The book was our mother’s idea. I’d seen her one night on the staircase. I woke up, saw that Bibi’s bed was empty, and crept out into the corridor. Through the half-open door of the flat I could make out two figures in the dark, a smaller one on the landing and a larger one a few steps above her.

  My mother was reading about mountains, and a vixen who got caught in a storm in her hot-air balloon.

  ‘Come back.’

  She extended her hand towards her daughter. At first, Bibi didn’t react. She was trying to open the window on the staircase, but her sleepy fingers couldn’t work the handle. Our mother kept on reading. She read with her deep, warm voice, a voice you could feel in your own chest.

  Her reading opened a door. Bibi slowly and tentatively turned round, wherever she was, and walked towards this door. I didn’t dare breathe as I watched the two of them. Not even once Bibi had grasped our mother’s hand and let her take her in her arms. Those were precious moments in her embrace. Only rarely were you allowed close enough to hear her heart beating.

  ‘There you are now. There you are.’

  People would try anything if the prospects were bad enough. They’d throw all reason and rationality to the wind. They’d believe charlatans, turn to the stars, take up prayer, and hurriedly switch gods if theirs didn’t come to their aid.

  Sooner or later, they’d give up. But if they were holding books in their hands, if they were telling stories they believed would bring people back to life, you just had to let them.

  We were preparing a patient for the intervention. She’d come from an institution, where she’d spent the past six years of her life. She was very sick. The type of patient of whom the doctor would say, ‘We can get her functioning again. We can spare her the worst.’

  And it made sense. As the doctor had said, it made sense. And when we explained the intervention to them, the family saw this too.

  Her parents were already old. Her sister was there as well. She was waiting in the corridor with her grown-up son.

  ‘Fine,’ said her father, once we’d discussed everything. He took the consent form, took one last look at his daughter, and signed.

  The doctor and his assistants were the first to take their leave. He’d see the family again tomorrow, and then something new would begin. That’s how he always concluded these meetings with families.

  I asked the family if they’d like to stay a little longer. They thanked me, but declined the offer. Like almost all the family members who brought their relative to the hospital for the intervention, they wanted to leave quickly and only come back when everything was over. I accompanied them to the stairs. I shook their hands.

  ‘Is there really nothing to worry about?’ asked the sister as I was saying goodbye. She held on to my hand a little longer.

  ‘She won’t be a burden to anyone any more,’ I said. This usually allayed any final doubts. I nodded at them.

  The sister released her grip, but she didn’t take her eyes off me.

  ‘You shouldn’t expect her to be an entirely new person. We do what we can within the bounds of possibility. That’s all we can do.’ I turned away.

  ‘Come on,’ said the sister’s son softly, but she stayed where she was. I could still feel her gaze upon me. It held the same scepticism as Sarah’s. It followed me as I walked away. It would follow me for the rest of the day, all the way to the nurses’ halls, all the way into sleep. How tired it made me.

  I turned round to her again. ‘It won’t heal her.’

  The next morning, as I was about to take over from the night nurse, the doctor asked me to come straight to his office. The woman’s family had provisionally withdrawn their consent for the intervention. They were asking for more information. They wanted to meet patients who had already had the intervention. My words had been a warning to them not to blindly follow their hope.

  Coffee was brought in. The doctor said, ‘I understand you. But I can’t tolerate this kind of behaviour here. I must put a stop to it before it escalates.’

  The corners of his mouth were twitching. I recalled the fear I’d once had that he might like me. My fear of his smile. But it was just the pain in the corners of his mouth. And you only saw it if you were close enough to him.

  ‘I knew I was taking a risk.’ He took a sip of coffee. He didn’t usually do this. He always let his coffee go cold in my presence. ‘I was aware this might happen to you.’ He looked straight at me. ‘You’re human, after all.’

  I was thirsty. I reached for my cup. It clattered on its saucer. I withdrew my hand.

