Night of Fire

by Colin Thubron

  I ran into Alan as he came towards our hut. Were there any trucks yet? I asked. I felt a coward. Only two had been promised, he answered, enough for the church workers and their families, enough for us. I wanted a place for my interpreter, I said, and her sick mother. He looked sour, uncertain. I demanded: ‘What will happen to the women left here?’

  ‘They’re usually raped, then abandoned. Sometimes they’re killed.’ He might have been talking of cattle. He’s sick, I thought, he may be dying. I went on staring at him.

  At last he said: ‘If you insist enough, Olivier will give in.’

  ‘How close are the Hutu now?’

  ‘Ten, fifteen miles, I don’t know.’ As I turned to go, he said: ‘You’d better hurry.’

  The alleys were filled with people leaving. They were walking swiftly, in near-silence, their arms lifted to the bundles on their heads. If I run, I thought, I’ll start to panic. So I strode fast while the cold fear beat up from my stomach, filling my chest. Women were crowded round the water pumps, filling tins and plastic containers before flight. The armed youths had vanished. Outside one hut three old men sat unmoving. As I passed, wondering at them, one laughed and said simply: ‘Nous allons mourir.’ Another man ran up to me, pleading through bloodshot eyes. I must help him leave, he said, he was a good man, God was pleased with him. He clung to my arm down successive alleys, until I shook him off.

  As I neared Chantal’s door, I looked behind me and saw a toppling cloud of smoke rising to the west. It ascended high above the rooftops, five miles away perhaps, in an ash-grey column against the sky.

  She was standing inside, as if waiting for me. Perhaps her mother had, after all, understood my previous coming, or else my mission was written on my face, because she said at once: ‘We can’t go.’

  I stared back at her, suddenly gutted by despair. It was as if something long known, unspoken, had slid into place. Even now I am not sure if she ever truly wanted to leave, or if her mother’s frailty was not an excuse. Years later I was still torturing myself with this. Because I never did know. I could read anything into those eyes: her sadness, her contempt, her love, even her emptiness. But when I looked at her now, I knew there would be no appeal. She appeared perfectly calm. But I said: ‘I have places for you on the lorry. Your mother too.’

  ‘My mother would die there. She is dying already. I can’t leave her.’

  I said: ‘I will carry her.’

  ‘No.’ The old woman was still lying by the wall, retching her tubercular cough.

  I said: ‘The Hutus may be here in two hours. You know what will happen.’

  ‘We have known them before.’ Then she said: ‘Stephen, I think you will go.’

  I don’t want to remember this. My silence lacerates me. People were running in the lanes outside now. Somebody cried out. And the fear surged through me. I must have been visibly shaking. I loathed myself. Perhaps she was helping me, pitying me, when she said: ‘You are going to leave us.’

  I heard no accusation, only a remote sadness. Even now I am afraid to remember my response. She went on gazing at me steadily, with no trace of surprise: a person I did not understand, vivid in her crimson dress, standing above the old woman, who now slept. In my memory she stands stark but detached, not only from me, but from everything except her mother: the last thread back to her old life.

  I don’t remember looking at her again. I was staring at the floor – I can still see the hairline cracks in its clay – then at the rotted base of her door as I opened it, then at the emptied street. And I ran.

  Eastward beyond the camp stretched four miles of stubbled maize. Then the yellow underfelt of grass began, with a sprinkling of acacia trees and the rise of bare hills. From a distance the land offered cover almost to shoulder height, but closer you could see how thin it was, the grasses almost diaphanous, and the shrubs – mostly prickly euphorbia – too widely spaced. A few of the refugees had gone along the river, but the rest were on the track south, where the nearest settlement was two days’ march away.

  They walked in silence, with long, quick strides. Their balanced bundles overcast their faces, and appeared too big for the slender necks and heads that bore them. Many women walked with babies slung to their backs, and their free hands carried water canisters or clutched the wrist of another child. Some were barefoot. From far away they resembled a single organism – a long, skeletal body that travelled with the illusion of terrible calm, as if this was the will of God. Behind them, beyond the camp, the smoke had spread and darkened into a towering storm cloud.

