1Now hear of the nurse.
2Her name was Adwoa. She was forty-one, and for sixteen years she had worked the night in a district hospital at the edge of a great hot city. It was the dry year, the same that emptied the pots in Thandiwe's valley. In the city it came as heat. For eleven days the air had not cooled, even at midnight, and the old and the weak were being carried in faster than there were beds.
3Her ward was the one for those who could not breathe alone. It had twelve beds. On that night four of the twelve lay with tubes in their throats, and machines beside them did their breathing. There was a market woman with a fever in her lungs. There was a boy of fifteen who had been pulled from under a fallen wall. There was a schoolmaster, and a young mother three days from childbed. The other eight were not much better.
4To help her Adwoa had Kwabena, a nurse of twenty-two in his first year, and an orderly named Yaw who had been there longer than the paint. The doctor of the night was across the city at the other hospital. In the corridor outside, on mats and benches, slept the families, for in that country the family gives the food and the washing and the watching.
5At eleven at night the lights went out.
6This was not strange. The power failed most weeks. There was a count of four in the dark, and then the engine in the yard coughed and caught, and the lights came back yellow. The breathing machines had not missed a breath, for each had a small battery in its belly.
7But at midnight Yaw came and stood beside her, and he did not speak. That was how she knew it was bad.
8"The fuel lorry did not come on Thursday," he said at last. "Nor today. I have dipped the tank. There is fuel for the engine until two o'clock. Half past, if it is kind."
9She called the power company, and a recorded voice told her that the fault was known. She called the keeper of the hospital, who did not answer. She called the doctor. He said he would come at once. Then he said that the traffic lights were dead across the whole city and nothing on the roads was moving, and he would come as he could.
10She went up to the roof to dip the tank herself. She did not doubt Yaw. A number that matters should be read by two people. The stick came up wet for the width of four fingers. He was right.
11She stood a moment up there in the hot dark. She had never seen the city like this. There was no light in it from one side to the other. There were only cooking fires on the hills, small and red, and above them more stars than she had seen since she was a girl in her grandmother's village.
12A fear had been climbing in her since Yaw spoke. Up there it reached her throat. Four on the machines, and the batteries good for an hour once the engine died. The heat. One young nurse. A doctor stuck in the road. She thought: this is too much for me, I am one woman.
13Then she did a thing she had taught herself in the bad years. She let her mind go up, as if it climbed a ladder off the roof. She saw the hospital from above, a block of dark with one yellow floor. She went higher and saw the city, and the hot country, and the curve of the world with the night lying across half of it. In all that dark there were a great many wards and a great many women standing on roofs. She went higher still, to where the years could be seen. In a hundred years every person in the building beneath her would be gone, the sick and the well alike, and she with them. It would still have been true for ever that on this night somebody had counted the breaths.
14From so high the fear looked very small. But the night's work was the same size as before. It was twelve beds, and her two hands could do it.
15She came down the stairs sorting as she came, as a market woman sorts beans. On one side she put the things that were not hers to move tonight. These were the lorry, the power, the heat, the roads, and the men in offices who had let the tank run dry. She set that whole pile down. She would pick it up again in the morning, and she would be loud about it then. On the other side she put what was hers, which was the next three hours, and her own hands, and whatever hands she could find.
16She did one thing more on those stairs. She made herself look at the worst of it before it came. At two the engine stops. At three the batteries are done. Then the machines are boxes. One of the twelve may die tonight whatever I do. It may be the boy. If it comes, I will close the eyes and I will go to the next bed. I will weep on Thursday. She walked all the way down that dark road in her mind, to its end, and she found that she was still standing when she got there. After that the night could not surprise her.
17"Kwabena," she said. "Bring me every hand-bag we have." These are soft bladders the size of a melon, with a mask or a fitting at one end. Squeeze one and it pushes a breath into a person. There were six in the ward and two in the store.
18"For how long?" he said. "Sister, to squeeze a bag for a person, breath by breath, it is twelve times a minute. Your hands cramp in a quarter of an hour. There are four of them. There are three of us, and eight others to nurse."
19"Yes," said Adwoa. "So it will not be us." And she went out into the corridor and woke the families.
20She stood among the mats with a lamp, and she told them the truth. She did not make it softer or harder than it was. The engine will stop at two. The machines will stop at three. After that, four people breathe only if a hand breathes for them, until the fuel comes, and I do not know when the fuel comes. I need twenty people who can count and who will not faint. I will teach you now, while there is light.
21They stood up. It was not all of them, but it was enough. There was a taxi driver, and two sisters who sold cloth. There was a rich man's son in a white shirt who had been angry all week about the state of the ward. There was a girl of seventeen named Esi, whose father, Mr. Boateng, lay in the ninth bed with a failing heart.
22She taught them on a pillow. Squeeze, and say one, two. Let go, and say three, four, five. Watch the chest and not the bag. If the chest does not rise, shout my name. When your hand begins to burn, do not be brave. Raise the other hand, and the next one takes the bag between one breath and the following. She made each of them do it forty times.
