Mortal Happiness: Chapter Two

The doctor laid down the syringe and watched her patient retreat into unconsciousness. The girl’s wrist-bones felt light and insubstantial between her fingers as she searched for a pulse. Beneath the fevered speediness a strong, young heart beat powerfully and without hesitation.

‘Will she recover do you think?’ As if trying to hide his height and healthy bulk, the new Canadian paramedic had compressed himself into a corner of the tiny cubicle. He hadn’t been present during the physical examination of course, but the doctor noted that just looking at the girl’s skinny arms and sweating face distressed him.

‘She’s a survivor and we can help her now.’

‘I was thinking of the emotional stress … can we cure that too?’

She ignored his tone; he wouldn’t be the first overconfident young idealist to arrive at a refugee camp and find his training only half the story. She wrote up the medical detail and treatment notes, hoping the hospital pharmacy still had a supply of the drugs she was prescribing.

‘She has Mediterranean Familial Fever, it looks worse than it is and it’s rarely life-threatening. She’s malnourished, no doubt mildly depressed - these things could exacerbate her condition.’ The doctor shrugged, ‘On the other hand, she’s young and her underlying constitution is strong.’ She looked directly at the young man standing awkwardly only a metre away. ‘There are patterns to recovery, mental and physical. When you’ve been here longer you’ll start to see them.’

‘I was trained to see every patient as unique, not as a pattern.’

‘I said there are patterns to recovery.’ Pushing her notes together she stood up from her perch on the girl’s bed. ‘Listen to me, Matthew … it is Matthew? You’re distressed - no, don’t shake your head – and you’re angry too, angry that we don’t have the medication that could have prevented this patient becoming sick.’

‘Aren’t you angry?’ the man blurted. ‘She’s suffering for the sake of a few dollars! Now we have to treat her and that shouldn’t have been necessary.’

‘We work with what we have however little that may be and while you’re here you’ll have to do the same. I’m skilled enough as a doctor to save this girl with or without medication and that’s not arrogance, it’s fact. People have been living with this disease for many, many centuries - we’ve had modern treatments for only a fraction of that time.’ She looked down at the patient, at the signs of long-term malnutrition, the slack, unhealthily sallow skin, at the effects of having lived her whole life in a refugee camp and knew that she was angry, very angry, just not about the things that bothered this man. ‘Anger is a luxury in a place like this. What she needs is efficiency and compassion.’ She smiled at him, ‘I’m sure you have those qualities, Matthew.’

He nodded uncomfortably.

‘Let me know when she wakes,’ she said, and left the cubicle.

Dr. Enna Serpukhova walked along a windowless corridor, past plain wooden doors on left and right. Her low heels struck the painted, concrete flooring and echoed off the walls like an external pulse, like a forgotten beat making itself known again. Briefly, she closed her eyes and continued walking, listening to her own sound.

All the individual spaces here in the hospital were constructed on her orders nearly a year ago; tiny, box-like rooms, where intensive cases could be treated away from the single main ward, away from cigarette smoke, noise and dust. She had fought for these plyboard havens in meeting after meeting with Markus Gutenberg, the camp’s director.

‘But can you justify the expense of these rooms?’ Gutenberg asked during one particularly acrimonious discussion.

‘Justify? To you, Markus? I wasn’t aware I needed to justify my professional opinion as medical director of this camp.’ The expense was paltry and she’d known the money was available.

Now, the corridor was quiet; only two of the cubicles were in use, which was good. She laid one hand briefly against the door of an empty room and wondered, yet again, about the seeming impossibility of reconciling money and human need. She detested Gutenberg’s use of medical aid money for ‘other’ purposes in the camp.

‘You do realise you’re asking me to help you explain away the illicit use of medical funding?’ she’d said, on the occasion of their last confrontation. She couldn’t believe the man’s blatant opportunism when her hospital was short of linen, food, drugs - everything really; so she’d said, ‘No, I won’t help you, but I’m sure you’re clever enough to think of an alternative - you usually do.’

She’d recognised and almost enjoyed his loathing of her at that moment, feeling her combat sinews stretching under his glare. He’d not asked for her co-operation again. She continued along the corridor thinking how she’d won that round – just like she’d won her cubicles. Continuing the fight had limited appeal though, just thinking of it made her feel tired.

