor. You know that, don’t you?

  But right now you’re just a house officer learning to take histories at the bedside, watching the great Professor of Medicine, Professor Man-Bird, whose pointed questions can unravel a man’s life and chart the map of his sins, his habits, his desires. Often he makes his initial diagnosis by asking, and seeing, before turning the sheet back, and touching.

  The test is the doctor, not a machine, and his dream of what’s inside a body racked and turned by sickness or accident. You’ve prostrated yourself before the all-knowing Man-Bird, like all the other house officers, and you’re hoping to learn what’s inside his fierce head, under the shining big top.

  He’s got all of you around him this morning, all the lucky bastards in his firm. Dorothy May, you’re happy to say, is in another firm and with any luck she’s with the ladies and babies, where she belongs. A Coloured nurse, her white uniform lacquered onto her firm breasts, wheels in a patient from the non-White ward, a grizzled Coloured woman, her toothless mouth downturned with pain, a faded, rose-patterned hanky twisted between her fingers. Today Man-Bird is not asking any questions. He goes straight to the patient, and exposes her abdomen to the staring, sleepless group of ten housemen. He’s not doing the usual tap and shuffle about the art of medicine, the magic wand of beribboned words, Hippocrates here, and Sir William Osler there, telling you that it’s more important to know what sort of a person has a disease than to know what sort of a disease a person has. He’s not shouting about the olden days where anatomy students were sent to executions, so they could see what’s inside the body when it’s drawn and quartered, so they could watch and take notes when the four pieces were separated and the internal organs pulled out. He’s not screaming, You chaps have it easy! Too bloody easy!

  There’s none of that today. He’s a lamb, his voice fallen and soft, his gestures small. It’s the most dangerous show of all. You know that, just as the other housemen do. You can smell the sweat that’s starting to prickle in armpits, palms, behind necks. Man-Bird palpates the woman’s abdomen and there’s a thick silence in the ward, as he draws the vast body of his knowledge into his fingertips. In your mind’s eye, you’re back in Gross Anatomy, lifting the lettuce leaf of the Greater Omentum and looking at what’s under the apron, rifling through the organs you named and labelled. This time they’re not out but in. They’re neatly packed and tucked into a Coloured woman probably from District Six, with roses looped between her fingers. You’re looking all over her for clues, at her sunken jawline, her swollen arthritic knuckles, the soft fabric that she’s teasing and kneading over and over again. You can hear the fish horn’s whine, and she’s selling flowers on the parade, her hands dipping in and out of big buckets of water. Nettie’s wiping your bottom. It’s raining in George and she says her knee hurts, and don’t be onbeskof, otherwise your mother will give you a jolly good hiding.

  Man-Bird’s eye almost catches yours but then it washes past you and lands on Maxie. Maxie is summoned to the patient’s bed and now it’s his turn to palpate the organs, and feel all the treasures and horrors buried under the skin. Do you feel the spleen, Mr. Sloan? Maxie puts on his best palpating face. Yes, sir, I feel the spleen, sir. Posterior to the stomach, sir. In contact with the diaphragm. Not a big love affair, you’re thinking. A letter once a month, maybe a phone call on the spleen’s birthday.

  Maxie goes back to the group and another houseman, Sam Katzenellenbogen, is summoned to the bed side. Sam is from the Orange Free State, a Jewish chap who grew up near the Big Hole and walked to school without shoes on his feet. He has a brown moustache and hooded eyes and Man-Bird makes a big fuss out of his name, Katzenellenbogen, Cat’s Elbow. Again Man-Bird asks, Do you feel the spleen, Mr. Cat’s Elbow? Sam’s hand crosses back and forth over the woman’s abdomen like a pale crab. The crab has dirty fingernails, and you’re hoping Man-Bird doesn’t notice. He’s looking away, thank God, and finally Sam’s crab-hand stops in the general vicinity of the stomach. Sam nods, Yes sir, I feel the spleen, sir. Man-Bird waves him back to the group.

  Mr. Harold Klein! The whole ward just lurched, an ocean liner rolling on a tremendous wave. It’s a wonder all the trays and instruments and beds and patients didn’t roll down the shiny floor and land in a big heap against the wall. Now it’s still again and you walk the gangplank to the starched white bed, the soft, brown abdomen in the centre, its surface crosshatched with lines and folds. The belly button is saying something rude but you don’t listen. Your fingers have a life of their own as they press into the softness, rifling through the layers of tissue, hunting the liver, the stomach, the colon. You’re looking for jellyfish in the pitch-dark, diving for golf balls from the railway bridge and all you’re coming up with is a fistful of mud.

