Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [62]
Even if a doctor decides to leave and stop being a doctor, people will still come to him from miles around to present severed limbs, laboring sisters, children flinging themselves backward, rigid with cerebral malaria.
A shit, carefully wrapped in a mealie leaf, is brought on the back of a bicycle through October heat and presented with proud, agonizing care at a clinic. “Here look! I am with blood when I go.”
This is the place where educated eight-year-old farm children are taught how to stabilize a broken limb, perform CPR, deliver a baby.
“The mother should not push or bear down until the child is beginning to move down into the birth canal, and she feels she has to push.”
Dr. Mitchell, the doctor in Mutare, is old and bent and very white, bordering on gray. No European African manages such white skin in Africa unless he is up before dawn, works in an office all day, and comes home after dark, seven days a week.
Mum starts having problems with the pregnancy. She says her problems are caused by the stress of independence. Losing the war. Losing the farm. She has heart palpitations and she is carrying too much fluid in her womb. She has started to look yellow. Her red hair has turned black and then gray from all the medication she takes and all the stress she is under. She bleeds and cramps. And Dad says, “Let this one go.”
“What?”
We hear them fighting.
“It didn’t have a good start.”
Mum is sobbing, “He, heee, heeeeee.”
“Come on, Tub. Maybe this one isn’t meant to happen, hey?” He sounds gentle with her.
“Heeee, heeeee.”
Dad gets up in the dark, lights a candle and a cigarette. I hear him sighing, walking down the corridor, and the bitter-acrid smell of tobacco smoke curls into my room. I shut my eyes tight and close my fists and want to hold on to the baby in Mum’s belly.
“Let’s not let this one go,” I say to myself.
Dr. Mitchell says that if Mum wants the baby then she needs to lie down all day and night and be close to a hospital just in case. If she wants the baby.
Mum wants the baby.
Vanessa and I want Mum to have the baby.
So she goes into the hospital in Mutare with her too-much-fluid-in-the-womb and her heart palpitations which she says feel like butterflies escaping into her throat. She takes a pile of books. Her friends from the Burma Valley bring her magazines and chocolates and sometimes beer. She lies down for weeks and weeks in the hospital.
Every day Mum watches from her window in the maternity ward.
Here is the line of Africans with their sick, dying, malarial, malnourished children and their severed, broken, bleeding limbs. Here they have come with their swollen wombs. And they have brought their curled bodies like tadpoles, small on the drying lawn, where they leak dysentery and diarrhea. Some of them are Africans who would have come to our clinic. Or to the Mazonwe clinic. Or to any one of hundreds of clinics that used to be run by farmers’ wives on remote farms across the area. Now they wait for a lift into town and after that they wait in the slow, yellow, fly-crawling sun. There aren’t enough nurses or beds and there isn’t enough medicine for all of them. Mum sighs and turns onto her side and her face falls long and old and yellow into the government-issue sheets (left over from the days of Rhodesia, but beginning to thin and tear). She starts to cry again.
Van and Bobo on a kopje
LOO PAPER AND
COKE
Dad takes Vanessa and me with him while he’s out looking for stray wild cattle and fencing the vast, unfenced ranch. We drive for two days to reach this particular herd. Dad is in the front, smoking, alone with his thoughts. Vanessa and I are in the back of the Land Rover with the dogs and the African laborers, bumping with