"Ass!" Shosho gladly takes the opportunity for revenge. "Been busy up to now, have you?"
"He has invented a new procedure that enables you to salute while you are sitting on the pot," Uzi whispered.
"Go to hell," grumbled the major and did his business.
Here and there the squeaking of a bed as one of the wounded men tries to find a more comfortable position for his wounds.
Quiet envelops the ward.
* * *
It is ten o’clock in the evening.
Rachel enters the room where the critical cases are lying. She always leaves this room till last, so that she can devote more time to the two of us, the "critical cases."
Through half-opened eyes I follow her movements over at the other bed. She inserts a thermometer between the teeth of the wounded man to take his temperature, and holds his hand to take his pulse. He just lies flat. His breathing rasps like a door that hasn’t been oiled for a long time. It was only half an hour ago that he was brought into this room. For two days he lay in the room opposite. He was shot in the chest.
Rachel lets go of his hand and writes something on the board which hangs from his bed. Her reddish face is remarkably unexpres-sive. She tries not to show any feelings. It is the expression of some-one who knows that the other is lost and thinks, "I’m not going to let that affect me." A trick of repression which never works.
"Drink," croaks the wounded man.
Rachel goes to the head of the bed and lays her little hand on his glowing brow. "In a minute," she says. Liar, I think to myself. Didn’t the doctor tell you not to give him a drop to drink?
Now it is my turn. I smile. Rachel smiles back. We two have a secret. Like children in the kindergarten. I cling to the ridiculous belief that only Rachel can help me to go to sleep, that without her I won’t be able to sleep a wink. A childish belief. One of those tiresome thoughts that a wounded man hangs onto without having the faintest idea why. Twice in the last week, when other nurses were on night duty, I called for Rachel for so long that she got out of her bed, came to me, and told me off. But still it meant something to her. Most of the wounded men treat the nurses as though they were