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his chin. There
was no persuading Jennie when she knew she was right. ‘They won’t be cheap.’
    ‘Second-hand won’t cost a
lot. We’ll get our money back when they outgrow them.’
    ‘I give in. It makes sense.’
    She gave him a hug. Happy
she’d won her argument, Jennie thumped down the stairs and out of the front
door.
    He tried to imagine bunk
beds with comfortable mattresses and pretty bedding. He picked up a teddy bear
from the floor and sat on the edge of Charlotte’s bed seeing only row after row
of hard wooden bunks, three tiers high, stretching into darkness along the
length of the infirmary building. The cries and the stench wound around him and
engulfed him.
    Eyes, large in emaciated
faces, followed his every move, pleading with him. Hands brushed his as he
walked past: some burned with fever, others were cold as death.
    It was raining again. For
two weeks he’d waited for the punishment that would surely be visited upon the
Roma and Sinti in the gypsy camp: each day the tension grew. He hadn’t been
ordered back there and, though he’d occasionally had the opportunity to throw a
crust of bread over the wire to waiting hands, he didn’t know if the young
twins had succumbed to typhus.
    Water dripped from the
ceiling, soaking the women on the top bunks, and falling with a steady plink
into a handful of metal bowls, their holes stopped with hard-packed bread.
Tongues moistened cracked lips, waiting for precious drops to collect. There
was never enough. Water … The cry was on every lip.
    He rarely got to know their
names: shaven, hollow-cheeked, dressed in regulation infirmary shirts or naked
beneath a filthy blanket, they all looked much the same. Nurses carried out the
night’s dead and laid them with care on the ever-growing pile. Plump rats, as
bold in daylight as they were at night, scurried through the mud to feed on
still-warm flesh.
    Outside, a file of naked
women shivered. He tore his mind from the quiet dead to the silent living. He
had a job to do. One by one his patients filed before him. Broken bones,
striped backs and bloodied heads, courtesy of the guards: lice, swollen feet,
abscessed wounds, gangrene, lice, scabies, dysentery, lice, typhus, scarlet
fever… lice… He apportioned tiny doses of medicine, eked out bandages, salves
and water. ‘Next.’
    ‘Miriam collapsed… please…
help her.’ The language was a mixture of Hungarian, Polish and German. Two
women supported a frail body. Miriam… the girl who’d knelt in the mud. She was
limp, her face vacant. He’d hoped to see her again, but not like this.
    ‘Miriam?’ She didn’t
respond. ‘When did she last eat?’
    ‘Two days ago, three…’
    ‘And drink?’
    ‘I don’t know. When the soup
bowl reached her it was empty… and someone stole her bread. I had none left to
give her.’ The woman’s voice broke. ‘I traded two days ration for a shoe.’
    He touched Miriam’s cold
hand, felt for the vein across her bony wrist, and placed his palm against her
forehead. ‘Her pulse is weak but she has no fever.’ He searched the rows of
bunks, looking for one whose occupants definitely weren’t infectious, or fouled
with uncontrollable starvation diarrhoea, or whose minds hadn’t retreated to
the point of being a danger to themselves and others. He pointed to a bunk
occupied by a Frenchwoman with oedema of the feet and a Czech girl with broken
ribs. ‘There’s space for her there, on that bunk.’
    ‘She’s my daughter… she’s
all I have.’
    He crossed himself mentally
for the grandmother, sister and children who’d been sent to the left. ‘Water,
food and rest is what she needs. I can’t offer much, but…’
    ‘Water, food and rest. God
is good. Thank you, doctor. Thank you.’
    He half-filled a bowl with
water. ‘Vis… wody… Wasser… aqua…’ The clamour rose from hundreds of parched
throats. Thin arms reached into the alleyway. ‘Water…’
    Miriam’s need was urgent. He
managed to rouse