Fractured: International Hostage Thriller

by Clàr NÕ Chonghaile

  I became aware of a soft hum even before we rounded the corner of a bleached wall that marked the edge of the outpatients clinic. Dozens of women and children were squatting in the dust, their sunset-red, brilliant blue and shocking pink veils pulled over their heads. Children sat by their mothers, some still and vacant like tiny statues, others rambunctious, all kicking legs and flailing arms.

  A little girl, whose round dimpled face peeked from her shiny green headscarf smiled shyly at me, and I waved back. She must have been about five. Her mother covered her face as I walked past, but the little girl pushed the veil away and kept smiling.

  I felt my own smile was insincere. It was not honest. It suggested empathy, which there was, and help, which I could not offer. As so often before, I was just a spectator. I could do nothing for her and I worried, as always, that she took my smile to mean something else. I have never known how to react to children on my travels, especially in poorer countries. I represent foreign interest and for so many, my presence suggests that people outside care. What should I do? Smile and let the hope live? Or explain, honestly and brutally, that the world probably does not care about your war, or your famine, or your slum, or the burns you got because you went to scoop petrol from an overturned truck, but that I am here to try to get them to care. I may succeed but I probably won’t. I’m just doing my job. And my job is to bear witness to your suffering, and tell the world, and then you are on your own again.

  I walked past the little girl and through the seated crowd. Some children shouted after me, then collapsed into giggles as I turned to them, eyebrows raised. Others were too weak to indulge in such games. Mothers sat, straight-backed and straight-legged with babies on their laps. Some of these weaker children followed me with unnaturally big eyes. Others had their eyes closed, and their mothers fanned them listlessly, swishing away the flies in an endless, futile, almost clichéd gesture of love.

  “I will take you to meet Dr Robert Mugyenyi. He runs this clinic,” Nabakoba said, steering me through the people.

  The shuffling and noise died down as I approached, only for a louder chatter to break out behind me as I moved through.

  We entered the clinic, edging past the people standing in a tight queue at the door. There was no place for personal space here. Each eager patient was squeezed up to the person in front, as though they feared any gap would be exploited. They were probably right.

  In the dark interior, I felt the shade like a lover’s touch.

  Nabakoba marched up to an older man who was bent over a little boy on a stretcher laid on a solid wooden table. The child’s mother brushed his forehead lightly as the doctor pulled back a pink bandage from his skinny stomach.

  Dr Robert Mugyenyi peered over his glasses at me. I knew that look. In the old days, I would have brazened it out. Yes, the doctor might be busy but I had a deadline and needed my five quotes, and some background in the next half hour or I would miss it. I don’t think I’m callous but I probably seemed so.

  Now I wanted to say, “No, don’t worry. I can wait,” but he was tilting his head to usher me over. I pulled off my flak jacket and dropped it on the ground near the stretcher. It felt obscene to be wearing body armour here among the thin, fragile, hummingbird-like women lined outside. The young mother glanced at me blankly, but her hand never stopped its rhythmic stroking of her son’s head.

  “You can hold this for me,” Dr Mugyenyi said in a low voice.

  Meekly, I took the edge of the bandage he had pulled back. The boy had a two-inch gash on his left side, just under his rib cage. The wound was oozing blood, slowly as though death was willing to wait a while for this boy with the slender, too-long nose, and lips like those of a girl.

  “He was hit by shrapnel while he was playing outside yesterday afternoon,” the doctor said as he gently touched the edges of the wound.

  “His family removed the piece of metal, but couldn’t get him here until today because of the fighting.”

  He said something to the young mother in a language I did not recognise, and she replied with a few words, her voice soft and insistent.

  “He needs stitches and antibiotics. But he will live.” I guessed he was talking to me again.

  The doctor smiled at the boy.

  “Eh, Asad.”

  He turned to the mother, this time speaking slowly in English, but using his hands to illustrate his words.

  “We will have to sew him up. Do you understand?”

  She nodded.

