A Wounded Land

By

Donator

philipp.donat@chello.at

A dog,

who dies

and who knows

that he dies

like a dog,

and who can say

he knows

that he dies

like a dog

...

is a human being.

( Erich Fried 1921-1988, translated, LC )

I have nailed this little poem between all the photos on my pin board, in it's German original by the way, hand copied by myself from the very first edition ever published. Which rests leather clad in my library, by the way.

…

Atop of a foolish eccentric I am probably a snotty show off. Ah, well…

The photos are displaying close ups of the faces of all the deep frozen carcasses that I've found in the plane in Tibet last month, and I put them up on the wall for the reason of reminding me. I didn't want to encircle one and explicitly write 'This could be YOU!' though, for fearing someone would get the impression of me having suicidal tendencies. So I decided on the subtlety of a poem instead.

Looking closely at my leg though, I'm coming to believe that I might indeed have suicidal tendencies.

The needle is clean and sharp.

...

Now which thread to choose?

There's turquoise, for my shirt, white for my underwear and black for the rest. This time it's a necessity oblivious to aesthetics, so I decide on black, though I know well black is the thickest and will look just brutally ugly. It'll be easier to pluck out once the job is done though, if you know what I mean.

Just like darning socks, but more fun...

... fun in the means of interesting of course.

Already being short on real disincentives I pour a good swig of fine liquor upon one of the wound cushions, a pathetic excuse for disinfecting you might say, and start rubbing it across my left thigh. As usual this results in a tugging, burning sensation of delicate indecency, the only similar feeling that comes to my mind might be anal intercourse without the use of lubricant. Anyway, I recommend it warmly if you're into masochism. Either one.

Leather belt crammed between my teeth I begin to sew.

First aid kits, I mean that type which you can find in every car, were created by people, who never ever had been gravely injured themselves before. There just is no other explanation why you cannot find a strong local anaesthetic, or at least a decent painkiller inside. Not to speak of antibiotics or all rounder antitoxins. Ha! I want to see one of those guys with a snakebite or something, and only one of their own med kits to treat themselves!

It hurts. Did I mention that it hurts? Yes, it indeed does.

My house own stock of medical equipment features an adrenaline substitute, which I absolutely do not need now, given that my hands are already trembling. Another few capsules of Phenobarbital are also waiting for being put to some use. A decent sleeping drug, and two of them taken with a hefty gulp of vodka make you feel rather drowsy and forgettable, but their pain killing effect is equal to that of camomile tee. Leaves me with the Russian method.

Hard to work when bleeding like a pig, though...

I am sitting on the corner of my bathtub, this way I can observe what I am doing in the big mirror on the opposite wall. While taking a deep breath I feel a shudder running over my entire body, and a swearword flashes through my mind just before my leg begins to cramp, and the fragile suture is destroyed. I haven't had the courage to pierce far enough from the freshly injured tissue and deep through the muscle, now I am rewarded with the strong black thread ripping away even more of my already mangled skin.

Barely able to determine if my leg or my teeth hurt more I spit out the belt and yell my pain and anger down the corridor. Down in the kitchen I can hear the din of Winston dropping the tea I'd told him to bring me upstairs. Could be my scream has frightened him a little, I wonder, grinning to myself.

…Today we'll hold a small lection about swearing. Swearing isn't a particularly bad thing per se, as long as you follow a number of certain rules. Firstly, avoid it when possible, especially if the matter you're tempted to swear about is irrelevant. This way people are less likely to regard you for a foul mouthed idiot, which would inevitably happen if you curse at everything that crosses your path. Secondly, don't try to make up any new curses. People are not likely to understand them, or worse, could even start making fun of you despite you were trying to look menacing. And third, if you really have to swear one day, do it whole-heartedly. There's no point in keeping your voice down when you feel the whole world is coming down and plotting against you at the same time.

Be a good girl. Clean leg. Take needle. Bite into belt. Try again.

After the painful experience I was just put through by my own incompetence, the only way to continue for me is to close my eyes and force myself every time before I do a stitch. Number one on the not-to-do list for the handyman plastic surgeon by the way. Hey, don't you remind ME of scars, especially not my own ones. I gave up on wearing sleeveless shirts on formal occasions years ago, but then, I also gave up on most formal occasions, years ago...

