There seemed to be nobody left who mattered to witness the moment of victory. Tirzah was a place of husks and rags, and the survivors who stayed behind were mostly too old and fragile to move, though some of them were not so very old according to their birth papers but had been shattered into premature senility by what they had seen and, in some cases, what they had done. The victors took possession of the emptiness and the silence, carrion crows flapping their torn black wings on a carcass after circling above while the animal twitched in its death agony. The foreign airlifts left behind native-born staff, and the fleeing citizens of Tirzah did not gather up with them either the many foreign guest workers and illegals, many of them women such as Ella.
One or two doctors, several nurses, three journalists and a handful of aid workers remained behind in the wreckage with the abandoned. The medics, Ella heard, were holding out in the city’s ruined hospital, where the taps dribbled rust and the surgical instruments were grown blunt after overuse trimming the mutilations of the siege’s victims. During the last bombardment and the rampage of the victors, the little group took refuge in the basement of the building; the old boiler pipes to the laundry room boomed deep as tubas if you accidentally knocked against them, but the X-ray cubicles were still solid. Two nurses, Anna and Paulina, carried down the patients that had been left behind: two children with terminal cancers, three amputees from the defences of the city, two army recruits, and a senile man, a remnant who had already lost all his family in the siege.
When these last days came, and the foreigners and their favoured friends were scurrying out, catching the last airlifts, and even the TV news networks had been ordered to leave by their national representatives, the manager of the Metropole boarded up the stucco décor and carved marble panels of the elegant hotel lobby as well as he could, barring its doors with bomb debris, and made off to the countryside, carrying as much of the cellar as he could stuff into pillowcases and wheel on a luggage cart.
Ella thought of the young Dr Martin, whom she had seen at work with the wounded. Séverine Martin, from the international agency FemMédecs du Monde, had once stopped Ella in the street and bent down to Phoebe’s small height and given her a pencil she had in her pocket, murmuring affectionately. Ella could see she was curious about Phoebe’s injuries, that in her eyes she was a case, a specific casualty. But she was at least kind.
‘What are you putting on her?’ the doctor had asked, very quietly, over the little girl’s head. ‘These VX-2 injuries . . .’ she shook her head. ‘We’ve seen many die of those terrible burns. Your little girl was . . . lucky. Perhaps we can help her. We can do skin grafts, it’s remarkable what we can do. When we get out of here.’
‘Nothing.’ Ella was sulky. They were standing in the street, in the sun, and she was late.
The young doctor shook her head. ‘One of the cruellest weapons ever used in war – to our shame, for ever. But you have covered up the scars – with something?’
‘Just make-up,’ Ella responded. ‘It eases the pain.’ She didn’t tell her she had acquired a small pot of the precious salve, for the doctor would want to know how she had got her hands on it. It was helping, but slowly. (Sometimes Ella wondered if she hadn’t been cheated, and that the fabulous spider’s webs had been adulterated with other elements. Sometimes she wondered about their properties altogether, but then the whispers she sometimes heard in her head became troublesome and hurt her.)
‘Come and see me, please. At the hospital.’ The doctor turned to indicate the building, rising clearly visible above the jagged spars of its bombed surroundings. One wing looked perilously carious: all the glass had blown out of the three topmost storeys on one side. ‘We’re still operational, you know. Just. I would like to help la petite. Please.’
Ella hadn’t taken Phoebe, then; she knew they would have had to wait for the doctor for a long time as she toiled round the ever-growing casualties of the guns on the ridge and snipers from their hides, and Ella couldn’t afford not to turn up at the hotel as expected; regularity, punctuality, no demands, no problems. Those were the manager’s rules. Any phones ringing asking why a bathroom hadn’t been cleaned, why a tray hadn’t been taken, or why the massage number wasn’t answering, and she would be out of a job.
As the wholesale evacuation was taking place, in the syncopated confusion of the flight of the refugees, against the roar of the helicopter blades, the bursts of the loudspeakers marshalling the fugitives and the shouts and howling of the scattered survivors, mother and daughter crept through the streets towards the battered hospital.
