Marshlands by Matthew Olshan Page B

its lips curled in a dry snarl. “As a matter of fact,” he says, “there’s been a steady uptick in insurgent attacks.”
    He opens more drawers. The bodies are riddled with shrapnel, the wounds packed with sandy debris. Some of the remains are tragically scant—a blasted jawbone, a bloodied sleeve. Many lack dog tags.
    â€œAre we sure these are ours?” I ask.
    Curtis tries to slam the drawer, but it wasn’t designed to be closed in anger. It recoils against rubber bumpers, then quietly slides home. “There’s a separate section for the enemy down at the end,” he says. “Knock yourself out.”
    In fact, the INSURGENT area is full to overflowing. I find two or three corpses crammed into each drawer, sometimes haphazardly, sometimes head to toe, their broken limbs woven together to save space. At first, I do my best to separate them, straighten their clothes, cover their desiccated eyes, but even these slight changes cause the drawers to jam. As I force them shut, the sound of cracking bone makes me think of the laundress.
    After an hour of fruitless searching, followed by another lost to the seemingly identical tunnels under the palace, I finally reach daylight. I’ve never been so happy to climb into my oven of a jeep. The spiral road winds me up and flings me into the desert. I don’t breathe freely until the jagged silhouette of the palace vanishes from the rearview mirror. Dust devils race me down the pitted road.
    This used to be a perilous drive, seeded with mines and improvised explosives. The surface has been patched but still gives a vehicle a good beating. As I near home, my wheels seem to gather speed. It’s like I’m driving down a ramp through the centuries.
    *   *   *
    That night, I wonder: Is there really a new insurgency? The question sits, indigestible, in the pit of my stomach, as Betty snores quietly in her corner. I may be a foreigner, but with every wound I’ve sewn, every child I’ve bathed, I’ve tried to come closer. I lie on a sweat-stained quilt, thinking, I’m bound to them, but are they bound to me?
    Eventually, sleep comes, but it’s disturbed by a vision of the laundress kneeling by my bed, holding a candle to her naked mouth. The guttering flame lights her face like a jack-o’-lantern, grotesquely hooking her nose, deepening her eye sockets, but above all, transforming the cleft in her lip into something huge and malignant. I’ve been thinking about a surgery , she says.
    Her words fill me with joy. I want her to be joyful, too, but her eyes are black and bottomless, as inscrutable as river stones.
    I wake to find Betty hovering over me. You’ve been blubbering , she says. You shouldn’t drink so much before bed. But don’t worry , she whispers, wiping my face with the sleeve of her shift, your secret’s safe with me .
    *   *   *
    A letter from Protective Services arrives by courier the next day, informing me that a claim of corpse-stealing is an ancient form of extortion in the marshes; that there have been many substantiated cases of insurgents perpetrating abominations while dressed as our soldiers; and that, in any case, the laundress’s son was a known insurgent with several atrocities to his name.
    I’m to cease my inquiries into this matter, to focus on the efficient management of the field hospital, and, in a final phrase that makes me wince, to “desist in the delivery of medical services to the insurgency and its shadow army of supporters, no matter the cause of injury .”
    In other words, I’m to stop treating marshmen.
    â€œShadow army,” “atrocities,” “abominations”—the language alone is infuriating. Do the deskbound mandarins who compose these letters even know what the words mean? “Desist in the delivery of medical services,” indeed! If a child is brought to me whose leg has