I was on my way back from the TV tower when I received a frantic text message. A friend of mine had been taken to hospital unexpectedly. I rushed over to the other end of the city and found him propped up with a couple of pillows in a mechanical bed chomping on a bag of chocolates and watching a movie.
“I was so worried!” I declared self indulgently as Will Smith whirled across the screen doing the Y2K. I felt cheated that he looked normal, but upon closer inspection his face seemed drawn and he appeared to have lost a substantial amount of weight.
“I sort of collapsed onto the floor with sciatica and I was in terrible pain,” he said apologetically as if trying to compensate for my concern and inconvenience all at once. He was relieved to know that the symptoms were quite similar to those that I had vicariously experienced through my mother’s back problems for the past decade and delighted at my knowledge of the repository of medication that was being administered to him in the various manifestations of intravenous drips, brightly-colored pills and lethal looking injections.
During subsequent visits he showed me pictures stored in various folders on his laptop. There was “Me in Iraq”, “Me in Bosnia” and “Me in Afghanistan”. Missions into the unknown as part of a special regiment.
“Was it dangerous?” I would ask as he flicked through the slideshow.
“Not really. Just a job,” he would answer.
It was odd how indifferent his attitude seemed. There he was, among nations of suffering beings and yet he maintained a cool facade of apathy. I found it hard to reconcile the youth standing proudly in combat gear, tanned and healthy, strapped with weapons to his chest with the shadow of a man lying helplessly in a pale blue gown beside me. I watched him wince in agony as he tried to maneuver into a more comfortable position, his handsome features gnarled with pain. I clicked on his favorite folder of “Home” in order to temporarily alleviate his suffering with a dose of all that was familiar in an environment that was all too distant and far removed. I watched him stare vacantly at the screen as if he too was trying to find a semblance of a connection between the actual and the surreal.
“Don’t worry,” I reassured with complete conviction, “a few more days and you’ll be out. But hey. No more jumping out of planes for you buddy! You’ll have to find a normal job like the rest of us.”
He called the very next day.
“I am not feeling too good,” he confided, “and the doctor still doesn’t know what’s wrong with me. He has the results but I can’t understand what he means. Can you come to translate?”
There was a growth on his spine. That was as much as I understood from the grim looking physician.
“Just a swelling probably,” I told him authoritatively as he was being wheeled back to his room. “Could be muscular. Maybe the anti-inflammatory stuff you are taking will reduce it,” I concluded optimistically. But by this time he was beginning to lose the sensation in his legs and a few days after that consultation with the doctor he went home. Our parting words still resonate with irony in the depths of my conscious being.
“Thank you, Lubna,” he said. “It meant a lot what you did. I hope we meet again.”
“If not in this life, then most definitely in the next,” I challenged laughing as I uttered those fateful words. I thought about him frequently but heard nothing after his departure. Until three days ago.
A text message from a strange number appeared on my mobile. “Did you hear? He has leukemia. Poor him. He is so determined to defy it though.”
“Oh God!” I thought. “Oh God! Please let him be OK.”
I dialed the international code wondering what to say. What do you say to someone who has cancer? How do you comfort someone who is barely 30 years old, in the prime of their life who has been handed such an awesome sleight of fate? What words, what euphemisms can you use to assuage the torment that they must be enduring? Do you put on a brave face belying your profound personal anguish? Do you pretend everything’s going to be hunky dory or do you just confess to not knowing what to say?
“I am just devastated,” I heard myself saying, “I know maybe I should not be saying this, but that’s how I feel.”
“Thank you,” he said stoically followed up with a matter of fact, “Do you know I have leukemia?”
I nodded stupidly as tears rolled down my face, my soul bitterly stung by the indiscriminate doling out of yet another of life’s injustices, images of the camouflage uniform, the other young men and the cavalier attitude to death and destruction that we all seem to adopt pervading my thoughts.
“According to the doctors I was exposed to radiation. You know when I was serving in maybe Bosnia or Iraq or Afghanistan. I don’t know where, but that’s what they think.”
He will begin his radiation treatment and chemotherapy next week. Inshallah he will recover soon thanks to all the latest advances in the field of cancer research and the excellent medical attention he will receive from the professionals surrounding him at one of Europe’s top hospitals. In a sense he is one of the lucky ones. People in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan are not so lucky. I wonder how many thousands, hundred thousands, millions or more of these civilians have been exposed to the same kind of radiation. Have drunk polluted water. Have fed their babies with contaminated milk. Have been ravaged by disease. Have agonized. Have hoped. Have prayed. Have despaired. Have run from one hospital to the next losing precious seconds along the way because there is no doctor, no nurse, no medicine, no bed, no chance. Have watched and waited as their loved ones, their mothers, their fathers, their sons and daughters perished before their eyes. Have died themselves within those moments devoid of the will to go on. Have been forgotten. Have never been remembered in the first place.
I wonder what it is all for. On whose altar these innocents are being sacrificed? In whose name? To further which ideology? In a world filled with nuclear giants and ethical dwarfs, this week marks the 60th anniversary of one of the world’s most indiscriminate cold-blooded premeditated murders. In a split second, 80 000 people lost their lives in Hiroshima and a similar figure in Nagasaki. A moment in history that witnessed the callous annihilation of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who were robbed of their lives, their dreams and their hopes. An instant in time whose far-reaching implications are still felt today. The death, suffering and torment still continue.
And for what?
To occupy a chapter in a history book so that we may learn lessons from past mistakes in order not to repeat them in the future? And yet does it matter? Do we learn? We seem to have mastered the art of war, but have little understanding of peace. We are more interested in learning about new ways to kill than how better to live. We gauge our success through weapons and armaments, not tolerance and understanding.
In the words of the late John F. Kennedy, unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes. It can no longer be of concern to great powers alone. For a nuclear disaster, spread by winds and waters and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike. Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.
(Lubna Hussain is a Saudi writer. She is based in Riyadh.)
