Moving Parts

The elevator, as could have been predicted with even the faintest idea of the way of things, will not stop at the first floor. It will transpire that the first floor was never in the running as a scene of the action; the elevator descends lower and lower, moving ever more rapidly, till it comes to a stop with a sudden jolt. It is only now that the door will open. It isn’t the only elevator in the large lobby where the narrator has found himself. Steel doors slide open and shut; now here, now there, small red lights flash over them. The tiled floor is strewn with handfuls of loose straw; sheaves of straw lie about, and straw mattresses block hallways that lead in every direction, echoing with moans and permeated with the smell of disinfectant. Let’s say that the exhausted doctor, the only one in the entire field hospital, in civilian life was the youngest assistant of the senior registrar in a university hospital; he had hoped to specialize in, for instance, gynecology. Instead of this he is battling gangrene with the aid of a surgical saw, assisted by a perpetually sleep-deprived orderly whose suspenders dangle beneath an ill-fitting white coat. The orderly is more vigorous all the same; he handles all the paperwork himself. What can they talk about, looking hard at one another through reddened eyes? Between them lies a stack of forms completed in the careful handwriting of a postal clerk only recently forced to give up his first ever appointment. The doctor’s gold-rimmed glasses flash. He is indignant. This patient isn’t dead yet, he remarks, thumbing through the forms; nor this other one, nor that one. Later there’ll be no time for paperwork; in this matter the orderly is undeniably right. With a vulgar curse, the doctor signs death certificates in advance. Formalities are easy. Nothing matters to those lying on the mattresses, gasping for breath; they no longer have any other desires. Their massed breathing is interspersed with whistles and hisses, then turns into groans, the bubbling of loose coughs, sobs, and hoarse rattles, interrupted all of a sudden by snorts that sound like giggles. The less seriously wounded slurp soup from tin bowls. On these lower floors of the hotel the body seizes the moment, greedy and certain of nothing. Personnel and freight elevators go up and down, bringing ever more consignments of wounded. Buckets are filled with bloody dressings fashioned from bed linen, some with shreds of lace still attached to them — improvised bandages that in most cases were of little avail. Over the refuse there is a buzzing — flies have gathered here from all the floors. Those that were looking for an open window and those that kept circling beneath lamps. They are always drawn to places where life is harder. At the end of their journey hangs flypaper. They squirm about on it in vain. They do not realize that the long series of rooms from which there was no good way out ends precisely here.