The Colonial Hotel

by Jonathan Bennett

  Did she really have that dream? Did the name come first, and the dream was a story, a humorous idea later thought of, that was somehow twisted in his end-of-life state into something apocryphal? I’ll never know. He really thought it was funny. A delightful joke he’d never before been able to share with me and it seemed to give him great pleasure in finally telling me.

  * * *

  MY DARLING, I HAVE NOT told you about the mass graves. Along with several other prisoners, I was forced to dig them during a strange few weeks where we were thrust back into the war proper, before being thrown into our cells and forgotten about once more.

  I had been sleeping. It was spring and the light was warming once again and I found it easier to pass from this world into another one of dreams. My cell door clicked open and I woke. It was not time for food. A guard whose voice I did not recognize—I only knew two or three at that time—entered my cell and grabbed me by the upper arm.

  Up, up, prisoner. Or perhaps it was: Come, come, prisoner that he’d said in their language. The ghost soldier, Hector, was directly across from me. I had learned he was once a political leader, a chief, or warlord of sorts, I suppose, from a town in the South. Disputed land, once his, now theirs. As a young man he attended university in the West. He enjoyed telling me about all the food he ate while he was away, hamburgers, spaghetti, and Froot Loops—those he’d loved the best it seemed.

  Doctor, are you there?

  Of course I’m here.

  Just checking. Don’t want you to think I’ve forgotten you! And Hector would laugh away to himself, enjoying the absurdity or silliness of whatever he’d just said, likely similar to whatever he’d said the day before. This is one way we survived, by checking on one another—in those rare moments when it was safe to do so.

  Some of the guards were violent. They would beat prisoners. They did not permit calling from cell to cell. We usually reserved bursts of shouted conversation for late at night.

  I will teach you some words now, Hector would announce, my lessons to be absorbed through cinderblock at night. He then would shout a word at me in his language, then in English, then the equivalent in their language. The North and South, as I was beginning to understand it, were dialects of the same tongue. So, up and come, sounded identical to my ears at that stage. They are, in fact, different words, but it takes some getting used to, for the nuances to properly reveal themselves. Up, up, prisoner, or Come, come, prisoner sounded almost the same.

  Either way, this day would be a different sort. In the back of the truck we were jolted about. There were six prisoners and two soldiers with rifles. I joined my fellow prisoners in smiling uncontrollably. The light was bright and I could see a bit better than in the darkness of my cell. Hector was giggling to himself. We were so pleased at the chance to be outside our cells. We did not know where we were going. To our deaths? Or some other equivalent? To us this was a blessed excursion. So Hector and I rode down the mountain, bouncing into one another, our skin touching another human being’s skin, eyes meeting eyes, the shape of one another’s gaunt faces, hands with bitten nails and calluses from the cinderblock or from doing exercises or punching the wall just to feel some physical pain, we took it all in and we experienced joy. This was the first time we had been out of our cells since we first arrived.

  My daughter, the problem of time persists. I really do not have a good idea of how long we’d been in there. Some years. Maybe two? They kept us so hidden at the beginning. We were a cross-section of political prisoners, men with either local or regional followings in the country, or else, as in my case, foreign nationals. What did we have in common? It can only have been that we were more useful alive.

  At the foot of the mountains, with the sea maybe a mile away, we were unloaded and given buckets. We had been brought to work as diggers. The Colonel was there, walking from end to end, barking instructions, saying hurry in their language—I knew it was him, his voice came to me immediately. Suddenly he was in my face.

  Doctor, he said. Join us. This is a hospital.

  I knew he was lying. He knew that I knew it too. It did not matter. The Colonel sounded the same to me. When he drew close to my face and I could see him properly I noticed a weariness now around his eyes. The war had drained him of all right and wrong. If he was fighting for a noble cause, the deaths and ruin he had caused had bankrupted any initial goodness.

  The clay soil was dark orange, the colour of rust and, as we got farther down, wet. At night we were made to sleep a fair distance away by the bank of a river, the water brown and ripe-smelling. Upstream, on the way here, we had passed a massive area of deforestation, burned ground and ashen stumps. We had seen men with hand tills turning the soil, preparing to plant crops. As the spring rain fell though, it washed the topsoil into the river. Dead freshwater fish bobbed and floated by on their way out to the sea. A fire of damp dung smouldered away, the smell of it peaty and thick. We were fed packs of aid rations, warming them in a pot of water over the few coals available. The silver packs had instructions and some words in English, and translations in other languages. I read and reread the English, making sure I knew all the words, that I’d not somehow forgotten anything.

  This pack contains a main meal such as beef stew, chicken noodles, or spaghetti, along with crackers, spread, biscuits, condiments, and saline water. Each pack contains approximately 1200 calories.

  We ate as we had not done in years. There was no talking. The pouches were licked clean.

  There was screaming in the night.

  Flame torches, hastily lit, flickered outlines of the surrounding foliage. Then a gun sent a bullet sizzling through the forest canopy, the sound of it hanging in the air. The prisoners around me huddled together and kept low. I could see only shapes, faint and fleeing, as they raced by with flames.