  “But he will be fine. You got here in time. You did well. He has a good and brave mother.” A nurse behind him translated in a soft whisper and the young mother smiled and covered her face with her black veil, her giggles tinkling like fresh water over stones. She bent and kissed her son’s forehead, who attempted a faint smile.

  Dr Mugyenyi pulled off his gloves and beckoned to the nurse. She came up to the table carrying a tray with a needle and surgical string. I moved out of the way, following Dr Mugyenyi as he went to a scratched desk in the corner to write in a long hardback notebook whose pages were turned up and spattered with brown and black stains. He was a tall man with a spare frame that suggested he never sat still long enough to allow fat to settle. He wore the same green fatigues as the other soldiers, but his slenderness was accentuated by the absence of a flak jacket, or a gun. His hair was grey, tight to his head, and his hands were huge. Instead of the regulation black boots, he wore trainers, old and worn with the laces fraying at the ends.

  “I do not have much time to talk to you. As you can see, we are very busy,” he said, waving to the crowded doorway. I could feel patient eyes on my back. Nobody would challenge me, but everyone was wondering how long I would keep the doctor from tending to them. I spoke rapidly, embarrassed by my uselessness.

  “I don’t need to talk to you. I just wanted to see what happens here. Perhaps I could sit somewhere and watch you work? Perhaps I can even help. I have nothing to do today. I am waiting for news of my son, but I can’t bear to be idle.”

  “Are you a doctor or a nurse? Have you any experience of first aid?” he said. The words were clipped, but his eyes were sympathetic.

  “No, I am a journalist, or I was,” I said. “But I can carry things, fetch things, check names, write down whatever you need,” I said, pointing to the book. “My handwriting is quite tidy.”

  Dr Mugyenyi smiled and squinted at his own spider-like scrawl.

  “Okay, you can stay. Sit here on this chair.” He pulled it forward from the desk.

  “I will find something for you to do in a little while.”

  He gestured to the next patient, an old man with a neatly trimmed, orange beard, a white skullcap stitched in silver thread and a hip-twisting limp. As the old man settled slowly into a chair, Dr Mugyenyi turned to me.

  “We are all hoping for good news about your son.”

  I nodded.

  For the next three hours, I swabbed wounds and cuts with antiseptic, I weighed babies so light I felt they might drift out of my hands like feathers. I cut bandages and fetched pills from a medicine cabinet that had more empty spaces than boxes. There were two Somali nurses working alongside Dr Mugyenyi but there seemed to be no end to the people waiting outside. The softly murmuring crowd sitting in the sand stayed the same. After a while, I stopped peering out of door. I was beginning to understand.

  “We see about three to four hundred patients a day. Everything from shrapnel wounds to diarrhoea, to malnutrition, sexual diseases, cuts and arthritis. There are hospitals in the city but they are very under-equipped, and sometimes people are afraid to cross the frontlines to get to them. At least here, they know we have medicines, or at least some. They know we will do our best to treat them. Of course, sometimes it is too late. Or we do not have what they need. Even in war, people still die of cancer.”

  Dr Mugyenyi spoke rapidly as he scribbled another incomprehensible entry into his notebook. I wondered if anyone ever checked these records. How many people had been reduced to a
note of ‘deceased’ in this stained ledger?

  The doctor heard it first. A slight disturbance outside. He started towards the door, putting his glasses back on. I followed. By the time I got outside, the noise had taken solid form.

  A man was running towards the tent, cradling a body in his arms, blood dripping into the sand. Behind him came a small knot of women and men, keening and shouting. The running man said nothing. He sped through the crowd. He was thin and wore a blue flannel shirt and a red-and-white macawis sarong. He was wearing just one flip flop.

  Dr Mugyenyi took the body from his arms. It was a little girl, maybe five. She had an obscenely large bullet hole in the right side of her chest. She was unconscious and her face was covered in blood and dust. But her thin chest was rising and falling irregularly.

  Dr Mugyenyi placed her on the stretcher, barking orders at the nurse. The running man collapsed onto the floor in a corner, his head in his hands, his shoulders heaving. He began to moan, a low animal sound that was more terrifying than the wailing outside the door.

