Hippocrates

My grandmother found me vomiting into the toilet. She came behind me and held my hair.

What is it? she asked me. Are you sick?

I wiped my mouth. I did not look up, and I did not answer. I vomited again, but there was nothing left in my stomach. I looked down at my stomach and thought of Saavi’s stomach, the rounded belly of pregnancy. Some female suicide bombers use pregnancy as a disguise, not only because it is easy to conceal explosives, but also because it weakens the resolve of police officers to see a mother. Each of them, of course, has his own. A transgression against a mother is a universal transgression; when a man treats a mother kindly, he imagines that somewhere else, someone is getting up on a train to offer a seat to his own mother, or perhaps helping her to carry her groceries from the market. He is remembering what his wife looked like in her first trimester; he is thinking of his younger siblings or perhaps his own children. He is thinking of life, and of repetition, and of things happening again, as they have happened to him. He is not thinking that anyone carrying a belly that size, that shape, would carry death.

This is why it is the best disguise. And that is why I was sick; I knew that the woman in the office building, who had ridden the elevator to the top floor, must be Saavi. Because the voice on the radio had said that: they had been able to tell that the bomber’s pregnancy was not a disguise, but real. I knew how she had become pregnant; I had had to tell her that she was. And I knew the bomber had to be her. Anyone but Saavi would have faked it.

Ihad not seen Saavi, of course, in several months: almost exactly the amount of time it takes to train with the Black Tigers, to rehearse a scenario like the one she had executed, to grow a pregnant belly into a more­pregnant belly. I had met her when I treated her for injuries at a medical tent outside one of the rebel camps. She was not a Tiger then. She had shown up and asked for a woman quite calmly, although her nose was obviously broken and one of her ears was torn. She was about my age. She had wound her long skirt between her legs and around her waist, and gripped it tightly, as though it were all that was holding her together. I had seen some older women in the village do this; people whispered that they had had so many children that their wombs were falling out. But I knew that this was not her situation. She did not tell me what had happened to her; the sentry who had brought her in did that so that she did not have to repeat herself. He had known her from his village, from before the soldiers had come to keep peace and to rape women, and he spoke more calmly and professionally about what had happened to her than I could have managed myself, if I had already known her. One of her dead brothers had been his classmate.

She was the first rape victim I had ever treated, and so I remember it clearly, especially because now, as an emergency room physician here, oceans away from those medical tents, I perform rape kits all the time. Back then, in Tiger territory, treating girls from the villages, I did not have rape kits. I did not know that there was an order, a procedure, to the cataloguing of a body that has suffered this most particular trauma; I did not know that there is a script of things that are proper to say and to do. This was what our mothers had warned us about: men and their desires, men and their wills, men and their bodies encroaching on ours. Some man had taken everything inside her house that was sacred; some man had taken everything inside her that she thought sacred.

She was wrong, of course; she had not lost her value. But we were not in a world that knew that. Even I, the medic, the half­doctor, did not know enough to say that. I was too young and stunned, unrolling gauze and tapping alcohol gently on to it to clean her face. Not yet a doctor, I already knew bones: I could appreciate this face, or what this face had been until very recently. I could see in the wreckage of its topography where its lines had fallen before: the high, shattered cheekbone, the formerly slender nose, the bloodied row of teeth, the small, red tongue, which she had bitten deeply. She had long eyes with very fine lashes, eyes that stared at me almost without blinking. She was unusually fair­skinned – a coveted marker of beauty, except in this time, when coveted markers of beauty made women targets. I felt suddenly grateful for my own dark face, mannish bearing and awkward, unfeminine height.

After giving his brief history and her name, the sentry left us. The tent was big enough for only twenty patients. Although some of the people I treated were civilians, most of my patients were fighters; they were hit by bullets, or perhaps shrapnel; both civilians and fighters were sometimes captured and tortured by the army. I fixed them up and generally sent them back out. Few of them stayed with me for any extended period. Now the tent was nearly empty. I took her to the far end, where I had her lie down on a sheet on the ground. I knelt beside her.

I am sorry there is not anything better, I said.

She did not answer, but I heard her moan quietly as she lowered herself down. I gave her some painkillers. A morphine injection. Mercifully, we had some left, and it was easy to find a vein. I cleaned her surface cuts and abrasions, but I did not bother to save and bag the evidence, as I would have done today. I left the blood under her fingernails; I untangled a long black hair from her clenched right fist and threw it away. It would not have done any good to keep it.

Then I lifted her knees so that her ankles were flat on the ground, and unwound the skirt, exposing her.

All right, I said, but this was just as much to reassure myself as her.

I had hoped that the morphine would help her go to sleep, to forget that I was retracing the path of violation, but she stared dry­eyed up at the ceiling of the tent as I examined her. The men had torn her; her raped body had ripped as though it had undergone a hellish labour. I wondered if I could stand to sew this most private wound together, and then, with a sudden rush of something that was not quite terror, I knew that I could. The knowledge was terrible, and to keep my grief for her – for us – to myself, I folded my lips together.

This is going to hurt you more, I said.

It doesn’t matter now, she said.

I offered her more morphine, but she only looked away. There was nothing to wait for. I lit the match to sterilize the first needle. I wished then, as I do now, that I could have held her hand, but I needed both of mine for this.