William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War

“ No !” he bellowed. “ Bastard! ” He shook his head, pacing out the four walls, trying to come to terms with the disappearance of something so immutable and massy, so incontrovertibly there .

Saleh arrived timidly at the door. “Bwana,” he said apologetically. “They took it a long time ago.”

“When?” Temple said.

“After you and madam went away.”

Temple whirled round. Saleh backed off.

“I could not stop them, Bwana,” he protested. “Many men came. For five days they were working.”

“Who was it?” Temple demanded in a hoarse whisper. “Who took it?”

“Many men,” Saleh repeated. “The Germani.”

Temple swallowed. He knew who had taken it. Von Bishop. The man had tried systematically to defile his home. Erich von Bishop had stolen his Decorticator. He would have to pay. It was as simple as that.

Wincing slightly, Gabriel removed the grubby, worn bandages from his thigh. A pad of bloodstained lint was stuck to the scab. Gritting his teeth he pulled it away. The six-inch scab that was revealed glistened and oozed. Gabriel’s eyes watered with the stinging pain. Deppe couldn’t understand why his leg was taking so long to heal. Gabriel smiled to himself. He hopped to the doorway of the lean-to shed he lived in at the back of the hospital. A piece of blanket hung from the lintel. Pulling it to one side he should see the hospital kitchens and the dusty vegetable plots. There was no sign of Deppe or Liesl. If they ever found out what he was doing he’d be sent away at once, he was sure. Liesl might not send him away, but Deppe would. Deppe would never forgive him.

Gabriel limped back to his bed and sat down. The constant re-infection of his leg wound was easier to explain now that all the medical supplies were running out. They were washing and re-using all bandages now, most wounds got infected these days. Automatically he touched the puckered scars on his abdomen. He would always be grateful to Deppe; it was a shame he had to frustrate his best efforts with his leg.

Gingerly with his fingernail, Gabriel prised up an inch of the scab. His eyes started to water again. With his other hand he took a pinch of dirt from the floor and sprinkled the grains onto the glistening wet wound beneath, like salt on underdone meat. He pushed the scab back into place, and carefully rewound the bandage on. In a day or so, if past performances were a reliable guide, the wound would become itchy, then inflamed and putrid. Liesl would have to clean it out, use some of the dwindling supplies of disinfectants, wash the bandages and replace them. He tied the final knot. It was a risk of course. If it didn’t get treated the consequences could be most serious. But that was the advantage of working in the hospital: you were always well looked after.

He pulled the tattered hem of his shorts down over the bandage. He sat for a while staring at his thin knees. He had lost so much weight over the months of recovery. He couldn’t understand why: he ate as much as anyone else — better even than the other prisoners had. But he was just skin and bone now: skin, bone, muscle and cartilage. Deppe said that was another reason why his thigh wound was taking so long to heal.

Gabriel got to his feet and went outside. He squinted up at the sun trying to guess the time. Four o’clock, four-thirty maybe. Perhaps he should go back to the ward and see if there was anything Liesl wanted him to do. There was always work to be done. Usually it meant helping the dysentery cases. Sometimes he helped feed the very sick men, or wash them. When Liesl was on duty he did all sorts of fetching and carrying jobs. Deppe wasn’t so happy about employing him. He said that it was against regulations to compel prisoners to do menial work. But Gabriel always reminded him that he wasn’t being compelled. He wanted to help, he told Deppe; wanted to do his bit to relieve suffering. But Deppe wouldn’t listen and always frowned heavily when he saw Gabriel giving assistance.

Fortunately Deppe spent less and less time at the Nanda hospital. As the war went on and the casualty list inevitably grew, his expertise was required at other hospitals, makeshift clinics and convalescent homes. “Deppe’s just an old woman,” Liesl had said when Gabriel told her about the doctor’s reservations. “Anyway, he is never here.” It was this conspiracy against the fussy doctor that had encouraged their curious friendship, that had broken down the formal restraints that exist between nurse and patient, captor and captive.

Gabriel smiled to himself as he went into the hospital, not that you’d expect Liesl to pay much attention to customs or conventions. He’d never met such a strong-minded woman.

It seemed that as the war dragged on so Liesl’s attitude had become more indifferent and resigned. In his months as her patient Gabriel had been well placed to notice this transformation. She did her job as thoroughly and efficiently as the conditions allowed, but she didn’t seem particularly to care one way or another about anything. Only Deppe had the power to irritate her. She didn’t despair, but she didn’t hope either. When Gabriel put his plan into operation and made his first tentative offers of help — holding a man above an enamel basin while she attended to an emergency further down the ward — she hadn’t even said thank you. She seemed to take it as just another event in the undifferentiated flow that constituted her day. Gradually — almost without effort on his part — Gabriel’s role in the ward increased. There were servants who worked in the ward but they couldn’t be expected to do the more sensitive tasks, and also a lot of the soldiers resented any more intimate contact with them. So Gabriel bathed feverish patients, spread ointment on chafing stumps, supported the dysentery cases as they trembled and shuddered during their burning evacuations, and, sometimes, he changed the simpler dressings. Soon he was a familiar figure in the one long ward that made up Nanda hospital. He would chat to the English soldiers, he even learnt a smattering of German, enough for the rudiments of conversations with the German wounded who, steadily, came to form the largest portion of the patients.

But now there were no English prisoners in Nanda. A week ago the eighty men and their garrison had been moved near the coast. No one knew why. One theory was that the effort of guarding and feeding them was proving too costly and that they were going to be returned on parole to the advancing British. Gabriel was thankful he had discovered that after they’d left. If he’d known in advance it would have been very hard to justify his staying on. As it was his conscience, was satisfied by a plea of ignorance.

He thought of this now as he stood at the end of the long ward. The heat was stifling. Over sixty beds had been crammed into the former storeroom-cum-warehouse of the research station. The windows were open, cane blinds hanging in them to minimize the heat of the afternoon sun. An old African servant came past with two heavy slopping buckets. “ Jambo Bwana ,” he said. Everyone knew Gabriel.

At the other end of the ward he saw Liesl taking a pulse. She looked up, saw him and made a smoking gesture with her hand. Gabriel turned and went into the small room that served as a dispensary. He sat down at the table in the middle of the floor and set about rolling two cigarettes from the crude, locally cured tobacco and their dwindling supply of paper. They were using a copy of Goethe’s Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers , a small, nicely bound book that Liesl said belonged to her husband. One leaf was sufficient for a single cigarette. They had reached page forty-eight.