Reconciliation for the Dead

by Paul E. Hardisty

  And now here, the same hospital as before. Everything in rows, always in rows. He reaches down and runs his right hand over the bandages that encase his chest. His whole right side is heavily swaddled. There is a tube running from an incision in his chest, another down his nose. Slugs of yellow fluid are sucked slowly from his body. He feels short of breath, as if someone is standing on his chest. He runs his tongue over the inside of his cheek. The hole is gone, sealed with a ridge of dangling threads. He rolls each stitch around the tip of his tongue until he has memorised every trough and tendril of this jagged new landscape. The stitches are incomprehensibly large. The outside of his face is heavily bandaged. He feels no pain.

  Night comes. Nurses, too, turning and folding, adjusting, whispering. One of them pumps his IV full of morphine. He sleeps. Morning floods the ward. The pain in his side returns, intensifies as the shadows contract and glide across the floor in ghostlike geometries. Fever transports him. The nurse ups the morphine dosage, but the pain returns quickly, grows. Dreams come, violent and impossible to grasp. A man standing at the end of his bed. He is broad shouldered and overweight, balding. His dark eyes are without depth. Looking into them is like staring into the void. He wears a doctor’s white coat and facemask but he is not a doctor. The man hovers there, staring down at him. It is the fat man in the suit – Botha. The one who was tallying the tusks in the chana; the one they’d seen at the base the day before Wade was killed. When Clay opens his eyes Botha is gone.

  Another morning comes bright and shadowlike. The pain is a living thing inside him now, growing. That’s when he sees her again. She is standing at the foot of his bed, facing him, like the man in his dreams. Other doctors are with her, men with grey hair and glasses. There is a hushed conference. Fear blows through his chest, a swallowing gale that leaves him gasping for breath. After they are finished talking the other doctors leave and she comes and sits next to him.

  Do you remember me, she asks. He nods, yes, how could I forget? She tells him that his wounds are not healing. They have missed something. I could have told you that, Doctor, he says. She nods, looks down at the floor a moment. The shrapnel shattered several ribs, tore through your left lung. Pieces of shattered bone and metal are still lodged in the lung. They did not get it all out first time around. Do you understand? she asks. He nods. She touches his hand and it is better than morphine.

  We are going to have to operate again, she says. I am going to do it myself. He tries to smile. It is hard to breathe, to speak. She squeezes his hand. Her smile is beautiful. The freckles on the bridge of her nose are beautiful. How is Eben? he asks. His own voice sounds far away, like a memory. Who? she says. Eben Barstow, from my unit. Is he here? He was hit in the head. He would have come in not too long before me. She shakes her head. I will try to find out for you. Are you ready? We have to take you in now.

  He awakens in post-op. Soon the pain is worse than before. His body is aflame. Fever transports him. He is in the house he grew up in, the pool and the big garden with the hut in the back where their maid lived, and it is somehow the murdered village; the faces of those massacred alive again, the living blank-eyed and cold. She appears once more, hovering above him, her voice disembodied, echoing through dreams and half-imagined illusions. Botha is there too, standing at the foot of his bed like an undertaker sizing him up for a coffin.

  Twice more he is wheeled into the operating theatre. Each time he awakens, and the doctors come, and for a while he seems stable. And then the fever returns. He has no sense of time passing. There is just the bed and the bandages and the slowly pulsing fluids and the pain advancing and receding in concert with the flow of chemicals through his body. He can feel himself tiring, wearing down. It is as if he is coming apart. Dreams and reality coalesce. She is there by the bed most times he wakes.

  The next morning – is it the next morning? – she is there again. She looks at his chart, sits beside him, holds his hand. The damage was very extensive, she says. Do you understand? We are doing everything we can. One rib was shattered into very small pieces. Some pieces are so small we can’t see them on the X-ray. I am having to do it by feel. I’ve gone in three times, now. I don’t think I can do it again. There is too much damage. I’m sorry, Claymore. She uses his name for the first time. Claymore. He thanks her. It comes out as barely a wheeze, but she seems to understand, smiles at him.

