Basma
by Claire Coggins
My body is beyond exhaustion as I snap the gloves off and slip them back into the box, irritated by the smug line on the side. 50 single-use surgical gloves. These particular ones are on their last legs; they have been used perhaps eight or nine times today. I leave the sanctuary of the little store room, and it surprises me how little my ears are affected by the noises from the wards. I won’t describe them. It’s been perhaps the hardest thing I’ve ever done, to stay here all this time. To stay and watch, and stop when I know there is nothing more I can do. I keep my eyes averted as I walk through the ward.
It used to be hard, not to stop and help, but I’ve learnt to keep to my shifts. A sleep-deprived zombie is of no use to anyone, as Jasper frequently commented when he saw me during my first few days here. I near the end of the ward and my eyes move to my new friend, the little girl huddled in the corner. She hasn’t seen me yet; her eyes are focused on the battered little book in her lap, though they don’t move from left to right.
“Basma! How is your brother’s, uh-” She looks up sharply and gives a tentative smile as I gesture at my stomach, feeling slightly foolish.
“Son appendice,” She tells me. I nod appreciatively. “I’m not sure. He was taken to another ward but my mother told me to stay here.”
My French has improved enormously since I arrived in Chad, but my medical vocabulary is still limited. I could talk about malaria in French for days, but as my little friend’s brother is the only victim of appendicitis in my wards the vast majority of French terms associated with it are unknown to me. She looks up expectantly as I glance at my watch; recently I’ve developed the bad habit of calculating how many hours of sleep I’ll get that night if I go to bed now, or skip dinner later.
It’ll be six tonight if I’m lucky. I return my eyes to her thin little face and make up my mind, then slowly, achingly, sit down next to her on the dusty floor. Communication between Basma and me has been limited, but it’s amazing how much you can understand through hand signals and bits of broken languages.
“You want me to read you?” I ask in French, giving a slightly embarrassed smile as she corrects me.
“Yes, please. This is a new one. Mama said it’s about a very beautiful woman who was put to sleep by a witch.”
“Ah, you’ve got to watch those witches. You’d think some of the princesses would learn…” I mutter to myself in English.
The blank look I receive in return prompts a few hazy translations before she gets the message.
“You really need to stop talking English here. People don’t like it when they don’t know what you’re saying.” I look up abruptly, not for the first time surprised by Basma’s blunt observations. I’m unsure of what to say.
“Yes, it’s just – it’s hard to be away from your own country for so long.” I stumble slightly over the words, then laugh.
“Sometimes I think I’m forgetting how to speak English, and if that happens soon I won’t be able to speak any language properly,”
“I could teach you better French. You have a very bad accent.”
“Really that bad?”
“Yes! Awful. And your…when you say things like I talk, I run, you use the wrong endings all the time.”
“I think you mean ‘grammar’. That’s the English, anyway.”
“Will you read the story now?”
“Of course.”
“And – Matt…”
“Hmm?”
“If – if I teach you to speak my language better, will you teach me to read?” Basma looks down at her hands. She’s embarrassed, and I realise why. All around us the staff and volunteers are pushed to their limits to care for the sick. If I give up my time, even my free time, to teach and be taught, we’ll both feel guilty.
“You know, it will help other people too if you can read,” I pat her awkwardly on the arm, wanting to show encouragement but not sure how. “Then when you’re really good you’ll be able to read to the other sick children.” She looks up, a small smile on her lips.
“I’d like that.”
“Then let’s begin.”
***
“My friend, the doctor over there, says your brother will be able to have his operation tomorrow. There’s a long queue.”
“Thank you. Can we read first today?”
Over the last few days Basma and I have struggled together in that dusty little corner of Ward 3, stumbling through verbs and conditional tenses, and later through castles and princes and magical wardrobes.
She’s the most patient teacher I’ve ever had. Already I can feel myself getting better, making fewer mistakes. Basma also seems to be close to the ideal pupil. I’ve lectured a couple of times at the local university at home, but the yawning, tousle-haired students have nothing on her, I think proudly. I get the feeling she’s not a natural, but her enthusiasm makes up for her mistakes, and mine too.
“The end.”
“Well done!”
“Yes, I always remember the last two words.” I smile.
“Right, you’re the teacher now. You know how lots of your people’s names have meanings behind them – well, I wanted to know what your name meant.”
She tells me, but it’s not a word I’ve learnt. “Can you, uh, show me -”
“Matt? I know you’re off duty but we’ve just had a whole new wave of people with acute malaria.” Jasper appears, looking harassed.
“Of course, I’ll be right there.” I give Basma an apologetic look, but I can see she understands. She smiles and waves goodnight.
