Stone Kingdoms (35 page)

Then there are no more words but only the choking, ragged breathing, and I reach out my hand towards it but touch only space, and as I call his name I hear his steps rushing away. Then there is nothing but the stretch and creak of the branches above my head and the spiralling echoes of his words.

25

Nadra
says the rains will end soon. I know she is right but I have grown used to their sound, find reassurance in the familiarity of their rhythms. Already the thunder seems far off, slipping like a lizard into some distant sky, and the anger of the rain – its beat and clatter on the tin roofs, its sluice through the gullies – seems almost spent. Something in me wants to hold on to its sounds, finds comfort in its fury, but I feel it fading into the loosening strictures of the air and know it is the start of the fierce heat of summer. Parts of my skin feel tight and stretched across my body, like the skin of a drum, and without warning or pattern pain can strike. The worst time is when they change the dressings, and then I have to send Nadra away, or she will argue with the nurses and criticize their clumsiness. But I know too that my body is healing, growing stronger, and now they let me sit in the courtyard, sheltered by the tree, for longer periods each day. It is a good place to sit because it feels as if the life of the hospital filters through it, and I am close to where Nadra teaches the children and so can hear her voice and the voices of the children. From the open corridors comes the chatter of the nurses and patients, the squeak and rattle of wheels, the smells of food and medicine. Some days I hear another sound, one which I have come to recognize – that of American AC-130 gunships and Cobra helicopters. I know they bring wounded from the capital, sometimes their own soldiers, and I listen to the blades thresh and slice the air, can even distinguish the particular sounds of their engines.

The
arrival of the Swiss specialist to examine my eyes has been delayed, because there is fighting round the airport and some planes have come under fire. But they tell me he will come soon and that they think the signs are good. I think my eyes will heal, heal like the rest of my body, but I must be patient and not seek to rush things. Perhaps Stanfield was right after all and I have been lucky. I think he would like to hear that.

Now everything is seen through thought, screened by the process of memory, and the darkness forces me to shape what I have seen, to fashion it into some permanence before it drifts away and is lost. So I sit and try to call it into life, sift and store it where I know it will be safe, where no one can take it from me. Sometimes I touch the bracelet on my wrist with my gloved hand, make it rub against my skin and it doesn't matter that some, like Stanfield, will think I have been a fool, for none of that matters any more, and I feel the lightness of that indifference. The only thing I don't try to shape is the future. I resist that temptation because it is one foolishness I won't be guilty of. I have no wish to taste the bitterness of disappointment.

It is the faces which start to give me trouble. Just when I think I have them fixed and locked away, they blur and slip out of focus. Sometimes they run and smudge like ink. I hold them in my mind like I held the piece of paper with Daniel's address, and then a squall of rain slants down and the ink bleeds across the page. Sometimes I lose my father's face and as I bring him something in his study there are only his hands, flat and crusted like starfish on his desk, and beyond, the seamless band of sky and sea. Sometimes I even lose Daniel's, and then I think of that first morning and a boy crouching in a doorway and wait for his face to turn to me with a sudden seep of smile, but sometimes it is the face of someone I do not recognize. When the faces do come back I try to freeze them in my head, but as I turn them over and over like the Polaroids of the children in
Bakalla,
they slowly drain of feature, dissolve into amorphous ghosts which drift between past and present worlds.

Now, in the darkness, I lose my own face, find it mirrored only in the memory of someone or something else, and then I see myself in Wanneker's eyes as he looks down at me from the back of the truck, but the face I see is the one he imagines and as the truck drives away it slowly vanishes into the greyness of the dawn. Frightened, I grasp for my face in the sliver of glass left in the frame Nadra gave me, but as I try to turn it to the light its surface clouds and I see only the little scrap of paper and the word Bakalla, and then something falls on the writing and it runs into nothing. I go desperately to the one place which always holds my reflection, see the mottled glass with its rusting clips, but there is no one there and even the trapped sky seems uncertain, as if it is only a vague memory of itself. For a moment I forget and lift a gloved hand to my hair, then drop it again. But then I force myself to laugh at my fear, smile when I remember Basif's promise to me, that he would make me beautiful. I shall remind him of it, threaten him with legal action if he fails, no matter how difficult the task proves. He will like that and tell me again that all women are beautiful, talk about Loren, tell me that my eyes will be as beautiful as hers.

