Читать книгу Namibia - The difficult Years - Helmut Lauschke - Страница 4

It was the night from Saturday to Sunday of the second week in February when a heavy cloudburst occurred. Series of lightning flashed through the night and the thunderstorms rushed most powerfully hammering rock-hard blows in ear-splitting and rolling staccatos down followed by trembling counter-tremolos over the ground. The walls shook and the doors rattled, the cups, plates and pots clattered and the asbestos plates in the ceiling grinded. A torrential downpour struck the corrugated roof and splashed against the panes. Down-flashing lightning glared like ghosts in acute windings over the swimming ground sponge. One lightning tore off a big branch from an old tree. Storms raged heavily and the glaring of the lightning were accompanied with hiss sounds of the power of thousand pythons. Hit waves rolled powerfully out like big cannons gave sharp shots that heavily detonated up to far for a stretch of some seconds.

An apocalyptic dream could not be more eery and horrific. It could be the dream of the shipwrecked man in the forlorn endlessness on the storm-foamy ocean between crashing-down wave mountains and the tearing-away wave valleys. The feeling of tininess and helplessness of the human against the powerful natural forces was present with the big trouble to save the soul in front of the drowning rift. Each time I felt the relief when the hitting waves rolled away and were fading down afar with the dull roars of the night. Forceful thunderclaps had torn the night’s sky like a gigantic sheet lightning flashing in wild zigzags across the sky behind and through the cut-off cloud banks. The optimism was unfounded in understanding the sheet lightning after the heaviest thunderstorm I ever have experienced as a message of peace, since the blood-red in the colour scale could be seen as the infernal hellfire as well.

I looked through the window at the raged-through sky and was waiting for further signs what the sheet lightning had to say, if there was the message of a peace angel or rather the devil’s message with a white-hot iron forged in the smithy of the hell to a huge killing sword of destruction. It were the flash pictures of nocturnal illuminations when it became still outside and the moon shone through the widening cloud banks and mirrored itself in the lake in the front garden. During this natural spectacle the question arose of defining life with the poor hospital conditions and the meaning what could be achieved in peace and with a right management what the war and associated mismanagement with the various kinds of corruption made impossible. I got tired and went to bed, but could not find the sleep.

It was after a long ‘walk’ that he gave up parts of his consciousness when the phone rang. It was three o’clock in the morning. I was on duty call. A nurse of outpatient department told that a girl had been brought, which was hit from the lightning. I put on shirt and shorts and went barefoot with sandals in my hand to the hospital that was approximately seven hundred metres away. I had no car and a hospital car for the doctors on call was not available. I walked through the darkness. The cloud banks were closed and prevented the moon to come through. The gravel road was soggy and covered with lakes that I trudged in deep potholes that the mud splashed up on legs and shorts. I tried to keep the walk in the middle of the road to avoid slippings into the side ditches that were filled of muddy water. I reached the unshielded dim road light at the checkpoint of the exit of the village where I showed the permit to the guard who stood back-leant against the small control room. No car was driving to give light to the road marking the huges lakes after the heavy rainl. I continued walking in the middle of the road what was difficult in the darkness, and stepped many times into the water-filled potholes that the mud splashed up on me. I passed the hospital gate and left the right wing open and crossed the square in front of the outpatient department building by trudging through puddles that covered the place.

I reached the entrance of the building and was full of mud spots up to the white shirt and arms. I washed off the mud in the scanty light under an outside tap and put the sandals on. Water dripped from arms and legs when he entered the outpatient waiting hall. The wet feet made squelch sounds on the cork of the sandals. The nurses on night shift made big eyes as they saw me with mud spots on shirt and shorts, but they did not say a word that the doctor had walked through the mud in deep darkness. I approached the trolley where a girl lay covered with a sheet. The girl’s face was burnt and she groaned with pain. She did not speak.

I pulled slowly the sheet from the chest down to the toes when I got shocked. A lightning had severely hit the girl. She had deep burns on the right lower leg from the knee down to the ankle. The soft tissue coat had partly burnt off on the frontal and lateral aspect that a large part of the shin bone was uncovered and charred. Other burns were on the left arm and left leg. Shock treatment has started by putting on an intravenous drip to a vein on the right elbow. I felt very sorry for the girl whose eyes already signalled that she could not keep up her life.