A few others had had the same idea: Virla, also from the hotel, whom Ella often passed on the back stairs up to the sixth floor where Virla had her beat. When she saw Ella and Phoebe, she began running, shouting incoherently as she overtook them, for Ella was moving slowly, half dragging, half carrying Phoebe; as Virla passed, she grabbed Ella by her hair and pushed her down on to the broken pavement.
‘Don’t you follow me. No way,’ she hit Ella again, ‘No room for you, no no no!’ But Ella shoved her; made her way past her. Virla took off again, towards the hospital, and Ella began running too, hauling Phoebe by the arm till she shook herself loose in protest.
When they scrabbled at the boarded-up windows of the basement round the back of the damaged building, there was no movement, no sound; light was breaking and Ella was full of fear that they would be spotted by the patrols. But at last a woman’s voice rose fiercely through a crack in a sandbagged vent and asked what they wanted; Ella cried out the doctor’s name.
There was a pause, and then more urgent whispers, and they were directed to a door concealed behind a stack of smashed equipment, unhinged, wrecked cupboard doors. Resentfully, Virla trudged quietly alongside Ella and Phoebe and followed them into the dark, sandbagged basement. A tense group of survivors was gathered around the young foreign medic, while, in the dimness, Ella could hear the groaning of the hospital’s last patients where they lay dying.
‘How are you, little one?’ said Séverine Martin, stroking Phoebe’s cheek. ‘I’m pleased to see you—’ she stopped herself, Ella knew, from saying, ‘alive’. ‘And Mémère? How is Mémère?’
Now, in the dark beneath the broken building where she had worked, Ella felt a quiver of self-pity, touched by the doctor’s considerateness and courage. She squashed the feeling, harshly, and gave her brusque thanks only. She told herself, When you last trusted a stranger, look where that got you. Never accept consolation; it’s always treacherous. Hope is that bad sprite, who flits in front of your eyes, deceiving you with her brightness, her glinting wings, her star-crowned wand. A whisper, again from that lost past, floated through her mind: Remember the wolf. So, refuse that feeling of common sympathy, for this medic doesn’t care about you. Not about you. Just for the mess of suffering humanity, in principle, in general.
There were no candles; only cracks of light from the high narrow bands of the basement windows, through the gaps between the sandbags. Yet her eyes became used to the gloom and she began to pick out her companions: Virla, now moaning on the floor in a corner, Paulina, a nurse, praying by the mattress on which two children were laid out, curving mounds so slight they seemed already weightless as in death, another woman stacking some debris to make a screen. Soon, Ella realised, to separate them from the corner they had to use for a latrine. Other shapes were slumped against one another, muttering a mixture of prayers, entreaties, curses, and cries, figures missing limbs with soiled bandages were stretched out side by side in one corner; there were several more children, many younger than Phoebe. More women, again. The remnant, thought Ella, we are always the remnant. We are cuttings from the pattern, and we fall from the tailor’s shears on to the floor, fit for stuffing cushions or padding shoulders; we are the disappeared, made invisible. Yet those discarded twists of cloth can utter, they fall into patterns and figures dropped at random like numbers cast from a lottery urn, but this will yield shape, arrangement, with ingenuity, with patience.
And rags are pulped and flattened and changed into the heaviest, ridged paper. And then, horizons of meaning widen, for there’s no limit to what stories they may then bear. Figure: ground. Interchangeable, inconstant, it just depends which your mind fixes on: the bespoke suit spread in deliberate plan and sections on the tailor’s table or the kelp-like twists of living cloth fallen from the shears.
She pulled Phoebe into her lap and stroked her, half-singing in a quiet, barely audible drone, so that the vibrations of her voice travelled though her fingers rather than the sound rising to her ears, and as she murmured and swayed, she watched and listened.
Gradually, they began to talk, very quietly, to tell one another where they had come from, what they had lost.
The inventories looped, massed, became a towering pyre; beloved kin, cherished belongings burned up in the war, lost in the siege; families dispersed and become untraceable, moorings here, in Tirzah, cut.
