Work Text:
In 1937, the Basque town of Gernika was bombed by fascists. In the same year, Pablo Picasso painted ‘Guernica’ as a response.
In 1965, Hawkeye Pierce visited the Museum of Modern Art.
Hawkeye Pierce feels like he’s being called into the principal’s office. He resists the urge to put his feet up on the oak desk in front of him and another, fresher memory resurfaces. For a second, he thinks he can smell the foulness that stuck to all of them in Korea and that had taken weeks of being at home for him to wash away.
He jumps up from the chair again and walks back and forth from window to wall like a tiger pacing his enclosure. The office doesn’t even look like in Korea. For one, it has proper walls and no liquor cabinet.
It happens to him less often nowadays. Occasionally, the noise of a helicopter makes his heart race. There are dreams, sometimes, but they are few and far in between. Eating in a cafeteria still gives him the creeps, even though the food here isn’t half bad. People hardly notice.
“Dr May will be with you in a minute,” the secretary pops her head into the office with a toothy smile that only barely covers up her own impatience.
“I hope he won’t make me wait until May.”
“I am sure it will just be a couple more minutes,” she assured him, her smile unwavering and still as fake as before.
“What, now it’s a couple more minutes? What happened to the one minute?”
He is sure now that the impatience is directed at him, not Dr May’s tardiness. He doesn’t intend to do anything about it.
“And if he has the time to tell you that, why doesn’t he have the time to come here right now? He asked to talk to me !”
He points at himself and the secretary sighs and closes the door again.
Dr May, medical director at Portland General, arrives four minutes later.
“Apologies for making you wait, Dr Pierce, but you know how it is. Always something coming up around here.”
He points him to the chair that Hawkeye had been sitting in until just a couple minutes ago anyway, and gets a dossier from his drawer.
“I hope the wait wasn’t too inconvenient,” he smiles, as he sorts through the papers, pushing his glasses back on his nose with his other hand.
“Oh, not for me,” Hawkeye waves the sentence away. “Maybe for my patients. You know how it is, always something coming up, patients needing my attention, bleeding out in the ER.”
This gets him a weak chuckle from Dr May.
It’s not what he was going for, but he takes it.
“Now, Dr Pierce, I am sure you know why I called you in here.”
“I swear, a moose ate my homework,” he puts his hands up in defence.
Another weak chuckle.
“They warned me about your sense of humour when I started here, you know. No, I wanted to ask why you haven’t accepted the conference invitation yet.”
Ah, that’s what’s going on, Hawkeye thinks. The envelope with the invitation has been sitting on his desk for a week now, opened but unanswered.
“Oh, that’s easy. I’m not planning on going.”
“If it’s money you’re concerned about, the hospital would be more than happy to-”
“That’s a most generous offer but you’re misunderstanding me. I simply don’t want to go.”
The director stares at him as if he’s just told him he’s taking maternity leave.
“I don’t understand,” he says, and for a second he really looks hurt in a way that is profoundly funny to Hawkeye and Hawkeye alone.
“It’s New York City, it’s a prestigious conference where the best surgeons in the country present their work and they want you as one of the keynote speakers to present your paper and you don’t want to go?”
He shrugs: “I didn’t want to write that paper either, but Dr Vermeer made me.”
And it had taken a lot of persuasion from their chief of thoracics.
Hawkeye is a damn fine surgeon but he isn’t a writer, least of all of academic papers. Makes him feel like he’s back at college, with all the referencing and punctuation and formatting. Dr Vermeer had to edit the paper several times before it was ready for publication and then it had taken months before it got published. He had already forgotten about it when Dr Vermeer had pointed to his name in the newest issue of the American Journal of Surgery.
He never expected anyone to pay attention to it either, for him, it had just been another operation.
The fact that no one ever had done what he did, the way he did it, was no surprise.
In Korea, half of the operations had felt like novelties, especially under those conditions.
He had just done what was right for the patient, and it had worked.
That night, BJ had called him to talk about the article and why he didn’t tell him about it.
