Born on Sunday
Mark Rigney
The hospital has a gate, but no fence. It has a guard house, but no guard. Even if the gate is shut and locked, the building is easy to enter: simply walk fifteen feet out of the way, go around the gate, and then up the six broad stairs, French-built and crumbling, to the always-open front door.
The hospital does have doctors, three of them, together with a crew of half-trained female nurses and a bevy of medical residents courtesy of the United States Peace Corps. All of the nurses are black, Éwé-speakers. All of the Peace Corps medics are male and white. The most retiring of these, Claude Renner, is the one unlucky enough to be nearest the entrance when the soldier bursts inside, carrying his unconscious son in his arms.
“A doctor!” the soldier yells, in French. “My son will have a doctor, now!”
Claude approaches with reluctance. The soldier is a bull, tall by local standards, and he wears thick folds of camouflage typical of Togo’s unpredictable army: a maroon beret with green trim, and jet-black sunglasses. Claude tries hard to concentrate on the limp boy in the soldier’s arms––six, maybe seven years of age––but the machine gun strapped to the soldier’s back keeps getting in the way of good, clear, diagnostic thought.
“The head doctors are out,” Claude says, also using French. This is why the Corps has placed him in Togo, where English has little currency. Claude, now a U.S. citizen, grew up in Quebec; to celebrate his new nationality, he deliberately changed his surname from the original Renier.
“Are you a doctor?” the soldier demands. Worried beads of sweat dot his dark, faintly mottled skin.
“In training,” Claude replies. “Almost.”
“The rest are where? Eating? Out––having fun?”
“I’m sorry, I have no idea.”
“Then you will be his doctor.”
Claude acquiesces, and he leads the soldier to an alcove with an empty cot. The alcove has a window and walls on three sides; it is as close as the hospital comes to a private room.
The soldier sets his son on the cot as if each of the boy’s limbs might snap, then steps back as Claude begins a quick examination. The soldier takes up a position by the foot of the bed, arms folded across his chest; he remains there, a statue of himself, until Claude has finished.
“Well…” says Claude, rising.
The soldier, with a fluid, expert motion, unslings his machine gun. One moment, the gun is harmless, aimed at the ceiling, and the next, the scratched, worn-looking muzzle is pointing straight at Claude’s stomach.
“I will return at this time tomorrow,” the soldier says. “If he is dead––you die, too.”
None of the doctors will touch the boy.
“Not my problem!” jeers Dr. Chen, waving Claude away. “I treat patients, not machine guns! Ha ha!”
Doctors Sahay and Norland agree, although unlike Chen, they skulk instead of gloat, and simply avoid Claude. Sahay is Indian, darker than any local, and short. He is addicted to painkillers. Norland is a ridiculously tall Swede, rail-thin, a self-described semi-professional alcoholic. Despite everything, Claude feels both are competent doctors, and he has never understood why they put up with Chen, whom villagers and fellow staff alike refer to as “the butcher.” Chen’s weakness: heroin, in startling quantities.
“Is it snakebite?” asks Chen, speaking in English, the hospital’s unofficial lingua franca. His head is box-like, nearly square, and cut by a wide, stretching mouth. “We low on anti-venom. If a viper got him, he dead very soon. Then the soldier come back tomorrow, ha ha! A bad day for Dr. Renner, yes, ha ha!”
Chen’s two-note laugh is legendary. To shut him up, Norland once hit him over the head with a bottle of Russian schnapps––a terrible waste, he said later, morose, because it didn’t work, not even for a moment “Stitches, ha ha!” Chen cried. “I’m bleeding, quick, a doctor! Is a doctor in the house? Ha! A doctor, in this hospital, yes! Ha ha!”
