by Dennis Bock
“He’s a good man, Norman,” she said.
“I’ll read it later.”
That letter remained unopened, tucked into the pages of a medical text, for the rest of my stay at the sanatorium. When I left, the book was packed among others and shipped, after the house where Frances and I had lived in Detroit was closed down, to Montreal, where it remained sealed, forgotten, until Father died in 1932. The evening I learned of his death, I opened the letter.
I poured myself a strong brandy, sat at the kitchen table of my small apartment and inserted a knife into a slit at the corner of the envelope, pulling the blade along the crease. I took the page out and read it, then folded and returned it to its envelope.
I found it again on an October morning, four years later, as I packed up my things for Spain. It was a poignant reminder of the end of things, a good life frustrated by silence and shame. Without thinking much about it, I slipped the letter into one of the books I’d set aside for the journey and resumed my packing. But I have kept it with me ever since, and want you to read it now.
Toronto
Oct 22, 1927
Dear Norman,
You have by now spoken with Mother, and perhaps she is at this very moment sitting before you, watching you read this letter from your absent father. Perhaps you are alone in that little cabin you have written to us about, I hope in swift and complete recovery following your operation. Either way I regret the fact that I have been unable to visit with you at Saranac Lake. I am told by a congregant—James McGovern, Jacob’s son, do you remember him? —that it is a lovely place of trees and hills and peaceful dark lakes. Much like Muskoka, he says, where you spent your early years. In any case, I am hopeful that this peace James referred to fills your heart now at this trying time.
As a father getting on in years I see that my life’s regrets are not few. Principal among them is the reality that for many years now I have been somewhat estranged from you, my son, and yet not in any absolute sense, for our relations are commonly respectful, as you will likely agree. But it is clear enough that there has remained between us an enmity the root of which I cannot but fail to explain or grasp. We are, it often seems at familial gatherings, reserved and suspicious strangers obliged to share a taxicab during a spot of summer rain. A mean characterization, but do you agree? It has been this way for as long as I can remember, and it is a terrible thing to admit, as I write this, so late (though God will show us that it is never too late) on the eve of this serious medical predicament you now face. Perhaps I have been too hard, too distant, too demanding a father? I am willing to assume what guilt I must in order that we together root out this hardness that you harbour toward me, for in my heart I feel much pride and love for you, as any father could toward his son. It is my great and sincere wish that you soften your thoughts toward your aging father, and that from this medical treatment you will emerge healthy and strong.
You must know you are not alone at this time. “After these things the word of the LORD came unto Abram in a vision, saying, ‘Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.’” Genesis 15:1
Please remember these words, Norman.
Your brother, Malcolm, and sister, Janet, send their love, as your dear Mother will have told you.
Your Father
*
I am proud to say I have pulled together a regular unit to accompany me on some short inspection tours throughout northern Shansi and Hopei. It is a good group, consisting of the two surgical students, Mr. Pin and Mr. Sun, as well as Ho and Mr. Tung. We are usually accompanied by a military escort of between two and twelve men, depending on the distance and area we are to cover. Behind enemy lines we usually take only two, as a larger group is more easily detected.
Recently we went up to Chia Kuan, a small grey town serving as a temporary base for soldiers of the 359th Brigade, and overrun with lice, chickens and more coughing black pigs. There we were greeted by Dr. Ku, Chief of Sanitary Service, and a Mr. Yuan, Political Commissar, both of that same brigade. It might once have been a picturesque village, Chia Kuan, whose mud streets were then dusted like Christmas brownies by dancing snow, but it had been transformed into a wasteland of sickly poultry eagerly pecking at one another’s startled eyes. Among the wounded men of the 359th, gangrene and the insidious bubbling abscesses caused by indifferent medical attention were chief among our concerns. In one day we treated seventeen patients, operating on five, one of whom, only eighteen or nineteen years of age, had lost the lower half of his face. What was so remarkable in this boy was that his eyes, only a breath above his disfigurement, had retained a soulful, almost angelic innocence. He seemed to watch patiently as I went about my work. That is not possible, I know, but those eyes led me to believe that in his mind—his mouth having vanished—he was, perhaps for an instant, smiling at me. Still a child not long absent from his mother’s arms, despite this mortal wound he was capable of hope. His eyes had not lost their belief that this world he knew, so harsh and uncaring, might yet yield goodness. They were the beautiful eyes of youth, and then, two hours later, he was dead.
We continued west to Chuan Lin Kiou, where we established another base for treating men from the 359th. Thirty-five more were delivered to us from Lia Yuan, a three-day trek over unforgiving road. The day after arriving there I was presented to Brigade Commander Wang Chen. He was tall for a Chinese, elegant and very serious, with the hands of a musician and the fine features of a leading man in the cinema. He received me in a large stone house at the edge of the village that had been given over to Company Command, its walls festooned with maps. He rose from his desk, saluted and welcomed me to Chuan Lin Kiou, then asked my opinion of the medical conditions in the military district. Again, Mr. Tung translated.
