Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives: Tales of Life and Death from the ER (36 page)

This night I found myself standing next to a doctor from another relief agency who was shouldering an oversized knapsack. We both surveyed the crowd.

“How many?” I asked him.

“The problem is,” he said, following his own train of thought, “the problem is, if the Macedonians don't open the border…”

“They've got to,” I said. I surveyed the crowd before us and tried to imagine turning the people back. No wonder the border guards looked even more frantic and edgy.

He shrugged. “The same thing happened last week and nobody got through,” he said. “Macedonia said they've got their fill of refugees. The U.S. has said they're going to evacuate some to the States, but that's just a promise now. And even if these guys do get across, there are twenty thousand more where they came from. Twenty thousand just that side of the border. That's what we've heard.”

“Is there a plan here?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. He looked out at the crowd and sighed. “Well, triage I guess. We're going to try to set up a station maybe two-three hundred yards over there.” He pointed into the packed crowd. “If you can, just go through the crowd and pick out anyone who looks sick and we'll look after them.”

We both walked forward the few hundred empty feet that stood between us and the crowd. Bafti and Dini followed along behind us. Then, suddenly, we were engulfed by the crowd. The ghostly faces now assumed personalized, demonic forms as people pressed in around me. Here were men with rotting teeth, stubbled faces, stinking with a two-month accumulation of road dirt, sweat and fear. Middle-aged Muslim women in their head scarves and long robe-styled coats gazed distractedly beyond me. Children's faces loomed up from below, expressionless. People tried to move aside for me but the press of bodies beyond them pushed them back against me. Bafti and Dini trailed behind, trying to keep up, Bafti shouting in Albanian, “Is anyone sick? There is a doctor here.”

Then by some whim of the crowd, Bafti and Dini were ahead of me, Bafti frantically waving me down. I struggled over. Dini gestured down into a small well of empty space in the packed crowd. There I found a woman inert on the ground. She looked as though she had decided, just shy of freedom, to lie down on the road and die.

Bafti and the family members were conferring while Dini stood just beyond them, the scene reflected in his sad eyes. “What is it?” I asked him.

“The family says she's had a seizure. She's not breathing anymore.”

I knelt beside her and, because it was much too dark to see, tugged her coat open so that I could get a hand on her chest. She was breathing, thank God, and—I mashed on her neck—she had a good pulse. As I did this, she opened her eyes and swiveled them, fish-like, toward me. Then she turned to look up in my direction. I recognized the expression on her face. I had seen it a hundred times over the past few weeks in the camps. It was a look that was one part exhaustion, one part terror, the look of a woman spiritually, as well as physically, at the end of her rope.

I glanced up, sighing, trying to gauge the distance to the tollbooths, the borderline, safety. On one hand she had only a few hundred meters to go, but between here and the tollbooth were those stony-faced Macedonian customs officials. And even if she made it across the border, I knew, after seeing so many like her, that you just can't turn fear on and off. Terror has a life of its own, regardless of circumstances. Even when safety comes, it doesn't just disappear. Terror is stubborn, resourceful, and lingers on in some long after it has served any constructive purpose.

I looked up at the family, who were peering down at me, awaiting my verdict. “She's okay,” I said. “Let her lie here for a bit and she'll be okay.”

I stood up, looking around for Dini. He was not far from me but was mired in a crowd even thicker than the one I was in, if that was possible. It took me a moment to see why. Dini was handing out cigarettes to everyone within reach. The crowd was passing around his lighter. I could see the flame flair up every few seconds, illuminating the face of the smoker, and then flick off, only to reappear a moment later, somewhere nearby.

Someone else shouted from within the crowd; I wasn't sure from where. Bafti and I struggled to our left, toward the voice that had called out. Finally Bafti was close enough to shout out, “What's the matter?” He passed on the reply to me.

“That woman there says she's pregnant.”

“How pregnant?”

“She says nine months.”

Oh, boy, I thought. “Is she having contractions?”

“She's not sure.”