“I didn’t think it was a big deal,” Hawkeye shrugged.
A couple days later, he received a letter and bottle of champagne from Charles, who congratulated him on his work.
“Do you know how much this conference would mean for the hospital? For its image?”
“Oh I understand,” Hawkeye smiles slyly, “you want to make Portland General Maine’s main hospital.”
“Exactly,” Dr May says and nods, followed by a streak of confusion darting across his face.
“Why don’t you present the paper, then?”
“Because they want the author of the paper, the man of the hour, the demi-god in white.”
Hawkeye fails to resist the urge to roll his eyes. It’s not like he doesn’t like his fair share of appreciation, or attention even, but not like this. Enough of the hero worship.
“Sorry, both of my parents were mortals.”
“Listen, Dr Pierce, you’re going to that conference, if you want to or not.”
Dr May’s voice takes on a tone he remembers only from superior officers, usually followed by a threatened court-martial.
A little voice inside of him wants to fight him. He can feel his blood run hot and there is nothing he wants more than to argue this case to death, defeat Dr May with his rapid fire arguments, jokes, insults, anything that would change his mind, and die on this hill, if all else fails.
A younger version of him would have done so and succeeded.
Hawkeye Pierce is no longer that man.
“About the money-”
“All travel and expenses paid, we’re even booking you a business class flight.”
For the first five years after the war he had scarcely left Crabapple Cove and had scarcely treated anything but common head colds, minor cuts, a few broken bones and burst appendixes. By the time this had started to bore him, he knew he was ready to go back into surgery.
He wrote applications to a dozen hospitals. He received answers from thirteen, one of them Boston Mercy. But when Portland General invited him for an interview, he knew it was the right choice for him. When he told Charles he accepted the position there, he was met with a list of reasons why Boston Mercy was the best hospital in New England.
“Portland is just an hour from home,” he had countered. “I need to be close to dad.”
“I understand,” Charles had answered, and that was the end of the argument. A week later, he moved to a small apartment in Portland.
The conference isn’t until late November, and Hawkeye almost forgets about it until Dr May calls him back to his office to give him the flight tickets, hotel directions and the order of events at the conference.
He writes the speech on the plane. It’s not his best work, but no one will care. He has the charisma to sell it, and that’s the only thing people care about. He scans the list of speakers, hoping for a familiar name or two. Not a single one, and the panels and poster sessions look equally bleak.
He knows that BJ doesn’t do conferences this far from home because of Erin, and that Trapper doesn’t do conferences at all. At a conference that prestigious, he thought maybe Charles would have entered a paper or two. Maybe he’s too busy, as Hawkeye should be too.
The stewardess gives him a strange look when she sees him pore over a loose collection of note cards, a Scotch in his hand and a pen behind his ear.
He almost hopes for a medical emergency on the flight, cries of “is there a doctor on this plane” just so he can jump into action and perform a tracheotomy with his pen or an impromptu open heart surgery and then call the hotel and apologise for missing his time slot because he was too busy saving a life.
The airplane lands without any problems and a taxi takes him straight to the hotel. He checks into his room and then walks downstairs to check into the conference. The main venue is a conference hall adjacent to the lobby, with a little stage on one side and an army of wooden chairs in neat rows.
A man at the entrance checks his papers and then smiles at him when he hands him a name tag reading “Benjamin F. Pierce”.
As the other attendees pour in, he gets out his pen, strikes out his first name and adds “Hawkeye” on top.
The room fills up quickly, surgeons in their finest non-hospital clothes standing around the chairs chatting about work and research and their marriages and kids. Hawkeye can’t wait for the conference to start, so people take their seats and no longer try to talk to approach him with the same dull questions about his work, research and non-existent family. The sooner it all starts, the sooner it will be over.
One of the front row chairs is reserved for him and he quickly switches some names around to sit next to the exit.
Surely, the room looked nice once. But now the carpet is worn down, and the decor is at least 20 years out of fashion.
Hawkeye feels similar.
