“Just you dare!”
He knocked again and then opened the door. A doctor was combing his hair in front of a mirror, and a nurse was putting lipstick on her wide mouth.
“Don’t you see we’re taking a break?”
“I see, but my child is terribly ill and we’ve been waiting. I never saw Comrade Vedric and his son come out.”
“They didn’t. They’re in the other room. We’ve been working since six this morning. Fine, bring her in.”
The nurse shook a thermometer, snapping her wrist thrice, and opened the child’s mouth to put it in. Lyerka’s teeth chattered. She bit the thermometer hard as her jaw clenched it.
“Oh my, don’t bite through that glass,” said the nurse.
After a minute, she pulled out the thermometer and held it up against the bald lightbulb. “It’s forty-three degrees. That’s way too high; she’ll need a lot of aspirin and a cold press.”
“Well, give it to her, then,” said Nenad.
“Of course, we know what to do.” The nurse got an aspirin, 500 mg, and put it on a spoon.
“Daddy, the puppy is hungry,” Lyerka said. “Promise to feed him.”
“Yes, I’ll feed him, don’t worry.”
“Comrade,” said the doctor, “who do you think will win in the semis, Dinamo or Hajduk? Tito is rooting for Hajduk, and so am I.”
“I could care less. Just help her.”
“I know. I need to keep some kind of conversation going to keep us sane, to keep you from worrying too much.” “Should I worry?”
“No, but we’ll wait a little to see how she responds. Open your mouth!”
They put the spoon with aspirin on her tongue and then poured water from a glass into her mouth. The water spilled over. Lyerka coughed, and the aspirin flew out of her mouth like a little white dove out of a church window. The pill fell onto the checkered floor and rolled around, disappearing under the cupboard.
“Why are you spitting it out, darling?” asked the nurse.
“She can’t help it,” Nenad said. “It’s a reflex.”
“Let me see.” The doctor shone a thin flashlight into Lyerka’s throat, pressing down on her tongue with the handle of an aluminum spoon. “Hmm, her throat is too swollen and red; she won’t be able to swallow such a large tablet. Fine, we’ll crush the aspirin so she can drink it.”
Lyerka gulped the water loudly and spat it out. “It’s yucky!” “You want more sugar, less sugar?”
“More.”
The doctor read the sports pages. Nenad rolled the brim of his hat. After fifteen minutes they measured her temperature again.
“She’s not responding yet. She’ll need more time and a cold press and an IV and more aspirin. We’ll have to keep her overnight, just like that boy.”
“Should I stay here?”
“It’s better if you go home and come back tomorrow morning. Nervous parents don’t help; they make us nervous.”
“Daddy, don’t leave,” Lyerka said.
“I’ll be right back, and I’ll bring you some ice cream.”
She smiled and closed her eyes.
The ambulance drove the two fathers home. The boy’s father, Vedric, pulled out a bottle of greenish slivovitz and swallowed two loud gulps. “My throat is too dry from all this anxiety,” he explained. “Would you like a shot?”
“No, I don’t drink.”
“I don’t know how you can stand to be sober in a situation like this. What is going on? Do you understand?”
“Who does?”
Nenad and Marta could not sleep that night.
“It’s my fault,” Marta said.
“What do you mean, your fault?”
“I was too happy and proud with how beautiful she was.”
“What do you mean, was. Is. She is.”
“I know, but what if she…”
“Don’t say it.”
The other two children slept.
“How about if we pray?” he suggested.
“It’s that bad? I knew it.”
“Prayer is a good idea either way.”
He got out of bed and played the guitar, slowly, a church song.
“When will you pray, then?” Marta asked.
“God loves music more than our voices.”
“How do you know that?”
“My soul knows that.”
Early in the morning, before any redness showed in the paling sky, Nenad bicycled to the hospital. The little dynamo hummed against the tire and produced enough light to illuminate the unpredictable road ahead. There were a couple of hills too steep for the bicycle, and he walked up them and sweated despite the cold wind. Lonesome dogs were howling at one another from two remote hills.
He found a different doctor, who looked strikingly similar to the night shift doctor, except his hair was silvery; it looked as though the same doctor had aged a decade overnight, but it was definitely a different doctor, shorter and thinner, standing irresolutely with a couple of plump nurses in the emergency room.
“How is she doing?” Nenad asked.
“Who? We have lots of patients in the ward. There’s some kind of epidemic.”
“My daughter, Lyerka Vukov.”
“Oh, yes, we can’t get her fever down. It’s still forty-three. And of course, with such a long fever, she’s delirious.”
“So, will she make it?”
“Let’s hope so.”
“Of course I hope. Can you do something more than hope?”
“I hope so.”
“Are you joking or something?”
“We’ll put her on IVs again so she doesn’t dehydrate, and with more liquids in her body, she could cool down.”
“Can I see her?”
She was red and her lips were green, and she mumbled about a puppy.
“Sweetie, I will get you the puppy. He’s waiting for you.”
Lyerka grasped his thumb, giving it a hot squeeze. But she had no strength to do it for more than a few seconds, and her hand dropped and she continued to moan. Her neck was swollen, bigger than before.
