Nur
Nur goes to the hospital to bring the boy home. It is against her better judgement, but there was something in the way Kerem spoke to her that frightened her. It had been … yes, something like a threat.
She is making her way past the cloud pine in the garden when a strange creature emerges through the rose bushes in front of her.
She stares at it for a couple of seconds, trying to make sense of the sight. It is one of the strays, the old ginger tom, but he seems to have something caught about his neck – a great collar of material. He must have become tangled in it. She should try to take it off him. She approaches him. He watches warily but does not back away, as if to show her that he is not afraid.
‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’ She turns to see the doctor, approaching from the house. ‘He’s not in a very good mood at the moment.’
‘He has something caught about his neck.’
‘I put it there.’
‘But why?’ She is ready to be offended. She never particularly liked the animal, he seemed a bully; there were terrible night-time fights of which she was certain he was the perpetrator. But this seems a strange and wanton cruelty to inflict upon any animal.
‘If you look at his hind leg – there on the left, just above the hip.’
‘The fur is gone.’
‘Yes, I had to shave it for him. He had a wound – it was a messy cut. So I stitched it, applied iodine.’
‘Why?’
‘Well,’ he shrugs. ‘I suppose because I can. I saw it, and knew that I could do something for him.’
There is no boast in the way he says it. It is as though he thinks it is the most simple thing in the world. She has to admit that there is a grace to this attitude. How many men in his position, she thinks, would have done the same thing? One in twenty? A hundred?
She is also thinking that it is exactly the sort of thing her father would have done. There was the donkey he had brought back with him from a trip to the countryside, which he had rescued because it had outlasted its usefulness to the farmer and was going to be killed. It had eaten every single rose from the garden, and knocked her grandmother’s favourite statue from its plinth, and once come into the house and left a steaming pile of dung on one of the most precious rugs, but they had kept it until it died a few years later.
‘A human,’ the doctor says now, ‘knows that when they have a wound stitched it is in their best interests. If they are told to leave it alone, to heal, they will. An animal has no such understanding. Hence the collar, otherwise he would have torn all of the stitches back out with his teeth and made the thing far worse. He saw it as a violation, even though I gave him a little Novocaine as an anaesthetic. It was one of the hardest suturing tasks I have ever had to do.’
He pulls back the sleeve of his shirt to reveal a wrist covered by lacerations, just beginning to heal to pale pink.
‘You could have caught rabies.’
‘I know. Or tetanus. You would think a medical man might know better. What can I say? I am a fool.’
‘You are not like most Englishmen.’ She did not quite mean to say it out loud.
‘In what respect?’
She supposes she meant that he seems to lack the English occupiers’ cold formality, their assumed superiority. Of course she cannot say any of this.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Well, that may be because I am not English. I’m a Scot. There are many of my countrymen who would demand blood for such a mistake.’
‘I see.’ As though it would make a difference to her, as though she might see him more kindly in the light of this new knowledge.
He smiles. He is somehow different today, but she cannot decide exactly how. It is a minute or so before she understands that it is because he is wearing neither a uniform or his doctor’s coat: rather what appear to be his own clothes; trousers, braces, shirt sleeves. He appears younger: somehow more and less himself. This is the private man. She feels oddly as though she has glimpsed him in a state of undress. The formality of his clothing has thus far provided a certain definition to all of their exchanges. It has made it easier, too, to see him as one of a type: the khaki-clad Englishman, soaked to the top of his fair head in the invisible blood of her countrymen. Well, her imagination will simply have to work harder, that is all.
It helps, too, to think of Kerem, watching them from somewhere. It is not unlikely that he has followed her again, to make sure she delivers on her promise. It throws new scrutiny upon her every action. What would he make of this amicable scene: the doctor in this new, casual incarnation?
Now the cat approaches George, and butts his ugly head against his shin. She is amazed at the affection, she would never have thought it possible of the creature.
‘I call him the Red Terror. He has become a friend. I like to think that he, too, understands what it is to have been in a war.’ And then quickly, ‘I should perhaps not make light of it.’ When she remains silent. ‘You lost someone.’
‘My husband,’ she hesitates. And my brother, she thinks.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It was not by your hand.’ She realises that she doesn’t absolutely know this to be true.
‘No. My role was to tend the wounded,’ he says, as if he guesses it and wants to dispel this possibility, ‘and the sick. As many sick
