THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (15 page)

He stopped, bent, and unfastened the buckles of his heavy sandals. He let his bare feet sink into the sand, then hitched the sandals' straps to his waist. He took the first step. He must have respect, he was driven to find it. The heat of the sand scorched the flesh on the soles of his feet, the grains clogged between his toes.

The second step, and then he was climbing a dune's lee slope and each step set fire to the skin under his feet, which was pink and protected between the calluses and the new blisters, but his grip was better than it was with the sandals; his toes dug into the loose sand and he did not fall. The burning ran from his feet to his ankles and up to his thighs. Caleb gasped. His teeth locked on his lip. He would not cry out. They tumbled down the dune's reverse slope. He fell but did not scream as the pain surged.

The boy, Ghaffur, was gone. Caleb was alone, abandoned by the caravan's stampede down the reverse slope. He scrambled to his feet.

He saw the boy sprint, sure-footed, past the pack camels and past the camels on which Fahd, Hosni and Tommy clung, as if for their lives.

He plodded after them, the gap growing and the pain burning. The boy reached his father at the head of the caravan and tugged at his father's sleeve. Rashid seemed to listen to his son, then turned. Tears welled in Caleb's eyes. His bare feet gouged into the sand. He saw, through misted eyes, the moment of disinterested contempt on Rashid's face, heard faintly the cough and the spit, then Rashid resumed his march at the caravan's head.

The next dune line was at least a mile in front. It was as if bull-dozers had scraped off the sand bed, scalped it down to a surface of grit and chipped stones. Rashid led the camels on to the new ground.

The boy waited for him.

Each step on the burned grit and the sharp stones was rich agony The boy waited and watched him.

Caleb's own craving for respect made him hang the sandals at his waist. If, now, he dropped the sandals to the ground, slipped his feet into them and refastened the buckles, he could not win respect. The vista stretched ahead of him, and he started to count numbers to divert his mind from the shoots of pain.

The boy's gaze wavered between Caleb's wet eyes and his feet. He thought the boy understood. The boy's feet were hardened as old leather and Ghaffur stood and waited for him. Caleb counted each step. He came closer to the boy - and the distance to the end of the caravan and the last bull camel carrying two of the boxes had widened. He reached the boy, still counting, and passed him and kept on walking and each step hurt worse.

'What do you say?' the voice piped.

'I am counting.'

'What are you counting?'

Caleb grunted, 'I am counting each step I take.'

'I have never heard of such numbers,' the boy said, and shook his head.

He counted the next number . . . and realized. The pain and the heat, the grit and stones under his feet had pushed him beyond the chasm that was the limit of his memory. He cursed softly. An old language had seeped into his mind, his past. He stamped on the memory and walked on.

Caleb endured.

At the base of the next dune line, where there would be soft sand, Rashid had called a halt. Fahd prayed, but the Egyptian and the Iraqi squatted in the shade of their kneeling camels. Caleb reached them.

Tommy sneered, 'What do you wish to be, a soldier or a peasant?'

When the Saudi's prayers were complete, they went on. The boy stayed close to him, eyes never off him, because the boy had heard the evidence that the life of the Outsider among them was a lie. Who was he? The boy's question had, almost, been answered. Caleb was able to hold the pace that Rashid set.

The traffic was fierce.

Lunatics hurled cars, vans and lorries around Bart's chauffeured saloon. His driver, a favourite with the expatriates at the compound, was slow to anger and seldom treated the roads as if they were stock-car circuits, manoeuvred among the hazards with caution, was a byword for calm, and therefore was in demand. They had just left the supermarket, on the northern edge of central Riyadh, where Bart had filled a trolley with meals-for-one. It was always a risk for an expatriate to drive himself: a foreigner was inevitably considered to be in the wrong at an accident scene. A European foreigner could be milked for rich pickings if a Saudi was injured or his car dented: no access to a lawyer, and no help from the embassy. He sat in the back of the Chevrolet, believed the company's sales pitch on the strength of the vehicle, and was relaxed.

