Chapter 16
Good Months
They found it in her lungs, as they had feared, and they found it in time.
It was a Thursday, four days after she came through the blue door, and the doctor, the same brisk young woman with the stethoscope, stood at the end of the narrow bed in the observation room with a sheet of paper in her hand. She read it twice. She was not a person who hurried. She folded the sheet in half, and then in half again, and sat down on a stool.
"Your sputum is positive for TB," she said.
"I thought it would be."
"And your CD4 count is sixty-one."
Nabirye lay still. A drip was running into the back of her left hand. A bag of clear fluid hung from a stand, and above the bed a small paper sign was taped to the wall, in Sister Agnes's rounded hand. YOU ARE DOING WELL.
"Sixty-one," she said.
"It was a hundred and sixty-four in December. It has fallen by a hundred in a year." The doctor's voice was gentle and level. "Normal is five hundred to fifteen hundred. Below two hundred, we call it advanced disease. Below fifty, there is a real danger of serious infections of the brain and blood. You are just above it." She paused. "You are a very lucky woman."
"I don't feel lucky."
"I know. But you came. If you had waited another month, I think we would be having a different conversation."
"What happens now?"
"Now we do two things." The doctor held up a finger. "First, we treat the TB. Six months of tablets. Four at first, then two. It's a hard regimen. It will make you tired and a little sick. But it works." A second finger. "And in two weeks, once we are sure the TB drugs are settling, we restart the HIV treatment. It's the same medicine. The same tablet. We do not change it. You've taken it before, and it suited you."
"Why wait two weeks?"
"To be safe. To avoid a very rare, very nasty reaction, when the immune system wakes up all at once and attacks the infection." She smiled. "I'll watch you like a cat."
Nabirye turned her head. Beyond the window, in the yard, a hen was scratching in the dust, and the sun had come out after the rain, and lit the red earth to the colour of rust.
"Will it work?" she said. "Again?"
"I see no reason why not. The virus has not become resistant. It's only multiplied." The doctor leaned forward. "This is the thing, Nabirye. I'm going to say it, and I want you to hold on to it. The medicine does not stop working. You stop taking it. That is all that ever happens. It is not that the drug fails. It is that the person, for a thousand good and human reasons, runs out of strength to swallow."
She felt something go through her, like cold water.
"I'll swallow," she said.
"I believe you."
"I won't stop. I'll never stop."
"Let us not promise for ever," said the doctor, drily. "Let us promise for tonight. And tomorrow, again."
It took a month to feel it, and three to believe it.
She spent the first fortnight in a bed in the clinic's small ward, a clean bare room with six beds, and a nurse who came at six, and a smell of carbolic. She slept. She did nothing but sleep. She woke to take her pills, a fistful of them, white and pink and orange, and drank them down with a cup of warm water, and slept again. Mama Teddy came every day. She brought a basin of food, fresh fish, and matooke, and a thick, sweet, sticky porridge made of millet, and she sat by the bed in the evening, knitting something shapeless in blue, and talked. She talked about her grandchildren. She talked about her knee. She talked about a man called Pastor Mwesigwa who had tried to propose to her at a funeral.
"What did you say?"
"I said, Pastor, I have already got a husband." She sniffed. "He is in the cemetery. He is a very quiet man."
Nabirye laughed. It hurt her ribs. She laughed anyway, in the hot, soft, lamplit room, with a bag of drip fluid swinging above her, and thought, I did not know it was still possible.
On the fifteenth day, they restarted the HIV treatment.
She was ready for it. She sat up in bed, in a clean nightdress, and took the small yellow pill from a paper cup, and put it on her tongue, and looked at Mama Teddy, who was watching her with her knitting in her lap and her whole large face crumpled with anxiety.
"It's the size of a pea," said Mama Teddy.
"I know."
"A big, strong, magnificent pea."
"I know, Mama."
"Go on."
She swallowed. It went down. She sat for a moment, still.
"Well?" said Mama Teddy.
"I feel..." She considered it. "Exactly the same."
"Excellent." The big woman took up her knitting. "That is how you know it is working."
She laughed again. It was easier this time.
By March, she was walking.
She did it first on the veranda, with a stick, one step at a time, holding the rail, in the cool of the morning, with the whole yard silent and golden. A kilo had become two, and two had become five. She had colour. She had hips. She had a face, once more, instead of a skull, and when she looked into the cracked mirror in the clinic bathroom she saw, with a kind of wary, incredulous shyness, a young woman with large dark eyes and a long neck, and she thought, Oh. There you are.
