The Dhow House

by Jean McNeil

  The conflict seemed to have taken its cue from the landscape. It was gaunt, half-hearted. The real war was in Gikayo, a hundred kilometres away, and in the coastal city of Gao, which looked out into the Arabian sea.

  In Gariseb the days started at 6am. The sun appeared without warning, a clouded disk that had been hovering in the sky all night. But within a minute it charged, heraldic, into the equatorial sky. She took three bucket showers a day. The dust clumped in her nostrils; if she blew them in the arid air the tissue came away black.

  At night the shadows were stone. She stood on the perimeter of the light thrown by the generator’s striplights. Sometimes she thought she saw shapes, bundle-sized, moving from thorn tree to rock; child goat-herders on the outskirts of their employers’ land, straggling behind their quick-trotting charges.

  The land was heartless. Or rather, it could have little use for them, for anyone. This indifference was so absolute it was almost cleansing. The brassy ridges of the hills broadcast a curious pulsing intent, like a heartbeat. The hills knew they didn’t belong there, they had never seen their kind before, these medical colonists with their moon tents and solar-powered walk-in refrigerator and strong boxes and provisions flown in twice a month. The long resinous grass that came and died the one week they had rain wagged its head in disapproval in the rare wind. It was part of the place’s conspiracy. I know you, it seemed to say her, with its bare hills that leaned so readily into the night. I know what you are doing here.

  ‘Okay, I think we’re almost there. You can finish up?’ A question curled in Rafael’s voice, but he did not stay to hear it answered. He was already behind her, shucking off his gloves.

  In the two months she had worked alongside Rafael, she had managed to glean that he was a Madrileño. He certainly looked the part: thin, edgy, a smoker. There was a bit of the dandy to him, if only because his goatee beard was always perfectly trimmed. Harsh glasses concealed fine caramel eyes. In the evenings he set himself personal building projects, working with the mechanics in the shed, fiddling with drills and old light bulbs. He produced light fixtures he referred to as ‘sculptures’.

  Rafael had been an anarchist in university; he was arrested and held for five months after a student protest, he’d told her. She wasn’t sure if that experience explained the narrow, hard streak within him. As a surgeon he was fussy, exacting. She had the sense that he might have perceived she was the better seamstress, where arterial surgery was concerned, and resented her for it.

  That day’s casualty came late, at four o’clock. Rafael unwound shrouds of gauze, sticky with flesh, to reveal a sabre wound to the tibia. It was deep – this is what distinguished it from a normal knife wound. Sabres were invented for a reason; they could slice cleanly through sinew and tendon and bone.

  They set to work. It proved a surprisingly easy job. She sutured under Rafael’s exacting eye. They were done within an hour.

  She pulled aside the curtain and threw her gloves into the hospital waste bin. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a sack – rags, perhaps, on one of the few rusted trolleys. It was parked beside the tent, against the billowing walls. As she approached the bundle twitched.

  She put her hand out and touched it. The bundle turned over and revealed a dark face. Dull eyes stared at her.

  She asked her name. The dull eyes followed her lips. She pointed to her ear. The woman shook her head. Two claw-like hands emerged from the bundle and went to her ears, then quickly apart. Boom, she mouthed, her mouth opening in a soundless oval.

  ‘I will find you a bed,’ she mouthed. She lay her head sideways on her folded hands.

  The woman closed her eyes. The expression on her face was indeterminate. It ought to have been relief, but it looked like sorrow.

  The following day she went to check on the woman.

  ‘I can hear now,’ the woman said. Her voice was deep and strong.

  ‘Temporary deafness – a bomb.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Then a stream of words in a dialect she couldn’t understand. She called for Lenjoh, the interpreter.

  The woman, Aisha, told her story. She had walked from her home, crossing grassy mountains inhabited by sociable baboons, cutting thin valleys with her miniature camel train, walking for ten days without food and only a little water. She’d slept only two or three hours a night. Her animals began to suffer: first from sleep deprivation, then hunger, then thirst. But Aisha had kept going. She’d brought three camels and five cows, her only remaining animals. She’d heard there was a food station on the other side of the border.

