by Frank Huyler
The headman led us out to the center of the orchard, where the trees were larger and spaced more widely, and gestured to the man with the table. They stamped the grass a bit with their feet, and then they put both the table and the bench on the ground.
The crowd of villagers flowed in through the doors, and began fanning out along the walls on either side. I could hear them moving through the trees behind me, chattering excitedly, encircling us.
I put my pack down on the table, and then turned to the headman, who watched me impassively, glancing occasionally at Rai. Elise put her case down on the table as well, and put her hands into the pockets of her jacket.
“Okay,” I said to Rai. “Please tell them to get in line, and I’ll see them one by one. Then Elise can draw their blood and pay them.”
Elise looked hesitantly at Rai. Rai thought for an instant, chewing on his mustache, as if deciding what to say. He turned to the headman, and spoke at length. There were no women in the crowd. One of the nearby men lit a cigarette with a match, took a long drag, and then passed it along to the others.
The headman watched Rai as he spoke, his face unreadable, and again he turned to the men behind him and spoke. They answered, and he listened carefully to the replies. Back and forth, for a minute or two, as we waited. Then finally he turned to Rai, a question in his voice.
“He wants to know why you want to take samples of their blood and what you will use it for.”
“Please tell him that we are doing a scientific study to learn where their ancestors came from,” Elise said, “and that if they do not want me to draw their blood I will not. And that I will pay them for each specimen.”
“They will not understand,” Rai said. “I will tell them only that you will pay, that it will not hurt them, and that they do not have to do it unless they wish.”
Rai spoke carefully. A few seconds passed, and again the men discussed this with themselves. The head of the village asked a single question.
Rai turned to Elise.
“How much will you pay?”
“One pound for each vial,” she said.
Rai grimaced.
“That is a lot for them,” he said. “It is too much.”
“It is okay,” she said. “There are not so many of them. I want them to agree.”
He stared at her for an instant, then shrugged and answered the question.
His words had dramatic effect. The men went quiet, and if anything became more watchful.
“Tell him,” I said, impulsively, nodding toward the headman, “that since he is the head of the village we will give him two pounds for his blood.”
Rai did as I asked. The man turned and spoke to the others behind him, and then they all began talking at once.
“Please tell them again that they don’t have to get their blood drawn if they don’t want to,” I said. “And that I’ll see them anyway and give them free medicines.”
Again Rai did as he was told.
“Maybe Elise should draw your blood first,” I said to Rai. “It might reassure them.”
He looked at me with dismay.
“Why mine, Doctor?” he replied. “And not yours?”
“She’s already drawn mine,” I said. “I’ll do it again if you want. But I think drawing yours might be more effective.”
He glanced back and forth between us, then inclined his head in that characteristic sideways nod I’d seen so often among them, which Rai did only rarely, and only, as I’d come to realize, in moments of unease.
“If you wish,” he said, finally. His voice was cold.
He spoke to the men again.
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“I am telling them I will show them what it is,” he said, tightly, “so they know it is nothing.”
“Elise,” I said, “you’re on.”
Rai gave me a dark look before turning back to the men. Then he took off his heavy parka, draped it over the table beside my bag, and rolled up his sleeve, exposing his brown forearm to the air. He did it quickly, forcefully.
“Thank you, Sanjit,” Elise said, as she bent and quickly un-snapped her case, then sat down on the bench.
He extended his arm across the rough table toward her, beginning to shiver in the cold despite himself. Goose bumps had risen on his skin. Elise bent over his bare arm, readying the needle and the vial and the alcohol pad and the yellow rubber tourniquet, and all the while Rai kept his face impassive, determined to betray nothing. The men craned their necks, and moved closer.
To her credit, she did it well, better than she had for me. She snapped the tourniquet around his arm, and waited as he squeezed his fist as she asked, and the vein rose in his forearm. She cleaned his skin with alcohol, then flicked the needle in as I had told her to and released the tourniquet. The jet of Rai’s blood instantly filled the vial, and then the needle was out, and he was folding up his arm, pressing a ball of cotton to the oozing spot, his face impassive. He put on his jacket, as Elise stood up from the table and held the tiny vial up in the air.
“That is all,” she said. “Just a little. No more than a fly.”
“Good job,” I said to her, quietly, as Rai translated her words once more, and she labeled Rai’s vial, just as she had done for mine, and noted its number down in her book, and placed it carefully in the open case.
“Thank you,” I said to Rai, who did not reply. He held his hand pressed to his forearm through his jacket.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get started. Ask them to get in line. I will see them, and then Elise can draw their blood.”
Rai did as I asked, but the men hesitated.
“Ask him,” I said, gesturing to the headman, “if there is anything wrong. Ask him if anything is bothering him.”
Rai spoke, and the man glanced nervously at me, murmuring a reply.
“His knees, I think,” Rai said. “He is saying that his knees hurt him.”
“Both, or only one?”
“Both, he says. But one is worse. And his back also.”
“Is the pain greater in the morning?”
Rai asked the question. The man nodded in response, and began pointing to his knees and then to his back.
