The Good Doctor (26 page)

I would have. I would have said it all. In that moment I wasn’t afraid to die.

But of course they weren’t there; I don’t know why I thought they would be. They must have left the camp for good when Tehogo was shot, and there was no reason ever to come back. It was only in
my mind that they were fixed in one place, like a target at which I had aimed my life like an arrow. But I had missed again. I couldn’t even summon up a proper tragedy from all the promising raw
material of my life.

So there was nothing to face up to in the end, except the ridiculous figure that was myself. Heavy, long past his prime, gasping for breath. Standing doubled-over in the centre of this deserted
theatre, watched only by rotten canvas and rusted barbed wire.

And him. After a few minutes he appeared, looking calm and a bit bored, strolling over from the far side of the camp, where I only now saw the top of his jeep sticking up.

He was wearing his uniform again. But his bearing today was casual, more civilian than military. He had his hands in his pockets and he was whistling through his teeth.

‘Good morning, Doctor,’ he said.

He didn’t seem surprised to see me there. Only a little amused at how sweaty I was.

‘You need some basic training,’ he said. ‘That’ll get you into shape.’

‘I came...’ I said. ‘I came... to look...’

‘Me too. Your boss, that doctor lady, told me what happened. So I thought it was time to check out your story. See if there was anything here. But...’

He gestured at the decay around us, the brown weeds pushing through the ground.

‘It’s not true,’ I said. ‘You’ve been here before. Why do you go on denying it?’

He smiled thinly; he was in a good mood today. ‘But there’s nobody here. Except us. And it’s a
kak
place.’

‘What will happen now?’

‘Nothing. They’ve gone. I don’t think we’ll be seeing them again.’

‘I meant... what will happen to him? To my friend.’

‘I was talking about your friend,’ he said.

And then there was nothing more to say. It had all run out here, in the unlikeliest of places, on an ordinary day.

‘How did you get here?’ he said. ‘Can I give you a lift?’

‘My car’s down there. It’s stuck.’

‘I’ll come and give you a hand. Let me just get my jeep.’

He started to turn away, whistling again, but I said, ‘Commandant.’

I don’t know where it came from, this pointless need to tell the truth.

‘You mean Colonel,’ he said.

‘I know you from before. Do you remember?’

It was extraordinary how his face changed. He was instantly alert. Something in him contracted to that hard core, tiny and closed and impregnable. He was watching me as if from a long way
off.

‘Where was that?’

‘Up on the border.’ I named the camp and the year. I saw his mind fix on that time in his head, then on my face, trying to fit the two together.

‘I was working as a medic,’ I said. ‘You used to call on the captain sometimes to help you. But one night the captain wasn’t there and you called me instead.’

‘You helped me?’

‘Yes.’

He stared at me for a moment longer and then he lost interest. I could see it happen. There was no danger to him; I was just a piece of flotsam after all.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘But we spoke to each other.’

‘Maybe so. I spoke to a lot of people up there. I’m sorry.’

His tone was brisk and detached. He wasn’t interested any more. I had made my little confession, but he couldn’t give me absolution. Acting on an impulse that I didn’t understand, I took two
steps towards him and held out my hand. He shook it. The gesture was nothing, an empty formality; the real transaction had happened a long time ago.

19

Laurence will never come back. I know that now. But for the first few days, even though I was alone again in my room, it didn’t feel that way. Laurence’s clothes were still
strewn around, hanging over the back of the chair and on the rail in the bathroom; his half-smoked cigarette lay among ash on the windowsill; all the signs indicated that he was just out for a
while, on duty or somewhere, and he would be back in a moment.

But after a week or so, on an impulse one day, I tidied away all his things. I gathered together the little shrine he’d built on the windowsill, with the photographs and stones. I folded his
clothes into a pile and put all of it into his suitcase – the one he’d been carrying when he arrived – and stored it under the bed. I wiped and cleaned away all the scuffs and marks, the shaving
foam on the mirror, the cigarette stubs. I took his toothbrush out of the holder in the bathroom and, after reflection, I threw it away.

