The Colonial Hotel

by Jonathan Bennett

  What can you do for me?

  I have bribed three officials to get in here today. I do not know if there is anything I can do yet, but at least we know you are alive. Efforts to negotiate your release can begin, if you wish them to. But I would not advise it. I believe we should wait and see how the political situation develops first. Best case, the Colonel’s army simply falls.

  In the meantime, it is our experience that once political negotiation begins, there is every chance you will be moved again and again, and we may lose you. Or negotiations may not succeed and the Colonel will kill you if you are not worth money to him. Either way, sometimes these things go public and the media gets hold of them.

  There are four or five independent journalists in the capital right now, covering the election. Two of them know the country well, and know that this is a real human rights story. If he falls, no one knows the totality of what we will uncover, how many bodies. There are some estimates of fifty thousand. . . . You don’t look surprised.

  No. What about my country, my organization? Do they know I am here?

  Paris, I can tell you that not long after you were captured the humanitarian agency you worked for was shut down. You’ll recall its religious affiliation?

  It was Christian.

  It was bankrolled by an evangelical church, yes? On the surface they operated in much the same way as many other aid agencies. The fieldwork they did was among the bravest. Many good clinicians, such as you, gave themselves over to the work. Sadly, the backing church itself got into trouble. A scandal. Embezzlement and fraud charges levelled at the leaders of the church and this extended to the executive director of the agency too. I can’t recall all the details. In any case, the aid work ceased almost immediately. I mention this to you because if you feel abandoned by the organization, well, you were not alone. Of course none were quite literally as abandoned as you were. As for your government, they have nothing on the ground here. They are of no use to you or me.

  It’s time for me to go. I will do what I can, and will be back when I am able. Stay strong, Paris.

  Please, I asked him, there was . . . a nurse with the organization. I must know what happened to her.

  I quickly gave him what details of Helen I could. I even mentioned you, my daughter, that Helen had been pregnant at the time, in case that helped him locate her.

  Tell Helen I am alive.

  He said he knew people, and would try. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of tin foil unwrapping it carefully.

  Chocolate, he said. Here.

  And then he left. I sucked the small piece, the sweetness and memory of it overcoming me before both dissolved in my mouth, until everything was exactly the same as it was before he came. Just myself in my cell, with you, with my happiness, and with the growing sounds of village life drifting in through the window hole. You were swimming in a pool today with friends, I thought, and went about picturing you in my mind.

  * * *

  THE MESSAGE OF MY FATHER’S illness had been delivered by donkey. The old man who was employed to shuffle supplies and missives from the organization to us came on donkey every few days. It was an effective mode of transportation in that region. Having clopped his way to our field operation, the man shuffled over to me and handed me a manila envelope. Inside it was a printout of an email. The man stood waiting as I read.

  The email was short and from my aunt. She had sent it to the organization’s headquarters for urgent forwarding.

  Paris,

  Your father’s condition has progressed. It’s time for you to come home. He was admitted to the local hospital with respiratory problems. He’s been discharged, but the doctor there told him it would not be long. You know your father. He did not want to stay in the hospital. So he’s back home and has a hospice nurse coming in several times a day. He is on oxygen and pain medication and is comfortable enough. I have been up and back to his place several times now. He’s been talking about you a lot. I know he’s difficult, but it’s time now.

  —Your loving aunt, H

  I had to finish the three cases we had before us—one woman was losing blood and needed urgent care. That was my decision. I asked the man with the donkey to wait a few hours. In the time that it took me to treat the patients, another few showed up. I saw them too. We closed the clinic for the day as the sun was setting and I set off atop the donkey, my backpack strapped on as well, the man walking alongside.

  I will be back as soon as I’m able, I said to Helen as I departed.

  It is right that you are going, she said.

  I’ll miss you terribly.

  We’ll manage here, or wherever we are, well enough.

  I was not at my father’s bedside for almost four days. I rode the donkey, on and off, for half the night. I could not get to the airport until the morning, and then could not get a plane for another twelve hours. I changed planes twice more before I made it. I was beyond exhausted from the trip, but could tell Aunt Hesione was relieved I’d arrived. I slept at her place, in the room where I’d stayed so often as a child, still the same burgundy and blue quilt on the bed, the same chest of drawers unmoved where she’d kept a stash of my clothes and a few toys. In the morning we set out for my father’s cabin.

  I wasn’t ready to see my father like that. My daughter, it’s not what you think. It wasn’t a son’s irrational fear of his father’s death and the sadness, or deep well of other emotions that would inevitably surface. I’m a doctor. I’d had time to consider this day from the time we first learned of his cancer and secondary problems. I knew he was going to get sicker. And had been doing that, if slowly, for two years. I was expecting all that.

  I wasn’t ready though to see him frail and withering, on oxygen and with a pain pump, because I just hadn’t seen palliative care done in this way, which is to say properly, in some time. It wasn’t my father I was confronting at all. It was me. I was witnessing the choice I’d made in how I’d been practising medicine in a personal way.