Claude gives up on getting a second opinion for the boy. This doesn’t worry him. He is an unflappable sort, a man who sleeps through the night no matter what the conditions, and besides, he’s had other patients in his care before, in fact if not in name, and the diagnosis here is simple: dehydration due to dysentery. The boy has amoeba in his stool. Another day untreated, and the boy would have died, no question; the soldier was right to be concerned. Easy to fix, however. Once the child has an IV in his arm, he’ll perk right up. In a day or two, he’ll be right as rain. Claude orders a saline drip, then discovers that the only nurse competent enough to prepare one has gone home, according to Dr. Sahay, “to slaughter something.” A special ritual, or merely getting a jump on the evening meal? Claude has no idea, so he prepares the IV himself.
An hour later, as he checks a syphilitic woman panicked over her fading eyesight, Dr. Chen breezes in, his checked shirt untucked and barely buttoned. “Chief Physician Claude Renner, your little boy is all awake. He asks for his doctor, ha ha! He start to look at me, but I run away, ha ha!”
By the time Claude gets back, the child is indeed awake, his eyes wide. Afraid, Claude decides; he has no idea what that tube is doing in his arm.
“N-koh-woh-day?” he asks, using one of the few Éwé phrases he knows. “What is your name?”
“Kwame,” says the boy. He gives a last name, too, but Claude cannot decipher more than a fragment. He decides to confirm the first name and stick with that.
“Yes,” replies the boy. “Kwame.” Then he launches into a series of what sound like questions, his eyes drilling into Claude’s.
Claude hesitates, translating after the fact. Parts of Éwé make perfect sense, but the rest trundles through his head like crunching, rusty gears. He has no idea what Kwame has actually said, so he falls back on a basic, informative answer. “Yes. You are sick. You have what is called ‘dysentery.’”
“You are a doctor. Make me get better.”
Claude decides he’ll have to find a nurse to translate if he is to get anything useful across, but just to be sure, he asks, “Parlez-vous Français?”
Kwame shakes his head, and a second try in English draws an equally blank response. “Wait here,” Claude says, returning to Éwé. “I am going to find someone who speaks your language better.”
“My father says if you do not make me well, he will kill you.”
Claude, already halfway out of the room, feels his shoulders freeze first, then his legs and feet. Did the boy just say what he thinks the boy said? “Kwame,” he says, “no one is going to kill anyone.”
The boy looks him right in the eye and says––or Claude thinks this is what he says––“My father has killed a lot of men. If I do not get well, he will kill you, too.”
Claude writes three letters every week. He writes to his mother and father, in Hull, and he writes to his Americanized sister, Janine. She is younger than he, just out of college, the first woman to gain a degree in any branch of his very extended family. In her last letter she’d asked, “Do the women in Togo go on to higher education? I suppose not, but perhaps if you settle there, you could start a school!”
The third letter goes without fail to Nora, his almost-fiancée. Nora, now Chicago-based, whom he met while in medical school in Rochester. Nora, who writes every evening and tells him not to worry that he finds the time to reciprocate only once in seven days. “You are working,” she writes, her hand skinny, shot through with narrow, trailing loops. “You are in a strange environment. Let’s try to live a life free from guilt, okay?” She signs each letter with a string of X’s and O’s; the last bore the date of July 13th, 1964, and at the bottom, she’d added a post-script: “You remember Mr. Hartley, at the hardware store? His son joined the Corps last month, he’s headed for Tanzania. Mr. Hartley says he is very proud of you. I wish I didn’t blush so easily!”
Claude loves Nora with that special brand of pure, unadulterated love that can only bloom fully at a distance. From Togo, Nora is perfect, unblemished in word, deed and form. He likes to picture her where she works, at the Garfield Park Conservatory, her hands sunk deep in rich soil, the smell of it filling her nose, scenting her blonde hair––tied back, most likely, with a red and white head scarf. She favors the tropical greenhouse, where myriad butterflies wobble through a tangle of thick, glossy leaves. Nora checks moisture levels there daily, and while she works, she daydreams plans for a butterfly garden of her own. When asked, she tells strangers she waters plants for a living. With friends, she calls herself a hose jockey. “I nurture,” she tells Claude. “I’m practicing for motherhood. If we had a baby boy, do you think he’d have your ears?”
