Right of Thirst (9 page)

“That is all,” she said. “Just a little. No more than a fly.”

“Good job,” I said to her, quietly, as Rai translated her words once more, and she labeled Rai's vial, just as she had done for mine, and noted its number down in her book, and placed it carefully in the open case.

“Thank you,” I said to Rai, who did not reply. He held his hand pressed to his forearm through his jacket.

“Okay,” I said. “Let's get started. Ask them to get in line. I will see them, and then Elise can draw their blood.”

Rai did as I asked, but the men hesitated.

“Ask him,” I said, gesturing to the headman, “if there is anything wrong. Ask him if anything is bothering him.”

Rai spoke, and the man glanced nervously at me, murmuring a reply.

“His knees, I think,” Rai said. “He is saying that his knees hurt him.”

“Both, or only one?”

“Both, he says. But one is worse. And his back also.”

“Is the pain greater in the morning?”

Rai asked the question. The man nodded in response, and began pointing to his knees and then to his back.

“Yes,” Rai said. “He is stiff in the morning. His knees hurt him. But then they get better in the day.”

The man looked down, his hands clasped together.

“Tell him I need to look at his knees.”

I stood, and rounded the table. There was a ripple in the crowd around us.

The man fumbled with his cloak without hesitation, drew aside the blanket draped across his shoulders, rolled up his loose brown cotton pants, and extended his leg. It was thin and pale, his knee knobby and swollen. I crouched down, and took off my gloves, and reached out. The man's flesh felt cool, and I ran my hands over his knee.

“Ask him to bend it,” I said, as the others gathered around him and began talking all at once.

The man's knee popped and clicked beneath my hand, a knot of gravel and bone.

“He has arthritis,” I said, as I stood and reached into my pack, and found the bottle of pills.

“Tell him to take these when he eats,” I said, and handed the bottle to the man. “Otherwise they might irritate his stomach.”

The man said something to Rai.

“He wants to know if they will make him better.”

I hesitated.

“Tell him yes,” I said finally.

The man took the pills, and held them carefully against his chest.

“Okay, Elise,” I said, and she smiled at the man, reached into her pocket, withdrew a roll of money, and carefully peeled off two worn bills and handed them to him. He stared intently at the notes, and then took them and tucked them away. A few seconds passed, and Rai's eyes narrowed, but then, to my relief, the man rolled up his sleeve and extended his arm as Rai had done. Elise opened an alcohol pad, withdrew a new clean needle, and without hesitation, as quickly and efficiently as she could ever have wanted, she found the vein, and filled the vial, and then he was stepping back with the ball of cotton pressed to his arm. The whole transaction was over in only a few seconds, and again I was proud of her—how steady she'd been, as if there was no audience at all. She asked his name then, and carefully wrote it in the book, and put the sticker on the vial, and looked up, smiling, at the others.

Without further discussion, the line formed, and just then the snow began to fall more heavily. The flakes were as large as moths in the air, and fell straight down, as dry as talcum, and when they struck our clothes they collapsed into powder. In a few moments the more distant trees of the orchard dissolved, and the figures in the crowd lost definition behind a curtain of falling snow. We sat on the bench, and one by one they stepped from the background up to us.

After the first awkward moments, it went smoothly. The figure would step forward. Rai would speak. I would listen, the man—they were all men—would answer. I would rise, and do a quick examination, and reach into my bag for some pills—I was careful to give each man something—and then Elise would do her work. None of them refused. I tried not to watch her, I
tried to focus on the patient before me, but nonetheless there was a glint of needles beside me, the sound of the rubber strap and the rustling of sleeves. She did it well, easing each needle in and out as if she'd done it for years. One by one they stepped back, a bill in one hand and a ball of cotton in the other. As the minutes passed, I could feel them relax, and several times I heard laughter in the crowd.

“It is better to hurry,” Rai said, as time passed. “It is snowing more. We must go back soon and check on the tents.”

Periodically I would sweep the snow off the table with my glove, and stand, and shake it off my coat.

They had bad teeth. It was the single most common complaint among them—their teeth hurt. They woke them at night. And so on. A bottle of antibiotics, a bottle of painkillers. I know nothing of dentistry.