23She put them in fours, one four to each bed. She did not put any family at its own bed. "You will squeeze too fast for your own," she said. "Your fear will be in your hand. You will breathe for a stranger, and a stranger will breathe for yours."
24At ten minutes past two the engine in the yard ran rough, and coughed, and was quiet. The yellow lights went out. In the dark the four machines sang their warning and went on working, each on its own small battery. Along the poles the grey medicine boxes glowed green, counting their drops as before. Adwoa did not think about those. They were made to run a full night on their own, and someone far away had made sure of it.
25At three, less four minutes, the first machine gave its long last note. It was the market woman's. The taxi driver was already standing there with the bag in his hands. Kwabena slipped the tube from the machine to the bag in the space of one breath. "Now," he said. The driver squeezed. One, two. The chest rose.
26The others followed within ten minutes, one, and one, and one. Then the ward had a sound it had never had. There was no hum in it. It was the sound of people counting under their breath in the dark. One, two. Three, four, five. Four bags sighed, each a little out of time with the next.
27Adwoa went from bed to bed with her lamp, and Kwabena with his, and they did not stop. They cleared a tube. They turned the boy. The rich man's son was at the bed of the market woman, whose whole stall he could have bought with his watch. He was breathing for her with his white sleeves rolled up and his lips moving.
28At twenty to four, the box above the ninth bed began to cry out.
29That was Mr. Boateng, whose heart had been failing for a week. He was not on a breathing machine. It was his heart that stopped. Adwoa was there in six steps, and Kwabena after her. They did everything that is done, with their hands on his chest and the medicines that were to be had. The paddles that might have shocked his heart awake lay dead in their cradle, for they fed from the wall.
30Esi was fifteen steps away at the fourth bed. She was breathing for the young mother, a woman she had never seen before that week. She heard the box. She knew which bed it was. She turned her head and saw the two lamps and the nurses bent over her father.
31Her hand did not stop. Adwoa saw it, in the middle of everything, and she never forgot it. The girl's face broke open like a dropped pot, but her hand kept the count. One, two. Three, four, five. The stranger's chest rose and fell. Tears ran off Esi's chin onto the sheet. She looked at her father's bed, and she breathed for somebody else's mother. She did not raise her other hand to be relieved until the proper time. Then she gave over the bag between two breaths, as she had been taught, and then she ran.
32They worked on him for twenty minutes. Adwoa knew at ten that it was done. She went on to twenty because his daughter was holding his feet.
33Then she straightened her back, and she said the hour aloud, and Kwabena wrote it down.
34Kwabena was shaking. He was twenty-two, and it was the first one he had lost with his own hands on the chest. He threw the chart board at the wall. "With power he lives!" he said. "With the paddles he has a chance! They let the tank go dry. The minister has an engine at his own house, did you know? I will find the man who signs for the fuel. I will—"
35"Yes," said Adwoa. "You will, and I will come with you, and we will carry that old man's name in with us and put it on the desk. I mean it. That is tomorrow's work, and it is real work." She took him by both wrists. "But you cannot do tomorrow's work tonight. If you spend this hour hating a man who is asleep across the city, the boy in bed two has no nurse. This is the hour you have. Look at me. Whose tube needs clearing?"
36He looked at her. He breathed. "Bed two," he said.
37"Then go to bed two."
38He went. She closed Mr. Boateng's eyes, as she had told herself on the stairs that she would. She drew the sheet to his chin and not over his face, so that his daughter could sit with him. And she went to the next bed.
39At ten minutes past six there was a noise in the yard that made every head come up. It was a heavy engine and the hiss of brakes. Yaw went down the stairs faster than a man of his years should. Eleven minutes later the engine coughed twice and caught, and the lights came on yellow, and one after another the four machines woke and took the breathing back.
40Nobody cheered. They were too tired, and there was a sheet drawn up on bed nine. But the cloth seller's sister went down to the gate and came back with a basin of hot porridge. The families ate it together on the corridor floor, passing three spoons, and no one asked whose basin it was.
41She washed Mr. Boateng herself before she went off, and Esi helped her. Neither of them spoke until it was done. Then the girl said, "I did not go to him."
42"No," said Adwoa. "You could not have helped him. I could not help him either, and I was there. But the woman in bed four was alive only because of your hand, and you did not let go of her. She has a child three days old, and that child has a mother this morning. Your father raised you. That was his work too, last night."
43Esi wept then, properly, and Adwoa held her. She did not say it would stop hurting, for she did not tell lies to the grieving.
44She went home in the full light. She was not content. One was dead who need not have been, and by noon she would be standing in an office with Kwabena, making herself unwelcome. But she was not in pieces either. She had not spent herself on what she could not move, and so she had been able to give all of herself to the rest. She washed her feet and lay down and slept, as a person does who has done the whole of her own part.
45Now leave the hot city, and go to a cold road in the mountains where people are walking away from a war.