“They are very poor,” I told him.
“And here in Chuan Lin Kiou?”
“Also very poor,” I said. “The care your men have received is bordering on outright neglect.”
He tilted his head back and stared at me, as raven-eyed and fearsome as a wronged protagonist in some Cantonese opera who was poised to take the head off an old adversary. He rose and leaned over his desk on his clenched fists. I believed at the very least that Mr. Tung and I were about to be ejected.
A half minute passed, but I didn’t once remove my eyes from his. “Tell him again, Mr. Tung, that his men are dying needlessly.”
“Do you think this is Hong Kong?” was his response, after my words were translated. “Do you suppose the world is at your disposal? We are surrounded by the enemy and bound by hundreds of thousands of square miles with few roads and no rail line. Paris does not care about us, Doctor. London does not care. Nor does Washington. Surely you know this. We have nothing here but our will to defeat the enemy.”
“The world is coming,” I told him. “I am an example of that.”
“And when they bring us supplies you shall have all you ask for. But not until then.”
“I ask only to know in advance when your troops will next attack.”
He looked amused. “What will this achieve?”
“Beyond saving lives? Is there more?”
“Yes, you can prepare their graves in advance.” With a rueful smile he sat down.
The high mortality rate of the 359th, I explained, was due to infection and gangrene, and this might be severely reduced if a mobile medical unit were deployed within two miles of combat. Such a unit would require notification of an impending action in order to establish an aid station and administer treatment within five or ten hours instead of the usual forty or more. If wounds were treated faster, infection rates would fall. “That is what is killing your men now. Infection. Sepsis.”
He thanked me, then rose and saluted.
I believed my appeal had fallen on deaf ears. The fact that I was a foreign national, I thought, had not gone in my favour. I’d met many such men here, angere
d by the world’s indifference to their suffering, and I could hardly say I blamed him. But that evening I saw Commander Chen enter our operating theatre like a man retaking the stage to reconsider his conscience. He stood at the front of the room and said nothing as my two students performed an amputation. He stood silently while I searched inside a man’s abdomen for fragments of the bayonet shattered inside him. Small bubbles of gas escaping from his crusted wound told me the infection was deep, and I withdrew the shards of hard metal and dropped them into the tin cup at my side.
He stayed with us through the night and the following day, observing us at our work. In the afternoon I was summoned again to the room lined with maps and informed that my mobile unit should be readied to operate behind any future engagements with the Japanese.
Three days later, on the evening of the 26th, I was summoned from my tent and informed that three regiments of the Eighth Route Army were preparing an assault on a Japanese line north of Lin Chu, some forty miles northwest. The logistics were detailed in the extreme. Delighted to begin preparations, I instructed Ho to gather my non-medical essentials—cold weather clothing, sleeping gear and so forth—before nightfall. We arrived at our base, Tsai Chia Yu, in the early morning. There we were provided a guide to deliver us to Hei Ssu, a village of perhaps two dozen homes set beside a narrow mountain stream. I was pleased to see that a small aid station had been prepared in advance, even though it was housed in a primitive stone dwelling whose four rough walls were covered only by flat shale laid atop heavy branches. Only one glassless window looked west over a breathtaking landscape of wind-blown scrub rising gently to the world’s snowy heights. We had over seven hours before the Eighth Regiment’s wounded began arriving late that afternoon. I rested for an hour. Retrieving a notebook from my pack, I recorded some observations for my monthly report and then took the booklet Mao had given me and studied its mysterious characters, imagining what wisdom they held, before closing my eyes and waiting for the casualties to arrive.
*
I’m thinking about your mother now more than ever. The farther I move away in time, the more often she returns to me, and it sometimes feels to me that we’re two pencil points in a slowly closing circle. One day we will touch hands and the circle will be closed, I’m almost sure.
It’s dark now, and quiet, which makes remembering an easy thing.
Today my memory is of a walk in the hills we took together. Earlier that day I’d told her about the blue, shimmering sea, and watching helplessly as the planes came in over a harbour in the south of the country. I’d seen a boy of five or six years stare up in awe, with a child’s absolute wonder, as they swooped in low, as if he expected the pilot to wave to him from that sleek, speeding airship. Even when the crowd began to scatter, he stood fixed in place, enraptured, as the bomb was released. It wobbled awkwardly like a stick swinging through the air, and exploded far enough away that the concussive force didn’t knock him over. But an eye-blink later, his head jerked suddenly back, his knees gave and he collapsed, and died as the harbour rose up in horror and flames.
I told your mother this two weeks after she’d taken those photographs of the tank column heading for the Guadalajara front.
