The Mission Song (5 page)

And you should know that I’m a man who hates, really hates hospitals, and is by religion allergic to the health industry. Blood, needles, bedpans, trolleys with scissors on them, surgical smells, sick people, dead dogs and run-over badgers at the roadside, I only have to enter their presence and I’m freaking out, which is no more than any other normal man would do who has been relieved of his tonsils, appendix and foreskin in a succession of insanitary African hill clinics.

And I have met her before, this degree nurse. Once. Yet for the last three weeks, I now realise, she has been an unconscious imprint on my memory, and not just as the presiding angel in this unhappy place. I have spoken to her, although she probably doesn’t remember. On my very first visit here, I asked her to sign my completion document certifying that I had performed to her satisfaction the duties I had been contracted for. She had smiled, put her head on one side as if deliberating whether in all honesty she could admit to being satisfied, then casually drawn a fibre-tipped pen from behind her ear. The gesture, though doubtless innocent on her part, had affected me. In my over-fertile imagination, it was a prelude to undressing.

But this evening I am entertaining no such improper fantasies. This evening it is all work, and we are sitting on a dying man’s bed. And Hannah the health professional, who for all I know does this three times a day before lunchtime, has set her jaw against extraneous feeling, so I have done the same.

‘Ask him his name, please,’ she commands me, in French-scented English.

His name, he informs us after prolonged thought, is Jean-Pierre. And for good measure adds, with as much truculence as he can muster in his reduced circumstances, that he is a Tutsi and proud of it, a piece of gratuitous information that both Hannah and I tacitly agree to ignore, not least because we could have told as much, Jean-Pierre being despite his tubes of classical Tutsi appearance, with high cheekbones, protruding jaw and a long back to his head, exactly as Tutsis are supposed to look in the popular African imagination, although a lot don’t.

‘Jean-Pierre who?’ she enquires with the same severity, and I again render her.

Can Jean-Pierre not hear me or does he prefer to have no surname? The delay while Degree Nurse Hannah and I wait for his answer is the occasion for the first long look that we exchange, or long in the sense that it was longer than a look needs to be if you’re merely checking that the person you are rendering for is listening to what you’re saying, because neither of us was saying anything, nor was he.

‘Ask him where he lives, please,’ she says, delicately clearing her throat of an obstruction similar to my own; except this time, to my surprise and delight, she is addressing me as a fellow African in Swahili. As if that wasn’t enough, she is speaking in
the accents of a woman of the Eastern Congo
!

But I am here to work. The degree nurse has asked our patient another question so I must render it. I do. From Swahili into Kinyarwanda. I then render the answer to it, from Jean-Pierre’s Kinyarwanda straight into her deep brown eyes, while I replicate, if not exactly mimic, her deliciously familiar accents.

‘I live on the Heath,’ I inform her, repeating Jean-Pierre’s words as if they were our own, ‘under a bush. And that’s where I’m going back to when I get out of this’—pause—‘place’—omitting for decency’s sake the epithet he uses to describe it. ‘Hannah,’ I go on, speaking English, perhaps in order to relieve the pressure slightly. ‘For goodness’ sake. Who are you? Where do you come from?’

To which, without the smallest hesitation, she declares her nationhood to me: ‘I am from the region of Goma in North Kivu, by tribe a Nande,’ she murmurs. ‘And this poor Rwandan man is the enemy of my people.’

And I will tell you as a matter of unadorned truth that her half-drawn breath, the widening of her eyes, her urgent appeal for my understanding as she says this, declared to me in a single moment the plight of her beloved Congo as she perceives it: the emaciated corpses of her relatives and loved ones, the unsown fields and dead cattle and burned-out townships that had been her home, until the Rwandans swarmed across the border and, by appointing the Eastern Congo the battlefield for their civil war, heaped unspeakable horrors on a land already dying of neglect.