I struggled over to the woman—actually a haggard-looking nineteen-year-old-girl dressed in a Muslim scarf and overcoat. She was leaning up against a man who looked to be her father. Bafti and she muttered to each other while I palpated her belly, as if that would tell me much of anything.

“We've got to get her over to the medic area,” I told Bafti as he struggled over to me.

“But she's with her family,” Bafti said.

I winced. “How many in her family?”

They counted. At least ten. No way we could move them all. “She won't go without her family,” Bafti told me. I knew her logic. Better deliver at a border crossing than risk never seeing your family again. I looked around for a moment, blinking mole-like in the bright light, trying to imagine myself delivering a baby onto pavement in a sea of thousands of refugees. It had been done before. A nurse-midwife we had hired delivered three babies in a railway station in Pristina during the first wave of deportation.

There was a lot of shouting from the Macedonian side of the crowd, where the border guards were trying to get people to stand in a line. I peered over the crowd and saw a frazzled-looking guard standing in front of the wall of emigrants, screaming orders in Macedonian at the crowd of faces in front of him. It was clear he wanted people to move, but nobody moved, nobody budged.

“A bloody idiot,” Bafti said, while Dini just looked on sorrowfully.

“What's this now?”

“You don't need to do this,” he shouted out angrily to the guard, but in English. The guard had no idea what he was saying. “You just bloody well don't need to do this.” He waved his hands. “He wants the women on one side and the men on the other. He's putting the families apart.”

Separating the families. The ultimate refugee nightmare. It seemed like such a small thing, but it was really one of the most powerful weapons to instill fear. I had cared for men released from Serbian prisons, who had been through taunts, beatings, starvation and deadly threats without turning a hair, but when it came to their families—God only knew where the family members were—they broke down helplessly, sobbing, inconsolable.

The pregnant woman still stood in front of me, face utterly without expression.

“Well, if she's not going to the medical unit, tell her she needs to get down to Blace Camp as soon as she's through the border.”

“If she gets through the border,” Bafti said grimly.

It was impossible to move farther along the road because of the packed crowd. We struggled back to the right, to the embankment that ran along the righthand side of the road, and fell behind a couple of English paramedics I knew from Senakos Camp who were lugging giant backpacks filled with medication. We clambered up the embankment until we were beyond the reach of the crowds and then we teetered along, working for each footstep, sending bursts of skree rolling down beneath us, until we finally arrived at an area, about fifty yards farther on, where the crowd started to thin out. I clambered down, reaching out for support. I was assisted by a man of about fifty dressed in an impeccable suit with an elegant tie neatly in place, reading glasses dangling from around his neck by a silk cord. He could have been the devil himself for all I knew. Beyond him, the paramedics laid down their backpacks and opened them up. With them opened now, I could see they contained everything, angiocaths, syringes, fluids—enough to stock a portable ICU should anyone be insane enough to want one here.

I moved on beyond them. Now there was enough space for people to collapse into. Whole families huddled on the ground, frozen in sleep. Children dozed in their mothers' arms, people sprawled out on their coats. Muslim women, scarves still wrapped in place, snored loudly. They lay stretched out, oblivious, while around them others stood in small groups, the tips of lit cigarettes about all that you could see of them.

In one group a man lay sleeping, face up, his hands on his belly. Something about him seemed familiar—not familiar in an everyday way—familiar on a visceral level. In his hands were some papers, and I could see there the little purple-covered Kosovar passport. Even though he was dead asleep, he was still clutching his (useless, worthless) identification papers, papers which signified that he was a citizen of a country that had seized his home, maybe killed some of his family and summarily expelled him. I remembered now where I had seen this man before, or rather someone who looked like him. It was on Macedonian TV. There was some footage of a tractor convoy, one of hundreds that had sprung up on the country roads and mountain tracts inside Kosovo during the flight of the refugees. This particular convoy had been ambushed by the Serbs, and now the dead lay scattered in the mud amid the abandoned carts and overturned tractors. The camera zoomed in on a man—a corpse, rather—who lay in the mud still clutching his passport and his identity papers. His last act must have been to try to prove his citizenship. What happened next? Did a soldier taunt him, telling him how worthless those papers actually were? Did he shoot him as casually as one child would shoot another with a toy gun? Did the soldier really think, “It's either him or me”?