A young man with a superficial skin infection, a honey-colored crust on his chin, his thin dark beard, his eyes the color of mud.

“Tell him to wash twice each day with soap and warm water,” I said, “and I'll give him some antibiotics.”

As he took the pills, I wondered if he had any soap.

Another bottle from the pack. Already I was running low. Impetigo, nothing more. It would clear up on its own anyway.

A scarred hand, a finger that would not straighten.

“He was cutting wood,” Rai said. “It was a long time ago, he says.”

Another bottle from the pack. Ibuprofen again.

“There's nothing I can do for that,” I said. “But these will help if he has pain.”

They were thin, not starving. But I was surprised, once the floodgates had opened, at how eagerly they pointed to their mouths or elbows, or clutched their bellies, and how greedy they
were for my bottles of ibuprofen and generic penicillin, which I knew would ease their aches only for a little while. I wondered what powers they had invested in me, and why, because even as I played along I knew better.

Then an old man, one of the last we saw. Wheezing, hunched over a stick, eyes wide and bulging, he appeared like an apparition. His beard was entirely white, his legs thick and doughy at the ankles, his lips dusky and pale. Two younger men helped him forward, and I realized that they must have gone to find him.

“He cannot breathe,” Rai said, growing steadily more impatient. “He cannot walk far. He sits up at night to sleep.”

I stood again, and rounded the table, and approached him. He looked up at me. I knew what he had before I touched him. I'd seen it a thousand times before.

I wiped the snow from my stethoscope, from where it lay draped around my neck, and when, after some coaxing, the man finally exposed his thin, dirty chest to the air, I pressed the cold metal to the skin beneath his left nipple, and listened. The odor of his unwashed body rose out of his clothes into the cold.

His heart, a jumble of clicks and murmurs, skipping and leaping, and then his lungs, full of crackles, wet and heavy and thick, as he wheezed on.

“What is wrong with him?” Elise asked, looking up from the table as the man covered himself again. “He looks very sick.”

“He is very sick,” I said. “His heart is failing.”

“Why is his heart failing?” she asked.

“It's hard to say. He might have had a heart attack. Or he might have had rheumatic fever at some point. There are a number of possibilities.”

The man spoke, with difficulty, to Rai.

“He is asking you to help him,” Rai said.

“I will give him some pills,” I said, finally, to Rai. “The pills will make him urinate. His legs will be less swollen and his breathing will improve. He'll feel better for a while.”

I reached into the pack.

“Will he be all right?” Elise asked, staring at the man.

“No,” I said. “He'll be dead soon.”

“Maybe he should go to a hospital,” she persisted.

I shook my head.

“It's too late,” I said. “A hospital couldn't do much for him either. He's an old man with a bad heart and there's nothing anyone can do.”

I handed him the pills. I didn't look at him very closely. I thought they were going to lead him away. But the man spoke again.

“He wants you to draw his blood,” Rai said, evenly, to Elise.

She blanched. For the first time I think it struck her. She turned to me.

“It won't hurt him,” I said.

She hesitated, and the man spoke again.

“He says his blood is still good,” Rai said.

Elise bit her lip, but then she smiled at the man, and did as he asked, reaching for his wick-thin arm.

“I would like to give him more,” she whispered.

“Then do it,” I replied, and before Rai could speak she'd pressed a handful of bills into his hand. It surprised him, clearly, and he put the money under his cloak as quickly as he could. He touched his hat, and bowed several times, and then, finally, the young men at his elbows helped him away. If those watching in the crowd saw what he'd received, they gave no sign.

The last man was a repeat visitor. Rai smiled contemptuously.

“He wants her to draw his blood again,” Rai said, “and pay him again.”

Elise smiled also, but more kindly, brushed the snow from her hat, and shook her head.

“We only need one sample,” she said. “Please tell him.”

The young man looked down at his feet, murmuring his request again.

“You see,” Rai said. “If you give them anything, they will ask for more.” He turned to me. “We must go, Doctor,” he continued. “I must check on the tents. The snow is heavy now.”

“Tell them we will come back,” I said, “when the weather is better.”

