ebola by Amir Tag Elsir

Author:Amir Tag Elsir [Amir Tag Elsir]
Language: eng
Format: epub

NINE

Lewis Nawa soon faded into insignificance now that chaos had seized the city. The little hospital room he was occupying for the fourth consecutive day was no longer the centre of anyone’s attention. It seemed a rare opportunity had come Lewis’s way to become an urban legend; the man who survived the very disease he had brought to the city, while so many others had perished. And yet it was not to be. Lewis’s story met with little enthusiasm from the people who happened to recognise him amidst the chaos outside, as the battle raged on between life and death – a battle he had started and then escaped. Yet even Lewis wasn’t entirely safe: the virus may have released him this time, but there was nothing to say it wouldn’t return at any moment.

Were this not the time of Ebola, Lewis’s life story – gabbled out during what he had thought to be his deathbed awakening – would have become the hottest news in town, on the lips of every citizen, friends and strangers alike. A cautionary tale for any woman rushing into marriage simply because a passer-by asked for her hand.

Things would have turned out very differently for Tina, too. She would have ignored her interfering neighbour and reinstated the old rocks to their position in the doorway. She might even have added an extra jagged one close by to crack Lewis’s skull open as he stumbled in. Perhaps Tina would even have gone back to Mansour, the apothecary, to return the fertility remedies she had just bought. This time she might have let Mansour casually grope her. After all, Lewis’s regular infidelity during their long estrangement was one thing, but his intention to deceive her again, after everything she’d gone through, was too much to bear.

As it happened, Tina hadn’t time for any of this, not even to scratch her head in confusion. Those present at her deathbed awakening heard how she had purchased a hatchet from an ironmonger, intending to put it to the worst of uses, before returning it in a burst of guilty conscience. She spoke also of the local teenagers who ran about the neighbourhood barefoot, playing football. She had so longed to seduce them, to teach them how to touch a female body, savour a kiss, and work around society’s moral code, no matter how concrete it seemed. It was only for her own sake that she abandoned the idea. Perhaps she also mentioned being raped in her youth and how her husband had abandoned her immediately after, yet nobody listening could make out exactly what Tina was saying.

‘If I hadn’t been a water-seller, I’d have been a dancer in the Nzara Folk Dance Troupe, with my uncle, Majouk.’ This was the last phrase Tina’s spectators were certain they heard her say. The words were the opposite of the response she normally gave when asked the age-old question, ‘If you weren’t you, who would you be?’ To which, of course, her standard response was, ‘I would be me.

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