At least I've managed to stop that bleeding by now, which was about time, given that my bath is swimming red and half of my bedroom's carpet soaked with my body fluids. So I've dropped from my own training course, so what? That just happens when you have your thoughts elsewhere during a cartwheel / summersault combo in seven metres height. At least I get some experience in self-preservation that way. A pretty lame excuse, I know that myself, thank you, tomorrow I'm going to see a doctor.

After I'd finished with caring for my injury and calmed my nerves with a cup of Darjeeling I'm taking a shower. The pleasant sensation of the warm water makes me think of Leo, but that man is probably right now getting himself shot by the Taliban. Not even I have a martyrdom complex comparable to the one of this war correspondent. I cannot really do more for him than tell him to be careful.

I tell Winston to go down to the cellar for a bottle of the oldest, heaviest Hungarian Tokajer my collection of rare wines features, because the last thing I need when I want to climb on the roof and let the warm summer night air dry my hair is an unobscured mind that tells me how dumb howling at the moon really is. Lying on my back, the roof bricks still warm from the evening sun and feeling the air caress my body and the wine doing his part of accelerating my pulse and amplifying the general feeling of satisfaction I enjoy the most basic of good feelings. My continued existence.

I dream of having a baby. Don't you mind it, that just happens roughly once in a month.

What has caused me in the end to ring up director Parker from CNN radio in the middle of the night and ask him if he knew something about Leo I don't know. I only know that I felt all cold over a sudden when he told me that Leo hadn't reported back for two days, but that it was perfectly normal and that I should go back to sleep and not the fuck dare to phone him again before eight in the morning. Nevertheless, the chilly feeling of loss just wouldn't wear of.

I come to think that I had grown to like his company, that he could have let me rot in that camp in southwest China and that he is probably ten times more courageous than myself, risking his neck having less then half of my abilities.

Do you remember the small essay about idiotism I wrote? Leo belongs to one of the rarest of all subclasses, the Idealists. Which makes it even more likely for him to get himself into serious trouble down in the Khyber Pass region. Idealists succumb to the uncommon prospect of them having the power to alter the world to the better. Complete rubbish. Most of them die painful deaths. I usually despise them. But there are a few exceptions to the rule, who for some mind-boggling reason indeed have managed to leave an impression on the world. Think of the Red Cross. Or Greenpeace. Ok, at least they're trying.

I dread the thought of my oestrogens growing me a guilty conscience, so I strain my mind for a more rewarding reason than a rescue to pay Afghanistan a visit during a civil war, and find legion. An opportunity to visit the Buddhas, as long as there are some still standing. Five thousand year old Bactrian pottery being bombed together with the museums. Some of the most ancient Islamic texts burning in the crossfire. Stock up of my private armoury on one of the local weapon markets. You go and pick one. A shopping tour with the crowbar it would be, as usual.

Next day I've booked a flight to Karachi, Pakistan. Kandahar is on fire. Kabul is also off limits, self speaking, and I even go one step further and book a flight that stops-over in Moscow for not accidentally passing through dangerous airspace. Being shot down is the very last I ever want to experience. The flight turned out to be rather uneventful, as expected, the only downside being a strenuous pain in my injured leg every time the cabin depressurises.

I don't want to be nitpicking or come across as fastidious, but do you know the kind of material the cakes are made of, which are always served as desserts on intercontinental flights? I mean this ultra dried, muffin like thingus that dissolves to almost invisible dust once you glare at it for more than five seconds. Probably designed by the same person that invented the conventional med kit…

Next step, getting myself a decent but at the same time not too conspicuous cross country vehicle, proved a little tricky, but nothing that couldn't be solved with a few drinks and money to the right people. The first serious obstacle would be crossing the border without the proper documents. Not because the Afghans wouldn't let me in, no, they had better to do than to guard their borders, no sane person was trying to come in anyway, but the Pakistani not letting me out. They had a medium sized army stationed at their western boarder to keep the 1.5 million refugees at bay. And that brought me to an idea.