She had missed her.
She did not tell herself that she was cured. She was careful about it. She had learned that lesson. She told herself, every morning, as she swallowed the yellow pill, that she was only well today, that it was a thing she did, a promise she renewed, like lighting a fire. It was a small, quiet, daily work. It did not feel like a miracle. It felt like washing a plate.
But it was a good work. It was, in its way, the best she had ever done.
She took a room in Kisenyi, near the clinic, in a compound where nobody asked. It was a plain one, with a window and a bed and a shelf, and she put on the shelf the green exercise book, and the watch, and a small framed picture of the Virgin that Sister Agnes had given her. She made tea in the mornings, on a charcoal stove, and drank it on the step, in the sun. She learned the names of the neighbours. She was greeted, in the lane, by a boy who sold sugarcane, and a woman with a baby, and a very old man who sat all day on a stool and said, to everyone, God is good, in a voice like a rusty gate.
On Saturdays she went to the group.
It met in the whitewashed room at the back of the clinic, at ten o'clock, round a long table with a plastic cloth. There were about fifteen of them. They came and went. They were men and women, young and old, a schoolteacher, a taxi driver, a widow of seventy, a boy of seventeen who said nothing for six weeks. They sat with their hands round mugs of tea, and Mama Teddy, at the head, with her purple gomesi and her great bosom, said, "Who is first?" and somebody began.
She had never been in such a room.
It was not a sad one. That was what astonished her. She had imagined, at the very beginning, in her fear, a place of whispering and tears, a roomful of grey faces. But the group at the Blue Door was loud. It laughed. It argued about football. It gossiped about a pastor, and a landlord, and the price of onions. It told jokes, terrible ones, with very dark punchlines, and roared at them. And in the middle of it, casually, as one mentions the weather, somebody would say, "I missed my pills on Tuesday," or "My husband will not let me," or "I told my sister and she wouldn't come into the room." And the whole table would go quiet, and turn, and listen.
"What did you do?" Mama Teddy would say.
"I cried."
"Good. And then?"
"I took my pill."
"Good girl."
It was a thing she had not known could exist. It was a place where nothing needed to be hidden. She sat on a plastic chair, in a circle of strangers, with a mug in her hands, and found that the muscles in her shoulders, which had been clenched for four years, were slowly, shyly, letting go.
On the fourth Saturday, she spoke.
"My name is Nabirye," she said.
They waited.
"I was a nursing student. I... I was going to be a midwife. I wanted to build a clinic in my village. I did not." She stopped. Her throat was dry. "I got sick. I did not go to a clinic. I was afraid. I thought, if I did not say it, it would not be real. And then I went to a prophet. And I stopped my tablets. And I almost died."
Nobody moved.
"I wanted to say it," she said. "Out loud. Because I haven't. Not to anyone. Not properly." She looked down at her hands. "I'm so ashamed."
"Of what?" said Mama Teddy.
"Of all of it."
"All?"
"I... I was with men. For money." She said it plainly, in the quiet. "I took things. I let them pay. I told lies. I told my mother I was a nurse. She does not know. She thinks I'm... she thinks I'm good."
There was a silence.
Then a woman across the table, in a faded blue dress, with her hair in a scarf, spoke. She was perhaps thirty, thin and tired, with a baby on her lap. She had not said a word in three weeks.
"My husband sold me," she said.
The room turned.
"For a debt. To his brother. When I was twenty." She stroked the baby's head. "I did not choose. I'm only saying. You are not the only one who was bought."
"I'm sorry."
"I do not want sorry. I want to say that I am still here." The woman looked up. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but clear. "And so are you."
A man said, "Amen."
A girl laughed, wetly.
And Nabirye, who had meant to be brave, and had not planned to weep, put her face in her hands and wept for the first time in her life in a room full of people, and felt a very large warm hand come down on her back, and another, and another, until the whole table seemed to be leaning toward her like a shelter.
It was Shamim who told Ibra.
She did it in April, at the clinic, in the yard, with a fierce look, having first made Nabirye promise. "I'm not asking permission," she said. "I'm telling you. He came to my salon in January. He walked in, in a white coat, and said, I'm looking for a girl called Nabirye. I said, Which one? He said, The best one. And he sat in my chair for an hour."
"Shamim."
"I told him nothing. I swear. I said, She is not here. But he waited. He came back. Every week. He sat, in my salon, in the middle of eleven women, for six weeks, with a face like a funeral." She put her hands on her hips. "He does not know what is wrong. He only knows that something is. And I will not stand and watch a man like that die of a broken heart because a girl is too proud."
