Malarial Nights,
Blood-Poisoned Days

by Lavie Tidhar

I

Puking and shitting I sit in my bamboo hut overlooking Lake Malawi puking and shitting as the parasites gestate in my body camp in my liver shitting and puking as the drugs course through my bloodstream like hounds following the smell of blood of rotting carcasses of rain as I waste away here overlooking the lake and the blue waters smoking chamba and puking and puking and puking until I have nothing left to puke and the shadows rape the light in the canopy of the trees.

II

How long have I been here, dreaming this dream, how long had my body brown shrank? I taste water and let it dribble out of my lips onto the ground where the children died. In the roots of the trees I found a skull, soft like a toy, hair still stuck to the dome of the head and the teeth smile, baby teeth smile and I dream of foods I can no longer taste and I shit myself, and return to the magazine lying by the mattress on the barren floor and wait and wait and wait.

III

I watch the fishermen bring the haul of campango early in the morning as the sun rises beyond the hills. I try to remember the taste of the fish as it roasts over coals and combines with the flavour of the yams buried in the sand but all I can taste is the sour stench that my mouth has become. Try to roll a joint, try, but the fingers shake, the hands shake, the body shakes, and the chamba goes scattering over the floor and through the cracks onto the ground below, a rainpour of weed washing away as the sun rises and the light comes crashing through the walls like the whisper of an execution.

IV

It starts with innocence, a mosquito bite, settling on the skin and then the puncture, the droplet of blood almost unseen, and the parasites crawl through the hole into the blood stream seeking liver and brain and death. Or it starts with innocence, with a mosquito bite, and the nails pick and pick and pick at it until infection settles like a fine mist of dust and the leg inflates like a balloon filled with blood. The earth about me is filled with tiny christs, they are planted in rows and rows of perfect beautiful crosses and the nails driven through their hands and feet are beautiful, precisiontooled in a factory in Johannesburg, and I pluck a christ and eat it and taste only ash.

V

My moans attract the tokoloshi at night; I hear their tiny ugly
feet shuffling outside as they climb through the shadows and into my head. They tear at my hair, my clothes, pull out my nails and I feel as light as rain and am reined by night. The tokoloshi dance oh look at them dance ugly little mandrakes twisting and turning a canopy of branches over my body like a temple like a coffin like a sickness in the blood.

VI

With the coming of the new sun I see a hippo in the waters, see the children run on the beach throwing stones. The lake's only monster, it disappears into the protection of the water and waits for the sun to set beyond the hills, waits to return for human flesh. The children run and laugh and in my isolation in the hut I run and laugh and bend over the side and my damaged insides try to fall from my loosening mouth, my liver plops on the ground like a gutted campango and my kidneys try to follow and throw their own stones. The hippo and I wait as the sun traces an arc in the bluecloudless skies and disperses in the water in a shower of sparks and the dark assassin hippo clumbers on to the beach searching for its own sweettasting medicine.

VII

The drugs are the worst, the pills upon pills upon pills but really they are only the road that must be traveled, and the body will renew itself, return alive and healthy, scarred but not yet dead. I walk to the hospital beyond the hill in the village down to Nkhata Bay up and down the hot hot hills my body dragging behind me as I walk. In the hospital they are waiting to be dying, scored through with the other virus, the other disease, body upon body upon body like the parents of my grandparents in the death camps in Poland. They lie together and wait as the women cook outside the maize meals they can no longer eat. The doctor lets me skip the queue of silent dead and pricks my thumb with an uncleaned blade. He gives me pills to make me better again and I walk away, leaving the dying behind.

VIII

Grass scatters into the paper and mixes with tobacco from the broken cigarette. Grass scatters and is sealed within the papertube. I click the lighter, tease the flame closer to the joint, watch it burst into flame; the smoke travels down the tube, collecting THC; it tickles the caves of my mouth, infiltrates the lungs, swims in the blood. Fifteen seconds. Fifteen seconds from inhalation to brain, and calm descends like a alien starship across the minefield of my mind.

IX

I take baby steps down the hill and on to the shore of the lake. The hippo is gone, and in his stead is a row of women, washing clothes in the water. Soap and sand, to scrub and clean. I step into the water, the cold sending heatwaves across my exposed skin, and I submerge myself, feeling the dirt and the stench of my body disperse into this giant bath, this combination of laundry, dishwasher and shower. Small fish nibble dead skin.

Later, I lie on the sand and the sun dries me, leaving me as light and numb as a leaf.

X

Scars slowly fade. I leave the lake. The passage of time returns into focus. Sunrise, sunset, their rhythm is replaced by the ticking of an electronic clock, by the horns of cars playing complex symphonies. I watch a shower of dust, smell the scent of the road stretching ahead, infinitelong sourpromiscuous. The sickness sleeps, and I step over it carefully, like stepping over the corpse of a dog by the roadside, and hail a car going everywhere, and nowhere, and is infinite.