by Wole Soyinka
“What’s happened to the present one?”
“Was there really one? All I know is that the four men who should be dead by now got away from us.”
He offered his hand to Ofeyi. “We may find her before you do. But with or without, I hope you will march with us.”
Ofeyi shook hands but said nothing. After the Dentist was gone, Ahime continued to stare silently at the ground. Then he cleared his throat and placed his hand on Ofeyi’s knee.
“I hope you will not think that I wish such a rapid end to your search that I hope for the worst result. But…it is best to begin with the worst. Have you…looked yet among the bodies in the mortuary?”
XII
“There is no more room in the mortuary.”
Through the Casualty Ward, past rows of prefabricated laboratories trimmed round with bare lawns and connected by covered passages. They entered one of these, followed its twists and strove against gravity as it bore them down a gentle incline. The walls of the tunnel thickened as they went deeper, padded and roofed in grey asbestos. “No more room whatsoever” the doctor, their guide repeated. “It filled up in no time at all.”
Before a massive lead-zinc door he produced a matching key and inserted it in the lock. The door opened sleekly, led to others. They passed through into yet another tunnel. It weighed on the searchers, still and airless. The doctor’s words beat a refrain of variations in Ofeyi’s head…no room in the morgue…no room in the morgue…no room at the inn…
Get out get out said the landlord
Shut his door in the face of the lord
Take up your rags Mr. Joseph and Mary
And pick up that brat with the face of a fairy
There’s no more room in the morgue, in the morgue…
“Not bad not bad” he heard the doctor murmur. His voice had a soft but weighted inertia that seemed to hang in that dead air.
“What is not bad?” Ofeyi enquired. He had not said his jingle aloud, so the doctor could not have been referring to that.
“You don’t look nervous or taut. Coming into a mortuary for the first time, most people do.”
“No, in fact I suddenly made up a ballad.” He stopped. “How curious. I haven’t even hummed a tune in my head for nearly a week.”
The medical turned. “Now that is most interesting.”
“Not at all. In fact it was your ‘no room in the morgue’ that started me off. Reminded me of a tour I made through Europe not so long ago and the number of hotels which tried to pretend they had no more room.”
“Ah” the doctor sighed. “You’ve been through that have you?”
“With a vengeance” Ofeyi said.
The doctor preceded them to the next door. “What was the ballad? I am most curious to hear it.”
“It was not about that experience. My mind jumped to Herod’s desperation for infanticide. And so on to the no-room-at-the-inn bit.”
Zaccheus said, “Yep. I bet that’s the way it was. You gotta know this guy doc. A word like that turns out a song like your dose of castor might shoot out a tape worm. If you’ll pardon the analogy doc.” His voice tapered out, seeing the doctor grimace.
“Well, how did the ballad go?”
Ofeyi forced a smile. “It is kind of you to try and take my mind off what we may find on the other side of that door. But I assure you it isn’t necessary. I realize I have been doing that myself. Making up lyrics to take my mind off was part of it.”
The man protested, “Not in the least, not in the least. It is a little indulgence I permit myself. Perhaps it helps me retain a healthy attitude in such morbid surroundings. Now your Nativity ballad—I say to myself—how curious! Then I wonder, does it reveal anything? Are you the kind whose mind instinctively joins up the entire cradle-grave cycle? Things like that. It stops me dwelling on what I really feel.”
He pushed the last door wide open.
A band of cold encapsuled them at once. They entered on a carpet of cold, it crept up their feet and slowed up the flow of blood in their veins. Zaccheus shivered uncontrollably. The doctor remarked kindly, “Yes it is cold in here. That anterior passage helps a little to acclimatize the body.”
“It didn’t acclima nothing on this guy doc.”
He and Ofeyi stood huddled by the door as if they did not dare come in any further into this icicle world. The doctor closed the door and moved towards a still life of five, mounted on a doubled trolley against the wall. Ofeyi moved forward as if in a trance, his eyes glued to a perfection of repose he had never yet encountered.