“Yes,” Rai said. “He is stiff in the morning. His knees hurt him. But then they get better in the day.”
The man looked down, his hands clasped together.
“Tell him I need to look at his knees.”
I stood, and rounded the table. There was a ripple in the crowd around us.
The man fumbled with his cloak without hesitation, drew aside the blanket draped across his shoulders, rolled up his loose brown cotton pants, and extended his leg. It was thin and pale, his knee knobby and swollen. I crouched down, and took off my gloves, and reached out. The man’s flesh felt cool, and I ran my hands over his knee.
“Ask him to bend it,” I said, as the others gathered around him and began talking all at once.
The man’s knee popped and clicked beneath my hand, a knot of gravel and bone.
“He has arthritis,” I said, as I stood and reached into my pack, and found the bottle of pills.
“Tell him to take these when he eats,” I said, and handed the bottle to the man. “Otherwise they might irritate his stomach.”
The man said something to Rai.
“He wants to know if they will make him better.”
I hesitated.
“Tell him yes,” I said finally.
The man took the pills, and held them carefully against his chest.
“Okay, Elise,” I said, and she smiled at the man, reached into her pocket, withdrew a roll of money, and carefully peeled off two worn bills and handed them to him. He stared intently at the notes, and then took them and tucked them away. A few seconds passed, and Rai’s eyes narrowed, but then, to my relief, the man rolled up his sleeve and extended his arm as Rai had done. Elise opened an alcohol pad, withdrew a new clean needle, and without hesitation, as quickly and efficiently as she could ever
have wanted, she found the vein, and filled the vial, and then he was stepping back with the ball of cotton pressed to his arm. The whole transaction was over in only a few seconds, and again I was proud of her—how steady she’d been, as if there was no audience at all. She asked his name then, and carefully wrote it in the book, and put the sticker on the vial, and looked up, smiling, at the others.
Without further discussion, the line formed, and just then the snow began to fall more heavily. The flakes were as large as moths in the air, and fell straight down, as dry as talcum, and when they struck our clothes they collapsed into powder. In a few moments the more distant trees of the orchard dissolved, and the figures in the crowd lost definition behind a curtain of falling snow. We sat on the bench, and one by one they stepped from the background up to us.
After the first awkward moments, it went smoothly. The figure would step forward. Rai would speak. I would listen, the man—they were all men—would answer. I would rise, and do a quick examination, and reach into my bag for some pills—I was careful to give each man something—and then Elise would do her work. None of them refused. I tried not to watch her, I tried to focus on the patient before me, but nonetheless there was a glint of needles beside me, the sound of the rubber strap and the rustling of sleeves. She did it well, easing each needle in and out as if she’d done it for years. One by one they stepped back, a bill in one hand and a ball of cotton in the other. As the minutes passed, I could feel them relax, and several times I heard laughter in the crowd.
“It is better to hurry,” Rai said, as time passed. “It is snowing more. We must go back soon and check on the tents.”
Periodically I would sweep the snow off the table with my glove, and stand, and shake it off my coat.
They had bad teeth. It was the single most common complaint among them—their teeth hurt. They woke them at night. And so on. A bottle of antibiotics, a bottle of painkillers. I know nothing of dentistry.
A young man with a superficial skin infection, a honey-colored crust on his chin, his thin dark beard, his eyes the color of mud.
“Tell him to wash twice each day with soap and warm water,” I said, “and I’ll give him some antibiotics.”
As he took the pills, I wondered if he had any soap.
Another bottle from the pack. Already I was running low. Impetigo, nothing more. It would clear up on its own anyway.
A scarred hand, a finger that would not straighten.
“He was cutting wood,” Rai said. “It was a long time ago, he says.”
Another bottle from the pack. Ibuprofen again.
“There’s nothing I can do for that,” I said. “But these will help if he has pain.”
They were thin, not starving. But I was surprised, once the floodgates had opened, at how eagerly they pointed to their mouths or elbows, or clutched their bellies, and how greedy they were for my bottles of ibuprofen and generic penicillin, which I knew would ease their aches only for a little while. I wondered what powers they had invested in me, and why, because even as I played along I knew better.
Then an old man, one of the last we saw. Wheezing, hunched over a stick, eyes wide and bulging, he appeared like an apparition. His beard was entirely white, his legs thick and doughy at the ankles, his lips dusky and pale. Two younger men helped him forward, and I realized that they must have gone to find him.
“He cannot breathe,” Rai said, growing steadily more impatient. “He cannot walk far. He sits up at night to sleep.”
I stood again, and rounded the table, and approached him. He looked up at me. I knew what he had before I touched him. I’d seen it a thousand times before.
I wiped the snow from my stethoscope, from where it lay draped around my neck, and when, after some coaxing, the man finally exposed his thin, dirty chest to the air, I pressed the cold metal to the skin beneath his left nipple, and listened. The odor of his unwashed body rose out of his clothes into the cold.
His heart, a jumble of clicks and murmurs, skipping and leaping, and then his lungs, full of crackles, wet and heavy and thick, as he wheezed on.
