Читать книгу The Camp Whore - Francois Smith - Страница 10

“Come,” Hurst says, putting his pen down on the writing desk, “let me show you what we have to contend with here.”

She hesitates, staring half dazed through the window behind him, aware of the sudden light, and an expectant curiosity in herself, almost a feeling of excitement, after the mounting unease of her conversation with Hurst. Yes, she realises, it was not a comfortable conversation. It’s not as if Hurst has a prickly personality, quite the contrary. It’s just … she can’t quite put a finger on it now.

Hurst takes long, energetic strides across the room, yanks open the door. “As I explained earlier, our primary interest here is fear and the effort to master it.”

For a moment she is amused by the contrast between the vigour of his movements and the serenity of his face, but then hurries to exit with him. He is not tall, she now realises; perhaps shorter even than she is.

“You might just as easily say we’re working with bravery,” he continues as she falls into step beside him, “with the expectation that this creates, and the consequent setbacks too. There are still those in the army and outside who think we’re seeing to misfits, those who are weak in spirit, susceptible to these breakdowns. But the fact is that most of our patients are officers. You might ascribe that to class, that they would naturally receive more attention and sympathy from the authorities, but the main reason is that officers in particular don’t dare show their emotions. They are the men who simply have to dismiss their fear. And here you see the whole caboodle: ataxic and tabetic gait, contractions and anaesthesia of the face, muscle spasms, knee and ankle jerks, paraplegia, hyperthyroidism, amnesia, alexia, aphasia, and then all the other common symptoms that you’d know from the clinical practice.”

They walk down a long, shadowy hall with a gleaming polished floor. She is aware of her dress flapping against her legs, of the thudding of Hurst’s heavy boots. They walk through a strange, ethereal shimmering of darkness and light – past open doors where electric beams fall almost blindingly bright across the dark passageway. As if she and Hurst have sheathed themselves in a thin membrane of modern knowledge, the latest scientific terms, a delicate net of words, and in this bright bubble they are adrift on an ancient sea, surrounded by convulsing bodies, writhing limbs, and eyes that plop glassily through the porous surface of antediluvian mud and slime. Gradually, something of the primordial soup starts seeping into their clarity, pushing through the molecules of the membrane and forcing open cracks for figures, faces and sounds to penetrate. Along with Hurst’s descriptions there is also another voice in her head, one of the old voices that still visit her sometimes, that of Dr Molesworth in a dark carriage en route to Bloemfontein: “What is it that you saw, Perry?”And while Hurst’s voice charts the new terrain for her, her attention is constantly diverted along these other, older roads – the roads she walked to get here, to this hospital. “It’s the war, isn’t it?” she hears Reymaker speaking, and sees his pale wrinkled finger stroking his cat’s tail. “You are not your war,” she wants to shout at him; she wants to see him shutting his eyes and recoiling, but Hurst has suddenly come to a standstill.

It was not unexpected; she was just lost in thought. Hurst had in fact been stopping all along to explain things. She’d noticed, for example, that he pauses before descending a flight of stairs, or when they’re out of earshot of the staff they periodically encounter in the hallways. “Shellshock is a misleading term,” he then says. “Initially, the medical fraternity thought it was nerve damage due to explosions. No, correction, initially they thought it was the scheming of cowards trying to escape the front. So they were treated pretty roughly. Solitary confinement. Punishment. You can imagine what it entailed. Electric shock. Emotional manipulation. But these days we know that many of the soldiers, the ones you see here, haven’t even been near a bomb, and that’s why we speak of ‘battle fatigue’ rather than ‘shellshock’. In many cases, it’s rather the ceaseless exposure to fear, tension, and simply days and weeks and months of waiting in a trench that causes the damage.”

They walk into halls, past beds with drab blankets, white sheets and grey faces. Some of the patients don’t even see them, staring at the ceiling instead, or out of a window. The nurses whom they come across in the wards are generally so busy that they don’t look up. Hurst occasionally bends down next to a bed to speak to a patient; sometimes he elicits a smile, a few words, but mostly just an anxious, bewildered stare. Sometimes Susan wants to ask something, comment, but everything she wants to say feels inadequate. It’s as if she’s lost her clinical distance and can only respond with personal impressions or emotional statements.