  That’s when he knows he is going to die. He knew it when he’d first been hit, but now he knows it for sure. He is not sad. There is justice in it, he tells himself. At least six men he has killed, maybe more. And one boy. He tries to tell her this as she sits beside him, but his voice is gone, his vocal chords frozen. Spikes of pain drive through his chest. She stands, looks down at him a long time. He knows she is saying goodbye. She turns and walks away.

  He misses Eben more than he has ever missed anyone in his life. This is a surprise to him. He is not prepared for it. The power of it.

  Time becomes a blur. There are vivid dreams. He is falling towards the ocean. The fat man in the suit is there again, standing at the end of his bed, smiling as he falls. He is so far up that the clouds beneath him look like strings of his mother’s pearls against the shifting blue of the ocean. He can see the longshore currents, the deep blue of the cold upwellings, the pale, sky-coloured shoals of warmer water, the emerald blush of sandy shallows and reefs. As he falls he reaches for his rip cord but he realises he has no parachute. As the ocean rushes towards him, he sees the bodies of men on the water. They float face down, arms and legs spread like the points of a star. The bodies are black against the vivid blue.

  He wakes just before he hits the water. Sweat covers his body. How can a heart beat so fast? He is still alive.

  ‘Hi.’

  She was sitting beside his bed in her white coat, a clipboard in her hands. She was smiling. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Better than I look.’ Clay tried to sit up, but she reached out her hand and gently pushed him back down.

  ‘Rest,’ she said. ‘That’s what you need now.’ She has an unusual accent. South African, yes, but with something else leavening the vowels. American?

  ‘How long was I out?’

  ‘It’s been almost two weeks since the last operation.’

  ‘Two days?’ His hearing must have been damaged by the explosion.

  She moved her head slowly from side to side. ‘Two weeks.’

  ‘Not possible,’ he croaked.

  She walked to the end of the bed, unhooked his chart and handed him the clipboard. There it was. He’d been in the hospital three weeks.

  ‘Jesus,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Thank whoever you like. You are a very lucky boy.’ She ran her gaze over him. ‘Sorry,’ she said after a while. ‘Man.’

  ‘Did you find out about Eben?’ he managed.

  ‘Your friend. Yes.’ She frowned. ‘He is here at 1-Mil. In the head trauma ward.’

  ‘How is he?’

  She pulled in her lower lip. ‘He is in a coma. But stable.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Clay closed his eyes, bit down on the fact. An image of his friend’s face came, blood pouring from the wound in the skull, pooling in the eye sockets. The bullet had taken away part of his skull and beneath the matted hair the brain glistened in the sun.

  ‘Can I see him?’

  ‘You are healing quickly, but right now you are in no condition to be visiting anyone. Perhaps, in a week or so, if you continue to improve, you might be able to receive visitors. But right now you’re not going anywhere, soldier.’

  Clay lay back. ‘Tell me, Doctor. No bullshit. Will Eben make it?’

  She looked over her shoulder, back along the length of the ward, then gazed into his eyes. A tear welled in her left eye, brimmed at the underlid, receded. ‘There is a good chance he will live, yes. But he …’ She stopped, sat staring at him. ‘Were you close?’

  ‘He is my best friend. Is, doctor. Present tense.’

  Her cheeks blushed pink. ‘Of course, sorr
y. I get so used to … to having these conversations. I apologise.’

  ‘But what, Doctor?’

  ‘I spoke with the attending surgeon. Your friend was in critical condition when he arrived, but stable. But there were complications. That’s what the surgeon said. Complications before the operation. Something went wrong.’

  ‘What do you mean, complications?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I only spoke briefly with the surgeon. Something about a foul-up in pre-op. Your friend suffered extensive brain damage. The operation was only partially successful. He is alive, but he has lost all motor function.’

  Clay said nothing.

