In addition to his salves and his medical talent, the short-haired man made two contributions that altered Lorimer’s understanding of surgical procedures and greatly influenced Håkan’s future. When the naturalist was about to perform his first operation, the short-haired man grabbed his hand before the scalpel broke the skin. Gently, he led Lorimer to a pot of water boiling over a fire. In it were the man’s own instruments. Through signs, he asked Lorimer to submerge his scalpel in the boiling water. Lorimer was confused but in the end did as he was told. The short-haired man hummed a melody while the instruments boiled away. After a while, he took them out with a pair of wooden tongs, making sure they never touched the parts that would be in contact with the patient. The second thing he did was wash his hands. For this, he used a strong alcoholic beverage he had salvaged from the raid. In some cases, he used the same liquid to clean the wounds. Before each operation, these two procedures—instrument boiling and hand washing—were repeated. In time, an amazed Lorimer had to conclude that the incredibly low number of infections must have been related to the man’s rituals.
“Our learned scholars in our marbled academies have failed to understand what this wise man has gathered from his observation of nature—that the putrefaction that flowers in a wound and the diseases that bloom in an open injury can be nipped in the bud. The very seed of these maladies can be boiled and wiped away before it takes root in the flesh.”
Håkan’s memory of what followed that first operation was obscured by thick smudges of blood, but behind the crimson-black swirls, his recollections had the surgical precision of a picture painted with a single-hair brush. Until sunset, they extracted pellets buried in the deepest fibers of the flesh, fitted the serrated edges of broken bones into one another, reset viscera and stitched abdomens shut, cauterized wounds with white-hot irons, sawed off arms and feet, and sewed flaps of skin around muscle and fat and bone into rounded stumps. As he became absorbed by the work, Håkan discovered a form of impassive care completely new to him. His detachment, he felt, was the only proper approach to tending to the wounded. Anything else, beginning with compassion and commiseration, could only degrade the sufferers’ pain by likening it to a merely imaginary agony. And he had learned that pity was insatiable—a false virtue that always craved more suffering to show how limitless and magnificent it could be. This sense of responsibility exposed a fundamental disagreement with Lorimer’s doctrines. The naturalist claimed that all life was the same and, ultimately, one. We come from other bodies and are destined to become other bodies. In a universe made of universes, he would often say, rank becomes meaningless. But Håkan now sensed the sanctity of the human body and considered every glimpse underneath the skin a profanation. These were not prairie hens.
When it got too dark to continue operating and ministering to the wounded, Lorimer walked up to one of the burros with his rifle, composedly took aim at its head, and shot it dead. Two men with minor injuries helped him butcher the animal. The weak were given warm blood to drink. The healthier ones chose their own cuts—once the tongue, liver, and pancreas had been carved out and eaten, they broke the thighbones and sucked out the marrow. After grilling some ribs and salting the remaining edible pieces, Lorimer boiled the burro’s head and later fed the broth to the feeblest. Two women baked a serpentine kind of bread. They rolled a long cylinder of dough and then twisted it in a spiral around a stick, which was placed at an angle on an X made of two other sticks over some embers. The dough spiral was turned at regular intervals, and finally the stick was removed from the center. The coiled bread was passed around, and each person broke off a ring of the spiral, charred on the outside and doughy on the inside.
That night, once their sedated patients had drifted away, the short-haired man and Lorimer shared a calumet. Compelled by the naturalist, who did not want to offend their host, Håkan also took a few puffs. Raspberries, urine, and wet down. He coughed discreetly through his nose and felt his stomach squeeze up against his uvula.
Lorimer wanted to know if the attackers had been white men. He tried to communicate through pantomime and by drawing scenes with coal. The short-haired man, concentrated on rearranging the contents of the pipe bowl, barely paid attention. Lorimer tried to stage a reenactment using Håkan and the impassive old man as actors. After a series of increasingly intense and abstract attempts, the short-haired man got up, put his fingertips on Lorimer’s cheek, and said, “Wooste.” Then he walked over to Håkan and, with a gesture that encompassed the Swede’s whole body, repeated that same word—“Wooste.” He pointed at both of them and said, one more time, “Wooste.” Finally, he took Lorimer’s arm, held it like a rifle, pointed it at the wounded lying in shadows, and fired. “Wooste.”
As the days went by, the few men and women who had sustained minor injuries started cleaning up and rebuilding the camp. With the help of bone needles and catgut, they turned rags into quilts and quilts into tents. The children were also hard at work at their own camp, a smaller reproduction of the real one, made of leather scraps and fabric shreds. Perhaps because the miniature emphasized the vastness of the surroundings, it seemed denser, heavier with actuality than the real thing. Several times a day, the children asked Håkan to walk around the toy tents, and everyone, including the adults, was endlessly amused to see the massive man further amplified as he strolled through the scale models.
Eventually, it became clear that about a third of the wounded would die. Their lacerations were iridescent with gangrene, and their brains had been utterly consumed by infection and fever. The short-haired man readied them for their departure by meticulously washing them, brushing their hair, and anointing them with lilac-scented oil. Whenever their wounds allowed for it, he dressed and bedecked them with the few valuables their plunderers had dismissed—painted pebbles, feathers, and carved bones (that these spoils had been left behind confirmed that the pillagers had been white men—wooste). Those strong enough to stand on their feet prayed for the dying in shifts. In an almost inaudible hum, they sang what sounded like a lullaby. It was a remarkable song, not only for its great beauty (its softness had to do with touch—a tingling air—more than with hearing) but mainly because of its length and composition. It had no refrain. No part of the melody (or, as far as Håkan could tell, the lyrics) was ever repeated. It flowed forward in an ever-changing rivulet. And they sang it all day in groups of three or four, in perfect unison, never missing a note, a beat, or a word. When one shift concluded, another group would take over without the slightest interruption or transition. Each and every time, regardless of the group, they sang with astonishing precision without any visible signal to mark the changes, as if their mouths were governed by a single mind (Håkan thought of flocks or schools where hundreds of birds or fish abruptly change direction, eddying to and fro at the exact same time without any forewarning). If the song was circular, the curve was long and subtle enough to make repetitions impossible to perceive. Whether it was a never-ending song or a melody made up by immeasurably long choruses, Håkan could barely conceive how such a feat of memory could be possible. It occurred to him that the singers made the song up as they went along and that they shared some sort of code—for instance, a certain sound of a certain length could only be followed by one specific note of a specific duration (a similar procedure would apply to words), so that the melody and the poem were entirely condensed in the kernel of the first note and word. But this system could hardly account for the richness and complexity of the lullaby, and if it did, the set of rules would be as hard to memorize as an endless song.