Rai translated for the last time, as the snow fell around us and slid in clumps out of the trees, and the apricots shone in the branches overhead. We stood, quickly, and Elise closed her case, and then without saying anything else Rai led us out through the crowd to the alley.

They followed. Already the roofs of the houses were draped in white, and the mud beneath our feet had disappeared, as if the village had been cleaned and remade. The sense of windless, abiding quiet, the vague mass of figures behind us, in and out of the curtain—we walked, listening to their excited, muffled voices fade away as finally they thinned out by the edge of the village. A few of the children continued with us up the trail beside the river for a while, but then they too turned back, and we were left alone with the river and the falling snow. I could see only a short way, as if I were walking with a lantern on a dark night. The river led us back.

All night the snow fell, whispering against the sides of my tent, and in the morning there were nearly three feet on the ground. Only the cook, Ali, was waiting for me at breakfast as I stamped in and shook off my jacket. For the first time I looked at my watch and realized I'd slept late, and that the others had eaten without me.

Ali was a small man in his forties with bad teeth, a patchy black beard, and a wet, alert gaze. When his few words of English were exhausted—Tea? Omelet? Finish?—he would smile and bob his head. He seemed like a different species entirely from the villagers who had erected our tents, thin from weakness rather than from strength, a man whom everyone looked through. Rai claimed to know little about him, only that he was from a large city to the south and had many children. He slept in the cook's tent with his nephew, who did the washing up, the sorting and stacking, and all the rest. The boy rarely entered the dining tent. Ali and his nephew seemed to get along well—we never heard a sound from them, and the meals came like clockwork. Unlike Rai, they prayed five times a day, in front of the cook tent, on plastic mats, falling to their knees, bowing, bowing again. They did it every day, no matter the weather, and I found it touching to watch them—the faith of the
poor, who understand that their fates are beyond them, and their rewards must wait.

“Omelet?” Ali said, smiling, as I brushed off by the doorway and stamped my feet clean and took off my jacket.

“Yes, please,” I replied. “I'm sorry I'm late.”

“Okay,” he said, and was gone.

A few minutes later he returned with his battered aluminum tray. He stood behind me in the corner by the heater as I ate. Usually he left, returning later for the dishes. I suppose it was because of the cold, and Rai's absence, and the fact that he was dressed thinly, with a cheap-looking tracksuit under what appeared to be a green cotton army surplus jacket. No gloves, damp dark wool socks in worn, off-white plastic tennis shoes of the kind that are sold to the poor by the truckload in market stalls throughout the world. There was an odor in the tent, and after a while I realized that it was his feet. The smell was tolerable, but unpleasant all the same, and I ate the omelet quickly, and the heavy white bread with a hint of mold and a packet of jam, washing it down with another lukewarm cup of tea.

“Thank you, Ali,” I said, as I wiped my mouth on the napkin.

“Finish?” he said, smiling, bobbing his head, coming forward to the table.

“Yes, finished.”

“Okay,” he said, and put my dishes on the tray. Then he was gone, out through the door into the snow with my dishes in his arms. The whole of it embarrassed me—his stinking feet, his obeisance, the way he stood and waited for me to finish my breakfast with such patience. He was poor, he was there for the money, and I'm sure it was going into the mouths of his wife and children somewhere in the slums, but I wished he hadn't stood there like that, and I wished I hadn't so utterly ignored him as
I ate my fill. Suddenly, I thought of Eric, standing in his white dress shirt and pressed black pants—yes, sir. There are several specials this evening. But of course it wasn't the same, not even close. Ali waited by a distance he could never in this world hope to cross. I was sure there was no dream behind his indignity, and I doubted whether he even felt indignity at all. He just stood there and watched.

Already the tracks I'd left from my tent were filling in. But it was only a few hundred yards to the main body of the tents, and if I missed them I could simply keep going until I reached the end of the field, then trace my way back along the side of the cliff. So I set off, in my hat and heavy down jacket. In a few minutes I was entirely in my own world, lost in my own breath. I felt as if I was wading through shallow water, with flakes as large as leaves falling to pieces as they struck my clothes, clinging to my eyelashes and eyebrows. I tried to walk straight ahead, paying close attention. Several times I turned around to examine my tracks, satisfying myself that I wasn't wandering in circles. But then I heard voices in the expanse before me, and followed them to the first of the tents.

