The Back of the North Wind by Nicolas Freeling

Author:Nicolas Freeling
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

—English of course. One arrived at the field attended by thirty servants all carrying crates of champagne: one then went into battle in full-dress uniform, armed with an umbrella.

He had to be ‘prepped’ for the operating-room: not very nice. He decided to have nothing further to do with this miserable figure being bundled about, but the scenes he found himself imagining, of a totally new life, afterwards, were not reassuring. Hard grains of cop-intelligence kept working grittily through the swathed layers of fantasy. The Vera whose lower half had been paralysed, whom he’d lifted and wheeled about and helped wash and dress, a year and more, would know how to deal with him. She’d be exceedingly down to earth about a man with one arm. A banal affair after all and always had been. One learned to do things with one’s teeth, with one’s toes like a fisherman or an Indian tailor: hell, he’d even seen (admitted only on television) an African blacksmith working with his toes.

The anaesthetist appeared, rather a nice woman smelling delicious, as a change from ghouls drowning one in ether-soaked sheets.

“I want my umbrella,” he mumbled slipping away from all this.

“‘L’escalier de Jade est tout scintillant de rosée’,” she said sliding in her needle. “‘Lentement, par cette longue nuit, la souveraine le remonte; laissant la gaze de ses bas et la traine de son vêtement royal, se mouiller, aux gouttes brillantes’”…

“Li T’ai Po,” she told him when she saw him next: he had remembered to ask.

A lot of sleeping; sixteen hours at one stretch.

Quite normal, said the surgeon when he came to look. You had, you see, several kinds of bash one on top of another and your whole nervous system has to recuperate: go on sleeping.

It was comfortable enough. Water beds, electric beds, and a teddybear-for-my-girl. Nice things to eat, pots of foie gras and so on, Brought by people like Orthez. Dotty intervals. ‘Nuvoletta in her lightdress, spun of sixteen shimmers, was looking down on them, leaning over the banistars …’

“James Joyce,” said Vera. “I know sleep incantations too.” They said you could feel the arm even when it wasn’t there.

“Is there any arm there?”

“Of course there is,” said the surgeon “and don’t be so bloody wet. Not denying of course a lot of fancypants in along with it. I’ll lay it out for you when I’ve time. Roughly what would go into a modern tennis racket—ask Rossignol. What did you expect—Paddy Doyle’s pig? The important thing is to move it. Today’s the day, so throw the ball up and serve.”

“Hurts.”

“Course it hurts; what’s left of you has to get used to all that. Excellent sign that it hurts: if it didn’t I’d start worrying.”

“Stretch it,” said the physiotherapist, after an interval of stupid nurses insisting that he play with stupid toys; rubik cubes or Chinese puzzles. “What do you feel?”

“Tingling sensation, like when you’ve sat on it and it’s gone to sleep.”

“Yes yes, stretch it more.”

“Ow. Hurts like hell.”

“Good,” said this abominable sadist, smelling of sweat rather.

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