  I’m ashamed to admit, but my first thought was about myself. In chasing Helen across the globe, in doing this humanly important work in developing countries, I was letting my Western clinical skills erode and not staying current in clinical research. I’d trained so hard to master all this. Given everything for it. How much longer could I continue in the field before I would not be able to return? It would not be tomorrow or even next year, but some day. Would Helen ever give up her work? Would I be willing to never practise again in a proper hospital? It could come to that. A choice was coming: my work, or Helen and her work.

  Four days before I’d removed a young man’s foot due to it being all but severed by a machete in a territorial street fight. My father’s cancer, irrationally, struck me as a luxury. His gradually managed death seemed decadent. I’d been practising medicine in countries where, if someone beat the odds and lived long enough to develop cancer, it would likely not be diagnosed. No imaging, no labs, no oncologists, and in essence no real way to treat. It would just run its course, metastasize to the brain, liver, and he’d die the way people had been doing since the beginning of time—from being old. But that was the rarity. As I bounced from country to country the death I saw mainly took the young. I saw either the effects of war, such as gunshots or knife wounds, or else the effects of poverty and malnourishment: rickets, typhoid, Ebola, cholera, tuberculosis. The idea of passing away with well-managed pain right up to the end made me irrationally angry at the inequity in the world.

  Dad, it’s me, Paris, I said as I approached the bedside. He turned his head toward me. It was still him. His face up close made my initial, reactive anger subside. Within minutes I calmed down. I became a son again, not a physician. Here was my father. This was the end. Here was his face up close. A face I had known since the beginning of my own life. And now it would be around no longer. I reached out and touched his cheek, his forehead. His skin was yello
wy-grey with jaundice. He’d not been shaved in a few days and his whiskers, white and thinly spread now, grew out of his neck, chin, and jawline.

  My aunt and I sat with him for about a week. We talked in his presence. She told stories about my childhood. He was in and out of consciousness. He told stories for the first few days. At one point near the end I made him smile. I’d been reading the daily newspaper to him with scant reaction, but I sensed he was enjoying the sound of my voice and the distraction of the news. In the middle of a report I stopped.

  Miss Jones, are you there? Dear Editor, I began. While I address you as Editor, I would remind you that with that it comes an obligation to actually correct mistakes in the articles you print, namely, the difference between sole and soul. I looked at Dad. The corner of his mouth was stretched and opened in a slack smile. I’d evoked his muse. His always adoring, willing, and available Miss Jones. As I saw his smile then, I realized something I never had before. She was real. Perhaps her name was not Miss Jones, but perhaps it was. She was not a fictional character. She was a real person he knew, not someone he pretended to talk to as he thumped about the house showing off. He had really been showing off. He had been practising in front of me, not to impress me, but to impress her. Who was she?

  My daughter, we will never know. But it pleased me to gain this insight at the end. That his heart did open itself for another woman. For you, Miss Jones, whoever you were.

  I woke from a nap in his wingback chair and knew he’d stopped breathing. I called out to my aunt, who was making dinner. We stood beside him holding hands.

  The days that followed were a blur of funeral arrangements and flowers, and obituaries and old friends phoning with sympathies. I emailed Helen the news, sent it via head office. The executive director wrote right back and told me the team was in transit. A mudslide had covered a village in a neighbouring country. I’d seen it in the newspaper yesterday that I read to my father. I told her I would be willing to join them at the end of the week. Could I come sooner? she replied. I’ll do my best, I said. Another incremental decision had just been made.

  At the funeral my father’s long-time boss, friend, and former minister of finance gave the eulogy. He cited many of my father’s accomplishments as an economist, policy maker, and teacher. He talked indirectly—he was delicate, not obtuse—about my father’s fight with depression without mentioning the on-air incident. Notwithstanding, the incident was what was widely dragged out and rehashed by the media as his death became publicly known. My daughter, may I share with you something? One unexpected thing the minister of finance said was this:

  Priam was a dedicated family man. I can tell you, as we worked late into the night in the lead-up to a budget or whatever else was the pressing issue for the government of the day, Priam always ducked away for an hour. Got to tuck in my son, he’d say. He was not asking for permission the way some might. He knew where his priorities lay. Of course his son Paris is now a grown man and a notable physician working on the starkest front lines of delivering health care to our world’s most vulnerable populations in deplorable conditions. I spoke to Priam as recently as a month ago, and it was of Paris, and your important work, Doctor, that he talked about most. There was never a prouder father of a son.

  In the receiving line afterward, there were tears and laughter—many people I did not know but who had worked with and for my father over the years, and admired him greatly. I scanned the faces of the women. What would Miss Jones have looked like?

  Later that evening I returned to the city to catch a flight out, then I would rendezvous with an aid convoy heading to the crisis zone. With Helen at my side, I worked virtually around the clock for the next two weeks. That was the final assignment before we ended up in this country, working at the camp, retreating to the hotel and its café, together.

  * * *

  FIGHTING BROKE OUT. THE SOUND of gunshots cracked sharply, echoing against the cinderblock walls of the jail. They were not far off, close to the village. For a time they would taper off, then again the firing would erupt. Gradually it came closer, further up the mountain, closing in on the village. Was this related to the election?

