The Garden of Burning Sand

He angled his head thoughtfully. “Penance and peace are related but not the same.”


“Peace without reconciliation is a lie,” she rejoined, repeating the words she had delivered to Sylvia months ago. “You seem fond of lies.”

He waited a beat before responding: “I could say that we’re even.”

“You could say, ‘Voetsak,’” she replied, pronouncing the expletive like an Afrikaner. “But we’re not even.”

Jan gave a short laugh. “A curious expression, hey? You’re right. Your lie to Dr. Luyt was selfless; mine the height of selfishness.” He scratched his chin. “How did you discover it?”

Zoe retrieved the first volume of Charity’s journal from her backpack. “She wrote about you,” she said, handing the notebook to him. “She loved you.”

He turned the journal over in his hands. “This isn’t the one you showed me before.”

“That was the third volume, written much later. This is the original one. She wrote her first letter soon after she left Livingstone.”

He played with the cover but didn’t open it. “What does she say?”

“That you were lovers. That you made love in your office late at night; that you were gifted, the most gifted doctor she had ever met; and that she wanted more than anything to be your wife. There was a time when she believed that was possible.”

He winced. “I suppose I let her believe that.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You suppose? She was your student. She had lost most of her family to disease. She was in school so she could get a good job and take care of her grandmother and her cousins. I know Zambian women. They don’t make the first move.”

Jan examined the waterfall. “It was an intense year,” he said eventually. “My research in Livingstone was meaningful but not essential. I had applied for a position in Cape Town, but I didn’t know if they would offer it to me. Charity was … I don’t know. She had a glow about her, a gift of insight and intelligence that I found irresistible.”

He glanced up at a bird flying overhead. “When Godfrey got sick, we were with him all night. We were exhausted; the rainy season was miserable—so many malaria cases. And then, miraculously, he survived. Charity thought of him almost like a son. The next week she brought me a meal to thank me. We were alone in the hospital after hours. I made a mistake.”

“If it was a mistake, why did you keep sleeping with her?”

He shrugged. “I’d never met anyone like her. I was with her as long as I could be.”

“Why didn’t you marry her? You could have made a life together.”

“That would have been impossible.”

The truth suddenly dawned on her. “Your family wouldn’t have approved.”

He glanced at her obliquely. “My parents are not racists. But it was 1996. The tensions in the region were extraordinary. No one would have understood.”

“So you left her. You got the job in Cape Town and you walked away.”

He shook his head. “I did something worse than that. She went to Lusaka because of me.”

“What?” Zoe demanded. “What do you mean? Frederick Nyambo took her.”

“Yes,” he nodded, “but I was the one who suggested it.”

All at once the whole story made sense. Everyone who knew Charity had been right and wrong at the same time. “How did it happen?” she asked.

“Frederick came to the hospital from Victoria Falls,” he explained. “He had an advanced case of leptospirosis—a severe bacterial infection. He’d seen an nganga and gotten some potions that did nothing. By the time I saw him, he was a mess. I managed his case, but Charity tended to him. He was there for ten days. I saw the way he looked at her. So I started talking to him about her. I told him about her family, about her grandmother’s stroke. I told him how bright she was. I thought if I got her a good job in Lusaka—something better than she could have gotten out of nursing school—she would go there and forget about me.”

“You did it so you could live with yourself,” Zoe said. “You bribed your conscience and then you broke her heart.”

“An elegant summary,” he replied, taking no offense. “Yes, I did it for selfish reasons. To be fair, she wasn’t guaranteed a job out of school. The economy in Zambia was turbulent in those years. But she was the best student in her class. She wouldn’t have starved.”

Zoe pictured Frederick Nyambo convalescing in a hospital bed and chatting with Jan Kruger about Charity’s future. “Did you convince him, or did he convince himself?”

“We convinced each other. He promised me that he would take care of her. I believed him. So I convinced her.” Jan’s voice trailed off, and he stared intently at the surface of the pool, as if the still water might conjure a reflection of Charity’s face.

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