like a heartbeat. The hills knew they didn’t belong there, they had never seen their kind before, these medical colonists with their moon tents and solar-powered walk-in refrigerator and strong boxes and provisions flown in twice a month. The long resinous grass that came and died the one week they had rain wagged its head in disapproval in the rare wind. It was part of the place’s conspiracy. I know you , it seemed to say her, with its bare hills that leaned so readily into the night. I know what you are doing here.
‘Okay, I think we’re almost there. You can finish up?’ A question curled in Rafael’s voice, but he did not stay to hear it answered. He was already behind her, shucking off his gloves.
In the two months she had worked alongside Rafael, she had managed to glean that he was a Madrileño. He certainly looked the part: thin, edgy, a smoker. There was a bit of the dandy to him, if only because his goatee beard was always perfectly trimmed. Harsh glasses concealed fine caramel eyes. In the evenings he set himself personal building projects, working with the mechanics in the shed, fiddling with drills and old light bulbs. He produced light fixtures he referred to as ‘sculptures’.
Rafael had been an anarchist in university; he was arrested and held for five months after a student protest, he’d told her. She wasn’t sure if that experience explained the narrow, hard streak within him. As a surgeon he was fussy, exacting. She had the sense that he might have perceived she was the better seamstress, where arterial surgery was concerned, and resented her for it.
That day’s casualty came late, at four o’clock. Rafael unwound shrouds of gauze, sticky with flesh, to reveal a sabre wound to the tibia. It was deep – this is what distinguished it from a normal knife wound. Sabres were invented for a reason; they could slice cleanly through sinew and tendon and bone.
They set to work. It proved a surprisingly easy job. She sutured under Rafael’s exacting eye. They were done within an hour.
She pulled aside the curtain and threw her gloves into the hospital waste bin. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a sack – rags, perhaps, on one of the few rusted trolleys. It was parked beside the tent, against the billowing walls. As she approached the bundle twitched.
She put her hand out and touched it. The bundle turned over and revealed a dark face. Dull eyes stared at her.
She asked her name. The dull eyes followed her lips. She pointed to her ear. The woman shook her head. Two claw-like hands emerged from the bundle and went to her ears, then quickly apart. Boom , she mouthed, her mouth opening in a soundless oval.
‘I will find you a bed,’ she mouthed. She lay her head sideways on her folded hands.
The woman closed her eyes. The expression on her face was indeterminate. It ought to have been relief, but it looked like sorrow.
The following day she went to check on the woman.
‘I can hear now,’ the woman said. Her voice was deep and strong.
‘Temporary deafness – a bomb.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Then a stream of words in a dialect she couldn’t understand. She called for Lenjoh, the interpreter.
The woman, Aisha, told her story. She had walked from her home, crossing grassy mountains inhabited by sociable baboons, cutting thin valleys with her miniature camel train, walking for ten days without food and only a little water. She’d slept only two or three hours a night. Her animals began to suffer: first from sleep deprivation, then hunger, then thirst. But Aisha had kept going. She’d brought three camels and five cows, her only remaining animals. She’d heard there was a food station on the other side of the border.
By night she hid her animals in the bush and slept inside a thorny acacia. Twice men with guns walked past her, looking for her. They’d seen her tracks but she’d been careful to erase the last several hundred metres with a makeshift broom of thorns.
By day she walked
‘Okay, I think we’re almost there. You can finish up?’ A question curled in Rafael’s voice, but he did not stay to hear it answered. He was already behind her, shucking off his gloves.
In the two months she had worked alongside Rafael, she had managed to glean that he was a Madrileño. He certainly looked the part: thin, edgy, a smoker. There was a bit of the dandy to him, if only because his goatee beard was always perfectly trimmed. Harsh glasses concealed fine caramel eyes. In the evenings he set himself personal building projects, working with the mechanics in the shed, fiddling with drills and old light bulbs. He produced light fixtures he referred to as ‘sculptures’.
Rafael had been an anarchist in university; he was arrested and held for five months after a student protest, he’d told her. She wasn’t sure if that experience explained the narrow, hard streak within him. As a surgeon he was fussy, exacting. She had the sense that he might have perceived she was the better seamstress, where arterial surgery was concerned, and resented her for it.
That day’s casualty came late, at four o’clock. Rafael unwound shrouds of gauze, sticky with flesh, to reveal a sabre wound to the tibia. It was deep – this is what distinguished it from a normal knife wound. Sabres were invented for a reason; they could slice cleanly through sinew and tendon and bone.
They set to work. It proved a surprisingly easy job. She sutured under Rafael’s exacting eye. They were done within an hour.
She pulled aside the curtain and threw her gloves into the hospital waste bin. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a sack – rags, perhaps, on one of the few rusted trolleys. It was parked beside the tent, against the billowing walls. As she approached the bundle twitched.
She put her hand out and touched it. The bundle turned over and revealed a dark face. Dull eyes stared at her.
She asked her name. The dull eyes followed her lips. She pointed to her ear. The woman shook her head. Two claw-like hands emerged from the bundle and went to her ears, then quickly apart. Boom , she mouthed, her mouth opening in a soundless oval.
‘I will find you a bed,’ she mouthed. She lay her head sideways on her folded hands.
The woman closed her eyes. The expression on her face was indeterminate. It ought to have been relief, but it looked like sorrow.
The following day she went to check on the woman.
‘I can hear now,’ the woman said. Her voice was deep and strong.
‘Temporary deafness – a bomb.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Then a stream of words in a dialect she couldn’t understand. She called for Lenjoh, the interpreter.
The woman, Aisha, told her story. She had walked from her home, crossing grassy mountains inhabited by sociable baboons, cutting thin valleys with her miniature camel train, walking for ten days without food and only a little water. She’d slept only two or three hours a night. Her animals began to suffer: first from sleep deprivation, then hunger, then thirst. But Aisha had kept going. She’d brought three camels and five cows, her only remaining animals. She’d heard there was a food station on the other side of the border.
By night she hid her animals in the bush and slept inside a thorny acacia. Twice men with guns walked past her, looking for her. They’d seen her tracks but she’d been careful to erase the last several hundred metres with a makeshift broom of thorns.
By day she walked
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