  I could not help here. I went and sat on the floor beside the weeping man. Eventually, I cried with him as we watched Dr Mugyenyi try to save the girl’s life. People crowded the doorway, whispering or watching with blank expressions. Death was no stranger here.

  “We must operate,” Dr Mugyenyi ordered.

  Two Ugandan soldiers, who had followed the man into the clinic, grabbed the ends of the stretcher and carried it out a small door at the back of the room, towards the operating theatre in the main hospital, a short distance away. Dr Mugyenyi raced after them, waving a hand behind his back to indicate that the man should come with him. He rose unsteadily, then followed the doctor silently. He never asked a single question.

  The nurse who had remained behind, a pretty Somali in a dark scarf and black robe, beckoned in the next patient. I pulled myself up and went to her.

  “Will the little girl be okay?” I asked as I helped her place a child in the weighing scales.

  “I don’t know,” she said in a low tone.

  “She was hit by a sniper’s bullet. It does not look good. The bullet is probably lodged in her lung. And she is, of course, malnourished. Even if she survives the operation, infection will be a big problem.”

  She lifted the child out of the harness, and placed him again on his mother’s lap. She reached for her thermometer.

  “You should go now. You have helped a lot, but you must rest. This heat is tiring, and this place is tiring.”

  I picked up my flak jacket and walked out into the sun.

  I was exhausted and yet I felt as though I had done more good in the last three hours than I had ever done. I could feel the stirring of a ludicrous idea, a brilliant idea. As I walked aimlessly around the base, I allowed myself to imagine something different, a new life. Then I remembered Peter and nearly stumbled with the guilt of having to do so. I needed to find Edward. I headed towards the canteen.

  Edward was not there. But Dr Mugyenyi was, his shoulders slumped, his head bent over a steaming cup of coffee. I sat opposite him, and then, without really realising what I was doing, I placed my hand on his large one, and I didn’t need to ask. I knew the girl hadn’t made it. We sat in silence for a long time. There was nothing to say. I pulled my hand back as a group of soldiers came in for their lunch of watery, too-tough meat stew and too-hard rice.

  And then, as plastic trays clattered and tin spoons scraped on cracked china plates, I told a man I had only known for three hours, the story of my son. A truth I had only told a handful of people, and belatedly, too belatedly, my son.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  NINA

  “How did you find out?”

  Dr Mugyenyi had finished his stew while I was telling him my story. Until now, it had really been my story. And Tim’s story, I suppose, though really he was a secondary character. I told the quiet doctor with the sympathetic, silent stare about my trip to Liberia in 1980, about my brief affair with Shaun, about his death. And about how, two months later, as I tried to put the pieces of my life back together in Abidjan, I found out I was pregnant.

  “I didn’t find out that Peter was Shaun’s son for a while. I knew it was a possibility. Actually, I knew or at least, I felt he was Shaun’s son from the moment he was born, but I just refused to confront that possibility. It was only when Peter got malaria when he was about two that I found out for sure. They did a blood test at the hospital in Abidjan. Peter is AB. Tim and I are both type A. It was not possible. That’s when I knew, or rather that’s when I had to face what I always knew. But I didn’t tell Tim for many years. In fact, I only told him after I had told Peter, and that was after Peter’s own son was born.”

  “I didn’t know he had a son. He is married?” Dr Mugyenyi asked. “In our internal memos, he was described as a single man in his late twenties.”

  “It’s a little complicated,” I said, smiling despite myself. “As you can tell from my own story, I have never been good at simple, and it seems my son has inherited this trait, as well as some of my other failings. But his eyes, those are Shaun’s.”

  Dr Mugyenyi sipped his now cold coffee slowly, his eyes fixed on the table. Suddenly, I felt stupid and self-indulgent. How odd for this Ugandan doctor to be listening to a stranger’s convoluted life story in this clanking canteen on a military base in Mogadishu. But then, aren’t all our stories the same? What changes is just the context, and perhaps the culture and the language in which we tell of our foibles and fuck-ups. There are no new stories in the world, they say. We are doomed to relive the dramas, and mini-tragedies, and banal drudgeries of everyone else. We just think it is special because it is ours.