  What, what? I asked those about me. None of the men answered—not even Hector. We did not sleep again. The soldiers were searching through much of the night for the escapees. In the morning the Colonel came to me.

  Doctor, said the Colonel. I will kill these men who ran. I know you are blind. So I tell you.

  For another four days we were made to carry bucketloads of wet clay out of an expanding pit. It was much wider and longer than it was deep and we followed their instructions of where and how to remove the dirt. I could only carry half bucket­loads, and not far. By the end of the fourth day I was exhausted and was unable to work. The Colonel locked me to the wheel of his parked jeep with a short, thin chain and padlock. He left me there with a box containing two aid packs, a street map of a city whose Spanish name I did not recognize, and the middle-half of a coverless paperback written in English. I believe this was his version of special treatment.

  The spring rains had eased and days had grown hotter, and steamier. I was left there, unattended and largely unlooked at, for the next few days. I ate the rations slowly and purposefully, portioning them out over as long a period as I was able to stand. During the day I rolled underneath the jeep to get out of the direct sun, lying on my back in the dirt, the grease of the underside of the jeep only inches away from my face. I had no shirt or shoes. I read the novel. It was not one I’d ever read before, and neither the title nor the author’s name were atop the pages. The story was about the First World War. Mustard gas and trenches. Running between the lines and horses being shot in the head due to superficial wounds, the beasts now burdensome. I caught snippets of the Colonel’s conversation as he marched between the dig and the camp. I wondered why he kept me alive, why he treated me with some exception. This was not the first time. Was it still because I was a physician? Was it Helen?

  So many nights in the cell I had combed the details of that final morning in the hotel’s café—bougainvillea, brioche, Helen speaking with the interloping woman, the Colonel. I had examined it all exhaustively. There were no more clues, no gestures that might have given a new understanding of it all.

&
nbsp; Helen knew she was not going to be detained with me, but did she know who she was talking to, the real identity of the leather vendor as the Colonel of the northern rebel army?

  I have asked myself how your mother knew this. What, or who, or how did she come to know him?

  Maybe you know. Maybe you pity me—how little information, or even how trusting I was, and I remained.

  When I could no longer focus on the words in the novel, when the trench warfare became too much, when I no longer saw the point or found interest in staring at a map of a city I did not know, I thought of Helen again, of our last day.

  It is time, Doctor, said the Colonel, kicking me gently in the leg.

  I had been sleeping under the jeep. I crawled out and he unlocked me. I stuffed some final pieces of food into my mouth before he led me away. I kept hold of the book in desperation, hoping somehow I might be allowed to keep it.

  You have become a dog, said the Colonel. He took the book from my hand and tossed it away.

  What happened to Helen? I said to him. My voice came out unnaturally loud, and assertive. It was a voice I had not used in years. It was a doctor’s voice. The one I perfected in medical school, the tone that instructed others to keep themselves together, the one that ensured everyone in the room—nurses, students, family members—knew that I was in complete control and that they must trust my authority, my skill. Now I had no control of myself. It came out of me as a kind of submerged spirit, rising from my broken being. The Colonel started. Then he put his face close to me. I could smell him, sour sweat and dirt.

  Who? The woman I arrested you with? She is my own whore! he said. And then he laughed and patted me on the face as a father might do to a son who is not yet a real man. Then he said, I do not know. I have never seen her again. That time is long over. None of it succeeded. Now we are alone, on our own. It’s better this way. You will see. We are winning. Soon the bodies will arrive.

  It was not to be the foundation for a hospital but a shallow mass grave. I helped carry the stiffening bodies and toss them in. I carried only soldiers. I overheard the Colonel explain to another man that an ambush had been planned. On the other side of the mountains government troops had set up a base camp from which to launch new attacks into the mountains. But they were not yet prepared and did not know the terrain. The Colonel ordered the grave dug before he ordered the attack.

  I make bodies disappear, he said to the man. I am magic.

  I don’t know the number exactly, but perhaps fifty bodies were tossed, some limp others stiffened, into the pit that day. Petrol was poured on and the outdoor cremation began with a burst of light and heat flaring into the sky.

  The corpses were still smouldering as we tied rags around our faces and began dumping the dirt back on. We worked much of the afternoon and into the next day until a spongy mound had been made. I vomited up the last aid pack I’d eaten. I’ve never had a reaction like that; maybe I was suffering from heat stroke. During this time the Colonel was called away.

  Once finished, we stooped before our work, leaning, beaten. Hector said the dirt mound was a blanket stretched over a fat man’s stomach; it hides nothing. I imagined how this would look from the air, a graze of fresh earth in the forest. Does a satellite photograph of this exist? If I was not to be saved, I still hoped for evidence of this crime to survive.

  Doctor, one of the blind men said to me in the truck on the way back to our cells, perhaps all our digging will prevent cholera at least.

  Dead bodies don’t spread disease. That’s a myth.

