The Good Sister

by Chris Morgan Jones

  ‘Sorry.’ This is one word she does have. She looks down at the floor but I don’t need to see her eyes to know she’s terrified. ‘Sorry.’

  Hafa is scared herself, I can see it. She needs to make the situation right.

  ‘Eat it,’ she says to the girl. ‘Take it. Eat it.’

  ‘That was me. I will eat it.’

  Hafa looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.

  ‘You cooked this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I didn’t. I left it for Zarifa, but he’ll kill her and he may not kill me. Borz’s eyes are like green ice, they feel like they could burn a hole right through my chest.

  I reach across the table and take the wing from Hafa whose mouth is actually hanging open. What I’m doing is a far bigger deal than undercooking a piece of chicken.

  It’s not that bad. In fact, it’s fine. The great warrior, killer of a thousand men, floored by a drop of bird’s blood. I eat it like it’s no problem and put the bones on my plate. Borz sits looking away with his arms crossed as if this whole business was way beneath his dignity. Everyone else has their eyes down.

  ‘Apologize,’ says Hafa when I’m done.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Borz sniffs, pushes his plate away, wipes his mouth.

  ‘Come here and say it.’

  I get up and stand by him. His frame bulges out from the chair.

  ‘Closer.’

  I take a step forward, so that my niqab touches his arm.

  ‘Look at me,’ he says. He uncrosses his arms and places a hand on each thigh. ‘Look at me.’

  Inwardly I brace myself for whatever’s coming but even then it’s so quick I don’t see it. He keeps his palm open but you wouldn’t call it a slap, his hand is rigid and it makes a hollow sound like a balloon bursting. I fall backwards, bring my hand up to my face, fall into Hafa, who pushes me away.

  ‘Here.’

  Impatiently wagging the fingers of the same hand Borz calls me back, points to where he wants me to stand. I keep my body turned from him but he shouts at me to face him and as I bring myself slowly round he hits me again. He repeats this process four times, varying the delay each time so that I never know when the blow is coming. By the end my cheek is ringing and I can feel my eye beginning to swell. I draw my hand across my mouth and blood comes away with it.

  With as much dignity as I still have I walk steadily from the room.

  13

  On his third day, Abraham returned to the hospital to find Huq darting about the corridors in a high state of panic.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Taking those drugs to Dar al-Shifa. You sent me.’

  ‘What took you so long?’

  ‘Al Mogmaa is blocked. You heard the bombs last night?’

  ‘Find Saad. We need to find Saad.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s a fighter in that room with half his fucking leg missing. And not just any fighter. Find him, or we are both fucked.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Just fucking go! Try upstairs.’

  Upstairs the hospital wasn’t a hospital. It was a place for the sick and the injured to wait and to die.

  And to moan, wail, scream. A low hum of pain washed in and out of the halls, hung over the patients lying hopeless on the broken floor, settled on an old man with twin cotton pads taped over his eyes. Settled on bodies that hadn’t been cleared. Clung to the airstrike victims and the thick layer of fine dust that covered them. As he wandered, Abraham felt that he occupied a different realm, that he could only look on as a ghost might, unable to act. Someone was helping these people. There were slings and bandages, limbs were set in plaster, but for every patient who had had treatment there were five waiting for it, and an image took root in Abraham’s mind of waters swelling impossibly at the entrance to a narrow channel.

  A ghost he might be, but he could be seen, and as he passed people looked up with a mixture of loathing and hope. His armband. How he longed to take it off. If he was in rebel country to the west he could do proper work, treat people, show the courage he was beginning to discover in himself. Here he was a lickspittle, a toady, a traitor to the oath he had never actually taken, and he hated himself about as much as everyone around him did.

  But even in this chaos there must be a system, some way of deciding who was treated, some sort of triage – insert himself into it and he could at least begin to make himself useful. He saw no staff up here, except maybe a nurse or two, and he hesitated to ask them because there was no way of knowing their allegiance. So he walked, and looked for a man in scrubs without an armband, feeling more useless and ashamed with every step.

