She looked at him quietly. Weighed his words, her fingertips resting lightly on the back of the chair. Was it the war? She looked at her boss on his throne, flanked by his statue of the goddess of wisdom. Anyone else would have burst out laughing at the eccentric old man, but she has learnt to take such caricatures in her stride. To tell the truth, she found it quite reassuring. It would have been harder if he’d been someone you had to take seriously. But is it the war that entices her? And if so, why?
No, she then decided. She chose this profession to be a healer; her life’s journey had led to those wounds that lie deepest and are slowest to heal, the wounds to the soul. And she is going to England because there are wards crowded with people whose souls have become caverns filled with flying shrapnel. “It is the people in the war that draw me,” she said.
Reymaker gazed at her and then riffled through some papers on his desk. “Oh, well, then,” he mumbled. She just needed to arrange a temporary replacement; he helped her to get a concession to travel and a post at one of Rivers’s hospitals.
Not at Rivers’s actual hospital, the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, but at the Seale-Hayne Hospital in Devon. “There’s a chap doing equally good work down there. Rivers seems to think he is on the right track, so that can mean only one thing. His name is Hurst.”
And here she sits, across from DoctorArthur Hurst. Major Hurst. A British soldier, in uniform. It is not a run-of-the mill situation. Certainly not for her. But this is exactly where her life choice, her career choice, was destined to lead her.
She could have spent her life running away from what she is, from what she had become in South Africa. But long ago she had already decided that there is only one way to survive, and that is in direct confrontation with the very thing that would continue to knock at her front door. But one’s not compelled to take such a sombre view, because, after all, her life was also saved there, in South Africa, and she’d simply decided to continue that sort of rescue work; the healing that she’d received at the hands of Tiisetso and Mamello in that cave is what she would promote. That’s how Rivers came into the picture. She would not give in to the wish to see someone suffer as she had suffered. The desire is still there at times. But that is not a foundation on which to build a life.
Hurst speaks again, and she listens with intense concentration. “But your interest in psychiatry, that is not necessarily an obvious choice?” he says.
That is not a surprise. She’s already had to answer that question a few times. In nursing college. Often. After that, Reymaker had asked … But long before that, she’d had to clarify it for herself. These are the facts she sits with: she was the daughter of a sharecropper, a child of the concentration camps. Well, perhaps not a child, but the fact remains that by any standards her education was defective. How did it come to be that someone with her background landed up in psychiatric nursing?
She has a few stock responses, but this time, before Hurst, she’s decided to evade the question entirely. “Yes, probably not,” she says, “but I came for professional reasons.” He looks down at his hand stretched out on the desk, and then again at her. She continues: “For a while, it must have been about ten years ago, women were actively recruited for psychiatric nursing in the Netherlands. Specifically, virtuous middle-class women.” She gives an ironic chuckle, a studied gesture. “This sort of nursing is premised on the reintegration of patients into the community. The first priority was to inculcate good civic values, and the Dutch authorities thought middle-class women were ideally suited to the task of bringing lost sheep back into the fold.”
“So that’s how you landed in your profession – by chance?”
He has not accepted her explanation at face value after all. “No,” she says, “not by chance.” He was not going to let her get away with it. “Luck was also on my side.” Briefly pausing, she continues: “There were people, though, who inflenced me, people who helped me make the decision. They also made it possible for me, in a practical way.”
“And now you are here. I suppose that was also not by chance?”
She senses that he is not satisfied with her vagueness. Careful, now.
“No, also not.” Again that smile. “Seems to me I am rather impressionable … It was your colleague, Dr Rivers. I’d heard of his work; he and my employer in the Netherlands are …” – are they friends? – “are in close contact and I wanted to, on behalf of our practice, gain some experience in his type of healing.”
He lightly nods his head: “And I assume in the Netherlands shellshock does not exist? I see. Yes, that makes sense. Or do you know what shellshock is? Have you seen it?”
Not in the Dutch practice, no. She remembers the woman in the Winburg camp who took to eating grass in the corrugated-iron pound where they sent those driven mad by grief to die; she thinks back to the time when she was bereft of all language and reason, proceeding in a cortège of women dressed in black on the road to her own damnation. Her answer is muted: “When I saw it,” she says, “the world did not yet have a name for it.”
He looks at her attentively before continuing: “Do you know what we are expected to do here? Officially. Do you?”
She does not answer; looks at him blankly, her thoughts still with the swishing of the black silk dresses, like wind rustling through the veld. Shellshock. Is that the name of the thing she has in mind?
“We are the guardians of the nation’s morale,” he says, and the way his lower lip drops the words makes her suspect a degree of bitterness. “The nation’s morale in a time of war. It largely comes down to ensuring that our soldiers are healthy enough to fight. Mentally sound. We need to confirm that these soldiers, our patients, are in the first instance genuinely ill and are not just malingering because they are too scared to continue fighting. Too scared to die. Our task therefore is to get them back into the trenches as quickly as possible.”
He looks at her blankly. She is now convinced of his irony. He had ridiculed his official task with great delicacy, or rather with expertly masked cynicism. She is dead certain of having drawn the right conclusion. She therefore risks saying: “I assume, Dr Hurst,” – mindful to strike a cautious note – “I assume that in this hospital the welfare of the patient is your first consideration.”
Again his mouth twists wryly, and she notices a faint flush on his cheeks. “We are going to try our best to heal them. And when they are well they can return to society.” He lifts his head, and she sees the eyes shining in their sockets as he then says: “And unfortunately our society presently finds itself in a state of war.”
She gets the gist of what he is saying. She does not have to answer him. For these men, war is currently the only mode of existence. Normal life is war. It is the only sanctuary. She wants to say what she had intended to say, something about aspects of Rivers’s work that she often thought about and more or less understood.
She hears herself saying something else, though: “I think part of the problem is that people think of themselves as being the war and nothing else. The irony is that you have to untangle them from the war in order for them to be ensnared again.”
“Or bolster them psychologically to the point where they maintain a distinction between themselves and the war.”
It’s as if his words are slowly moving towards her through thick mud; one by one, they reach her. “And so you are not your war?” She almost takes fright as the words line up before her. Inside her, etching into her. She has never expressed it that clearly to herself, even though it has been her life’s work. Dealing with catharsis, with closure, the winding-up of her war.
You are not your war.
“Exactly,”