Bina could have explained it to me and might have had some muti as a cure. I assumed that she and her women had the same systems, but I had no way to be certain. She might have known my problem before I said anything. She often knew things about me before I did. After Cee-Cee died, I realized that I hadn’t been bothered . . . how many months . . . three? . . . I had lost track.
And once I started worrying, it consumed me. What does it mean? What caused it? Something I did? Food poisoning? Some women said that the British had poisoned the food. Could they put chemicals in the rations that would affect women’s cycles—maybe as a way to kill off our breed? This was one thing I did not even share with my journal.
I found myself wearing down when I walked to the edge of the camp. That had to be a signal of something. I prayed at all times and in all places, even in the latrine. Had God done this to me as a tax upon my sinful thoughts?
Janetta would have known something about the problem or would have gone with me to the hospital. I almost asked Moeder a dozen times. But I could not shape the words and force them out. I would not allow myself to die without a fight, but I was too much a coward to tell my mother.
The British nurses at the hospital tent seemed my only option. They would not know me. They were trained for such things, I suspected. A nurse could take me in and tell me how long I had to live, and those left in our tent would not have my illness thrust in their faces. But what kind of examination would this require? A nurse, perhaps, but a doctor . . . never. I would run.
I expected the nurses would have no time for me with so many sick children needing attention. I would walk toward the hospital marquee and circle at a distance until I was able to subtly bump into a nurse going to work. Or I might see one outside the tent. I would comment on the weather, and she might recognize some symptom. I had never been to a hospital or been examined by a nurse. But I could do this.
Two guards stood near the tent, and mothers clustered nearby, waiting for word of their children. They were kept out except for short periods. My hands shook from nerves. I had heard women saying that this was a place where doctors pretended to help but instead hastened deaths as part of a plan to bring about our extermination. And the nurses, they said, were here only to find husbands, to marry an officer or a doctor.
Several nurses came out together in stained aprons, short red capes, and straw boaters atop pinned-up hair. They walked past the group of mothers while another nurse stopped to talk. I eased toward the fringe of their circle so that the nurse might walk past me when she finished her updates. She provided reports as calmly as possible. Some women confronted her, and others abused the guards; some raised howls, and others turned away, silent. The nurse nodded her head solemnly with each report, respectful of their grief but not participating.
Having worked her way through the mothers, she stepped toward me. “And you?”
“Ja . . . hallo.”
“A question?”
“I . . .”
“You’ve stopped having your cycle and you’re afraid to ask your mother about it.”
The woman was a medical genius.
“Am I dying?”
“No.”
“Oh, praise God. Am I sick?”
“Probably . . . it’s usually a sign of poor health, but it’s common here. Your cycles will probably come back and you’ll be fine.”
“I’m not the only one?”
“No . . . half a dozen a week. They all stand outside looking lost . . . like you.”
“So . . . I am not dying?”
“Not from that.”
“Why . . . why now?”
“Living here. Bad food, stress . . . happens all the time, particularly to the young girls. We didn’t know this would be something that developed in camps like this. Probably something we need to keep track of and study. Our understanding of medicine grows from times like these. I think in your case, you’re not getting enough good food. You thought all sorts of horrible things, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Natural.”
“Do I need . . . what . . . an exam?”
“How are you otherwise?” She felt my neck, beneath my jaw, asked me to cough. She looked in my mouth, turning my head toward the sun. She took my face in her hands and looked in my eyes. What else can she see in there? . . . Can she read my thoughts, too? Am I that open? She looked at the edges of my kappie.
“Lice?”
“Not anymore.”
“Common,” she said.
She felt my shoulders and then my arms.
“You’re malnourished, but healthy . . . surprisingly. Think of it this way: your body knows it can’t do everything anymore, and it has to make some decisions. It is still trying to grow, in addition to everything else.”
I thought of Cee-Cee, her breath in my blood, deep in the vessels, and my obligation to carry it for her. I needed to stay healthy.
“Are you much weaker?” she asked.
I hadn’t thought about a degree of such a thing; something that happens so gradually is hard to notice. When I thought back, I couldn’t summon the small things, but only the big things, the violent storms, the floods, the dust and winds that wore me down.“I don’t know about weakened,” I said. “It’s more like I’ve eroded.”
She nodded.
“You could have come in and seen us, you know,” she said.
“I was . . .”
“Afraid?”
“Ja.”
“You’d heard we were terrible.”
“Ja, the women at the reservoir said . . .”
“. . . children only come here to die.”
“Ja.”
“Most children aren’t brought here until they’re about to die and it’s too late for us to do anything about it.”
Cee-Cee.
“Or they’ve been treated by some folk remedy or witch-doctor cure.”
“Muti.”
“What . . . yes . . . some tribal medicine, folk treatments. Some of it seems helpful. . . . Some of it is ridiculous.”
Her accent was different from Maples’s, making every word with an r turn into a lengthy growl. I found I kept saying “pardon” . . . forcing her to repeat herself.
“I’m sorry, I have a hard time understanding,” I said.
“Many do. . . . I’m from Scotland.”
She pulled a hard candy from her apron and gave it to me. I took it without thinking. She opened one for herself, too.
“Are you with the Undesirables?”
“I don’t like that word.”
“Little wonder . . . how’s Irreconcilables?”
She pronounced the word in more syllables than I could count, and it rattled the hard candy against her teeth.
“Better.”
“Don’t like any of the names, do you?”
“No.”
“I just wish this would be over,” she said.
“Me, too.”
Neither one of us took sides on the outcome, only craving an end.
“Would you tell me something? The truth?”
Oh, God, what could she want of me? I had to be careful. This might be how they get information: we get sick and frightened, and they make us talk. Maybe that’s what happened with Oom Sarel. They don’t do it with things in the food or with firing squads; they use our fears against us.
“That depends.”
She laughed.