“What is wrong with him?” Elise asked, looking up from the table as the man covered himself again. “He looks very sick.”
“He is very sick,” I said. “His heart is failing.”
“Why is his heart failing?” she asked.
“It’s hard to say. He might have had a heart attack. Or he might have had rheumatic fever at some point. There are a number of possibilities.”
The man spoke, with difficulty, to Rai.
“He is asking you to help him,” Rai said.
“I will give him some pills,” I said, finally, to Rai. “The pills will make him urinate. His legs will be less swollen and his breathing will improve. He’ll feel better for a while.”
I reached into the pack.
“Will he be all right?” Elise asked, staring at the man.
“No,” I said. “He’ll be dead soon.”
“Maybe he should go to a hospital,” she persisted.
I shook my head.
“It’s too late,” I said. “A hospital couldn’t do much for him either. He’s an old man with a bad heart and there’s nothing anyone can do.”
I handed him the pills. I didn’t look at him very closely. I thought they were going to lead him away. But the man spoke again.
“He wants you to draw his blood,” Rai said, evenly, to Elise.
She blanched. For the first time I think it struck her. She turned to me.
“It won’t hurt him,” I said.
She hesitated, and the man spoke again.
“He says his blood is still good,” Rai said.
Elise bit her lip, but then she smiled at the man, and did as he asked, reaching for his wick-thin arm.
“I would like to give him more,” she whispered.
“Then do it,” I replied, and before Rai could speak she’d pressed a handful of bills into his hand. It surprised him, clearly, and he put the money under his cloak as quickly as he could. He touched his hat, and bowed several times, and then, finally, the young men at his elbows helped him away. If those watching in the crowd saw what he’d received, they gave no sign.
The last man was a repeat visitor. Rai smiled contemptuously.
“He wants her to draw his blood again,” Rai said, “and pay him again.”
Elise smiled also, but more kindly, brushed the snow from her hat, and shook her head.
“We only need one sample,” she said. “Please tell him.”
The young man looked down at his feet, murmuring his request again.
“You see,” Rai said. “If you give them anything, they will ask for more.” He turned to me. “We must go, Doctor,” he continued. “I must check on the tents. The snow is heavy now.”
“Tell them we will come back,” I said, “when the weather is better.”
Rai translated for the last time, as the snow fell around us and slid in clumps out of the trees, and the apricots shone in the branches overhead. We stood, quickly, and Elise closed her case, and then without saying anything else Rai led us out through the crowd to the alley.
They followed. Already the roofs of the houses were draped in white, and the mud beneath our feet had disappeared, as if the village had been cleaned and remade. The sense of windless, abiding quiet, the vague mass of figures behind us, in and out of the curtain—we walked, listening to their excited, muffled voices fade away as finally they thinned out by the edge of the village. A few of the children continued with us up the trail beside the river for a while, but then they too turned back, and we were left alone with the river and the falling snow. I could see only a short way, as if I were walking with a lantern on a dark night. The river led us back.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
All night the snow fell, whispering against the sides of my tent, and in the morning there were nearly three feet on the ground. Only the cook, Ali, was waiting for me at breakfast as I stamped in and shook off my jacket. For the first
time I looked at my watch and realized I’d slept late, and that the others had eaten without me.
Ali was a small man in his forties with bad teeth, a patchy black beard, and a wet, alert gaze. When his few words of English were exhausted—Tea? Omelet? Finish?—he would smile and bob his head. He seemed like a different species entirely from the villagers who had erected our tents, thin from weakness rather than from strength, a man whom everyone looked through. Rai claimed to know little about him, only that he was from a large city to the south and had many children. He slept in the cook’s tent with his nephew, who did the washing up, the sorting and stacking, and all the rest. The boy rarely entered the dining tent. Ali and his nephew seemed to get along well—we never heard a sound from them, and the meals came like clockwork. Unlike Rai, they prayed five times a day, in front of the cook tent, on plastic mats, falling to their knees, bowing, bowing again. They did it every day, no matter the weather, and I found it touching to watch them—the faith of the poor, who understand that their fates are beyond them, and their rewards must wait.
“Omelet?” Ali said, smiling, as I brushed off by the doorway and stamped my feet clean and took off my jacket.
“Yes, please,” I replied. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
“Okay,” he said, and was gone.
A few minutes later he returned with his battered aluminum tray. He stood behind me in the corner by the heater as I ate. Usually he left, returning later for the dishes. I suppose it was because of the cold, and Rai’s absence, and the fact that he was dressed thinly, with a cheap-looking tracksuit under what appeared to be a green cotton army surplus jacket. No gloves, damp dark wool socks in worn, off-white plastic tennis shoes of the kind that are sold to the poor by the truckload in market stalls throughout the world. There was an odor in the tent, and after a while I realized that it was his feet. The smell was tolerable, but unpleasant all the same, and I ate the omelet quickly, and the heavy white bread with a hint of mold and a packet of jam, washing it down with another lukewarm cup of tea.