He is no longer the young, promising surgeon he was when he got invited in front of a draft board. The salt in his salt and pepper hair has been gaining territory since he was 30.
Sometimes, when he is standing in the OR his feet and back hurt and he knows he is too young for this and that it was the day-long OR sessions in Korea that had worn his body down, together with the lack of sleep and malnutrition.
Half of the doctors in the room look like they’re fresh out of med school. The other half look like they died a year ago. The first half probably thinks he belongs to the second half.
When did he start feeling that old? How long until all these new techniques are impossible to keep up with? How long until he’s obsolete?
If anything, this damned paper proved to him that after everything, he still was a damn good surgeon. For how much longer he couldn’t possibly know.
After three years of meatball surgery and five years of nothing, it had taken him a while to get used to it all again. People told him he was a good surgeon, but there had always been the voice of doubt in his mind: good for a country doctor? Good for a meatball surgeon? Good for someone who wasted the better half of a decade?
He knows that BJ and Charles had felt the same after returning home. BJ had just been at the start of his career when he had been drafted, and Charles had been well-respected in his field. Both of them had shaken off Korea much quicker than him. BJ recently made chief of surgery at his hospital himself, and Charles had been in charge of his little herd of surgeons from the second he returned to Boston.
Hawkeye doesn’t even want a promotion.
He doesn’t want to write any papers, he doesn’t want to go to any conferences and he doesn’t want to spend every free minute of his day reading journals. He just wants to do his job well for as long as he possibly can.
A man enters the stage now, finally, and the room falls silent.
Hawkeye is only half-listening.
Something something welcome everyone, something exciting research yada yada.
Two doctors enter the stage, and Hawkeye has to force himself to listen when they talk about research into arterial bypass surgery.
His talk is next, and Hawkeye tries to turn off his brain the second he is called on stage. He can hear himself talking, but he might as well be an audience member. Even though he has all his note cards in order, he improvises half of his talk, simply holding the cards in his hand as he points to the various diagrams the slide projector is throwing at the wall behind him.
His jokes get laughs, and when he explains the specifics of the procedure, he can hear pens clicking and scribbling down notes. There are some nods and some wide-eyed young surgeons in the middle rows.
He has no idea what he has been talking about.
“A question, Dr Pierce,” one of the young surgeons perks up as he is ready to take his bow and leave the stage.
“Are you thinking about developing this further in a laboratory setting? I’m on a research grant at-”
“I’m thinking about using the technique,” Hawkeye smiles through gritted teeth. “I grant you permission to do whatever you want with your grant.”
He’s half off the stage when a man stands up: “Dr Stoker from Mount Sinai. I have a question too. More of a comment, really-”
“No comments, unless they’re on stone tablets. Now, I’d really like to get back to my seat and I’m sure Dr Cardiff is eager to take over for me.”
Dr Stoker sits back down with a sour expression on his face and in the front row, a woman beams at him before taking the stage.
The man on the chair next to him, whose name tag he can’t read from this angle, gives him an appreciative nod when he sits back down.
After Dr Cardiff’s speech, a coffee break is declared and the masses wander into a second room, where coffee and cookies are laid out on some standing tables. While everyone is distracted, Hawkeye sneaks out of the room, already sensing an upcoming barrage of people with questions that are more of a comment, really.
He stuffs his name tag into his jacket pocket and debates going up to his room, before changing his mind and walking outside for some fresh air.
Fresh air is relative in New York, but it’s better than nothing. It’s cold outside, but as long as he’s walking, he’s at least feeling warm.
Some of the trees are bare already, while some have the last of the yellow and red leaves clinging to their branches.
The city is grey, as is the weather. Skyscrapers and concrete and clouds, with some redbricks in between, and even these take on a grey tone in this weather. If he didn’t know better, he’d think that the coarse exterior of these buildings is reflecting the sky above as windows do.
It’s busy, but New York always is, and he is quite glad that none of these people knows him. No one looks at him here, questions him aimlessly wandering around the city.
It starts to drizzle and he wouldn’t have noticed if it wasn’t for the tiny dark spots on the sidewalk and his clothes.
