Part 6
I finally caught sight of Hashim weeping on one of the chairs as Besan tried to quiet him, offering him the cat nestled in her arms as consolation for his lost friend. All that patriotism he both preached and critiqued rushed out of his face in tears. He was scared, he looked like he just wanted to go home.
Wherever that was.
It was consolation enough to me that the children were asleep. The sound of warplanes kept them up at night and the orders to keep moving made them exert themselves during the day. Even though the sun shone outside, they didn’t have to pick up and leave this time. Because there was nowhere to go, they already touched ground everywhere there was to go these past 7 months. I was happy to see they were getting their rest finally, even as the world crumbled around them.
Adnan was manually checking the pulse of a sleeping beauty, wrapped in a torn tulle skirt from her waist to her feet dangling off the cart wiped of any fruit or food. She was so deep asleep that Adnan must have thought her dead from shock. However he brought his finger under her nose to find her greatly alive, while patting down a boy who took to sleeping on the floor, shaking with goosebumps, his eyes twitching as if he was reliving trauma that crept into his nightmares.
The girl who was thrown off the stage after her brother’s death, offered to soothe the boy with song when approaching Adnan or help with the cut on her forehead that hadn’t stopped bleeding since it happened.
I guess a soldier all the way on the other side of the hall caught a whiff of Palestinian people helping each other, and apparently, he didn’t like that.
The nurse clicked open his nearly empty first aid kit and held up a small cotton pad to her bleeding brow bone when a forearm tattooed with the star of david shot up from under the protective circle of turned over chairs and grabbed his which was reaching for a roll of bandages in the box.
‘What is this?’ Adnan tried defending himself bravely, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
‘Neither did they,’ the buzzcut man dismissed, grimacing with golden teeth on display and a golden cross necklace hung from his neck, blacked out with ink up till his strong chin- which he used to signal Adnan, whom he held with his hands behind his back, towards the stage. Adnan reluctantly stepped up the side of the stage and allowed the guard to force him into where the light hit it in a heated shower. He then wordlessly pulled his surgical scrubs over his head, dumping them by his feet and looked to his abuser-in-waiting for approval.
‘Enough?’
‘Hardly’ scoffed the man, unable to see the olive skin under the elbow length white undershirt he still kept on. The doctor stripped off another layer, another sheath of dignity, from himself and stood awaiting his punishment in white trunks. Only it didn’t end at punishment.
Upon seeing the soldier reach for the grip of his gun, tucked in the front of his waistband, the nurse pedalled backwards. ‘You want to kill me?’ he expressed, a little shaken but not surprised at the officer's aptness to rid him of his life.
‘Bingo’, he phrased, an accent about as thick as his ego protruding through.
‘Why?’ Adnan whispered, almost inaudibly yet still loud enough for everyone in the room to start murmuring prayers.
‘Li’ann ya Akhi,’
(because, bro)
‘Ana baqdar atruk el-sughar, bas guys like you… well..’ he explained with a chuckle.
(I can spare the little guys but..)
‘Reporters,’ he spat, targeting me and staring cock eyed into those of another man, Mouin who stood, clutching the cheap camera that he still had and used sparingly as a harmless freelancer to his side.
‘Reporters just love getting their pieces from you doctors, you doctors who defame us and save everyone we kill’ he boomed, projecting his voice into the sparse and restless crowd, waking Karim and making Aboud- the sick child with a severe case of c-ptsd, whimper. Adnan’s face went green upon hearing the parts of his sick, twisted ideology revealed to be true.
In the corner of the room, beside the utility closet I came in from, a couple of bored soldiers were brutalising a man with a ghostly, clammy face. One of the soldiers, an exceptionally veiny lad with a devilish curve on his mouth, drew a deep gash with the razor sharp bayonet of a rifle on the man's forearm which he threw out with a cry that turned the medics' noses in his direction.
Everyone in this room was familiarised with each other’s name and each other's families either by talking or by connections established before the war tore them apart, they even knew the particular diseases that ail one another. This man was a haemophiliac, who’s clotting disorder made it lethal for blood to spring from his flesh like that. Shima didn’t or rather, couldn’t move, both anxious for her condemned friend and not knowing how to aid the man with her dentistry. Meanwhile Besan shot up to go help him when she was stopped by the soldier who told her to halt.
‘The chavil ’ spoke the man, disinterested in whatever the ‘chavil ’ requested.
“His last wish is to take care of…that” he repeated their odd and signature saying, gesturing towards the man writhing on the ground, breathing harshly as the blood poured in gallons out of a single artery.
Adnan was ushered to the back of the room by his captor and another soldier to make sure he didn’t slip away, but I knew that was the furthest thing from his mind right now. Even with his own life hanging by a thread, he made it his last wish to nurse the victim’s wounds. He rushed to the bleeding man, his hands trembling with the thought of the life he would lose after helping sustain another’s. One last time.
The bandages in the box ran short halfway through the process of annulling the bleeding. So he tore a piece of his own shirt that he re-wore after being called to action.
The soldier, standing with anticipation behind Adnan like the grim reaper, began counting down the seconds until his pre-flexed finger would pull back on the trigger. ‘Ten… nine… eight…’ The seconds dragged on like hours, each one a dull beating in my ears as I watched from afar.
Adnan worked frantically, applying pressure to the wound, using his thumbs to press down directly on the the deep gash. He then layered the makeshift bandages and wound them tighter over and over around the laceration with more pressure each time.
‘Seven… six… five…’ The bleeding, as well as the countdown- slowed, and I felt a gust of relief accompanied by absolute dread.
‘Four… three…’ The bleeding finally subsided, and for a fraction of a second, a fragile silence fell over the room. Adnan exhaled a shaky breath, his eyes filled with a fleeting relief as his eyes shifted from the injury to meet the victim’s grateful ones, welling with tears.
‘Two… one.’
The shot rang out, and Adnan's body slumped forward, crashing onto the man whose face bleached as he screamed at his saviour, the most alive he’d ever been 2 minutes ago, now dead on his lap.
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