“These came last. We had hopes that we might save the child but it was a futile effort.” He shrugged. “It would have made no difference in any case. The ones we did save, the killers came and finished them off—right on the operation table.” He walked softly over to a corner of the concrete platform, pulled off a sheet. “Like him. I was rather proud of my work on this one. Heart and lungs badly perforated by bayonet thrusts but I worked under candlelight and managed to save him. Yes…I confess I felt very proud of that surgery.”
They hardly took in the doctor’s words. Eyes roamed round the oppressive stillness of every object. A ponderous stillness, a weight of eternity that seemed measurable clung to the smallest wad of cotton, pressed on the air and the grey fog of light in which the room was bathed. The temperature fell steadily, the living bodies felt clammy hands about them sucking their vitality into a universal deathness.
The chamber was split by raised concrete slabs, these also ranged around the walls, interrupted only by glass-and-zinc cupboards laden with test-tubes, slides, fluid-filled jars and human organs. On the slabs some of the bodies were already opened. Delicate instruments, scalpels and stainless forceps, glass tubes and hypodermic needles; then the heavy tools of the trade—choppers, hacksaws, meat-axes and huge weighing scales. They looked on grey frozen livers and congealed marrow. The brain was a fallen meteor: craters, ridges, a network of irrigation channels formed a microcosm of the world from which it had fallen. A heart sat in glazed aloneness on the top of a glass case, a funerary ornament above a body lying piecemeal, not in state.
Ofeyi felt the doctor’s eyes on him. He returned his look and the man asked, “You don’t feel faint or anything?”
“Why? Should I?”
“Some people do.” He continued to finger something in his pocket.
Then there was a thud behind them. Zaccheus had collapsed, banging his head hard on the floor. The doctor rushed to his aid, smiling with undisguised satisfaction. He fished out the smelling-salts from his pocket and held it under the band-leader’s wide nostrils. “Old-fashioned remedy” he commented, “but still the best. I was beginning to fear I would be disappointed.”
Zaccheus woke to the gentle hum of the cooling plants. The doctor was still waving the phial to and fro under his nose while he blinked from one face to the other.
“You passed out” Ofeyi informed him.
“Never!” Zaccheus swore. “I must have slipped” he rubbed the back of his head, “there is a bump on the back of my head. That’s what knocked me out.”
The doctor shook his head, helped Zaccheus up and spoke in a disappointed voice. “Just the same I was wrong. The wrong man fainted.”
“You mean it was I you…”
“I’m afraid so. I am losing my touch. This sudden inundation of death has dulled my judgement about the living…yes, I’ll use that excuse I think.” He turned brisk. “If your friend is fully recovered we had better begin our search hadn’t we? I don’t think you’ll be able to survive this temperature for too long.”
Zaccheus pulled at Ofeyi’s sleeve. “If you ever tell anyone…”
“Are your legs all right?” the doctor asked, solicitous.
“Very well thank you. It was nothing.”
“Good. Because we are about to start v
iewing them by the score.”
Suddenly Ofeyi could contain himself no longer. As they passed a new body in which a cleaver still stood he burst out: “But Doctor, is this how you must treat a human body! Just like a butcher’s shop? Two pounds of liver please a portion of spare ribs a prime cut from the haunch and a pound of breast….”
“Ah yes, hm, it is rather like a butcher’s shop I must admit.”
“It is indecent!”
“Oh no I wouldn’t say that. We don’t find it indecent. We learn much about the human body here you know. Unfortunately…ah well, that will come in time too I suppose…but we don’t seem to have learnt much about the human mind. What makes it act in this manner for instance…still, it is hopefully only a matter of time….”
They resumed their progress through the trolleys and concrete slabs, stopped involuntarily at a family group. At least so they interpreted the pile—a father, a mother, three grown boys and a six-month pair of twins. The man and the eldest of the boys were badly charred, the others unmarked. Yellow ointment seeped through thick bandages on the eldest boy. A strangled cry came from Zaccheus: “Look at that!”
