excerpt from how we live and die

by Lise K. Strom

Hassan left the municipal hospital early. It was a Friday afternoon, the heat pouring through the windows, making the patients moan in pain and thirst and reducing rolls of medical tape to soft, useless masses of glue. He took his leave without a word to anyone, as was his custom, threading his way through the emergency room crowds, the hands reaching for him, touching him, grasping for his attention. There was no other way to enter or exit the hospital. Bodies bloody and dismembered came through these doors, sometimes on a stretcher, more often on foot, ragged clothes hanging at odd angles, fresh pieces of gauze distributed by earnest young women who helped soothe the patients as they waited and waited and sometimes died in the heat and stench of the ward.

Hassan held his breath as he passed, too many open mouths breathing death here, their inner rot expelled with every uttered word. Please, please Doctor, please. He felt the hands tug at his clothes, too weak to bother brushing off. A single hand wrapped strongly round his wrist. He jerked around, could not tell which body owned the hand, pulled away.

"Ass," he hissed as he walked on. He made a mental note to wash that wrist particularly well that evening. And inwardly he cursed his fate, a doctor once tapping on the chests of newborns to clear their lungs, now sewing fingers to their hands and staunching blood from leaky bodies. The hours spent in residency under clean, hygienic lights, sterile tools, separately sealed, a life of schedules and temperance, of smiling into the faces of beautiful, rotund women, their bellies huge with child, optimistic and self-absorbed, and reassuring them of things he knew that nature would take care of even in his absence. But doctoring was no longer a profession, not now, not here; here, now, he was simply a surgeon, a mechanic on the assembly line working among hulls that should have been scrapped long before he ever saw them in consultation. Wretched dirty animals, he called them. And this thought ran through his mind as he rounded the corner and viewed the ward once more before he left the hospital: all these wretched dirty animals. Should have left when we had the chance, he thought, would have been better than this.

He walked slowly up the dusty street that led to his home, laboring under the weight of the afternoon sun, his briefcase in hand, its leather handles frayed and splintered from years of use. He scrambled from one patch of shade to the next, the heat blistering his feet through the flimsy soles of his shoes. A rotting goat carcass sat in the ditch, its smell of offal and sweet-sickly death perfuming the afternoon. The breeze scooped up a handful of sand to toss in his eyes as he scurried from shadow to shadow. Down the street he went, blowing the dust from his lungs to keep from screaming at the heat of the road under his feet. Hassan paused before the chemist�s shop to see if Alifa, the neighborhood gossip, spied him from her window above, but there was no trace of her hand holding the curtain aside to watch the comings and goings of the street below.

"Doctor!" called Said, the chemist. "Good to see you!" The chemist's shop displayed only a handful of sun-baked vials of expired tablets on dusty shelves. A bottle of aspirin, brought from France, sat alone in the window, the lettering faded.

"Good afternoon, Said," Hassan said, tipping an imaginary hat to the old man. Old rituals for old men, for a time when he walked the streets with dignity, his shoulders not nearly as crooked as they were now. There goes the doctor. The obstetrician. The best obstetrician. Once that was the chant that whispered after him. Now he worked alongside the other drones, the surgeons, his arms covered to the elbow in gore, nurses holding his lunch above a patient�s inert body as he took a bite, no time to sit in the cafeteria, no time to linger over a cup of tea, only time to salvage the wounded who were badly losing on a battlefield as wide and broad as the city itself. So many enemies, so difficult to tell; how luxurious, Hassan thought, to live in a world of only good and evil. He lowered his eyes and continued walking home.