Getting myself a fake id as an emergency surgeon working for the red cross cost me nothing but a phone call, and even if someone would indeed require my services, I had a whole lot of profound experience, unorthodox maybe, but tested in all possible environments.

I had the chance to prove it all too soon, the border was closed when I reached it, and I had to spend the next two days stitching people together in the makeshift field hospital in one of the many refugee camps while waiting for a chance to go on. Leo hadn't called back yet, Parker let me know. I felt a little disturbed. Even more as that evening a man was carried in, who had stepped on a landmine, and now had little left of his legs, and even that little was likely to kill him now, because it was swollen red and covered with pus from the gangrene. I had to assist when it was taken off, if I didn't want to blow my cover yet. The man died before it was over, and I puked behind the tent when nobody was looking, but no one ever blamed me. It was war. People died. They were thankful for every helping hand. That I was an impostor wouldn't probably have bothered any of my patients if they'd known.

In the morning, after a night that I am not willing to describe, I finally left the camp. The border had been reopened for charity purveyances, and I drove as fast as I could, my hands still sticky from the mucky water the people considered drinkable around here, and a Westerner like me was unlikely to survive without cooking it for two hours.

I had totally forgotten about any cultural or financial reasons I had come for, there was sand, sand, sand, dirt, sand, more dirt, more sand, rocks, dust, grey dust, brown dust, red dust, dust in gusts, dust in storms, and not a hint of water or vegetation. The land even lacked the majestic impression the Sahara would probably leave on you. A wasteland. When I finally found a dark puddle beside the road (HA! 'Road', think of it…) it turned out to be oil. I felt mocked. I found Afghanistan to be a more life threatening environment than even the Antarctic, because there, the most dangerous things where the penguins. Here you had children with machineguns running the streets once again. I'd seen it so many times, I almost got used to it by now.

With a flaming red cross painted to my door I was most likely to be stopped, questioned, robbed, raped and killed (the sequence is irrelevant, by the way) sooner or later, so on first occasion I hired the most harmless goat herders you've ever seen to sit on the loading space of my car and menacingly display the bunch of AK's I'd brought along as decoration whenever we met somebody. It worked wonders. As I had hidden my long hair under a turban and my face was hardly visible under all the dirt anyway, I was totally ignored and we blended into the crowd perfectly. If you could call five people per square-mile a crowd.

I was intended to shorten my abidance in this land to a minimum, I hardly slept, and we soon reached the mountain village where Leo had last made contact. The smoking ruin I found put a damper on my optimism to find him though. Also my fear of landmines was justified I soon found out, and me and my personal 'guards' were damn lucky it was only a small anti personal charge that did little to no damage to the extra steel plate I had demanded to be welded to the bottom of the car. While I was sweating like a pig, trying to hold the petulant vehicle on it's four wheels, the others where hardly noticing it, as if that was happening to them every day. It probably was, on second thought.

Do you have any idea how it feels if you've to change the tire as the only woman in a car together with six men? I was willing to add 'goat herders' to my list of idiotism, only to find it already mentioned…

We headed north. War was north meant Leo was north, easy computation.

What really surprised me was that we indeed found him. Alive and breathing, even on his own feet I've to add with wholehearted admiration. Frankly, I had expected him to be a corpse meanwhile, because he was walking the road north from where we had found his car earlier that day, perforated with MG fire and still burning. It took a lot of insanity to walk the road with all those mines buried everywhere I wondered. After he'd spent about five minutes with his face wordlessly buried in my arms, he showed me why he had taken the risk. He was carrying a child in his backpack. A little girl, hardly two years of age. Its face was badly scratched, it was heavily undernourished and probably hadn't had a drink in a few days, but for all other reasons healthy.

"What is this supposed to be?!" I yell at Leo, too disturbed to notice how dumb this question actually was, trying my best at finding something to feed the little bugger at the same time. The girl soon starts to cough up the water I gave her to drink, simply because she is drinking as avidly as someone is supposed to, this close to dying of thirst.