The girl was brought to the intensive care unit to control the basic parameters as pulse rate and blood pressure in short intervals. The girl was laid in a bed next to the window in the first two-bedroom. The wounds were dressed and an old bed frame was put over the lower leg that the sheet didn’t touch it. The resuscitation was combined with injections against pain. It was out of question that the girl would lose her right leg, if she would survive. I took a seat on a stool in front of the bed and measured blood pressure and pulse rate and made the first notes on the observation sheet. The girl was in a very critical condition, since inner organs were affected by the high voltage as well. I connected an old ECG-machine which was the only one in the hospital, and fixed the electrodes on the girl’s chest with small plaster stripes and read the oscillogram of the heart action on the moving paper stripe. The ECG showed the tachycardia with irregular extrasystoles. The oscillogram confirmed the pulse rush as palpated on the wrist artery. The pain killer became effective and the girl closed her eyes.

It was Sunday morning five o’clock when I set off for the way back to the flat. I was extremely tired and looked for a rest. Kristofina was the girl’s namel. I took her name in my mind on the walk barefoot through the mud with my sandals in the hand. I passed the checkpoint and the guard looked at me with big eyes, since he could not believe that I was a doctor coming back from work with all the mud spots on legs, shorts and shirt. I removed the spots from the legs under the tap water outside the flat and entered the small veranda and put the sandals down. I went through the small sitting room to the kitchen for a cup of instant coffee with the chicory supplement. I stirred two teaspoons of sugar in and put the cup on the small table in the sitting room and started reading in Martin Buber’s ‘The Book of the Praises’, so the fifth psalm: “Give ear to my words, O Lord, consider my meditation. / Recognize the voice of my cry, my King, and my God: what I will pray to you. / My voice you should hear in the morning when I direct my prayer to you and look up to you. / Since you are not a God that has pleasure in the wickedness neither shall the evil dwell with you. / The foolish shall not stand in your sight, since you hate all workers of iniquity. / You will destroy them that speak leasing: the Lord will abhor the bloody and deceitful man.”

I saw with the inner eye how Kristofina bent her body in pain and final agony. I tried to console the suffering girl by reading the verses of the sixth psalm and sending her the verses with my deepest sympathy: “Lord, do not rebuke me, neither chasten me in the heat of your anger. / Have mercy on me, You, because I am weak and my bones are as my soul is. / But You, my Lord, till when I have to wait ?! Return and untie my soul, rescue me for the sake of your mercy ! / Because in death there will be no remembrance of you. Who can thank you from the grave ?!” I felt exhausted when I cleaned my mind trying to encourage Kristofina to go her last way given from the fate after lightning had hit her so severely. I had her burnt face in mind when her eyes ‘told’ that she cannot keep up her life. Now Kristofina should go her way even when she must do it alone, but bravely and with confidence in her soul.

The phone rang close to ten o’clock. The nurse from the intensive care unit told that Kristofina had passed away five minutes ago. I became tears in my eyes and wished this young girl the great peace by crossing the last bridge. I felt deeply sorry for her that she had to cross the bridge alone without taken on her mother’s hand. I was shaken by the fact that life on this planet could be so short and unfulfilled. After I had put down the receiver, I opened the ‘The Book of the Praises’ and sent her the following verses of the last psalm afterwards: “O praise him ! / Praise God in his sanctuary, praise him at the vault of his power./ Praise him in regard to his mighty, praise him according to the fulness of his greatness !”

I had fallen asleep when Mr. T. knocked at the door around eleven o’clock. He came from the Sunday service in the white painted church with the short and small bell tower over the main entrance where the pigeons sit in front of the small bell chair and shit the churchgoers on their heads and Sunday clothes. Pigeons could shit into the face, if the churchgoer looked up to the forth and back swinging bell with its small rings or was looking up for something else. Mr. T. had dropped his wife and the three sons at his house to have a chat with me. He took a seat in one of the two outseated armchairs and lit up a ‘Camel’-cigarette, while I went into the shower. When I came back barefoot with a clean short-sleeved shirt and shorts, Mr. T. leafed in the book ‘The great philosophers’ of the historical philosopher Karl Jaspers, who had taught this subject at Basel university.

