diseased?’ the doctor asked.
‘Yes.’ Joseph stood taller. ‘I’m Joseph. This is Farai.’
‘Ah! Me, am Dr Musadabwe.’ They shook hands. ‘Your father was a great man! I heard a lot of goody things about you. Am velly-solly for your losses.’ The man’s breath was putrid.
‘Thank you,’ said Joseph. ‘Did you work at his clinic?’
‘Ah, no, I’m just a fellow student with your father from UTH days. A velly-good man.’
Joseph thought his father had gone to med school in Zimbabwe, not at UTH. He felt a tug on his hand and looked down. Farai raised his Fanta bottle, which looked oversized in his little hands and still needed opening.
‘Give,’ said Musadabwe.
Farai handed it over shyly. Musadabwe opened it with his teeth and handed it back. Farai broke his beaming smile to sip from it, then marched out of the kitchen.
‘Your father?’ Musadabwe turned back to Joseph. ‘Was a blirriant man. A mind stretcha!’
Joseph nodded and fondled his own unopened Fanta.
‘His resatch was just—’ Musadabwe pursed fingers and lips and kissed them together. ‘He was on the blink of blaking through to some other side. Groundblaking, I swear to Goad.’
‘His vaccine research?’
‘Yes! He was going to heal us. The Virus is getting worse with these viro multiplications…’
Two Chinese men in lab coats strolled in, speaking in serious voices. Musadabwe fell abruptly silent and turned away from Joseph, opening the fridge as if to contemplate its insides. Joseph excused himself to the man’s back and went to look for Farai.
He found him outside the closed door to the sitting room. Farai wrapped his hand around Joseph’s thumb as they both pressed their ears to the wood. Behind the door, the keening of the women accrued volume and insistence until one voice broke into a seething wail. The other voices climbed to meet it in staggered succession, as if up a ladder with missing steps. It had never occurred to Joseph that sadness could have such fury to it. The two feelings seemed so different, two bells of disparate size and swing. Now they chimed together and the hair on his neck rose up.
* * *
Three days later, the family held a funeral service at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. It was cloudy outside and the modern stained-glass windows – skew panes of lemon and menthol and cherry – looked like dusty coughdrops. The family sat in the frontmost pew, Grandpa and Joseph in suits, Ba Grace, Gran and Aunt Carol in chitenge outfits. Salina, who had arrived only yesterday, wore an Ethiopian garment, a rococo braid of orange and green winding down it, and a headwrap as tall as a bishop’s hood. Thandi wore a black retro-1990s suit, the sort of thing that was so fashionable in London that it was old-fashioned in Lusaka. Farai, with a child’s impunity, wore overalls.
The extended family, the village of Grandpa Ronald’s relatives, filled the pews behind them, the women wearing matching chitenge wrappers over their church dresses. Meeting them all had been nightmarish for Joseph in a hall-of-mirrors way, the prominence of certain traits – high cheekbones, trapezoidal noses – making it especially difficult to distinguish between the aunties. Scattered in the audience were about thirty doctors of various ethnicity, their white coats making them look like paper dolls among rag dolls. At one point in the service, they all rose on cue and began reciting in unison:
I swear to consider dear to me, as his parents, him who taught me this art; to live in common with him and if necessary, to share his goods with him; to look upon his children as his own brothers, to teach them this art. He will prescribe regimens for the good of his patients according to his ability and his judgment and never do harm to anyone. He will not give a lethal drug to anyone if he is asked, nor will he advise such a plan; and similarly he will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion. But he will preserve the purity of his life and his arts. He will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; he will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art. In every house where he come he will enter only for the good of his patients, keeping himself far from all intentional ill-doing and especially from the pleasures of love with women or with men, be they free or slaves. All that may come