Claude hopes not. The men of his family have flaps for ears, they are positively cartoon-like in their prominence. He considers himself lucky to still have a full head of hair, dark and close-knit; the isolation of the village has allowed him to indulge and grow it longer than he ever could working at a hospital at home. Just last week, Nora sent him a newspaper clipping, a fuzzy photograph of “the next sensation,” a British rock band calling themselves The Beatles. “To me,” she writes, “you look like George.” With ears, thinks Claude—George the Beatle with Dumbo ears.
As Claude begins this week’s letter, it is dark outside, a pleasant evening as it almost always is during the long dry season. Claude sits across from Kwame in a rickety folding chair he’s stolen from the kitchen, and he considers the possibility that this will be his last letter, his last because he will be dead, riddled with bullets by an anonymous member of Togo’s unreliable army. Perhaps, as he retches in his own gore, he’ll have the time and presence of mind to write a final scrawl: “Dearest Nora, I love you. I am sorry. A simple case of dysentery, and I blew it.”
Kwame is asleep and responding well. His fever is down, his pulse and heart rate well within the bounds of normalcy. Claude tries again to write, to make sense of how unremarkable it was to have a gun aimed his way, even at point blank range. He wants to say, “I am worried that I have lost the capacity to feel,” but does not dare. Would Nora marry a man with armor for skin and a career implanted where his heart should be? No, surely not. He must write something less nerve-wracking. He must avoid the issue.
That night, with the letter finished and lying unsealed beside his bed, Claude dreams. The dream is sudden, a fearsome bolt: he sees the soldier. He sees right through the darkened panes of the sunglasses, but where the eyes should be is just another sheen of smoke-black glass. The soldier blinks and Claude shoots awake. He is drenched in sweat, confused. His eyes sweep the room, certain he will spot an intruder aiming a weapon at his head.
The day cannot pass quickly enough. Claude fumbles syringes and smashes a coffee mug on the hospital’s reddish floor tiles. When updating charts, he can’t control his pen.
Chen laughs at him. “Fearless Doctor Renner, ha ha! Today is your turn to feel like the patients, ha ha!”
Dr. Sahay corners him just before noon. “We have attempted to contact the authorities,” he says, “but the police are all quite suddenly unavailable. We asked around the village, but no one will admit to knowing who this soldier is, or if he is actually dangerous.”
Once finished, Dr. Sahay hovers, as if waiting to be dismissed. “It’s lunch time,” says Claude. “You should go and eat.”
“I will, yes.”
And he does, leaving not only the building but the grounds. With him go Norling, the nurses, and every in-patient capable of even a stumbling walk. Chen, however, remains. He eats a banana, sideways, chewing along one exposed seam as if he were nibbling on corn-on-the-cob.
“You should get out of here,” says Claude. “Just in case.”
“Nah, not me. I stay with you, see what happens.”
“Don’t be brave on my account.”
“Better make sure that boy still alive. If he break a fingernail while you looking somewhere else––whee! Trouble!”
Claude in the lead, they make their way to Kwame’s room. He is sitting up, engulfed by a bluish hospital gown intended for an adult.
“Nee-foh-ah?” asks Claude, hoping he has pronounced “How are you?” correctly. “You look better.”
The boy lets his fingers toy with the IV, but makes no effort to remove it. “Yes,” he says, “You have power with Mawu-Lissa.”
Claude checks the IV’s needle to make sure the boy hasn’t affected the drip with his picking. “Did you get that?” he asks Chen.
“Mawu-Lissa is God, the twins of moon and sun. He says––Ha ha!––you made him better with the moon.”
Outside the window, two scarlet butterflies skitter into view, bouncing off each other, flitting left, right, rising gradually skyward. Behind them Claude can see a row of low palms, their fronds brushing one against the next, rustling in the lightest of breezes. Beyond the trees, he has a decent view of the village road. On that road, walking with determined strides, comes the soldier.
