Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

‘Is he the driver?’ She whispered it, not wanting to break the silence.

‘This is how they sometimes sleep, take a short rest. Simply stop in the wrong lane, leave the lights on, and stretch out on the road for half an hour or so. Or he could just be drunk.’

They drove on, Anil now fully awake, leaning with her back to the door so she could face Sarath as he spoke, hardly audible in the wind rushing into the windows. As an archaeologist he always travelled on night roads, more since his wife died, he said. There would be two trips every week-up to Puttalam or to the south coast. He accompanied teams of students puttering along the bunds of prawn farms for ancient village sites or he went to oversee the restoration of a stone bridge in Anuradhapura.

They were just south of Ambepussa and would reach the outskirts of Colombo in an hour. ‘When I was young, my father took bets with us-how many drunks we’d see sleeping by trucks, how many dogs we’d pass. A bonus if we saw a dog with a sleeping man. Or sometimes it would be a group of three or four dogs in the moon shadow of a stilled night truck. He’d bet with us to keep himself awake as he drove. He loved to bet.’

After a long pause Sarath continued. ‘All his life he gambled. We didn’t realize this when we were children. He had an ordered business life, he was a respected lawyer. We were a stable family. But he loved gambling, and our fortunes went up and down.’

‘All you want when you’re a kid is certainty.’

‘Yes.’

‘When you met your wife, you were sure, were you… that you were both…?’

‘I knew I loved her. But I was never certain of us, as a pair.’

‘Sarath, can you stop the car, please.’ She heard the slight hollow thump as his right foot slipped away from the accelerator. The car began to slow, not stopping. She was silent, staring ahead into the dark. He veered onto the shoulder and they sat in the dark purring vehicle.

‘You realize there were no dogs back there, by the truck.’

‘Yes. I thought that as soon as I spoke. There was something wrong.’

‘Perhaps it was a village of no dogs… We have to go back.’ She took her eyes off the road and looked at him, and the car jerked loose into a half-circle and drove north again.

…

They reached the truck in twenty minutes. The man by the truck was alive but couldn’t move. He was almost unconscious. Someone had hammered a bridge nail into his left palm and another into his right, crucifying him to the tarmac. He was the driver of the truck and as Sarath and Anil approached him a terrified look appeared on his face. As if they were coming back to kill him or torture him further.

She held the man’s face between her hands while Sarath prized the nails from the tarmac, freeing his hands.

‘You have to leave the nails in for now,’ she said. ‘Don’t remove them.’

Sarath explained to the man that she was a doctor. They got a blanket out of the trunk and wrapped him in it and carried him to the back seat. There was nothing to drink besides an inch or two of cordial, which he quickly swallowed.

They were going south again. Every time she turned to see how the man was, his eyes were wide open looking at them. She told Sarath they needed saline solution. She saw a faint light ahead and put her hand on Sarath’s arm to get him to stop. The car pulled over quietly and he shut off the motor.

‘What village is this?’

‘Galapitigama. The village of beautiful women,’ he said, like a refrain. She looked at him. ‘Supposedly. McAlpine said so.’

She climbed out and walked to the door of a house behind which she could see light. She smelled tobacco. Sarath was beside her.

‘We want salt. Hot water. If not hot, then cold will have to do. A small bowl of it-we need to take the bowl with us.’

When the door opened they saw a room busy at knee level. There were seven men around the perimeter, rolling cigarettes, weighing batches of them on scales, packaging them with thin string. Illegal night work. They wore only cotton sarongs in the hot, closed room, which was windowless. Three lamps on the floor where the piles of beedis were stacked up. Everything had a brownness, an orangeness, from the contained weaving flame of the lights. All of the men were in checkered blue-green sarongs.

The bare-chested man who opened the door stared past them to the car, nervous at their possible authority. Sarath explained that they needed a pot of hot water and salt, then as an afterthought asked for some beedis, if they would be willing to sell them. At which the man laughed.

One of the other men went out through the far door while she and Sarath stood on the threshold, then he returned with salt in one hand and a small bowl in the other. Anil enclosed his wrist with her fingers and turned it so the salt clouded into the water.

This time she got into the back seat beside the truck driver. Sarath said something to him over his shoulder and the man tentatively gave her his left hand. Under the faint roof light Anil soaked a handkerchief in the saline solution and squeezed it onto his palm, the bridge nail still in it. Then the other hand, then back again to the first.

Sarath started the engine.

There were forests on either side of the empty road. The motor’s hum filled the quietness, a thread in this silent world, just her and Sarath and the wounded man. Now and then a village, now and then an unmanned roadblock where they had to slow down and twist through the eye of a needle. As they passed a streetlamp Anil saw that what she was squeezing into his palms was now bloody water. Still she didn’t stop, because the movement kept him calm and awake, kept him from drifting into shock. The mutual gestures-her pull, his giving-were becoming hypnotic to both.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Gunesena.’

‘Do you live near here?’

The man rolled his head slightly, a tactful yes and no, and Anil smiled. In an hour they were within the outskirts of Colombo, and later drove into the compound of Emergency Services.

In the operating rooms of the base hospitals in the North Central Province there were always four books in evidence: Hammon’s Analysis of 2,187 Consecutive Penetrating Wounds of the Brain in Vietnam; Gunshot Wounds by Swan and Swan; C. W. Hughes’s Arterial Repair During the Korean War; and Annals of Surgery. Doctors in the midst of an operation would have an orderly turn pages so they could skim the text while continuing surgery. After two weeks of fifteen-hour days they no longer needed assistance from books and moved with ease alongside wounds and suture techniques. But the medical texts remained, for future doctors in training.

In the doctors’ common room in a North Central Province hospital someone had left a copy of Elective Affinities among the other, more porous paperbacks. It remained there throughout the war, unread save by someone who might pick it up while waiting, consider its back-cover description, then replace it respectfully on the table with the others. These-a more popular gang that included Erle Stanley Gardner, Rosemary Rogers, James Hilton and Walter Tevis-were consumed in two or three hours, swallowed like sandwiches on the run. Anything to direct your thoughts away from a war.

The buildings that made up the hospital had been erected at the turn of the century. It had been managed in a lackadaisical way before the exaggeration of war. In the grass courtyard, signs from a more innocent time would last throughout the waves of violence. Half-dead soldiers who wished for sun and fresh air rested there and ate morphine tablets beside a BETEL CHEWING IS PROHIBITED sign.

The victims of ‘intentional violence’ had started appearing in March 1984. They were nearly all male, in their twenties, damaged by mines, grenades, mortar shells. The doctors on duty put down The Queen’s Gambit or The Tea Planter’s Bride and began arresting the haemorrhages. They removed metal and stone from lungs, sutured lacerated chests. In one of the hospital texts that the young doctor Gamini read was a sentence he became excessively fond of: In diagnosing a vascular injury, a high index of suspicion is necessary.