Chapter Four #2
Dr Henning rolled the boy slowly towards himself, as gently as if he were made of papier-maché and rough hands might cause a tear.
I arranged the clean sheet. I tucked one side under the mattress and bunched the rest along the centre of the bed, just touching the boy’s back and bottom.
Such a round word, bottom; his was all bone.
I smoothed his pyjamas so they would lie flat beneath his body; a bedsore could kill him.
Then I looked up. Dr Henning was waiting.
I nodded and he let the boy roll slowly back.
He came around the bed to repeat the movement.
I could have done it; I had done it a thousand times and the boy weighed nothing.
But I didn’t insist. I took the doctor’s place on the other side, and when he lifted the boy I pulled the gathered sheet towards me, made it taut, tucked it in, hospital corners, neat and tight.
I’d come to appreciate a well-tucked sheet – it was a moment of control at a time when control was elusive.
Dr Henning made his observations: pulse, temperature, blood pressure.
He leaned in to smell the odour of the boy’s breath and I wondered what he might detect.
I expected him to grimace but he gave nothing away.
He spoke all the while to the boy, his words a curtain of sound that kept me out, a reminder of who they both were.
I suppose he was telling him what he was doing.
To me, he said nothing.
From midday, I watched the clock. My stomach growled, though it was impossible to hear it among the sounds of the ward.
At half-twelve a trolley arrived with food for the patients.
I delivered it and was surprised when Dr Henning helped.
A third were nil by mouth and a third could feed themselves.
We spread out among the rest. There were two who refused.
One had trouble keeping food down, the other thought to starve himself; some of them did.
I sat with a man who had lost the means to chew and could barely swallow.
His lunch was a cup of thickened soup, barely warm.
I blew on each spoonful out of habit, then manoeuvred it towards the hole in his face.
He would tilt his head back and we both hoped the soup would slide down, find its way.
His belly, like mine, was grumbling, always grumbling.
We were disappointed, but we tried again and again.
We must have had some success because on the last spoonful, he choked.
Then vomited. It looked almost the same coming out as it had going in.
A thickened gruel, the colour of pumpkin.
It stuck to my apron. It sounds awful now, but back then it was ordinary.
They vomited, they bled, they shat. Bits of them we would mop off the floors and parts of them we would wrap in cloth and send to the incinerators.
I’ll try not to speak of these things too often, because no one really wants to know and I don’t care to remember, but sometimes it can’t be helped.
These things – those men and their bodies – are the background of my story.
Without them, nothing I want to remember would have happened.
I sponged the vomit from the front of my apron and hung it in the storeroom.
At two o’clock I realised no one was coming to relieve me, and no one had thought to bring me lunch.
Dr Henning was attempting to make a meal out of food the patients had not eaten.
My pride protested but my stomach urged.
When he was done I browsed the trolley, as if it were a display of cakes.
But it was a mess of bowls and plates littered and smeared.
I retreated to the nurses’ desk and revised the notes I had made hours earlier.
Dr Henning cleared his throat and I looked up. He was holding a plate with a sandwich in the centre – corned beef and cucumber pickle. The plate was clean and the sandwich unmolested.
‘They do not always remember us,’ he said.
Was it the first time we spoke? I remember being offended.
Us, he’d said and I thought, we are not the same.
I accepted the plate but I did not thank him.
I ate the sandwich at the nurses’ desk and when I finished I took the plate to the trolley.
I saw again the mess of crockery littered and smeared with food and it occurred to me that I’d taken the lunch he had salvaged for himself.
That he must have made do with half-eaten scraps.
I reminded myself that he was the enemy, but then so was I – he’d been careful not to touch me.
I scanned the ward and found him. In his white coat he was just a doctor like any other.
He took the stethoscope from around his neck and attached it to his ears.
He slid the chest piece under the fabric of Jakob’s pyjamas and searched, like any doctor would, for the sounds he needed to assess.
Heart or lungs, I didn’t know, but the movement was familiar and when he’d found the spot he held the diaphragm in place and turned his head to the side, away from the man, all the better to hear what the body had to say.
When the body had whispered its secret he took the stethoscope from his ears and placed it around his neck.
He cupped Jakob’s shoulder, as I had. Then he bent his head.
The plate was still in my hand and I looked at it. There were crumbs from the sandwich and a smear of yellow pickle. We are not the same, I reminded myself.
Dr Henning crossed himself then adjusted Jakob’s blanket. He looked up and I didn’t have time to look away. ‘Soon,’ he said.
I stood by the trolley, the plate in my hand. He’d been careful not to touch me but I imagined what the brush of his fingers might have felt like. A phantom touch that prickled my skin and made my limbs soften in a way they hadn’t for a long while.
I recalled him on his knees, waiting to be kicked.
It helped. My limbs were once more my own: two pegs on which to stand, nothing more. A relief and a regret.
Within weeks of arriving at étaples a raw discomfort began to move about my body.
It was fatigue, cold, heat, the constant scrubbing of hands, long hours on swollen feet.
I was driven mad by the ache and the sting and the itch.
The frailty of my body was a surprise and a humiliation and it was sometimes difficult to overcome.
There is no point in you being here if you can’t be relied upon, I was told and so I became reliable.
It was like acting – a repeated line to toughen up and the discipline to walk on stage over and over, even when there was no desire to.
Before I started on the German ward I had begun to feel less.
It was general and specific. If I paid attention to my body at all, and mostly I tried not to, it felt like being in a tepid bath – neither hot nor cold, no pleasure and little pain.
I could do my job but the edges of my body felt blurred; I could not discern them.
There was sometimes a tingling, in my fingers and toes, the tip of my tongue, the whole expanse of my belly.
I tried not to think I was disintegrating.
The conditions on the German ward were no different to any other: the fatigue, the stifling heat, the constant scrubbing of hands and the long hours on swollen feet. I was neither hot nor cold, I felt no pleasure and little pain.
Then I imagined the brush of his fingers.
They do not always remember us. I wrote his words in the journal.
I also wrote that his voice sounded deeper when he spoke English.
That when I took the plate he removed his hand instantly.
That he looked in my eyes for barely a second (saw fear or hate?) then looked down.
Barely a second, but it was long enough to note that his eyes were not just brown, they were light brown with a halo of burnished gold expanding and contracting around the pupil.
Remember the details, Helen had said. They will be different, Iso had insisted.
I wrote this detail down for no particular reason, except that a shiver had run through me when I thought of him handing me the sandwich and I imagined our fingers touching.
The doctor, the German, the Hun. He’d nodded as if to say, enjoy your day. Then he was on his knees, in the dirt. He’d offered his lunch so I would not go hungry. But he would not stop to talk and he was careful not to touch. These are the details I began to record.