Leo is wise enough not to answer me in the first place. Only after I've managed to stop the heart rending whining the girl has uttered from time to time, by protectively covering her head and putting my little finger in her mouth for her to suck on it, he gradually begins to speak. Of him driving through a small village, the same ruin where we had found his car…. his voice is hoarse and solemn.

About the Pashtun soldiers attacking. The war rapidly moving south towards Kabul. The Northern Alliance being equipped with modern American weapons. How the houses had been disrupted by grenade fire. I've to admit, I am only half listening. A few of the locals that hadn't yet fled building up a doomed resistance. Him being caught in the middle, trying to document the ongoing. His car taking hits from both sides and dissolving under the assault. The small family, a mother and two children, attempting to run from the battlefield. How he has never seen a human being die so close in front of him. Them being ripped to shreds by a shrapnel that must have been fired by a battle tank. The small bundle the woman had carried virtually rolling into his arms… the cries… the gunfire… the burning…

I have stopped listening, and he shuts up, his eyes, like my own, fixed on the little kid that I am gently rocking now. I sigh relieved, it looks like the little girl has finally fallen asleep in my arms.

"What the fuck are we going to do with her now?" I hiss, afraid that I might wake her. That Leo was injured, even bleeding right now I hadn't noticed until then. That he was going to take her back to Europe with him, he tells me. What I had thought? If I would leave her behind?

In my mind I slap myself around for seriously wasting a moment on considering this option, she has cuddled up to my bosom and is sobbing silently in her sleep. I've never been good with children, never have, never will, but right now I am breaking into a sweat, and it's not the burning heat around me that's causing it. I've no idea myself. Leo suggests that we hurry to get away. Even the hired clowns that are still sitting on the car, hardly ever speaking to me, over a sudden begin to throw a torrent of words at me that sounds thoroughly frightened. The reason behind it is simple: when I turn round I do it only to see the biggest parade of military hardware I believe ever existed, approaching from the horizon.

I regard myself a good driver. Even more when I am motivated. That day I kicked down the accelerator and didn't take my foot off it until we ran out of fuel, which was much to my disdain, hardly twenty minutes later. It was then we finally discovered that less than one half of the canisters I had taken with me from the camp had really been filled with petrol, the other contained just water. The canisters were identical though. That probably explained why the water had always tasted like petrol there.

It couldn't be overseen though that there was still an army heading in our direction. Some of the men threw questions at me (or curses? or something… else?) while the others where downright terrified. Running out of time I issued everyone a clip for his AK, a bottle of water, five hundred new US dollars and a slap on the back, expecting them to run off in all directions. Five of them actually did exactly that, only Rhachif (or however that name is pronounced) stayed. He was probably the only one who had some brain in his head, as he gestured me that he was willing to follow us. Must have figured that we would be really thankful, maybe even able to bring him out of the country, if we survived this.

As if the goddess of bad luck was returning to apologize we found ourselves at the outskirts of a small city called Baru, if I read it right, barely a few hundred metres away from the first house, which was, like probably every house in Afghanistan right now, a ruin and smoking from being bombed. A place to hide for the moment.

I had guessed wrong though, bad luck hadn't come back to apologize, but to kick us once again. The small attacking force, that had cost Leo his Jeep a couple of hours ago, had only been a scout unit and was now making camp right in the centre of this town. I told Leo to take the girl and wait in a dark corner while I was going to check the surroundings, and in a jiffy I had fought my way through the rubble up to the first floor and spied around. It seemed that the guys with the turbans were pulling up a commando point here, I counted two lorries that functioned as troop transporters, as well as two smaller vehicles with heavy MGs mounted to their roofs. All in all about thirty-five soldiers. Then I watched one of our former comrades run directly into their arms. He was pretty dead, pretty fast. And if we didn't pull out in less then half an hour, I figured, we would most likely share his kismet.

