‘No,’ she says, ‘thank you.’
He can afford to appear generous if he wishes: he is the occupier. He makes the rules. These possibilities are closed to her. His freedom to act in this way, in any way he wants, is only another means by which to wield his power. And for this pretence of friendship she decides to hate him a little more.
George
‘I’m going to help you to sit up.’
He arranges the pillows, careful with his movements lest they cause any pain. The boy watches, silent. The fever-glaze has gone, there is a new curiosity. This, the advent of consciousness, is the first time he has really seen the boy. Before that he was a case, an urgent one.
His eyes sting. He rubs them, and they only feel worse. He waited with the child through the night, watching for any sign of the fever mutating, worsening. He has done the same a hundred – a thousand – times before, beneath canvas in the Mesapotamian desert, in a temporary barracks beside the Caspian Sea: a marshland place so famously rife with the disease that Alexander the Great sent his unwanted generals there to die. He has watched men return entirely to themselves only to fall suddenly, fatally, back into the clutches of the thing.
He is still not certain that the boy will survive; he chose not to tell the mother this. He senses that she has suffered enough; she wears it upon her like a cloak.
‘Is there pain?’
A hesitation. He thinks perhaps the boy does not understand. He gestures at his head, his stomach, pantomimes a wince.
‘Some pain,’ the child says, articulating as precisely as a judge. It is said bravely: I am suffering, but I am not going to complain about it. Beneath his eyes are bruise-like impressions. Not, George thinks, so much the mark of his recent condition as a more general, long-term malaise: poor nutrition, general fatigue. He saw it in the faces of the Russian children on the refugee ships. He does not know the mother at all, but he has some idea of the sort of person she might be. He can imagine that not being able to feed her son properly would pain her.
Now the boy is looking about himself, with wonder and poorly concealed fear. He understands. He has experienced the same phenomenon almost daily across the span of the last five years. At least now he is static, for however long it may prove to be. When they were on the move it could take a good ten minutes of careful thought. He would stitch together the memories of the previous day – adding these to the ache in his legs, the temperature of the air trapped beneath the canvas. Even then, one could not always be certain. The desert could be a different place from one day to another.
‘You are in the hospital,’ he says. ‘You have a rather bad case of malaria.’ He stops, not sure how much the boy understands.
The child blinks, tries to shift himself to sit up.
‘No, let me help you. There.’
‘Thank you.’ Then, rather formally, ‘I’m sorry. My English is not good.’
He has to work not to laugh. ‘It’s a sight better than my Turkish, I can assure you. I’m impressed that a boy of – how old are you? How … many years do you have? Eight?’
‘Seven.’
He is taken aback. Eight had been a wild overestimation, to flatter the child. He had thought five at the very most. Malnutrition, most likely, has stunted the boy’s growth.
‘You are a soldier?’
‘I’m a doctor.’
‘You are in the army?’
‘Yes, but my job is slightly different to the others’. I’m there to save lives.’
‘For the soldiers in your army.’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘You saved other soldiers?’
‘Several.’
Mere skeletons, George remembers, in a worse state, if that was possible, than their own men. Ruined by frostbite and dysentery. The Ottomans had won Gallipoli. They had won it with sheer numbers. Men used like bullets; launched toward the enemy, never expected to return.
The boy is looking up at him with a mixture of fascination and fear. George wonders what tales he has heard of the British army. Nothing good, that is for certain. A sudden inspiration. ‘Do you like animals? Animals, you know?’ He makes a puppet from his hand, his fingers four running legs.
The boy nods, suspicious.
‘And birds?’
Another nod.
‘There was a desert we passed through. The Mesapotamian desert. And then, suddenly, the rains came, and it wasn’t a desert any more. Suddenly there were flowers – orchids, such a bright purple that they looked like tiny coloured lights in the grass – and thousands of birds came to feed from the insects that came for them. Can you imagine it? Thousands.’
The boy does not say anything. George isn’t even sure he understands. But perhaps it doesn’t matter. The memory is, really, a selfish indulgence. He remembers the particular green of the grasses: it was like seeing the colour, really seeing it, for the first time. ‘And there were great plump birds called partridges, and smaller ones, grouse. And in the swamplands there were boars. Boars. Do you know what that means?’
The boy shakes his head.
‘Like a pig, but with lots of hair, and tusks.’ George finds himself pushing back the front of his nose to make a snout, grunting. He feels ridiculous. He has no idea what Bill would make of this, if he were to come in now. But he is rewarded when the boy smiles for the first time since his arrival at the hospital.
‘You saw it? That animal?’
‘Oh yes, of course.’ He didn’t, actually. They remained mythical: which made a kind of sense; it was the land of myth. There, oil seeped up through the ground unchecked, a concentration of ancient power. The locals paid it no heed; it was of little use to
