Authors: Nadine Gordimer
After recovery from surgery, thyroidectomy's the scientific term, he was allowed to go back to the ordinary: Benni, the small son, work. Recovery: an interim four weeks while an obligatory period passed before the radioactive iodine treatment the doctors had found, by means of a scan, was necessary to what's their word, ablate residual cancerous tissue. He, and Benni and his parents under the unspoken sacred authority of the life-threatened one, lived the four weeks as if they were the usual progress of daily preoccupations. Ordinary. He timed a field trip that brought him from the wilderness the day before he presented himself back at the hospital for this ablation process.
He and his wife were told, in the most tactful way such Outer Space instructions may be conveyed, that when he was discharged after a few days of total isolation in hospital he still would be radioactive and a threat to those in contact with him. His wife came to tell Adrian and Lyndsay, who were together in the family home, the old house. It was not for a moment necessary to wonder what to do. Lyndsay spoke at once, for both of them, and it was there, in the tightening of Adrian 's forehead and his darkly fixed eye, that she was certainly so doing. – He'll come to us. Until it's safe. -
Taken for granted.
It would have been somehow intrusive to bring up the risk to them; clearly that final of all matters, the value of life and death, had long been discussed ultimately and privately, and resolved between them. Don't break down in emotion of gratitude. What decision other than this should she have expected a mother and father make? What conception of their own parenthood did their son and his wife have, then.
Only when they saw her off at her car did she turn without knowing what she was doing or as if to pick up some object left behind, and put her arms round Adrian, her head coming only to the level of his chest, a first-time embrace after five years of the peck on either cheek at Christmas and birthdays. Then to Lyndsay, two women touching breast-to-breast for a moment. The three had not spoken to one another on the walk from the house to the car. The last exchange had been as Adrian stood back to let the women pass through the front door: he had asked when was the probable date of Paul's discharge, and she had told him maybe two days, still.
Lyndsay's spread hand shaded her eyes from the sun. – Well, soon as you know… I'll fetch him from the hospital. – Only logical, she was already committed to being in contact with whatever it was that he would represent.
Benni with slow precision contained, restrained herself with the seat belt, turned the key in the ignition, slotted the gear, released the brake. Nothing else for her. The car had automatic transmission, at once moving over the gravel with the sound that came to her as grit grinding between clenched teeth, the doors snapped locked. Shut out of the process that was taking him over, herself detained in the prison of safety. She could not imagine what this kind of isolation would be like. For the first time since she took the call with his diagnosis, she was thinking not of him but of herself, herself. If there had been tears now as she drove they would have been for her.
The house is listening. Every now and then it is interrupted by the hum of the refrigerator turning itself on to maintain its ski resort temperature in the warm kitchen. He meant to get up and appear at breakfast with them but the doctors hadn't wanted to discourage him by telling him how deathly tired he would feel even after excusing himself to get to bed early and sleeping eight hours. His limbs, those biceps and forearms, thighs and calves, would not move. He could not even tremble into effort; there was no summoning it.
You just rest. Adrian 's face round the door, stealthily, speaking only when he saw the son's eyes open. Lyndsay jostling from behind. That's what recuperation is. The parents had decided his state was recuperation. This was a better attitude than the doctors' informed conviction that tests would monitor whether removal of the gland and the blinding dazzle of invading radioactive iodine would defeat the opportunism of predatory cells to show a renewed attack elsewhere; congratulated themselves that the vocal cords had not been seriously damaged. The patient speaks in a normal voice, not like some sort of castrato, even the timbre is his own. When he thinks in this dim-dozing timeless half-consciousness lying in bed, of what must have been done to him while he was totally absent in an operating theatre, he watches a few maverick cells dartingly escaping the knife, later fleeing the radiant iodine to set up a new base in what he experiences is the territory of his body. It's a car-chase movie of the kind he'd switch from to another channel. The doctors have been pleased to note that the sense of humour he produces before them is a positive factor, the right spirit to endure whatever is ahead for him according to the oracle of the scan.