‘I have a son in Enoch,’ said Ella, suddenly. ‘We’re going to go there and find him. He’ll be doing well. He’ll become a doctor, perhaps. Or a lawyer. Or an engineer. Or a teacher. He will take care of us. When this is over.’ She began to speak, more rapidly. ‘I am glad now that I sent him away from here. I knew it would be terrible here. I wanted him to be safe – somewhere, elsewhere. So we left him—’ She hugged Phoebe and rocked a little.
‘You must keep your strength,’ whispered the doctor. ‘Don’t talk, try to sleep.’ They could not stay long, she knew, not without water or food. Aloud, she said, ‘We don’t know how long we’ll have to stay here. When it’ll be safe – or at least not so dangerous as now, outside.’
Soon after, the old man began to howl; the sound rising and falling like a siren wail. It maddened them, and they implored him to stop. But his wild eyes showed he did not understand, and the hole of his mouth seemed to gape so wide it would swallow them all.
‘They will hear him, we’ll be dragged out, he’ll be our death,’ wailed one of the fugitives in the basement.
Doctor Martin shook her head where she sat, wearily crouched against the wall. She had no drugs left for the old man in his dementia. The little morphine she had she was keeping for the children; the vial was wrapped and tied to her waist.
When the old man’s cries did not stop, the younger nurse, Anna, took up a metal dish, a curved receptacle for instruments, and raised it above her head. When the threat did not put an end to his noise, she brought it down hard on his temple.
The doctor groaned, ‘No! We must hold on to what is left of our humanity, please, no!’
But the man fell sideways; the blood from the wound trickled feebly.
Phoebe clutched her mother. ‘Is he dead?’ she whispered, into her body.
‘No, no, of course not, he’s just quiet now. Come,’ Ella pulled them both up, to creep closer to Séverine. ‘You don’t mind,’ she asked. ‘If we’re nearer you?’
‘Don’t be afraid,’ the doctor murmured. Then she repeated the words again, needing to convince herself. ‘Don’t be afraid.’ She paused. ‘They say the age of miracles was long ago. But I’m not sure.’ In her drawn face, she managed a dim twinkle for Phoebe. ‘Something will happen.’
She was counting on aid workers returning, hard on the heels of the victorious besiegers; her own organisation, she knew, would return swiftly. As soon as the army and its warlords and the war machine’s bosses had done with jubilation, they’d need services up and running, and, to get them, they’d have to agree to terms with the international agencies. There would be a semblance of order restored, soon.
She was almost muttering to herself, to give herself courage, for she too was weak from the long work of the siege. ‘So many dying, so many limbs, so many bodies . . .’ She began to cry, and Ella did not put out her hand to touch her, for she did not believe in consolation and she did not trust pity.
In snatches through the long hours, she slept too; now and then muffled weeping and whisperings of some of her companions in the close basement interrupted her. Later, one of the children woke with a sudden, piercing cry. Phoebe was sleeping, but at the sound she shuddered and groaned and curled herself into a tighter ball. Séverine Martin woke; she went over to the mattress, where the dying boy was gasping. In the basement, the air was stifling now with the smells of decay, disease, and the restless sleep of bad dreams and foul bodies. The last dose she’d given the child had worn off. Quickly, she unwrapped the vial and, with a much-used syringe, administered half of the remaining supply of morphine. The child’s body was a dry twig; it gave a last shiver all over, then lay without movement. The doctor shrank from the bedside, covering her eyes.
Ella was watching.
When she’d pulled herself together after the shot, the doctor roused Paulina, then, reluctantly, Anna: ‘We have to take the bodies out of here – help me.’
The three of them staggered under the weight of the old man as if he were already encased in lead.
‘I think we have to take the chance, to go out,’ said Dr Martin, ‘It’s nighttime. If we leave him in the corridor, there are grave risks attached, and our resistance to disease is already weakened.’
‘It’s madness,’ said Anna. ‘Snipers.’
‘It’s dark – look. We must take him out. For everyone’s sake.’
