When he asked if it came from a store, she shook her head and said she got it from a cousin who sold jars the stores didn’t want anymore. She said that breast-feeding was what people did in the marshes. They were in the capital now, where babies ate proper food.
He played with the boy’s index finger, which was papery and limp. Sister, he said, do you want your son to be healthy?
She nodded.
Then listen to him. He’s telling you what he thinks of store-bought food.
She nodded again, slower.
Then, in a confidential aside, he told her that his own mother had insisted on breast-feeding him long after other children his age were eating solid food.
Her eyes widened. Is that true? she asked.
Actually, it wasn’t. His mother had disdained breast-feeding; she’d always referred to it with a wrinkle of the nose as “that procedure.” But he felt justified in telling a little lie. It made him angry to think about the money the woman was spending in the name of modernity, while her baby wasted away.
* * *
In the next room, a marshman with an oily baseball cap pulled low over his eyes sat on the edge of the examining table, sunk in thought. Before any words could be exchanged, the marshman sat bolt upright, staring straight ahead as if this were a military inspection, not a medical one.
The cause for the visit was obvious. His left hand was wadded with stained gauze. The bandage was filthy and held in place with clear packing tape.
He surprised the man by starting his examination not with the wound, but with a few mundane questions. Are you eating well? Are you having any trouble with your digestion? And then, leaning in, he asked whether everything was all right in the sack.
This brought a wry grin. The marshman confided that, ever since the accident, he hadn’t really had an appetite for women.
He played along, clucking his tongue. He said there’d been a period in his own life, after a fall from a horse, when he couldn’t perform his marital duties. His wife had packed her bags and moved to her mother’s house for three months.
None of this was true, except for the part about the fall from the horse, which had been quite serious. The marshman perked up at the mention of riding. He asked if the doctor really rode.
Yes, of course, he said, although not as much as I used to.
The marshman commiserated. Back home, his uncle had been a horse trader. One of his chores as a youth had been to take his uncle’s new horses for a ride in the dunes in order to gauge their desert-worthiness. He remembered riding for hours across trackless sand. Sometimes, if the horse was strong, he’d dig in his spurs, close his eyes, and gallop blind. He said it was like being lifted up in a whirlwind.
You must miss riding very much.
The marshman shook his head. His flight of fancy was over. He said that he worked in a noodle shop. Sometimes the machine that cut the noodles jammed. Clearing jams was part of his job. Someone had turned it on while his hand was involved with the blade. The machine had taken his fingers, but luckily just the tip of his thumb.
Here, he said, hastily unwinding the bandage.
There’s no rush.
The marshman smiled mirthlessly. It’s all right, he said, there’s no pain until the end. Before tearing off the last of the gauze, he paused for a moment to remove his cap, which was dark with sweat, and set it aside. When he ripped the last of the bandage free, his whole body convulsed. A croak came from his gaping mouth, but he didn’t cry out.
The odor of the crusted stumps was nauseating, but the cap was hiding something worse: a ring of scars around the head, like the impression of a thorny crown.
He knew how a marshman got scars like that. He’d watched his own soldiers wrap the razor wire and pull it tight.
He went to the sink and ran the water until the dizziness passed. The mere sound of it was soothing. He splashed some on the back of his neck, then turned to the marshman and apologized. My heart is old and weak, he said.
He readied a bowl of warm water and a heap of loose cotton and began to clean the stumps. The crust was stubborn, so he had the marshman soak his hand. He changed the water several times to keep it warm.
When the suturing was finally exposed, he saw that the stitches were tight and regular, the work of a skilled amateur. Ordinary sewing thread had been used. He asked who’d done the stitching. The marshman said he’d done it himself. One of his coworkers had helped—a man, he added pointedly, who didn’t faint at the sight of blood.
He ignored the insult and told the marshman he’d done a fine job. The wound was healing well except for one stump that had gotten infected. There was a risk the infection would spread if he didn’t do a better job of dressing it.
He salved the stumps with antibiotic ointment and bound them. When he was done, the bandage looked like a boxer’s hand-wrapping. It pleased the marshman, although he was loath to show it.
Is it comfortable? he asked. Did I wrap it well?
Well enough, the marshman said.
Do you mind if I ask about the scars on your head?
The marshman shrugged. When they wanted something, your people were very thorough.
8
There was a surge of patients at lunchtime. It was good to see so many marshmen in one place. He understood a roomful of marshmen in a way he couldn’t hope to understand his own people. They were practical above all else. Factory workers who’d spent their lunch hours patiently waiting made way for a child with a painful ear infection. He admired their selflessness. It would have been easy to raise a fuss, or try to slip the doctor a few carefully folded bills.
He saw patient after patient. Most of the cases were straightforward: pink eye, pubic lice, shingles. Treatment was limited to what was on hand in the clinic. Often, the best he could suggest was an herbal remedy.