  Turning a corner, he found himself in a wide hall where the hospital’s main entrance must once have been, now half collapsed into glass and masonry and sheered lengths of window frame. Armed guards stood by the opening that remained, and through them now against the white street outside came a black figure carrying a child, head turned to its mother’s shoulder, arms loosely wrapped around her neck. One of the guards stepped in front of her, hand on the trigger of his gun: who was she, where did she live, what did she want. The woman just shook her head, unable to speak, and behind her her husband began to answer. This was their son, five years old, he was hurt, they don’t know how, they found him with a great wound, they are good people, supporters of the cause, please, we need help.

  The guard stood, tilted his head, took his time.

  ‘You tell me how this happened or you turn around and fuck off.’

  Abraham walked to them and as his eyes adjusted to the light saw a wound in the boy’s side, deep and dark beyond the shirt someone had ripped apart to give it air. The boy made no sound; his skin was pale and the hair on his forehead pasted with sweat. Abraham stood between the fighter and the family and crossed his arms.

  ‘Are you a doctor?’ he said. ‘Can you treat this boy?’

  The fighter looked uncertain. The script for this exchange hadn’t been written.

  ‘How old is he?’ Abraham asked the father.

  Like a man used to being trapped by such questions, the father looked at Abraham and tried to divine the answer.

  ‘Five. Just five.’

  Abraham turned back to the fighter.

  ‘Do you think you should decide his future value to the khilafa?’

  Reaching to the mother he took the child and carefully held him, one arm across the shoulders, one under the knees. There was no weight to him.

  ‘The husband stays.’

  The fighter reached out and placed his hand on the man’s chest.

  ‘I might need him,’ said Abraham. ‘The mother’s hysterical.’

  He glared into the dumb eyes of the guard and realized what it was about these people. This man was no more a wolf than he was; he was a sheep, herded and processed like the people under him. Disrupt their programming and they couldn’t function.

  ‘I’m the doctor here.’

  There were no beds. Half the rooms had no furniture at all and the rest were full. Abraham went from doorway to doorway, desperation growing. Really, they had minutes to save the boy. He could feel the small store of life left in him as surely as he might see the dimming light from a bulb about to blow.

  ‘Are you a nurse?’

  He stopped a woman in the corridor and she nodded, said nothing.

  ‘Find me Dr Saad.’

  ‘I don’t know where he is.’

  ‘Are you ISIS?’

  He didn’t need to see her eyes to see that the question terrified her; she stiffened and shrunk back.

  ‘No.’

  ‘The boy will die. We don’t want to be the ones who killed him.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Tell him it’s a fighter’s son. Anything. Bring antiseptic, antibiotics.’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Try.’

  She went. Two more full rooms and then a closed door that with a nod Abraham had the father open. An office, small, hot
, not used, to judge by the papers piled on the desk and the floor and the stacks of chairs against the far wall.

  ‘Clear the desk. Push it all on the floor.’

  When they were done, Abraham laid the boy gently on the desk, wiped the hair from his brow, and told him everything was going to be okay. When he opened his eyes, as he did from time to time, the pupils were shaking, delirious. The colour was leaving him, his breaths were short and the skin around his eyes was turning a dark, lifeless grey. A handsome boy, like his father, with thin limbs and a graze on his elbow, the kind of injury a boy of five should sustain, playing somewhere perhaps, in the hanging ruins of someone’s former home.

  ‘Water,’ he said to the mother. ‘Get water and a cloth, whatever you can find.’

  She looked to her husband, and Abraham reassured her.

  ‘You’re veiled. It’s easier for you to move around. Please. It’ll be all right.’