It was three men from the village. They were knocking the snow off the roofs of the tents with spare wooden tent poles. At first, they didn't see me. One man, shorter than the others, was having difficulty reaching high enough with his pole, and the others were laughing at him. Their faces were flushed and damp from exertion, they looked young and happy and unreserved in their ragged clothes and their round wool hats and their off-colored eyes. For an instant I was tempted to retreat into the snowstorm—I felt abruptly self-conscious, as if I were about to enter a room of strangers at a black-tie affair—but then one of them saw me, and said something to the others. They turned around, and fell silent, and the door closed.

“Hello,” I managed, with an awkward wave of my gloved hand.

“Hello,” one of them replied, bowing his head before looking up at me again.

“Captain Rai?” I asked.

They didn't understand.

“Captain Rai?” I said again. The short man muttered something.

“Rai,” one of the taller men said, as it came to him, pointing down the row. “Rai.”

I thanked them. They bowed their heads; they smiled and did not meet my eye. It was many degrees below freezing, they were brushing the snow off the tents and banging it loose with wooden sticks, it was all over them, and yet they were hardly dressed. No gloves, the thinnest of shoes, and it didn't touch them. They were like birds, in the dead of winter, with pale bloodless feet clasped tight to the wire.

Rai and Elise were with the rest of the villagers at the northern end of the tent city. The snow made it difficult to set up more tents, so Rai had set them to work clearing the roofs. They walked back and forth down the rows with their sticks. How long he would keep them at it was unclear; the snow showed no sign of relenting. Elise held a pole, and was pitching in with the rest, but Rai stood empty-handed, hooded in his parka, some distance from the others.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Good morning,” he replied, shortly.

“How are the tents holding up?”

“It is snowing heavily. But if we keep the loads down probably they will be okay.”

The tents were standing, but the roofs bowed beneath the weight, straining the lines that held them to the ground. The
villagers were entering the tents with their poles, and lifting the roofs from within. From a distance, the tents swelled, and the powder slid off them.

“It's a good thing they're empty,” I said.

“Why?”

“Can you imagine what it would be like if we had two thousand people here? In this?”

“Then they could clean their own tents,” he said. “I would not have to do it for them.”

He paused to light a cigarette, then continued.

“This will delay them,” he said. “They will not be able to cross the passes until the snow melts.”

“How long will we have to wait?”

“I don't know.”

Elise had seen me.

“Here,” she said, trudging toward us, handing me her pole. She was breathing hard, her face red and wet from melted snow. “Help us.”

“Good morning, Elise,” I said.

“Sanjit will not work,” she said, looking at Rai. “He is lazy.”

Rai smiled. I would have thought that such a comment would be an affront to his dignity, but he was playing along.

“If you were my wife,” he said, “you would not be talking so much.”

She laughed.

I smiled along, surprised by their playfulness. And I felt something else—a clear wave of jealousy. It came over me without warning. I had hardly seen them exchange two words since we'd arrived in this place, and yet now, suddenly they were joking like old friends.

“I'm going to rest,” she said, handing me the pole. “I am going to the tent.”

Rai shook his head and looked pleased as she walked away.

“Well,” I said. “I'm going to get started.”

I set off by myself. It wasn't heavy work, but it was enough to make me unzip the front of my jacket, and stop for a breather every now and then. I stepped alone into the cold dark interiors, one after another, pushing the broom slowly into the sagging canvas overhead, and let the snow roll off. It was far too cold for the snow to melt, and in that we were fortunate. Wet snow would have soaked the tents through. But Rai was right; the snow was dry, and poured off the roofs like salt.

The snow-covered canvas muffled all sound. I could hear nothing from the outside world. It was satisfying to stand inside them, and push the pole against the roof, and feel the weight of the snow slide off to nothing with a long sigh. As I entered them one after the other, with all the snow and quiet around me, they reminded me of ruins, or the cells of catacombs, deep underground, as if people had once lived there, and left long ago.