"I'm not proud."
"You are the proudest person I have ever met."
"I'm ashamed."
"It is the same thing, in a different dress." Shamim's voice cracked. "Please. He loves you. He's loved you since he was twenty. He gave you forty thousand shillings in a handkerchief. He sent you three messages. He stood in a petrol station and let you call him a..."
"I know."
"Then go and see him."
She went on a Sunday.
She took a taxi to Mulago, and stood at the gate of the hospital in the heat, with a bag over her shoulder, watching the crowds go in and out. It was a vast, dusty, shabby place, with a thousand people in the yard and a long line of ambulances at the door. A woman was selling oranges on a mat. A man with a drip stand was walking, slowly, in his pyjamas, round and round the car park. The smell of it, of carbolic and sweat and frying, struck her in the throat.
She had not been in a hospital in two years.
She nearly turned back. She stood with one foot on the pavement and the other on the kerb. He'll see. He'll know. He will look at me, and see. But a security guard at the gate said, "Madam, are you lost?" and she heard herself say, "I'm looking for the laboratory. For a Mr. Sekitoleko."
"Ibra? The tall one?"
"Yes."
"Second floor. At the back." The guard grinned. "He's the only one who stays on Sundays."
He was alone.
She found him in a small white room at the end of a long corridor, with a bench of microscopes and a rack of test tubes, in a white coat, with his glasses pushed up on his forehead. He was bent over a slide. He did not hear her come. She stood in the doorway for a long moment, watching him, with her heart going, the thin back, the long careful hands, the line of his neck. He had grown a short beard. It made him look older. It made him look like a man.
"Ibra," she said.
He turned.
He did not say anything. He looked at her across the room. He did not move. For a very long time, the whole of his face, his eyes, his mouth, the small muscles at the corners, were completely still, and she saw, with a pang so sharp it made her breath stop, every one of the last four years go across it, like cloud shadows across a field.
Then he smiled.
It was a slow, wondering, broken-open smile. It changed him, from the inside. He took off his glasses, and wiped them, and put them on, and took them off again.
"You came," he said.
"I'm sorry."
"No."
"I was so cruel."
"You were not." He put down the slide. He came across the room, carefully, as though she might be a bird. "You were frightened. I knew. I knew the whole time. I should not have..."
"You were being kind."
"I was being clumsy." He stopped, an arm's length away. His eyes went over her face, her collarbones, her hands, with the swift expert glance of a man who has looked at a great deal of blood. She saw him see it. She saw him see it all. The thinness. The shadow. The very particular pallor.
He knows.
She waited for it. For the flinch. For the step back.
"You have been ill," said Ibra, quietly.
"Yes."
"Are you... is it...?"
"I'm HIV positive." She said it clearly. She had practised it, on the taxi, in a whisper. "I've been on treatment since January. Before that, I stopped. I nearly died. I'm better now. I wanted you to hear it from me."
The room was very quiet.
Outside, on the roof, a pigeon was cooing. A trolley rattled in the corridor. She stood with her hands at her sides, and her chin up, and her whole body braced.
Ibra did not move.
Then, very slowly, he put out both hands. He did not reach for her. He only held them out, palms up, between them, in the white light, as a man offers a bowl.
"Thank you for telling me," he said.
"That's all?"
"What else would you like me to say?"
"I don't know. I thought you'd..."
"What?"
"Leave."
"Where would I go?" He gave a short, unsteady laugh. "I have been looking for you for four years. I am not going to leave because you have told me the truth." His voice shook. "I'm a laboratory technician, Nabirye. I run four hundred tests a week. I know exactly what it is. It's a small, sad, manageable thing. It is not a person."
"It's me."
"No." He shook his head. "It's a thing you have. And I have a cold."
She began to laugh. She could not help it. It rose up in her chest, a strange wet cracked helpless sound, and she put the back of her hand to her mouth, and he was laughing too, in the middle of the sterile white room, with his glasses crooked, and then she was crying, and then she was in his arms.
He was very thin, and very warm. He smelled of disinfectant and soap and old books. He held her, carefully, round the shoulders, as one holds a person who has been in the water too long, and she put her face in the front of his coat, and felt him shake.
"I did not mean the things I said," she whispered.
"I know."
"At the petrol station. I was so afraid. I said..."
"I know what you said. I have forgotten it." His voice was thick. "I'm very good at forgetting. I have to be. I look at a thousand slides a month."