It was the lack of understanding German language that he put the book aside and said that he had a great interest in philosophical books, when he was at school. He recently had read some essays of Martin Buber. I asked Mr. T. about the core of Buber’s philosophy. He said that the core of his philosophy is the I-You-relationship or the dialogue between the ‘I’ and the ‘You’ reflecting on man and mankind. I said that each philosophy should go about the personality in its cultural diversity from man to man to understand each other more and comprehensively and to control together the ‘it’ by examining the social aspects which go beyond the analytic scientific thinking what had led to the manipulation of minds by setting the materialistic priorities that had caused spiritual impoverishment and ignorance. People of the day do question the existence of God or any supernatural power. They ask, if such an existence could accord with the principles of natural or other sciences and with human reason and reasonableness. With the ‘disappearance’ of God, the values of ethics and humanity had dramatically declined.

The materialistic-oriented manipulation has led to the small-scale thinking and loss of the humanistic education and destruction of the personality with decadence and coarsening in human character and behaviour. It is demonstrated by examples to what human beings were able to do when they kill on a mass scale other people as done in the holocaust. The core in Buber’s philosophy is the dialectic contemplation in human life in which things are contrasted in dialogues that the subject is finding itself through and in other subjects. The way of thoughtful and you-related communication leads to a mutual understanding which has to be seen as the basic fundament in social life. It is the dialogue what gives the foundation that human beings respect and love each other in values of life and dignity.

In connection with the holocaust, Mr. T. mentioned the Boer war when British put thirty thousand Boers with women and children behind bars where most of them had starved to death. I mentioned the great and courageous conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler of the Berlin philharmonic orchestra, who had saved lives of some Jewish members of the ensemble by his personal intervention with propaganda minister Goebbels. There were musicians who left with other Jewish artists, doctors and scientists Nazi-Germany and emigrated to Britain or the United States, while others were still deported and killed in the extermination camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka.

It was the personal commitment of this sensitive conductor what was not without taking the risk. His dedication of saving other lives had made Wilhelm Furwängler immortal as he was as conductor in presenting the symphonies of Beethoven. The other savers were the families in the working-class areas of Berlin. These families kept circa three thousand Jews and some other thousands of victims hidden behind wardrobes, in attics and cellars. It were families of labourers which supplied them with food and washed and ironed their clothes and linen and were caring for them till the end of the terror regime. They risked their own lives, when the club-footed propaganda minister trumpeted with big lips that Berlin was ‘cleaned’ and free of Jews. I didn’t mention the chamber orchestra in Auschwitz concentration camp where the deported philharmonic musicians played Beethoven and Brahms and the SS-officers and other Nazi-bigwigs attended the concerts in their sparkling killer uniforms, who had sent these musicians afterwards as a matter of routine naked into the death chambers. I also did not mention Isabel the Catholic, the daughter of Philip II of Spain, who robbed the Jews of their belongings and ordered then the merciless massacre on them.

The topic of the conversation came on Buber’s Psalms’ translation into German which Hermann Hesse praised as an authentic linguistic creation close to the original Hebrew text. I cited the fifth and sixth and the last psalm of ‘The Book of the Praises’ that I read for Kristofina in the morning. It was the last psalm I has sent her as she had passed away. I told Mr. T. the story of Kristofina how she was hit from lightning that she had burns in the face, on the left arm and the right lower leg with the open and charred shin bone. I told that I have seen her on the trolley in the outpatient department shortly after three o’clock and was shocked about the severity and that a human being could survive such a strike though her eyes already signaled that she couldn’t keep up her life. Despite the necessary medical measures were taken, a few hours later she passed away. Her soul has left the physical body. The termination of her short life was not forseeable, since a human being belongs to both the soul and the physical body and both together determine way and length of life.