  The shots continued sporadically into the night. I do not know if the villagers remained in their houses, tending to their fires and feeding their children, or if they fled on foot, deeper into the mountains. Mealtime was missed the next day. And the next. Cries began from other prisoners. Hunger set in deeper with me, more angrily, than I’d ever recalled. I joined them in screaming out for food. Our cries went unanswered.

  By day four I felt weakened and lay on my cot. We had been forgotten. Other men still raged. The shots came and went in bursting clusters. Bullets hit the outside wall of the prison. Abruptly the sky grew dark and a storm let rain down hard on the roof. The fighting inched closer. The storm was intense but over quickly, leaving a purple then yellow light bruising the piece of sky I could see through the hole high in the cell wall. The gunfire continued for another day. Finally, a quiet grew.

  The stillness was broken about dusk by the sound of keys in the prison hall. Doors were opening and voices came alive. Men were being set free. Opposition soldiers had arrived. I heard the dialect of the South, men speaking as Hector did, as they did in the town from which Helen and I had been taken. Not all the doors were opened. I heard the word for blind outside my door. And the word for doctor. And the word for no. Repeated several times, no, no.

  Please, I said.

  There were other shouts too. Others were not set free. Political prisoners from the North, perhaps. I had not eaten in days. Trucks and motors came and went outside the prison. There was much shouting in the village. I could hear the voices of women now, crying out for the children. Some men too. Voices of opposition soldiers. Trying to communicate. On my cot I lay down preparing to die. The prison was no longer staffed. If it took more than another week for them to check each cell, I would not survive. The ghost soldier knew it too and began screaming to me.

  Doctor. Call out your window, Hector said. But I lay on my cot without the strength to fight any longer.

  The retreating government soldiers, prison guards, set fire to the surrounding forest as they made their retreat. With all the water that had fallen, the brush did not ignite well, but they must have dumped out petrol. Thick smoke bellowed over the town, and into the window hole of my cell. Elsewhere prisoners screamed. A kind of madness then took over the few of us left. I drew short breaths, prone on my cot.

  Smoke inhalation, or the early stages of starvation, made my body begin to shut down, preserve itself and will itself to live for as long as it was able. The visions I had were complicated and unrecoverable to me afterward.

  Some of the prison buildings were burned. Opposition soldiers returned and took control of the prison the following day. I remained imprisoned, mostly unconscious. Whatever accusation or charges against me, real or invented, whatever case that was to be defended or thrown out, was now gone. The government was in the throes of changing. The Colonel was being deposed. A new leader, with a new army from the South, was now invading the North. They were freeing sympathetic border villages and committing acts of brutal violence against those not. The Colonel’s brand new son born to a young wife, a baby boy, was placed into hiding with women in one of the camps. Hearing this, the new ruler ordered all male baby boys be killed there. Daughter, it is said this massacre of innocents happened, though it has never been confirmed.

  I didn’t know any of this at the time. No one did. And what do we really know now? The evidence is erased by a tide of blood, ever ebbing and flowing. The only witness to these nights of terror is the moon.

  My daughter, as far as the world knew at that moment, the governing power was being democratically shifted from the previous ruling junta to the opposition party. An election had been held. Western observers had given a provisional green light: many voting irregularities, but an election nonetheless.
Aid money would flow. The new leader appeared on television, waved, and made the peace sign, or the victory sign, just as his army was exacting revenge and crushing any residual resistance or loyalty to the former colonel who had gone into hiding.

  During all this I lay prone in my cell. At some point I must have been found and determined to be alive. Were I a prisoner from the North, I would have met with a similar fate to some of the others around me, who were shot where they lay. Their bodies were dragged deep into the forest, stripped naked, and left for the cats or other animals to find and feed upon. But I was a foreigner. And they did not know who I was, or why I was there, only that they had been told I was a doctor. A foreign doctor. Captured by the previous government. Worth keeping alive, someone must have determined. Might be worth some money? Or, at least, some good will.

  My daughter, wherever you are, if you read this, you must know that I confess to having given up. I lost the will to live. Can you forgive me? I was not heroic, or a freedom fighter. I was starving and semi-conscious and had given up.

  * * *

  PART THREE: PARIS & OENONE

  And muffling up her comely head, and crying

  “Husband!” she leapt upon the funeral pile,

  And mixt herself with him and past in fire.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Death of Oenone”

  Paris

  SHE MOISTENED MY LIPS, DABBING a cloth dampened with flat cola. With each pass of cloth, the wetness, the sugar, the shock of it pulled me from my inner state. And she sang so gently: songs of pain, of the earth and the trees, of the water and the mountains. How many days had she been singing? Some songs I think were meant for children, other songs that told stories of how this valley got its name, which animal represented this pond or another, songs to bring good harvests and plentiful fishing, songs of spirits that looked over and protected a sleeping village, songs of mother love and regeneration. Some songs called out and needed responses, and she sang these parts, my parts, for me.