The drizzle turns into rain.
Hawkeye stops under the marquee of a bodega and considers his course of action. He could walk back to the hotel, but the risk is too great that someone sees him and makes him go back to the conference. Hawkeye turns up the collar of his jacket and walks on, staying close to the buildings in order to stay dry.
He follows no clear path, simply picking directions by which street looks most interesting, knowing that if he gets lost he just has to hail a taxi.
Eventually, he ends up in front of a gigantic cube of a building, two rows of windows on top and large, grey tiles facing him. Streams of people walk in and out, opening and closing their umbrellas. He doesn’t know what to make of it until he sees in large letters ‘The Museum Of Modern Art’ written on the side.
Hawkeye buys a ticket.
He doesn’t know much about modern art nor does he care for it, but everything beats listening to the same three doctors talk about the same three surgeries for the next couple of hours.
Some of the more colourful paintings are interesting to look at, and that’s at least something. In Korea, he’d sometimes have to sit through Charles trying to explain the great impressionists to him when drunk and he’d have nothing against seeing some of those now, at least he’d have a smattering of knowledge on those.
He recognises the names of some of the artists and knows he should care about them, but mostly Hawkeye just wanders from room to room, past other tourists, glancing at each painting for just a second or two. If he likes it, he stops for a few seconds more.
He hopes that by the time he’s made it through the museum, his coat and hair are dry again. For the first couple of rooms, his shoes leave wet prints on the parquet that reflect the light when he looks back to stare at his path through the rooms. Other prints of different shapes and sizes draw their own paths and add to the picture as people walk in and out. It’s a prettier picture than half the stuff on the walls.
On the third floor, it’s not much different, until he reaches a room that, on one of the walls, houses a single, large painting.
The sheer size of it takes Hawkeye’s breath away before he can really tell what it is.
In front of him, covering an entire wall, hangs a painting in black and white and grey, and at first, he thinks it’s just shapes he’s looking at until he sees the horse, mouth agape, and the hands and heads of people and is that a light bulb?
A sign identifies the painting as Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. He has heard of it, of course. Hawkeye vaguely remembers seeing a small picture of it in a Boston newspaper when he had just moved there.
He never had the time back then to check it out. He never really thought about it.
It’s not a very realistic painting, Hawkeye notes. He can’t make out the whole body of the horse among all the weird shapes and he knows that horses don’t have eyes like that. The heads look like stuff he tried to draw in art class as a kid.
And then, as if that part of the painting had been hidden from him before, his eyes wander to the bottom left corner of the painting.
A mother stands under half a bull, her head stretched upwards in an unnatural angle stuck in a silent scream, a baby in her arms, it’s eyes lifeless and head limply hanging over her arm.
As his eyes lock with those of the mother, he can feel something inside his body turn . He wants to say it’s his stomach, and he does feel nauseous, but it’s something less tangible than the organs he spent his life studying and cutting open.
And then something inside him simply stops.
He knows, logically, that his heart is still beating and pumping blood through his body, a fragile but efficient network of blood vessels and organs, but he can no longer feel any of it.
He heard of people having out-of-body experiences where they feel themselves float outside their bodies, but it isn’t like that. If anything, his body is more his own than usual, it has simply stopped, right in its tracks.
The rest of the painting reverts back into the abstract shapes he perceived it at when he walked into the room for the first time. The other visitors turn into blurry shapes at the periphery of his vision.
Here he is, on the third floor of a museum, and here is the mother and her baby.
He never found out what happened to her, he realises.
He never saw her again after getting off the bus.
She must have buried it somewhere. She must have grieved it somewhere.
Did she have a husband? Was he in the army, or had he died too? Did she have to tell him?
“Sir, we’re closing.”
Hawkeye turns around when he feels a hand on his shoulder.
The security guard is pointing at his watch.
Hawkeye comes to slowly, and his feet feel like lead. He hadn’t even noticed the time passing.
The room is empty now, except for him and the guard leading him outside.