Ella turned her face to the wall as they dragged the carcass to the barricaded door. But they did not have the strength to go farther and collapsed, by the sandbags, the corpse fallen sideways. The nurses began to laugh, uttering sharp, crazy notes, as they tried to straighten the old man’s clothes, arrange his limbs, find something to cover his face.
Phoebe, seeing this, scared, was burrowing in Ella’s breast; her mother tried to fend her off, but, occasionally, the damaged girl still needed that comfort.
The doctor was peering out of the window slit just below street level. ‘We must try, we must, to get him out of here.’
Together, the nurses and Dr Martin pulled apart the barrage of sandbags against the door to the area outside, the space between the basement and ground level, and dragged the body just outside. A gust of air freshened the atmosphere; Ella turned her face towards it. Watching from the door, Séverine Martin reported, ‘There’s still a lot of confusion, movement, explosions. You’d never think there was any more glass to be shattered. Everything’s burning, too. The night’s lit up. And the rats! Rats are too clever to burn in their holes. And the stray dogs – they’ll have become dangerous.’ She turned back to the room and addressed the nurses. ‘Leave the child. We can’t dump him like that, a bone for a pack of pie dogs. We must carry him out of here. Perhaps upstairs – have you the strength? He weighs no more than a . . . swallow.’
But it wasn’t so. In death, the child’s corpse slumped leadenly. Collapsing on to the floor, the nurse wailed, ‘I can’t go any further, not any more.’
The nurses stood, listless, in front of the obstacle. ‘We can’t,’ one said. ‘It’ll kill us.’
The young doctor surveyed the basement, grim-faced. Against the walls, on the floor, lay the remnant of all the victims she had tried to help; some fitfully sleeping in the half coma of thirst and famine, others groaning; soon, the second child would die.
She closed the door to the street above and heaved one bag up against it again. Slowly she returned to her spot on the floor near Ella and Phoebe.
‘Don’t try to carry him out,’ Ella whispered. ‘We can bury him in a sandbag – he’s only small. Then sew it up again. For a time, it will do, no?’
On hands and knees, heads hanging from exhaustion and inanition, the two of them parted the bulging sacking; Dr Martin’s scalpel was still sharp enough to saw the fibres; then they scraped at the sand, hollowing it out, as if, Ella remembered from a faraway past, they were transplanting a flower to a new bed, a slip of geranium that had triumphantly taken in a tiny pot and needed space to grow.
The child was sunken-cheeked, with eyes like a baby gibbon’s, so round in their deep sockets and starin
g wide and deep. Ella refused the choking in her throat, and pushed the body into the bag, flexing the tiny blueish legs further discoloured with greyish patches, the motions recalling to her now, even more incongruously, the action of stuffing a fowl. Grimly, furiously, she took the needle from the doctor and pushed it through the coarse fabric, ignoring the punctures of her fingers as she sutured the cadaver into its makeshift shroud.
If they could not come out into the air soon, they would all die, and the rats would come to the feast.
She sucked her finger where it was bleeding: could one eat one’s own flesh and be nourished? she wondered. Could one become a closed loop, drinking one’s own piss and picking through one’s shit for scraps as flies and beetles and even birds do on cowpats and other droppings, digging out seeds and berries that have passed through without being broken down?
‘I can’t sleep,’ said Séverine Martin, weakly. ‘Not any more. It’s dawn, another day.’ She was slumped against the wall, her eyes open wide and lustreless as if old coins were already placed over them to close them. She put out a hand to Ella. ‘Talk to me. Let me hear a human voice.’
‘You said not to talk.’
‘Yes, but it feels we’re the last left on earth, and I want to hear a woman’s voice. It’s the first thing one hears coming into the world and so . . .’
Ella shifted Phoebe’s weight, for the little girl’s head was lolling heavily against her. The doctor looked sidelong, marvelling.
‘I thought so, you’re still nursing.’
Ella didn’t answer.
Séverine coughed a laugh. ‘How long has that been?’
Ella didn’t reply. She said instead, ‘It’ll dry up here. Probably has already. It’s comfort, not for food, you know. It eases her when . . .’ She was angry the doctor had noticed.
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