He was going shopping. The supermarket had merely been his first call, and his last call would be the English-language bookstore, but next in line was the Pakistani-staffed men's clothes emporium.

There, at least, he would be treated with courtesy, made to feel valued - and so, at their prices, he damn well ought to be. Little luxuries had come late in life to Samuel Bartholomew: none at home as a child, none at school where pocket-money allowances were grudgingly paid by his father, none as a student in London. He was looking for a couple of ties, silk, and a couple of shirts, best Egyptian cotton.

Bart's student years and the pre-qualification studies had been an endless miserly existence. Nine years in all, and always his wallet had been light. Through pre-clinical and clinical, through his pre-registration year with six months as a hospital house physician and six more months as house surgeon, and during the final three working as junior scrote at a general practitioner's surgery in east London and back again into a south London hospital, he had suffered un-relenting penury. The legacy of it was that today's purchase of shirts and ties had importance. Being able to shop when the mood took him was, even now, a small sign of personal achievement.

The traffic wove and schemed around them. The blast of horns and the roar of speeding engines was filtered in the air-conditioned interior.

Ahead, over the driver's shoulder, he saw a Land Rover Discovery pull up to the kerb. A blonde woman, quite young and European, stepped out and kids spilled from the back.

He could see the nape of a young man's neck tilted back against the driver's headrest. An Arab, holding a plastic bag, paused by the near side door, hesitated on the pavement.

His own driver was slowing: the traffic-lights in front were against them. Around his car he heard the scream of brakes. God, worse than castration for these people would be the loss of their vehicle's horn.

The Arab crouched, was hidden by the Discovery, and when he stood again he no longer held the plastic bag.

The lights changed, and suddenly the Arab was running.

The driver saw nothing, concentrated on the surge of the traffic towards the junction. The plastic bag was half under the rear door of the Discovery. There was a waft of cigarette smoke through the front window on which a tanned elbow rested.

Bart knew. Every three months, in batches, expatriates were summoned to the embassy for sessions with the security officer, and Eddie Wroughton would usually slope in, unannounced and without introductions, and stand at the back as the security officer briefed the audience of bankers, accountants, surveyors and defence-equipment engineers on precautions that should be taken, where the no-go areas were and the dangers. During the war, when Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV had pumped out, twenty-four/seven, images of destruction and mutilation in Iraq, expatriates had been advised to stay at home, keep off the streets and boycott work. Now the families were back, but 'Care should at all times be exercised', the security officer had said, at the last briefing Bart had attended. Usual routes should be varied and vehicles should not be left on the street; it was sensible to check under a car each morning. Bart understood what he had seen. He sat rigidly upright in the back of the car.

They passed the Discovery.

He said nothing. He saw the young man lounging, relaxed, in the driver's seat, waiting while the wife and kids browsed in a jeweller's shop. Through the plate-glass front of the shop, he saw a flash of the young mother's hair and the kids beside her. His own driver accelerated. Then they passed the Arab, sprinting, and his
thobe
billowed against his legs as he ran. His face was close to Bart. He seemed to be reciting, his lips moved as if in prayer, his eyes were behind spectacles, his cheeks were clean and his moustache trimmed

- he was like any other of the young men who paraded the pavements and hospital corridors, and sat behind ministry desks. His driver was picking up speed. The Arab was lost from Bart's view. He had swivelled in the back seat, inside the constraint of the belt, and looked back at the Discovery, could just see the young man's face: first posting abroad, making the sort of money he could not hope to match back home, living in a villa with servants and a pool for the kids, and . . . The Discovery was a hundred yards behind them. They went through the junction.

He could have turned his head away, looked instead over his own driver's shoulder, but did not.

He saw the flash, its blinding light.

He saw a door come off and cannon across the pavement into the glass of the jeweller's window. Then a bonnet. The Discovery seemed to be lifted up, and when it came down the duststorm gathered round it. There was the thunder. His driver braked. Every vehicle around them braked. They were spewed across the road, jamming it.