  “How did Peter react when you told him?” Dr Mugyenyi asked, after a quick glance at his watch.

  He had not spoken about the little girl who had died, and I got the sense he didn’t want to. Maybe that is also why I spoke so freely. I needed a listener and I felt he needed a story to take him out of this place, even just for the duration of his lunch break. The ideal distraction.

  “He was furious. He felt as though I had deliberately lied to him and worse, deliberately forced him to live a lie. I thought he would be sympathetic. He had fathered an illegitimate child – although I hate that term, but I suppose there isn’t any other way of saying it. I thought he would understand what happened to me. I suppose I wanted sympathy. We make such harsh demands on our children.”

  “And did you ever understand what really happened?”

  The question surprised me. It upset my narrative and that rarely happens to me these days. I have a finite number of stories, and I have told them all. I don’t expect any revisions, or corrections, or indeed questions. And this particular story was always too painful in the telling to invite rational discussion.

  “I don’t know if there is that much to understand. Perhaps that is where we go wrong. We always want a reason for everything. But most of what happens to us is without reason. Or at least without the kind of empowering, fulfilling reason that we like to believe governs our lives. I don’t believe in life as a whole. It happens in pieces, and some of the pieces make no sense. They could happen, or not happen. It’s not fate because that is too grandiose. We are not governed by fate but by the ineluctable, inevitable power of the random.”

  Dr Mugyenyi smiled.

  “You are a cynic. That’s good. So am I. I have to be. I see the power of chance everyday. That little girl who died on the operating table today. You can’t tell me that was part of something bigger. It was not. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her father did not have a car to get her here quickly. And here we did not have what she needed to save her. These are all random events and circumstances and they came together to end her life. There is no greater meaning, much as we wish there to be.”

  We sat in silence, listening to the clatter of dishes from the kitchen, the hum of the air conditioner creating a fake, mini-climate.

  “My marriage collapsed becaus
e of my secret,” I said. “When Peter was born, I could not love him in the way a mother should. He was living proof of my betrayal, of my fickleness, and of my loss. I don’t know if what I had with Shaun was just a war-time romance, a chemical byproduct of high levels of adrenaline and fear. But every time I looked at Peter in those early years, I was reminded that I would never know. And the sorrow I felt because of that unquantifiable fact was unbearable. It poisoned my relationship with Tim. I always knew I would have to tell him, and tell Peter, eventually. Everything I did happened in the shadow of that certainty. So my present was crushed between the mistake of my past and the certain betrayals of the future.”

  “Aren’t you being too hard on yourself?” Dr Mugyenyi said. “You say these things are random. So how can you take responsibility for the random?”

  “The events themselves are random,” I said, measuring every word. It was important to get this right. I had spent so many years trying to understand.

  “How we react to them, shouldn’t be. I think that is where my failure lies: I did not have a strong enough moral compass, or ethical grounding, to be able to deal with what happened to me. That is where I have let myself and my family down.”

  Dr Mugyenyi’s phone rang. He answered it, listened for a moment, grunted and hung up.

  “There is someone at the main gate to see you. They would not tell me his name but he is Somali, a civilian. Nabakoba is coming for you. Are you expecting anyone?”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t think I knew anyone here. Maybe it is someone from the British embassy?”

  “They would not have to wait at the gate. I must go.”

  Dr Mugyenyi rose quickly, stuffing his phone into the pocket of his trousers. He extended his hand formally.

  “It was very nice to meet you. I wish you the best of luck with finding your son.”

  I shook his hand, suddenly feeling embarrassed. Hoping he hadn’t felt my revelations were inappropriate. Perhaps he was simply shrugging off another story of woe, just one of the many that peppered his days with other people’s tragedies, the way shrapnel will reach far and wide, wounding as many as possible.