The late afternoon air was fresher than for many months when she left her office by a side door. She unwrapped the stethoscope from around her neck and wound it carefully into a pocket and started walking, fast, head up, towards the ridge of ground behind the hospital. She liked to walk. She liked mountains and distant panoramas, but there were none of those here. This slight incline was beautiful simply because it was the highest point for kilometres in any direction.

On the crest of the dry, gravel slope Enna shielded her eyes against the afternoon sun. The wind blew cool across her cheeks and she licked a finger and held it up to feel the direction. Easterly. She licked the finger again, tasting high places and dark green forest. Below, on a flat plain beside the river, the refugee camp with its tents, huts and disused railway carriages covered the yellow landscape like a skin disease. It had been home to 45,000 old men, women and children for more than a decade. Having quickly spread from the original settlement, the camp now almost filled the otherwise empty plain. Looking down at the ugly, sprawling site she felt an unexpected sense of belonging.

Her gaze settled on the hospital, her hospital. Its rough walls looked dull and soiled, but she was proud of them and what lay within them. After a few hours inside the hospital’s small, airless rooms she often longed for escape, counting the moments until she could walk up here and be alone. Now she wondered what was happening down there. Would the new paramedic settle down or crack up? Who was in charge of the cleaning? She could almost smell the harsh disinfectant, the odour of plyboard warming and warping in extremes of temperature. Old people had died between those walls, a few babies had been born. Life went on, after a fashion.

She turned, scrutinising the topography: the dry plain that, towards the river, merged awkwardly with an endless, marshy flatness that bred mosquitoes, water snakes and dysentery. If she closed her eyes she would clearly see the vistas of her childhood - jagged silver peaks, towering spires of stone, plunging, roaring rivers of pale green. She kept her eyes open. She liked this view, desolate and different as it was to the splendours of the Caucasus mountains. She was happy here; happy to live in a place that reminded her of the past only because it was unlike anything she once knew.

Walking through the most crowded part of the camp, the Assistant Director found himself momentarily lost among lines of wet laundry. Two women bent over tubs of soapy water, hands and forearms scarlet from scrubbing, smiled on seeing him. One called out,

‘Mr Perotti! We will see you tonight? You will come?’

‘Of course,’ Tomaso Perotti smiled, ‘I’ve been looking forward to it.’

The women waved wet, raw hands as Perotti nodded and moved on.

It was a lie. He was not looking forward to whatever was going to happen tonight. He understood that marking occasions was uplifting, inspiring even - but why this? Why would he, or anyone, look forward to observing a decade of squalid living and absent hope? To avoid thinking about that Perotti rolled up his sleeves and walked into the largest of the male washing facilities to check the plumbing. The hot water was brown and smelt old; after a moment it gurgled then disappeared. He made a note in his worn, leather bound notepad and continued his walk.

This wasn’t a politically fashionable or commercially significant part of the world, he knew that only too well. What was this small corner compared with Sudan, Afghanistan, Burma? But, and this is what made him angry, when he’d been appointed Assistant Director he’d actually believed he could turn the camp into a permanent, self-supporting community. Now, two years later, he knew his hopes were ridiculous. ‘Self-supporting’ turned out to be just another word for under-funded and he’d grown to despise bureaucracy with all his plebeian, Roman soul. Like the refugees themselves, he went from day to day, stopping leaks, mending walls and cleaning drains. But privately, very privately, he kept his own, ideal vision alive: a comprehensive, financially viable and seemingly impossible vision.

Near the agricultural stores he hesitated, looking around. He recognised the sensation; it was as if something warm had brushed past him. He glanced upwards to where a distant figure stood against the skyline above the hospital and smiled. Changing direction he thrust his notebook into his pocket and began walking faster.

Watching her husband coming towards her Enna felt a familiar, liquid movement in her body. Watching Tomaso never failed to move her in a way she recognised but could barely describe, even to herself. This quite ordinary-looking man striding upwards in his rough shirt and soiled trousers was the reason she was happy here in this treeless place. That and the hospital. As she moved slowly to meet Tomaso she felt a momentary flash of guilt, an insight into how little of her feeling for him she showed or shared.

When they met he kissed her and together they walked back to the top of the ridge and stood hand in hand.

‘What do you think about up here?’ Perotti asked.

Enna smiled, ‘Everything. Today I thought about mountains.’

‘Ah, your mountains,’ Perotti said and raised her hand to his lips, kissing her palm. ‘How are you?’

‘The same as when you last asked me at six o’clock this morning.’

He laughed. ‘You’re not the same En, you’re a completely different wife when your hair’s tied up like that.’ He stroked a strand of long dark hair from her face, wrapping it behind a small, slightly pointed ear.

