“Yes, but what else can I do? I can’t fix your leg up if you don’t—”
“Fuck off, you’re hurting me, can’t you see? Who the fuck sent you?”
In class, Roger had warned us that the injured may not be polite. I tried to remember what he had said exactly and the specific way to respond: “A person who is suffering tends not to follow etiquette, but you have to be firm and keep doing what you know is right, even if it’s painful.”
I laid him on a blanket (rule number three: always try to cover the victim, or put a layer between him and the ground; shock and loss of blood lower the body temperature and create hypothermia), then I started to work on the fracture, bandaging it tightly in a splint.
“Don’t touch me, you bloody idiot! Call a doctor. You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing!!”
“Stop being such a pain in the ass. Now,” I hissed with a forcefulness I didn’t know I had. “And let me work in peace.”
I was amazed at the speed with which I’d shut him up.
I wrapped him in the cover and while I was at it retied the loose bandage on his head. I thought I’d fixed him up pretty nicely. It was a treat to look at him all snug under the blanket, his bandages tight, looking so much cleaner and tidier than when I had found him.
Now I knew for sure he was going to survive.
More or less at this point, once we had all assisted our wounded, or evacuated them from the accident sites, the casualties leapt up like blood-spattered zombies, their heads and arms bandaged somehow or other, gauze hanging, their clothes slashed, and, in front of the group that had gathered around, gave their evaluation of the assistance that had been provided. It was a sort of quick, very technical overview, where oversights and errors were pointed out.
Obelix jumped up like a bloodied jack-in-the box and, in front of everyone, graded my intervention.
“Let’s see what we have here. Maria, you acted quickly, you turned off the engine straightaway—well done, it was the first thing to do. You immediately checked the airway and response and that was good too.”
He had resumed a detached, impersonal tone, gone back to being an instructor. For some reason I didn’t fully understand yet, I felt a certain disappointment. Only two minutes earlier, I had been comforting him as he moaned, reassuring him that he was not going to die, that everything was going to be all right, and now this sudden change in our relationship had caught me off guard.
“You realized right away that the head wound was only superficial, and you handled it quickly—which is right, although your bandaging technique needs some improving.”
He coughed a thick smoker’s cough that seemed to originate from deep inside his lungs. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“So far, so good. But there’s one thing you didn’t pay attention to.”
He pointed to his ear and asked the group, “Can anyone tell me what this is?”
A few of them gingerly stepped in to look, but shook their heads.
I felt a pang of jealousy. Obelix and his injuries were my responsibility, they belonged to me and I didn’t want anyone to come between us. I stepped in and studied the rivulet of dried yellow liquid that ran from his ear down his neck. I hadn’t the faintest idea what that was supposed to be. I looked at Obelix, hoping he’d give me a clue. I shook my head.
“Cerebrospinal fluid leakage,” he announced darkly. “It tells you there’s a serious head injury, possibly a skull fracture. You wouldn’t have thrown me backwards and forwards like that if you’d been aware of it.”
“Yes, actually, I didn’t—”
“You forgot to check to see if my neck, or spine, was broken,” he went on, ignoring me, “and that was a serious mistake. What else. You dragged me out of the vehicle rapidly and you remembered to lay me on a blanket to prevent hypothermia. Well done. The splint wasn’t bandaged securely enough. But all in all, I’d say you didn’t do too badly.”
“I think I’m beginning to get the hang of this.” I was bragging to my father, who called me again that night. He was thrilled by my daily schedule and didn’t want to miss a detail.
“Tomorrow we’ve got a class on land mines and after that we go into a checkpoint situation.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Okay, what they do is they stage a checkpoint, like in one of those countries where there’s a revolution going on, a civil war, something like that. Then they split us up into groups and each group in turn pretends they are a news crew that needs to go through. One of us plays the producer, another one is the cameraman and the other one is the journalist.”