After Hurst has pulled shut the umpteenth door behind them, she wants to grasp the opportunity before the next one to say something that has nothing to do with her. She raises a hand towards him to draw his attention, but just then the door opens on the opposite end of the hallway and a nurse stands in the opening, her expression inscrutable. Susan swallows, her throat dry. She literally swallows her words, and her hand slowly drops to her side. Above the nurse’s head, in that fraction of a second before the door closed behind her again, she’d seen a body recoiling upwards from a bed, as if the sheets were a white-hot flame – that was a human being.

The door clicks shut, and Susan and the woman face each other in silence. That was a human being, Susan thinks, and feels the delayed shock of adrenalin pricking her fingertips. She hears Hurst speak from behind. “Anne,” Hurst says to the nurse, “won’t you show Nurse Susan Nell the ropes?”

The woman opposite her, Anne, her blue eyes, her whole face is immobile, only her mouth moves when she speaks, and then with an almost cynical slant to the full bottom lip. She is Anne Maxwell, apparently one of the senior nurses in the hospital, but exactly where she fits into the hierarchy is not clear. She seems to be aware of the arrival of the “Dutchwoman”, but she listens to Hurst’s brief introduction with a deadpan look, almost absent, similar to that of hospital staff when taking a pulse reading. She watches Hurst as he walks away, and once he is out of earshot, she addresses his receding back: “What has he already shown you? One of his miracles?”

It is a flat, somewhat bored tone, but the blue eyes flash at Susan and then glare pointedly to where Hurst has disappeared around a corner. Susan suspects that the woman is parodying the typically strict matron. She is not certain how to react to it. Is Anne Maxwell mocking Hurst? She ignores Anne’s sideways glance and says softly: “The people I’ve seen looked pretty haggard.”

Anne immediately starts to stride ahead. “Come,” she says, “come, let me show you.” Susan falls into step with her, and with her gaze still fixed ahead she says: “Those who are healed, miraculously healed, or on the verge of improvement, you will see in the library, or in the music room, or strolling in the garden.”

Susan is unsure of the exact import of the woman’s words. Miraculous … is she being sarcastic? It is merely a passing thought, though, because what really occupies her mind is what she had fleetingly seen behind that door. She lengthens her stride so as to walk just ahead of Anne Maxwell, looks over her shoulder, and asks, “What was that in the ward behind us, where you’ve just come from?”

Anne’s eyes swivel towards her and then back again, a fleeting gesture, meaning what exactly? Was it a confirmation? A warning? But before Susan can even ask, Anne speaks. “Percy Meek,” she says, and then: “Not yet ready for the library or a stroll in the garden, would you agree?” Susan stares at her. What is the woman talking about? Anne continues undeter-red: “You should have seen him when he was admitted.” She bangs the door open with her left hand and they enter a room with a long table and chairs; emanating from somewhere are kitchen sounds and the smell of food being steamed. “The staff dining room,” says Anne, standing at the head of the table, folding her hands in front of her chest and continuing without a pause: “He thought he was still in a trench when he got here, lying prostrate and dodging bombs, his pupils as large as saucers.” She looks Susan squarely in the eye for the first time, and then Susan notices it: her irises have a navy, almost purple edge. And below those eyes, the lips scarcely seem to move as they shoot out volleys of words: “There in his bed, totally spastic, he sweated like a horse, his pulse a hundred and forty, and his head, trunk, legs, everything, shaking. He sees ghosts,” she says, “the ghosts of the Germans he brought down with his bayonet. They’re coming for him, he hears their bullets smashing down next to him, they’re coming for him.”

Susan still does not know how to react. Beneath Anne’s severe exterior, her expressionless face and the monotone of her description, a keen intelligence shines through; the account even sounds rehearsed, and the mouth, Susan notices, yes, the mouth is always just a hair’s breadth away from a smile.