  Do you feel the spleen? Man-Bird’s voice freezes the sweat on your upper lip, it locks your jaw. All you can do is shake your head and search. The woman in the bed raises herself a little, and then she sinks back. The hanky falls from her fingers onto the floor. For a hideous second, you imagine that you’ve killed her with your ignorance. The pages of your anatomy book whir in your head, next to an endless parade of the organs and ducts. Right, left, right colic flexure, left colic flexure, left, right, ascending colon, descending colon, right, left, jejunum, secum.

  DO YOU FEEL THE SPLEEN? No, sir, you whisper, and you can almost hear everyone behind you begging, Just say you feel the spleen. Tell him you have it. She’s going to die anyway. We’re all going to die. Just tell him you feel the spleen!

  Mr. Klein! You’ve got to be able feel the spleen! He’s hissing now, and you’re the one who is being drawn and quartered, whose insides are spilling out all over the floor. That’s your gallbladder rolling under the bed, and a nurse just stepped on your pancreas. All that’s
left standing, is your penis, and it bobs its circumsized head at the housemen. I’m sorry, chaps. You wish someone would pick you up, put you in Dorothy May’s handbag and take you out of this glinting, evil place.

  More than anything, you hate the spleen, this stupid mouse of an organ hiding behind the stomach somewhere, tricking you like this. You’d like to pull it out and squeeze it to a pulp between your fingers, then trample it to death. Maxie catches your eye and he looks like he’s struggling to breathe. All the housemen look like they’re drowning, like their bloody ship is sinking. You hate all of them, and you want to scream and cry at the same time.

  Mr. Klein was the only honest one, Man-Bird intones. The patient does not have a spleen. The woman in the bed bursts out laughing, suddenly, a mad noise from a completely unexpected source. She turns her head into the pillow, overcome with embarrassment, as she tries to stifle her cackles.

  Now it’s Maxie’s and Sam’s turn to feel the rack and the screw, Man-Bird’s talons around their necks. He talked them into feeling an organ that wasn’t there and now they’re sitting in the stocks, two chumps on a log. Man-Bird is flying high, dropping diseases down on all of you, malaria, tuberculosis, leukemia, thalassemia.

  Schistosomiasis, anemia and glandular fever. All of them cause the purple mouse to grow into a purple kitten. But why isn’t it there, Mr. Klein? Why is this spleen not enlarged but entirely absent from the scene? What happened? All you can think of is the train, the colon-train and a terrible accident, sir. She must have suffered a fall from a dizzy height. Or something must have fallen on her, like the bad hand of a bad husband. A train or a car, a big mistake and she came in to the hospital bleeding like mad and she almost died, sir. But she was spared because her spleen was removed and the artery supplying it was tied off. She was saved!

  You’re tap dancing down the wards one week later, long after even the nocturnals have turned in. “Hey, tjoekie, it’s a quarter to four . . . there’s a stripe of moonlight pointing right at my door . . .” You’re dreaming of taking Matron in your arms. . . “Tjoekie, don’tcha know that I’m nude . . . You mustn’t keep me waiting when I’m in the mood. . . .” You haven’t slept for days and days, and even the windows have started to dance.

  The lights are ringing all over the world, the doors are flying all over the world. The Coloured nurse collars you because you’re the house officer on duty. What? You’re watching her mouth move, and you can’t figure out if she’s speaking English or Afrikaans. But then she makes a choking gesture and you follow her like the wind down the corridor to outpatients, where there’s a brown man going blue, his lung collapsed, pneumonia squeezing him to death. The senior house officer has taken a powder. The non-White wards are too much for him, especially on a Saturday night. Too many knife wounds. It’s like a bloody abattoir, you heard him tell one of the other senior chaps.

  But you wanted moonlight in the hardest part of the hospital. You’re right in the broken heart of Groote Schuur feeling the glimmer of war, something huge you can help to fix.

  The button of a nurse whispers trake, and you take the scalpel from her. You’ve never done a tracheostomy before. Yes, the metal tube is there, you have the scalpel in your hand, the lights are burning bright. You’re ready to jump into the forests of Normandy, the valley of the Rhine. Your parachute is sharp and it glows in the dark. “When the lights go on again all over the world . . . and the boys are home again all over the world. . . .” The song leads the scalpel into the trachea, breaking and entering, a full-scale invasion. The body shoots back, a stream of blood that leaves you drenched, right down to your socks.

  You’re suddenly wide awake, more awake than you’ve been for weeks and weeks. Jesus Christ, Harry, you forgot his thyroid! You sailed straight into the isthmus and punched a hole in his superior thyroid artery!

