Chapter Forty-Two #2
Two decades later it is the time I wake, alone in the dark, to remember.
Our world fell silent. That battle was over but a new battle would soon begin.
I left Hugo with the boy in bed four and went to the storeroom. I loaded the trolley – a basin of warm soapy water, flannels, bandages, tape. I pushed it to the bedside then adjusted the screens.
The boy was between us. Hugo had one hand on his shoulder, the other on the crucifix around his own neck. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear the prayer.
I waited. I filled my lungs then let the breath out slowly through soft lips. The ward was unnaturally still, as if the pall of death were searching for another to embrace and none wanted to tempt it.
When Hugo looked up, I couldn’t read him.
‘It is a relief,’ he said.
I nodded. But he shook his head.
‘For me,’ he said. ‘I wanted him quiet. And the silence, his silence, it is a relief for me.’ He looked stricken. ‘What have I done?’
The prayer, perhaps, was for forgiveness.
‘A kindness,’ I said.
‘I do not know if that is true.’
Thou shalt not kill, I thought. He would not escape uninjured.
What followed was a wordless dance. A mime. We knew our parts, had played them countless times, but this is the only occasion I chose to record, and can now remember.
I removed the bandages from the boy’s eyes, I wrote, and the dressings from the sores on his cheeks and neck and hands.
Already he was less familiar. The heavy lines of pain were gone and all the things that could plump his flesh were in retreat.
His blind eyes were simply closed. Was it possible he was sleeping?
I thought this every time I encountered death, but it was never so.
Iso would have drawn his cheekbones high, his jaw square, the bridge of his nose as straight as a rod. Her gestures, in charcoal or pencil, would be too quick for purpling skin and open sores. His eyelids she would frame with long dark lashes. He was beautiful, I realised. But what did that matter.
We removed his gown and he lay naked between us. He was paling, but the palette of colours that told of his death were becoming more vivid. I placed a hand towel over his genitals and we began.
Even now there is a particular sound, a gentle trickling of water as it is squeezed from a flannel, that brings them back: the boy in bed four, and Hugo.
They are one, and it is often Hugo’s face I see as I gently wipe the film of life from his forehead, from behind his ears, from the hollow below his Adam’s apple.
But then it is Hugo too, who is my mirror as we lift the boy to wash his back then lay him gently down.
His shoulders, his arms, his armpits. We wiped gently over gas-burned and broken skin.
We took his hands in ours and washed between his fingers.
They were cool and ghostly green and I recalled my own, numb from cold, and how Hugo’s warm breath had revived them.
We cleaned his chest, his belly, between his legs.
There was a smell of faeces. I cut up a wool dressing and created a plug.
We rolled him, gently, as if he were still in pain.
His thighs, his knees, his calves, his feet. We stood together at the end of the bed and washed between his toes.
I cut his nails.
I washed his hair.
I shaved wisps of whiskers from unburned skin on the end of his chin and above his lip.
He would not be seen when we were done, but this grooming was important. This tenderness. He was Bill. He was Hugo. He was that first boy I released from hell. He was every man I had ever longed for and every man I had rejected.
I closed his mouth and secured his jaw with a bandage.
I filled out the death labels and tied one around his neck.
I don’t remember what I did after that, though there must have been a round. Other patients must have been cared for. Even now, that’s how I think of what we did. Care. He was dead, but we were still caring for the boy in bed four.
I must have heard the chattering of birds that came before the light of dawn.
I stepped away from the boy and walked out of the German ward, away from Hugo.
I looked above the roof of the hospital hut and watched the swallows, the swifts, whatever they were; I no longer cared to know.
They flew every which way, scattering, I wrote later, not like slips of paper on a whirling wind, more like boys on a battlefield.
Their season here will end soon and they will fly away.
I thought I would be sick.
I looked down the road to see who might see me, and there they were, the street cleaners with their cart of shovels and pointed sticks and large hessian bags.
They were almost as consistent as dawn and I’d come to expect them on the road when I emerged from my night with the Germans.
If they weren’t there, I’d wait for a few minutes, wondering how they came to be cleaning up after someone else’s war; whether it was worth whatever they were paid to be away from their homes.
African and Chinese, I’d written once in the journal.
But despite our daily greetings I never asked their names or where they were from, or how long they had been gone from their families.
I don’t think I cared, but now I am curious.
If I had vomited it would have been their job to clean it up.
I breathed deep and held it down. In a minute they were outside the ward and I nodded, as I always did, and they nodded back.
But I longed to hear the African speak. We could talk of birds, of swifts or swallows, as we had that first time.
I looked up. The birds were there, above the roof of the hut, darting this way and that. Insects, I thought, not bullets.
‘Are they the same birds, do you think, from last season?’
‘It is possible,’ he said. ‘Though I do not know why they would return.’
‘What are you doing?’ Hugo asked. The day had arrived and we were speaking after a long silence.
‘Writing a letter of condolence.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s part of the routine.’
‘Even here?’
‘No, not here, but why not?’
‘He is the enemy.’
‘Not anymore.’
Hugo looked at the note I was writing to Frau Hoffman, the mother of the boy in bed four. I wrote her name in the journal and I wonder if I would remember her now if I hadn’t.
‘It is in English,’ he said.
‘It is the only language I know.’
‘She will not understand.’
I looked at him. ‘I am taking the time to write to her of her son. She will understand.’
‘What? What will she understand?’
‘That we cared,’ I said.
‘It will not be enough.’
‘No, it will not.’