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around there,” Bird said, unable to convert quickly into the Western calendar. “I wonder if it’s suffering.”
    “What, our generation?”
    “The baby!”
    “That depends on what you mean by suffering. I mean, the baby can’t see or hear or smell, right? And I bet the nerves that signal pain aren’t functioning, either. It’s like the Director said, you remember—a kind of vegetable. In your opinion, does a vegetable suffer?”
    Does a vegetable suffer, in my opinion? Bird wondered silently. Have I ever considered that a cabbage being munched by a goat was in pain?
    “Do you think a vegetable baby can suffer?” the doctor repeated eagerly, pressing with confidence for an answer.
    Bird meekly shook his head: as if to say the problem exceeded his flushed brain’s capacity for judgment. And there was a time when he never would have submitted to a person he had just met, at least not without feeling some resistance. …
    “The oxygen isn’t feeding well,” the anesthetist reported. The doctor stood up and turned to check the rubber tube; Bird had his first look at his son.
    An ugly baby with a pinched, tiny, red face covered with wrinkles and blotchy with fat. Its eyes were clamped shut like the shells of a bivalve, rubber tubes led into its nostrils; its mouth was wrenched open in a soundless scream that exposed the pearly-pink membrane inside. Bird found himself rising half off the bench, stretching for a look at the baby’s bandaged head. Beneath the bandage, the skull was buried under a mound of bloody cotton; but there was no hiding the presence there of something large and abnormal.
    Bird looked away, and sat down. Pressing his face to the window glass, he watched the city recede. People in the street, alarmed by the siren, stared at the ambulance with curiosity and an unaccountable expectation plainly written on their faces—just as that host of pregnant angels had stared. They gave the impression of unnaturally halted motion, like film caught in a projector. They were glimpsing an infinitesimal crack in the flat surface of everyday life and the sight filled them with innocent awe.
    My son has bandages on his head and so did Apollinaire when he was wounded on the field of battle. On a dark and lonely battlefield I have never seen, my son was wounded like Apollinaire and now he is screaming soundlessly. …
    Bird began to cry. Head in bandages, like Apollinaire: the image simplified his feelings instantly and directed them. He could feel himself turning into a sentimental jelly, yet he felt himself being sanctioned and justified: he even discovered a sweetness in his tears.
    Like Apollinaire, my son was wounded on a dark and lonely battlefield that I have never seen, and he has arrived with his head in bandages. I’ll have to bury him like a soldier who died at war.
    Bird continued to cry.

3
    B IRD was sitting on the stairs in front of the intensive care ward, gripping his thighs with grimy hands in a battle with the fatigue that had been hounding him since his tears had dried, when the one-eyed doctor emerged from the ward looking thwarted. Bird stood up and the doctor said: “This hospital is so goddamned bureaucratic, not even the nurses will listen to a word you say.” A startling change had come over the man since their ride together in the ambulance: his voice was troubled. “I have a letter of introduction from our Director to a professor of medicine here—they’re distant relatives!—and I can’t even find out where he is!”
    Now Bird understood the doctor’s sudden dejection. Here in this ward everyone was treated like an infant: the young man with the glass eye had begun to doubt his own dignity.
    “And the baby?” Bird said, surprised at the commiseration in his voice.
    “The baby? Oh yes, we’ll know just where we stand when the brain surgeon has finished his examination. If the infant lasts that long. If he doesn’t last, the autopsy will tell the full story. I doubt that the