There was nothing substantial that I could do for the savaged leg. I cleaned the wound, and tried to remove as much of the shattered bone as I could wrench free with the pliers. His screams settled on my skin in an oily sweat, and I shivered with every gust of frosty wind. I put sutures into the ragged flesh where clean, hard skin would support them, but there was no way to close the gap over completely. One thick chunk of bone protruded from the lumpy meat. It occurred to me that I should take a saw, and hack the long bone off to make a neat wound of the stump, but I wasn’t sure if that was the right procedure. I wasn’t sure that it wouldn’t make the wound worse than it was. I wasn’t sure… And there’s only so much screaming you can bring yourself to cause when you’re not sure what you’re doing. In the end, I smothered the wound in antibiotic powder and wrapped it in non-adhesive gauze.
The second wounded man had taken a blast in the face and throat. His eyes were destroyed, and most of the nose and mouth were gone. In some ways, he resembled Ranjit’s lepers, but his wounds were so raw and bloody, and the teeth were so smashed, that Ranjit’s disfigurements seemed benign in comparison. I took the metal pieces from his eyes and his scalp and his throat. The wounds at his throat were bad, and although he was breathing fairly evenly, my guess was that his condition would worsen. After dressing his wounds, I gave both men a shot of penicillin and an ampoule of morphine.
My biggest problem was blood, and the need to replace what the wounded men had lost. Not one of the mujaheddin fighters I’d asked during the last weeks had known his own or anyone else’s blood type. Thus it was impossible for me to blood-match the men, or to build up a bank of donors. Because my own blood type was O, which is known as the universal donor type, my body was the only source of blood for transfusions, and I was the walking blood bank for the whole combat unit.
Typically, a donor provides about half a litre of blood in a session. The body holds about six litres, so the blood lost in donation amounts to less than one-tenth of the body’s supply. I put a little more than half a litre into each of the wounded men, rigging up the intravenous drips that Khader had brought with him as part of his smuggled cargo. I wondered whether the equipment had come from Ranjit and his lepers as I tapped my veins and those of the wounded fighters with needles that were stored in loose containers rather than sealed packets. The transfusions took nearly 20 per cent of my blood. It was too much. I felt dizzy and faintly nauseous, unsure if they were real symptoms or simply the slithering tricks of my fear. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to give more blood for some time, and the hopelessness of the situation-mine and theirs-crushed my chest with a flush and spasm of anguish.
It was dirty, frightening work, and I wasn’t trained for it. The first-aid course that I’d completed as a young man had been comprehensive, but it hadn’t covered combat injuries. And the work I’d done at my clinic in the slum was little help in those mountains. Beyond that, I was running on instinct-the same instinct to help and heal that had compelled me to save overdosed heroin addicts in my own city, a lifetime before. It was, of course, in great part a secret wish-like Khaled, with the vicious madman Habib-to be helped and saved and healed myself. And though it wasn’t much, and it wasn’t enough, it was all I had. So I did my best, trying not to vomit or cry or show my fear, and then I washed my hands in the snow.
When Nazeer was sufficiently recovered, he insisted on burying Abdel Khader Khan with the strictest adherence to ritual. He did that before he ate a meal or even drank a glass of water. I watched as Khaled, Mahmoud, and Nazeer cleaned themselves, prayed together, and then prepared Khaderbhai’s body for burial. His green-and-white standard was lost, but one of the mujaheddin provided his own flag as a shroud. On a simple white background, it carried the phrase:
There is no god but God
Mahmoud Melbaaf, the Iranian who’d been with us since the Karachi taxi ride, was so tender and devoted and loving in his ministrations that my eyes went again and again to his calm, strong face as he worked and prayed. If he’d been burying his own child, he couldn’t have been more gentle or clement, and it was from those moments during the burial that I began to cherish him as a friend.