  The wound was smaller than he’d thought at first; what he had taken to be flesh was only bloody skin. Gently turning the boy on his side, Abraham ripped the shirt right up to the armpit and looked around for something to cut the fabric. In the drawer of the desk he found a tiny pair of paper scissors, cut round the sleeve and up through the collar, and as he knelt to inspect him noticed a second wound on his back, an inch or two to the left of the spine. Oh God. Make me equal to this.

  The father knew. Half the fear on his face was for his son, and the rest for how much worse their lives might become if he told the truth.

  ‘What happened?’

  The father shook his head.

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not going to hurt him.’

  Such sadness in the man’s eyes. Such contortions.

  ‘It will help him. If you tell me.’

  ‘He was playing.’

  ‘Playing.’

  ‘He was playing football, in our street, and someone shot him. A friend dragged him away, another came to get me.’

  ‘Why did they shoot him?’

  ‘I don’t know. For playing.’

  Abraham breathed as deeply as he could and closed his eyes. One day God would punish these people. Whose God he didn’t know, and he didn’t care.

  The mother came with cloudy water in a metal jug and a strip of cloth that looked pristine, more or less, and Abraham cleaned the skin around both wounds. They were too low for the bullet to have damaged the liver, or the kidneys, but his appendix might have ruptured, and his bowel was almost certainly damaged. The bleeding had slowed, but then the poor boy’s blood pressure must have dropped to nothing, and there was no telling what was happening to him inside. Where was the nurse? He wouldn’t blame her for not delivering the message, or the doctor for not hearing it. Trapped in this tiny little hutch with the parents’ eyes on his sweating hands and all their hopes pushing down on him, Abraham might feel that there was nothing more important in the world – but this was nothing, this was just a tiny part of it, one small beat in an insane, endless drum roll of suffering and pain.

  ‘What’s his name?’ he asked. It was all he could think to say.

  ‘Ali.’

  ‘Ali.’ Abraham nodded and said the name. He did what he could, what he knew to do. Raised Ali’s hip on a thick pile of papers to try to slow the flow of blood, such as it was. Cleaned the wound. Checked his pulse, which was weak but steady. Really, that was it. What else was there? He needed drugs, and sterile dressings, and expertise. The weight of the responsibility, the sharpness of it – Abraham hadn’t felt anything like it since Ester’s diagnosis, when Sofia had been made of glass and at every step he had expected to drop her.

  Without real help the boy would die. With a look, he let the father know what he was doing and left the room.

  Now he ran, picking his way through the bodies and the soon-to-be bodies, round to the broad staircase and down again onto the fighters’ floor, cool and ordered in comparison. Passed Huq and held a hand up to his punchable questioning face. Worked hard not to catch the eye of a single fighter.

  In the theatre, a nurse was washing blood from the operating table onto the floor.

  ‘Where is he?’

  She looked at him, or at least she turned to him, and said nothing.

  ‘Saad. Where is he?’

  But she didn’t or wouldn’t understand him.

  Abraham found him three rooms away, inspecting the dressing on a wound to a fighter’s neck, so intently that he appeared not to notice Abraham come in. The fighter’s face was pained and irritable; seeing Abraham, he pushed the doctor away.

  ‘Enough. You. What are you fucking staring at?’

  The doctor turned, still concentrating, and frowned at Abraham. His scrubs were splashed with old and fresh blood.

  ‘One of your patients. The operation you just finished. His blood pressure is dropping. I was told to get you.’

  Behind his metal glasses the doctor’s eyes were grave, bloodshot, searching. His gown was too big for him and the sleeves were pulled up by rubber bands at his elbows. He wore no black band.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I . . . I’m new. Please hurry.’

  The soldier closed his eyes in pain and impatience.

  ‘Fuck off, the both of you. Would you? Fuck.’

  Still frowning, the doctor looked up at Abraham as if he was simply too tired to work out the puzzle he represented, and passing him left the room, walking at such a pace that Abraham had to jog to catch up.

  ‘There’s a boy, upstairs, he’s been shot through the flank, just inside the hip. I think he’s going to die.’