He came to see me yesterday for the first time since we talked. I had heard his footsteps a couple of times before but they only came so close, then turned away again. When I asked him how he was he made a joke, talked like Basif, and so I said nothing, played the audience to his performer, listened to the lightness with which he inflated his words. He brought me a present – the loan of his personal stereo and a tape of U2. He was very proud of the sacrifice he made for the tape, telling me that he had had to trade a whole carton of cigars, but joking that he planned to steal them back when the patient went to the operating theatre. When he placed the earphones on me and pressed play, the volume was too high but I nodded my head in gratitude and
gave
as convincing a pretence of pleasure as I could. Eventually I had to tell him that it was too loud and as he adjusted it I thanked him again and tried to nod my head in time to the music. After he'd gone I pressed the stop button with my elbow but sat wearing the earphones, thinking of a people who need statues that move, plaster madonnas who cry tears.

It is Basif's step I hear now, his brief hesitation and then the confident continuation of his approach.

‘Good morning, Basif.'

‘Good morning, Naomi. How are you today?'

‘Not so bad. Thank you for the tape. It was very kind of you.'

‘It's nothing. I can always get more cigars.'

‘You didn't manage to steal them back again?'

‘No, he gave one to all the other patients in the ward. They smoked them at night when no one was watching, but in the morning the head nurse smelled it and he said the doctor gave them to him as part of his treatment and I got the blame.'

I laugh and I know my laughter pleases him. Then I ask him if there is any news of the Swiss doctor.

‘There is still some fighting close to the airport, but I think it will soon be over and then it will be safe for planes. Very top doctor. I think he will be able to help. Then you will be able to see again, see how handsome I am.'

I laugh again and say I hope I will not be disappointed, and this too pleases him. ‘As beautiful as Sophia Loren's eyes, you said, Basif.'

‘Of course.'

‘What colour are her eyes?'

‘Miss Loren's? Brown, I think. Sometimes she wore glasses.'

‘Do you know the story in the Bible about how the blind man was cured?'

‘No, I don't think so. Tell me.'

‘My father would sometimes read it in church. It was one of the miracles. Christ healed a man who had been blind all his life
by
spitting on the ground and making a paste, then putting it on the man's eyes and telling him to go and bathe in a pool called Siloam. What do you think of that, Basif?'

‘It's not a treatment I know, but I'll look up my old medical books. Maybe we should try it, tell the Swiss doctor he doesn't need to come.'

‘In the story, too, the Pharisees, the holy men, were angry that the blind man had been healed on a Sunday.'

‘These things are important in religion,' he laughs. ‘Would you let me look at your eyes, Naomi?'

‘Of course. You feel a miracle coming on.'

‘No miracles and I'm not the expert, but I'd like to look.'

I feel his hand lightly tilting my head upwards and back, his breath on my face as he comes close. I hear the click of the light, feel its heat on my face as I look where he tells me, and his hand leads my face to the right position. In one of my eyes I see a circle of light. At first I think I'm imagining it but then I know it's there and as I tell Basif he chuckles and when I hear the off click I hold the light in my head until it blinks like a beacon. I want to shout to Nadra but I know she's taken the children for a walk in the grounds of the hospital. In my excitement, I start to talk too much, but Basif slips into his doctor's voice and urges caution, warns that it might not mean much, that we must be patient, not expect miracles. But I know he's pleased and a little excited himself. I thank him again for the tape and try to return it, but he tells me it is my present and I must keep it and that he hopes to get me more. Then he tells me that soon he is going on holiday and that he intends to visit Paris, look up some of the people he studied with, then maybe go on to London or Amsterdam. He has friends in all these cities and they will show him a good time. When he speaks of Paris I think of Martine, try to imagine her sitting in a cafe with some handsome young man to whom she gives all her love, but the image splinters and is replaced by stronger memories. When I shiver, Basif asks me if I am cold and would I like to go back
inside,
and I have to make a joke and distract him with questions he will like to answer.

