by Dennis Bock
There was no response. I believed the girl was unconscious.
There was only enough room on the platform for one person. First the mother climbed up, held her daughter’s head for a moment and whispered in her ear. When she came down she spoke with Dr. Brown, who then went up and examined the child as best he could. When he came down he told me her breathing was shallow. He saw no trauma to the head but could tell nothing of her internal injuries, and there was likely severe damage to the body. She might last another few days in there, no more, nor was there any way of extracting her.
The mother said something I couldn’t understand, and Dr. Brown told me, “She’s saying we have to help her.”
The woman didn’t speak after he explained there was nothing we could do. She stopped insisting and bowed deeply. Then she climbed back up onto her platform and sat quietly with the child. It was heartbreaking.
The moon was full when I returned to the building later that night, unable to sleep. It was well past midnight, and a silence surrounded the village. The girl’s mother stirred and looked down as I climbed up the rickety ladder. There wasn’t enough room for both of us, so I sat on a large stone in the broken wall. The girl’s head was perhaps two feet below me, facing down. In the bright moonlight I could see the individual strands of dark hair, lovingly brushed. She wasn’t moving. Once I was up there, her mother paid me no more attention. It was as if she again were alone with her daughter. I opened my coat pocket and offered her the syringe I’d prepared. She clearly understood its purpose, but would not take it. I sat with her a while longer, then climbed down and walked unhappily back to my bed.
Next morning, we continued north through terrain empty of tree or bush. We crossed eight rivers in one day without seeing a single bridge. The next five nights we stayed in villages and treated the ill and dying before sleeping in borrowed rooms on mud floors, but never again did I see anything as terrible as that child trapped in the building. Her image haunted me as I lay staring up at some dark ceiling while Ho slept the sleep of the innocent and untroubled.
Conditions at the Eighth Route Army Base Hospital in Ho-chia Chuang were even more horrifying than those at Yan’an. Hungry cats were permitted to sit unmolested upon windowsills and under chairs waiting for discarded bandages to be dropped to the soiled floor, while men were starved of medicine and care. The entire hospital smelled of death and decay. The doctors and nurses were visibly exhausted, scandalously under trained and thoroughly demoralized. After we treated the most urgent cases (which took five full days), the sorry staff was assembled before me. “This will not stand,” I said. “Mr. Tung? Tell them, in the strongest terms possible, that I have had the dishonour of teaching undergraduate medical students with a more solid foundation in medicine and anatomy.” I was, perhaps, overly harsh. But is that even relevant? This is not the real world here, after all, if by that one means a world interested in the delicate egos and moods of the faint-hearted. This is no hospital ward where we punch a clock and entertain notions of seniority, union dues and advancement. This is an alternate world, an unreal world. It is a world of man’s blackest construction.
Shall I tell you what was in that syringe I left for the mother? You will know. It was enough. That is all I can say. I held it to my arm to demonstrate the procedure. I pretended to stick myself, then indicated where the thumb compresses the pump. I did it again, holding it out and miming the steps. She watched, silently. Then I handed it to her and climbed down the ladder.
The mother might have left it there, or thrown it into the rubble below, or sold the unused needle in the local black market. Or perhaps she slipped it into her daughter’s arm, then into her own.
Please do not judge me. The world cannot be cleaved into two convenient halves of right and wrong. War and peace, black and white. Lovely notions but terribly flawed. I hope you will understand that these words and actions stand only for my own thoughts and deeds and are meant to represent no one else and no other place or thing. I saw a situation and acted as best I knew how. I claim no privileged domain over right and wrong, not as it applies to individual behaviour. I have seen too much of the world to trick myself into believing that. You will have your own sense of how things should be, and that is as it should be.
*
Ho sits on an upturned trunk beside the window, looking through my recent drawings. What does he learn from them? Perhaps he’s not a poet after all but an artist or surgeon intent on overtaking the great Bethune at his own game. How pleased I should be! Perhaps he will be my student one day. I have put tea on for us. When it’s ready, I will flip open the Chinese dictionary and ask if he takes sugar. I might see him smile.
*
It was at Ho-chia Chuang, a border town of perhaps ten thousand situated between Shansi and Shensi provinces, that I cemented my reputation as a feared presence. Eyes turned down at my approach. I was a feared officer by then, a man of legendary temper. How I shudder now at the thought. People shrank from my presence. Conversations ceased, and in silence they gave the open-palmed salute to the forehead. I understood the dead, so the living and their small concerns did not interest me. It was as though I saved my compassion for the dying. For anyone else I had no patience, and this I regret. The near-dead, curled and silent or clawing the air in their pathetic contortions, were my only concern. So what if my students, those would-be doctors, nurses, orderlies and aides, could not stomach the arrogance of a stranger, even if he happened to be the pinnacle of their aspirations? Well, then, they were dressed down, shamed for their selfishness and told to leave.
