“Are you all right?” he asked, panting, his disheveled hair flopping in the wind.
No words came when she tried to speak. No words, but the tears that had sprung to her eyes said everything. Beneath their feet, the ground passed like a shadow, an indistinguishable flash of gray.
The officer bent down to pick up Natalia and placed her firmly in Despina’s arms. “I, too, have a daughter,” he said, unlatching the metal door behind them. “A daughter younger than yours whom I haven’t seen in two and a half years.”
Then, placing his hand on the small of Despina’s back, he pushed her forward into the airless cavity. The last thing Despina saw before the door slammed shut and darkness engulfed her was the heartbreaking sadness etched on the officer’s face.
21
IN FRONT OF MARIA AND Stefan’s home, Anton paused to catch his breath. Although he’d become accustomed to traveling long distances on foot, these particular ten blocks had left him drained. The autumn breeze rustled the leaves on the sidewalk, and they swirled around him in a circular dance of red and yellow and burnt copper. Slowly, he climbed up the steps and knocked on the door.
He did not know, in fact, if Stefan and Maria were home, if they had perhaps left the city. It had been months since he’d seen them, since they’d had any contact, really. Certainly, he did not blame them. What was there to talk about these days, where was there to go, when bombs came unexpectedly now, often before the sirens? And then there was that other matter, that letter that had sent Despina into a tailspin, just days before she and Natalia had left for Snagov.
When she’d first shown it to him, holding it out as though she was passing a death sentence to be read in front of a jury, he’d nearly smiled, sitting next to her on the bed. “What’s this?” he’d said with a slight amusement. Only too well he knew those vertical lines that crept between his wife’s brows when some perceived peril loomed over their household. Each time, he would have to make her see how senseless her agitation was, how things weren’t as grave as they seemed. But as his eyes lingered over the lines, his own hand began to tremble. That letter had left him speechless. For the first time in their married life, he was flooded with an equal sense of anxiety and confusion.
“How did you get this?” he asked.
“Maria, of course. Who else? Who else is at the crossroads of all this?”
“And what does she say about it?”
“Well, you know her,” Despina replied irritably. “You can only imagine what she has to say.”
The letter fell to his side. Curling his arm around Despina’s bent shoulders, clearing his throat, he pronounced slowly the words that he knew she did not want to hear. “Maria is right, Des. It’s the right thing to do. Natalia should at least know they are still alive.”
He flinched when she sprang from the bed. “Anton, are you telling me that you, of all people, don’t see how damaging this would be to her? To us, as a family? Here,” she spat, grabbing the paper out of his hand and crumpling it before thrusting it back at him. “I want you to take it and burn it. I know what you will say. I know what you think. I know what this makes me in your eyes. And I don’t care, Anton. I don’t care because I am asking you, no, I am begging you to do this one thing for me.”
He stared at her, wide-eyed, astonished. Above all things, his wife was a fair woman, and this he had not expected of her. “Despina, how could I do such a thing?” It broke his heart the way she looked at him, his strong woman who would bend to no one, the pleading in her eyes, the fear. He could look at her no longer, so he stood and turned away.
“Then hide it,” he heard her whisper coldly. “Put it somewhere where I never have to lay eyes on it again.”
Then she’d stormed into the bathroom and slammed the door. Over the flow of the faucet, he heard her sobbing quietly.
Taking a handkerchief from his coat pocket now, he wiped away beads of sweat from his forehead. The temperature had dropped abruptly, but he felt flushed from the walk. He still hadn’t gotten over the shock of the call, the way he’d found them at the train station, and all that had followed—the taxi speeding recklessly along the cobblestone streets, his daughter’s whimpering in the backseat, his wife, bent over her small body, not moving, as if she was near death herself. Then, at the house, Sofia wrenching open the taxi door, running upstairs from room to room to gather more blankets, to draw a bath and fetch the rubbing alcohol.
