Dupont didn’t have to spend too much time on his examination. The victims, twenty in all, were quite dead and the flies were aggressively reassembling around their banquet.
The officer ordered us all back into the jeeps. He feared the rebels might be hiding nearby watching our movements, ready to attack if we lingered. So we quickly drove away from that awful place.
After a mile or so, the jeeps paused on top of a hill and we looked back. We could see no movement, only the faint outline of the columns of flies again.
“Just as well no one lived,” Dupont told me. “Sometimes we find survivors in such a state the only humane medical treatment is to shoot them.” He looked at me. “That may sound like a violation of ethics, but in my view it would be a crime to keep them alive.”
BACK AT THE hospital, we sat together over a cup of coffee.
“I used to wonder why they mutilated the bodies that way,” said Dupont. “Then last year I had a chance to talk to one of the rebel leaders. He’d been shot in the stomach during an ambush and captured by government troops. They were taking him to the capital for a show trial and were afraid he’d die of his wound on the way. They stopped in at the hospital and asked me to give him a shot of morphine to keep him alive.
“That’s when I asked him why his men treated the bodies of soldiers this way. His dialect was hard to follow, but I understood him to say that people of the region had been doing this to their enemies, and vice versa, since time immemorial. Yes, there was an element of pure terror in it, but it was more than that. The combining of parts of animals, humans, and plants was to show off the superior creativity of the rebels — that they could come up with forms even the gods hadn’t thought of.” Dupont hesitated. “That’s if I understood him properly. He was in a great deal of pain and I didn’t know the language well. Anyhow, I gave him the morphine and it kept him alive long enough to be taken to the capital, where they hanged him in the city square a few days later before a big crowd.”
I was shocked at how cruelly human beings could behave. I said so to Dupont and he thought for a while.
“It’s true we do inflict a lot of pain on each other,” he said. “But it’s nothing compared to the suffering in this world that we’re not responsible for. As a physician, I’ve seen decent, kindly people in agony from cancers, snakebites, diseases, malarial fevers, and so on. Not to mention schizophrenia and a host of mental torments that make life unbearable for the sufferers and their families. Even children who haven’t had time to do anything wrong aren’t spared. What about that little baby born without a head? Who’s to blame for that? Clara says you were a bit upset over it.” He frowned. “If there is indeed a Creator, it’s easy to understand why some people think He’s either the torturer-in-chief or has a very sadistic sense of humour.”
Those words reminded me of my father scoffing at the Theory of Intelligent Design, and of Miriam Galt describing the cruelty of nature. Dupont would have seen eye to eye with each of them on that matter.
EARLY ON THE morning after the massacre, Dupont knocked at the door of my room and came in, looking upset.
“All foreign nationals have been ordered out of the country immediately,” he said. “The government can’t guarantee our safety any longer.” Apparently this official decision had been brought on by a rash of rebel attacks not far from the hospital. It would have to be evacuated. Dupont and Clara, along with the rest of the staff, would be permitted to stay on for another week to wrap up affairs and ensure that all the patients were transported back to their villages. Dupont had tried to persuade the authorities to let me stay on, too, and help with the evacuation. They wouldn’t hear of it since I wasn’t a medical professional.
“So I’ve just radioed the coast and arranged a plane to come for you,” he said. “It would be too dangerous for you in a truck, on your own. The plane should be here around noon and will take you directly to Racca. After that, I’m afraid you’ll be left to your own devices. With any luck, you should be able to get on a ship to some place that’s safe. I’m so sorry now for bringing you into this mess in the first place.”
I came here of my own free will, I assured him. And the fact that I was healthy again was thanks to him. Anyway, he had enough problems without dragging me around. I was much more concerned about his own fate, and Clara’s. Would they be all right?
“We’ll be fine,” he said. “This is just another of the hazards of working in these places.”
I looked at little Sadie, the cat, lying as usual at the foot of my bed. I stroked her fur and she purred. Dupont read my mind.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be giving all the cats a shot of morphine just before we go,” he said. “It’s better than leaving them to starve. Or worse.”
AROUND NOON, a four-seater plane appeared overhead and settled down on the landing strip. The pilot waited for me on board with the engine running. All morning I’d been helping Dupont and Clara prepare for the general evacuation, and we hadn’t had much of a chance to talk. They took a few minutes to come and see me off at the plane.
Dupont shook my hand and wished me well.
“I’m so sorry about this,” he said. “I hope we’ll run into each other again.”
Clara gave me a peck on the cheek and looked at me with her huge eyes.
“Remember,” she said. “You can’t run away from love. It’s the baggage we carry with us on all our travels.”
Dupont laughed.
“Advice, right till the last minute,” he said.
He helped me climb up onto the wing and I took my place in the little cabin behind the pilot, who shut the door. He began to rev the engine, making the plane shudder so much I feared it might fall to pieces. After just a few seconds, it leaped forward and raced along the strip for a hundred yards or so before soaring upwards abruptly. As it banked westwards towards the coast, I looked down. The hospital was already so far below that Dupont and Clara were only the tiniest dots.
I’d never been in a plane before, but after the terror subsided, I felt pure exhilaration at hurtling through the air. That sensation was quickly erased by the realization that I had just left behind the only people who cared about me on this huge continent, or anywhere else in the world, for that matter. I knew I’d never see them again and suddenly felt empty and lonelier than I had at any time since my parents died.
BARELY AN HOUR LATER, I was in Racca again. The pilot, a gaunt German national who’d barely spoken to me in the plane and whom I’d had difficulty hearing anyway because of the noise, hadn’t much more to say when we landed. He directed me to an airport truck that took me to the Seamen’s Union Hostel at the docks.
I stayed there for just two nights then found a berth as a deckhand on an outgoing freighter. Being hired was easier than I’d expected, thanks to my “previous experience” at sea, but even more because ships were recruiting crew quickly so that they could get clear of the region in case of general civil war.
“You were lucky,” said the bosun of my new ship, the SS Charybdis, bound for South America. “We were about to sail short-handed, never mind maritime law.”
That was how he greeted me after I’d climbed the rope ladder onto the ship’s swaying deck. The ride out on a small boat through huge breakers with attendant sharks had seemed even more dangerous than when I’d first came ashore with Dupont.
“Yes, the Fates are on your side,” said the bosun.
I was beginning to doubt that some great power was watching over every human move, including the last-minute appearance of a deckhand to satisfy official requirements. But Fates or no Fates, here I was on a sea-going vessel, the most junior member of the crew once more. I didn’t at all mind when the bosun informed me that the ship wouldn’t be sailing directly to South America but would be zigzagging along the way, taking on and depositing cargo at various remote spots in the Atlantic. The more zigzagging the better, as far as I was concerned: no one was desperately awaiting me and I wasn’t desperate to arrive anywhere.