  The truck carrying Alan had disappeared in front of us, and our own followed, tortuously slow, threading between the refugees. I was seated with Vincent and Olivier in the open back, in people’s full view. Olivier perched upright beside me in his white jacket, even now touched by a little vanity – he had commandeered two lorries, after all. On my other side, Vincent’s head was bowed in prayer. Above the clank of the truck I heard: ‘. . . bless . . . save . . .’ Twice he turned to me, to bolster or comfort me, talking about the seminary and the Lord. Dazed, choked with dust, I wondered: what Lord, what seminary?

  On either side of the track the faces raised to mine – some were barely a foot away – looked steeled and old in resignation. One or two lit up with misplaced hope at the sight of us. If they bore resentment, I could not tell. Sometimes the driver honked his horn to clear our way. At first I smiled weakly at these people, then I could bear it no longer. I noticed several of my students. I leant forward against the truck’s rail, and covered my face.

  I could not know that this was only the beginning, and that thirty years later these people’s homeland would be torn again, more terribly. The line of refugees straggled at last, then petered out over the pink savannah. Soon we had crested the first horizon. The track ahead of us was empty now. Our tyres whispered over the dust.

  * * *

  The fire ate into the timbered bowels of the house. It licked away the plastered ceiling of the basement and reached the joists above. The smoke alarm had been defunct for years, and the flames spread in near-silence. Anyone viewing the house from far away would have mistaken them for the lights of a New Year party.

  All at once the smoke was pouring up between his floorboards. Sleeping beneath the duvet, he inhaled the fumes into his dreams. Then asphyxiation woke him in confusion and pitch darkness. He groped from his bed and slithered to his knees. Some memory set his lips in automatic prayer, which stopped of its own accord, and he clambered to his feet. He found the torch by his bed, but its beam lit a swirling wall of grey. When the fire at last burst through the floor, it opened up below a roaring furnace whose flames leapt ten feet into the room. But by then he was lying unconscious as at the lip of a volcano, and in his fainting mind there was no heat or light at all.

  3

  Neurosurgeon

  The human brain – the seat of memory and consciousness – weighs just three pounds, and has the texture and colour of beige blancmange. It can be held in two cupped hands. But it is the most complex and baffling structure in the known universe. Floating within the skull in their own cerebrospinal fluid, its eighty million cells put out electrical connections that outnumber the stars of the Milky Way. The brain is threaded by a hundred thousand miles of blood vessels. Yet cut it with a knife, and it feels nothing. It has no pain receptors, but it survives in a frenzy of activity. In its structure it holds the history of human evolution, from the reptilian stirrings of the brainstem that regulate breath and heartbeat, to the limbic system of the earliest mammals, to the bulging cortex of the primates. All these strata lie buried in the human brain, like ancient memories.

  Its receptors for smell, perhaps the oldest of the human senses, are intricately divided and subtle, and were alerted now by the smoke rising through the corridors of the house. The stench entered Walford’s nostrils as he slept, but was dismissed by his forebrain as the harmless aroma of cooking or of a coal fire in some distant apartment. His breathing, for t
he moment, barely changed. Once he imagined he heard a faint human cry, but this too, muffled by his dreaming, carried no alarm.

  In any case, although he had been here many years, the other tenants were barely known to him. He distantly envied the schoolteacher upstairs, who had retired early and taken to travelling; but he seldom spoke with the reclusive woman who shared his landing, and he avoided the anaemic-looking tenant in the basement. As for the owner, Walford glimpsed him so rarely (and paid his rent by standing order) that he sometimes wondered if any landlord existed here at all. Fancifully he imagined the flats as the different cells of a dying brain – its residents seemed mostly frail and old – connected only by these passages where the light bulbs might need replacing and the faded crimson carpets were starting to split along the staircase treads. Months ago he realised he would not be staying. His rooms here were the den of a single man, redolent of his years as a registrar in the county hospital nearby. This was no place for a wife. The garden far beneath his balcony was shorn by salt winds and traversed only by cats. No child would play there. The once-proud building reeked of seclusion, of retirement, not of life’s beginnings. He had planned to leave several years ago, but had found no time for buying a place of his own. Now that he was going, he wondered how he had tolerated the house so long. The thick walls smelt damp in winter, and the corridor windows leaked and rattled. He could imagine children growing sick here. This was how he thought nowadays: of marriage, children. He would soon be gone.

