He could, so easily, have killed him.
As a rabid dog was shot, so Bart could have ended the life of the man whose face he had looked into, whose name he did not know.
He could have said that the brute was a violent fanatic, raging with a desire to murder. He eased the needle into the left side flesh of the wound, where the blackened gangrene had taken deepest hold. A total dose of forty millilitres of two per cent Lignocaine would have put down the rabid brute. The dog would have gone into spasm, then been on the irreversible process towards death. Instead, Bart had measured out what was necessary to spare the dog pain. Too many had walked over Bart. He was not their servant. He thought the young man handsome. There was a quality about him, Bart thought, that the stubble on his face, the tangle of hair above his eyes, their brightness, and the dirt encrusted round his mouth did not mask. Flitting into his mind was his own boy. The boy who loved his mother, loved Ann. The boy who had taken the owner of the Saab franchise to be a proxy father. The boy who had never looked into his face after the dawn visit of the police. He could justify himself. .
He used the cleaning agent, Cetrimide, slopped it into the wound, and began to dab with the lint. 'This is going to hurt, going to hurt worse as I go on. I've used all the painkiller that's possible.'
He sensed that the head nodded behind the manual. He did not think that the man would cry out. Perhaps an intake of hissed breath, maybe a gasp, stifled… He cut deeper into the wound pit, poured more of the Cetrimide into it, swabbed, then manoeuvred the forceps over the first pieces of grit and stone, and took them out. The woman's hand was over the man's fist but his eyes never left the printed page. Bart went deeper. He cut, swabbed, retrieved. He knelt beside his patient and the sweat slaked off him. He thought it extraordinary that the man did not cry out, but had known he would not.
She held the hand tight. Bart could have told her she served no purpose, that the man did not need her as comforter. He found the pieces of cotton, embedded, and lifted each of them out, had to cut again to find their root. Any other man that Bart had known would have fainted. Himself, probably his heart would have stopped…
Debridement was from the battlefield surgery of the Napoleonic wars, with patients either insensible from shock or dosed with brandy or biting on a peg of wood or leather. No gasp, no hiss for breath. He searched for more cotton fibre, stone, grit, a fragment of I he missile, and heard the rustle of a page turned. No man that Bart had ever met could have endured it without protest. Bart had reckoned he might have to kneel on his patient's ankles and have the woman hold down one arm and the older Bedouin the other arm, grip him so that he could not struggle as the scalpel went in and the lorceps probed. Not necessary.
'You're doing well,' he murmured. 'We're getting there.' He was sodden with sweat.
He went to work on the gangrene. It was neither pretty nor delicate work. Not at medical school, certainly not in the practice at Torquay, not even in the villages around Jenin had he performed such primitive surgery before. He was guided by old memories of books read long ago, and his instincts. Bart sliced at the flesh, cut slivers from it, then flicked the scalpel blade to the side, ditched it behind him. The woman flushed. A section of flesh, poorly discarded, had fallen on to her ankle. Her eyes were screwed up at the sight of it. She would have felt its diseased wetness on her skin. He cut again. Still there was no cry and no hiss of breath. Closest to the wound the flesh was black. Away from the wound it was darkened.
Layer upon layer of it he sliced away. He reached out, took the piece from her ankle and threw it further. The flesh, scattered behind him, brought flies in a feeding frenzy. He cut to pink, rosy flesh, and to clean skin.
He was weak when he finished. 'Well done.'
The whispered response through clenched teeth: 'I didn't do anything.'
'Well done for not thrashing around.'
'Would have made it slower, more pain for me and more difficult for you.'
Bart did what was forbidden, looked into the face. It was ravaged.
The eyes stared out, great lines furrowed the forehead and the muscles bulged on the neck. He thought that whatever this man, terrorist, rabid dog or freedom-fighter, set out to achieve he would succeed in it.
'I can't give you any more Lignocaine because that would kill you.
I'm going to close it up, not totally. Superficial sutures to hold the skin's edges, but it has to be open so that any further pus can get clear. Later we'll do an antibiotic injection, and if the pain is un-manageable by this evening I'll try a morphine jab.'
'Why am I still alive?'
Bart grimaced. 'Why indeed… '
Al Maz'an village, near Jenin, Occupied West Bank.
The helicopter belched the rocket. It had made one pass, a slow circle above the village, then steadied and fired. The flame creased behind the rocket, was vivid against the cloud. He had been locking his vehicle when he heard and saw it. He had watched its circle and known what would folloiv. The flame speared towards the village roofs.
Bart could not see its target, but knew it. The rocket – then another, then a third – dived, exploded, devastated, and threw up a mushroom cloud of dirt, dust and rubble.
He ran. It was expected of him that he should run. His cover demanded of him that he run.
He ran across the square and into a wide street, went towards the medical centre in the yard of the village's school. He knew what he would find in the alley, opposite the collapsed telephone pole. He did not look up, did not see the helicopter turn away. He would find a hole that smoked and burned, and around it would be collapsed rubble. The hole would be like the black gap when a tooth fell out. The rockets from the helicopter were always fired with precision. The crowd spilled from the alley, a wasp storm. A fist, where the crowd was densest, held up a mobile telephone. The scream of the crowd reached him. He saw her… tens of arms held her and snatched at her. She was supine and did not struggle. He thought of her as thirtyish, no more than forty. The hands had dislodged the scarf from her head. He did not know whether she was an agent, of lesser importance than himself, or whether she was merely an innocent who had used her mobile telephone while the helicopter had made its first circling pass. An agent or an innocent, she was doomed. Hysteria would kill her. He did not know whether she was a wife, a mother. She went with the crowd and Bart was pushed aside, half crushed into a doorway. She was taken towards the square. Bart saw her eyes. She was condemned but her eyes had peace. He thanked his God for it. He thought the shock of her capture had destroyed the fear. The moment that their eyes met was a split second, then she was gone, at the core of the baying crowd.
He went on.
At the collapsed telephone pole, Bart turned into the alley. The missing tooth had been a home, was now a crater, and the two floors of the homes on either side of it were exposed. Sleeping rooms were opened up. Beds hung angled over the crater, and more rubble had fallen in the alley. Dust had coated the lime-green Fiat. Men dug and crawled in the crater. He heard the low, keening moan and knew there was no work for a doctor here.
First two children were carried out.
A woman's corpse followed them.
With reverence, a man's body was lifted clear.
He saw the frozen face of the man who had sat in the rear seat of the Fiat.
It had been on the second page, at the top rank, of the most sensitive fugitives. Now the face was like a circus clown's, coated with the white dust of the plaster of the interior walls. The dust made a mask for the face and death had distorted none of the features. No wound disturbed it: strength was written on it, and he fancied there was honesty. Bart turned away, and pressed his hand against his throat to suppress vomit.
He did not dare to walk back through the square. He had not the courage to go past the scaffolding erected in front of the square's principal building.
An hour later, Bart sagged from the chair.
He went down on to the hut floor and the coffee he'd held spilled on to the boards.
He wept.
Only Joseph saw him.
On his knees and on his elbows, his body quivering from the tears, he heard the beat of Joseph's words. 'You did well. For us you are a jewel. A man who was a murderer was liquidated because of your bravery. You are responsible for the saving of many lives. Listen, Bart, we regret the deaths of two children and a woman in the house. We regret also that a lynch mob has killed a woman they believe guilty of treachery to their society. Two children and two women are set on the scales against the lives of many. You are a hero to us. I tell you, Bart, beside Jerusalem's Mount Herzl is the Yad Vashem memorial where we remember our own and their suffering, and