‘I think the patients appreciate my ability to see where I’m sticking the needle …’ She tipped her head, smiling at him coquettishly, ‘and I thought you liked my chignon.’

‘Chignon! What a wonderful word for hair torture, how very French.’ He laid an arm across her shoulders and as he did so, saw that the sun had changed the colour of her eyes from deep amber to a pale, translucent gold. Then she looked away from the light and everything changed again. He blinked and said, ‘I know you must have your chignon, my darling. Secretly I’m glad that only I get to see you as you really are.’

‘And how am I really?’

Perotti pulled Enna to him more fiercely than he’d intended, sinewy arms wrapping her shoulders and back, his face buried in her neck so that she laughed with the suddenness of it. ‘Naked,’ he whispered, ‘with only your hair around you, and warm skin, warm …’

She inhaled sharply as he bit her lightly on the throat, then wriggled through his hands, laughing. ‘The whole camp will get to see me as I really am if you carry on. Maybe Gutenberg is spying on us with his binoculars at this very moment. Some of the women have told …’

‘Oh, no, no! You must never say ‘Gutenberg’ while I’m expressing my passion for you … it’s impossible. Christ, you’re talking about a man who wears socks and open sandals! I’m Roman, these things matter!’

They both laughed. Holding his warm dry hands in hers Enna knew why she belonged here, here and nowhere else.

Four years earlier, as they were leaving Sudan and shared horrors even now spoken of only in code, Tomaso had said, “Come home with me”. Knowing ‘home’ would be utterly unlike her own experience of that word, she’d agreed. The Italian sun had warmed without burning. Food was shared and plentiful. There was laughter on the back of scooters and singing in the urban darkness. Italy had soothed nerve endings wired to that pitch just beyond human hearing and re-tuned them.

Childhood in the remote Caucasus, medical school in Moscow and Toronto, aid work in Kosovo, East Timor and Ethiopia, nothing had prepared Enna for Rome, or for the changes in her lover as he grew back into what she came to think of as his ‘Italian personality’. She’d never tired of the ruins, the churches, the bustling piazzas and Tomaso had told her she was the perfect tourist, not understanding that Rome delighted her because its histories had nothing at all to do with her own.

One day he’d borrowed an uncle’s battered old Maserati and they had driven out of the city. The open car roared past the broken archways and cracked facades of the Via Appia and she’d smelt the scent of sun on fertile soil, loving its dry headiness and the taste of earth at the back of her tongue.

In the mid-afternoon they had stopped near the Villa of the Quintilii and walked hand in hand under pines and cypresses, on stones worn glassy by more than 2000 years of passing feet. She’d listened as Tomaso described life on the ancient road, populating it with Syrian barbers, Greek poets and sweating legions and as he spoke she had realised that he was describing himself in Rome’s history. Watching him that day she’d felt his rootedness, his certainty of belonging and truly recognised, for maybe the first time, how alike and how different they were. She’d felt briefly sad, because the things that she most loved in him were all absent in herself. Then she’d praised his words with kisses and said, ‘This is the most beautiful part of Rome, it will always be my favourite place.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I enjoy parallels, and all roads must have two sides, even in the mountains where each side is different.’

‘Different how?’ he’d asked.

‘You are a city boy,’ she’d teased him. ‘Only someone who has never been in high mountains would ask that question. Where I came from one side of the road is a wall of rock, the other sid nothing but air.’

Leaving the ridge, they walked back down towards the camp. Approaching the hospital building, Enna said, ‘I have one more patient to see, but I should be home early this evening. Let’s make something Italian for dinner.’

‘You’ve forgotten haven’t you,’ Tomaso said, ‘Tonight is the ten year anniversary celebration.’

‘What? Oh, my God… of course.’ Sounding chastened she asked, ‘Are you worried about it?’

‘Worried? No. More like … appalled. I have a bad feeling about the whole thing and it’s not just the shit I ate for lunch. Which is why …’ He held her in a tango clinch, their joined arms extended in a straight line. ‘I’m expecting you to hold my hand and distract me from disasters, and old men who smell and shed lice and ...’

She pushed him away, laughing at the mock gravity of his expression. ‘Do you miss Rome so much?’ she asked, one of his hands still held in hers.

‘Not when I’m with you my darling. You are my Rome, my Athens, my Par …’

She punched him lightly on the arm and they continued downhill together.