Authors: David Park
Stone Kingdoms
For
Alberta, again
Contents
Nadra
says the rains will break soon. I say nothing but hope she is wrong, then wonder what the world will sound like when we finally fade into the renewed heat of summer. Since they brought me here, high in the mountains, far from the coast and the sea, the rain has been constantly in my head. Now the whole world narrows into the tightening vibrations of its sound, the electric cackle of its static. I touch the padded gauze which covers my eyes and listen to it clatter on the tin roof, rattle against the slats of the shutters the nurses close each night. Sometimes it rushes and gusts like a burst of temper, and then the gullies sluice and seep into a lisping babble of speech.
Somewhere an overflowing gutter stutters, and I count the seconds between splashes until they coalesce into a continuous stream. Occasionally a cooler breeze sidles into the room like a pick-pocket, ruffles the net over the bed, then slips away again taking what it came for. From time to time the whirr of the fans goes dead and the air slumps heavy and motionless, but then Nadra comes and fans little eddies of coolness which drift against the raw pus of my face.
I like the rain; there is a comfort in its presence, a reminder of a power beyond the human. Nadra says it is a gift from Allah and she sings a song from her childhood, but when she tries to explain the words they don't make sense. She's always close. I know the cool feel of her hands on my skin, her fingers teasing out the tats in my hair. My own hands lie muffled and swathed and her touch replaces my own. I know the whorled and
toughened
skin of her fingertips, the palms of her hands smooth as stone. They let her sleep on matting in the open-sided corridor which faces into the courtyard. I ask Basif if she can bring it into the room beside my bed but he refuses and says she would be in the way. Sometimes he likes to play the doctor, and I will not please him by arguing.
I ask Nadra what Basif looks like and she giggles and goes coy as if I'm asking her something personal. She guesses he's probably in his late thirties, is quite tall with thick black hair already flecked with grey. She whispers that his face is handsome and laughs again. I know he has long thin fingers, and when he examines me they play over my skin like a woman testing a table for dust. I know too that he smokes and has a taste for garlic. He was the doctor on duty when they brought me here and his was the first voice I heard. When he examines my face he tells me I shall be pretty again. It's clear that prettiness in a woman is important to him, a prerequisite for a healthy future. He assumes it is what I want to hear. I listen to him flirt with the European nurses and know he is one of those men who believes he has a unique charm and so sprinkles it about like some holy incense, confident that those who inhale its scent will become devoted disciples. He believes it so surely that I have no heart to tell him I hear his words only as some far-off drip of water from a broken pipe, and anyway he would assure himself that my indifference is because of my injuries, because of what I have seen.
Nadra tells me that the room is small, that mine is the only bed. The walls are painted a lime-green colour and opposite my bed is a poster of a smiling woman with her child below a slogan warning about Aids. She says the sun slants into the room through the louvred slats and throws a griddle of shadows across the bed and far wall, that the ceiling fan has white blades turned at the end like the propeller of a plane. The hospital has its own generator; at night I lie and listen to its hum until the rain returns and drowns it out.
Piece
by piece they have taken the shrapnel from my legs, and the pain lessens as the days pass. Basif has promised that in another week or so they will let me sit out in the courtyard for a short while. He says the sun will help my skin heal. I ask him about my eyes and he makes a joke and tells me everything is going to be all right. He says my eyes will be more beautiful than Sophia Loren's; he says she has the most beautiful eyes in the world. But as he talks I hear only the silences between his words, the stepping stones of his evasion.
A nurse dresses my burns twice a day. She tries to be gentle but it's always painful when the bandages are prised away from the raw blisters of skin, and sometimes I can't help crying out. Then Nadra comes and stands close, smoothes my hair and whispers in my ear. Once when the pain made me shout there was a hiss of words from her and an angry return from the nurse and I had to ask Nadra to wait outside. I try to ask the nurse about my eyes but she pretends she doesn't understand. Basif says the bandages over my eyes mustn't be disturbed for another week at least. There is another doctor â a Swiss specialist â who is due to fly in from the south and then there will be another examination. So for the meantime there is nothing to do but lie here and listen.
Voices volleying across the courtyard; the slop and drip of the rain; the choking caw of some night bird; the faint far-off gurgling of water disappearing down the throat of a drain. The splash of wheels in puddles. Sometimes Nadra curls at the foot of the bed and sings the songs her mother has taught her. I try to find a tune in them but they ripple outwards like a stone dropped in water and never return to any recognizable melody. I think of my own mother. Sometimes as the drugs take their effect and I start the slow slide to sleep I hear other noises and want to cry out to frighten them away but the sounds die in my throat and I fall helpless into a deep rift of unconsciousness.