Things felt a bit better then. I was nearly alone again. And when one day, a week or two later, I had the sudden inspiration to move the furniture around, back to the way it was before he came,
it was almost as if he’d never been there.

Though he had. I knew that too. And there was the other empty bed to accuse me.

Amongst the few papers he had, I found a letter from Zanele, on the back of which was a return address in Lesotho. I wasn’t sure if I should write, but then I did. Nobody else might’ve told her.
This was a difficult job. I thought it would be simple – just a blunt statement of fact – but the facts themselves resisted me. I wrote down that he was dead, and then I sat staring at the word.
Dead.
It seemed to have a meaning that didn’t apply in this case. There was no body, no weapon, no clear set of events. In the end I wrote only that he had disappeared, under bizarre and
extreme circumstances, and that I would explain if she contacted me.

She didn’t contact me. Maybe she never got the letter – she might have been back in America by then – or she may not have wanted to know more. I didn’t know what else I could do to follow up,
and the truth is that I was relieved not to know.

I looked through his letters for a home address, but there wasn’t one. The envelopes that had come from his sister – who was really his mother – didn’t have a return address on them. I asked Dr
Ngema if she had anything on file, and she told me that she had already attended to it. Again, I was relieved not to be involved.

Then his mother arrived one day. This was one or two months after he’d gone. She was a tall, gaunt woman in a black trouser-suit, chain-smoking cigarettes in a long holder. I couldn’t put her
together with Laurence at all. There was something of the broad face that I remembered, but the manner and the looseness of her gestures were strange. She spent a good few hours stalking around the
hospital grounds, peering into weedy corners, looking over the wall. She gave the impression of someone searching with calm determination in all the wrong places for something she had lost.

Eventually she came to sit in the room with me. Dr Ngema, who wanted nothing to do with any difficult emotions, asked me if I would see to her. ‘This is Laurence’s sister,’ she said hurriedly.
‘She wants to chat to you for a while.’ I didn’t mind; I was even curious, in a painful way. But when we were facing each other, she on his bed, I on mine, the way that he and I used to talk, there
was suddenly nothing to say. Instead of an awkward scene, we seemed to have been brought together by a vacuum.

I took out his suitcase and the little heap of photographs and gave them to her. She picked through them listlessly.

‘I’ve got the keys for his car too,’ I said. ‘You’ll want to take that, I’m sure.’

‘Oh, no, no. Not now. I’m here in my own car.’

‘It’s just standing out there. I start it up from time to time.’

‘That’s good of you. I’ll come and get it soon.’ She looked around, her dark eyes darker in their pale saucers of bone. ‘So this is where...’ she said, ‘where...’

‘Yes?’

‘This was his room.’

‘He stayed here with me. Yes.’

She looked directly at me. She was a frail woman, who seemed almost to have been glued together, and only her smoke-roughened voice gave an indication of some of the harshness of her life. That,
and something in her eyes.

‘You were his friend,’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘He told me. He wrote about you often in his letters.’

‘Did he? I’m touched by that. But I don’t know how good I was as a friend.’

‘Oh, you were. Don’t run yourself down. I could tell by the way he spoke about you... He said you took care of him.’

‘Really,’ I said. ‘Yes, I suppose I was his friend.’

‘Thank you for being good to my... to my little brother.’

The whole act was absurd, and doubly absurd now. I couldn’t help myself. I said, ‘I know you’re his mother. There’s no point in concealing it.’

She didn’t flinch – just nodded calmly, puffing on her cigarette. ‘He told you, I suppose.’

‘Well, I... yes.’

‘That shows how much he trusted you. He would never have told you otherwise.’

I didn’t know how to answer that. I wished she would go, but she seemed to have taken root here in the room. A silence spread while she puffed and puffed, and then she said suddenly, ‘I don’t
understand how this happened.’

I felt a quickening in myself, as if all the pretence was finally dropping.

‘It’s a very complicated set of events.’

‘So you do understand.’

‘No, I... Not really, no.’

‘But he’s disappeared.’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s not dead. He’s disappeared. That’s not the same thing.’