  By night she hid her animals in the bush and slept inside a thorny acacia. Twice men with guns walked past her, looking for her. They’d seen her tracks but she’d been careful to erase the last several hundred metres with a makeshift broom of thorns.

  By day she walked through the bush. She’d seen people – black stick figures, she’d said – coming towards her and panicked. But they turned out to be apparitions.

  Three of her sons were dead, killed fighting Al-Nur. They had been coerced into uniform by the state. ‘They were herders,’ she said, through Lenjoh. ‘Men of peace.’ By the time she made it to camp, only one camel was alive. She had seen this camel tethered to a tree just outside camp, heard him lowing painfully day and night.

  ‘Please take care of him,’ the woman begged her. ‘I cannot feed him.’

  For the next ten days she took her staff ration of UHT milk and fed it to the camel via a makeshift funnel given to her by a sweet Irishman on the mechanics team. She gathered leaves from the few acacias in flower, swaddling her hands in thick gloves to avoid the thorns. She plucked sparse grass, as Aisha had instructed her to do.

  At first the camel swivelled its backside at her, and she feared it would kick. But after he’d taken the first draught of milk he let her approach. When he saw her he made a deep rumbling noise that could have been pleasure or pain. At night she fed him water.

  She was forty-seven, Aisha told her. She looked seventy. When she was strong enough Aisha was given a small tent from their store of fifty or so. These were lime green Vango tents from the UK. Aisha had stared at it as if she’d just been given a four-bedroomed house.

  The camel stayed attached to a nearby stunted whistling thorn, which it quickly stripped of its leaves. In her breaks she led the camel out to pasture as far beyond the camp as she dared and stayed there while it fed, leading it back to Aisha’s tent at night. During one of those breaks she watched a rainbow form, far away. A sudden wind swept dust in a spiral, erasing its beams in an orange haze. In the distance was the scrawny valley where it was rumoured lions lived.

  The sun set as it always did, hurling itself over the horizon. It was dark within ten minutes. The moon rose and the corrugated landscape bathed in silver strips. She stared into its gleam, thinking how the detail of her life was so unanticipated – she had worked in barren, blasted places before, of course, but they were almost always military hospitals, run by rote and fear. She never spent her off-hours tending to a lone camel as if she’d been appointed its guardian angel, trying to read the expression in its indifferent eyes. It pleased her, to be so disrupted from her sense of herself.

  ‘How is the camel doing?’ Rafael appeared next to her. She was startled. In three months he had never sought out her company, other than to discuss the surgical rota for the day, the new nurse arriving from London, or logistics.

  ‘He’s getting stronger.’

  Together they watched the camel orbit the acacia. He didn’t seem to mind the hobbles, stepping around them delicately, padding back and forth with his cushioned, dinner plate-sized feet.

  ‘I wonder if the lions would go for him,’ he said.

  ‘I know, I’m thinking I should put him in my tent, and I’ll sleep outside.’

  Rafael have her a quick sideways glance.

  ‘It’s a joke.’ Although, as she said it, she wondered. The Bedouin’s camels slept with them. She quite liked the idea of settling down on a r
ug beside him.

  ‘Ah.’ Rafael nodded. ‘I don’t think the logistics people would permit it, actually.’

  She watched Rafael walk away to his makeshift workshop where he struggled with his sculptures.

  The moon had risen. It hovered in the east, low-slung, peering at her with its censor eye.

  Yes, Gariseb had been this so far, a strange dislocation. It was not merely a more remote version of other field hospitals she had worked in. In Gariseb she treated Christians and Muslims side by side, and in the recovery tents or the canteen a détente ruled: there were no skirmishes, not even arguments. It seemed the wounded found common ground. In any case she was uninterested in religion or ideology. She normally traversed far more intimate terrain – the flooded blood vessels, the exploded retinae, the tributaries and marshlands of flesh.

