Michael Ondaatje - Anil's Ghost

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 eardrum 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.