Chapter Forty-Two #3
We’d drawn privacy screens around the boy in bed four and I could have stayed away, I could have left him to the orderlies, but I entered and found his face uncovered.
The sheet that should have hid him from our gaze was pulled up to his chest and his arms lay on top instead of beneath.
It was as if he were sleeping. I must have done that.
A lapse. How odd. His face was becoming unfamiliar and I wondered if perhaps it was another boy in another bed, getting cold because his arms lay on top instead of beneath the sheet.
I spoke to the boy and Hugo must have heard. He pulled back the screen and stood on the other side of the bed.
‘He could be sleeping,’ I said.
‘No.’
He was right, nothing is as still as death and yet I needed to be sure.
I held his hand and it was colder than I expected.
I lifted his arm and felt him resist. ‘Oh god,’ I whispered.
But I’d misunderstood. I searched for a pulse and there was none.
I put his stiffening arm beneath the sheet and Hugo did the same on the other side.
I looked at the boy’s face. High cheekbones and a square jaw held closed with a bandage.
I lifted the lid of one eye and it was clouded.
I closed it and admired his lashes, long and dark, and I remember thinking, what a waste.
Hugo’s hand was resting on the boy’s chest as if waiting for it to rise. I covered his hand with mine and we were still for a while. Then I held the sheet and Hugo held the sheet and we pulled it up and over the boy’s face. We left him then and pulled the screens closed.
There was a plate of food on the nurses’ desk. Cold toast, with butter and jam. A flask of coffee. It was Iso’s flask; she had come and gone.
We three had been one. That’s how it felt in the hours after that boy’s death.
For days our bodies had cared for his and we’d felt his torment in our guts.
It had to end and so we ended it, together.
A trinity of souls. But Hugo couldn’t understand it that way.
His rules, his oaths, his commandments – they singled him out and shamed him.
‘If this rule can be broken, what of others?’ he said.
‘All rules can be broken, Hugo.’
‘Then what is the point of them?’
‘Sometimes they keep things in order. They keep things working and keep us safe.’
‘And other times?’
‘They keep us in order.’
‘For what purpose?’
I shook my head. ‘There are so many,’ I said. ‘The trick is to know when the rule is worthy and when it is not.’
‘But how can you know this?’
‘I feel it, Hugo. In my body.’
‘But bodies are selfish,’ he said, and I wondered what else we were talking about. ‘How can you be sure your body has not manipulated you?’
Poor Hugo, I thought. The rules gave him certainty, and now he had none.
‘We can never be sure,’ I said.
I had tried to reassure him but could not reassure myself.
I returned to my hut and lay awake in my cot, the lullaby of trains and lorries, usually so effective, no match for my anxiety.
Bodies are selfish, I wrote. I have an urge to touch a body that doesn’t flinch when I press its flesh or, worse, lie flaccid.
Flaccid was the word I’d thought of on the German ward, when the boy had stopped struggling and I’d held his wrist. I was checking for a pulse.
There was nothing. I looked at my watch and it was 3.
59am. His arm had grown heavy and his hand and fingers hung loose.
Flaccid, I’d thought. There was no tension, no response, though he was still warm.
But not for long. Flaccid, I’d thought again and again, and it became like the scratch at the end of a record that no one removes from the gramophone.
Flaccid, I’d thought, for the rest of the shift, over and over, even as the boy paled and cooled and stiffened.
It is an unpleasant word, like pus or mucus. Intrusive and distracting.
In the week that followed I shared three shifts with Hugo.
He moved about the ward more slowly; he spent longer reading patient notes and taking observations; he sat by the beds of men he had performed surgery on until they woke – my job, not his.
On three occasions I heard him ask the matron or sister to check the dose of morphia he was about to administer. He never asked me.
‘You are thinking too much,’ I told him. He was making an inventory of the ampoules of morphia. He’d made an inventory only hours before. ‘Some decisions are made by the body, Hugo, not the mind. They respond to suffering instead of justifying it. They honour feeling, not thought.’
‘Is that what happened?’
‘I think so.’
He kept counting the ampoules, though it was clear the box was full.
I took his hand and made him look at me.
‘Have you ever shared pleasure and wondered where yours ended and the other’s began, then realised there was no distinction? That your bodies have absorbed each other and a shared pleasure is guiding your every move?’
He stared.
‘Pain is no different, Hugo, and when it is shared we move as one to relieve it.’
Still he stared and I was unsure if he understood.
‘That boy was in unimaginable pain, Hugo. As a doctor you made a good decision, but as a man you simply had no choice.’