“Hmmm…”
“We get to the checkpoint in our vehicle and the guys, the militia or whatever, start asking for money, passports, documents, bribes. In other words they start giving us a hard time, saying we can’t go through, our papers are not in order, blah blah blah. Basically they threaten they’ll have to keep us there. Stuff like that.”
“But what are they actually teaching you, tesoro? I still don’t understand.”
Despite the endearment my father suddenly sounded irritated.
“Well, the point is we have to figure out how to extricate ourselves from the situation, how to react without getting us into more trouble. There are all these unwritten rules one needs to know, like always take off your sunglasses, keep your hands on the dashboard.”
“On the dashboard?”
“Yes. Then you have to know how much cash you need to have at hand in case they decide to keep your passport, how to handle the really aggressive guys, who to pay and how. Apparently checkpoints in danger zones are where the most incidents occur. People get shot at checkpoints all the time, you know.”
I had started talking like Nkosi and Jonathan. It felt good to use the jargon.
“Basically, what you’re saying is they teach you how to bribe guards at checkpoints, yes?”
“Well, basically, yes. If necessary,” I said, defensively. “Should the situation get hairy.”
It annoyed me that my father, of all people, wouldn’t see the point of this. Wasn’t he supposed to be Mr. I Know It All on coup d’états, guerrillas and tribal clashes?
“But, Maria, it sounds more like an acting class than a training course to me. More like you’re playing danger,” he said. “I’m just wondering how this is going to help you once you actually find yourself in the situa—”
“Afghanistan is one huge checkpoint.”
“Right,” said my father skeptically.
“What?”
“Nothing, it just sounds a bit sinister, at least from where I’m standing. Besides, I know how impressionable you are. I wouldn’t want you to—”
“No, I’m fine, I promise you. The first couple of days, maybe. But now I’m getting into it.”
Perhaps he was beginning to feel guilty for having pushed me into this, now that he could see how the adventure was taking shape in all its gruesome details. However, at this point I didn’t need him to remind me how ill-suited I was to all this. Not now that I was beginning to cope. Not when I’d just managed to shut Obelix up.
Even the first-aid classes had taken a different light. All that talk about blood and amputations didn’t freak me out as much as it had two days earlier. Something had shifted in the last forty-eight hours. I had acquired an unexpected faith in the resistance of the human body now that I had begun to see it in a new way, as a solid chunk of flesh and bones, or better yet, as sausages. It seemed that, after all, everything could be fixed up with a snip here, a few neat stitches there and a good, tight bandage.
At dinner, Liz Reading had commandeered a position at Nkosi’s table and was now sitting between him and Jonathan Kirk, laughing and tossing her thick dark hair as Jonathan poured her a generous glass of wine. Bob Sheldon, the Australian journalist—a corpulent, hairy man with a gentle, bovine air—had joined them. I waved at Nkosi as I waited in line holding my plate in front of the shepherd’s pie and the cauliflower au gratin, but
quickly turned away again, fearing he would ask me to join them. I could already hear Jonathan’s booming laughter as, heedless of the volume, he was telling a funny story about meeting once with Chavez. I headed over to Mike, the quiet, balding rebel, who was sitting at a table at the back all by himself.
“How’s it going?” I asked him.
He put his book down.
“I guess the novelty wore off.”
“Who did you have as a victim today?”
“Alan, the one with the blue eyes. He was wounded in his thigh. An arterial hemorrhage.”
“Ah!” I said. “Was it difficult to handle?”
“Oh, I gave up straightaway. He kept squirting blood in my face with that pump thing, and he just wouldn’t stop. They do it on purpose. It’s their private joke. They pick one victim and then laugh amongst themselves afterwards. I wasn’t in the mood to play along.”
He snorted and went back to his roast.
“You mean you just left him lying there on the ground bleeding to death?”
“Yes. Anyway, I didn’t have a clue what to do with all that blood spurting on my glasses.”
He’d gone on strike. Incredible.