The parents have gone, she to So-and-So amp; Partners' chambers with a sheaf of documentation of her current case, he to his board meeting.
Lyndsay has arranged the 'quarantine' with the object of making him, Adrian, and her least embarrassed and aware of it. She has a special basket, souvenir of one of her trips years ago to a legal conference in a country where one bought such craft at the airport and didn't know to what use to put it, that was now the repository for his clothes and bed linen to be set aside for washing separately from the general bundle done by Primrose. One of those supermarket compartmented plastic trays held his cutlery kept apart with glasses and cups in a cupboard cleared of kitschy gifts, detritus of house guests, that it seemed wrong to throw away but never used. Plates: it would have been an unnecessary waste (sacrifice) to destroy, after the recuperation, as a necessary precaution, crockery with the beautiful hand-painted motifs from Italy she had ordered in some inexplicable fit of extravagance one year. (Who could have dreamed then, in that exquisite place, that a time would come for a different kind of hyperbole to describe expenses that were far exceeding medical aid schemes.) She had stocked a supply of barbecue paper plates of the kind stout enough to hold hot food. Adrian, through an industrialist friend with – no doubt – doubtful influence over the network people, had promptly installed a telephone and fax line in the assigned room, in fact right there, a stretched hand away, on a bedside table.
He could call Benni. At work. Or on her mobile if she's driving; is she wearing the no-hands model with the ear-aperture attachment he insisted on buying for her when the only thought for exposure to radiation likely to affect them was that said to exist in the old models clamped to the head. He cannot lift the hand, no device of the millennial gods of communication could reach across infinitude between how he lies and the module console-desks, Corbusier lookalike chairs, leather sofas for clients, professional flower arrangements, blown-up images of improbably beautiful or famous people and landscape paradises, from award-winning advertising campaigns; Berenice is admirably successful. A fax – to whom? His team, Thapelo and Derek, stick figures in the area where the intention to site a pebble-bed nuclear reactor plant has to be opposed. When he was in a wilderness her city place did not exist for him, as at her console in that city space his wilderness did not exist for her.
Neither does. Both equally unreachable. He's the receded. It's him. Far away.
Planes can land on automatic pilot. He's got up and gone to the bathroom reserved for him. Radiation is carried in urine and faeces. As he pees it just occurs to him, will he ever wake up with an erection again.
They have not left him really alone. There's the servant, now called housekeeper. Except that he's alone, apart, with anybody – everyone. His mind continues haphazard ridiculous wanderings; dogs are put in quarantine quarters, for months, when taken to other countries, a precaution against carrying rabies infection from Africa. Poor doggie. For him, the doctors have said, about sixteen days, including the first few in hospital isolation. Enough. Then he'd be fine, clear.
First they'd assured that the removal of the gland would be all that was necessary for a cure, he'd be fine, clear.
Then they'd had to admit that sometimes residual thyroid tissue remained after surgery. Could be intentional – to continue something of the normal function of the thyroid gland; sometimes inadvertent. Which was the case in his instance was not volunteered and what was the point of questioning anyway.
Neither his wife nor the parents were aware that of course he knew about the treatment for residual malignant tissue before the doctors told him and his wife. After the announcement by telephone of what had him by the throat, an early morning in the bedroom, he had gone that day to the university medical school and said he was doing research which required use of a medical library. There he had his own consultation with documentation on papillary carcinoma, the most serious form of thyroid cancer. More frequent in women and in both sexes more frequent in the young. So: thirty-five, a candidate. Read on. If there is suspicion that after thyroidectomy some tissue remains, then radioactive iodine ablation must follow. This radioactive iodine treatment is dangerous to others who come into contact with the individual who has received it.
Iodine, the innocent stuff dabbed on a child's scratched knee.
A few weeks' isolation. Fine, clear. Now sure the assurance, again, this time.
He
would have to know, from within.