Bart imagined .. . His own driver swung his body and lifted the medical bag - black leather and embossed with the initials S.A.L.B. -

off the front seat and was passing it into the back . . . Bart imagined the blood spurting from severed arteries, legs amputated because they always were in a vehicle explosion, a head crushed against a shattered windscreen. Hardly turning from what he watched, Bart pushed away the medical bag. He imagined the young woman frozen in the jeweller's shop, cut by glass, and the kids clinging to her legs. He imagined the quiet groans of the young man in the Discovery, as the pallor settled on his face, because death from vehicle explosions always came later, in Accident and Emergency. He knew it because he had seen it when his life was a greater lie.

He faced his driver, who still clung to the medical bag, which held the morphine and syringes that killed pain when death was inevitable. What he should have done, what he had practised and become expert at before moving to the Kingdom, was debridement.

If there had been the smallest chance of saving life, there in the road while the patient groaned in shock and pain, he could have cut out the wounds and lifted clear with forceps - they were in his bag - the worst of the blast's debris: plastic from the dashboard, cloth material from the seating, clothing, old techniques developed by Napoleonic surgeons and still valid.

'Drive on/ Bart said.

Amazement and confusion wreathed the driver's face. Bart was a qualified medical doctor, had passed the exams and been inducted as a member of the Royal College of General Practitioners. He had sworn the oath named after the father of medicine, Hippocrates, to follow the ethics and duties required of him. He was, he knew it, dirt

. . . Did he care? So much of his life was betrayal. He did not care.

'Don't get involved, don't get caught up' was the mantra of expatriates in the Kingdom. 'Don't put your nose in because no one'll thank you and you'll get it bitten off instead' . . . Fuck the shirts, screw the ethics, fuck the ties and screw the duties . . . The oath had been sworn too long ago. He hated himself, and disgust squirmed in him.

'Where to, Doctor?' the driver asked.

'Back to the villa, I think. Thank you.'

When the traffic moved, when the sirens were in the road, they drove away.

Bart had justification to hate himself.

Al Maz'an village, near Jenin, Occupied West Bank.

The patient had acute diarrhoea.

He had been called by the patient's father. It was now four months since he had been embedded in the Palestinian community, and trust for him was growing.

Bart was escorted into the bedroom. In lozv light other members of the family ringed the walls, but only the mother was beside the bed where the girl lay. Four months before, the smell would have made Bart retch; he was used to it now. The mother held her daughter's hand and spoke soft, comforting words to her.

What astonished Bart was that the whole of the village was not laid out prostrate with acute diarrhoea. That part of the village was a shanty town of homes thrown together with corrugated iron, canvas and packing-case boards. No sanitation or running water. When he had left his car he had seen that this corner of the village used an open sewer.

The girl was pale and weak from dehydration. He had learned already that hospitalization was not an option for the shanty's community. At home - at what he still thought of as home - there would have been an express ambulance ride to the Royal Devon and Exeter. He was not at home, and
l
ikely never would be. Clean drinking water, care and love were the best that the girl could hope for. He had the water, and the parents would give the care and love. From the father's description of his daughter's symptoms, Bart had known what to expect, and had brought with him four tzvo-litre bottles of Evian water, and he told the mother how much should be given by spoon to the girl and how often; he made a point of urging her to wash the spoon in boiled water. There was a picture of Arafat on a wall and, near to it, another of a young man with doe dead eyes and a red cloth band tight round his forehead. Bart never talked politics in the village, never talked of the struggle of Arafat's people, never passed comment on the martyrdom of the suicide bombers. He did not have to. The whole village, the shanty area and the homes round the central square, knew of his bitter denunciation of the military at the roadblock outside the village. He was the worm in the apple's core. The door at the back of the room was open. Beyond it was a cooking lean-to with a table and bowls for washing, and a stove threw off the scent of damp, burning wood. It was not warm enough for rain, not cold enough for snow; the weather was driving wet sleet. What blankets they had were piled on the girl's bed, and he thought the other children and the parents would sleep cold that night, if they slept. The girl was a waif, reduced by the severity of the diarrhoea, but he smiled warmly and predicted she would be fine. At the back of the cooking area there was another door and from it came the draught.