‘We’ll come with you,’ she said again, out loud, and this time the man came towards her and gave her another letter.
This one was just as abrupt and said: Please bring these books. A list followed, eight titles. He told her where they could be found in his office. She told her sons to get a few extra clothes and shoes, but she packed nothing for herself. She carried only the books, and once they were outside the man directed them to an already humming car.
Linus Corea made his way to the tent in the dark and lay down on the cot. It was nine at night, and if they came they would be there in about five hours. He had told the men when it was most likely for her to be home alone. He needed to sleep. He had been working in the triage tent for close to six hours, so even with the brief nap after lunch he was exhausted.
He had been at the camp of the insurgents ever since they had picked him up in Colombo. They had got him a little after two in the afternoon and by seven he was in the southern hills. No one had spoken to him in the car, just the idiot language, a joke of theirs. What good it did he wasn’t sure. When he reached the camp they explained in Sinhala what they wanted him to do, which was to work as a doctor for them. Nothing more. It was not an intense conversation, he wasn’t threatened. They told him he could see his family in a few months. They said he could sleep now but in the morning he would have to work. A few hours later they woke him and said there was an emergency, and led him into the triage tent with a lantern and hung it on a hook above a half-dead body and asked him to operate on the skull in lamplight. The man was too far gone, still they asked him to operate. He himself was uncomfortable with his broken rib and whenever he leaned forward pain tore through him. Half an hour later the man died and they carried the lantern to another bed, where someone else who had been shot had been waiting in silence. He had to remove the leg above the knee, but the man lived. Linus Corea went back to sleep at two-thirty. At six a.m. they woke him again to begin work.
After a few days he asked them to get some smocks for him, some rubber gloves, some morphine. He gave them a list of things he needed, and that night they attacked a hospital near Gurutulawa and got the medical essentials and kidnapped a nurse for him. She too, strangely, did not complain about her fate, just as he hadn’t. Privately he was irritated, and tired of a world that necessitated this, but the device of courtesy that had been false in his other life continued. He thanked people for nothing much and he didn’t ask for anything unless it was badly needed. He became accustomed to this lack of need, was rather proud of it. If he wanted something—syringes, bandages, a book—he would write out a list and give it to them. Maybe a week later, maybe six weeks, he’d get them. The first hospital attack was the only one they planned just for him.
He did not know how long they would keep him so he began to teach the nurse everything he could about surgery. Rosalyn was about forty, very smart under her seeming complacency. He had her operating alongside him when they were overrun with wounded.
After the first month he admitted to himself that he didn’t miss his children or wife anymore, even that much of Colombo. Not that he was happy here, but being busy he was preoccupied.
There was no energy in him to be angry or insulted. Six till noon. Two hours off for lunch and sleep. Then he worked six more hours. If there was a crisis he worked longer. The nurse was always beside him. She wore one of the smocks that he had requested and was very proud of it, washing it out every evening so it would be clean in the morning.
It was just another day but to him it was his birthday. And he thought about that on his walk to the tent. He was fifty-one. The first birthday in the mountains. At noon the jeep swept by and he and the nurse were bundled in. They drove for some time and then he was blindfolded. Soon after, they pulled him from the vehicle. He gave up then. A lot of wind in his face. With his probing feet he sensed he was on a ledge. A cliff? He was pushed and he was flying in mid-air, falling, but before there was fear he hit water. Mountain cold. He was all right. He pulled off the blindfold and heard a cheer. The nurse, in her clothes, dove off the rock into the water beside him. The men dove in after that. They somehow knew about his birthday. From then on, a swim became a part of the day’s schedule, if there was time. He always thought of it before he fell asleep. It heightened his excitement about the oncoming day. The swim.
He was asleep when his family arrived. The nurse tried to wake him, but he was dead to the world. She suggested that the wife come into her tent with the two boys so he could sleep undisturbed, he had to be up in a few hours to work. At what? the wife said. He’s a doctor, the nurse said.
It was just as well. The drive had been arduous and she and the children were tired themselves. This was not the time to greet and talk. When they woke the next morning it was ten, and her husband had already been working for four hours. Had walked into their tent carrying his mug of tea, looked at them, and then had gone to work with the nurse. The nurse had told him she was surprised his wife was that young, and the doctor had laughed. In Colombo he would have reddened or become angry. He was aware this nurse could say anything to him.
So when his wife and children woke they were ignored. The nurse was gone, the soldiers they saw went their own way. The mother insisted they stay together, and they went searching around the compound like lost tourists till they found the nurse washing bandages outside a dirty tent.
Rosalyn came up to him and said something he did not catch and she repeated it, that his wife and children were by the tent entrance. He looked up, then asked her if she could take over, and she nodded. He walked away from the close focus of the tent work, passed people lying on the ground, towards his wife and the children. The nurse could see him almost bouncing with pleasure. When he came closer his wife saw the blood on his smock and she hesitated. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, lifting her into an embrace. She touched his beard, which he had forgotten he had grown. There were no mirrors and he hadn’t seen it.
‘You met Rosalyn?’
‘Yes. She helped us last night. You of course wouldn’t wake up.’