‘I’m not sure that I follow you.’

She was still calm and imperturbable; I watched as she dumped the old cigarette out of the window and fitted a new one into the holder. ‘What I mean is,’ she said, ‘he may come back.’

Her voice was level, and I thought she was making a statement. But her eyes stayed fixed on me and I realized that it was a question.

I thought about it for a moment, then I said, ‘No. I don’t think so.’

And she started to cry. It was astonishing: that long, passionless frame, yielding up so much jagged emotion. She dropped her face into her hands and sobbed. I went to sit next to her and put an
arm around her. It tore something in my heart and I was sorry that we’d arrived, after all, at this moment of genuine feeling.

Laurence was gone. He’d disappeared. And in a certain way she was right: that is not the same thing as dying.

Other people went away later. They disappeared, but not like Laurence: they went off into the labyrinths of their own lives. After a few months the soldiers were posted
somewhere else and Colonel Moller went with them. One night they were there around the pool table, drinking and swaggering, and the next night it had all gone quiet.

Then Claudia Santander went back to Cuba. What had happened with Laurence was somehow the last straw for their marriage. There was no more fighting through the wall, but the silence instead was
heavy and colourless. It was obvious that they weren’t speaking to each other any more and then, at one of the Monday meetings, it was announced that she was leaving next week. So the rupture came
at last. When she was gone it was just the two of us in the passage, Jorge and me, and the hours of duty became very long.

Dr Ngema left at almost the same time, back to the city and the post in the Department she’d been wanting. This was supposed to be a good departure, for her and for me. And of course it was. But
there was a final conversation with Dr Ngema that I can’t forget, which seemed to rise up out of nowhere.

It was in her office, on one of the last afternoons before she left. She was showing me what the job involved, the reporting and auditing and filing. At one point she was telling me how to go
about applying for funding to get extra staff to replace the people we’d lost. This was a crisis for the hospital, obviously, that had to be dealt with urgently. But it reminded us both of more
personal feelings and in the middle of some long, dry explanation she went abruptly quiet. Then she sighed and said, ‘Poor Tehogo.’

‘What?’

‘What happened to him was terrible. It was a terrible thing.’

I could have left it; I could have let it go. But something turned in me. As she went back to her papers I said: ‘And Laurence?’

She blinked, looking startled. ‘Yes. And Laurence too.’

‘Tehogo is still alive,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Laurence is alive.’

She put the papers down slowly and looked at me. The air between us had thickened.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.

‘I mean Tehogo is one of them. They came to get him so he wouldn’t talk. But they won’t harm him.’

‘“They”,’ she said. ‘Who are “they”?’

‘His people.’

‘Tehogo didn’t have any people. He was alone. If you want to know, I think the soldiers took him. He saw something they didn’t want him to see.’

I clucked my tongue in disbelief. ‘He wasn’t a victim,’ I said. ‘Why must you believe he was?’

Now she smiled, but without a trace of amusement.

‘You never liked Tehogo,’ she said slowly. ‘You had it in for him from a long time ago.’

‘That isn’t true.’

‘I’m sorry, Frank, but I think it is. You wanted him out. You wanted him gone. You couldn’t deal with him. Well, now he’s gone.’

‘He hasn’t. He’s out there somewhere.’

‘You’re very sure of everything.’

‘I know who Tehogo was. He was a thief, I saw what he did. I was disappointed in you, that you protected him.’

All of this was spoken very coldly and politely between us, as though we were discussing some abstract point. There had been a lot of times lately when Dr Ngema and I had talked sharply to each
other. But this wasn’t like those times.

‘That young man,’ she said, ‘that young man had a very hard life. A very difficult life. Much more difficult than yours. None of your chances, none of your advantages. Doesn’t that count with
you?’

‘Not in this case. No.’

‘No. I can see it doesn’t.’ She was looking at me, but also past me, at something beyond me. ‘I can see you have no idea of what it means to be a black person in this country. Only your own life
is real to you.’

‘That’s true of everybody. You can only live one life.’

‘Black people live many lives.’