Primrose (it's not only whites who dub their offspring with pretentiously inappropriate names, a queen in ancient times, a flower in the imagined gardens from which the rich conquerors came) has left his breakfast prepared according to new household instructions. Tea and toast on an electric hot tray, fruit and yoghurt, honey, a cereal he doesn't know still existed, must have been something his mother remembered in connection with him as a child. A spoonful tastes like hay.
Primrose who knows him, of course, from ordinary occasions visiting the parents, does not appear. Through the windows open to let in the morning sun (what time is it, does a watch really know) there comes a low busy conversational twitter. He used to have budgerigars in a cage in this house as a kid, they would communicate confidentially like that – Lyndsay, his mother, who couldn't bear to have creatures caged, communicated the realisation of the birds' imprisonment to him. He must have given them away. But this low morning conversation was not that of caged birds but Primrose and some friends passing whatever the time was for them. He had not been told of the problem of Primrose as a member of the household. Realised it only as he ate the food prepared by her and heard her, unseen, in the cadence of African voices speaking their own language.
Adrian and Lyndsay had had to decide what to do, whether this woman, innocent of danger, innocent of any family responsibility towards the son, should be exposed at all. Lyndsay woke up in the night after a long discussion earlier and spoke aloud as if it were continuing. Adrian stirred and said the right thing she hadn't taken into account, as he so often did. (So much for her legal mind.) They must speak to Primrose: the decision to send her away must not be seen as a banishment from her place in their lives but come about with her full understanding and acceptance as their duty to her safety.
The tall heavy woman, ageing gourd filled with a life of many troubles, rather than a delicate yellow flower, who had never before been called into the livingroom to sit down and talk with her employers, nevertheless gave them the uninhibited attention their good relations, her considerate working conditions and excellent pay, she found naturally called for. The white people didn't try any of the sentimental coming close many did with blacks these days when they wanted something from you, the mama didn't start off with the you-are-a-mother-yourself bit. And there was no father for the dad to claim as a father like himself; the man who had fathered Tembisa, the boy for whose education at a private school the employers were paying – had long gone back to his wife in the Transkei. First Adrian explained in detail Paul's illness, treatment, and this strange aftermath unlike that of any other illness. When she didn't follow, she pinched her mouth, lifted her cheeks to their high bones and asked: What – what. It was both a question and horrified compassion; of course she had enquired, every day, for news of his condition while he was in hospital, shaking her head, God will see he comes through. They had to explain, while not offending this faith, that he had not come quite through, not yet. Once she had heard the facts there was little need to explain why he could not go home to his young wife and child. She pre-empted them. – He must come here to us. – Didn't they know she had enjoyed sharing the care of the little boy when Mama was in charge while the mother was busy with the doctors and the husband?
There was the proposal, she would go to her home in the new government housing scheme in the district where she was born, a house they had, in fact, helped her, with a gift of the down-payment, to build for her mother.
– How long. -
They did not know. Adrian reassured her; she would have her full wages.
She brooded, a pause they respected without offering a repetition of explanations.
– Take a little holiday. – Adrian tried again.
She addressed Lyndsay, there are considerations men, who everywhere, at her mother's house or this one, have everything done for them, do not understand. – How can you manage? -
Lyndsay gave a small grunt of a laugh. – I don't know. But I will. -
And now to Adrian, the man. – Her work every day and the papers she bring to read at night. I see the light on late. -
How can you manage meant: I do not go. So then there were three in concentrated discussion, like complicity. How could she stay? Was it possible to arrange her presence, as they had arranged the study for quarantine tenancy; ensure that her duties would entail the absolute minimum of contact with danger from touch, clothing, utensils – who knows about the air breathed.
But all was accepted on some unspoken understanding that they – the mama and her husband – were allowing her to put herself at risk along with them, the only ones who had reason to. Perhaps the woman had survived so much in her life that she couldn't really believe in the danger they couldn't say came only from a cough, from a person's shit, from pus or blood. Something he gave off, some kind of light you couldn't see.