Acts of Faith

SOMETHING HAD PUT a rat in Fitzhugh’s belly, and it began to chew its way out after midnight, waking him from a deep sleep. Flinging his mosquito net aside, he grabbed his flashlight from the night table and, keeping it pointed at the floor to avoid waking Douglas, fled out of the room for Manfred’s front door. The rat took a breather, allowing him to leave the house and cross the compound without too much pain. He was dismayed to discover padlocks on the doors to both pit latrines. How Germanic to padlock a latrine. How un-Germanic to fail to tell one’s visitors where the key was kept. The gnawing in his gut began again. There was nothing for it now but to bolt for the bushes. Just then he spotted the small circle of a penlight bobbing toward him. His own light revealed the nurse, clad in a shift, with an object gleaming between her breasts like a pendant. The key! He could tell by her walk that her need wasn’t half as urgent as his.

“Ulrika! Give that to me! Now, please!”

She hesitated a beat, startled by his assault; then she took the key from around her neck and handed it to him.

He quickly opened the padlock and, slamming the door behind him, squatted over the hole. With deep gratitude for Ulrika’s fortuitous appearance, he commenced to evict the rat. There was a click outside as the nurse pulled the key from the lock—he’d had the presence of mind to leave it there for her.

“Is the Sudan beer,” she said. “I never drink it. Pfooey! God knows what is in it.”

The beer? He’d never known any brand of beer to have an effect like this. Finished with her business in the adjacent enclosure, Ulrika gave him a knock.

“Fitz, you are all right?”

He came out, feeling embarrassed, although there was no reason to; a bush nurse wasn’t likely to attach any opprobrium to the most disgusting functions or dysfunctions of the body. During his emergency, he’d failed to notice that she’d taken her hair down for the night. He noticed it now, cascading over her shoulders, lending a little flair to her sturdy, peasant looks.

“In case it wasn’t the beer, something more serious, do you have any pills?”

“What a stupid question. This is hospital.”

In the dispensary, she rummaged in a cabinet filled with boxes and bottles while he stood behind her holding the light. The back of her hair, an extravagance of waves and curls, shone with a brightness that reminded him of Diana.

“Cipro.” She slapped a foil-wrapped packet in his hand. “Good for many things. One a day.”

They headed back to the living quarters, he in his undershorts, she in her shapeless shift, past the sleeping forms of patients’ relatives camped out on the hospital grounds. A breeze fanned the ashes of their dead cooking fires and a faint aroma of smoke tinged the night air.

“How do you say ‘thanks’ in German?”

“Gedanke,” she answered, and leaned a little further forward, neither innocently nor with seductive intent but with a lack of self-consciousness that meant she was completely comfortable in his presence. And that amounted to a seduction.

“Gedanke,” he repeated.

They returned the way they’d come, past the sleeping people, down a footpath bordered by rocks. Out here the night sky was almost intimidating in its clarity; the numberless stars seemed to assault you. Fitzhugh and Ulrika walked straight to her cottage and went inside without a request or invitation being spoken. She sat down on the edge of her bed and peeled off his shorts as if she were undressing a patient; then she pulled her shift over her head and held the mosquito net aside, motioning to him to get in first.

Less than half an hour later, with a friendly pat on the ass, she asked him to leave; she couldn’t risk his staying the night. Herr Doktor wasn’t a puritan, but he expected discretion, she said, although Fitzhugh suspected she was more worried that he would be seen by Franco.

He felt a little ridiculous, tiptoeing into Herr Doktor’s house like a kid who has violated a parental curfew. He crept into the room and saw that Douglas was still asleep. Returning to his bed, Fitzhugh was nagged by the guilt that always assailed him when he’d indulged his appetites. The guilt, however, was mitigated by the fact that he hadn’t enjoyed himself very much. Something had blocked his climax, despite Ulrika’s skillful manipulations and sexual choreography. Maybe they were what blocked him—a bit too skillful, too clinical, too, well, nurselike. She touched him everywhere the way she would tap his knee to test his involuntary reflexes. What finally brought him off was a fantasy. Shutting his eyes, he pretended it was Diana grinding away beneath him, Diana’s lips nibbling his ear, her breasts offered to his mouth.

In the morning, after he and Douglas had finished washing up, there was a commotion at the hospital. They saw a knot of people clustered around the door to the medical ward and went to have a look. Inside, the old man lay on his side on the floor, his eyes open and still. The bedsheets were still wrapped tightly around him from his shoulders to his feet, which didn’t make him look like a mummy so much as like a giant larva with a human head. Whether he’d fallen out of bed or had deliberately thrown himself to the floor, it was impossible to say.

Ulrika, dressed in her uniform, stood over him, speaking quietly to Manfred in German. The doctor nodded, instructed a couple of Nuban aides to remove the corpse, and came outside.

“So, gentlemen, gut schlafen?” He rubbed his beard with his knuckles; the nurse must have summoned him before he’d had time to shave. “You slept well?”

They said they had.

“He will be taken in the Land Rover to the village near where you found him.” Manfred cocked his head at the aides, lugging the body through the door. “We will hope that is where he came from, so we don’t have to search all over for his people. We also hope”—he sent a stern look at Douglas—“that some true emergency requiring the vehicle does not arise while it’s gone. What a pity if someone were to die who doesn’t need to because of this. I trust that the next time, if there is one, that you find someone lying in the bush, you will go on.”

“Don’t think so,” Douglas said after a silence. “I understand what you’re telling me, but I don’t think I’d be able to do that.”

The response didn’t surprise Fitzhugh in the least.