I try not to worry about my eyes. The pain has eased and that in itself is a relief. Now I can tell the difference between night
and
day. Once when Basif examined them I felt the heat of the lamp on my face and I thought for a moment that I caught the light shining through the fine filament of his hair. Perhaps I only imagined it, but for a second it was as if he had a halo like an angel's. I should have told him â it would have appealed to his sense of humour. Sometimes, not seeing doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world. Sometimes it even seems like a release except that the absence of the physical world throws the mind back into memory, and then there is nothing to distract from the past.
Most days, when he has finished his rounds, Basif comes and talks to me â he calls it my therapy. When they brought me here and started slowly to separate the rags of my clothes from the scorched patches of my skin he talked to me as he worked, as if he feared that silence would help me slip beyond his reach. When I told him I came from the North of Ireland he paused and said, âIreland? Bang! Bang! Boom! Boom!', then laughed at his joke the way I've heard him do so many times. He tells me he will make me beautiful again. Perhaps it is his eyes which are damaged â I tell him I was never beautiful and he tells me all women are beautiful. He talks all the time, his voice accompanied by the cold click of scissors, the dab and patting of sterile swabs. Sometimes he speaks in French to one of the nurses and then the words flow in a fluent stream and make me think of the ocean and as I scream I want only to drown in the coolness of its depths. A needle pierces my skin, somewhere a baby begins to cry, while hands gloved in plastic move over my body like termites over some rotting piece of scrub wood. Before I pass out I hear his voice praying over me, a litany of names: âU2, Jackie Charlton, Bono, Under a Blood Red Sky.'
I want to tell him that I'm from the north, that Jackie Charlton is English, but he goes on with what suddenly sounds like his version of the last rites and before I can speak I fall into a shadowy well of nothingness.
Now he sits on the edge of my bed and talks to me about
himself.
When he tells me he's from the Lebanon I have to stop myself saying, âBang! Bang! Boom! Boom!' but there's little chance of interrupting. Obviously, my therapy is to listen. He tells me of his father's fine art export business, of the swimming pool, of the two racehorses they used to keep, of their holidays in Europe, how everything was lost. But soon his father will start again, rebuild the business, and when I ask him how, he explains it only by saying his father is a well-loved man and has contacts all over the Middle East. About a wheel that must turn. About fate. He tells me everything about himself except the one thing which might be of interest. Why he is here in Africa. It is a question which I do not ask because I have learnt already that it is rarely answered with the truth. The mutual embarrassment of a clumsily conceived response is to be avoided. It is also a question which must be thrown back on the asker.
Of course, even now I like to believe my own lies. I had different ones for different people â my friends, the school, the agency, even myself. Polished, professional performances, bright with the sheen of sincerity. Once here it makes no difference, you fade into the woodwork. Every nation under the sun and every faith, the secular and the divine, establishing bridge-heads through which to funnel their particular brand of aid. And everywhere you go, the Irish. In the hospitals and transit camps, in the schools and field missions. Doctors, nurses, priests, engineers, teachers. A nation still of wild geese. As Basif's voice drones on, I think of young men and women, driven by the old hunger, arriving in London and New York, clutching the names and addresses of those who have gone before. And, when distance and alcohol generate sentimentality, they talk of going home, but the dream fades into the morning light of a new day in a big city. I have no sentimentality, no dream of going home, and I am glad.
Basif asks me about Ireland but I pretend I'm tired and avoid his questions. I grow weary of his voice; it flutters round my
head
like some waxen moth. I long for Nadra's touch, the sound of rain. I turn my head away, then feel him lift himself off the bed and hear his footsteps fade as he goes to share his therapy with someone else. I beckon Nadra to come close and she lies on the bed and I feel the warmth of her body, smell the scent of her skin. I try to touch her but remember my muffled hands. She lifts and separates the caked strands of my hair, easing them out with her fingers. The only sounds are the light crinkle of my hair and the whirr of the ceiling fan.
It is very beautiful to be loved. Before, I had only guessed at how beautiful. The fan stutters and starts again and I know now that there is no such thing as love in the abstract. There is only this â the giving and receiving of small tendernesses. The only light in the darkness. I think men do not understand about love â or I have not met any who do. Some women do not understand either, because they live in the shadow of men. Perhaps it is not the men's fault, perhaps they are to be pitied, but I remember what I have seen and have no pity to give.
Nadra sponges my hair and tries to untangle the matted mess, sometimes taking scissors and snipping out some unsaveable piece. I think my mother would cry if she saw my hair. Suddenly Nadra stops and moves away from the bed. A visitor has arrived. Charles Stanfield introduces himself and I wonder if his appearance has changed from the first time we met. He was the one who greeted our arrival, a small man in a white linen jacket, shirt and tie, carrying a briefcase full of American dollars for paying off the faction which controlled the airport. Technical services is what they call it in the accounts. His only concession to the climate was a Panama hat. He looked as if he were heading off to umpire a cricket match in the Home Counties.