Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [90]
She knew little of the great world herself, less perhaps than he did. There was for her no life outside her home. Every evening she sat in her kitchen, then slept in the bed behind the curtain. She could not write to Roman in prison about what she felt for him, about her hunger for him, because he was unable to read. She wished she had taught him, the way she had been taught, so he could escape his solitude, but he had always returned from work exhausted. When darkness came, she washed herself at the barrel of rainwater by the barn, then walked with the lamp towards the house. She’d pick up a book, but as soon as she sat down with it she fell asleep in her chair. She never got used to reading in indoor light, although every evening she attempted this. It was already a pleasure to rest in a soft chair and hold a book in her hands. Sometime later, after the lamp burned down, she opened her eyes. Perhaps the smoke from the burned-out wick woke her. She stood up, gathering her senses into almost clarity, and went through the darkness to her bed.
War
Because of his partial vision Lucien Segura did not fight in the war. He volunteered instead to be part of a commission that studied disease and trauma along the battle zones near the Belgian border. He arrived at the front with treatises and reports he’d translated from German texts of new rehabilitation techniques, but he was ignored by the young overworked doctors. Around him was the chaos of troops being destroyed by mortar and starvation and, above all, fear. They needed something else, not someone to study them. While he continued to file reports, he began working in the hospital tents. Within a month he had become another person, one of the anonymous wave of soldiers and attendants, his face gaunt, the goatee spread into a rough beard, while the impatience and anger in the missives he continued sending to Paris meant that they were seldom read, just buried in files.
He caught the diphtheria in his second year. At first he had a mild fever, then difficulty swallowing. Two days later Lucien could barely talk, unable to make even the sound of a murmur, his palate paralyzed. The tissues of his neck were swelling and he was fighting for every breath. In the medical tent he could see others bleeding from their mouths and noses and guessed this was also a portrait of him. Lucien had been a passive and fateful man; now everything in him fought to overcome the exhausting pain, so that he could think clearly. He knew the disease’s first twelve days were the most unforgiving and dangerous. He knew too that there were other diseases prevalent in the camp and insisted on sleeping in the open, crawling outside to avoid the circling air of the wards. There was no solitude there, among those on the path to death, and he needed privacy to hold on to what strength he had. He swallowed only liquids that were certain to have been boiled, and refused offers of unknown water.
The military reported his likely fate in a letter to his wife and she arrived, barely recognizing him among others in the sanatorium at Épernay. She discovered, when he was able to speak, that she could not understand his thought processes, or his bitterness like a poison towards the political world. He demanded she leave him alone with his ‘companions,’ though in reality he was fully solitary, studying only himself to be aware of the shifts in his illness, in the desire to survive.
After twelve days, he and the others who were still alive were made to live alone in tents, made to wash themselves and prepare their own meals. They were still toxic. They still carried the ‘plague in the throat,’ the white membrane that might suffocate them. The Spanish called it garrotilla—1613 was ‘the year of the garrotilla.’ He felt he knew more about diphtheria than anyone else there, and he was