makes things a little more difficult for us. Our water supplies?” Manfred turned an imaginary tap. “Enough to survive, nothing more, and I dare not protest. Water. Before everything else, water. Do you suppose it’s good for the soul to devote so much of one’s energy to obtaining something so basic as that? Do you suppose it teaches the value of simple things?”
Fitzhugh didn’t want to get into metaphysics and asked how much water was needed. Check with Franco, the doctor replied. Franco could tell him, down to the barrel. Franco was very precise—a northern Italian, you know.
Manfred leaned over the bed and conversed with his patient, who turned his head aside, exposing a round pink scar on his neck. The doctor examined it and said:
“Goiter. I removed it yesterday. A lack of iodized salt in the diet. The Nubans used to trade with Arab merchants for salt, but that is so much more difficult now. There is your priority number two. Salt.”
He moved on to the next bed, occupied by a strapping youth with the chest and arms of a Greek statue, wearing a gold earring in the style of Nuban males; it hung from the top of his left ear rather than from the lobe. A long horizontal scar, crisscrossed by recent stitches, ran around his side, just under his ribs, and he lay in a stupor induced by an IV drip of Demerol. A woman who could have been anywhere between forty and sixty sat at his bedside, on a dirty floor mat. She raised weary, bloodshot eyes toward Manfred, he muttered a few words to her, and she responded in a voice as tired as her eyes.
“A beautiful specimen of Nuban manhood, not so?” Manfred said after checking the young man’s chart. “A kadouma in his village, a wrestler. He and his mother came here last week. He had a bad pain in his side. They thought he’d been injured in a match. I suspected amoebic liver abscess, but when I cut him open to drain the abscess, I discovered a tumor. With the X-ray, I could have found it beforehand and spared him the surgery. The tumor is inoperable. Now we wait for him to die. He’s nineteen years old.”
They went from the surgical ward to the medical ward, the two divided by a plywood partition, then into pediatrics in the next building. Fitzhugh, making occasional notes, felt he was being guided through an exhibition of half the injuries, infirmities, and pathologies to which human flesh is prone. Dysentery and gastroenteritis declared themselves by the stench; dry coughs announced tuberculosis; febrile brows and shivering bodies testified to malaria; skeletal limbs whispered starvation; blood and pus oozing through gauze dressings rumored bullet and shrapnel wounds; amputated limbs screamed gangrene. He was able to look on the adult cases with detachment; he had seen their like before, his heart had grown the necessary carapace, thinner than the impenetrable callus that made some people incapable of feeling a thing yet thick enough to allow him to gaze on the worst sights without crippling his sanity; but in the children’s ward he realized that his prolonged leave from relief work, bringing sweet reminders of what normal life was like, had opened cracks in his emotional armor. An infant with a belly bloated by severe malnutrition being fed intravenously because the terror of a bombing had dried up his mother’s breasts; a young woman clutching a month-old daughter born, said Manfred, ten minutes after her twin had emerged dead from the mortar fragment that had pierced the woman’s stomach: those were sights Fitzhugh couldn’t bear.
He fled outside, with a pressure in his chest like the onset of a coronary. What a war this was that offered no sanctuary anywhere. A soldier in any one of its armies and militias was probably safer than a child in the womb. Jesus, aborted on the threshold of life by a hot steel sliver propelled by the random physics of a shell burst. He wished he knew where that particular projectile had been assembled, and the identities of the workers who’d packed the explosive and installed the fuse and detonator; he would like to show them what the products of their labor did. Not that imparting such information would make any difference. Those workers wouldn’t walk off the job in moral disgust. They had mouths to feed. It seemed that in the struggle between mercy and cruelty, cruelty would always have the upper hand.