  * * *

  They were walking high above the sea. A bitter wind had got up and was beating the waves into silver fish scales far out to the horizon. The path was too narrow for them to hold hands. He marched behind her tensely, angry that this day – of all days – should be fouled in August by a cold wind. But she did not care. Her neck was unbuttoned to the sun, and she went with the loose-limbed stride that had sounded too loud in the hospital wards. Long before he met her, a colleague had described Kate as radiant, a description that alienated him. Kate was a paediatrician, and he imagined an overwrought gaiety enacted to inspirit bedridden children. She, in turn, had been put off by his looks, she later said. She thought they bore a strain of arrogance (she’d never retracted this) and laughed at the hero-worship that neurosurgeons attracted. They were little more than technicians, after all.

  Strange, he thought, how mutual distrust had turned to desire. (There was no neurological clue to that.) As Kate walked in front of him, long strands of hair escaped her cap and blew ash-blonde in the wind. On these rare weekend walks along the coastal paths of Dorset or Cornwall, the claustrophobia of the hospital dropped away, and they entered a country of their own whose inhabitants strode past with backpacks and curt greetings, and where the fragility of brains or lungs seemed far away. Beneath the path the limestone cliffs dropped two hundred feet to blackened rocks, and seagulls were crying in the clefts. She turned from time to time to share something: the curious patterns on the sea, a flight of cormorants. She was touched by girlish elation. That was her oddness, he thought. There was an innocent vitality about her, and a hint of rebellion, that had survived her professional self-possession. You could not pass lightly through eight years in paediatrics, then specialise in respiratory disease. Children had died in her arms. Sometimes her elan seemed to him a kind of courage. He was in love, after all, at the age of thirty-seven.

  They climbed to a coastguard station and to the chapel on St Adhelm’s Head. His arm circled her waist. She was flushed and smiling. The chapel was square and plain, ringed by sunken earthworks – a stone tent pitched against the sky. They stood under its sheltering wall, in the high grass. He imagined that these treks honed his mind. That was typical, Kate said: he could do nothing without purpose. His workload in the hospital was so concentrated that the thought of aimless walking took time to catch on. While trekking was to her a kind of ambulatory rest, he would designate an object for their journey: a distant quarry, perhaps, or a lighthouse. It was as if he were making up for some immemorially lost time. He had the idea that before his mother’s death his adolescence had been spent adrift, that this surgical commitment was his absolution, and that his teenage dreaminess had been waiting, like protoplasm, to evolve into what Kate saw as an introverted ambition. But sometimes he traced the choice of his career to a time even earlier, when as a nine-year-old boy he had stumbled on the woman.

  He had wandered away from his parents down an aisle of the local supermarket, turned a corner and found her prone and stiffened on the floor. She was ashen, staring. As he gazed, her body began to shake. Then her arm lifted and pointed at him. The pupils of her eyes rolled back in her head. He froze in terror. What had he done? Some liquid flooded out beneath her body. He screamed. From behind, his mother’s arms encircled him.

  He had never heard of epilepsy, of course. The mystery of it – of the ordinary adult deformed into something else – haunted him for months. He saw her in the street the next day, and she smiled at him. He gaped after her. A demon lived inside her, waiting, lived inside everybody perhaps, lived even in his mother, in him. The horror of it went on in his memory. The woman quivered and pointed in his nightmares, unexplained. He wanted to understand her. He wanted to know why she hated him. His mother explained that she was ill; and then he wanted to cure her. He wanted to cure his fear.

  Years later, after his mother’s stroke, when for three days she wandered in her own labyrinth, emitting words and cries to people not there, he longed to share the zone she was inhabiting, the fragments of her consciousness, before the relief of death. What had she seen or heard? Where was her pain?