  ‘I’m going to have you transferred to another department. Maybe it was just too much here. This will give you an opportunity to sort yourself out. And after that, we’ll see.’

  I nodded. There was nothing else I could do. My courage was of no use to me in here.

  ‘Other hospitals have had a lot of success,’ he said, ‘with disorders like yours. Inclinations no human should have… such things don’t have to go untreated. I’d like to start offering that here too. Maybe it could also be a solution for you. I’d like to help you.’ Then he stood up. He extended his hand towards me. ‘I’ll enquire as to how you are doing.’

  I reached for his hand. ‘Goodbye,’ I said quietly.

  He blinked.

  10

  It happened. Nurses had arguments and had to leave their ward. I’d assumed nothing like that would ever happen to me, of course. And when it did, I waited in vain for my dismay to set in.

  I was transferred to the ward on the second floor. My old room-mate had done her training in internal medicine there. When she first started, she would go very pale whenever she talked about work. It was rough, she said. The older nurses ran a strict regime. They didn’t think much of compassion. Not towards anyone.

  It was still like that. You could see it in the way the younger nurses climbed the stairs and lined up for the handover. That was the power of the older nurses. That would be my power one day too.

  I didn’t mind. I was used to it. By now I could read the older nurses. I knew the signs and reacted automatically. I didn’t even feel the fear I was supposed to feel. I was under observation. The doctor had said he would enquire as to how I was doing on the new ward. Yet I was wholly indifferent to this observation. ‘Yes,’ was all I said to the older nurses. I did what was demanded of me, without resisting or buckling under pressure.

  I changed dirty sheets, I tended to wounds, I administered medication, I washed bodies, and if I was berated and barked at while I worked, I felt no shame. I simply waited until the nurses had finished their tirade. They were as bound by time as I was. It never lasted long.

  Only the night shift was a challenge. The silence breathing down your neck. The weariness, usually around three o’clock, a hammering weariness driving into your eyes and legs, subsuming everything. Death, sneaking up from behind. I could barely keep it at bay.

  At the end of the shift, I sat in the changing room on the bench. I thought about the young man who’d developed a severe fever. The weariness had long since evaporated. I was on an early-morning high, rejoicing that he had survived.

  When I looked up, Sarah was there. Standing only a few metres away.

  We stared at each other in disbelief. The night had left its traces on us: Sarah’s apron was smeared with blood, her uniform edged with dark patches of sweat.

  ‘I heard what you did.’ She came over and sat down beside me. She stretched out her legs. ‘With that patient who was here to be operated on.’ She took out her cigarettes and lit one. ‘It was stupid.’

  She blew out the smoke. So she was one of those who left their cigarette butts here – the ones we complained about and cursed because they couldn’t wait five more minutes to smoke outdoors. Impossible, I thought. She’s impossible.

  ‘Please don’t do anything like that again.’ She was careless with her cigarette. The ash was dropping on her apron. ‘I can’t lose anyone else.’

  How much I loved her. For a moment I couldn’t breathe.

  11

  Once every two weeks, I visited Marianne. I did my hair before each visit. I cleaned and polished my shoes. I borrowed a handbag off a nurse from a better home. She adjusted the collar on my dress. She pulled the handbag out of the crook of my arm and moved it to the right place. She spotted every detail that exposed the person standing before her. Unlike him.

  He was always there. He seemed almost delighted when I came in the door. ‘Hello!’ he said, looking like all he wanted to do was throw open his arms and embrace me. But he’d been trained out of such habits. He put all the emotion he felt into his handshake instead.

  ‘Hello,’ I replied. We’d never introduced ourselves. It was probably too late for that now.

  ‘Marianne,’ he said, kissing his sister on the forehead. ‘You have a visitor.’ He let me have his chair. He stayed standing, but seemed to crumple as all the joy drained out of him.