  The patient’s painting the whole town red! Streaks of scarlet stripe the walls, the floor, the ceiling. The nurse’s uniform has gone from white to ruby. She’s in a bright evening gown now. You’ve slid through the Valley of the Shadow of Death on your bottom right into the jaws of hell, into the howling flames. The man on the stretcher reaches for you, his face twisted in agony and surprise. Dokter! You hold him, trying to close the hole in the dyke with anything you can lay your hands on but this leak is impossible. His life-force sweeps over you like a tidal wave. He’s taking away everything you’ve learned. You’re going with him into the abyss.

  With a gurgle and one last spluttering sigh, his dinghy capsizes and he sinks like a stone. He didn’t even make it to Ebb ’n Flow.

  You’re still here. Pinch yourself but don’t look at the nurse. She’s dead quiet and you want to kill her. It’s all her fault. She should have called someone else, not you. Didn’t she know that you’re so tired and so small that all you can do is clappety-tap down the halls by yourself? Didn’t the nuns tell her that you still shit in your pants?

  There’s a group of Coloured nurses in the room now and they’re all over the place with buckets and mops. The water is soapy and red. They don’t tell you what they’ve seen before, that the isthmus of the thyroid is a trap, a bridge over the throat that comes in many shapes and sizes. Even if you hadn’t forgotten all about the thyroid, even if you’d found the isthmus, you still could have jammed right into it. You’re going to have to pay for your mistake like everybody else does. A bubble of blood trickles down from the corner of the dead man’s mouth, and pops on the way to the floor.

  The man’s name is Fanus Meintjies and his wife, Sara, is on the other side of the swinging doors. Go tell her that her husband is gone, that his temperature flopped from low to high, from high to low again, that all he wanted to do was go back to the shop because he had that institution on the brain. Tell her any story you can think of but just don’t tell her that you killed him. You wash off the blood that’s caked your eyebrows and you change your coat for a fresh white one before you swing through the swinging doors.

  You’re pretending to be Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter, taking soot out of a beautiful woman’s eye, passing a camel through the eye of a needle. Sara Meintjies is crying and you’re floating just an inch or two below the ceiling, bumping the back of your head occasionally. He said he loved you, and goodbye. So sorry, Mrs. Meintjies. Bump goes your head every time you tell a lie. Bump bump.

  She’s blinded by your fresh white coat, so blind that she’s saying Dankie, dokter. Baie dankie. Thank you, doctor. Thank you very much. She’s a small Coloured woman, smaller than you, and you could pick her up and carry her out of here, and it would be over, at least this part anyway. But you have to keep acting and telling her about his collapsed lung and how it was all too late. Even though you did the tracheostomy he had already stopped breathing. Ek is baie jammer, mevrou. I am very sorry.

  Maxie likes to say that these are the people we get to practise on, the poor people of Africa. The Strandlopers, the Hottentots, the Xhosa and the descendants of Malay slaves. The Cape Coloureds, the Bantu, all the shades of non-White, all the different language speakers who come here and bleed here and die here. You might as well have pulled your wagon into the laager at the Battle of Blood River and shot your own Zulu. At least you wouldn’t have had to lie to his wife that he’d died before you killed him.

  You might as well have joined the Ossewabrandwag and marched across the Great Karoo reenacting the Great Trek with a flaming torch in your hand. You could even be in Hitler’s Army right now, killing your own people all over Europe. There is no pit deep enough for you, no jail that will hold someone who forgot about the thyroid gland.

  Chapter 13

  THE SUN IS slipping, laying a place for itself at Bertie’s table, ready to dress his house in dazzling colors. We’re on the other side of the mountain, in the shadow of Devil’s Peak and the light is fading on us, the day is almost done.

  Simon’s outside your room and he’s shouting in the corridor at someone about your IV. Is it morphine and is it too much because now your breathing i
s getting harder and harder and the old chorrie is fighting to get up the hill, even though you’re in first gear. Ma gives me a full tray and I’m eating brown meat and gravy and a tower of mashed potatoes as Simon’s voice starts to sound more and more like yours.

  Ma’s talking about the night and the carjackers and the thieves and the skollies that come out in the dark and I’m staring out at the hunched mountain, with its baboons folded into the crevices, waiting for the spray of stars to come out. I remember how you tumbled down at the end of the day William and I got married, how you lay on the ground and I thought you were dead. I ran away from you into William’s arms. Protect me, protect me, I said, pulling his arms around me like a cloak. His lips were on my hair, and he held me until I was calm, until you got up and brushed bits of gravel from your wedding suit, laughing as if you’d just heard a good joke. Now William’s on the other side of the world and you’re not getting up this time. I’m hugging myself in the half-dark, hugging the baby floating inside me, wishing William was here to hold me and steady me, in the storm that’s beginning to break right over our heads.