He’d made quite a study of folk healing in the marshes. There was a lot he could do for the children and elderly, who were open to traditional ways. The middle generation, however, was skeptical. A prescription of herb tea upset them. What did they need him for, if all he had to offer was a remedy they could have gotten from any street peddler?
He tried to explain that the old ways were often the best, but in fact there were plenty of cases beyond his ability to treat. The elegant woman, for instance, with several grandchildren in tow, who presented very serious neck tumors. He sent the children off to play, then waited in silence as she unwrapped her long headscarf. The tumors were advanced. All he could do was give her aspirin to try to ease the pain.
By the end of the day, he was exhausted. Standing in place took a greater toll on his legs than a day of drifting. Being sociable was tiring, too; listening for hours on end, making himself quiet. What he really wanted was to slink back to his room, kick off his shoes, rub his swollen feet for a minute or two, and fall asleep under the rough blanket.
The orderlies were leaving for the night. He heard distant bolts ramming home.
He went to the buffet table, but the food had long been cleared away and the tabletop scoured clean. All of the trash had been taken out. The trash cans in each examining room had been lined with fresh bags. The supply carts had been restocked and were parked neatly in a row.
He collapsed into one of the easy chairs and drank a juice box he’d found in a cabinet, perhaps stashed there to pacify a child. The juice was sickly sweet, but he gulped it down.
He started to drift off but the juice went right through him. The restroom was locked. He had no idea where to begin looking for the key. His need was urgent, so he filched a bedpan from one of the supply carts and took it back to his room.
Just as he was finishing, he heard a faint “Hello?” It was Thali. He tried to hide the bedpan, but she burst in before he found a place for it.
The color was back in her cheeks. Her arms were full of grocery bags. She told him how pleased she was to hear the good report about his work that day. Apparently, he was a big hit with the patients. Perhaps not so much with the
orderlies, but they were a famously difficult bunch.
She apologized for being so late, but she’d been held up at work. She’d met with a powerful woman on the museum’s board of directors who agreed with her views on the marsh exhibit. With an ally like that, perhaps she stood a chance of reversing the director’s decision. At any rate, it had been a long and productive day, and she was in a mood to walk. Would he mind if they walked rather than took the bus?
He nodded and said, “Yes—I mean, no.” He’d spent the day talking to marshmen of every stripe; now he was having trouble stringing two words together in his own tongue.
“First things first,” she said. She went to a closet and came out with the key to the restroom.
“Here,” she said, “I thought you might want to freshen up.”
He went to the restroom and emptied the bedpan into a toilet, then leaned against the stall for a few moments and closed his eyes. Water was dripping somewhere, perhaps in one of the huge old porcelain sinks. The way it echoed put him in mind of a cave. He pictured wet formations, spires and stalactites.
It cheered him to think there were slow accretions happening all around.
* * *
They left through a gate that overlooked the Mall, with its neat row of brilliantly lit monuments. Their glowing marble filled him with feeling—not patriotism, certainly, but perhaps a cousin of it, a sense of pride in being affiliated with so much power. He turned to her and said, with breath that left traces in the frosty air, that he wanted to give her flowers.
She burst out laughing and kissed his cheek, then gave him one of the lighter bags and hooked her free arm through his. She said there wasn’t a florist for miles, when what they both knew she was saying was that he couldn’t possibly afford flowers. He told her that she was a formidable woman, a born diplomat. She patted his arm as if he were an unwelcome suitor who’d just made a surprisingly good case for himself.
He was familiar with her neighborhood now. The cavernous elevator in her building no longer seemed threatening. There was no awkwardness at her door. She simply opened it before them, sat him down on the sofa, and fixed him a drink. He tried to refuse it, but she insisted, saying it was good for his nerves.
The drink was mostly tonic water with a splash of inexpensive gin. He would have preferred whiskey, but took several sips just to be sociable. It was full of ice and gave him a chill. He told her that tending bar was yet another of her talents. She answered from the kitchen that he was a liar, but a sweet one.
He finished the drink in a few long gulps, the faster to be done with it. His plan was to return the tumbler to the kitchen and to tell her how good everything smelled, but he couldn’t seem to stand.
The sofa began to swallow him. He felt he was sinking up to the waist in cool desert sand. The sand around his thighs was especially cold. It had absorbed the frigid night air and was releasing it into his bones.
He woke to the sight of her kneeling at his feet, pressing a towel to the carpet. His empty glass was on the coffee table. There were ice cubes in his lap.
“You must have dozed off,” she said. He picked up an ice cube and tried to drop it in the glass, but somehow managed to miss. The cube hit the edge of the coffee table and shattered.
“Please,” she said, “don’t worry about it. It’s just ice. It’s just water.”
“I’m a fool,” he said.
“No,” she said, “it was an accident.”
“Stupid, stupid,” he said.
“Really,” she said, “all I wanted was for you to relax a bit.”
He started to cry. His tears were as surprising to him as they were to her.
“No, no, no,” she said, “please.”
He apologized, but couldn’t stop. “There’s a medical term for this,” he said.
