The Distance Between Us. Masha Hamilton
needs morphine,” the junior doctor says. “Penicillin.”
The senior doctor doesn’t reply at first. He looks at the girl thoughtfully with large, liquid eyes. A skeletal cat prowls the ward, meowing loudly. “You know the state of our supplies?” he finally asks.
“We’ll use what we have,” the junior doctor replies.
Still studying the girl, the senior doctor speaks in a rhetorical tone, as if he were teaching. “Is that practical?”
Caddie doesn’t understand what he means at first. She wonders if she’s misinterpreted the Arabic.
“Either way, we must alleviate the pain,” the younger doctor says, his tone growing peevish. “The question you raise is in Allah’s hands.”
The senior doctor crosses his arms and taps the fingers of his right hand. “We have twenty vials left of morphine. Penicillin is also short.”
The ward is suddenly quiet; even the patients’ moans seem to die on their lips. Only the doctors speak, quickly, one’s voice falling on the other’s.
“And you suggest?”
“Codeine.”
“Oral codeine.” The junior doctor grunts. “The corruption of our own government . . .”
“Fortunately, some nerve endings—”
“. . . means we never have enough. And for infection?”
“—are already dead. So the pain—”
“Infection, I said.”
The senior doctor picks up the girl’s chart and writes. His voice is painstakingly slow now and Caddie has no trouble following his words. “There’s been a clash with some settlers. Two teenagers and a child are on their way in right now, Ahmed. Another child. This one eight years old. Bullet wound to the leg. Decent chance of survival. But without painkillers, the boy may tear at his wound. Infection and death could follow. Needless death.” He sighs. “You know this, Ahmed.”
“In Allah’s name, look at her,” the younger doctor says.
The senior doctor looks at his colleague sadly but from a great distance, as though mourning a son’s obstinate refusal to learn. “You can invoke Allah,” he says. “But I have to allot the supplies.” He hands the chart to the nurse. “I’ll return in two hours. Let me know if there is change before then.”
The child is no longer crying. She stares at Caddie with stunned eyes that hold fear—though surely, and please let this be so, she is too young to comprehend the sentence just pronounced on her. It must be the possibility of more pain that frightens her. Not the promise of nonexistence.
The first doctor has his back to her; he is already moving on to the next patient. “Excuse me,” Caddie calls. “I’d like to talk to you about the medicine shortages.” He turns. For the briefest instant, she sees a flicker of interest in his eyes. Then he looks her up and down, and scowls. “We can talk as you work, if you’d like. Or I’ll wait.”
“You are—who?” the doctor asks in English.
“Newspaper reporter.”
“Which country?”
“America.”
His frown stiffens. “You aren’t allowed in here. I have nothing to say to you.”
“I heard you talking,” Caddie says.
“You heard? And in what language did you hear?”
“My Arabic is fine,” she says, slipping back into that tongue.
“Mistakes are easy to make when it is not your language.” The doctor continues to speak English. “Not your people.”
“I might be able to help.”
“You think we will get more money because you write that a bomb-maker’s sister suffers? If it were so simple, you think our own would not have already achieved it?” He shoves his right hand into his pocket and tilts his head. His look turns suddenly softer, appraising. “You want to help? Go to an Israeli hospital and bring us back the medicine we need.” He steps toward her. “But go quickly. The child can’t wait.”
She could do it. Get in her car and zoom back to Jerusalem. She might be able to persuade some leftist-peacenik doctor to give her the morphine, the penicillin, whatever is needed. For a little girl, a few supplies to ease her pain. Maybe even save her life.
Caddie rubs her right wrist, remembering the leather band Marcus wore at his. It was a gift from a woman whose demolished home he photographed, whose coffee he drank, whose children he admired. He’d given her back her dignity, the woman told him, so she gave him the bracelet. They called each other habibi, friend.
Caddie had scoffed. “A story is a story,” she’d told Marcus later. “These people aren’t our friends. We don’t share their lives in any sense of the word. We slip in, dig up what we need and move out, fast. All that buddy-buddy stuff is only worth it if it gets you a better photo.”
“Bullshit,” he’d answered. “You want something more, too. Something to make us more than friggin’ voyeurs.”
“Us? I know better.”
Now, watching her, the doctor’s stare slowly grows hard. “I’m very busy,” he says, and turns away.
Caddie studies his long, narrow back. She imagines a series of interview questions. Have you ever been so tired you dispensed the wrong medicine? Have you ever made a mistake that cost a patient his life, and then lied to the family? She watches him leave the room. She can no longer see him, but in her imagination, he blushes.
Still, it’s difficult to leave. The girl’s family has not yet returned, and she is watching Caddie with eyes that pull. It’s as though she’s waiting for an answer to a question.
Get too close, feel too much, and you’re sunk. That’s what she’d told Marcus. What she believes.
Caddie forces herself from the hospital room into the hallway and halts before a window that overlooks an inner courtyard where recovering patients sit surrounded by extended families. The floor feels gritty beneath her feet. She leans against a wall. She’s done here.
As she fights sluggishness, an emaciated man moves past, one hand pressed against the wall for support. The patient’s eyes are large above hollow cheeks. Each step is a labor. He’s maybe twenty-five years old, strikingly young for one so strikingly ill.
The flesh is weak.
The first time she’d heard the minister say that, she thought he referred to Grandma Jos, who had been having more and more accidents as her eyesight worsened, who’d cut herself that very morning with a paring knife. And Caddie wondered, how did he know, this minister? How did he know that Grandma Jos was aging fast? Did he, as God’s emissary, have God’s ability to see straight into their home? Was Grandma Jos really right, with her faith that seemed so inept?
Later, much later, when she learned the minister meant something else, something obscure about lust and sin and redemption, she rejected his interpretation as overblown and unrealistic, the explanation of the cloistered. No, she’d been right from the start: “the flesh is weak” was a maxim—or, better, a protest cry—about the inescapable vulnerability of the human body. Everyone has to die—in an armchair, on the pavement, in a bed. Caddie can’t prevent it.
She turns to leave and almost runs into two orderlies rushing past, pushing empty beds. “Fucking son-of-dog Zionist settlers,” one curses loudly to the other.
“Any dead?” Caddie calls after them.
The orderly glances at her over his shoulder. “Yeah. There’s dead.”
“How many?” she asks, but he’s already moving out of earshot.