At first the invaders wanted only to hunt down the
génocidaires
who had hand-killed a million of their citizens in a hundred days. But what began as hot pursuit quickly became a free-for-all for Kivu’s mineral resources, with the result that a country on the brink of anarchy went totally over the edge, which is what I strove and struggled to explain to Penelope, who as a conscientious British corporate journalist preferred her information to be the same as everybody else’s. Darling, I said, listen to me, I know you’re busy. I know your paper likes to stick within family guidelines. But please, on my knees, just this once, print something, anything, to tell the world what’s happening to the Eastern Congo. Four million dead, I told her. Just in the last five years. People are calling it Africa’s first world war, and you’re not calling it anything. It’s not a bang-bang war, I grant you. It’s not bullets and pangas and hand grenades that are doing the killing. It’s cholera, malaria, diarrhoea, and good old-fashioned starvation, and most of the dead are less than five years old. And they’re still dying
now
, as we speak, in their thousands, every month. So there must be a story in there somewhere, surely. And there was. On page twenty-nine, next to the quick crossword.

Where had I got my uncomfortable information from? Lying in bed in the small hours, waiting for her to come home. Listening to the World Service of the BBC and remote African radio stations while she met her late-night deadlines. Sitting alone in Internet cafés while she took her sources out to dinner. From African journals purchased on the sly. Standing at the back of outdoor rallies, clad in a bulky anorak and bobble cap while she attended a weekend refresher course on whatever it was she needed to refresh.

But the languid Grace, suppressing an end-of-shift yawn, knows nothing of this, and why should she? She didn’t do the quick crossword. She doesn’t know that Hannah and I are participating in a symbolic act of human reconciliation. Before us lies a dying Rwandan man who calls himself Jean-Pierre. At his bedside sits a young Congolese woman called Hannah who has been brought up to regard Jean-Pierre and those like him as the sole perpetrators of her country’s misery. Yet does she turn her back on him?—does she summon a colleague or consign him to the yawning Grace? She does not. She calls him
this poor Rwandan man
and holds his hand.

‘Ask him where he
used to
live, please, Salvo,’ she orders primly, in her Francophone English.

And again we wait, which is to say Hannah and I stare at each other in dazed, out-of-body disbelief, like two people sharing a celestial vision that nobody else can see because they haven’t got the eyes. But Grace has seen. Grace is following the progress of our relationship with indulgent attention.

‘Jean-Pierre, where did you live before you moved to Hampstead Heath?’ I ask in a voice as determinedly dispassionate as Hannah’s.

Prison.

And before prison?

It is an age before he provides me with an address and a London phone number, but eventually he does, and I translate them for Hannah who again gropes behind her ear before writing in her notebook with the fibre-tipped pen. She tears off a page and hands it to Grace, who sidles down the ward to a telephone—reluctantly, because by now she doesn’t want to miss anything. And it is at this moment that our patient, as if roused from a bad dream, sits bolt upright with all his tubes in him and demands in the coarse and graphic manner of his native Kinyarwanda
fuck my mother what is wrong with me
and why did the police drag him here against his will?—which is when Hannah, in an English weakened by emotion, asks me to interpret the
precise words
she is about to say to him, not adding or subtracting anything, Salvo, please, however much you might wish to do so personally out of consideration for our patient—
our patient
being by now a paramount concept to both of us. And I, in a voice equally weakened, assure her I would not presume to embellish anything she ever said, regardless of how painful it might be to me.

‘We have sent for the Registrar and he will come as soon as he can,’ Hannah is pronouncing deliberately, while also pausing in a more intelligent manner than many of my clients to allow me time for my rendering. ‘I have to inform you, Jean-Pierre, that you are suffering from an acute blood disorder which in my judgment is too advanced for us to cure. I am very sorry but we must accept the situation.’

Yet there is real hope in her eyes as she speaks, a clear and joyful focus on redemption. If Hannah can handle news as bad as this, you feel, then Jean-Pierre ought to be able to handle it too, and so should I. And when I have rendered her message as best I can—
precise words
being somewhat of a layman’s delusion since few Rwandans of this poor man’s standing are conversant with such concepts as acute blood disorder—she gets him to repeat back to her via me what she just said so that she knows he knows, and he knows he does too, and I know both of them know and there’s no fudging of the lines.