A Catalan surgeon named Frederick Duran Jordá asked me to talk to his team in the sierra north of Madrid about my transfusion unit. He was hoping to start up something similar in Barcelona. I had returned from the southeast only three days before, and the news of the attack on the Almeria-Málaga road had beaten me back to Madrid.
That evening in the sierra, in a large stone house on the edge of a village, I came to discover that the conference wasn’t what I had been led to believe. A car had come down to Madrid for us and, an hour later, dropped us at the gate of a large walled property. Here we were met by two men dressed in green and brown corduroy coats and pants. They wore berets and well-worn mountain boots and each carried a rifle. One of them accompanied us through a garden, past an empty swimming pool and into the house, where we were introduced to Captain Weber, from Syracuse, New York, a Spanish captain named Aroca and El Viti, the leader of a partisan group based near Segovia, a large, fit man who didn’t smile and continually bit the inside of his mouth. The American asked if Kajsa would please wait outside.
“This is my assistant,” I said, which by then was my custom.
“That’s fine,” he said. “Would your assistant mind waiting outside?”
I walked her out to the garden. When I returned Weber explained that a man of my expertise was needed in the hills near Segovia. My specific knowledge was required, he said. He was not able to go into detail.
“Once you have arrived,” he said, “you will be told what you’re needed for. Not before then.” He nodded at the partisan. “This man will guide you, El Viti. He knows only where he’s to take you.” Aroca listened carefully, his eyes moving back and forth between the two foreigners.
“I can be ready in twenty-four hours,” I said.
“Tonight,” Weber said. “It must be tonight.”
“Can I see your orders?”
From his breast pocket, the Spaniard withdrew a document. It was stamped and signed by General José Miaja.
“You’re opening another front at Segovia?”
He ignored the question. “This man will take you. It must be tonight.”
“The girl?”
“No,” he said.
In the late afternoon, as I waited for nightfall, your mother and I walked over the rocky fields at the edge of the town. We were just under an hour north of Madrid, and another hour from Segovia. I didn’t know where this man with dark emotionless eyes was taking me, but it couldn’t be as bad as Almeria. ‘The hills rose up into low mountains in the distance, and all around us grassy tussocks seemed like small islands among paths carved by generations of wandering goats.
We climbed over a stone wall covered in bramble and black raspberry. I was distracted. My thoughts had been in Almeria and the small boy I’d seen fold over on his knees, but now my imagination was up in the hills, over the Guadarrama Pass. Their coming up into this territory meant that they were planning on opening a new front at Segovia, and this entailed medical reconnaissance. I wondered when the assault would commence.
Kajsa was unusually quiet, and I supposed she was troubled by the incident at the house.
“Do you ever want to have children?” she said after a while.
“Not after what I saw down south.”
A driver and I had taken a new Renault down to Málaga, which was already emptying itself out, a whole city of refugees heading east on the coastal road to Almería. A hundred thousand people glutted this thin artery running parallel to the sea. We drove headlong into a catastrophe of women and children, twenty miles of sick and broken people and animals dying at the side of the road. Occasionally, without hurry, a Heinkel dipped from the clouds for a strafing. We began ferrying whoever we could the seventy miles to Almeria. And then the bombers came. We saved hundreds from the jaws of death only to deliver them into the belly of the beast.
Walking, we came to a shallow gully. I stepped over, then leaned back to offer my hand. She took it, and stepped across.
“Not even eventually?” she said. “After all this?”
“I can’t imagine a time when all this is over.”
We walked along the gravel road to the village.
The village sat on a hill looking down over a greening valley studded with grey stone fencing, goat trails and, far below, the road and rail leading back to Madrid. We walked along the high street, where most of the shops were closed and soon only the bars would be open. We wandered the smaller streets that reached up the hillside and ended at rock walls or abandoned buildings looking for somewhere smaller and quieter to have a drink, but nothing was open up there.
We went back down to the bar beside the fruit-seller, who was just then pulling
the steel grate down over his storefront. He didn’t look at us as we walked by him into the bar, which was crowded with men and their families. It was the hour of the aperitif, close to eight o’clock. The air was thick with black tobacco smoke and loud talk.
An empty table at the back of the bar overlooked the valley, where the evening sun cast a low golden light that left a lake of shadow below us but turned the eastern slope of the valley a resplendent, fiery green. We sat down with our drinks and watched two men playing chess at the table next to ours. One of them, much older, was being beaten badly and had only a few pieces left. The other man, who I realized was his son, was showing no mercy as he took one piece after another. Both father and son had short, stubby fingers. They were both labourers. The father didn’t look up as his son brusquely knocked pawns, knights and rooks off the board with his own pieces.
I gazed down at the road. “Madrid’s only thirty or forty miles away, full of terrified mothers.”