  ‘Your friend is quadriplegic, Clay. I am sorry.’ She looked at the floor. ‘And there is little chance he will regain cognitive function.’

  Something was pushing down hard on his larynx. He was choking. Tears flooded his eyes, hot, unbidden. Shame welled up inside him. He gasped. He hadn’t cried since his parents died.

  He felt her hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Don’t,’ he snapped, pushing her hand away. ‘What does that mean – won’t regain cognitive function?’

  ‘Those parts of his brain that control speech and movement have been badly damaged. He can hear, see, understand, but he cannot move or in any way acknowledge communication.’

  Anger bloomed inside him now. Fury. If he’d had his R4 he would have blown out the windows and shredded the walls, kicked over the beds. ‘Are you saying that they could have saved him, but someone screwed up? Is that what you are telling me?’

  ‘Look, Clay, I’m sorry. Please understand. He was in a very bad way when he came in. That kind of trauma, it almost always—’

  Clay cut her off. ‘Answer my question, God damn it.’

  She straightened, crossed her arms. ‘Calm down, soldier,’ she said, stern now. ‘Bullying me is not going to change anything.’

  But he couldn’t hear what she was saying. ‘They told me to leave him,’ he shouted. ‘They fucking told me.’

  She recoiled, shocked at the vehemence in his voice. ‘Please, don’t—’

  But he didn’t let her finish. Remorse crashed through him. ‘I should have left him out there. Let him die. God, what have I done?’

  She sat another moment and then said, ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.’

  Clay said nothing, lost inside his own pain.

  ‘You need rest. I am going to give you a sedative.’

  He looked up at her. ‘How long until I can go back to my unit?’

  She frowned, just an inflection of the mouth. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Of course, I’m serious.’

  She winced. Her gaze hardened. ‘You are not going back, soldier. Not for a long time.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Six months, at least.’

  Clay swallowed. ‘Might as well be forever.’

  ‘If it was up to me, it would be.’

  Clay looked at the soldier in the bed facing him. He had lost his right leg just above the knee. ‘Dying is easier than living,’ he said.

  Her eyes ignited. It was as if she was trying to look right into him – into places he dared not go.

  ‘Stupid boy,’ she breathed.

  21

  All You Can Do

  Many years later, after London and Yemen and Cyprus, after finding love and losing it, after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final verdict on his testimony and application for amnesty, he’d sit in the Polana Hotel in Maputo and think about those days in the military hospital and marvel at how time dulled the senses, ripped out all intensity and left only a palimpsest of dreamlike impressions. The way the shadows slid across the floor and the whitewashed walls, the smells of the veldt coming like memories of memories on the breeze that blew through the big, open windows of the recovery ward, the other odours – hospital antiseptic and soap, urine and sweat, the occasional waft of smoke from the incinerator. Sounds, too: the squeak of bed springs, the clip of nurses’ shoes on the polished floors, the voices of men lost in a thousand dreams, a thousand worlds that no one would ever know or see. He’d think about all that was lost and undone, the waste of lives entire, and try to place all of this into some kind of equilibrium between cost and benefit, between good and insane. And in this futile calculus, staring out at the vastness of the Indian Ocean, its changing blue serenities and violent slanting storms, there was no succour.

  ‘You fokken slacker.’ Crowbar stood at the end of Clay’s bed dressed in his best uniform and maroon paratrooper’s beret. The blue Honoris Crux ribbon topped out a rack of decorations that blazed on his chest. ‘Lying here while the rest of us to do all the hard work.’

  Clay smiled with the good side of his face, saluted with his left hand. ‘My Liutenant.’

  ‘The doctors say you are improving.’

  Clay tried to push himself up. ‘Good to see you, sir.’

  ‘Lie at ease, troop,’ Crowbar said, pulling up a chair. ‘We have to talk.’ Crowbar looked right and left along the ward and sat. ‘The enquiry is in three days.’

