made him dizzy to think of hearing her voice again.
Hours passed. The old man’s hand twitched in his, and his breathing stopped a moment, then started again. It was quiet now on the ward. All the men around him were sleeping, and he imagined the nurses were asleep too, in their chairs. A dull light reflected off the linoleum in the hall. All he could see was the old man’s profile, and his chest trying to rise and fall.
He thought of Kopano, shoved under the train. And the man in the cell next to his, who’d never again see his children. And the young man who’d cried out for his mother, pleaded to God. After their voices had gone still, Isaac had not grieved for them. There was no grieving in that place. For there to be grief, there must be love, but hate had consumed it all.
The old man tried to sit up. He got his elbows halfway under him and collapsed. Isaac put his arm under his shoulders and lifted him until he was half sitting. He could not hold him because of the weakness in his arms. He laid him gently down and reached for the pillow off his bed, lifted the man again, and laid him down on the two pillows. The old man began to breathe rapidly through his mouth. His breath stopped abruptly, and then he began again. His lips were becoming blue, and his eyes were closed. Isaac laid his hand lightly on the man’s chest.
Several times more his breath started up rapidly, then stopped. Each pause lasted longer, and each time it stopped, Isaac thought he was gone. He waited and held his own breath. And then the old man breathed no more.
Isaac closed his mouth for him. He felt he had been witness to something beyond reckoning, that he was not worthy of what he’d seen. He did not know how to pray for the dead, but he whispered, “Modimo, I beg you to have mercy on this soul, passing from Earth to the great beyond. Forgive him, and let him find perfect love and rest in peace.” The old man’s jaw dropped open again. Isaac closed it gently. He was exhausted and returned to his own bed. He thought of calling a nurse but the old man’s soul could take its leave more peacefully if his body was not disturbed until morning. Lying beside him with his eyes open, he realized he had never learned the old man’s name. To him, he would always be simply the old man.
The next morning, on the slope of the old man’s sunken garden, a flower bloomed, opening into five white petals and three white curling stamens. The old man had planted the flower, wahlenbergia caledonica, from seed. He’d been waiting to see the white petals unfold, tinted, as he knew they’d be, with the lightest shade of purple. One by one, the birds in the cages began to sing. First a pair of yellow canaries, then a lovebird, the glossy starlings and bulbuls, then the tiny zebra finches with their orange beaks and feet. A light dew lifted from a blue spur-flower and a Chinese ground orchid, from the gray green leaves of a mound of widow’s tears, and from a clump of blue-eyed grass. The red-faced man who’d shouted at Isaac stood in the doorway of his house, listening.
58
Two weeks after starting his medication for tuberculosis and typhoid, they moved Isaac out of the TB ward into a general medical ward. He was still very weak and had little appetite. Alice brought him a drawing from Lulu and another from Moses. Lulu’s was of their school and their teacher, with White Dog sitting outside under a tree. Moses had drawn Alice’s house, the outside on one half of the page, their bed with the two of them in it on the other half.
Alice sat on Isaac’s bed. There was no other place to sit. Her hair, which was usually gathered into a messy knot at the nape of her neck, was down around her face. Her eyes were very blue and she looked at him intently.
“How are you?” she asked. It overwhelmed him. He felt a ridiculous and dangerous urge to touch her hair where it had fallen around her chin, to push it back around her ear.
“I am going better,” he said, as though he were a truck with an engine.
“Have they said when you can leave?”
“My lungs must be clear,