which was nothing more than a tukul set a little apart from one of the bungalows that served as wards. Quinette was relegated to helping a male nurse prepare the patients for surgery, cutting their clothes away from their wounds, sponging them with hot water and bacteriological soap. There weren’t many beds open, so the injured had been placed on blankets on the ground, under an awning of plastic sheets propped up by crooked wooden poles. She and the nurse worked by a hissing high-pressure lantern that was a magnet for insects. He spoke only Arabic and a few words of German picked up from his boss, forcing him and Quinette to communicate mostly in an improvised sign language. She hadn’t eaten since this morning and was dizzy with hunger, its pangs occasionally overcome by a swift, sharp cramp of dysentery. Her knees grew stiff from all the stooping and squatting, but she relished these afflictions; the thing she was doing wouldn’t be worthwhile if it didn’t hurt a little. And hunger and tummy cramps were next to nothing compared with the patients’ sufferings. The fabric of their bodies gouged, slashed, and punctured, they appeared not to have been maimed so much as vandalized by some malicious delinquent.
Captain Bala was unconscious. He didn’t flinch when the nurse, after replacing the makeshift tourniquet with a rubber tube tied below Bala’s shoulder, ripped off the dressings. He motioned to Quinette, and she sponged the gash. The arm was swollen, and she feared septicemia had set in; and yet when she laid the back of her hand against the captain’s forehead, his skin was cool to the touch, almost cold. If he had an infection, he would be running a fever, she knew that much. The nurse had meanwhile wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around Bala’s good arm. He pumped the bulb, read the gauge, pumped again, and with a grave expression softly whispered, “Ya Allah—my God.” Then, as he took Bala’s pulse, his hand resting on the captain’s midsection, he appeared to feel something strange, for he let go of the wrist and pulled up Bala’s shirt, revealing a lemon-sized lump, with a red-rimmed pinhole in its center, just below the ribs on his right side. The nurse pressed it, and Bala awoke with a sudden jerk, a startling cry. A flurry of gestures told Quinette to fetch one of the stretchers leaning against the bungalow’s wall.
The captain was Michael’s size, well over two hundred pounds, and her back nearly popped as they lifted him onto the stretcher and carried him to the operating room. She was out of breath when they set him down outside. They waited. Bala lapsed back into unconsciousness. From somewhere behind the tukul, a generator throbbed. In a few minutes the door swung open and two orderlies passed through the rectangle of bright light, carrying a woman rolling her head from side to side, the stump of her right leg swaddled in bandages. Manfred and Ulrika followed behind, pulling off their masks. They cupped their hips in their hands and arched their backs and took deep breaths of the still night air before they each lit a cigarette. The lighter’s flare illuminated Manfred’s bloodshot eyes, the half-moon sags beneath them. His whole face looked like it was under the pull of a powerful gravity. The poor man had been bandaging and cutting and stitching and pulling metal out of people for the past eight hours. He and Ulrika smoked while the nurse apprised them of Captain Bala’s condition. That’s what Quinette assumed he was doing; she couldn’t understand a word. The doctor motioned to bring the wounded man inside.
The operating room, with its baked mud walls and ceiling of corrugated tin, looked nothing like the ones on TV medical shows. Except for a breathing apparatus with a face mask hanging from it, there was no high-tech gadgetry flashing signals of life’s functions. Overhead lights shone on a stainless-steel table covered by a stained foam mattress. Hot water steamed in pots on a propane stove. Lily was cleaning surgical instruments in one, dipping them with tongs.
The two strapping orderlies returned and laid Captain Bala on the table. Quinette stepped back toward the door but didn’t leave with the male nurse. She had a special interest in this patient and figured that entitled her to stay and watch; however, her view of the operation was blocked by a wall of backs as Manfred and his assistants went to work. “I