  A strange change had begun. Marianne was starting to look as if she was made of stone. Her eyelashes, her nails, her mouth, her skin – her body seemed entirely untouched by time in this bed. He, on the other hand, was starting to disappear. He’d become thinner, his face narrower, his voice quieter. The presence he’d been given, a presence to fill any room, had shrunk to the point where it no longer exceeded himself. The only thing that roused him was the joy he felt when I came. And when he talked about Marianne’s progress, which no one but he could see.

  ‘How is your work going?’ he asked.

  ‘Very well, thank you.’ I didn’t say: There’s been an incident. There’s been a derailment on my part. And since then, I’ve been doubting who or what I am.

  ‘I play cards with her,’ he said. He pointed to the pile of cards by the photographs. He told me this every time. He said he followed her blinking, or the tip of her index finger. That she’d already won a game this way. And then he forgot, and told me again.

  ‘Has she had any visitors since I saw her last?’ I asked.

  ‘You know what they’re like.’ He frowned briefly. The furrows in his brow seemed to be saying: No, you don’t know what they’re like. You don’t know anything about us, you’re not one of us. Then they vanished again. ‘Father has expanded the foundation. Now he even pays for scholarships for working-class children. Have you read about it?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘He would roll up his sleeves and single-handedly drag anyone out of the dirt. Apart from us, of course. After all, we’re his own. He’d have to take a good look at himself in the mirror. And grapple with what he sees there.’ He cleared his throat. ‘But what am I saying? You’re here. You’ve come all this way. The day you left, Marianne was distraught. Of all the places you could have gone to when you left school, you chose the middle of nowhere.’ He sounded reproachful. ‘Did you get married there?’

  ‘No.’ Her old room-mate had moved in with her sister. A tooth as a farewell gift, and Marianne never heard from her again.

  I was grateful. I was grateful that here, I could step into her shoes. That I could be her for a few hours. That here, I wasn’t worthless. I could be useful if I wasn’t me.

  Her brother accepted my no. ‘There’s a doctor here,’ he said, ‘who’s trying a new treatment. He’s cautiously optimistic.’

  ‘What kind of treatment?’

  ‘A high-dosage drug. High enough to’ – his hand made a fist and thumped his chest – ‘restart someone’s heart.’

  ‘Who is this doctor?’

  He went over to the table. He poured two glasses of water but only brought his own back. ‘My father asked me the same question.’ His water went down the wrong way, and he coughed. ‘He phones here, did I tell you that? He asks me to hold the receiver to her ear so he can talk to her. He tells her about his day.’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then screwed up his face as if there was a bad smell in the room. ‘I’m the spitting image of him. More than my brothers and sister. The nose, the eyes, the mouth, the ears… everything. I even sound like him on the phone.’

  ‘I wouldn’t get the two of you confused.’

  ‘You definitely would.’ He smiled, and he became a different man. ‘But thank you for saying so.’

  His smile was infectious. It was all over this room. I looked at Marianne, convinced it would infect her too.

  ‘Tell me what you know about this treatment.’ I wanted a taste of this hope he was still harbouring. I knew I shouldn’t. Not me. I knew better. But I still wanted it.

  12

  She opened the door as I was getting changed. ‘Sorry,’ she said, closing the door in front of her a little.

  ‘Come in.’ You’ve seen me before, haven’t you? I added in my head.

  ‘How was your night?’ She slipped into the room behind me.

  ‘Long.’

  ‘Mine too.’

  We saw each other more often now I had night shifts on the new ward. We said goodbye to each other in the usual way: ‘See you Saturday.’ ‘See you Monday.’ ‘See you next week.’ The familiar untidiness was returning, and in the corner stood our plant, showing off its luminous green, unperturbed by anything that had happened in this room.

  ‘Have you eaten yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shall we go down and see what there is?’

  I nodded. We’d only recently started doing that together again. ‘Sure.’