Mr. T. stood up and said that his family was waiting. He thanked for the conversation and expressed the wish to resume the talk which he assessed as substantial when he climbed into his Toyota ‘Hiace’. Mr. T. closed the driver’s door and left the place. I closed the gate and went back to the small sitting room and left the door to the veranda open to get some air movement. It was hot and the flat had no air conditioning. I made a cup of instant coffee added with chicory and put the cup on the small table in the sitting room. I lit up a ‘Stuyvesant’ and leant back in the outseated armchair with Karl Jasper’s ‘The great philosophers’. I continued reading where the philosopher said: “The value of the reality of the four most influential human beings (Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus) is the experience of the basic human situation and the assurance of the human assignment which had been spoken out by the four important people. They had touched and answered the ultimate questions by their lives and work. Each of these personalities is to us as following human beings as to mankind at large like a permanent and restless questioning.” [R. Piper & Co. Publishers, München-Zürich 1981, 3^rd edition, Volume I page 227]

I reflected on my life and possible meanings and included the young girl Kristofina in this contemplation. Every second of thinking about life, new questions came up that I could not answer. I asked himself, if I had learnt something new to understand the basic things in life when I discovered that the answers became lesser and more doubtful the more I questioned the various aspects of life. The answers were more unsatisfying the older I got. It became difficult to understand the reason for the question-answer gaping. The fact was not compatible with the conception and meaning of life. I closed the book and put ‘The great philosphers’ back on the table. I worried about the inability in putting things together when I went for another cup of coffee and came back and lit up another cigarette. I sat back in the armchair and followed the smoke rings and trails when I remembered older people’s sayings not to look for an answer of everything what was going on in life.

Smoke trails moved under the asbestos mats in the ceiling and along the wall as I thought of Kristofina. I saw her burnt face and body with the charred shin bone and saw her eyes which told that she will lose her life what she gave up a few hours later to free herself from the pain of a disfigured body with one leg only and the contracted scars. I asked the astronomic question, though I had no knowledge of ‘far-visual’ science where Kristofina was ‘walking’ now after having left the planet and having crossed the ‘bridge’ to the universe three hours ago. I ‘saw’ her soul flying like a bird flapping powerfully the wings, while she passed one sun after the other deeper into the galaxy. I looked into ‘The Book of the Praises’ and sent her the best wishes for her ‘flight’.

Some cars drove through the standing water to and from the ‘International Guest House’ opposite to the flat. Broad tyres on the big wheels of the passing Casspirs splashed the mud up to the treetops and against the mosquito mesh of the veranda. Dark clouds drew up when I had the wish to visit Dr Witthuhn. I put on trousers and rolled the trouser legs up to the knees and left the flat closing the veranda door with the sandals in my hand. Mud and standing water went up to the ankles or higher when he stepped into a pothole. The rain started when I reached with mud spots on the trousers the house of Dr Witthuhn who carried a twelve-set of ‘Guinness’-dumpies from the car into the house. He trudged with shoes through ankle-high water in the front garden without rolled-up trouser legs. Gate and boot shutter were open. I closed the boot and followed the friend. “That was a night spectacle. It was not far that the water had flooded the sitting room”, Witthuhn said on the way from the car to the house, while I washed the mud from the feet and rolled down the trouser legs. I put the sandals behind the main door and entered the sitting room. There I greeted Dr Bernhard who was accommodated in the small sleeping room packed with cardboards and other things. It was the room where I have slept or lain sleeplessly a couple of weeks before.

“Take a seat I bring a beer”, Witthuhn said. I took a seat on one of the upholstered chairs next to the club table. Dr Bernhard had occupied the two-seater and leafed in a glossy magazine forward and backward. Witthuhn put three dumpies on the glass plate of the table. He went back to the kitchen and brought the glasses and put them on the table as well. He filled his glass and took a seat on the other upholstered chair and said cheers and emptied the half of the glass. “How was your duty?”, he asked with some beer froth on the upper lip. When he heard the story of Kristofina with the charred shin bone and the tachycardia with extrasystoles and that the girl passed away after a few hours, he said that he has not seen a human hit by a lightning. Dr Bernhard leafed in the magazine forward and backward and read passages on one and the other page. The fatal fate of the girl seemed not to touch him. He was busy with himself. I was wondering about the colleague’s indifferent attitude. It revealed a personality outside normal range. Dr Bernhard was close to fifty. He was not married and had no family. His character was reserved. He did not speak about his private affairs. It was in contrast to the openness of other colleagues who had exchanged their life experiences under the seal of confidentiality. When Dr Bernhard opened himself to a small gap, he spoke of his mother, but not of his father. His behaviour was of an introverted loner, though he could be a charming person as well. He was sporting, played tennis after working hours and was a dedicated mountain climber of the Swiss Alps.