“What did she eat before she got sick?” asked the doctor. “Maybe she ate some poisonous mushrooms?”
“Not this time of the year—nothing’s growing in the winter, other than oyster mushrooms, and those are never poisonous.”
“Dry mushrooms? Old pork?”
“We don’t eat pork.”
“You are Jews? Adventists?”
“Neither, but we just don’t. The problem is, she’s had an inoculation against rubeola. What do you think is the problem?”
“I don’t know, an allergic reaction. We’ll give them some milk.”
“Milk?”
“Yes, milk helps with allergies and poisons.”
“She had plenty of milk. You have nothing stronger? No real medication against this?”
“We’ll think about it. Just let me think.”
“Well, think fast. If you save her, I’ll give you ten thousand dinars.”
Lyerka gasped and breathed fast like a dog after a long run. Her mouth was open, and her little red tongue trembled.
“And I’ll sign over my forest to you,” Nenad said.
“I’ll do what I can.”
The nurse placed wet towels over her body. They gave her an IV.
Nenad waited in the corridor, which was filthy with muddy print marks of boots of all sizes, in all directions. Clearly, people here walked in circles, disoriented and frantic as they waited, and so did he, with his hat brim rolled in his left hand and his right hand scratching a sore spot on his scalp, layered with dandruff, until it bled.
“The fever is going down, just a little, but it’s in the right direction,” said the doctor. “Don’t panic. We’ll do all we can, and we are talking to the specialists in Zagreb over the phone.”
Nenad wondered whether the sudden activity by the doctor had anything to do with the offered money. The motives didn’t matter; saving his chedo, his dear child, did. So the thi
ng to do was to go home and raise the money. He bicycled back, first to Drago to ask him for a thousand dinars, which Drago gave him without comment. He rode home and collected his savings hidden in the attic under a pile of red roof tiles. He gathered ten thousand, a small fortune. With that he had planned to buy a new Opel or perhaps a Mercedes. So much for that. He bicycled back to the hospital. In a curve the bike slid over gravel, and he fell, banging his elbow like a child.
He took the same doctor aside, onto the muddied, spotted-marble floor of the dark corridor, near white-painted windows, and said, “Doctor, how is she doing?” He felt unsteady, and as he leaned against the window frame, thick cracked lead paint crumbled and peeled off in little sheets.
“To be frank, the fever has come back, and we can’t knock it down.”
“What is it?”
“It could be meningitis, as a side effect. Apparently there’s a lot of it around.”
“You call it a side effect? It sounds pretty major.”
“Well, we don’t know. We actually don’t have the blood test results yet.”
“What are you waiting for? I’m giving you ten thousand dinars—that’s what a factory worker would make in two years— to save her. You have to try harder.”
“It’s not necessary. I’ll do my best.” But contrary to what he was saying, he stretched out his hand and took the blue envelope, with the stamp of the walls of Dubrovnik, and placed it in the right front pocket of his pants, keeping his hand in the pocket, deep, as though he was shifting his balls to a more comfortable position.
“You promise you’ll watch her? Consult your best books and other doctors. Maybe there are American doctors in Belgrade at the embassy who would know about these side effects? Can you call them?”
“Yes, we’ll call them. I’ll do what I can. Let me go now— talking with you won’t help her. We’ll try a few things.”
“May I go with you?”
“Better not at the moment. Just wait here, and we’ll call you in.”
Nenad paced up and down the corridor on the spotted black and yellow floor. The light of the thinly clouded day spread through white curtains and bounced off the floor in a jaundiced hue. What to think in a situation like this? He’d been under the gun several times in the war, and it felt simpler—immediate fear, possibility of a clean and violent end. He’d even had shrapnel lodge near his kidney, but two years after the war, it crawled out of him, and he woke up with a small wound bleeding calmly. The shrapnel looked like somebody’s iron molar. He’d much rather be hit with shrapnel again. The mix of hope and fear only increased his dread.
He was not the only one pacing—there were four other parents. They all smoked. Nenad knelt near a bench and prayed. God, if you save my daughter, I will serve you and do whatever you want me to do. I will give biblical names to all my children. I will witness for you and go to jail if necessary. And if you don’t save her, I will become a communist. Not that I am in a position to make threats, but isn’t it a good idea to make friends in this godless country?
Before he could say amen, he heard a scream.
He stood up. A doctor was speaking softly to a mother and holding her shoulder.
“What, he is dead?”
“Yes, two children are dead.”
“How about my child?” asked Nenad.
“Is Dara all right?” cried a woman next to him.
“Wait, not so fast. We’ll give you the names.”
“Is Lyerka alive?” Nenad hoped it would be another child, not his.
“Dara is dead,” said the doctor. “Sorry to say.”
“Are you sure? Maybe she just passed out.”
“What can I tell you? This is a major tragedy.”
“You couldn’t do anything?”
“And Lyerka?”
“Alive, we are working on her.”
Nenad kneeled against the wall and prayed on.
“Look at him, his child is alive, and he is praying to God,” said a man. “And he has money. I’m sure he paid them.”
