17 July 2013
“In his innocence, he never knew that what he was was: an old kind man in his burning pride.” (Dylan Thomas, Notes)
Since my grandfather is too kind, proud or indifferent to complain about the negligence of the hospital that he’s been brought to, after collapsing with weakness in his house, I’ll be angry for him in the only passive-aggressive way I know: I’ll write about what’s going on here. It’s been 13 hours and 41 minutes since the ambulance brought him into the emergency ward. I know this because there’s a big LCD screen, like in an airport, with each person identified by their initials and age, the time they’ve been wasting precious hospital space, and their status: flashing red is bad, other colours mean other things. I check, and Saba is the oldest person there. “At 97, he’s seen both world wars and founded the state of Israel,” I wanted to say to the bored assistant who clamped something onto his (Saba’s) finger and stuffed an oxygen tube into his nostrils, without speaking to Saba or even checking if he was awake or not. But I didn’t.
There’s a hectic calm in the emergency ward at night, or a calming chaos, with the life-monitors beeping and buzzing off-time next to each sleeping patient, forming complex rhythms and echoes, a symphony of human weakness. Each new patient is shown to a bed and waits nervously to be seen to, and with the passing hours the pain turns to nervousness, nervousness to frustration, and then to anger, and then back to pain. Nurses walk through the ward like green messiahs, patients and their families stretch out their hands, looking for attention; occasionally the nurse, in her merciful grace, will stroke a drip-infusion or scribble illegibly on a scrap of paper. Families here are super-irritable, but usually manage to hold it in, sit on their chairs and pretend to be stoic and empathetic. There’s lots of politics around chairs: after losing my original chair early on to a joined Arab-Haredi putsch, I embarked on a daring raid behind a closed curtain and managed to take a top-level (tall, blue imitation-leather) chair from a lonely, sleeping patient. It didn’t make it any easier to sleep on the chair at night – after much research, there is no comfortable sitting-sleeping position. Bored, I put the oxygen-thing in my nostrils for an hour-or-so, couldn’t decide what it made me feel apart from silly.
The hospital is the most democratic place there is, or maybe demacratic, everyone is equally helpless, all treated with the same indifference by tired nurses and trainee doctors, regardless of sex, age or religion. It’s now 4am. A green messiah just flittered by, I reverently asked her what was happening with Saba, she wordlessly peeled a sticker off his file, stuck it on her arm and floated away. Half-awake, I watch other people in the enormous room. A father holds his sleeping daughter’s hand, shivering in the air-conditioned room and muttering verses from the Quran. Three women sway and read Psalms manically. Religious men eat their dinners guiltily – it’s the fast of Tisha Be’Av tonight. A tall Haredi man with a white beard down to his chest swoops in, holding a screaming child with a bloody finger. “The finger is in a plastic bag!” he declares in a booming voice, as if he was the ultimate authority, as if he was speaking the Ultimate Truth, as if the finger being in the plastic bag was the kabbalistic secret meaning of all suffering in the world. A Zen Koan: The finger is in the bag. He is escorted down the hall by wide-eyed medical students to where, presumably, they learn the mysteries of the plastic bag, raza desakita.
Saba is half-asleep, the oxygen tube has fallen onto his chest and I leave it there. Earlier, he told me that he’s been in hospitals in four countries. That he’d got shrapnel blown into his face fighting the Italians in Abyssinia, that he’d ridden on a donkey to a field-hospital in Khartoum, where they operated on him, and sent him back to be captured by the Italians and taken to a prisoner-of-war camp. “It was a very good hospital there,” he reminisced, “very modern. The doctors came quickly, I didn’t have to wait.” Saba’s still clinging on to life, but his grip is loosening. We’ve been here now for 14 hours and 22 minutes, and his initials are green on the LCD flight-departures screen. The nurse, in a fit of humanity, wrote on his medical report: lucid and charming man. He is, but his body is failing him. Everything is breaking down, skin hanging loosely on brittle bones, crusty toenails on petrified flesh. “Don’t grow old,” he tells me, “It’s terrible. Don’t grow old.” And we both try not to think about that any more.
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