And when Jean-Pierre has gruffly repeated her message, and I’ve again rendered it, she asks me: does Jean-Pierre have wishes while he waits for his relatives to arrive? Which is code as we both know for telling him he will very likely die before they get here. What she doesn’t ask, so I don’t, is why he’s been sleeping rough on the Heath and not back at home with his wife and kids. But I sense that she regards such personal questions as an intrusion upon his privacy, just as I do. For why would a Rwandan man want to go and die on Hampstead Heath if he didn’t want to be private?

Then I notice that not only is she holding our patient’s hand but she’s holding mine too. And Grace notices it and is impressed, though not in a prurient way, because Grace knows, as I know, that her friend Hannah is not given to holding hands with just any interpreter. Yet there they are, my calf-brown, half-Congolese hand and Hannah’s authentic all-black version with its pinky-white palm, both of them entwined on an enemy Rwandan’s bed. And it’s not about sex—how can it be, with Jean-Pierre dying between us?—it’s about discovered kinship and consoling each other while we’re giving our all to our shared patient. It’s because she’s deeply moved, and so am I. She is moved by the poor dying man, even though she sees such men all day and every day of her week. She is moved that we are caring for our perceived enemy, and loving him according to the Gospel she’s been brought up to, as I can tell by her gold cross. She is moved by my voice. Each time I interpret from Swahili to Kinyarwanda and back again, she lowers her eyes as if in prayer. She is moved because, as I am trying to tell her with my eyes if only she will listen, we are the people we have been looking for all our lives.

I won’t say we held hands from then on because we didn’t, but we kept our inner eyes on each other. She could have her long back to me, be stooping over him, lifting him, caressing his cheek or checking the machines that Grace had fixed to him. But every time she turned to look at me, I was there for her and I knew she was there for me. And everything that happened afterwards, with me waiting beside the neon-lit gateposts for her to finish duty, and her coming out to join me with her eyes down, and the two of us not embracing in our Mission children’s shyness, but walking hand in hand like earnest students up the hill to her hostel, down a cramped passage that smelled of Asian food to a padlocked door to which she had the key, it all flowed from the looks we had exchanged in the presence of our dying Rwandan patient and from the responsibility we felt for each other while a shared human life was slipping out from under us.

Which was why, between passionate bouts of lovemaking, we were able to conduct discussions of a sort unavailable to me since the death of Brother Michael, no natural confidant having until now presented himself in my life with the exception of Mr Anderson, and certainly not in the form of a beautiful, laughing, desiring African woman whose sole calling is to the world’s sufferers, and who asks nothing of you, in any language, that you’re not prepared to give. To provide factual accounts of ourselves we spoke English. For our lovemaking French. And for our dreams of Africa, how could we not return to the Congolese-flavoured Swahili of our childhoods with its playful mix of joy and innuendo? In the space of twenty sleepless hours Hannah had become the sister, lover and good friend who had consistently failed to materialise throughout my peripatetic childhood.

Did we do guilt—we two good Christian children, brought up to godliness and now five-star adulterers? We did not. We did my marriage, and I declared it dead, which I knew for a certainty it was. We did Hannah’s small son Noah, left behind with her aunt in Uganda, and we jointly longed for him. We did solemn promises, and politics, and swapped memories, and drank cranberry juice with sparkling water, and ate take-in pizza, and made love right up to the moment when she reluctantly puts on her uniform and, resisting my entreaties for one last embrace, skips down the hill to the hospital for an anaesthetics class she’s attending before beginning night shift with her dying patients while I go hunting for a taxi because, due to the bombings, the Underground is part-operational at best, and the bus will take too long, and Heavens above, look at the time. Her parting words, spoken in Swahili, were nonetheless ringing in my ears. Holding my face between her hands, she was gently shaking her head in joyous marvel.