The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani

Author:Ahmed Bouanani
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811225779
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2018-05-08T20:04:06+00:00

this morning it’s raining dirty dishwater. The ground’s become a bog that we have to wade across to get from one wing to the next. Actually all connection to the outside world appears to be severed. The other patients are so distracted by the biting cold that they haven’t noticed that the nurse and his squeaking gurney are missing. The most alert among them must be thinking, “Oh, he’ll pass by another time!” The windows of the neighboring block — whose uniform facade rises over the high, thick hospital wall — are all closed, locked up. No life is visible inside. Normally I can see women hanging their laundry from clotheslines stretched between television antennas, and young girls hidden behind the shutters, watching the street scene below; often I hear their radios blaring music and news of a world that’s no longer my own. Now, the building looks like a stone face with lots of closed eyes, and the rain beats against it intermittently, as if to rattle its lethargy, to awaken a breath of life — but all in vain. A heavy melancholy reigns everywhere, in the traces of the ocean air. The silence of the birds and the immobility of the oak trees in the neighborhoods near Wing C remind me of a petrified forest; shrubs, thickets, branches, frozen overnight, seep, drop by drop, to the rhythm of a deluge that batters the hospital’s isolated wings in slow motion. The cold is all the more intense now that we’re inert. Our stiff, aching limbs grow more and more numb. And the damn heater doesn’t work! Just a shitty electric hot plate hanging above the room’s entrance . . . but good God, why can’t they just replace it? Most of the patients are coughing even harder. Rover bursts into the room, using an unfurled newspaper as an umbrella. He sits on the edge of my bed.

“It’s never worked,” he says.

“What?”

“The damn heater.”

“What’s the point then?”

“Here, this will warm you up.”

He reveals, as if by magic, a paper cup of black coffee that’s still hot. I take it with both hands to warm my fingers, which are starting to turn blue. He takes a cigarette out of my pack, lights it, and announces out of nowhere that he’s leaving the hospital, tomorrow; then seeing the surprised expression on my face, he adds: “For a day.”

“One day?”

“Come on. You think they handed me a medical certificate with ‘permanently rehabilitated’ written out in bold, capital letters?”

He smiles. A small, bitter smile.

I congratulate him like an idiot.

“It’s nothing. They granted me one day to attend my mother’s funeral.”

No trace of sadness or grief in his eyes. He’s watching curls of smoke rise from his cigarette.

“You’re surprised that I don’t look upset?” — I remain silent because I can’t find anything to say — “I cried a long time ago when I was six or seven years old. Back then, my old man was drinking himself to death. The last time, he didn’t get a chance to sober up.

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