‘Mmm.’ Linus Corea laughed. ‘They keep me going.’ He paused, then said, ‘It’s my life.’
*
Whenever a bomb went off in a public place, Gamini stood at the entrance of the hospital, the funnel of the triage, and categorized the incoming victims, quickly assessing the state of each person—sending them to Intensive Care or to the operating theatre. This time there were women too, because it had been a street bomb. All survivors in the outer circle of the explosion came in within the hour. The doctors didn’t use names. Tags were put on the right wrist, or on a right foot if there was no arm. Red for Neuro, green for Orthopaedic, yellow for Surgery. No profession or race. He liked it this way. Names were recorded later if the survivors could speak, in case they died. Ten cc’s of sample blood were taken from each of the patients and attached to their mattresses, along with disposable needles that would be reused if they were needed.
The triage separated the dying from those who needed immediate surgery and those who could wait; the dying were given morphine tablets so time would not be spent on them. Distinguishing the others was more difficult. Street bombs, usually containing nails or ball bearings, could cut open an abdomen fifty yards from the explosion. Shock waves travelled past someone and the suction could rupture the stomach. ‘Something happened to my stomach,’ a woman would say, fearing she had been cut open by bomb metal, while in fact her stomach had flipped over from the force of passing air.
Everyone was emotionally shattered by a public bomb. Months later survivors would come into the ward saying they feared they might still die. For those on the periphery, the shrapnel and fragments that flew through their bodies, magically not touching any vital organs, were harmless because the heat of the explosion would sterilize the shrapnel. But what did harm was the emotional shock. And there was deafness or semi-deafness, depending on which way one’s head was turned on the street that day. Few could afford to have an ear
drum reconstructed.
In these times of crisis junior staff members did the work of orthopaedic surgeons. Roads to larger medical centres were often closed because of mines, and helicopters were unable to travel in darkness. So all versions of trauma, all versions of burns, surrounded the trainees. There were only four neurosurgeons in the country: two brain surgeons in Colombo, one in Kandy and one in the private sector—but he had been kidnapped a few years earlier.
Meanwhile, far away in the south, there were other interruptions. Insurgents entered the Ward Place Hospital in Colombo and killed a doctor and two of his assistants. They had come looking for one patient. ‘Where is so and so?’ they had asked. ‘I don’t know.’ There was bedlam. After finding the patient, they pulled out long knives and cut him to pieces. Then they threatened the nurses and demanded they not come to work anymore. The next day the nurses returned, not in uniforms but in frocks and slippers. There were gunmen on the roof of the hospital. There were informers everywhere. But the Ward Place Hospital remained open.
There was little of that kind of politics in the base hospitals. Gamini and his assistants, Kasan and Monica, managed a quick nap in the doctors’ lounge when they could. Half the time curfews kept them from going home. Gamini wasn’t able to sleep, in any case. He hadn’t come down yet from the pills he had recently started taking, the adrenaline still in him though his brain and motor senses were exhausted, so he would walk outside into the night under the trees. There would be a few people smoking, relatives of the wounded. He had no wish for contact, there was just his blood racing. He came back inside and picked up a paperback and stared at a page as if it were a scene on another planet. Finally he would go again to the children’s ward to find a bed where he was a stranger and felt safer. A few mothers would look up with suspicion, concerned to protect their children from this unknown man, like hens, before recognizing him as the doctor who had come to the area two years before, who could never sleep, who climbed now onto a sheetless mattress and lay on his back, still, until his head fell to the left watching the blue light. When he was asleep the desk nurse unlaced his shoes and removed them. He snored loudly, and sometimes it woke the children.
He was thirty-four years old then. Things would get worse. By the time he was thirty-six, he was working in Accident Services Hospital in Colombo. ‘Gunshot Services,’ they called it. But he remembered the pediatric wards in the North Central Province, the blue light above that jaundiced child which somehow also comforted him, its specific frequency of 470 to 490 nanometres that all night kept breaking down the yellow pigment. He remembered the books, the four essential medical texts and the stories he never finished reading though he kept them in his hands for hours as he sat in the cane chair trying to rest, trying to come down to some kind of human order, but instead only darkness came down on him in the room, his eyes peering at the pages while his brain stared past them to the truth of their times.
It was one a.m. when Sarath and Anil arrived in the centre of Colombo, having driven through the city’s empty grey streets. As they got to Emergency Services, she said, ‘Is it okay? Us moving him like this?’
‘It’s okay. We’re taking him to my brother. With luck he’ll be somewhere there in Emergency.’
‘You have a brother here?’
Sarath parked and was still for a moment. ‘God, I’m exhausted.’
‘Do you want to stay here and sleep? I can take him in.’
‘It’s okay. I’d better talk to my brother anyway. If he’s there.’
Gunesena was asleep and they woke him and walked him between them into the building. Sarath spoke to someone at the desk and the three of them sat down to wait, Gunesena’s hands on his lap like a boxer’s. There was a daylight sense of work going on around Admissions, though everyone moved in slow motion and quietly. A man in a striped shirt came towards them and chatted with Sarath.
‘This is Anil.’
The man in the striped shirt nodded at her.
‘My brother, Gamini.’
