V
The front lines are far away now, and the only wounded I see each day are the residents of the convalescent hospital that I have been sent to. It is a long, long way from the war. My sheets are clean and crisp. The water I drink cold and clear, far from the brackish muck that had been passing for liquid back at the Forces hospital. Hot, fresh food – a soft bed.
A rotating crew of male and female nurses takes blood, stool and urine samples. Once a week I fill little plastic containers and hand them to a mirthless nurse with a smile. We are given a battery of written tests. Every day for about two weeks, sitting in a windowless room with a dozen other men, I scroll endlessly down a questionnaire, answering hundreds of inane questions.
I’ve struck up a friendship of sorts with a snarly, acerbic man called Shadrach. He mutters his suspicions after every test in a thick eastern European accent. He shamelessly flirts with all the nurses, but like the rest of us, he can’t get so much as a smile out of any of them. He’s older than me by at least twenty years and seems to suspect everything and everyone around him. I laugh and tell him that his grandparents spent too many years behind the Iron Curtain for him to ever be truly content with authority. He laughs and tells me that it’s the funniest joke he’s heard since his arrival.
One afternoon we’re sitting outside, soaking up a late summer sun, listening to the awful piped in music floating out from the rec room.
“Do you have someone waiting for you back home,” I ask.
Shadrach snorts. “Waiting for me? Yes. Waiting to annoy the living shit out of me until I die.”
I laugh. It’s a typical Shadrach reply.
“You have some young love at home, yes?” he asks. “Some beautiful woman who wants to make a life with you, maybe a baby?” He takes a long drag on a cigarette, smuggled in by a sympathetic orderly. “You haven’t plumbed the depths of true misery, my friend, “unless you’ve been married to the same woman for forty or more years.”
I laugh, but at the same time I’m sorry for him. My own answer surprises me: “Sometimes I think that the best parts of me only come out when she’s around.”
He looks at me, and I’m waiting for an acerbic jab, but he puts his hand on my shoulder, and says nothing. My thoughts drift to Aisling again. I want so badly to see her, to be with her in a room, making a meal or talking about nothing. I wish desperately for those future days when I can re-experience her. The ideal that I’m holding in my head has become too routine and uninteresting. I want to hear her make a strange noise, or say something off color – I want the real Aisling, not my fading memory of her.