Feeling the breeze

I remember visits to my doctor during the days of the Zim bearer’s cheques. ‘Take off your shirt and lie on that bed, please,” he would say.

He’d take his stethoscope, instruct you to breathe in and out as he listened to your chest, maybe massage your body, listen some more, ask some questions.

Then he’d make his diagnosis and give you your prescription and you would be on your way home to recuperate. And then our national currency went into the dustbin, with our chequebooks, and in came cash in the form of the US dollar and the rand.

I must say that R300 a visit to a doctor makes one think twice about consulting and most of us have become our own doctors, devising homemade cures in desperate bids to economise. But one day, feeling too bad to risk a home cure, I visit my usual doctor for a consultation.

He instructs me to take off my clothes and lie on his bed. I take off my shirt and shoes and head for the bed.

The doctor says: ‘Hey, I said take off your clothes.” I blink at him. He says: ‘The trousers too.” ‘Huh?”

I go inwardly. This has never happened before. I hesitate. I know the underwear I’m wearing is not a good sight for anybody except me. It’s seen time.

Also, as a bachelor, I feel no pressing need to change my underwear every day, or to wear my best underwear, as there is no one I want to impress.

I am also painfully aware that I’m wearing those undies that mysteriously developed a small hole in front some time ago, as if some naughty rat had been gnawing at it, and that I mended the other day with off-colour cotton.

Well, these are desperate times and one has to economise and not buy things unnecessarily, especially clothing, and especially things like underwear, which are always worn out of sight.

So, I am thinking: ‘Take off my trousers?” My mind is telling me to tell the doctor not to worry about the consultation, that I am now feeling better and will come another day, but the pain in my body decides otherwise.

I take off my trousers. I steel my mind against all thoughts of my underwear. I close my eyes. I feel the hands of the doctor all over me, pressing, pumping.

I open my eyes. I watch the doctor’s eyes closely, but they are devoid of expression as his hands continue over my body. Then the stethoscope, and, whew, it’s finally over.

I stand up and get dressed, but now my eyes don’t meet the doctor’s. He tells me to come after a week for a review.

Of course I do not go for the review, for that will mean that I have to fork out another R300 and you can’t just pick up R300 off our trees or even at the doorstep of State House. Anyway, I’m also feeling better, so what the hell …

Two months later the same pain hits my poor body. I have to go to my doctor again. But then I think: taking off all my clothes, embarrassing underwear —

So I go to another doctor, and this time I make sure I’m wearing my Christmas underwear, new, no scratches on it. There’s the same wince-inducing consultation fee. He is also male.

I stand before him and he goes: ‘Take off your clothes and lie on that bed, please.” I take off my shirt and head for the bed and he calls again: ‘Your trousers too.” And when I head for home this time, I am smiling …

Christopher Mlalazi is a writer whose debut novel, Many Rivers, was published in June. He lives in Zimbabwe