“Stay here,” says Claude. “Both of you.”
Claude exits the building and waits at the top stair as the soldier marches to the gate, pushes it open and continues inside. With each step, the soldier’s feet flip up tiny plumes of dust. Claude knows full well that he should not be out here, exposed and alone. He should simply let him in, lead him straight to the infirmary. Now it is too late to second-guess. The soldier has arrived.
Standing at the bottom step, the soldier halts and removes his sunglasses. It is difficult for Claude to be sure––the sun is against him, and the soldier, dark already, is strongly backlit––but it appears to Claude that the soldier’s eyes are red, puffy. Sleepless, most likely, or perhaps he expects the worst: he’s been crying in anticipation.
“My son––?” the soldier asks, in a voice that clearly hopes he need not finish the sentence.
“He’s fine. Awake. Waiting for you.”
The soldier nods and, once started, cannot stop. His head bobs back and forth, the chin moving up, moving down. “I would not have shot you,” he says. “I would not have done that. My people believe that when a person dies, their spirit, their djoto, moves to the next born to that family. So, even if my son had died, he would still be with me. He would come back as my next child. But you––you have no woman here, I have asked. Do you have a family for your spirit? If I had shot you, killed you, where would you be?”
Claude falls back on information. “We gave Kwame a drug, an amoebacide. He needs to stay here for another few days, and then you can take him home.”
The soldier sucks in a breath, forces his nodding to stop. “You believe as the missionaries do. You believe that when you die, the djoto goes away, to Mawu-Lissa, to Heaven. That’s right, yes? You don’t believe you could ever send your spirit to another in your family.”
“I don’t believe that, no.”
The soldier cracks a rueful grin. “I was raised by missionaries. I am supposed to believe as you do, but––if Kwame were dead, I think I would tell the missionaries to––how do they say that?” The soldier pauses and then says, in stumbling English, “I would tell all of you, ‘Go to hell.’”
Kwame suddenly sticks his head out of his open window; he leans as far as he can, his hands on the sill, the tube of his IV trailing back inside, supported by Chen. He’s sixty feet away, but even from here, his expression is brimming, ebullient; it burns itself into Claude’s memory, a smile to carry for life.
“Father!” the boy cries. “Father!”
Above Kwame, the scarlet butterflies continue their silent mating dance; their wings flash in the sunlight, then disappear over the roofline of the hospital, heading out across the deep green sweep of the coffee plantations and up to the higher hills of home.
A week passes, and Kwame has left; he waved as he trotted away down the road. It’s business as usual for a while, but then Chen brings a stone to work one morning, wide and squat, cannonball-heavy, the sort that has been tossed through old, fast-moving rivers. He waits until Claude is in a busy hall, then plunks the stone down at his feet. The smack of its landing cracks a tile. Claude jumps, a nurse screams.
“Ha ha! This rock, Dr. Claude Renner! Make it better––make it better by tomorrow––or I kill you dead with guns!”
Chen sticks out his forefinger and thumb in imitation of a pistol, then doubles over laughing.
Claude picks up the stone and staggers out of the building and into the dormitory where the doctors and the Peace Corps men are staying. Chen is hot on his heels, full of flurried apology, half Chinese, half English, but Claude refuses to hear. He makes it to Chen’s room, opens the door––none have locks––and, using the stone as a club, proceeds to demolish everything in the room. Rather than trying to stop him, Chen flees, crying for help. By the time Chen returns, with a half-dozen able-bodied men, Claude is slumped in the hallway panting from exertion, the stone abandoned at his side. Of Chen’s possessions, only clothing has survived. Even the bed frame has been pummeled into kindling.