“You mean for crying?” she said. “Does it really need one?”
She got up and went back to the kitchen. He heard the banging of pots and pans, followed by a curse. He was awake now. He got down on the carpet, still feeling woozy, and went over the wet area with his sleeve. An ice cube had skittered under the sofa. He tried to reach it, but it was too far away. Still, it felt good to lie down.
When she came back and saw him on the floor, she helped him up, but brusquely. There was irritation in her voice when she announced that dinner was ready. She sat him at the little table in the kitchen facing the sink, which was piled high; it looked as though she’d used every pot and pan in the kitchen to prepare their meal.
She served him in silence. He waited for her to be seated, but she went to the sink and began cleaning up.
He asked her to join him, but she insisted that he go ahead and start.
He was certainly hungry enough. The food smelled delicious. The drink and tiny nap had sharpened his appetite. He still had no idea what she’d prepared. Some kind of meat stew with wild rice.
Finally, she realized he wasn’t going to eat without her. She made herself a plate with very small portions and sat down.
There was no talking for a while. The stew was the kind of dish that should have been simmered for hours. Even so, the flavors were good. He liked the rice the best. She made it in the marsh style, sautéing it with a bit of onion before adding water, which made it glutinous. He could have eaten several helpings of the rice with gravy, but there was no way to leave the meat, so he ate the meat as well, cutting it into bits.
She misinterpreted his fastidious cutting. She apologized and said she should have known that his teeth would still be sore.
Even though he didn’t want there to be any untruth between them, he was grateful for a reason not to have to eat the meat, which was very strong and gamey. She asked if he knew what kind of meat it was.
He shook his head.
She smiled triumphantly and told him it was wild boar. She obviously considered boar a great delicacy. Here in the capital, it probably was, but back in the marshes he used to hunt boar all the time, not for the meat but to ease the burden of the farmers, whose crops were ravaged by wild pigs, and who were often victims of their deadly attacks.
He started to say something about boars, but she cut him off. “Would you be interested in staying on at the clinic?” she asked.
It was an odd question. She made it sound as though working there had been his idea. He said that being with patients made him feel useful, but he doubted he had much to contribute.
She told him he was being too hard on himself. “It was only your first day,” she said. Then she asked him what he thought the clinic needed.
“A real doctor, for a start,” he said.
“Seriously, what else?” she said, handing him some paper and a mechanical pencil. “Make a list. Think of it as a village dispensary, a place equipped to handle anything short of major surgery.”
The phone rang. She answered it in the living room while he worked on his list. The problem interested him.
He’d already made a page of notes when she came back to the kitchen and leaned on his shoulder. Her eyes were brimming over.
“So much for my ally on the board,” she said.
He wrapped an arm around her waist. She curved herself to him and stood that way for a time.
“They’re going to ruin my village,” she said. “For the second time.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
There were only a few ways for the evening to resolve itself, all of them complicated. He asked if he could use her shower. She told him he was welcome to.
He showered without any thought of how much hot water he was using. The bathroom was full of steam by the time he finished. The towels were all very large. He wrapped himself up to the armpits in one before going back out.
She’d laid out fresh clothes for him on her bed. He took them back to the bathroom and dressed. The bathroom was very small and the floor was wet, but he was glad of a few more minutes behind a closed door.
He found her asleep on the couch in the living room, a half-empty bottle of w
ine nearby on the coffee table. She was snoring; her parted lips revealed purplish teeth. He tried to help her to bed, but she rolled away from him, so he gave up and covered her with a sofa blanket. Then he sat by her on the floor, from time to time brushing the hair from her sleeping eyes.
His legs fell asleep, and still he didn’t move. He found himself humming an old song.
“That’s pretty,” she said.
“Go back to sleep,” he whispered.
“It sounds like a marsh tune,” she said, reaching for his hand. She nuzzled it, tucking it under her cheek like a pillow.
He shifted his arm, trying to make it comfortable for her.
“Here,” she said, “come up here with me.”
She tried to make space for him, but the couch was narrow. He wound up more or less on top of her, his arms straining to support his weight.
“You can lie on me,” she said, “I won’t break.”
He laid his head on her breast. She wrapped her arms around him.
He felt whole, or nearly whole.
“Are your parents still alive?” she asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “But I don’t think so.”
“Do you miss them?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I miss mine, too.” She pulled his face to hers and kissed him. She shifted under him, freeing him with busy hands, then pulled her own clothes aside.
He felt for a time that he was drifting on a lake, the sunlight warm on his shoulders. He didn’t want to hasten it, but his body moved anyway.
She strained against him, clasping with her thighs.
Afterward, they fell asleep.
She woke him a few hours later and led him to her bed. It was dark. His leggings had come unwrapped. He was embarrassed to be half naked in front of her.
She brought him a glass of water, which he drank in great gulps. She laughed and told him to save some for her.
They climbed under the sheets. He thought he might be dreaming, but her earthy smell was real enough.
Marshlands Page 5