They followed the direction of his shaking finger. Hanging from a hook was a human rib-case. There was a repetition of the previous thud behind them and they turned at the sound.
“Oh dear, your friend has fainted again.”
As the doctor bent over him Ofeyi said, “Maybe we should leave him there. I don’t really need him for the search.”
“In that case we must move him from the floor or he’ll freeze to death.”
They carried him onto a canvas stretcher, the doctor opened a cupboard, found a rug and covered him in it. “We shouldn’t take long. I’ll pull out the drawers, they come out head-first. Just nod No until Yes!”
As the doctor laid his hand on the first sliding compartment Ofeyi asked, “What was the history of that family group?”
“Oh that? They were locked in a room and the house set on fire. The others were simply asphyxiated, but the father and eldest son tried to make a break for it, tried to find an escape route for the rest.”
Ofeyi nodded slowly. “All right. Let’s see what we came here for.”
The doctor pulled each drawer outwards on smooth rollers. A fresh gust of iciness revealed that it was still possible for the death chamber to deflate further the intruders’ pretensions to warmth. The trays slid forwards on smooth aluminium grooves and Ofeyi looked down directly on one death-mask after the other; the skins were drawn taut, grey and unreachable. Even those that bore labels had relinquished all pretensions to a human identity.
“Why don’t I pull them out myself?” Ofeyi asked after the first twenty or more.
“All right. That ladder is for reaching the higher pallets. Just hook it against that rail.”
He looked on one head after another, and he found himself thinking, how little one really knows of the top of a man’s head. The face yes, a too familiar terrain. But the top of the head, one rarely sees that even through a life-time acquaintanceship. The doctor hovered anxiously below: “Are you sure wouldn’t rather I pulled them out for you?”
“No, I think I can get through them quicker this way.”
The doctor glanced up from time to time to catch the first sign of distress. Zaccheus recovered shortly afterwards and he made him sit down in a chair. They both watched Ofeyi and the movement of pallets in and out of the filing complex. Time and time again they caught a flicker of recognition but it was only Ofeyi’s eternal alarm at human recognition—a frozen moment of thoughtfulness, of surprise, of hurt, anguish, of despair or of transcendental peace. Even a gruesome joy, but all forever frozen and greyed in a cold wind.
I’ll lie here some moment in time, labelled perhaps or without the sham of identity. Perhaps only with a filing number—date, place where picked up, by whom picked up…too late for it to matter then, at least not to me whom it really concerns.
Third tier. Fourth, Fifth, Sixth. Two bodies to one compartment in some cases—these were the children…no, there was no more room in the morgue, the emptied hulk of Ofeyi would have to wait in the streets or rot in one of the makeshift graves. As if it mattered. The feeling grew on him that Iriyise could not be here, that her living essence could not be summed up in one of these wax parodies of the human condition. Not one of these counterfeiting forms could desecrate her image by laying claim to a similarity in fate, so, why seek ye the living among the dead…still he continued…last row, last pallet. Out. In.
Relief? But I’ve known it all along. The ritual had to be undergone, no more.
When he came down he found the doctor holding up a piece of human tissue to the light. “Cancer” he explained. “Oh, not all the bodies here are from the recent carnage. This happened to be a case I was working on before my routine was forcibly suspended. That’s a cancer tissue. We are isolating cancer tissues by the ton in every hospital all over the world but we still haven’t worked out the causes.” He replaced the tissue and smiled. “Well, at least you did not find her. There is hope.”
“Yes…perhaps…”
He clapped him on the back. “There is hope. You mustn’t let your spirits be cast down by the sobering experience of the search.”
“Sobering…? Yes. Yes I would call it that. In the face of every dead form there is something of all the humanity one has known, man or woman.”