  Clay nodded; he’d been told by the head doctor that he had been ordered to appear at the inquest, that he had been cleared to attend for one day only.

  ‘I’m here to push your wheelchair, Straker.’

  ‘How are the boys, sir?’

  ‘We stayed in-country for two weeks after you were hit. We lost de Koch. Killed a lot of fokken kaffirs, though. FAPLA and Boy.’

  Clay closed his eyes; de Koch had been a friend. They all were.

  ‘Eben’s worse.’

  Crowbar straightened. ‘I saw him.’

  ‘I should have…’ Clay began, stumbled. ‘I didn’t—’

  ‘Don’t, Straker,’ Crowbar interrupted. ‘No good can ever come of it. It’s not for you to decide.’

  Clay lay quiet. Many years later, in the wilds of Yemen, another good man would try to teach him exactly this, and would give his life proving it.

  Crowbar leaned in close and dropped his voice. ‘Look, Straker. This inquest is total bullshit. A complete rondfok. The boys and I have all agreed what happened.’

  ‘I understand, sir.’ Of course, he understood. He listened, heard, memorised. It was the truth. Of course, it was. What other truth was there? What other could there be?

  ‘Good.’ Crowbar slid a steel hipflask into Clay’s hand. ‘Something for the pain,’ he said. ‘Don’t drink it all at once.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Clay slid the flask under the bedsheets. ‘Can I ask a favour, sir? It’s important.’

  ‘Of course, seun.’

  ‘There’s a package buried under the floorboards of my tent at Ondangwa, under the upper left foot of my bunk. Can you bring it to me?’

  Crowbar frowned. ‘Personal effects?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Crowbar shuffled his feet, waited until a nurse passed. ‘And Straker, just so you know. Wade wasn’t killed by a SWAPO mortar.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘But the Colonel sent out a patrol after them.’

  ‘No, son. Wade was killed by an M27 frag. Didn’t you hear it?’

  ‘No sir, I was asleep.’

  ‘I was the first one there. He was killed by someone inside the base. One of our own.’

  Clay shook his head, realisation flooding through him now.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Could have been anyone.’

  Not anyone. ‘I know why they did it, sir.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it, Straker,’ Crowbar snapped.

  ‘But, sir…’

  Crowbar drilled a withering stare into Clay’s eyes. ‘No, Straker.’

  ‘Wade knew, sir. That’s why they killed him.’

  Crowbar leaned in very close, until his chin was almost touching Clay’s cheek. ‘Don’t say another word. I don’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t want
to. And neither do you. Do you understand me, troop?’

  ‘But—’

  ‘This is my army, Straker. My country. As fucked up as it is.’

  ‘Do you think that justifies—’

  ‘Shut the fok up, Straker.’

  ‘Then why tell me about Wade.’

  Crowbar sat back in the chair, raised his thick, hairy forearms, clasped his hands behind his head. ‘I’m not any happier about it than you are. Wade was a good officer.’ He closed his eyes.

  ‘You’re part of it aren’t you?’ Clay regretted it as soon as he’d said it.

  ‘Part of what?’

  ‘You ordered us to attack the village. Kill all those people.’

  ‘I fokken follow my orders, Straker. I don’t decide what happens. I do what I’m told and try to bring as many of you limp-dick amateurs back alive as I can. Fok jou, Straker.’

  ‘So you admit it.’

  ‘I don’t have to explain myself to you, Straker.’

  ‘And now Wade’s dead.’

  Crowbar stood wrenching his beret between two massive hands. ‘You think I killed Wade?’

  ‘No, I…’ Clay stumbled. ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I hope the hell not.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  Crowbar leaned back in. Clay could smell the booze on his breath. ‘Look, Straker, let me give you some advice. Just forget anything you might think you know about any of that kak. It’s not for us. Get better. Get through this. With that wound they’re not going to let you redeploy. You’ve done your part. Go home. Find yourself a good woman and have half a dozen kids. Try to live. It’s all you can do.’