  She ought to have felt harassed, or at least discontented by the camp, its isolation, her straitened circumstances, her sudden demotion to camel herder. But she was glad to be back in the field. If she had stayed in her job at St Thomas’, she’d never have understood any of this – but what? She still could not identify it exactly, this suddenly pressing truth. It was like a dark, sleek animal, glimpsed only before it disappeared around the corner.

  She had been there for nearly four months when he appeared. She was working fifteen-hour shifts. Sleep had become a dreamless refuge.

  She emerged from one of these nightly comas into an orange morning. The camp was quiet at 6am. There were no twelve-year-olds who would soon be footless, no pickup trucks of bleeding villagers. These began to arrive after 7am, the casualties of dawn assaults.

  She ate her customary breakfast quickly – coffee and a small bowl of porridge. The diet had become oppressive. Every day lunch was the same: sorghum flatbreads and goat stew. The organisation made a gesture to Western cuisine in the form of chicken legs, flown in on the UN plane every month and pushed to the bottom of the vault-like meat freezer. She had eaten no fish. She found that a dull desire, not as sharp as a craving, had taken hold of her bones. There was an oily base to the hunger.

  She walked to the triage tent. Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of a man leaning against the wall. She couldn’t remember seeing him before, couldn’t remember pulling him out of the flatbed of a pickup truck.

  He approached her. He was like a greyhound, quick, aquiline. There was a flash in his eye, a firmness to the slant of his mouth. His age was hard to judge, but then it was, generally, here. The twenty-eight-year-old doctors and logistics managers who worked with her looked twelve. The thirty-two-year-old Bora and Nisa she soldered back together looked sixty-three.

  He reached her. ‘I would like to show you something.’

  His English hit her like a blow. She had yet to meet an insurgent who would admit to having learned a word of the infidel’s language, although many did speak it more than adequately, a result of their training in Yemen. Anthony had shown her surveillance drone photographs of a neat, fold-away camp in the mountains two hundred kilometres from Sana’a, in a hill fort that had been the British cavalry headquarters at the turn of the century.

  He took out a notebook. It had black covers and ruled pages and was bound by a black elastic. Bound tight to the notebook was a pen. ‘I will have to translate.’ He leafed through it. He gave her a hesitant look.

  She studied him. His lean frame suggested he was a Bora, although he was not particularly tall. He was most likely from the coastal city of Gao. Most of the men who evaded their questions were from there. She had never been to the city but she had read books and seen photo essays on the once grand resort city. The photographs she had seen were from the 1930s and showed wide, tiled avenues fringed by thin palms. It looked like Rio de Janeiro. There was even an art deco cinema in town, sandwiched between two Italian restaurants: the names were visible in the bleached black-and-white images: the Terraza Roma, the Toscana.

  The city was sandwiched between the desert and the same ocean she would come to know in the Dhow House. But the city had lost any sense of its original geography. Entire blocks had vanished in the civil war. Gutted hotels surveyed the Indian Ocean like open-mouthed old men. Former foreign consulates stood roofless to the scald of sun. Gao’s salmon-coloured buildings had once been garlanded with second-storey balconies fringed by filigreed stonework. Its mosques had been as white as those she would later see in Kilindoni, their minarets traced in green trim. The beachfront had the same ivory sands, shallow warm waters patrolled by black-tipped reef sharks, the desert rose growing on its edge.

  The man proceeded to read from his notebook. It was a story he had written, he informed her. The story was about a man who died from shark bite – one of the many sharks that scissored the cold waters off the coast of Gao, only to be reincarnated as a pair of spectacles. Everyone put him on their faces, the man told her, and their sight was instantly corrected. Widows saw the reasons for their husbands’ deaths and thanked God for having given them the opportunity to die as martyrs. Children saw their true vocation as soldiers of God. They stopped longing for the streets of the old capital with its bars and Italian magazines, its DVD stalls and mandolin players.

  ‘And the sharks?’ she asked.

  ‘The sharks are too big to wear the spectacles, so they go on killing senselessly.’