"I don't deserve..."
"Nobody does." He drew back, and took her face in his hands, and looked at it, with his heart in his eyes. "That is the whole point. That is what the word grace means. It's the thing you get when you haven't earned it." He smiled. "Your father gave you the name. I looked it up."
She stared at him.
"I'm not asking for anything," said Ibra. "I want to be clear. I'm not going to say, marry me. I'm not going to say, I love you. Well, I am going to say it, but I will say it once and not again." He swallowed. "I love you. I always have. I would like to be your friend. That is all. I will sit next to you, on a bench, in whatever room you like, and I'll listen. And if one day you wish me to be more, I'll tell you the answer."
She was crying so hard she could not speak.
"Is that acceptable?" said Ibra.
"Yes."
"Good." He wiped his thumb across her cheek. "Now. I have a sandwich. It's cheese. It is very bad. Will you have half?"
It was a very good season, though it had no name.
That was how she thought of it afterward. In Uganda there are only the rains and the dry, and the long slow wheel of the sun along the equator. But that year, from April to the end of June, it seemed to her that the whole country was in flower. She woke in the mornings to a clear gold light. She walked to the clinic through streets she knew, past the mosque and the hardware shop, with her bag swinging, and people said Good morning, sister. A woman gave her a mango. A child waved.
She was working.
It had begun by accident. Sister Agnes, short-handed one Saturday, had asked her to hand out leaflets in the waiting room, and she had done it, quietly, with a smile, and a woman on the bench had said, "Are you a nurse?" And she had heard herself say, "I was training to be."
By May, she was in the clinic three days a week, as a volunteer, in a blue apron. She weighed the patients. She took their blood pressure. She sat with the frightened ones, in the yard, on the bench, and held their hands, and said, in a low voice, "I'm not going to tell you it's easy. But I'll tell you something. I've done it. And I'm still here."
They listened. They always did. It was extraordinary. It was the most useful thing she had ever said, and she had not known it until she opened her mouth.
This, she thought. This is what I meant.
It was not the clinic of her childhood dream. It was not a bright building in a green valley. It was a low yellow house in Kisenyi with a chipped door. But it had a bench, and a poster of a woman with a pill, and a long line of sick people on the verandah, and a woman in a purple dress, who gave them tea. It was a place where nobody had to be carried alone.
I could build that, she thought. I could build it at home.
She wrote it, one night, in the green exercise book. She turned to the first page, to the line she had written at nine, in a child's hand, and put the pen to the paper below it, and wrote, slowly, in the careful slanting letters of a woman:
I still want to build a place where nobody has to be carried.
I think I know where to begin.
She looked at it for a long time. Then she wrote underneath, small, in the corner of the page: Tell Maama.
She underlined it. She drew a box round it.
Soon.
The letter came in the last week of June.
It came to the clinic, in an envelope with a blue crest, and Sister Agnes carried it in on a tray with a cup of tea and a very large grin. "For you," she said. "Open it."
"I'm afraid."
"It is only paper."
She opened it.
Dear Miss Kibirige, it said. Further to your recent application, and the supporting letter from the Blue Door Community Clinic, we are pleased to inform you that the Board of St. Veronica's School of Nursing and Midwifery has agreed to re-admit you, on a compassionate basis, to the Diploma programme, with effect from the first of September, subject to a satisfactory medical certificate.
She read it once. She read it twice.
She was sitting in the whitewashed office with a cup of tea in her hand, and the sun coming in through the window onto the desk, and a vase of plastic flowers. She could not move. She could not breathe. The whole room had gone very bright and very small, and the words on the paper swam, black on cream, like fish in a pool.
Re-admit.
"Sister," she whispered.
"Yes, my dear."
"They said yes."
"I know." Sister Agnes was crying, openly, with a broad wet smile. "I spoke to Sister Benedicta myself. She said, I always thought that girl had a gift. She said, Send her back."
"I can't believe it."
"Believe it."
"I'm going to be a nurse."
"You always were." The old woman took her hand, and held it, hard. "You never stopped. You only took a long road round."
Nabirye put her face down on the desk, on her folded arms, and sobbed.
She stayed there for a long time. And somewhere, in the middle of it, in the warm dark of her own sleeve, with the sun on the back of her neck, she heard a voice in her head, clearly, in the thick rolling Luganda of a village at the foot of a hill. You will pay me by coming home.
I will, she thought.
I will, Maama. I'm so nearly there.
She did not know it was the last of the good months.
Nobody does.