The telephone rang. Dr Witthuhn went to his sleeping room and took the call. He came back and told that two patients were brought to hospital, who needed urgent attention. The overture of the ‘Magic Flute’ had ended. I emptied the bottle, wished the colleagues a restful afternoon and rolled up the trouser legs to the knees and left with sandals in my hand the friend’s house. I stalked through ankle-high water in the front garden. It was raining when walked barefoot on the muddy road to the hospital. The guards at the checkpoint were in a relaxed Sunday mood. They let the mud-walker pass without requesting the permit. I walked and crossed the square and washed the mud under the outside tap from the legs. The sandals were put on and the trouser legs were rolled down when I entered the waiting hall of the outpatient department. Two trolleys were standing with patients. A circa forty-year-old man lay on the first trolley with a broken right ankle. He had slipped off and had bent the foot.

On the second trolley lay a five-year-old emaciated girl with a bloated abdomen. The girl had no bowel movement since a couple of days and vomited since two days. The palpation of the abdomen was painful especially in the upper part beneath the xiphoid of the breastbone. The examination resulted in the suspicion of an obstruction at the exit of the stomach. The X-rays confirmed the fracture of the upper ankle joint on the man and a couple of hazelnut-sized stones in the girl’s stomach. The mother told that the girl had not eaten since two days. The stones had to be removed. The mother followed the nurse who brought the trolley with the child to the ward to prepare the child for theatre. I informed the theatre staff and the army doctor who worked in the paediatric ward to give the anaesthetics. The operation was set for five o’clock. In the meantime I reduced the ankle fracture on the man and immobilized the foot by putting on a padded leg cast. After this, the patient was brought to the orthopaedic ward. Other small surgical procedures on other patients were done as well.

It was close to six o’clock. I hurried to theatre and changed clothes in the dressing room. The young army doctor who was a dedicated and friendly colleague, had started the introduction of the anaesthesia. The young instrumenting nurse put the instruments on the instrument table in systematic order, while I washed hands and forearms and dried them in some sterilized sheets of blotting paper. A young nurse pulled the operating coat over me and tied the laces on the back, when I pulled the gloves over the hands. I entered the operating room when the nurse had cleaned and covered the sleeping girl with sterile green sheets. The girl had no fat tissue under her skin. I did a midline incision from the xiphoid to the umbilicus. After dividing the fascial and peritoneal sheets the abdominal cavity was opened. I examined the stomach and palpated the stones. An incision was done before the pylorus and eleven stones were removed. The incision on the stomach and the layers of the abdominal wall were closed by sutures. The wound dressing was fixed with some plaster stripes and the girl was brought to the recovery room where a nurse put the oxygen mask on her face and measured blood pressure and pulse rate in short intervals. Here the girl regained consciousness. I put the eleven stones into a small plastic bag and left the theatre room to change clothes in the dressing room. I gave the plastic bag with the stones to the mother who was worried outside the theatre building. She looked at the plastic bag in her hand and thanked for his work done. This I read from her face. The mother could not understand that the daughter had swallowed so many stones. Since the daughter did not show signs of any mental disorder, to swallow stones had to do with hunger. Girl and trolley left the recovery room. A nurse carried the trolley to the surgical children’s ward, when I followed the trolley and the mother followed me. Both were reflecting on the question why the girl had swallowed the stones. I helped to put the girl from the trolley on the bed and gave some instructions to the nurses. I made my notes in the file and left the ward for the outpatient department where no patient was waiting.

I left the department and rolled up the trouser legs and took the sandals in my hand. I walked barefoot through the mud of the square, passed the gate and kept the walking feet on the middle of the soggy road. A heavy rain came down. I was wet to the skin when I arrived at the checkpoint where two guards stood under the tin roof of the small control building. The guards let me pass with the sandals in my hand when a Casspir passed by and threw the mud in a high arc in my face that the sand stuck in the hair and eyes and ears. I put off the wet and dirty clothes on the veranda and stood naked behind the mosquito mesh and looked on the lake in front in the twilight of the Sunday evening. It was raining when he went into the shower and washed the sand from the hair and face and body. I went to the kitchen in underpants and cut two slices from the tasteless mixed-grain bread and spread some margarine on and ate the slices with appetite, since I had not eaten the whole day. I emptied the cup with cold coffee from the morning and looked over the place with the pouring rain and trees standing in the lake. Voices came from the guest house on the other side. A women giggled that two men started laughing.

