Free The Dhow House by Jean McNeil Page A

their minarets traced in green trim. The beachfront had the same ivory sands, shallow warm waters patrolled by black-tipped reef sharks, the desert rose growing on its edge.
    The man proceeded to read from his notebook. It was a story he had written, he informed her. The story was about a man who died from shark bite – one of the many sharks that scissored the cold waters off the coast of Gao, only to be reincarnated as a pair of spectacles. Everyone put him on their faces, the man told her, and their sight was instantly corrected. Widows saw the reasons for their husbands’ deaths and thanked God for having given them the opportunity to die as martyrs. Children saw their true vocation as soldiers of God. They stopped longing for the streets of the old capital with its bars and Italian magazines, its DVD stalls and mandolin players.
    ‘And the sharks?’ she asked.
    ‘The sharks are too big to wear the spectacles, so they go on killing senselessly.’
    She listened in his voice for any note of irony. Finally she said, ‘So it’s a parable. You are the man who becomes a pair of glasses.’
    He gave her a solemn, nearly nostalgic look. He was not strident. He didn’t seem to have the self-destructive stubbornness others of his kind displayed. His manner was mild but watchful.
    The sun’s tangerine flare caught his face and turned his skin to bronze. He pointed towards the dressing swaddling his left abdomen. He must have been operated on two or three days before.
    ‘How long will I take to heal?’
    ‘I’ll do an examination tomorrow and tell you then.’
    ‘I must go home. My father is waiting for me.’ He named a village not far from Gao. His face lightened at the sound of its name, but his eyes remained two pieces of coal. ‘You won’t tell them?’
    ‘Tell who?’
    ‘Who you speak to, over there,’ he flung his right hand north, an errant compass.
    ‘We are doctors.’
    She saw his eyes search her face and fail to find what they were looking for.
    He gave his name as Ali. She struggled to picture his body on the operating table. She must have operated on five different men the morning Ali arrived. With his clipped, martinet stride she would recognise his walk in a crowd of similar thin, impala-haunched men. His skin was darker than most, he was not particularly tall or imposing, but he had a commanding quality. He was very thin, a result of his wounds, lack of food, years of loping through the desert and the natural physique of his tribe, the Bora. ‘We are all like camels,’ he said. ‘We need no food, only a little water to keep us going.’
    There was no appeal or gratitude in Ali’s eyes, but no disgust either. He was not like the others she had treated, who looked at her – a woman – with a confused wash of fear and distaste. They squirmed, sometimes, told the interpreter they wanted a man. ‘There is no man. She treats you, you live. Or you can refuse and die.’
    Ali’s wounds had not been not so severe, she recalled. Bone was incredibly strong. If a high-velocity bullet entered a body and hit a bone, it could be deflected, even if the bone itself were shattered. Then the bullet went on a zany trajectory, sometimes travelling up people’s forearm, through their shoulder, and out the other end, leaving its trail. If it failed to hit the soft tissue of a vital organ, the casualty might be saved.
    There were other wounds, invisible, that only a surgeon would see. The kidney smashed into overripe watermelon, so that the flesh became almost granulated, slipped through her fingers with its ooze of juice and blood. When they hit organs, bullets pulped them. Then there were the bullets that kept on going through the body, having encountered no real resistance, shattering out the other side of a shoulder or an arm, taking with it a triangle of flesh, then carrying on into the body of the person behind them, passing through a shoulder or a neck again, penetrating the skin of a third. These bullets