Susan begins to suspect a playful irony, but again Anne continues before she can say anything. This time, though, she has a question: “But why did you come and work here? Why not in a general hospital? That’s where the staff shortages are. To treat trench foot, or the thousands of cases of venereal disease. Not to mention those who’ve been blown to bits. Shell-shock is but a drop in the ocean.”

The woman is pulling her leg, no doubt about it. Susan drops her defences, and the words jump right out of her mouth. “Thousands of cases … what do you mean?”

“Oh, it’s common …” Anne begins, but Susan’s spontaneous response is immediately overcome by a sombre suspicion that she has said something untoward, something improper, that she has exposed herself. “I’m sorry,” she backtracks, alarmed, “I didn’t answer your question.” She examines Anne’s face to gauge the effect of her words, but the blue irises with the dark rim betray nothing. “I was trained as a psychiatric nurse,” she then says, her voice strong, the delivery firm.

This time Anne raises an eyebrow. “Oh, really?” she says. “Do you have that type of specialisation in the Netherlands?” She doesn’t seem to want a response, because the next sentence is already flowing as unhurriedly as the rest: “Iron restraint, you were taught that, I can see. And that’s good enough for this place. But what am I talking about, here they require only the best, because if you make an error with one of these men’s diagnoses, the firing squad could be his fate. Rat-a-tat-tat. Not something that’ll happen if you incorrectly diagnose foot rot, right? So, chin up and smile, you’re at the forefront of military medical science.” Iron restraint? That is what she thinks about as she walks down the hallway next to Anne. Susan notices that she takes long, easy strides, and for a while she enjoys walking in step with her; a sort of military camaraderie in their synchronised paces, a bravado even, but then it seems silly to Susan and she consciously changes her stride. Still, there was something in this fleeting, inconsequential experience that has left her with a tingling sensation, and then she dares, also because Anne’s spirited irreverence has made it possible, she dares to give up some of that alleged restraint. “Do they also shoot those with venereal diseases?” she asks.

“What?” Anne barks melodramatically, but still without the trace of a smile. “Perhaps where you come from, but here we’re civilised.”

It jolts through Susan. Where she comes from? Yes! That’s in fact what she has in mind, Susan realises. For a while now, that’s what she’s wanted to say. While Anne was speaking, heaven knows for how long, an old image came to mind, it was in her head, here, in the passage, and back there, in the kitchen, and it was something that Anne had said that gave rise to this thing, this image from her youth. It was in Cape Town, yes, that’s where she’d seen it, it was one of the English soldiers, a captain, who had brazenly walked down Adderley Street with a prostitute on each arm, utterly at ease, as if he … as if he … but it’s not that either, no, not that, it’s actually just the simple fact that she’d lived in Cape Town for a while and that, practically speaking, she hailed from there. For some or other reason she did not tell Hurst, did not want to tell him, but now in this hospital hallway, and to a woman she has known for barely more than five minutes, here she wants to say where she comes from. “In Cape Town, once …” she begins, then holds her breath.

“Cape Town? Have you been there?” Anne enquires above the click-clack of her shoes.

Susan slowly exhales. “That’s where I actually come from,” she says. “Before the Netherlands. That is where I grew up.”

Goodness, that was easy, she thought. Why, then, was it so difficult for me before? No, probably not difficult, but still, with Hurst it was an issue, a kind of obstacle, and this thing about her origin is what gave the conversation with Hurst an underlying awkwardness, like an unwanted touch, like fingers that … she shudders, shakes her head to banish the thought.

Only then does Susan realise that Anne has come to a halt, and that she’s walked five steps or so ahead without her. She stops immediately and turns around to her colleague, and it strikes her that Anne has the ideal face for this era and this place, for this war, with those purple-haloed eyes and that steely mouth. “Then you’re a woman who has come a long way,” Anne says. “You can tell me more than I can tell you.” She starts walking again, this time with a gaze firmly fixed on Susan.