I should not have sent them away, he thought again, for the hundredth time. If he could only turn back time to when he and Despina had quarreled and he had insisted, no, he had demanded that she go to the country. He was the one who had placed that distance between them, those forty kilometers that now might cost them their daughter’s life.
Like a madman, he’d been ringing the bell, again and again, and when he realized it, he stepped back, letting his hand drop away. They are not here, he said to himself. You fool, they are not here. And he had turned to go when the click of the door made him halt.
“Anton. My goodness!” Maria exclaimed through the cracked door. She swung it open all the way, and, tying her robe, she motioned for him to enter. “Come in. Come in, please.”
“Thank you, Maria,” Anton said, removing his hat. “Is Stefan here? I must speak with him urgently.”
“Of course, Anton.” She fumbled with the light switch near the door, and when the light went on and she saw his face, she paled. “Anton, what’s wrong?”
“Maria, please, if I may speak with him.”
She nodded quickly, patting the lapel of his coat before rushing into the house to find her husband. An overwhelming fatigue spread through him, and he wondered if it had done any good coming here. Yet where else could he have gone for help? Where else was there to turn when every hospital had refused to admit her? They were full, completely full, he was informed by every clinic in the city when he called them one by one, when he begged and offered any sum of money and in the end had threatened that he would just come with her, he would come and sit at the entrance until they agreed to take her. Wounded soldiers were being cared for on cardboard cots, he was told. The beds themselves were saved only for the gravely wounded, the ones who were not expected to make it through the night. There was simply no room for civilian patients, no room for a case such as this. But Stefan had connections; he had powerful friends. He was perhaps the only one who might be able to get them a doctor, to cobble together a small miracle.
“Anton.” Stefan’s voice boomed behind him, bringing him back to reality. He felt the firm hand on his shoulder and turned. They had been through so much together, he and Stefan, so many grave moments. But he couldn’t speak now and simply held out his palms to him as if begging him to read the truth in his eyes. My daughter is dying, his eyes said, and he began weeping, right there in Stefan’s arms.
“It’s all right,” Stefan said after a silence. “Whatever it is, it will be all right.”
22
DR. VLADIMIR TOOK THE STETHOSCOPE out of his ears and placed it back in his brown leather bag. He leaned over Natalia and picked up her wrist, checking her pulse again. Gently, he placed her arm back on the bed.
“I’m afraid I don’t have very good news,” he said somberly. “If I could have seen her a little sooner, perhaps . . .” His voice trailed off. Even after thirty years of practice, he still struggled with this sort of thing. There was simply no easy way to deliver such news.
“What do you mean exactly, Doctor?” Despina uttered, her voice hinged somewhere between disbelief and laughter. A tiny web of veins appeared underneath the white, nearly translucent skin at her temples. The doctor cleared his throat and glanced away awkwardly. He had to get through the next steps with delicacy.
“I’m afraid it’s not good news,” he repeated, taking off his glasses and placing them in the leather satchel. “She has an infection, perhaps she’s had it for days, because it looks quite advanced . . .” Again, he paused, fumbling for the right words. “Judging from her high
fever, the infection has likely spread, may already be in her bloodstream. I’m afraid there isn’t much I can do at this point.”
Stone-faced, Despina stared at the doctor. She couldn’t move a muscle, yet all she wanted was to pounce on him, hit him with her fists. She wanted to gouge his eyes out, tear the last hairs from his receding hairline. She slid to the floor near the bed. Something opaque veiled her vision; it turned everything in the room an ugly, grotesque shade, like that of congealed blood.
Anton knelt down beside her, tried to put his arms around her, but she batted at him. When he tried again, she hit his shoulder, his cheek, and she scrambled away. Then she screamed. She covered her own ears and screamed, a sound so guttural that even Natalia’s eyes snapped open.
“I’m so very sorry,” the doctor said again, taking a few steps toward her but stopping halfway. He went back to his bag and began rearranging its contents. “Maybe if we had some penicillin, if we had it days ago . . .”