“You see, I’m only an accountant for an NGO. We do work for refugees,” he explained. “I sit all day in an office with air-conditioning and a doorman. I don’t think I’ll get too many opportunities to save someone with a severed artery. If anything like that does ever happen, I think I’ll call an ambulance with my cell phone and let them deal with it.”
I took a better look at Mike. Glasses with silver frames, sagging eyelids, lusterless hair; the texture of his clothes was soft, fuzzy, lifeless. I wasn’t sure he was being sarcastic. Candid, more like it. We ate in silence for a few minutes.
“Excuse me, but can I ask you something?” I said.
“Sure.”
“You’re not by any chance a priest, are you?”
“No.”
He shook his head slowly. He looked amused.
Only then did I notice the book he was reading all this time—The Artist Within: A Journey to Discover Your Hidden Creativity.
The following day, the checkpoint scenario didn’t exactly go as planned.
It was almost dusk and we were all packed in the van; Keith was driving us to the location of the action. The landscape had taken on a spectral appearance; it was drizzling again and the cold got into your bones. It wasn’t the kind of afternoon one longed to spend outdoors. I would’ve preferred to read a book by the fireside. The others were laughing and telling stories, a raucous animation like on a school bus.
Just then we heard the shots. The van slammed to a halt, and we were swept up in shouting, volleys of gunfire, blows to the side of the van; someone yanked the sliding door open. I caught a glimpse of camouflage suits and black balaclavas. Everyone was screaming like crazy. It felt like the end of the world.
“Get the fuck out! Out, I said, get out, bastards, move!”
Hands grabbed me and flung me out together with the others. Before I could get an idea of what was going on, someone shoved my head forward and stuffed it into a thick, dark, rough sack. There was screaming and banging all around. I couldn’t think straight.
“Down! I said get down, you motherfucker!”
I felt a blow in the back of my knees as two heavy hands bore down on my shoulders. The next thing I knew, I was facedown in the freezing, slushy mud. My heart was beating wildly, the cloth of the bag was stuck to my nostrils like a suction cup and I was gasping for air.
Then the voices subsided all at once; a preternatural silence fell. All I could hear now were the men’s footfalls in the wet grass (how many were there? and who were they?). They moved slowly, intentionally. All I could make out was muffled, rustling sounds, as if heavy bundles were being moved around. I heard footsteps approaching; someone kicked my ankle, forcing me to spread my legs open. The hands grabbed my arms and wrenched them away from my body.
There I was, crucified, facedown in clods of frozen earth with a bag over my head.
A cold rage started mounting. It was unbelievable, what they were doing to us. The bastards. This was too much, completely over the top. To pay money to be pushed down, face in the mud. One could easily catch pneumonia lying in the rain like this.
“I’m not bearing with this another second. I’m getting up.”
But I didn’t. One side of my brain instructed me it was better to remain there on the ground, perfectly still, if I didn’t want to get into more trouble.
I listened to the footsteps shuffling around me, stealthily. I could tell our kidnappers were busy doing something but had no clue what it was.
I tried to fully inhale the bit of air that passed through the cloth—I badly needed to breathe—but the sack clung to my nostrils even more. I started hyperventilating.
Great. I’m going to die of asphyxiation.
I furtively began to move my hand towards my face, I wanted to at least pull the cloth away from my nostrils in order to create enough space so that some air could filter through. But something hard hit me on the head (was it a boot, a rifle butt? I could no longer tell what anything was). A pretty heavy blow, mind you. I felt a hand grab my wrist and tug my arm out, thrusting it violently to the ground.
I tried to recall this breathing exercise I’d learned years before that helped release tension and anxiety. One had to breathe in very slowly, hold the breath for six full seconds, then slowly breathe out.
I couldn’t work out where my companions were, how far from me, whether they had been dragged away. I could no longer hear their voices, or feel their presence. Could it be that we had all sunk in this horrid silence, lost to each other, without the courage to even send a signal?
