my suspicions. The Sudan military confiscates it for their own use. What do I do when someone comes to me with a broken bone? I poke, I prod, I guess. When someone comes to me with a persistent pain here or here or here”—he touched his liver, his stomach, his back—“and I suspect cancer? I cut them open and have a look. Exploratory surgery, performed with instruments sterilized over an open fire. I return to medicine as it was practiced a hundred and fifty years ago. Ha! Longer ago! I could be a surgeon in the Roman army. Silly, silly, nicht wahr?”
“Criminal is what it is,” Douglas said.
“Criminal? Are you a prosecutor? And whom will you prosecute?” Manfred faced the machine while words tumbled from his mouth like rocks in an avalanche, and his pale blue irises shot back and forth as if they were looking for a way to fly out of his head. “Absurd. Yes, that is the better word than silly. This entire century has made friends with the absurd, and none are better friends with it than the Sudanese. A war whose beginning no one can remember, whose end no one can see, whose purpose no one knows. Yes, they are best of friends with the absurd.”
Thinking, Count on a German to go abstract on you, Fitzhugh wrote “X-ray film, sterilizer, hoes, diesel” in his notebook.
Probably the man hadn’t had anyone’s ear for weeks. There were two other Europeans at the hospital, a German nurse and an Italian logistician, but Fitzhugh would bet that they’d listened to their boss’s rants once too often and had made his silence on certain issues a condition of their continued service.
Manfred turned off the light with a swat—there was a savagery in almost all his movements—and ushered his visitors outside.
“And this mission you two are on is absurd also. I hope you realize that.”
The remark struck them like a backhanded slap.
“If that’s what we thought, we wouldn’t be on it, would we?” Douglas said.
“I shall enlighten you, then. Even if you find places to land big planes and even if those planes are not shot down, how do you propose to get what you deliver to the people who need it? There are hardly any roads to speak of, and the only vehicle I know of is my Land Rover, which I need if I am called away and which can’t carry very much in any case. So tens of porters will be needed. What a tempting target a column of porters will make to some Sudanese pilot. He will not be able to resist. The first time such a procession is strafed, you will find it difficult to recruit others for the job.”
“Let us worry about that problem.” Douglas’s expression had gone blank, and Fitzhugh now knew him well enough to recognize that studied blandness as a sign of anger.
“I fully intend to,” Manfred stated. “I have too many problems of my own.”
Half of them probably self-inflicted, Fitzhugh thought, following him into the U-shaped courtyard formed by the breezeway and the two long buildings. Infants in their laps, several women were sitting against a wall, some wearing the sorts of dresses collected by church groups in the West, while two were nearly naked, rows of bright beads girding their waists. Their bellies were ornamented with ritual tattoos, the raised scars on dark brown flesh resembling rivets in leather. The women sat with the listless postures and lifeless expressions Fitzhugh had seen everywhere in southern Sudan, the faraway stares and slumped shoulders and bent heads forming their own kind of ritual tattoos, marking all, regardless of native tribe, as members of the single tribe the aid agencies called “affected populations.” Manfred, squatting down, read the notations written on the strip of surgical tape plastered to each mother’s forehead. He spoke to each gently, patted the infants’ heads, even sang a few bars of what must have been a Nuban lullaby. It somehow pleased Fitzhugh to see that his personality had another, more attractive dimension.
“The little ones are going to be vaccinated, and they’re afraid, the mothers,” he explained, rising. “It is the unknown. They have been told their babies should be vaccinated, but of course they have no idea what is involved, so I explain it to them in a way they can understand.”
He spoke to them again, and the women stood and filed inside, the half-nude females displaying on their backs and buttocks, brown as burnt cork, round as