It’s dark now, as dark as it gets in a city with millions of street- and traffic lights and cars and lit up windows and billboards.
It’s still raining.
His clothes, which had been dry by now, are drenched again within minutes.
Soon enough, Hawkeye finds himself back at the hotel, where today’s portion of the conference is long over and only a handful of people are standing around the lobby talking. After changing into dry clothes, Hawkeye hits up the bar and orders a Martini for the first time in over a decade.
He orders three more before going to bed.
The next morning, Hawkeye doesn’t even think about attending the conference. Dr May had told him to use the other two days for networking and for making sure to tell people how great Portland is treating him.
He grabs a croissant from the breakfast buffet and walks back to the museum. He reaches it quicker this time, walking a direct route instead of zigzagging through the streets. He pays for another ticket and makes a beeline for the third floor.
Hawkeye doesn’t exactly know why he does it. He doesn’t know if there has to be a reason.
He stands in front of the Guernica, as close as he’s allowed to stand, and for as long as he can stand in one spot. As a surgeon, that is a pretty long time. He can hear people enter and leave, people having quiet conversations about the painting, but they all blend into the background again.
When he can no longer stand, he sits down on the floor, eye to eye with the baby now.
It’s a quiet meditation on his past, a past he has tried to not think about for a decade.
He is better now, Hawkeye tells himself.
He hadn’t flinched once when a baby boarded the plane yesterday.
He is a surgeon again.
He visited his dad every other weekend. He had been there during the next operation. He had been there until it was all over.
He visits the family plot every year.
He talks to his friends on the phone and sends them Christmas cards. Two years ago, they had all met up with their families and he had lifted Erin up when he hugged her, even though she was 12 and tall for her age and had protested vehemently.
The baby, it would be about that age now.
It wouldn’t remember the war and would play with its friends at school and disobey its mother and it would be a - he realises he doesn’t know if it was a boy or girl.
In his head, the only thing it can be is a baby.
There is no window in his room and the light is unchanging. Hawkeye doesn’t have a watch. He doesn’t need to know how long he’s been here.
Picasso never saw this scene, of course. He painted this at home in France. Still, it’s real. Decades apart, it’s real, so real that it might be the same mother in this painting.
No, Hawkeye thinks. The mother didn’t scream. They would have heard her and it all would have been for nothing. Her tears had been silent and he can still see the exhaustion and fear in her effort to stay silent in her mourning, and the suppressed sobs.
Maybe he will never get better, maybe he isn’t allowed to. The same way the mother wasn’t allowed to scream and the baby wasn’t allowed to grow up.
Maybe it will always be like this, periods of normality followed by whatever he is going through now. It can’t be another nervous breakdown, no, that had felt different. Whatever it was, it was the opposite. A painful clarity. While the breakdown had him suppress the memory, now he wanted to do nothing but think about it.
“Sir? Sir, can you hear me?”
Hawkeye doesn’t move.
“Sir, we’re closing, you need to leave. Sir, I don’t want to repeat myself a third time.”
There is a hand on his shoulder again, but this time it pulls him up forcefully.
“We closed fifteen minutes ago, you need to leave.”
“I’m, I’m not finished,” Hawkeye brings out and his voice is hoarse. He hasn’t used it enough today.
“Yes, you are. Now, if you don’t start moving, I’ll have to throw you out.”
It’s the same guard, or at least Hawkeye thinks so.
“The baby,” Hawkeye says and his voice feels like sandpaper in his throat. Sounds like it, too.
“It’s not running away, it will still be there tomorrow.”
He feels the grip on his arm tighten as he gets steered down the stairs. Resistance is futile.
“I should have stopped it,” Hawkeye cries out as they pass the lobby.
“Please, I need to find out how I could have stopped it.”
“Stopped what,” the man rolls his eyes. The woman behind the front desk gives him a queer look.
“The baby, the war, the, everything, I-” but with that Hawkeye is pushed through the doors and out on the cold street.
