Stolen Children , livre ebook

STOLEN CHILDREN
David Wickham
2QT Limited (Publishing)
First eBook Edition published 2016
2QT Limited (Publishing)
Unit 5 Commercial Courtyard
Duke Street
Settle
North Yorkshire
BD24 9RH
Copyright © David Wickham 2016
The right of David Wickham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that no part of this book is to be reproduced, in any shape or form. Or by way of trade, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser, without prior permission of the copyright holder
Cover design: Charlotte Mouncey
Additional images from iStockphoto.com
Author/Publisher disclaimer:
While historical details are believed to be accurate, all the characters and names in this book are fictional, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names.
ePub ISBN 978-1-912014-67-5
A Paperback edition of this book is available ISBN 978-1-910077-97-9
In praise of Stolen Children
“This is a story of passionate love and divided loyalties grippingly told. Set against the struggle to right the wrongs of Argentina’s Dirty War, which David Wickham knows well, he tells how the search for lost children causes turmoil for families, communities... and lovers.”
Dame Joan Bakewell
(former Booker Prize Judge)
“An extraordinary story, thrillingly and sensitively told.
A journey into the heart of darkness with enough light to banish despair.”
Roger Bolton
“An intense, absorbing, heart-breaking drama set amidst the dark days of one of South America’s most ruthless dictatorships.”
Gavin Hewitt
“A deeply affecting novel, filled with acute emotional insight and vivid historical detail. A gripping tale that astounds you with man’s capacity for evil - and good.”
Subniv Babuta
By the same author
More Than a Game (with David Teasdale and Sebastian Coe)
For Pam
who always knew
and for all the stolen children who have
been reunited with their proper families
and for those who have yet to be found
How she would have loved
A party today! ‒
Bright-hatted and gloved,
With table and tray
And chairs on the lawn
Her smiles would have shone
With welcoming... But
She is shut, she is shut
From friendship’s spell
In the jailing shell
Of her tiny cell.
From ‘Lament’ by Thomas Hardy
Between 1976 and 1982, the Argentine military government killed about 30,000 people who they believed were enemies of the State. Around 12,000 simply disappeared; they were murdered in captivity after being tortured for information. Among the missing were at least 500 pregnant women who were allowed to give birth to their children in prison and were then killed. Their children were given to military families, or friends of the military regime, to prevent the rise of another generation of subversives.
Chapter 1
1977
The rain on the corrugated iron roofs of the outbuildings sounded like the stamping of the crowd at the Bombonera football stadium in Buenos Aires when the home team scored. The ground shuddered in the same way but there was no joy in the ceaseless vibration. On the rounded Spanish tiles of the main block, the noise was more muted but it still threatened disaster.
At midnight, most of the windows were in darkness save in the guardhouse and the prison hospital. The young squaddie in the sentry box heard an occasional, muffled scream between the thunder claps, but people screamed in their sleep here. And the dogs were never silent, barking at their own shadows, leaping across the wall with every flash of lightning.
Inside the building, in the prison hospital, a young woman prisoner was giving birth and dying. She could see the doctor’s grey eyes over his white mask but they never looked at her. The pains were coming more quickly now. Between the spasms, she drifted in that half world between awareness and near death.
Sometimes she thought that she was already dead and suffering in hell for her sins. The darkness, the fire, the pain, the terrible noise, they were all there just as the priest who had heard her confessions since she was a little girl had said they would be if she did not behave. In the last few years she had been less honest with her confessor and this was clearly her punishment. More fire, more noise, more pain, and they did not bother with confessors in this place. Another spasm caught her. She was sure there would be worse in the afterlife.
She pulled against the manacle which chained her to the operating table. She was trapped. She had seen other women go off to have their babies and assumed that the guards took the manacles off. The women never came back so she could not ask.
All the pregnant internees were kept at one end of a long corridor, their torture over for the moment. They were the only ones who stayed for long in the prison; others would come for a few days and then not return to their cells.
What would become of her baby? Until now, Caridad had never given up hope, never stopped praying for a miracle. Maybe if she had been more honest with God He would have come to her and her baby’s aid.
Caridad had tried to stop her baby coming, to delay the spasms, to prevent her child being born into such a world; now it was too late.
‘Please!’ she screamed.
‘Shhhh. Be calm.’ The doctor was stern and he gripped her leg hard.
She had only seen one doctor at San Juan, when she was first arrested and they realised she was pregnant; subsequently she was seen twice more. She remembered when she, or rather her jailers, had dislocated her shoulder after hanging her up by one arm. Two of them held her down then and the doctor yanked her arm back into position. Since she had arrived here, she had never felt a soft hand, never a hand at all unless it was beating her senseless or squeezing the life from her.
‘Please!’
Who was she pleading with? What was she asking? She didn’t know any more. For five months Caridad had screamed and no one had heard. She remembered what a women in the next door cell had said when she first arrived: ‘Tell them what they want to know. Everybody does in the end.’
After two or three days she had told them but still they tortured her: beatings, near drownings, sleep deprivation, the picana ‒ a prod they moved cattle with which gave her electric shocks ‒ and rape. She had lost track of how many times she had been raped and by how many people; her only solace was the knowledge that they could not contaminate her with their sperm because she was already pregnant. Sometimes one of the soldiers or policemen would wander into her cell, slap her hard across the face, rape her and leave, without saying a word. Sometimes two or three or four men would come in, rip from her body what passed for clothes and pass her around, spinning her from one to another and raping her, laughing and talking as though she were not there. Sometimes they raped her with the picana .
That went on until about four months ago, when the doctor said that she would lose the child she was carrying if they continued. The men had smirked and warned her not to regard it as a reprieve but ‘just a little pause in our activities’. And then one had squeezed her nipple hard to show he outranked the doctor. Since then, they had taunted and cajoled her but didn’t physically abuse her. They moved her to a cell in the special corridor, gave her proper food to eat and a mattress to lie on.
She had been pretty before, even beautiful. The hair which used to spring from her head was now lank and thin. The once full lips had narrowed; now they were rigid and pursed with pain. Her quicksilver eyes were dull; once indigo and as wide as the pampas, they had retreated behind her high cheek bones. Her face already resembled a skull.
Now her baby was coming and there was nothing she could do to stop it. The pains were coming every two or three minutes but, after the pain of the picana , she could bear them. She dragged her wrist against the manacle, braced her knees again and arched her back.
‘Push!’ the doctor said. ‘Just push ... and relax. And push!’
There was no pethidine, no epidural, only oxygen to keep her alive long enough to deliver. She drew on the mask but it did nothing to ease her pain. She pushed.
The nurse was more excited now. ‘It’s coming.’
‘Pushhhh!’ said the doctor.
Months of agony and brutality the world had not yet heard about were fused in Caridad’s single scream and the child was born.
‘ Bueno !’ The woman was aware of someone saying that above the cries that announced her baby’s first breaths. She tried to raise her arms to the child but one was shackled to the bed and the other could only wave weakly in the air. The doctor finished wrapping the child in a white linen cloth and passed it to a nurse, then it was gone in an instant. They did not tell her whether it was a boy or a girl.
She tried to scream, ‘My baby!’ Her mouth moved but emitted no sound. She had no more fight left and anyway, she was already being wheeled out.
Chapter 2
The outer door of the operating theatre swung open and a wavy-haired man in a police captain’s uniform entered. The doctor, swathed in surgical cap and gown, glowered at Captain Raul Martinez but reluctantly accepted his authority. It was dangerous to appear disinclined to do one’s duty.
‘I was about to call you,’ the doctor said.
Martinez