I walked on, the crowd thinning as I went. As I walked along I kept calling, “Doctor, doctor,” in Albanian, until I realized I was just whispering, so I gave up. I must have looked spectral myself. People looked at me and veered away, turning their faces into the darkness. At one point there was the stench of urine off to the left. A man I thought was praying in the darkness turned out to be relieving himself. I walked past families, children limply asleep on the ground underneath. Off to the right, sitting cross-legged on a pile of logs, a woman sat, head bowed, weeping deeply. It struck me that I had seen no crying here; even children didn't cry, as if there was no grief fresh enough to need relief. Then I came up close to her and realized this was one of the aid workers, someone in a medical safari vest, sobbing helplessly. I knelt down in front of her. “Are you all right?” I asked in clumsy Albanian.

“No,” she said in English. “No, no, no.” She tried to blot up her tears with the back of her hand, got nowhere and buried her face deep into her upturned palms. “These are my people,” she sobbed. “My people. I can't go any farther.” She looked back up at me accusingly.
“I can't go any farther.”

I looked up and saw why. Beyond us loomed the Serbian border, the dead end of no-man's-land. It was as sudden as that. The gathering of the refugees stopped there. No gate, just another imaginary line. Off to the side a sign in Cyrillic, used only by the Serbs, not by the Albanians, announced the Kosovo customs office. It was completely dark beyond that, the road entirely open.

I stood up, hand to my chest. I was tempted to keep walking, something that seemed as easy to do as falling down. There were twenty thousand more refugees there in the darkness, twenty thousand more waiting to cross the border. How many pregnant women? old men? starving, terrified children? Then I looked down in front of me. What good was I going to do for
them
if I couldn't even help her? What was I going to do without medicine and equipment or—most important—some political power, while dealing with a people who would just as soon put a bullet through my head?

I turned back, stomach churning, telling myself, No, no, it's beyond that border that people really need help. But I turned back, back to the light, such as it was, back to the refugees. And what could I do? I was afraid even to try to comfort the aid worker sitting on the roadside.

Bafti sat down beside her and looked over at her with his innocent face. He, too, said nothing; he sat there, silently, watching her cry. I started calling out again, my voice sounding plaintive.

Someone waved at me, a small gesture. I almost didn't see it. There was an older man sitting next to what looked to be his wife and a middle-aged daughter.

“Doctor?” I asked them.

The man motioned me closer. As he did so his wife began to undress. She pulled off her coat, then a wool vest and a flowered rayon blouse. I looked around nervously, hoping no one would notice the striptease. Then the woman turned her back to me, a back plastered over with toilet paper. Her husband began peeling the toilet paper away and I saw what she had been trying to cover. It was a burn, a large burn that covered her entire back. God knows how it had happened or when, but by now it was badly infected. The toilet paper came away with a layer of formless gray goo plastered against it. There was the sickening smell that bespoke intensive care units, terminal illness. It was the smell of pseudomonas.

“Jesus,” I told no one in particular. I thought now of clean gauze four-by-fours, Neosporin and Silvadine cream, sterile gloves and brisk nurses. I thought of going home.

I motioned for her husband to get her dressed and follow me. I walked this woman and her family back through the crowds of no-man's-land, past all those sleeping bodies and beyond to the crowds near the triage area. When I arrived, the pregnant woman and her husband were there as well. She was lying on her side moaning. Dini sat next to her, holding her hand. “Contractions are still ten minutes apart,” he told me. “Should we try to get her across without her family?”

“You walk her to the border,” I told him and sat down abruptly. My hands were shaking.

I had only sat there for a moment when suddenly there was a murmur from the crowd and a sense of movement. Everyone was shifting restlessly, and somewhere at the near side of the Macedonian side of the border there was a shout. Soon the shout was taken up by the crowd immediately behind it and then deeper and deeper into no-man's-land until it swept by us and passed on into the darkness behind us.