He walks straight back to his room and falls asleep. In his dream, he is back on the bus, again and again, and no attempt can stop it. Every path leads into the same direction: him in that room, with the same guilt. He wakes up in a cold sweat.
On the way to the breakfast buffet, Hawkeye walks past the young researcher. He can be lucky he wasn’t drafted yet, he thinks.
For a third and final time, Hawkeye leaves for the museum. When he pays for his ticket, the same woman sits at the front desk and raises an eyebrow at him.
“Your friends are already upstairs,” she says as she hands him the ticket.
“Yeah, yeah,” Hawkeye nods, not sure what the woman is talking about but too nervous to spend his time thinking about it.
Back on the third floor, he finds half a dozen people sitting cross-legged in front of the painting.
“Did you hear,” a young woman says as she enters the room with a man by her side, “that yesterday some guy did a sit-in to protest Vietnam here?”
Hawkeye wants to open his mouth to say something. Obviously she’s wrong. If this had happened, he would have noticed. He was there the entire day, surely he wouldn’t have missed it.
“Really?” the man asks.
“Yeah, it was in the papers this morning. Security guard said he had to throw this guy out two days in a row and he shouted something about stopping the war.”
The man nods: “huh, interesting.”
One of the people on the floor turns around and smiles at the couple: “That’s why we’re here, too.”
She is a young woman, a hand-painted sign in her lap with a peace symbol.
“It’s inspiring, isn’t it?” She points at the painting.
“Macy,” the man next to her shushes her. “This was supposed to be a silent vigil.”
“But how can we spread our message if we don’t talk to people?”
The man rolls his eyes: “the painting speaks for itself. War is hell.”
“War isn’t hell.”
He isn’t sure why he said it, but now everyone is staring at him.
“War is war and hell is hell.”
He still remembers explaining this in a shabby OR what felt like half a lifetime ago.
“There are no innocent bystanders in hell,” he points at the painting, at the mother and child.
Back then he had been tired all the time, physically and of the war, but it was nothing against the tiredness he feels in his soul this second, chewing up the same talking points from a decade ago for a whole new war.
“Dude, you’re right,” the man nods.
“So, let me get this straight,” Hawkeye says, positioning himself between the couple and the vigil, “you’re sitting here now become some meshuggener got thrown out of the museum?”
“No,” another woman smiles: “we’re sitting here because we believe in peace and we want to end the war. All wars.”
There is a murmur going through the room in agreement.
“It’s, like, a sign. We’re showing the bigwigs in Washington that we’re sick of war. Sure, it would be better if we were more people, but it has to start somewhere, you know. Yesterday it was just one guy, today it’s us six, and maybe tomorrow it’s the whole museum. And then the whole city, maybe. If just enough of us decide it’s time for peace, they’ll have to listen.”
Hawkeye nods. He isn’t sure if he believes it. He probably doesn’t, but he gets it. There was a time he thought that writing a letter to Truman or crashing the peace talks or taking out an appendix could make a difference. Vietnam has been going on for ten years now. He had been lucky with his three in Korea.
But maybe they were right, maybe it simply would have taken more people. Six is a good start, that’s half the disciples. But he’s getting too old for this at an age far too young.
There is a new generation of surgeons now and a new generation of soldiers dying in a foreign land and a new generation of babies dying in their mother’s arms and a new generation of righteous outrage.
“Have you seen the one Picasso did about Korea?” the woman standing next to him asks into the room.
“Yes,” Hawkeye lies and turns around to leave.
Whatever the painting is about, he is sure he has seen it.
In April 1966, a detail from Guernica was printed in El Corno Emplumado with the text ‘Stop the War in Vietnam Now’.
In 1967, several posters with the same motif were printed. Protestors in Central Park held up prints of Guernica.
In December 1969, Irving Petlin, Jon Hendricks and Fraser Dougherty produced ‘Q. And babies? A. And babies’ using a picture of the My Lai massacre.
In February 1974, Tony Shafrazi sprayed ‘KILL LIES ALL’ onto Guernica.
Throughout the war, anti-war vigils were held in the Guernica room.