The woman gave him a worried look. Muttering something, she refused to take the money. But Tartar stew was what he wanted and he laid the bill down insistently, reached for a metal mug by the pot, and handed it to her to fill. There was a warning buzz from the vendors around her — for her or for him, he couldn’t tell. Since she continued to hesitate, he dipped the mug in the pot himself and slowly downed the thick liquid. Although he knew from the first sip that he was drinking an unusual brew, he went on draining it for its warmth. I needn’t worry, he told himself. I ate all kinds of swill in the army and was none the worse for it.
Peasants and stall holders had surrounded him, gawking as he emptied the mug. Some were scolding the woman and trying to overturn her pot. Yet she did not seem intimidated. Brandishing an iron ladle, she kept them at bay while laughing heartily and breaking into a little song. The human resources manager, regarding her more closely, decided that she suffered from Down’s syndrome.
Well, he thought, comfortingly, even if she fed me carrion, I’ll puke it up in the end. But the baby is a lost cause. I can’t play with it in front of all these anxious women. It’s time to move on.
Several women followed close behind him. Although he could feel their fear on the back of his neck, he made no sense of it. Quickening his pace, he hammered on the iron gate. The soldiers recognized him and let him in, shutting the gate behind him.
He swallowed it before we understood what he wanted. There was no way to warn him because he couldn’t speak our language. That’s why we followed him, to tell the soldiers he had to throw up. The problem is that they don’t open the gate any more unless you have a ticket. What an army! Our parents worked themselves to the bone digging a shelter for the imbeciles who ranthis country, and now we have to payto visit it!
What will happen to him now? He doesn’t know what he’s eaten or who made it. In the end they’ll accuse us of poisoning him and shut down the market. We were too kind to that madwoman, all because of her baby. No more! You’ve made a mockery of us long enough, you lunatic! Say goodbye to your pot and your fire and take your baby that doesn’t know its father and go sing to it by the lake. And watch out that some wolf or fox doesn’t eat it by mistake.
At first he thought the stew had a fishy saltiness. Then it was a cloying sweetness. Furtively, so as not to offend the guards, he spat on a rock. His spittle, though tasting like blood, was green.
I should have swallowed it more slowly, he scolded himself. Nevertheless, he had faith in his digestive system. When all the cooks in the army had failed to poison him, how could a market vendor succeed?
The old sergeant was still at his post outside the barracks, making tea on a kerosene burner. The human resources manager, grateful for the charging of his battery, nodded hello. Although he would have liked to wash the nauseating taste from his mouth with some hot tea, he thought it best to rejoin the sleeping travellers.
Either their sleep was dreamless or their dreams were very quiet. The manager put a finger to his lips to warn the consul not to disturb them. “Everything’s fine,” he whispered reassuringly, though the consul did not look in need of reassurance. Drawing a curtain on the window to keep out the morning light, he went to his corner, covered the bare feet of the boy with an unthinking movement, lay down on his mattress, bundled up in two blankets, and hoped for a dreamless sleep himself.
In fact, he had no dreams. He had only a terrible, stabbing pain, as if someone were hacking at his intestines. Three hours later he awoke, jumped to his feet, and doubled over. Fortunately — it was late and the daylight was bright — there was no one else there, because the needs of his body had overcome its inhibitions and he had fouled his pants and bedding. He was barely able to stagger to the bathroom. It was a dismal WC without a toilet seat or window, its only toilet paper strips of old newspapers, and once there he had an attack of chills. Filthy and shivering, he writhed on the cold concrete floor, not caring that the door was unlocked.
As though the woman he had fallen in love with in his dream had passed on her condition to him, he felt more dead than alive. Yet despite his agony, he could still laugh at himself. I’m obviously not a general, he thought, because even a squad leader would know enough to lock the door before deciding what to do about this mess. Still, I’m in a foreign country and will never meet anyone from it again, so what do I care? Let the journalist and the photographer see the state I’m in, too. Take a good look, you weasel. It’s the Eros of your Symposium, a thick-skinned, unwashed daimon linking the human to the divine, the temporal to the eternal …
He didn’t even try to reach the sink. It was as if getting to his feet would make him responsible for himself when all he wanted was to be a helpless baby whose mother would change his soiled clothes.
As an officer, he had seen enough cases of food poisoning in his troops to know that this one had only just begun. The blithely swallowed stew had not yet had its last word. He mustn’t leave the bathroom before he was sure he could control his bodily functions. Exhausted and in shock, he stripped off his pants and underpants and lay shaking and half-naked, waiting to see what his body would do next.
A long while passed before he heard the door handle rattle. Not knowing which was worse, being found by a stranger or by someone he knew, he looked up to see, in a patch of light framed by the doorway, the Tartar boy. The light eyes beneath the pilot’s cap observed him with a maturity beyond their years. Although he knew the young man had wiped all knowledge of Hebrew from his mind, he addressed him in it firmly to explain that, as bizarre as it seemed, he was looking at a case not of insanity but only of food poisoning, for which a doctor had to be summoned at once.
7
The boy did not, as might have been expected, run to the consul, who was enjoying a hearty breakfast in the hotel dining room. Rather, he went to get the old sergeant. A quick look at the half-naked emissary on the bathroom floor was all the sergeant needed. Leaving at once, he came back a few minutes later with three soldiers and a stretcher. They rolled the sick man onto it, where he lay like a wet, filthy rag; covered him with blankets; and carried him to a service elevator that slowly descended to the hospital deep in the ground.
The sergeant’s quick response, taken without consulting his commanding officer, was not just the consequence of his natural sympathy for the emissary, whose paratrooper’s boots bespoke a military past. The opportunity to perform an emergency manoeuvre in a base degraded by tourists appealed to him equally. True, the underground hospital was no longer what it had been. Less military activity meant fewer medical problems, and those who suffered from them nowadays preferred the civilian hospital in a nearby town. Why take one’s chances with a questionable army medic in the bowels of the earth?
Hence, the hospital’s burned-out light bulbs had not been replaced, its leaky taps continued to leak, and its central heating had been despaired of long ago. Yet its emergency lights still functioned, a legacy of the Cold War, and the sergeant was able to find his way around. Knowing that food poisoning needed no antidotes, only time to purge the system, he ordered his men to place a bed, equipped with two large chamber pots for sudden exigencies, near the toilet. Then he removed the blankets, took off the last of the emissary’s clothes, and cleaned him carefully with wet washcloths. The boy, the emissary rejoiced to see, did not shrink from lending a helping hand and even wiped his feet with a cloth. What an irony, he thought. We all said he would have to bathe at our first stop, and now he’s bathing me.