‘I don’t think the bullet killed him.’
‘Well, we can’t tell where it hit him, Hawks goes off too quickly. The guy just puts his hand up to his stomach and then drops.’
‘If he got hit in the liver he’s had it. Don’t forget, this is Missouri in eighteen-fuck-knows-when.’
‘Yeah. What’s his name?’
‘Who?’
‘The guy shot.’
‘Valance. Cherry Valance.’
‘Cherry? You mean like Jerry, or Cherry, like apple.’
‘Cherry Valance, not Apple Valance.’
‘And he’s Montgomery ’s friend.’
‘Yeah, Montgomery ’s friend Cherry.’
‘Hmm.’
‘I don’t think it hit him in the liver. Look at the angle of the shot. The trajectory seems to be going up. Popped a rib, I suspect, or glanced off it.’
‘… Maybe glanced off and killed some woman on the sidewalk?’
‘Or Walter Brennan…’
‘No, some dame on the sidewalk that Howard Hawks was fucking.’
‘Women remember. Don’t they know that? Those saloon girls are gonna remember Cherry…’
‘You know, Leaf, we should do a book. A Forensic Doctor Looks at the Movies.’
‘The film noir ones are tough. Their clothes are baggy, it’s too dark.’
‘I’m doing Spartacus.’
In Sri Lankan movie theatres, Anil told Leaf, if there was a great scene-usually a musical number or an extravagant fight-the crowd would yell out ‘Replay! Replay!’ or ‘Rewind! Rewind!’ till the theatre manager and projectionist were forced to comply. Now, on a smaller scale, the films staggered backwards and forwards, in Leaf’s yard, until the actions became clear to them.
The film they worried over most was Point Blank. At the start of the movie, Lee Marvin (who once played Liberty Valance, no relation) is shot by a double-crossing friend in the abandoned Alcatraz prison. The friend leaves him for dead and steals his girl and his share of the money. Vengeance results. Anil and Leaf composed a letter to the director of the film, asking if he remembered, all these years later, where on the torso he imagined Lee Marvin was shot so that he could get to his feet, stagger through the prison while the opening credits came up and swim the treacherous waters between the island and San Francisco.
They told the director that it was one of their favourite films, they were simply inquiring as forensic specialists. When they looked at the scene closely they saw Lee Marvin’s hand leap up to his chest. ‘See, he has difficulty on his right side. When he swims later in the bay he uses his left arm.’ ‘God, it’s a great movie. Very little music. Lots of silence.’
Gamini worked in the base hospital at Polonnaruwa during his last year in the northeast. This was where the serious casualties from all over the Eastern Province, Trincomalee to Ampara, were brought. Family murders, outbreaks of typhoid, grenade injuries, attempted assassinations by one side or another. The wards were always in turmoil-outpatients in General Surgery, floor patients in the corridors, technicians arriving from a radio store to fix the electrocardiogram unit.
The only cool place was the blood bank, where the plasma was refrigerated. The only silent place was Rheumatology, where a man slowly and quietly turned a giant wheel to exercise his shoulders and arms, which had been broken in an accident a few months earlier, and where a solitary woman sat with her arthritic hand in a basin of warm wax. But in the corridors, the walls mildewed with dampness, men would be rolling giant cylinders of oxygen noisily off the carts. Oxygen was the essential river, hissed into neonatal wards where incubators sheltered babies. Outside this room of infants, and beyond the shell of the hospital building, was a garrisoned country. The rebel guerrillas controlled all roads after dark, so even the army didn’t move at night. In the children’s ward Janaka and Suriya circled their patients-one had a heart murmur, another suffered from fits-but if there was bombing or a village attack they too became part of the hospital ‘Flying Squad,’ and even those in the neonatal ward worked the triage and operating room. They left an intern behind.
The specialists who came north seldom worked only in their specific area of knowledge. They were in Pediatrics one day, but might spend the rest of the week helping to contain an outbreak of cholera in the village settlements. If cholera drugs were not available, they did what doctors in another era had done-dissolved a teaspoon of potassium permanganate in a pint of water and poured it into every well or standing pool. The past was always useful. At one time Gamini tried to keep an infant alive for four days. The girl could hold nothing down, not her mother’s milk, not even water, and she was dehydrating. He remembered something and got hold of a pomegranate and fed the child the juice. It stayed down. Something he’d heard about pomegranates in a song his ayah had sung… It was legendary that every Tamil home on Jaffna peninsula had three trees in the garden. A mango, a murunga, and the pomegranate. Murunga leaves were cooked in crab curries to neutralize poisons, pomegranate leaves were soaked in water for the care of eyes and the fruit eaten to aid digestion. The mango was for pleasure.
Gamini was working with Janaka Fonseka in children’s surgery when they began hearing news in the corridors that a village had been attacked. In front of him on the operating table was a small boy, naked except for white shorts, a huge mask over his tiny face. The two doctors had been preparing for the operation all week; neither of them had attempted it before, they had been reading the text of the procedure in Kirklan’s Cardiac Surgery over and over. They had to cool the boy’s body down to twenty-five degrees Celsius by running cold blood into him, reducing his temperature until the heart stopped. Then they would operate. As they began cutting, the wounded started coming into the halls and they were aware of the Flying Squad in action around them.
He and Fonseka stayed with the boy, keeping just one nurse. A heart the size of a guava. They opened the right atrium. This was as close to magic as the two of them got in their days there. They talked frantically back and forth to be certain of what they were doing. They could hear the carts carrying equipment or bodies, they couldn’t tell which, racing down the halls. There’d been a massacre, they now heard, a village thirty miles away had been pretty well wiped out. Somebody had to be sent there to see if any were still alive. The child in front of them had a congenital abnormality, a beautiful kid, Gamini kept wanting to take the mask off and see his face again. Wanted to look at the boy’s dark black eyes, which had been full of trust, which had looked up at him as he gave the needle that had put him into uncontrolled sleep.
Fallot’s tetralogy. Four things wrong with the heart, so he would live perhaps only into his early teens if they didn’t operate now. A beautiful boy. Gamini was not going to leave him alone, betray him in his sleep. He kept Fonseka with him, not letting him go to the others as Fonseka thought he should. ‘I have to leave, they keep calling out my name.’ ‘I know. This is just one boy.’ ‘Fuck, that’s not what I mean.’ ‘You have to stay.’
The operation took six hours and all that time Gamini stayed with the boy. He let Fonseka go after three hours. The nurse would have to help him reverse the bypass. He knew her as a starting intern, the Tamil wife of one of the staff. She and her husband had come to the peripheral hospital in the last month. Gamini stood by the boy and explained what they had to do. The boy would have to be rewarmed with blood at a higher temperature, and at the key moment the bypass had to be removed. Fallot’s tetralogy. No one had ever performed the procedure in this country.
So in the fifth hour Gamini and the nurse reversed the process that he and Fonseka had set up. The young nurse watching him for any sign that what she was doing might be wrong. But she was faultless, faultless, calmer, it seemed, than he was. ‘This one?’ ‘Yes. I need you to cut a shallow three-inch line there. No, to the left.’ She cut into the boy’s body. ‘Don’t remain a nurse. You’ll be a good doctor.’ She was smiling under the mask.