Read from chapter : hope again...
John 'the doctor'
After a while I was able to talk to Nobomi alone as well, because Hugh could tolerate a half-hour without her. I was concerned about her for the sake of Hugh’s recovery and I was also concerned for her own health because of those periods of fear which seemed to stalk her and grip her at unexpected times. And, I’ll be honest, I was curious, and curiosity for its own sake is not an easy thing for a therapist to face up to - I had never spent time with a black person in any capacity, and in these circumstances I was interested in how the fact that her roots and culture were so different from my own would affect this work. More than that, though, I was interested to see how spending this time with her was going to affect me.
At first she would not respond when I asked her directly about her fear. But I was too direct. She just sat impassive, head bowed. “Slowly, gently, step by step” I heard my father say. I wondered aloud what was the last thing she could remember that wasn’t Vienna. “Mbulu”, she said quite suddenly. As she said the word she looked up at me and I saw that her eyes had lost the peaceful serenity they normally had, her body became rigid, her face was taut, her eyes wide open with a fearful stare.
“What is Mbulu?”
But she was not staring at me, she was looking way beyond, I could not imagine into what dark place. “Not fingers, claws”, her face creased in horror, her hands lifted to try to blot out some image, then a scream like nothing I had ever heard before, “Nooooooooooooo…..”
...
The scream brought Mariana running. She burst into the room, another carer in tow. I was relieved that she didn’t immediately rush to comfort Nobomi. I had learnt we must beware not to rend the fragile tissue which holds a life together, just. There were other chairs around us and I motioned to the ladies to sit and together we waited, the four of us, a silent congregation, until Nobomi’s vision faded.
...
Nobomi did not seem surprised that I was wanting to talk about where they might move from here. Hugh seemed indifferent, which itself caused me concern. I was having a joint talk with them, something we had started to do over the last couple of weeks. I sensed in Nobomi a yearning to be away from the confinement of the city - she was after all a child of open spaces, at least to the extent that I was able to imagine her homeland. At this point perhaps I should confess that one afternoon when my services were not needed I had visited the library in Felderstrasse - not too far from here in the Town Hall buildings - to see if I could find the place where “the ducks have flown away”. After a lot of searching through indexes and enormous leather-bound atlases with pages as big as newspapers, some interleaved with fine semi-transparent india paper, I found it. Matatiele. It seemed to be on its own in the middle of an area of green-brown shading on the map. Just to the north wound a wide band of grey, light in places but dark grey along a central thread with snaking blue rivers intersecting. I worked out it must have stretched some 600 miles in all. Its name, one word, wove along its length: Drakensberg. With the help of an old Dutch dictionary I worked out that it meant Dragon’s Mountain. I was in South Africa. Words like Eastern Cape and Basuto and KwaZulu were lying around and cities I only knew as names, Johannesberg, Durban, Cape Town. East London caught my eye, perhaps because it sounded a little incongruous, perhaps because on this sheet it lay on the coast above the cartographer’s florid inscription of ‘Indian Ocean’. I looked around again to find Matatiele, a long way inland, and wondered what it had been like for a teenage Xhosa country girl from the mountains to walk well over 100 miles to the Ocean and arrive at a European town called East London. The Nobomi I hadn’t met. Yet.
I’ve digressed. I hope your imagination is not inventing any unseemly sub-conscious promptings. I was going to lose my clients and I was floundering, partly from professional concern and partly, well, lives which had been part of my life were about to disappear. It is human to want to keep a connection. We rarely simply walk away.
They were both in our meeting that afternoon and I managed to prompt Hugh to give the same sort of account of his stress episode to the three of us as he had done to me on my own previously. The fact that he went there so easily was both a comfort and a worry, but I was hoping to use his openness to lead into a shared discussion on how they would handle such episodes together in the future, for they would certainly happen again. I wanted Nobomi to hear about the result of sustained senseless suffering and its indelible effect on Hugh’s thinking and reactions, such as the insidious infiltration of self-blame and ‘just deserts’, the unpredictability and vulnerability which may stay with him always, the ever-present possibility of suicide. At the same time I was conscious that it all seemed a monstrous burden to place on one who had her own ‘evil spirit’ lurking - that Fear with claws, which caused her scream. Hugh was composed and considerate now, archetypal British officer-class, but always willing to admit that, yes, depression could come upon him. He was seeming to believe he could rely on his voice of reason to talk him through the trough when the need arose, but I was afraid that he was unable to recognise that he could lose this self-control in an instant, unexpectedly, unforeseen and unaware, and the impenetrable black mist descend again. For him, the quiet, unquestioning, patient, presence of this girl whose name meant Life, who walked so lightly on the earth and seemed to see beyond horizons, was the best therapist he could ever have. For Nobomi, though, there would not be the same security, and this thought cut through me like a blade. Where lies the true therapist’s responsibility? The master might tell his new practitioner - this is only one and you have many more, equally deserving, who are waiting.
Yes, but in each single moment there is only one.
I chose not to mention the man who had been seen following them on their walks. Speaking to you now, I can still feel the swing between anxiety and complacency as I try to decide the right course. But I did not tell them.
In the end I found myself wondering who was preparing who for the parting. Hugh was steady and I concluded that his bouts of severe depression were set off by random sightings or events, which I thought might be as little as a turn of phrase in a particular tone of voice, but being random could not be predicted, or part of any cycle. To construct a life around un-knowable happenstance was inconceivable. Nobomi seemed concerned for me, as if the course of my life had somehow become connected with their’s… or hers? I had told her nothing of myself and I wondered whether our unit of three, this place, Vienna, and my therapist persona had become fused as an entity, and with others took its place somewhere on the open plane of her homeland which she seemed to carry always with her. Perhaps that was as it should be.
I didn’t see them leave the last time. We had come together the previous evening, the three of us up in that mansard room looking out over the lights of the city. The midnight blue of a clear night sky allowed the horizon to be just discernible like the marker of another world. We each knew the meaning and the ritual of this gazing over the city and we spoke very little. The following morning I called at their room because I needed to re-arrange the time for our meeting that day, but the room was bare. Mariana said that one of the staff had told her she saw them go out on their walk earlier than usual and the man who followed them was there as always, but this time, she couldn’t be sure, but she thought he was walking between them as they went out of sight through the trees in the park.
A yawning emptiness opened up inside me. I went out of the building and walked aimlessly into the park, scanning the cruelly ordered paths and lawns, as if… as if, what?
No, Father, she wasn’t just a patient.
~~~