The doctor nodded. “Let’s go back to my surgery. I have something there we usually requisition under the name Medical Comforts. I think you could do with a drop of it.”
Ofeyi followed him out, nodding assent. Zaccheus shot out of the morgue yards before them.
A sensation—rather like a constriction in his breathing—held Ofeyi captive in the doctor’s office the moment he let his body go lax in a chair. He fought down a sudden senseless heaving, an eruption in a little known part of him which struggled for release. Some long buried spring had welled into motion around his chest cavity; restricted, it threatened to burst through his mouth and nostrils, through ears, head and eyes, a violent memory awakened, an anger at loss only yet intuitively felt. It coursed through nerves long deadened by the incessant demands of the past months, and he strove powerlessly against a force that threatened humiliating release through tears. A cold claw clutched at his guts, savaging his breath. Then he felt gentle fingers pulling away his own which had formed a vise against his head and the commencement of a massage on his temples. The doctor spoke to him in a soft voice, almost as to a child:
“You should never try to stem back tears, not especially if you are unaccustomed to them. No, keep your eyes shut. Let your arms hang down. There, that’s better.”
Zaccheus stared at both in anxiety. “Is he sick doc?”
“No. Only a different version of what happened to you in there. I think he’s fine now. How do you feel?”
“Better, thank you.”
“Here’s your drink. It is the local brand from your national distilleries I’m afraid. That is all the headquarters supply us these days. Quite right too but…”
Zaccheus laughed. “Couldn’t agree with you more doc. Still—cheers!”
“I shall drink to a happy conclusion of your search.”
“That is too much to hope” Ofeyi muttered.
“No, I believe you are wrong.” He felt the two pairs of eyes on him—he had spoken with such considered emphasis—so he tried to explain. “I’m sorry, but it is really difficult to account for these things. When you came into this room earlier today and spoke about your search I…knew, yes, I knew that you were not talking about a dead person. She did not feel…did not emit—a dead aura.” Feeling their eyes still dubiously on him he threw up his hands in frustration. “Oh words, words! A very long time ago I gave up this whole business of words. I started out to study history if you really want to know. Suddenly I switched over to
medicine. Many things have happened since then but…take what took place here, in this very room only eight days ago. My senior nurse was killed in this room.”
With a rapid movement he was across the room and had whipped off a pile of medical journals and books from the couch. A huge dark discoloration marked the beige cover. The doctor took out his pipe. He began to fill it from a tin.
“Yes, that stain was his. They followed him in here and killed him. Nobody would come near the hospital for days, I did all the cleaning myself, with the help of some patients, Cross-river natives of course. The others had fled or been killed. But I was about to tell you…when the murders began I was doing my ward rounds. From the wards I went straight to the surgery and there I remained for days on end. My nursing orderly never turned up. I moved from ward to surgery and back again, morning and night. I missed him dreadfully, but of course I hoped that he had made good his escape when the mob invaded us. His body never turned up you see, so I permitted myself to hope. It wasn’t a very deep hope to tell the truth but you know how it is. The fellow had been so close to me throughout the years I’ve worked here, I couldn’t quite accept the possibility of him not escaping. Then—yes, I remember—I was making my ward rounds again, I actually had my stethoscope against the chest of a geriatric, also taking his pulse. Then he asked me where my nurse was. And do you know, I just said straight out, without thinking, oh, my senior nurse? I think he is lying dead in my office.”
He paused. The office grew oppressive with the presence of the murdered man. “Well you can imagine what happened. I was stunned, paralysed for some moments. Then I dashed upstairs. Sure enough the poor fellow was there lying across that couch. Horribly gashed and mutilated poor man. Been dead for nearly a week.”
Ofeyi took his glass and walked to the window, gazed at a vast tract of land, arid, stretched forever into emptiness. It was fissured all through as if it were a mudflat, only occasional tufts of grass broke the surface. A few crown birds sought grass seeds among these, stepping delicately through like stick-insects on swamp surface.