A Change of Climate: A Novel

injections. Injections are the main thing with them. And I give so many, because if they don’t get one from me they’ll go and get jabbed with God knows what by God knows who, and pay a fat price for it.”

“It’s not real medicine, is it?” Ralph was uneasy. “Just giving your patients what they want.”

Koos tapped his forehead. “Up here, Ralphie—that’s where the battle’s fought. You know, they have no confidence in me, these people. The girls want to find out if they’re pregnant, and so they go to a diviner the day after they’re late, and the diviner tells them what they want to hear, yes or no as it suits. If he’s wrong, the girls somehow manage to forget it. But they come to me and I say, I can’t tell you now, visit me again after two months. They look at me like—man, hes stupid, this Boer.”

Ralph glanced up at him. Koos wanted to talk; there was so much that he bottled up inside himself every day, and he would talk about anything, anything except what ailed him. “Your girl, Dearie,” he said. “You need to find out why she thinks her babies are always sick. You know, in this part of the world, we don’t have misfortunes plain and simple. If something goes wrong you need somebody to blame. Who’s done this to me, you ask? Who’s put this sickness on me? It might be, you see, your ancestors. It might be some enemy of yours. But it’s not just plain fate. It’s not the hand of God.”

“I suppose that’s comforting, in a way,” Ralph said.

“Is it?”

They both wondered, whether it was comforting or not: in the silence, cattleflies buzzed and dashed against the wire-mesh window. Koos said, “It sounds to me that what your girl needs is to call on Luke Mbatha, my dispenser. You’ve met Luke? You’ve seen Luke, Saturday night, in his zoot suit, with some Jo’burg shebeen queen on his arm? You think he bought that on what I pay him?”

“What, the suit or the woman?”

Koos was bowed by his amusement; his red hand knuckled his head. “Both cost, Ralphie, suit and cunt. No, Luke—he does a good trade in cats’ livers and lizard skins and python fat. You ought to go and see him in the backyard there. A lot of his mixtures you don’t swallow, thank Christ, you just put the bottle on a string and hang it round your neck. Might suit your girl Dearie. He does business by mail, too. Love potions. Maybe other kind of potions— murder ones—but I don’t ask him. A man came in last week and said he had beetles in his bowels. I sent him straight through to the back. If he believes that, it’s Luke he needs, not me.”

Ralph no longer bothered to get on his high horse; to say, they’re not barbarians. He knew Koos was not passing judgment. He was implying that there is another view of the world that you could entertain: and that he did not entirely despise it. “Still,” he said, “you have to keep your eye on Luke, I suppose. To see that he’s not harming anyone.”

“He does less harm than some. Have you seen these things the blacks use?” Koos took a little box out of his desk drawer and skimmed it across at Ralph. Extra Strong Native Pills, he read. “Extra Strong is an understatement,” Koos said. “Almost, if you had beetles, you’d blast them out. And worms—I tell you, man, they’re always deworming themselves, and killing themselves in the process. I’ve seen it—I’ve had people crawl in here and die on me slowly. Certified worm-free, but unluckily for them their blerry worm-free liver’s packed up—and you need to see people dying at that speed, Ralphie, because when the liver’s gone, a person’s life continues three days, and the only pain relief’s a bullet in the brain.” Koos shifted in his chair. “So I let Luke get on with it. It’s like these churches, isn’t it? You wish your mission servants would come to your church—but you know they go to more exciting types of services. What I do is, I go in there every month or so, have a look around among Luke’s stock. Just make sure there’s nothing human, that’s all. Anything human, and—I’ve warned him—I go to the police.”

“What do you mean, human?”

“People disappear, you know? We always say, they’re lost into Johannesburg, but sometimes they’ve gone a lot farther than that.

There is a trade, you can’t deny it. In bodies, live ones. They take the eyes, the tongue, whatever they need for medicine at that time. It’s a big problem for the police as to who’s guilty —and of course they feel they shouldn’t have to handle it, it’s a native problem. The reason why it’s so difficult to pin blame is that gangs do these things, networks, and how can you pick out who’s responsible— who can you say is the killer, if a person’s been cut up by different hands? And of course, if you cut people to pieces, they do die in the end.” Koos looked up, and saw the expression on Ralph’s face. “All right, don’t believe me,” he said. “I don’t like to think about it either. Who wants to admit such things go on?” He jerked his thumb in the general direction of Pretoria. “It gives encouragement to them.”

When the new year came, the bus fares went up, and the bus boycott started. Ralph got up at four each morning to pack the mission’s car with more people than it should hold, and to edge the complaining vehicle out of Elim, downhill toward Pretoria. The people who had permits to work in the city needed to keep their jobs; every taxi in Elim was commandeered, but still they passed silent convoys of men and women, walking downhill in the smoky dawn. The headlights of other cars, going uphill, crept by theirs; there was some sympathy in the liberal suburbs of Johannesburg, and there were men and women willing to drive through the night to help the people from the townships. Ralph had his name noted, at roadblocks. He was questioned, roughly, in Afrikaans. His lack of understanding drove the policemen into a fury. “We’ve got your number, man,” they said. “You must be a communist, eh?”

I want, he thought, to put into practice a different kind of Christianity from my father’s: one in which I don’t pass judgment on people. I don’t judge Lucy Moyo, or Koos, or (without evidence) Luke the dispenser whose trade is so dark; I don’t judge the president, or the police sergeant who has just cursed me out. “But if you don’t judge,” Anna said, “you certainly institute some stiff inquiries into people’s motives. I am not sure that is always quite separate from the process of passing judgment.”

She knew him better, by now. That kindness of his, which she had taken so personally, was essentially impersonal, she saw.

That morning at the roadblock, the policeman said to Ralph, kafifirboetie. Black man’s brother, or dear friend. “I would like to be,” Ralph said. “But I wouldn’t make the claim.” The policeman spat into the roadway. Only his upbringing prevented him from spitting in Ralph’s face.

On the day of the public meeting, the day of the baton charge, Koos opened his hospital in the nursery school’s hall, rolling up his shocked and bloodied patients in blankets, speaking in five languages to ban the hot sweet tea and ask for water, just water; for bandages—anything, any rags; for anyone with a steady hand to help him swab and clean.

Ralph gave a thought to a dusty office in London, an aerie in Clerkenwell, the headquarters of the organization that had sent him here; and he thought of the churchgoers of Norfolk, passing the collection plate; he heard them say to him, you have no right to misappropriate funds in this way, misuse mission property: to press the blue smock of a nursery school angel to the bleeding mouth of a township whore who has been smashed in the face by a baton. It was the cook, Rosinah, who of all the mission staff had witnessed the police charge; Rosinah, who seemed to have no life outside her dictatorial kitchen practices. Now she rocked herself in a stupor of grief, telling how it was peaceful, baas, hymn singing, a speech, and now the police have chased the young women and beaten them on their breasts, they have done that thing, they know where young women are weak.