I reflected on the day’s events, while I lit up a cigarette and again I experienced the old phenomenon that answers got shorter the deeper the questions went. I stood up and switched on the light. I took a seat on the hard veranda chair at the veranda table in the small sitting room and started writing a letter. The letter was not finished when I laid the sheet aside and took another sheet to write a poem addressed to myself about loneliness of a stranger and of strangely looking people with a strange language I could not understand and about poverty and faces of fear and many other things that made me feel as stranger in this godforsaken corner. The writing went from the hand that he wrote a second poem about love and human being in need of love. I wrote down the thoughts and desires and smoked some cigarettes. I was worried about the strange reality with working days under the extreme and miserable conditions.

The night went by. There was no radio or tape player to listen to music I liked so much. I went to bed and did not pull over the sheet and listened to the hammering sounds of the rain beating the roof. I had a dream when stones were raining from the sky. They cracked on the roof that I crawled under the bed and put hands over my ears. A rock chunk broke through the roof with an ear-splitting bang and crushed me. I saw the girl Kristofina on the other side of the bridge. She turned her head and called my name like a siren to the other side of the bridge. Kristofina shouted that I should take courage and should follow her. She stretched her arm backwards out to get hold of my hand and to drag me to the other side where she was waiting. I came closer when she said with a smile of confidence that lightning cannot strike her anymore and that the rain has stopped. She thanked for the wishes and blessings by reading psalm five and six and the last psalm I did send her afterwards when she had crossed the bridge.

Kristofina could not finish her words of thanks and I was not sure, if she got hold of my hand when the phone was ringing and interrupted the conversation. I was torn off from the dream of the last great bridge. I felt that I was hanging in the air. My skin was sweaty when I took up the receiver. On the other end was the nurse from outpatient department. She asked, if there was a problem with the phone, since she had tried several times to reach me. I apologized and gave the deep sleep as reason, but did not mention the dream about the last bridge where I met Kristofina. The nurse understood. She told that a female patient was brought from Catholic mission hospital Oshikuku with severe abdominal pain. I was awake when I put the receiver down. The rain had stopped as Kristofina has said in the dream.

I put on the clothes which were still wet after I had beaten shirt and trousers against the mosquito mesh to remove the sand. I rolled up the trouser legs when I looked on the paper of the unfinished letter and read the two poems about loneliness in the strangeness and of the desire for love. I put the poems on the table and thought of the poor little girl on whom I had removed eleven hazelnut-sized stones from the stomach and set off for the hospital. The light was on that I could bypass the puddles in the front garden, but the soggy road lay in darkness. On the walk through the mud I had the sandals in my hand and remembered the ‘raining’ stones and the rock chunk that crashed through the roof and crushed down on me.

I passed barefoot the checkpoint at the exit of the village. A bulb gave a dim light in front of the small control building. The two guards with carbines over their shoulders remembered the mud trudger. They started laughing when I told that I was a doctor and had to walk to hospital. One guard asked why the doctor was not fetched by a car that he must not walk in the darkness alone and barefoot through the mud. I said that no car is available to transport doctors on night duty. I did not say that the major-superintendent had a new Ford mini-loader reserved for himself, though he did enjoy an undisturbed sleep. The guards could hardly believe this explanation. They became quiet with signs of sympathy and respect for the walking doctor, but disagreed how a doctor on night duty was treated by the hospital administration. I passed the checkpoint and looked to keep the middle of the soggy road with the water-filled potholes.