Claude has been dreaming, just as he has every night since Kwame’s arrival at the hospital. He confronts the soldier, his eyeless eyes, the awful circular void at the tip of the gun as the barrel comes up. But then the soldier’s eyes shift, the whites return, a pupil forms from the darkness, and the man blinks. The gun falls to his side, and that is even more frightening, for Claude is certain the gun could rise again and fire at a moment’s notice––but it doesn’t. The soldier simply stands there, gazing impassively at everything and nothing. Claude tells himself, even in sleep, snap out of this nightmare! Concentrate. Think of family. Think of Nora! Think of those stunning butterflies.
He runs through the scenario nightly, sometimes twice in an hour, and sleep, afterward, comes hard. The dream leaves him sweat-soaked and clammy; his pulse races as if trying to burst from his body.
It does not help that he dreams this dream far, far from Togo. He has left the hospital on what he calls a vacation and what the Corps terms an extended leave of absence. The business over Chen’s room has not died down quietly. Chen, refusing to be mollified, has suggested that if the soldier from Togo won’t kill Claude, then maybe he, Chen, will. Sahay and Norling both deemed it advisable to transfer Claude, however temporarily. Claude opted for a trip to Egypt. He has always wanted to see the pyramids.
He sleeps now in a tent, a tent that is part of a huge archeological dig near the base of what will soon become the Aswan High Dam. Work on the mighty Aswan has been steady for four years and promises to take at least four more, but even so, there is no time to waste; in the Nile Valley upstream, the number of artifacts, remains and burial grounds is almost beyond counting. Claude has a friend on the dig, one Robert October, and he needs all the help he can get. “We’ll train you up,” Robert had told him, while they were still both in the States. “Come any time. You’ll find that digging up bodies is oddly therapeutic.”
Now, wide awake and unwilling to risk sleep again so soon, Claude reaches under his cot and pulls out paper, a thin, brittle envelope, and a stubby pencil. He sits with his legs over the edge of the canvas cot and writes, in the dark, on his knees.
Dear Nora,
I have a new address. Your last few letters probably won’t reach me. Things are complicated; there are thoughts in my head I need to get rid of. Did I tell you about Kwame? It translates, I think, to “Born on Sunday.” For a while there, it looked like his being sick might cost me my life. I don’t mean to be mysterious. The facts look like this: I’ll be here in Egypt for three months, and then I guess it’s back to Togo. I don’t think the Peace Corps will let me jump ship on my commitments, although I’d like to. But even if I’m stuck here, I want to marry you. I want you to marry me. I want family, and soon. I want to stop being frightened of where I go from here.
All my love,
Claude
The hospital has a gate, but no fence. Some say it never had one. It used to have a guard house, but that fell down ages ago, and someone immediately made off with its corrugated metal roof. The gate is locked now and the lock is sufficiently rusty that it would never open even if the misplaced key could be found. Who had it last? One of the doctors, perhaps, before they moved off to the modern twenty-first century hospital in Kpalimé. It doesn’t matter. The door is wide open, if anyone wants to look around. Chickens sneak in, together with the occasional goat, seeking shade. Mice and snakes scurry through the walls.
Outside, at the rear of the building, stands a well-planned garden. Even untended, as it has been for several years now, it still surprises. Every plant and tree was hand-picked for its ability to attract butterflies. The butterflies are still plentiful in the hills to the west, and famously so, but here, surrounded as the village is by such a warren of plantations––coffee everywhere, with cassava and cacao filling in the gaps––butterflies have become a rarity. Is it any wonder, then, that the garden draws the villagers? Whenever they have time, they wander here and sit either on the ground or on the one surviving bench, and they watch the butterflies and their crazy-quilt flights until at last the moon, the night-time half of Mawu-Lissa, brushes the tops of the trees and the dancers settle for the night. The villagers nod and walk back to their homes, holding hands, some of them, and talking in reverent, hushed tones. All is well, they say; Mawu-Lissa watches over us––and also over the doctor and his wife, Nora. They were good people, a fine addition to the village. It is good, too, that before they died they had many strong children. So many good children to guard and nourish their spirits.