He promises that he will send me postcards, and I ask if they make postcards in Braille and he thinks this is a good joke and says that I am crazy after all, and asks me again if I know Marty Sullivan and if perhaps I am his sister. When he stands up to go he leaves me with his doctor's voice, saying there is a good chance I will be able to read the cards for myself but I must be patient and wait for the Swiss doctor. I nod my head and thank him again, listen to his footsteps as he walks away, the high bounce of his voice as he calls out to someone. Even in the distance I pick out his laughter. It is light and buoyant, shining in the afternoon sun, but as I sit and listen to it float slowly back to me I hear only its loneliness, its desire to live in the moment. I think of Sinead's story, listening for her father's key in the door, the kettle filling for his supper, and the night she heard the woman screaming and the silence that was worse than screams. For Basif too, I think the silence is worse, and when in his dreams the killers come back for him, he will know their faces, and there is no escape from that. And when the footsteps come too close and he wakes with a scream, I hope there will be someone to hold him too, tell him that everything will be all right. Perhaps he will be lucky. I blink my eyes and try to recall the circle of light, listen to the final skims of his laughter.

Sometimes as I sit under the tree I think I catch a stirring of its scent, but perhaps I imagine it, perhaps it comes from somewhere else. I don't sit under the canopy so often now, preferring the shade of the branches with the slight flutter and play of the leaves. The tree creaks, as if some spasm of age rucks through its tired limbs, the way a house will suddenly stretch and crack before settling again. I think of the house I grew up in, and the silences which ebb and flow through it like the rhythm of the sea. It is empty now, with a ‘For Sale' sign in the front garden which rattles with every flurry of wind and grows
rusty
and blanched of its colours. Perhaps when the sea is calm, other noises will seep into the silence: voices from a radio in the kitchen; my laughter joining with my mother's as it fountains into the spaces then falls back about our heads; the sound of my father's tread on the stairs as he comes to look at me while I sleep, his footsteps as he walks through the yellow fan of light. I remember the touch of his hand on my head, lighter than I have ever known it. I lift my hand and touch my face with the glove, but the touch is too heavy and the yellow light of memory slips into shadow.

I look up, turn my head to the sudden, loud footsteps in the corridor. At first I don't recognize them. He wears shoes as opposed to sandals, and his pace is businesslike, quickened by purpose. But then I hear his breathing, the slight breathlessness, the occasional thin wheeze as if there isn't enough oxygen in the air to fill his lungs, and I know it's Stanfield. When the footsteps stop I sense he's standing in the corridor watching me and I lift my hand in a little wave that tells him I know he's there. As he comes closer, his feet pressing the dust of the courtyard, I anticipate the smell of his after-shave, and before he speaks I catch the waver of its spicy, citrous scent.

‘Hello, Naomi, how are things going?'

‘Getting better, I think.'

‘That's good, that's good. Basif says you're making good progress.'

‘You've spoken with him?'

‘Yes, just briefly on the way to find you.'

‘Did he say anything to you about my eyes?'

‘No, I don't think so, only to tell me that the Swiss doctor is delayed by the fighting round the airport. But the word from the UN people is that it will only take a few more days to mop up the remaining pockets of resistance, and then the airport will open again. So I suppose you just have to be patient.'

‘You're the second person today who's told me to be patient. Don't worry, Mr Stanfield, I'm good at being patient.'

I
hear him sit down on the chair opposite. ‘Call me Charles, Naomi.'

‘What's happening in Bakalla? What about Martine and the others?'