As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow (47)

“How Sweet Is Freedom.”

Torn, bloodied muscle curls over the fractured humerus, the tendons pink and stretched like an elastic band. My stomach heaves but I swallow down the nausea. I hold up his arm carefully and when I look at Dr. Ziad, who’s operating on the laceration on the soldier’s thigh, he shakes his head. The patient has lost too much blood. Not even the manual transfusions would be enough, and it would take too much time and effort that could be spent saving another life. Not to mention the high risk of infection. Our hospital isn’t built on preserving limbs, but on preserving life.

The soldier suddenly stops singing and looks at me. “You’re going to cut it off, aren’t you?”

I nod slowly, my eyes aching with tears. His uniform is shredded, the green turning dark with blood. It leaks into the stitched revolution flag on his chest, coloring the white stripe red. He’s not that much older than I am, his dirty blond hair matted and his forest-green eyes glistening with tears. In another life, he wouldn’t live with death. The world would be his oyster and, starry-eyed, he’d venture out to find his place in it. He’d have read about wars and revolutions in schoolbooks, where they’d remain confined. Never a reality.

But even with this reality, his face betrays no hysteria. I presume it’s a combination of shock and the minimal dose of anesthesia we gave him.

“Do it,” he grits out.

His arm suddenly feels very real in my hands. Usually patients scream, begging us to save them. All they know is the pain.

“But—but how will you fight?” I ask.

He grins and nods to his left arm. “I still have another one, don’t I?”

This time the ache transforms into my own tears that slip down my cheeks. The soldier lays his head back on the hospital bed, casts his eyes to the ceiling, and goes back to singing.

His arm is sent with the rest of the casualties from today to be buried in the cemetery.

I lose track of time as I try to race against it and catch the souls before they rise from their bodies. Only when Dr. Ziad physically intervenes and confiscates my scalpel do I stop.

“Salama,” he says, eyes blazing. “Enough. Go home.”

My stare drops to my hands, which are sticky with dried blood.

The main atrium’s lights are dimmer, the moans of those in pain low, and doctors and families alike are sprawled against the walls and floors, catching their breath. The sun’s rays filtering through the windows give the colors a harsh hue. The red vicious, and the gray desolate. These are the shades seen when twilight takes over the world. I’ve never stayed this late before. During the day, the colors are electric, urging me to work faster before they slip from my fingers into nothing. The red is vibrant, carrying life, and the gray promises the fall of rain.

The atrium suddenly feels like a casket.

“Okay,” I choke out. “Okay.”

I clean my hands and grab my bag. Dr. Ziad gives me a reassuring nod. I stumble through the patients, dragging my feet, until I push the hospital doors wide open. Cool air washes me from head to toe and I take in a deep breath, begging it to launder away the residue of bile and blood from my mouth.

Daisies. Daisies. Daisies.

I’m standing on the brink of sunset, the honey-orange dye taking over the sky and the horizon above me deepening into a rich navy blue. A canvas for the stars.

It looks… haunting.

Someone moves and my eyes snap down to see Kenan lying on the hospital’s steps, his camera atop his chest. His long legs stretch out in front of him and he glows under the twilight sky. The way stars shine in his eyes and the small upturn of his lips make him look like something out of a story. For a minute, in the day’s tail end, he looks as if he’s dreaming aloud.

God, he’s beautiful.

I watch him for a while, remembering how near he was to me last night when he walked me home. I feel warm all over.

My hands coil tightly into the fabric of my lab coat, frustration about to cleave my heart into two. It’s during the quiet times that it raises its head, taunting me about my lost teenage years. We’re so young. Too young to be suffering like this. And I know I’m holding myself back from falling for him. But his kindness is addictive, and I’ve found myself craving it, basking in the image he’s constructed of me. In the lie—a selfless girl who saves the wounded regardless of her own safety.

In that might life, with his ring glittering on my finger, we’d be going out for dinner on a Thursday night to a fancy restaurant where the street would be filled with laughing people and couples celebrating the end of winter, drinking warm tea. The shops would be open until late, the lights keeping the night at bay, flickering to yellow sunbursts on the century-aged stone walls. We’d be lulled into our own world where everyone else’s conversations would be muted and the clock’s arrows would blur, defying the laws of time until he’d take me home. And under the flowering lemon trees outside my apartment building with the lunula moon as our witness, he’d cup my cheeks and kiss me.

Without meaning to, I let out a sigh and his chin snaps back down, eyes sparkling when they catch on my silhouette.

“Salama,” he says, his voice warm as a summer’s day.

“Kenan.” I relish his name. It leaves a sweet aftertaste on my tongue.

He jumps to his feet, stretching his arms overhead.

“Let’s go?” he asks, and I nod, trying not to look too eager.