There was simply nothing more to say to this poor woman, this mother who was coming apart before his very eyes. From his breast pocket, he took out his chain watch and looked at the time. There was nothing worse than this feeling of helplessness, of a battle lost. Of death beating down hope, winning.
“If we had what?” Stefan asked from where he stood motionless in the doorway. Now that he had brought the doctor here, now that he’d scoured the city and banged on the doors of people he’d never disturb in the night and paid in gold bars and begged on his knees for a semblance of help, he expected more than a declaration of defeat, a sentence passed without much of a fight. “If we had what, Doctor?”
“Penicillin,” the doctor repeated warily, rubbing away at his temples. “It’s a new drug that could cure a bacterial infection like Natalia’s. A wonder drug, really, quite new and scarcely available. It’s nearly impossible to come by these days. No hospitals in this country have it, and if they did, they would have run out of it long ago, using it on the men who are dying by the thousands—”
The doctor stopped in mid-sentence, realizing that he had ventured into a subject that did not concern anyone in this room. That, in fact, it would make matters worse. But Stefan had a look of concentration on his face, as if he was already ahead of the conversation, as if he had long moved past his words.
“What if I could get it for you somehow? What if I could get it to you? How much time does she have?” He hated having to ask this in front of Despina, but there was no time to speak to the doctor in private. And they were all beyond measured words now.
“Two, maybe three days. Perhaps a week,” the doctor replied in a low, somber voice. “But as I’ve said before, it’s impossible—”
“Let me worry about that, Doctor,” Stefan interrupted. He had already grabbed his hat from the top of the dresser. “Let me try.”
This time, he was not addressing the doctor. He came to crouch down next to Despina at the foot of the bed and tried to pry her hands away from her face.
“Look at me, Des,” he said, but she would not. She would not raise her head to look at anything in the room. “Despina,” he said again, resting his hand on her shoulder. “I will do all I can. I will do all that’s in my power. But I will need to unlock the one door that you do not want opened.”
For a while, no one spoke. The only sound in the room was that of a tree branch tapping on the windowpane, as if it, too, demanded an answer. Despina buried her face in Stefan’s collar and began to weep.
“Yes,” she mumbled between sobs.
Her tears flowed freely like an open dam, and she no longer cared how she looked in the eyes of a stranger, for she had nothing else to lose. They streamed down Stefan’s hands as she clenched them tightly against her cheek.
23
A DAY PASSED, PERHAPS TWO. THERE was no telling, really, the minutes and hours threading together endlessly, mercilessly, heedlessly. Without regard for what went on inside the walls of their home, Despina’s desperation and cries, Anton’s stunned silence, his frenzied pacing across the wooden floor, back and forth, back and forth.
Every few minutes, Despina leaned over to put her ear close to Natalia’s lips, praying for the shallow sound of her breath. She did this mechanically, like a marionette being pulled this way and that by invisible strings, propelling her to move even as she felt dead herself, a moving corpse. Holding her own breath, she listened for Natalia’s ragged exhale against her cheek. It was still there, delicate, like a butterfly’s wing. The mere realization that she was still alive brought her such sweet relief. The fragile string connecting life and death had not yet unraveled.
So little time had passed since the doctor’s visit, and Natalia’s skin was already beginning to take on a bluish, translucent hue. She was so still it was difficult to believe there was still life inside her, that blood was still coursing through her veins. The night before, she had not uttered a single sound. Even her occasional sighs, her faint whimpers, had ceased.
For two days, Despina had sat at the foot of her bed, refusing to move, refusing the trays of food that Sofia brought in for her. Refusing to speak to Anton. Aside from getting up once or twice to get a glass of water, she had barely shifted since Stefan had left their home to chase down this unattainable drug, this penicillin that perhaps did not even exist. And if by some miracle he did manage to get it, would he make it back in time? Would it be too late by the time he returned? A few days, the doctor had whispered in Stefan’s ear, but Despina had heard it louder than the church bells in the plaza at the end of their street. Two, perhaps three days, mere hours, was all she had left.
