Novels by Regina Chabala

Elias In six weeks the capital sent two letters, both of them two lines long.The surgeon is pleased. We stay longer.That is the second one, and the market read it aloud to itself for a day and a half and made it say whatever it needed to say, because a letter is a page, and this valley has never once looked at a page and seen only itself. Letters say what the writer can afford to send; that is the first lesson of the desk, before the desk teaches you anything about money. So I listen to the market the way I listen to a client: I hear the wish underneath the facts, and I file both.The rains came in the sixth week, late and total, and for nine days they did not stop to finish a thought.I walk that street the way I walk my own books: in order, and often. I know her clock now the way I know the tide of a ledger. The shutter goes up at six; on school days she is gone by seven with her book under her arm and the old woman from the next yard keeps the counter; she is back by four; and o

ELIAS Two weeks after her father sat in my chair, I began buying him whole.Chanda came first. He kept the tailor's stall by the market and a paper against the Mwiyas that had been going soft in his tin box for a year, and when my clerk sent for him he came up the same afternoon, hat in hand, ready to be insulted. Men like Chanda rehearse the speech about old friendship and hard times on the whole walk up the stairs. He did not get to use it."Sit," I said. "I want to buy the paper."He sat, and watched me the way a man watches weather. "The paper is not for sale, Mr. Kaoma. The paper is a promise.""Everything in this valley is a promise," I said. "Some are sold out loud and some are sold quiet. Name your figure."He named it. I paid it. He signed the transfer the way a man signs a confession he has decided not to regret, and on his way out he stopped at the door, because even a tailor wants to know the weather he is walking into."Forgive me. That paper was not worth what you paid.

ELIAS Outside, the valley light is brutal and kind at once, and I stand on the hospital steps and I do not know what to do with my hands. I have come up here every Wednesday for three years, and I have never once left early, and today I am leaving with the visit undone, and I cannot go back in. I cannot go back in because if I go back in I will have to look at her again, and if I look at her again, something in me will say the word it has been forbidden to say, and I will not be able to take it back.So I stand on the steps like a fool, and I make a promise to a child who does not know my face. I promise that I will never be the reason she hurts. I promise that the thing with no name will stay buried, that I will carry it down the hill and leave it in the valley and never once let it out.It is the truest thing I have ever said. I mean it still.I did not go back the next Wednesday. Or the one after. I told myself it was the road, the rain, the work. I told myself a hundred small lie

ELIAS The corridor smells of iodine and boiled maize and something older that has moved into the walls and will not leave. Three years of Wednesday afternoons have taught me the smell. I could walk it blind, which is good, because today I am walking it half blind anyway, tired from the road, and the light off the polished floor is doing nothing for my head.The desk is at the turn. The nurse looks up before I reach her, and she already has the pen in her hand."Mr. Kaoma. She's resting today.""Good," I say, and I sign the book.That is the shape of my week. I come up from the valley on the two o'clock bus, I sign the book, I stand in the last room for a while, I leave the oranges on the table. Small things. A man builds his whole life out of small things, and then one day he looks down and finds he has built a shrine without meaning to.The last door is open a hand's width. I stop because there is a voice in the room, and it is not hers. It is small and careful, and it is reading."

MARA Thirty days under his roof, and Elias Kaoma has not touched me. Not my hand at dinner, not my waist on the stairs. He opens doors. He pulls chairs. His hands never land. I have counted every near miss the way a woman counts stones in a wall, and I have stopped sleeping. The note lives in the second drawer of his desk. I know because he showed it to me the hour I arrived. Not hidden, not waved. Just there on the blotter: white paper, my father's ruin in numbers, my signature underneath, and mine was the only steady hand on the page. So you know what you're worth, he said. That was the first thing Elias Kaoma ever said to me. Not welcome. Not my name. He is not cruel. That is the trap in him. Cruelty I could fight. He is simply certain. Kaoma House sits on its hill the way he sits at the head of his table, as if it has never occurred to either of them to be anywhere else. Thirty days, and he has not raised his voice once. He has not needed to. Tonight I am late to dinner on pu