Upon my arrival I made myself available for queries and then, when no one spoke, their eyes downcast, I ordered each man and woman to formulate a question. “Make it a good one,” I said. I demanded that they learn, and fast. “Those of you with strength and character will change the direction of this war, and will stay on here. The others will find postings elsewhere,” I said. “Nothing matters here at all except the comfort and dignity of our patients.” With each question posed, if I sensed weakness I’d remind the speaker of his profound ignorance; when he returned the next day, I’d heap praise upon him. Nothing but exactitude, dedication and order would suffice. I told them it was my duty to rid the hospital of anyone whose natural inclination was to drop bloody gauze on the floor, ignore the pain of his patients or dream about the end of his shift before it had scarcely begun. That person was useless to us. At times now I cringe when recalling my tone, but I made a hospital out of that chaos. That is our triumph, and it must be remembered.
After those few days it became clear enough that no one but I could achieve a similar success throughout the entire Border Region. I was the most experienced and most capable. For the Director of Medical Services of the Eighth Route Army, Dr. Chiang Chi-tsien, I prepared a written report concentrating on the lack of sanitary conditions and proper medical training, the frequently incorrect use of medicines and an overall and alarming absence of supplies and discipline. I conducted a thorough investigation, interviewed the entire staff, ran through all the procedures. This facility had failed utterly, and I had no reason to believe it was different from any other in the region. The underlying problem, I concluded, was the Eighth Army’s woeful lack of adequate training. I had begun to remedy this situation, I said, and detailed my preliminary efforts.
After I spoke with Dr. Chiang, it was decided that I would prepare a manual outlining basic measures regarding sanitation, wound cleaning and dressing that could be printed as a booklet and distributed to clinics and field hospitals throughout the province and beyond.
In order to continue this work I departed on a tour of the front near the end of May. I was accompanied by Mr. Tung and Ho, my boy, two student surgeons, a Mr. Ping and a Mr. Sun, a nurse and an armed escort of three soldiers. For over six weeks we travelled from village to village like a Gypsy caravan. Instead of bottled herbs and ancient recipes we carried as much spotty evidence of the twen
tieth century as could be loaded onto our sweaty, half-starved, overworked animals, as if we aimed to deliver the healing powers of modern medicine and technique over the limitless reaches of an undiscovered empire.
*
We were still without a permanent base we could return to. By mid-July Dr. Brown was obliged to return to the Mission Hospital from which he’d been given leave. Now I was alone for the first time since meeting Jean in New York fifteen months before, and the only trained doctor in over 100,000 square miles. As a distraction from the reality of these overwhelming odds, I threw myself into my work with even greater vigour and spent my days reorganizing all medical procedures at Sung-yen K’ou. Of course, there was nothing so grand as a hospital there, only a series of huts and shacks that had been appropriated from the villagers, a breeding ground for untold infection, in which wounded men lay, largely unattended in their filth, stretched out on their hard mattresses with not so much as a blanket or change of clothes.
In order to begin the process of correcting the lamentable conditions there, I saw to the construction of an operating room, a sterilizer, one hundred leg and arm splints, standardized dressing trays, urinals, bedpans, stretcher racks and an incinerator.
To instill routine and improve procedure, I drew up operational checklists defining nursing responsibilities, began holding one-hour tutorials on basic aspects of anatomy and physiology, making much use of a blackboard, and convened a weekly conference at which questions and concerns might be raised. I was aided in this respect by the indefatigable interpreter, Mr. Tung, who had proven himself more than useful in getting across not only my words but also my displeasure, disgust and rage at the frequent incompetence.
It was here at Sung-yen K’ou, in sight of the Great Wall some ten miles distant, that we built our hospital in the shell of an abandoned Buddhist temple. Beside this structure, I was provided an office in a small house that had belonged to a large farming family who had perished in the war. Given seed money of two thousand dollars over a period of two months, carpenters and stonemasons transformed the temple into the Demonstration Hospital, whose thirty beds would serve as a training centre for all medical matters. Every morning, sometimes as early as six, I was awakened by the sound of hammers, saws and axes. It was with the pride and humility of a beneficent ruler that I walked among the rising walls of this great cathedral, encouraging the workers with a cheer or double handshake, bowing deeply under the hot sun to praise their efforts.
My hospital opened three months later, on September 15, 1938. It was indeed a proud day, and one that I wish I had been able to share with your dear mother. How her face would have glowed with joy. But I did not stay long to bask in the glory, the Japanese made sure of that. We struck out for Hopei Province, where there were new reports of a gathering threat. Throughout the remainder of that month and well into October we travelled by horse and by foot, with three tethered mules bearing the burden of our equipment and supplies, visiting one village after another. Ho and Mr. Tung were always at my side; the latter now, in addition to bridging the linguistic divide between me and the world, served as my anaesthetist. We moved from skirmish to skirmish operating and, when time permitted, instructing those men and women who were able to learn.
One night, shortly after the evening meal, a young man approached me and Mr. Tung. When he saluted me, I rose.