  The doctor stopped. Fighters passed and Abraham willed him to keep his voice down. At the far end of the corridor he could see Huq, peering.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I lied. It’s a boy. I need your help or he’s going to die.’

  ‘Sometimes that’s better.’ He studied Abraham’s eyes as he might a fresh case for diagnosis. ‘Why are you helping?’

  ‘I’m still new.’

  ‘If you’re fucking with me you’ll regret it. Show me.’

  Huq watched them impotently as they approached.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I need him upstairs,’ said the doctor, with a finality that caused Huq to take a step backwards to let them pass, glaring at Abraham for undermining his authority.

  In twenty minutes they had found supplies and the doctor was directing Abraham to fix a drip in the boy’s arm while he bandaged the two wounds. There was little else to be done; for now they had to wait for any bleeding to stop and guard against infection. Later he would operate, if that could be done and would actually help.

  ‘Do you know him?’

  Abraham took a moment to realize what he meant.

  ‘No. I never saw him before.’

  ‘Then why come to me?’

  ‘I knew he would die.’

  The doctor wasn’t satisfied, and Abraham understood.

  ‘I’m new. I guess the discipline is hard at first.’

  ‘That was a risk.’

  ‘I didn’t want this on my conscience.’

  ‘You have a conscience?’

  The door opened and the director of the hospital came into the tiny hot room, Huq behind him.

  ‘We’re busy,’ said the doctor.

  ‘With what? Who is that?’

  ‘A boy that you shot.’

  ‘Stop that now and get downstairs. A fighter is losing his life.’

  ‘When I’m ready.’

  ‘Stop it now.’

  The doctor looked up from his work.

  ‘How many times? Do you have another surgeon? No? So shoot me when you do.’

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  The director nodded his head at Abraham.

  ‘I needed help,’ said the doctor.

  ‘He told you to come up here.’

  ‘One of the nurses told me.’

  ‘Which nurse?’

  ‘Are you serious?
How would I know which nurse it was?’

  ‘He came for you. He brought you here.’

  ‘Fuck you people. I told you, a nurse came to tell me a boy was dying. I don’t like boys to die. Not boys who are playing in the street. Not even the boys you send to the front. This one may live. He may not. Maybe if he lives he’ll be strong enough to blow himself up for you one day and then you’ll be a fucking hero.’

  Abraham watched the director, whose eyes went from him to the doctor and back again.

  ‘You, we need. You, we do not. Downstairs, now. Not one more mistake. And you.’ He turned to Huq. ‘Keep better control of your people.’

  14

  can I see you my sister? would be good to see you

  after my work tomorrow? i can come to your makkar maybe

  — bien sûr ma soeur, any time. I am here for you always. Basha street, 143

  near the hospital?

  — a few blocks away

  take care sister, from the airstrikes, I’m surprised they put a makkar there

  — it’s fine, we hear them but we’re okay

  tomorrow probably

  — can’t wait, my sister, can’t wait

  15

  I don’t know what’s happening to me. My head is full of snakes and doubts. A crisis of faith. My first. I feel like I’m being split down the middle.

  There are some who profess to serve God and yet stand on the very fringe of faith. When blessed with good fortune they are content, but when an ordeal befalls them they turn upon their heels, forfeiting this life and the Hereafter.

  That way true perdition lies.

  Bed is no sanctuary. Maysan and I exchange looks when we say goodnight. I should hug her but everything is too tightly wound here, it’s too soon. It’s just good to know I’m not in this completely alone – although it’s not like we’re really together, we don’t talk or anything. Another human being who understands. It’s enough.

  Irene helps as well. She will be a good friend to me, I think. After class tomorrow I’ll go and see her, if I go straight there it shouldn’t be a problem – I can tell the driver it’s official business. So: sleep, work, then back to the makkar. Things aren’t so bad. The lights are out and I’m messaging her again when the door opens and there’s Borz, silhouetted, huge. I must have been nodding off because it gives me such a shock my heart starts racing.