‘Right,’ she said, flatly.
‘He’s my younger brother—he’s our doctor.’
There had been no touching between him and Sarath, not a handshake.
‘Come—’ Gamini helped Gunesena to his feet and they all followed him into a small room. Gamini unstoppered a bottle and began swabbing the man’s palms. She noticed he wasn’t wearing gloves, not even a lab coat. It looked as if he had just come from an interrupted card game. He injected the anaesthetic into the man’s hands.
‘I didn’t know he had a brother,’ she said, breaking the silence.
‘Oh, we don’t see much of each other. I don’t speak of him either, you know. We go our own way.’
‘He knew you were here, though, and what shift you were on.’
‘I suppose so.’
They were both intentionally excluding Sarath from their conversation.
‘How long have you been working with him?’ Gamini now asked.
She said, ‘Three weeks.’
‘Your hands—they are steady,’ Sarath said. ‘Have you recovered?’
‘Yes.’ Gamini turned to Anil. ‘I’m the family secret.’
He pulled the bridge nails from Gunesena’s anaesthetized hands. Then he washed them with Betalima, a crimson sudsing fluid that he squirted out of a plastic bottle. He dressed the wounds and talked quietly to his patient. He was very gentle, which for some reason surprised her. He pulled open a drawer, got another disposable needle and gave him a tetanus shot. ‘You owe the hospital two needles,’ he murmured to Sarath. ‘There’s a shop on the corner. You should get them while I sign out.’ He led Sarath and Anil out of the room, leaving the patient behind.
‘There are no beds left here tonight. Not for this level of injury. See, even crucifixion isn’t a major assault nowadays. . . . If you can’t take him home I’ll find someone to watch him while he sleeps out in Admissions—I’ll okay it, I mean.’
‘He can come with us,’ Sarath said. ‘If he wants I’ll get him a job as a driver.’
‘You better replace those needles. I’m going off duty soon. Do you want to eat? Along the Galle Face?’ He was talking again to Anil.
‘It’s two in the morning!’ Sarath said.
She spoke up. ‘Yes. Sure.’
He nodded at her.
Gamini pulled open the passenger-side door and got in beside his brother, which left Anil in the back seat with Gunesena. Well, she’d have a better view of both of them.
The streets were empty save for a silent patrol of military moving under the arch of trees along Solomon Dias Mawatha. They were stopped at a roadblock and asked for their passes. A half-mile beyond that they came to a food stall and Gamini got out and bought them all something to eat. On the road the younger brother looked thin as his shadow, feral.
They left Gunesena sleeping in the car and walked onto Galle Face Green and sat near the breakwater by the darkness of the sea. While Gamini unwrapped his spoils, Anil lit a cigarette. She was not hungry, but Gamini would in the next hour consume several packets of lamprais, a startling amount for someone she considered slight and bony. She noticed him palm a pill and swill it down with Orange Crush.
‘We get a lot like this one. . . .’
‘Nails in hands?’ She realized she sounded horrified.
‘Nowadays we get everything. It’s almost a relief to find a common builder’s nail as a weapon. Screws, bolts—they pack their bombs with everything to make sure you get gangrene from explosions.’
He unwrapped the leaf of another lamprais and ate with his fingers. ‘. . . Thank God it’s not a full moon. Poya days are the worst. Everyone thinks they can see. They go out and step on something. Are you the team working on the new skeletons?’
‘How do you know about that?’ She was suddenly tense.
‘It’s the wrong time for unburials. They don’t want results. They’re fighting a war on two sides now, the government. They don’t need more criticism.’
�
�I understand that,’ Sarath said.
‘But does she?’ Gamini paused. ‘Just be careful. Nobody’s perfect. Nobody’s right. And too many people know about your investigation. There is always someone paying attention.’
There was a short silence. Then Sarath asked his brother what else he was doing.
‘Just sleep and work,’ Gamini yawned. ‘Nothing else. My marriage disappeared. All that ceremony—and then it evaporated in a couple of months. I was too intense then. I’m probably another example of trauma, you see. That happens when there is no other life. What the fuck do my marriage and your damn research mean. And those armchair rebels living abroad with their ideas of justice—nothing against their principles, but I wish they were here. They should come and visit me in surgery.’
He leaned forward to take one of Anil’s cigarettes. She lit it and he nodded.
‘I mean, I know everything about blast weaponry. Mortars, Claymore mines, antipersonnel mines which contain gelignite and trinitrotoluen. And I’m the doctor! That last one results in amputations below the knee. They lose consciousness and the blood pressure falls. You do a tomography of the brain and brain stem, and it shows haemorrhages and edema. We use dexamethasone and mechanical ventilation for this—it means we have to open the skull up. Mostly it’s hideous mutilation, and we just keep arresting the haemorrhages. . . . They come in all the time. You find mud, grass, metal, the remnants of a leg and boot all blasted up into the thigh and genitals when the bomb they stepped on went off. So if you plan to walk in mined areas, it’s better to wear tennis shoes. Safer than combat boots. Anyway, these guys who are setting off the bombs are who the Western press calls freedom fighters. . . . And you want to investigate the government?’
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