  Glancing over my shoulder, I saw she was still wearing her coat. She was waiting until I was done and had moved away from the wardrobe so we wouldn’t get too close to one another. Since we’d gone back to living in the room together, we’d avoided closeness, any physical contact.

  ‘Meret,’ she said softly.

  My heart leaped. She’d said my name, breaching the invisible boundary between us.

  ‘I’m all done.’ I sat on the bed and undid my ponytail. My scalp hurt. I massaged it with my fingertips.

  ‘You are being careful, aren’t you? About what you say to people?’

  ‘Of course I am.’ I didn’t say: Actually, I couldn’t care less what happens at work any more. I’d said this to her once before, and it had enraged her. Through clenched teeth, she’d forbidden me to repeat it.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ She pressed her palms together.

  I looked over at her. At first, we’d also avoided any eye contact. I’d reacquainted myself with every corner, every spider in this room so I didn’t have to look at her.

  ‘An encounter.’ Now she was looking at me too. My body stiffened.

  ‘What kind of encounter?’

  The image of the young woman was before me again. The laundry bag, the sparseness of her words. It wouldn’t go away. ‘She was a patient of mine.’

  ‘Did she have an intervention?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And she survived it?’

  I nodded again, this time more energetically. ‘Everything went fine. We discharged her three days later. Then…’ My chest was burning. ‘Then, her new life began.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Now she works in the laundrette. I met her when she was bringing laundry to the hospital.’

  ‘Right.’ Sarah rubbed her palms together. ‘And how was she?’

  ‘She was…’ I shook my head. I saw Vera’s clothes before me, folded and stowed under her blanket in hospital. Her small, light suitcase. Her face twitching while we were talking, as if she was suddenly afraid of me.

  ‘Do you remember her name?’

  ‘Vera.’

  ‘Vera.’ Sarah folded her hands together again. She’s enclosing this name in her hands, I thought. Now it can’t escape again. A childish defiance rose within me.

  ‘I worked with time,’ I said, ‘as the older nurses taught me. But I don’t understand… They said I just needed to carry out my duties, every day, and eventually I wouldn’t see the individual faces. I’d see the bigger picture. Time would be on my side.’

  Sarah was silent. She stood up.

  ‘Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be?’ I asked, my voice brittle with defiance.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No, it isn’t supposed to be like that at all. I… I’ll never forget my patients’ faces. What makes you think time is on our side?’

  Something tightened in my throat at her tone. Everything in this room was fragile. Every word, every movement. If I pushed too hard it would be over. I said nothing.

  She put her shoes in the wardrobe. It still didn’t bother her that everyone else took off their shoes at the entrance. Sarah walked around the halls in her shoes, tramped up the stairs in her shoes, thundered down the corridor in her shoes, no matter what the other nurses said.

  Sarah took off her coat. She still wasn’t wearing a scarf, hat or gloves, though the weather had turned cold.

  ‘Do you still hear from him?’ She pulled off her stockings and threw them into the wardrobe.

  ‘He sends his regards, once in a while.’

  ‘Regards.’ She took a few steps. ‘Regards,’ she repeated quietly, stroking her lips with her fingers.

  ‘Do you miss it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted.

  ‘Your conversations?’

  ‘I miss sitting in his office and knowing that… things are possible.’

  She stood still. ‘I can understand that.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Do you think I’m not capable of vanity?’ She shook her head. ‘You should know me by now.’

  Yes, I knew her. I knew her body so well. Every day, I missed touching her.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and get something to eat.’ I stood up. I followed her out of the room, along the corridor, watching her hands. The hands that had enclosed Vera’s name.

  13

  He phoned me on a Sunday morning to tell me Marianne was dying. ‘She should have been better by now,’ he said. I could hear the anger in his voice.

  Over the past few weeks, they’d been giving her the experimental medicine. The drug was in use in other clinical areas. In an extremely high dosage, it was expected to gradually wake her up. But instead of waking her, her body, which had remained functional, was now gradually giving up.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13