Back home, a few weeks before the trip, I'd rented a film about a biology professor who'd spent his life studying the burrows of ants. I'd liked the man, and his passion, and his awkwardness on camera, and the pleasure he so clearly took in his work. He was soothing, somehow, and I'd watched the film twice before I sent it back.

The professor's idea was both simple and elegant. He and his graduate student filled a wheelbarrow with their equipment and pushed it out to the ant mound. Then, carefully, the professor shoveled off the top of the mound until the central tunnel was exposed, ants flowing everywhere. Meanwhile, his assistant turned on the gas burner in the wheelbarrow and melted a bar of lead in a crucible.

It took a while for the lead to melt, and during this time the professor talked a bit about his research, in his slow Southern
drawl, about the biomass of insects on this earth and ants in particular, how generally important they were, and how little was known about them. And yet they were among the most intricate of living systems in the world. They were born to their roles, and followed them without pain, without regret or choice or pleasure, and yet they were alive. They had fascinated him since he was a small boy. The assistant boiled and stirred the lead. It looked like molten silver, or mercury, and when it got hot it was runny and thin, not thick and slow like I might have expected. At night, I imagined that it would have glowed, but in daylight it was simply shiny.

Once the lead was ready, the assistant handed a galvanized steel funnel, with a handle attached, to the professor. The handle was long enough that the professor didn't have to bend. He held the funnel over the exposed tunnel, then nodded to his assistant.

“This is the delicate part,” he said for the benefit of the camera. “The lead cools quickly, so it has to be done just right.”

The assistant was careful with his tongs and his crucible, pouring the lead into the funnel as the professor held the funnel steady and let the single bright thread flow into the ground.

“It took us a while to figure out how much lead to use,” the professor said. “And how hot to make it.”

When the cup of lead was gone, the professor looked at his watch.

“Now we wait,” he said, putting the funnel back into the wheelbarrow.

They walked between the narrow trunks of young pines. The earth was red. The biology professor digressed a bit—he talked about sawtooth pine and spruce pine, he talked about grasslands and periodic fires and the good they do for ecological systems. He talked about how one system is related to another, and how
you can't change one without the other, which he said we were just beginning to learn even though I'd heard it many times before.

When the minutes were up, the professor and his assistant started digging. The hole was deep when they were done—nearly six feet, measured exactly with a string. By then they were using trowels, and finally heavy brushes, the kind with wooden backs that scrubbed the floors of the nineteenth century.

At last they had it, pried loose from the ground. A perfect cast of the ant burrow, with many branches, and a little ball at the bottom where the queen lay encased. It was a strangely beautiful object, a shining metal root, hot enough to be handled only with gloves. It looked like silver.

Back in his laboratory, many dozens of similar casts hung from the ceiling, with name tags affixed. It was, the professor said, the largest collection of ant burrow casts in the world. One could tell the species of ant from the shape of the burrow—the number of branches, the location of the queen's chamber. All the millions, working in the dark, and yet they were following a secret plan, a blueprint, which they carried in their genes and reproduced over and over again. Sometimes the burrows were abandoned, for mysterious reasons, and reoccupied, but only by colonies of the same species. The shape of the burrow, the professor said, was identical no matter where they were on earth, and had not changed for tens of thousands of years.

 

There was a movement in the doorway.

“Doctor?” Captain Rai said inquisitively, hood up, peering in the tent.

“Let them do this,” he said.

“I don't mind,” I replied.

“Already you have done too much,” he said.

“It's good to get some exercise. I'm tired of sitting still.”

“Yes,” he said, and smiled. “It is also good to rest and have lunch.”

Already it was a little past noon by Rai's watch. On the way back to the dining tent we passed a few of the villagers—they had broken into small groups for the job—and Rai stopped to speak to them. They emerged from the flurries, dark forms becoming whole, like a pack of wolves. Then they bowed their heads and were gone.

“What did you say to them?” I asked.

“I told them to go back to the village today. The snow is not so heavy now.”

It was true—the snow was lessening.

“What did the radio say?”

“The front is passing,” he said. “But they will not be coming now for some time. It will be very deep up high.”