“What is it?” I asked.
His face was visibly upset. Not unlike Ho, he was very young.
Mr. Tung listened to him and then turned to me. “There has been an attack,” he said, “on Sung-yen K’ou. The Japanese have overrun the town. Nothing is left.”
“The hospital?” I said.
“Destroyed.” he said.
Ho appeared then. He had not yet heard the news. He leaned across the table. I suppose now he was going to remove my plate. Perhaps it was the expression I wore on my face, the rage he saw there, but before he was able to withdraw his hand, I grabbed his wrist and raised it to my face, examining it as if for some abrasion or proof of . . . I don’t know what. I knew I had terrified him, though, and I had no business doing that. From the corner of my eye I could see the fear on his face as he glanced at Mr. Tung. His limp hand offered no resistance. I threw it down in disgust and walked out into the dark.
I walked through the village and out into the country. I don’t know precisely where. But there are hours I cannot account for. The Japanese knew perfectly well how to strike at the morale of the Eighth, how to cut its heart out perfectly. I had been warned that the hospital might prove an irresistible target, yet my persuasiveness and vanity had won that argument. And as if to shame myself further still I had assaulted the person as loyal to me as if he were my own son. Children are the heritage of the Lord, I heard myself say.
The following morning I awoke in my tent. My limbs ached. My stomach was empty. I dressed and slipped out from under the tent flap. Light was just breaking over the hills. Ho sat alone by the cooking fire. He rose and saluted, still afraid of me. When I motioned with a hand to my mouth, he turned to the fire and began preparing my meal. Watching him, I wondered: Had I become my father?
*
I have been thinking a fair bit about mortality lately. You might suppose I’ve always done this, but you would be wrong. You might lose your shirt on that one. I have spent a lifetime in the presence of death. I have watched it, touched it, regretted it, bereaved it and done my best to dodge it for these last forty-nine years, but it strikes me as odd that I have not really pondered it. I am not one to duck philosophical issues, nor am I easily frightened. Could there be in the inner reaches of my heart some residual Christian belief that I draw upon in moments of need? It surprises me even to think this.
It has been a difficult stretch, lately. We are all worn out. I’m often too tired to write and yet find myself wandering in thought more than is usual, even for the dreamer I am. I’ve been recalling the surgery I underwent to collapse my tubercular lung so many years ago, in October of 1927. Why should this occur to me now? I remember walking lost among the great dark trees along the shores at Saranac Lake the day before the procedure, in my mind running through the operation I’d chosen to subject myself to, when I saw my old mother quietly standing beside a large pine, watching me. I hadn’t known she was coming. I had informed her as to the state of my health, of course, and the date of my surgery. Even so, her presence there surprised me. It was as if she’d felt her own life’s blood at the edge of extinction.
We walked together quietly. A light breeze drifted over the lake. It was an odd reversal, I thought, the mother walking slowly for the son, who in turn resembled an old man shuffling off to his own funeral.
“I know what I’m saying,” she told me. “I know you’ll be fine. There is still much in this world for you to do, Norman.”
“The world needs a fair bit of correcting, I’ll grant you that, but I’m not so sure I am the one to do it.”
She took my hand in hers. “You are a special man. You’re on this earth for a reason. The Lord will see that you understand that reason.”
I said, “That I can offer myself as a guinea pig?”
She said, sternly, “Don’t mock His ways.”
“What, then, is this great plan of His? The Kaiser? Sixteen million dead of the bloody Spanish influenza? Is that His great plan? Forgive me if I don’t drop down on my knees.”
“Will you pray with me?”
I looked at her. “You know I almost killed a man? Only three weeks ago. Frances’s lover. Did the war do that to me—the faithless, jealous husband?”
She didn’t say anything. We were stopped, standing on a pebbled shore. Out before us the lake was a sheet of unbroken glass, reflecting the sky. Here was all Heaven and Earth spread before us and I could think only of mocking the beliefs that had formed me and defined the one woman who had always loved me, unconditionally, perfectly.
I said, “What do you think of God’s plan now, Mother? A murderer if I’d shown half the bravery I like to think I have.”
She turned and walked back up the shore. I’d hurt her gravely, saying that. I thought I’d driven her away for good. To my shame, I was glad to have her gone.
That night we ate in silence. She had reserved a guest cabin. We sat on her porch, our chairs positioned to face the lake.
“I want to apologize,” I said. “I haven’t been thinking straight.”
“I know. A mother knows.”
I said, “He couldn’t come?”
“Your father gave it a fair bit of considering. He fears his congregation would be lost without him. I told him it was the other way around. ‘You should think about that,’ I said. He didn’t appreciate my saying that and went upstairs for the rest of the night. At breakfast he gave me a letter. He went out without touching a thing.”
She got up and went into the cabin. The screen door slammed. The sound carried over the lake. She returned a moment later and placed the sealed envelope before me. I didn’t move to pick it up.