It’s hard treating distressed people on a good day, but when I feel as though I could fall asleep on my feet there’s nothing I’d rather do less. The thought of people like Basma keeps me going, though. People who need me, need us. We give drugs, we give drips, we comfort and we try to stay awake, and somewhere in the middle of it all I look over to the little dusty corner of Ward 3, and Basma isn’t there. In the same way that small problems seem magnified when you wake in the middle of the night, so does Basma’s absence. But I can’t stop, I barely have time to think, and by the time I can go to bed I’ve subconsciously put it to the back of my head.
Morning light comes quickly, and I return to the ward still in a haze of sleep. The sight of a little girl curled up on a bed jogs my memory and I look to Basma’s corner. To my relief she’s there.
“Good morning!” I make a mental list of things to fetch and order and people to see as I hurry up to her so I can say a quick hello before my shift starts. Yet her eyes are dark as she looks up at me and my rapid train of thought abruptly slows, falters. Something is wrong.
“Basma…”
“My brother. He – he is dead.”
Ah. I suddenly realise that that possibility has been at the back of my head since yesterday, though I didn’t acknowledge it. I don’t know what to say. For the first time in a long while, words fail me. This is my job – I should be able to think of something to say that will help!
“I’m so sorry.” That’s it.
“It’s not your fault.” To my surprise, a small smile appears on her lips. A second later, two thin arms are wrapped tightly round my waist. “Thank you.”
“You’re going? Now?”
“I have to see my mother. Then we’ll go home. For…for the funeral.”
“You’re so brave.” I am truly astounded by her ability to keep herself together. I have seen so many deaths, so many crying, broken people. But not this one. Hope sparks in her eyes, and I wonder if that’s what’s fuelling the smile that still graces her face. “Thank you, too. You are a very good teacher. I’m sorry we never finished that story.”
“Me too. Also, I didn’t tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“My name. It means – something you do when you are happy, or hopeful, or content. I think you know -?” The smile appears for one last time on her face, and it clicks. Of course. She wouldn’t suit any other name. I can feel hers mirrored on my face as she lets go and walks away.
I slip outside for a minute, and as I do the rain starts. Big, fat drops fall on my head and shoulders, and I laugh. Because there is hope, and it feels so good.
Yes, it feels good to be alive.
This story was inspired by the work of Médecins Sans Frontières.
The Anecdotal Wife
by James Greenwood
Even the sun seemed weary of its own heat. For months the air was sick with warm impatience; and Bourdais, being the sort of oleaginous little man who would have lived a happier life in some Norse pine forest, like from an advert—with cool breezes, and the enchanting privation of company—was fed up with all of it.
As it was, the office was a migraine of body-heat. The water was foetid in plastic cups, the talk of marketing a soupy stagnation which thickened over the midday hours. Eventually the collective will to continue burnt out: frustration gave way to delirium, and delirium to the phrase “je m’en fous.” All pretence of work decomposed, and when the young Jean returned from the Shopi with the beer by two o’clock the atmosphere had collapsed into jeers and talk of sport. Ties were removed from wet collars.
But Bourdais was not a sporting man. He in fact had no interests. The office, and perhaps the bar up the street, were the only places to find this elusive urban hermit. Even those who felt compelled to defend him could only call him “laid-back”. In the freedom of that afternoon, Bourdais found himself surrounded by the smarter, younger and generally better men who worked for his firm; men who had social lives, and knew him only for being an acrimonious gent, with hours to pass until it was time to clock out. The situation necessitating conversation, he once again led into his favourite topic, which was the Wife.
The stories he had for them! The way she insisted on ironing socks, the dusting of lightbulbs, the neurosis of the housewife—the same tales which echoed at the bar every weekend were stirred into the warmth and lethargy of his workplace. His colleagues laughed, noted how uncannily Mme Bourdais reflected women they themselves knew, or had the misfortune to be married to, and congratulated the stumpy gentleman on being such a straight-talking guy.
The working day officially ended, the plod towards the bar gave Bourdais the time to notice the sunlight dashing off the pavement, to recognise the strange blueness of the sky; he was not an unhappy man, with a mind full of meat, and brewing with contentment. He giggled inwardly, returning to the homeliness of the subterranean watering hole, that he had fooled all of his colleagues into thinking he was married. And the barman too nodded encouragingly, as M. Bourdais trickled out his drinks and repeated anecdotes that had never happened. The Wife of these adventures was nothing but fiction. Bourdais had thankfully never been married in his entire life, and only wore a ring on his swollen finger to keep up the charade, and of course to keep all those desperate hags at bay. Married indeed! He was the chief misogynist of the town. But all the men listened with respect and gratified him with laughter—as his countrymen were in the habit of doing, out of spite for the fairer sex—so Bourdais had no intention of revealing the truths of his domestic situation to any of them.