  She listened in his voice for any note of irony. Finally she said, ‘So it’s a parable. You are the man who becomes a pair of glasses.’

  He gave her a solemn, nearly nostalgic look. He was not strident. He didn’t seem to have the self-destructive stubbornness others of his kind displayed. His manner was mild but watchful.

  The sun’s tangerine flare caught his face and turned his skin to bronze. He pointed towards the dressing swaddling his left abdomen. He must have been operated on two or three days before.

  ‘How long will I take to heal?’

  ‘I’ll do an examination tomorrow and tell you then.’

  ‘I must go home. My father is waiting for me.’ He named a village not far from Gao. His face lightened at the sound of its name, but his eyes remained two pieces of coal. ‘You won’t tell them?’

  ‘Tell who?’

  ‘Who you speak to, over there,’ he flung his right hand north, an errant compass.

  ‘We are doctors.’

  She saw his eyes search her face and fail to find what they were looking for.

  He gave his name as Ali. She struggled to picture his body on the operating table. She must have operated on five different men the morning Ali arrived. With his clipped, martinet stride she would recognise his walk in a crowd of similar thin, impala-haunched men. His skin was darker than most, he was not particularly tall or imposing, but he had a commanding quality. He was very thin, a result of his wounds, lack of food, years of loping through the desert and the natural physique of his tribe, the Bora. ‘We are all like camels,’ he said. ‘We need no food, only a little water to keep us going.’

  There was no appeal or gratitude in Ali’s eyes, but no disgust either. He was not like the others she had treated, who looked at her – a woman – with a confused wash of fear and distaste. They squirmed, sometimes, told the interpreter they wanted a man. ‘There is no man. She treats you, you live. Or you can refuse and die.’

  Ali’s wounds had not been not so severe, she recalled. Bone was incredibly strong. If a high-velocity bullet entered a body and hit a bone, it could be deflected, even if the bone itself were shattered. Then the bullet went on a zany trajectory, sometimes travelling up people’s forearm, through their shoulder, and out the other end, leaving its trail. If it failed to hit the soft tissue of a vital organ, the casualty might be saved.

  There were other wounds, invisible, that only a surgeon would see. The kidney smashed into overripe watermelon, so that the flesh became almost granulated, slipped through her fingers with its ooze of juice and blood. When they hit organs, bullets pulped them. Then there were the bullets that kept on going through the body, having encountered no re
al resistance, shattering out the other side of a shoulder or an arm, taking with it a triangle of flesh, then carrying on into the body of the person behind them, passing through a shoulder or a neck again, penetrating the skin of a third. These bullets kept going for an average of 2.2 kilometres – another statistic her dry major boss had taught her, nearly ten years ago now, in Kandahar.

  In Ali’s case there was a neat exit wound from an AK round which had skirted his abdomen and exited his back, tearing his lateral muscle but missing his spine. She had traced the bullet’s cavity, sewed the exit hole, and thought, that’s another one ticked off.

  The following day she stopped by the recovery tent. Ali sat on the bed. She examined him and pronounced that he would be well enough to leave in two days’ time.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, in his precise English. In one eye was an inquisitive, even kindly, expression. The other eye’s direction was random and interrogating. This astigmatism unnerved her. When she spoke to him sometimes she would focus on the left eye, sometimes the right. It was as if her mind refused to take him in all at once.

  That afternoon she was stirring masala into a cup of tea when Andy called to her, telling her she had a visitor.

  Ali hovered on the threshold of her office.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ she said, in her best Arabic.

  ‘Thank you,’ he returned, in English.

  ‘Please, sit down.’ She offered him an orange plastic chair, regulation issue, coated in dust, like everything else.

  He levered himself slowly onto the chair without wincing, but his pain was evident in the twitch of his deltoid.

  ‘You are not quite healed.’ She knew he was planning to leave the following day. They could do nothing to stop their patients sending a goat herder as a runner to the nearest village with a message to send a truck. In the old days they’d had to return people across the border or into frontlines beyond the field hospitals, a dangerous task.