Was that all it took? We had been a group only moments before and now we were isolated, blind, each of us caving in to this frozen solitude.
I don’t know how much time had passed. I could hear the light rain pattering on the leaves of the trees, the footsteps, more sounds I couldn’t identify, like metallic clinking against something here and there. I had gradually begun to breathe more normally; at any rate, it didn’t feel like I had cotton wool up my nose anymore.
Footsteps approached me. The violent, brutal grip again. I felt the hands rifle through the pockets of my jacket, my pants, flipping me left and right like a deadweight, as they kept pushing something sharp into my back. The hands removed my wallet, my cell phone, my glasses and my room key. They touched me with an impatient, dangerous feel. They wrenched off my watch and my bracelet, clamped my wrist trying to snatch my silver ring, which was too tight and wouldn’t come off.
Somehow, although I knew the man was only playing a part (it could have been Tim, Alan, Obelix—someone I knew), I just couldn’t make myself speak to him and explain that I hadn’t been able to get the ring off for years, that he probably needed soap if he really intended to take it. He was determined to take everything off me, and wouldn’t let go of my finger till he succeeded by twisting it this way and that. Then the hands lifted my hair and fumbled around my neck, looking for earrings. The fingers were coarse, smelly. Their touch disgusted me. They yanked off my mother’s gold chain.
I had worn that chain since the day she died without ever taking it off. It had been ten years I’d had it around my neck. I wanted to cry.
“I hate you,” I mouthed. “I fucking hate you. You didn’t have to fucking do this to us.”
A leaden silence had descended. More than silence, it was an absence of life, as if someone had turned off the background hum of the insects, birds and plants and silenced nature’s breath.
In that eerie emptiness a shot suddenly rang out. A distant, isolated shot, like a lonely instrument. Then rustling sounds, scuffling all around me. I heard feet dragging on the ground as if they were being pulled against their will; I sensed fear in those footsteps.
They’re taking them away now. One by one. Maybe they’re dead, I thought.
There was another sh
ot. No shout, no struggle. Why didn’t any of us react, or at least try to find out what was happening to the others? Why didn’t anyone call out anyone else’s name?
Jonathan, Mike, Nkosi, Liz? I didn’t want them to die, I didn’t want anything to happen to them. They were my buddies.
Yet we were passively complying. Each one closed up in his own black hood, all spatial references, all sense of orientation gone; now merely victims awaiting execution. Another sharp report in the distance. Was there someone pointing a gun at my head as well, ready to shoot me if I moved or if I even called out someone’s name?
I heard footsteps coming quickly in my direction. Somehow I knew it right away. My turn had come.
They pulled me up like a heap of rags and shoved me forward. I stumbled into bushes, on the uneven ground, the hands prodding my back. I could hear the heavy breathing of the man shoving me. Then the hands pressed on my shoulders, forcing me down again. I fell to my knees on the wet grass. The hands grabbed my arms and made me cross them behind my head.
So this is it.
On my knees, hands crossed behind my head, waiting for a bullet that I can’t even see coming. Like an animal in a slaughterhouse.
This is how one dies, in the cold and the dark of a night like any other. Without a voice calling you by name, without even the sight of another human being. Your head stuffed inside a bag, alone. And you don’t even know why this is happening to you.
Memories and images muddled. The English hostage, the kind middle-aged man in the Day-Glo orange jacket. One moment in his car. The next on the ground with a gun at his head. Panic shutting my throat. Now the metallic taste of death.
It’s just this simple, and the same for every one of us. I thought I knew. But now I really knew.
I felt the hands loosen the tie on the bag.
Beheading, I couldn’t help but think.
They pulled the hood off my face. I saw Tim, the senior Defender.
He put a hand on my shoulder and leaned over me with a gentle smile.
“Everything okay? You all right?” he whispered while Alan was filming my face with a small video camera.
End of Manners Page 6