Despina lifted her eyes to the half-opened window framed by sheer fluttering curtains. She no longer had the strength to ask God for mercy or forgiveness, for she was screaming inside, her fists clenched so tightly that she drew blood from her own palms. Do you hear me? If you are up there, if you exist, show me. Show me! she shouted voicelessly to the perfectly blue patch of sky that seemed to smile at her innocently.
To keep busy, she began reciting poems from the children’s collection that Natalia had loved when she was younger. She remembered reading them to Natalia when she was a little girl and the sound of Despina’s voice was enough to lull her to sleep, to calm the nightmares from which she startled awake during those first months after they had brought her home.
As she had done then, she kept reading long past the time when the light of evening bathed everything in a pink-orange hue, long after darkness fell into the room and shadows swelled and moved on the wall above Natalia’s bed. She turned on the side lamp and continued reciting poem after poem, unaware that her throat felt like sandpaper, that her voice was raspy and thick. She did not stop until daylight, until Sofia came in and dragged her away to her own room to get a little rest and wash up.
In this strange and austere household that she had once known so well, Sofia had become uncertain of her role. No one seemed to have any desire for the food she cooked. No one asked about clean sheets or pressed clothes. No one seemed to notice that a leak had sprung in the kitchen ceiling and water was collecting in a pot underneath.
“Should I call the plumber, Mr. Anton?” she had asked, realizing now that the pot was filling so quickly it had to be dumped out every couple of hours.
Anton had just looked at her as if he had not understood one word of what she said. Sofia had lowered her eyes and closed the door to his study. At least he had finally settled down. For two days, he had been pacing the house nonstop, the rhythmic sound of his hard-soled shoes trudging back and forth, endlessly, for hours. Now he just slumped in that chair by the fire and stared into the dwindling flames. Tiptoeing around him, Sofia asked if he would like something to eat, if she could bring him the morning paper. He shook his head and went back to staring into the fireplace. Death had already permeated their home.
Another day went by.
Anton began to plan for what would inevitably come now, in a matter of hours, a matter of days. A child lost. A child los
t to them, after all they had been through. A child lost at his hands. He dropped his head against the sofa rest and began to weep. He did not hear the doorbell until the third ring. In dreamlike motion, he got up to open it.
“Anton, thank goodness.”
In the doorway, Stefan stood holding his hat against his chest. He smiled and said something just as a tramcar went clattering by, drowning out his words.
Why are you smiling? Anton wanted to ask. How can you smile at a time like this? But he did not, for in his extended palm, Stefan was holding a small brown box.
There was no grace in Anton’s movements as he reached for it, yanked it greedily. In one swift move, he tore it open, ripping through the thick cardboard as if it were made of flimsy paper. The box came apart easily in his hands, and just as it did, Anton saw the Red Cross emblem, bright red and distinct, like a gaping wound at the top of the box. A foreign address was scribbled underneath it in small print: Geneva, Switzerland. Inside the box, there were ten or twelve small vials containing a whitish, cloudy substance.
“She will need to receive it intravenously,” Stefan was saying now. “Dr. Vladimir has arranged for her to be admitted today at the Coltea Hospital. But we need to hurry.”
Anton nodded, dry-mouthed, stunned. Hope flooded through him with unexpected force, and it fueled his shattered heart, spurred on its wild galloping, and it began pumping too fast, too hard. How? he wanted to ask. How did you manage this? But the words were trapped in his throat, and there was no time for questions, no time to delve into what he already suspected, what he knew, in fact, must have been the only way. Tears spilled once more onto his pale cheeks, shaded in stubble.
“Now, Anton,” Stefan said more firmly. “Go on and get her now. I will be waiting in the cab.”
At the bottom of the steps, Anton saw a town car parked at the curb, its engine still running.
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