With appalling clumsiness the key scratched the door paint in the old man’s attempt to get into the flat. He could barely squint at his own hands in the night-time darkness, and his hand-eye co-ordination hiccoughed contemptuously at his incapacity to find the lock. With practiced difficulty, Bourdais managed to get in.
A lamp was on, in a suspicious fashion which he was unaccustomed to on returning home. He was awkwardly aware of a scratching sound, which might have just come from his own ears, and the smell of fried eggs.
Someone, he told himself, is cooking eggs. In my flat.
He didn’t want to investigate—he would much have preferred to just stumble into the bedroom and pass out—but something in his sodden mind warned him against losing consciousness with burglars in the next room. He also knew that the beer he sought could only be found in the kitchen, and he would rather have been beaten to death with an oil-coated spatula than forfeit his drink.
There in the kitchen was a floral dress, clinging to the back of a woman who stooped over the grill. The woman told him there was no beer in the fridge.
“What have you done with my beer?”
The woman suggested that he had drunk it already. Bourdais considered this eventuality both suspicious, and quite likely. The woman herself was equally suspicious. She turned, and there stood a middle-aged lady who Bourdais had no means of describing. She was not distinctly ugly or beautiful, old or facially expressive, but was just standing, a fact of nature, and demanding that he take a bath before he stunk the house out.
“Sorry?”
She responded by reminding him that he knew exactly what she had said, and that he was an embarrassment. He nodded.
“Who are you?” he asked eventually. The creature replied simply and suspiciously that she was his Wife, idiot, and was tired of being ignored and forgotten by him.
A fearful sickening, like the realisation of a deadline, took Bourdais by the stomach and tortured his innards. How could he have forgotten his Wife? Nobody just forgets they’re married, try as they might. It seemed absurd that he could have done
such a thing. In fact it was strangely absurd—all the more strange with the memory of his never having a Wife.
“But I’m not married!”
She said, all too quickly, that her standing there was all the proof he needed; that he had often said such cruel things; that she was always at home while he was away, drinking and working; and that he wasn’t making any sense, as usual.
“Sense has got nothing to do with it! You shouldn’t be here because… you shouldn’t!”
He felt stupid against her angry sighing. He couldn’t be wrong? He had never seen this remarkably familiar woman before in his life. He needed to sit down and he needed beer, and he needed to say everything about this all at once.
His Wife told him that he shouldn’t have drunk all that beer, then.
“What in God’s…?”
Thoughts crept on him with dangerous consequences. He was drunk, and tired, and confused after a deliriously hot day; this was a trick played by someone who had found out about his private life; he was mad and delusional, and very drunk. That was the explanation.
He was told to stop drivelling and have that bath. The woman carried on, nondescriptly busying herself as women do. If she was his Wife after all, Bourdais slurred under his breath, then he would have to divorce her anyway. The Wife reminded him that he was Catholic, despite everything, and needed a bath. Could he just run away from this apparition? Couldn’t he have made a daring bid for sanity, to some other bar perhaps? Bourdais was dizzying himself into submission. He took her advice as an excuse to leave the room. Her voice was like a thought spoken in his head, as he clung to the walls en route to the bathroom, warning him not to sleep in the bathtub, or else. He locked the bathroom door in a vertiginous sweat.
It took a moment for him to make eye contact with his reflection. What an effect the day had had on his face. He looked like death, like an old woman, and extremely drunk. Even his eyes weren’t the same colour, somehow. The Wife, he told his swimming conscious, might not exist. Logic says she’s not there, but all the evidence says she is. He was only truly aware of the sensation, the feeling of her presence. Was it comforting to have this woman in his home? This woman, his Wife? He stopped thinking—not purposefully, he just forgot how to, staring into the mirror. He soaped his face with cold water, afraid of the bath and unready to confront her. The tap-cold water hurt his eyes and skin, and gave the impression of refreshing him.
Suppose he was married, he started again, to this woman, all along. He would have been insane to have forgotten her, but accepting her existence would be the first step to recovery, or so he reasoned. If not, it was either madness or deception, or a joke, or even a dream. In any such case, the experience of it was in his mind; the fear was in his mind, even if it drained his face and shook his livelihood as it did his knees.
She may have been in the kitchen that very moment, tunnelling away; or she could have walked out, or vanished entirely, washed away by tap water. But she had been in his mind, had filled his world and invaded his thoughts, and that was all that mattered. So, unbathed and with unready steps, M. Bourdais returned to the hall to confront it.