  The man remained unconvinced, saying, Who are you anyway, talking to that dog the Colonel! You’re not a doctor, are you? Liar. And the man then lunged at me, grabbing my neck and squeezing. A guard pulled him off and pointed his rifle at the man for some time. I hadn’t registered trouble in his voice when he first spoke. Maybe it was my tone. Had I used my physician voice again? Did it suggest to him that I had everything in hand, and that I was to be trusted to get us all out of this? If this were the case, then his reaction was understandable.

  By that night we were all back where we had begun, alone in our cells. Through the window hole I could see a fuzzy blur—the moon. It was the rarest event, just a piece of it, creeping into the frame, adding an unfamiliar light glow to my square of night sky. Fuzzy. The word reminded me of Helen eating a peach. It was on a day off and she’d said that all she really wanted in the whole world was a peach. I went out into the streets and spoke to person after person until I found a market. About me were merchants selling grains and mangoes, rice and tubers—but no peaches. It was such a long shot.

  What’s wrong with mister, why so sad, eh? said a woman behind a stall. She was young and pretty. I said I was hoping for a peach. And I smiled at her, not even knowing if she understood what I said.

  We have better than that here. Take this, try it, try it. And she put an orb into my hand, about the size and colour of a tennis ball. You believe me? I smiled and said I did. I paid her for it and left.

  It’s all I could find, I said, and told Helen the story with a shrug.

  Well, let’s see, she said, and ripped open the skin. The flesh inside was white and stringy looking. She bit into it and made a face of delight. Always trust local knowledge of God’s best work, she said. And then added, Thank you, Paris. That was kind.

  * * *

  MY FATHER KNEW WHAT IT was to live alone. I think he would have understood the way my mind loosened while I was in captivity. I don’t just mean that he lived alone as a single man, all those years after my mother left him. Arguably, he had me around, and his work kept him company too. I mean the decade before his death. The years he spent following his on-air incident, after which he retreated to a cabin on a property in a remote part of the country.

  My daughter: when it is left to itself, a mind evolves. Why parse matters here? The mind. The body. The self. Me. I.

  At the outset, I was frantic to remain . . . what is the right word? Aware. Let’s use that word. I was determined to stay aware of who and where I was. I was a prisoner of war—of sorts. Caught up in a conflict in which I had played no part, owed no allegiances to one side or the other. I had not been charged with a crime—not that the rule of law had even been in play. For all I knew, as the days passed, the time was shortening until a morning would arrive and my cell door would be sprung open by government soldiers or Special Forces from some Western nation having parachuted in—as they do in movies—to rescue their own. If this were to happen, and I was to look back on such an event having had occurred, I wanted to make sure I was still aware, and had been able to stay mentally fit.

  I have seen the way my rescue would play out enough times on television. The narrative goes like this: after being flown to some nearby foreign military air base and having shaved and taken a quick shower, looking frail and tired, I would deliver a command performance at a press conference. I would say that my captors did not harm me, and that I was grateful for the work my government did to safely secure my release. That is how the release story goes. If it cannot go like that, it does not go on television at all.

  But maintaining a sound mind, one that is always prepared to be rescued, is itself the delusional state. Free or incarcerated, each man has only a limited time on this earth. How you live it within your allotment, and the given circumstances, became an all-important idea to me. I could not afford to waste my days waiting for some new state of military-­designed reality to drop down from the sky.

  My father suffered from severe depression. I did not know this growing up as a child. He would simply drift away from me, and the world around him, for months at a time. I learned how to take care of myself. When I was young, my aunt would take me in. As I got older, I felt it my responsibility to take care of him. I would lie for him in increasingly clever ways, and wait for him to return. As I saw the warning signs, I would insist he take a vacation. This was code between us
. And he would yank me out of school and we would get in the car and drive and drive. Usually to someplace warm, where we’d stay put until things came to pass for him.

  When we couldn’t get away, when he still needed to teach or work at the bank, or during his later years in government, I would do the shopping and pay bills. I would make him dinner and bring it to him, getting him out of bed to go to work if I was able, or making him call in if I wasn’t. I later learned that many of his colleagues thought he was an alcoholic and would cover for him. One of his closest friends told me at his funeral that it wasn’t until he’d had his public breakdown that he’d put it all together.

  His public breakdown. That’s what it was. Why do the media exploit mental health incidents? I believe it is because they can just report the facts—leave out all innuendo. They can objectively report someone behaving impossibly improper or irrational. It requires no injected sensationalism for it to be enticing.

  I was a medical student on a placement at the time and so I didn’t see it occur. Only later did I watch it after my aunt called me at work to let me know. It was a typical live-to-air political debate show. He’d been doing them for several years. They loved his biting commentary and his fearless insider insight. His career was in the past, and being a political pundit was simple enjoyment for him. On this day, a particularly pointed argument broke out, and his opponent took a personal swipe. You could almost see my father breaking. He sounded coherent at first, but his statements began to make less sense. He accused his opponent of lying, of corruption. The moderator stepped in, and for whatever reason the producer did not go to commercial. My father then began a rant that included descriptions of the man buggering a former premier and bribing officials in the ministry of finance. The man just laughed and goaded him on, and the moderator only desperately tried to rein it in. Then my father had stood and punched the man in the jaw, knocking him right over.