As the night before, I washed the mud from the legs under the tap next to the entrance of the outpatient department and rolled down the trouser legs and put on the sandals over the wet feet. I entered the waiting hall and the nurses looked with big eyes at me. I approached the trolley with the patient brought from the Catholic mission hospital Oshikuku [founded 1924 by frater Hermann Bücking]. The patient was an old woman who could not tell her age what was common with old people. Her sister told that she was fifty, though her face looked older. The abdomen of the patient was bloated and I could not hear sounds of bowel movements through the stethoscope. But there were gargle and murmur and splashing sounds around the umbilicus. Blood was taken for chemistry and a nurse brought the sample to the lab. Since the X-ray machine was not working, the diagnosis had to be made by the physical examination only. I puzzled the findings together and diagnosed an obstruction in the lower segment of the small intestine with intussusception of the last intestinal loop into the large bowel [with a cuffing effect]. An operation was inevitable and the nurse translated the findings and diagnosis and the necessity of an operation into the language of the people. The lab-technician brought the blood chemistry results. The protein was below normal and the white blood cells were increased. The potassium level was above normal. I asked Dr Nestor, the black colleague, who was on duty for the department of internal medicine, to give the anaesthetics.

A nurse and I carried the patient on the trolley to the theatre building. After changing the dressings I filled a cup of tea in doctors’ tea room and stirred two teaspoons of sugar in. The patient was on the operating table when Nestor arrived and changed his clothes. I informed him of the findings and operative management needed. The instrumenting nurse had put the instruments on the instrument table and cleaned the skin over the abdomen with the brownish disinfectant solution and covered the rest of the patient’s body with green sterile sheets. After the midline incision from the xiphoid down to some centimetres below the umbilicus I spread the fascial and peritoneal sheets and opened the abdominal cavity. The small bowel loops were bloated and the large bowel was black with the smell of decay. The instrumenting nurse assisted. I removed the gangrenous bowel and connected the end segment of the small bowel [ileum] with the end bowel [rectum] by suturing the end-to-end anastomosis. It was a big operation which lasted more than two hours. The nurse gave a great example by assisting and instrumenting this operation.

It was three o’clock in the morning when the patient were carried from the theatre to the recovery room where the nurse put the oxygen mask on the patient’s face and measured the blood pressure and counted the pulse rate in short intervals. A bladder catheter was inserted to measure the urine output. The two doctors went for a tea to the tea room. They spoke of the critical situation in the hospital and mentioned the airs and graces of the superintendent in major’s uniform, who turned and twisted the words upside down. He made the morning meetings useless to a waste of time, since nothing came out of practical importance what could lead to an improvement. They agreed that Hutman continued his game as informer for the superintendent by snooping around the people. He undermined the spirit of good work and destroyed what the others tried to improve in this difficult situation. The military was controlling the activities in the hospital. “It is ridiculous to refuse medical treatment to patients who are suspected Swapo-fighters or Swapo-supporters. This is absurd and unethical ”, Nestor said and added that black people reject the occupation by South African forces, since the people reject the racial segregation with the colour bar. Only Swapo will bring the change according to the UN-resolution 435, what the whites in their opportunistic attitude oppose.

“As long as the whites are the masters, the situation remains hopeless for the blacks. That is the reason that the blacks resist the white system and support Swapo to make the country independent and restore the human rights for black people as well by giving them back human dignity.” It was a programmatic remark of the black colleague who suffered under racial discrimination like all the black people. I called the South African ‘apartism’ the African fascism as an anachronistic system that had become frail. It could not be held alive, also not militarily.

Nestor told his story: He was a child when he helped an older white lady by carrying a heavy box. He followed her to the exit of the shop. Another white lady did not wait passing the entrance that he touched her accidentally with the box. She beat him so hard in his face that he fell with the box. The content of the box spread over the pavement. The woman shouted loudly at him, while he was lying with pain on the pavement. She said that a black boy shall never touch a white lady. The other white lady came back from her car where she had opened the shutter. She helped him up and collected the food articles from the pavement and put them back in the box. She saw his left temple was bleeding that she dried it with a tissue. She gave him a five-Rand coin as compensation for his suffering as some extra money after she had stowed the box in the boot. “There I have experienced by myself how white women treat a black child who did nothing wrong by helping an older woman. From that time onwards I was afraid of white people who put their skin colour above the plight of a black child.”