  He was already studying medicine, but he knew nothing about this neural twilight. He chose to practise general surgery. For a while, prosthetics and transplants obsessed him. Then, as a junior house officer, he witnessed his first brain operation. In the annexe to the operating theatre, before going under anaesthetic, the patient – a middle-aged bus driver with trigeminal neuralgia – told him through clenched teeth how for the past four years he had scarcely dared shave or brush his teeth for fear of activating this torment. It would recur, he said, like a jackhammer entering his jaw.

  Yet five minutes later, nothing seemed simpler, more economical, than the way the surgical needle glided into his unconscious cheek. The surgeon – a gaunt authoritarian – briefly checked the X-ray screen to confirm the needle’s position, then released a weak electric current down it. Drowsily the awakened patient confirmed the focus of pain, and was returned to sleep. Then the surgeon passed a high-frequency current to the needle’s tip, and somewhere in the forest of sensory nerves the tormenting fibres were cooked and destroyed. Within ten minutes the whole thing was done. The bus driver’s four-year agony was over, the surgeon hurrying to another case, and Walford was left with the realisation of his calling, which had slid into place with the ease of something preordained.

  Fifteen years later, he felt that the only real frontier of medical knowledge was the brain. By comparison, the make-up and function of a heart or kidney were childishly simple. Even their transplant had become commonplace. But the brain stayed all but unknown: less a composite organ than a labyrinth of electro-chemical activity. Its workings could be most typically guessed only when one area was damaged; and it learnt from itself, and changed. He thought of the brain as he might of an unbreakable cipher. In its memories it held the web of human identity. It was the incarnate self.

  The most potent advances in surgery would surely be here. Long before he ended his career – in twenty-five, thirty years’ time? – the excision of brain parts would be in decline. Already sub-cranial stimulants were being developed, electrodes implanted to destroy rogue brain cells, nutrient drip-feeders to nourish others, and neuro-pacers that would forestall cortical seizures.

  Neurosurgeons, of course, had a reputation for self-importance. They rarely believed in their own inexperience. A senior surgeon once joked to him that you could teach a monkey to operate, but you could not teach it to desist.
But after fifteen years in surgery, Walford felt at last that he needed no superior beside him at the operating table, that he could deal with whatever crisis was thrown at him.

  Still, but rarely, things went wrong. No two operations were alike. Even the simplest one taught you something, even now. There was no such thing as an easy process. Misguide the knife, and a patient might lose her hearing or his mind. He prided himself on his record in an inexact science. But he was never reconciled to imperfection. The operations he found hardest were those by which a lasting injury had to be inflicted in order to cure an illness or save a life. They carried always a rankling sense of failure. Last year he had excised the malignant tumour of a young woman with acoustic neuropathy; he saved her, but at the expense of a disfigured mouth, and he could not think of it without self-censure.

  But there had come a point in his career when he emotionally withdrew. A patient had been referred to him whose frontal lobe tumour had been resected in Switzerland. It was a grade 2 tumour which would surely turn malignant. Lying as it did in the language hemisphere, it had been extracted too cautiously. Fragments remained, and now the cavity was refilling with cancerous growth. After he had operated, excising part of the supplementary motor area, the woman could communicate only in whispers. It had been an acceptable risk; but she would never speak normally again. For months her husband raged at him, sometimes barging into the hospital reception hall or waiting for him outside, and hammered him with abusive emails and solicitors’ letters.

  It was after this that he willed himself into change. There could be no perfect record. There were patients you damaged, others you lost. He slammed his mind shut on them, because next morning he must be in the theatre again, his mind and hands steady. Now he operated without the relaxing banter or quiet curses or soothing music that some of his colleagues employed. He wanted complete silence. His orders to the registrar or nurse were curt and toneless. He exacted a chilly tension. Colleagues thought him cold, and he took it as praise. Coldness was competence. The secret was to understand the patient, with no confusing empathy. A patient, after all, was more than a person. A patient’s response might spell a small medical advance. The successful operation was the one that increased knowledge.