Every once in a while I attended lectures of my fellow professors at the university, either for a snore or a good laugh, on the better days I could at least polish my Latin. I never gave up hope to stumble about something interesting though, and I remember now fragments of one of the more thought out attempts at explaining religious wars: If you observe the historical development of all the world religions, you soon spot a pattern of historical events that repeats itself in every one of them. It seems as if they were all programmed to absolve a certain sequence of phases in chronological order. The differences between them, that finally result in conflict, origin from the fact that said religions were often founded many centuries apart, and therefore stuck in different phases of development when they made contact with each other. The Islam was founded roughly 620 anno Domini, like Christianity it suffered from suppression in its beginnings, but quickly absorbed it's surroundings. It passed a phase of expansion, inner struggle, fragmentation, survival of the most powerful groups, another expansion, and right now, fanatism. If I do the equation right, we are just at the doorstep from the end of the crusades to the beginning of the witch-hunts. A disturbing prospect, to say the least.

I climbed back down to share my findings. Neither Leo nor Rhachif were objecting when I told them I was going to hijack a lorry, for it had a bigger petrol tank and probably water and extra gas on board. Leo had a pistol, but never shot with it, so I took it from him. I was going to ask Rhachif if he had ever handled a gun before, but then remembered the kids playing with AKs in the streets. Firefights are not akin to me, but there's a big difference between settling a dispute with a gun in hand, and a surprise attack on a commando unit. The little girl was looking at me with big, black and very sad eyes, the only thing visible, as Leo's hand was lightly covering the rest of her face to drown the noise if she was going to scream for some reason. I don't know what it was that had triggered my instincts, but I was willing to turn the city place into a graveyard, rather than having to watch this child die before me.

"Nothing to worry about," I say and stub her nose playfully.

As Rhachif was speaking a language that was as alien to me as the guidebook to a Korean video recorder, I tried to explain mostly with hands, feet and little sticks to sketch into the sand. We had a small advantage, as the unit had dissolved to scout and secure the outskirts of the city. Fortunately we had appeared behind them, they were not suspecting an attack from this direction with the vast backup coming down south right in their tracks. Afghan warfare was not anyhow different from any other, left behind were only the four drivers, two men on the machineguns, and a commander operating the radio. All except the commander sitting in a circle eating.

I had ordered Rhachif to sneak around the house and be ready to jump into the lorry after he'd gestured that he was capable of shorting out a car. I needed Leo to take care of the girl meanwhile, so I sent him to outflank the small group and throw a stone as a distraction manoeuvre. What I was going to do, he asked. "I am going to take care of the rest," I answered, sticking the pistol into my belt and arming myself with two knives. If only one shot was fired, we were busted. He nodded, kissed me and vanished. Under normal circumstances I would have martered my brain to think up a more pacifistic solution, but I was quickly running out of time.

After I'd watched them rushing off, I started my approach over the rooftops. That was a more than tricky business, most of the houses actually didn't have an intact roof any more, and some of the bricks were heated to almost dangerous temperatures from the fires smouldering below. I finally reached the edge of the house right above the still unnoticing group of soldiers, I saw Rhachif ducked into a dark corner close to one of the lorries, Leo lying flat on his belly in a ditch across the street, staring at me, all was ready, and so I nodded.

How to slit five throats in under two seconds is a task you can hardly train for anywhere. I can say I managed quite good if you consider the circumstances, but if Leo hadn't whacked the last one over the head with a brick I would possibly haven't been able to tell somebody about it. Rhachif had indeed gotten the lorry running by the time I had cut the tires of the other three cars open, and I did a running jump to the loading space to save us time. Leaving cries and shots behind us, we hit open road.

…

Leo became feverish during our journey east, and even dropped comatose before we reached the border to Pakistan. It's a pity he wasn't awake any more when out of curiosity I opened one of the crates that were loaded on our lorry. What I had mistaken for a scout unit had truly been a forward edge commando, ordered to round up valuables in this region, primarily of historical nature. They had collected and boxed a small fortune for me.

I've bought Rhachif a small grocery store in London and visa for his family, the leftover money might even last for his grandchildren to go to college. No need to be greedy, given that I robbed his country. In exchange he agreed to continue pretending that the little girl, who we had begun to call Nora on the way back, was his own daughter. That made all much easier.

Right now I am lying in the grass playing with her…

Maybe someday I'll even see her laugh.