It was the sad story of an innocent black child. I saw that Nestor started stuttering when he told his story and when he spoke to the superintendent in major’s uniform. This speech disorder was certainly related to his traumatic experience as a child. I asked Nestor why small black children started crying and grasped the mothers’ hands when they saw me coming on the square or when I entered the children’s ward. Nestor told that this had to be seen in the historical context what the whites had done to the black people. Children had seen how the whites had shouted at their fathers and mothers, had degraded them by beating and deporting them. Since then a black child did not expect something good from a white man. “Such a child needs time to experience that there were other whites who have a good heart and care for a black child”, Nestor added.

It was four o’clock in the morning when we left the theatre building and wished another some quiet hours. I went back to the outpatient department where no patient was waiting. The nurses of the night shift, one man and two women, sat in the hall around the table. Their heads were lying on crosswise-topped forearms on the tabletop. I left the waiting hall and rolled up the trouser legs to the knees. With the sandals in my hand and I stalked like a stork through the mud. I tried to keep the feet in the middle of the road and trudged in big puddles and some deep potholes. I reached the checkpoint. The sleepy guard on the chair put up his head and turned it from left to right signalling that I should pass, while another guard was snoring on the second chair with his head bent over the chest. So I continued walking through the mud.

I reached the flat and pulled off the dirty clothes in the veranda. I went into the shower to clean the body from the mud and to refresh my mind. I did not think of a sleep anymore. I dried the skin and put on a fresh underpants and went to the small kitchen to make an instant coffee with the chicory supplement. I cut two slices from the tasteless mixed-grain bread and spread some margarine on, since the fridge did not offer more. I put the stuff on the veranda table in the small sitting room next to the papers and books. I wrote down the experiences of the weekend and mentioned the terrible lightning that had hit Kristofina fatally. I mentioned also the five-year-old emaciated girl on whom I removed eleven hazelnut-sized stones from the stomach, and the old woman from the Catholic mission hospital in Oshikuku, on whom I removed the badly smelling dead large bowel and connected the living parts by a deep bowel anastomosis.

It was around six o’clock when I read the two poems of the evening before. I added a second page to the second poem about loneliness and why love is so important in life. I put my life between the details and the smoked cigarettes what is not healthy as other things are not healthy and not human as well in this godforsaken corner of the world. It was Monday morning and humid when sunrise had started. No wind came through the open door. The sun dived the cloud banks into a red-violet ‘fire’ ocean of melancholy. Some rays cut small strips. I left early for the hospital and walked along the road bypassing the puddles and potholes filled with mud water. Several times I had to cross the road from one side to the other. The soggy ground was slippery under the old sandals with the walked-off profile.

I tried to prevent a landing in the mud by getting hold at a tree stem or stake or post. The two guards at the checkpoint were the same who sat four o’clock with the carbines over their shoulders sleeping and snoring outside of the small control building. These guards greeted and let me pass without asking for the permit. The one guard, who turned in the earlier morning the head signalling that I should pass, was wondering that I obviously did not need a sleep. I reached the hospital where people covered with blankets were waiting in front of the reception. I washed the mud from the feet and sandals and entered the doctors’ dining room for breakfast. I was the first. To the three slices of the tasteless grey bread the warder in the tea kitchen put a boiled egg on the small plate. He brought a tin pot with hot water and put it on the table. A small tin bowl with chicory-added coffee powder and a filled sugar bowl and a milk can and a flat tin container with margarine and two other small tin bowls with chemically refined jam were on the table.

After a short breakfast with a cup of coffee I went to the wards to look after the patients who were operated in the previous night and day and other patients admitted after bone reduction with immobilizing plaster casts. The five-year-old girl with the eleven stones smiled that she was released from the heavy pains. Her abdomen was soft and the temperature was normal. The intravenous drip ran properly. The old woman after resection of the dead and badly smelling large bowel with a deep anastomosis was in a better condition, though her temperature was still febrile. She was on antibiotics and the intravenous drip was running. The patients with casts after bone reduction were in good condition. Some of them waited for the discharge. I made notes on the observation sheets in the files and filled in the death certificate for Kristofina remembering the eyes in her burnt face telling that she cannot keep up her life that I read her the psalms five and six and the last psalm. I also remembered the dream when Kristofina crossed the last ‘bridge’ and when her soul flew with powerful wings into the universe passing one big star after the other.