Paradise
by Laura James
Everyone searches for their little corner of paradise, a pocket of the world in which they can lose themselves and be lost. I found love in mine.
My heart is French, my head British. Sadly neither my mind nor his tongue could justify my staying and so I waited, skimming stones across the water’s surface that cracked like a crème brulée, watching the market spring to life one final time.
Digging my heels into the dirt I cursed the ferry ticket in my pocket and prayed that he’d end our stubborn feud and be my reason to stay. He had 30 minutes. My quest for culture, life and truth almost led me to the artistic Paris, a city with innovation and revolution pumping through its foundations. However, following the death of my Mother, my heart’s compass led me to seek painted shutters with vibrant window boxes, windswept coasts with emerald seas and above else where she called home, Bretagne.
Dol is a bustling, vivacious little patchwork of lives set on a patchwork of cobbled streets sewn together by a fierce love for traditional custom and a complete disregard for urgency. To fall in love here is inevitable. As I waited in the shadows I observed one last time the Wednesday morning rituals of the market’s awakening, and the characters that give Dol her shining irresistibility.
Mado. My best friend. She was the epitome of French youth; all dark enigmatic eyes and a beautiful mane of effortlessly perfect black curls. Her rare mix of youthful nonchalance and kindness meant that to me, a stranger to continental custom, she was a true gem. She dealt in pride, the pride of Brittany, Mara des bois strawberries. Their almost perfumed, saccharine taste fused with her natural sweetness meant that she had cultivated quite the fan club, and always sold out by ten.
He had 20 minutes left. Luc was more beautiful than he knew. Always 15 minutes late, he’d arrive with a croissant, his father and Le Monde in tow though he’d never read it. He threw soaps of all scents; honey; lavender; coconut and peppermint carefully onto the shelves, knowing each by smell, never glancing from where his father would sit petting the dog. He was a typical Breton worker, strong shoulders, big hands, yet he had an unusual softness about his eyes that were not unknown to leak, if just for a second, at the sound of his daughter’s laugh. Luc was blind.
Fifteen minutes left.
Scents of poulet-roti, livestock and fresh bread flooded my nostrils, multi coloured balloon, scarves and bon-bon stalls dazzled the eye as the hustle and bustle of the crowd became more spirited. Amidst it all, the very heart of the town, Jacques, was perched on an old three-legged stool. Through a bristly white moustache he told tales of his truffle scouting days; the war; his life; his wife; his daughter and her daughter: Sabine. He oozed royalty with every tale and his deep oceanic eyes, the colour of the emerald coast upon which he had lived his whole life, commanded respect. Many a time the whole town had watched in awe as he and his wife performed the traditional Breton dances, in traditional Breton dress, after consuming perhaps a little too much traditional Breton cider. Without him , there would be no Dol.
Gazing at places in which these people had once stood cast not sadness upon me, but peace. I had spent 12 months of my life in what I can only describe as my little paradise. He was not coming for me. I swallowed my surroundings, glancing lovingly at the tree under which we’d sat for man an afternoon, him teaching me the words of Sartre and de Beauvoir, I Shakespeare and Keats to him. Then to the café on the tree-lined street, a mini Champs- Elysees on which we’d sat drinking bitter coffee from tiny cups, letting our laughter resound around the square’s stone walls.
I could taunt myself no longer. After one last desperate glance I sped on my way to Saint-Malo . A catastrophic accident had clogged the motorway, causing me to arrive, breathless, just in time for the midnight ferry. On deck, underneath the giggling stars I resented every inch that I travelled away from the place I so longed to be. I’d loved him completely but stubbornness, both his and mine, had driven me back “home”. England.
Next day. The phone rings. Secretly praying it was him, I ran and answered it with as much nonchalance as I could muster. It was Mado. The customary “salut” had barely left her lips before she exploded, “Sabine ! He tried to come, he loved you so, he was in the accident, you know how Jacques drives when he’s mad…” Her words trailed off like smoke from one of his cigarettes, Mon Grandpere.
That stubborn old man on the stool had given me family and introduced me to the part of the world that had completed me. He’d given me my life. Had I taken his? So now I sit on the little stool in the centre of my home town, Dol, retelling my story. Our story. Mado is enthralled, munching on her Maras and Luc sits, misty eyed with his little girl on his knee. Many other gather just as they once did for my Grandfather as I tell the story of how he tried so hard to stop me from leaving.
“No no ! You’re telling it wrong!” my Grandpere wheels himself in from behind me with a tray of bitter coffees. The crash may have taken his legs, but not his spirit. So the spirit of the town lives on. Everyone searches for their little corner of paradise, a pocket of the world in which they can find themselves and be found. No matter how lost they’d presumed themselves to be.
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