“That’s how it goes—the world always favors those with money.”
“Maybe we should have prayed to God.”
“He has probably given money to his God, too.”
The two dead children were wheeled away, covered with white sheets; one had her eyes wide open, and the other had them closed, and on his eyelids were placed two sugar cubes to keep the eyes closed and to decrease the bitterness of death.
A few minutes later Nenad knocked on the door of the room with four beds. The doctor and the nurse were playing cards at a table. Next to them was a large red apple on an orange-colored plate.
“Is she alive?”
“Yes, she must be.”
Nenad ran to the white bedside. Lyerka moved her face toward him and smiled. Her eyes gleamed; she looked radiant. Her hair emitted indigo-blue rays, or so it seemed to his wet eyes, refracting the light and intensifying it, as though he were sinking into the dark of an ocean and looking upward toward the glare of the unreachable sunshine. Nenad leaned over and kissed her forehead. It was astonishingly hot.
“Can’t you give her more aspirin?”
“Oh, she’s had plenty. She’s running about forty-one. It’s not all that bad. It used to be worse. It’s going down, sort of.”
“You think she will make it?”
“She might, she might.”
“Is there nothing else you can do for her?”
“No, we just have to wait now, like you.”
“And so you play cards?”
“And so we play cards. Health is a game of luck like cards. At this point we can only hope to be lucky.”
He walked back to Lyerka. Her mouth was twisted, and her eyes were glazed. Foam floated down her cheek.
“Look at me!” he said.
But her eyes seemed to be looking beyond him, through the walls, into the clouds, reflecting the clouds, becoming gray. He had wasted her last minute of consciousness talking with the card-playing doctors. But maybe she hadn’t been conscious in a while anyway.
“Don’t you see, she’s dying,” he said. “Can’t you do something?”
“Oh?”
Nenad looked into her eyes. They were hazing up, losing focus. A milkish hue covered the brown of her iris.
“We did what we could. Many children died from this inoculation. They gave us a dosage that was way too strong.”
“Are you sure you did what you could? Maybe you gave up too soon? Isn’t there some drug to keep the heart going?”
They didn’t reply but looked for the pulse in her neck.
He couldn’t look at the cloudiness in her eyes, and he put his large hand over her face and pulled the eyelids down. They sprang back up, halfway.
“Give me the apple,” he said.
It was an old red apple from the late fall, with creased skin. He sliced it and put two moon-shaped slices over her eyelids to keep them closed. An apple was the first gift of God to man, so be it. Maybe the apple will help her see all the way back into paradise.
He held her in his arms. Her temperature was becoming normal. Why did she die? Maybe I didn’t believe enough. But the whole world is full of unbelievers, and many of them do fine.
At home, when he brought her in, the older kids shrieked in fright. He laid her down on her bed. The siblings stood on the side and stared.
“Is she asleep?” Nada asked.
“You could put it that way,” said Nenad.
Her mother turned ghastly pale and said, “I knew it.”
“What do you mean, you knew it?”
“I’m not surprised. We were happy, we were too happy, for the first time in our lives, these last few weeks. And I was too proud. I boasted that evening how she could multiply. God has punished us. I shouldn’t have bragged about what a beautiful child we had.”
“Why do you think it has anything to do with you? Just now I thought it was my fault, that I didn’t believe enough. Why do you think it has anything to do
with us? Maybe God wanted her in his heavenly choir. Maybe she’s happier there.”
“She’s not there. She’s nowhere.”
And now the funeral had to be arranged. There was no cash left in the house.
“Go ask them to give it back to you,” Marta said.
“I can’t ride to Pakrac now. It’s too far away. I don’t care, life is over. I’m exhausted.”
“We must still bury her.”
“I don’t know what we must do. Maybe we can just keep her in the bedroom, maybe she’ll wake up.”
“Well, we must bury her; there’s no other way.”
“No, it’s all over.”
“Life goes on.”
“It doesn’t.”
“It was so beautiful while it lasted. God gave, God took away.”
“America took away.”
Nenad bought a black flag on credit. Marta sewed it onto a pole, and Nenad stuck it out of the roof through a space between two loosened tiles. Sunshine streaked through one window, projecting a parallelogram onto the warped wooden floor.
He went to the printing press office in the center of the town, near the Hungarian Calvinist church. The press used to publish a weekly newspaper but now published only death notices and festival posters.
Darkness filled the house, unabated by the ceremony surrounding death. Rather than buy a coffin, Nenad built one and varnished it. Yes, she said he could build anything. How much nicer it would be if he were building a doghouse. Maybe if he’d let the dog come in, her happiness would have carried her through the poison.
Before going to bed, he went over to the table where Lyerka lay in state and kissed her cheeks, which were frightfully cold and rubbery. It was as though the real body had burned away and vanished into the clouds and what remained was a death mask made of some special mix of rubber, plastic, and bread dough. It seemed a peculiar chemical mix, such as only German and American technology were capable of producing. But that couldn’t be—death and cold corpses existed even before. Yes, but this was an American death. Of course, my thoughts are all rubbish, futile spasms of strained nerves. Here she is, and the soul is still somewhere near her body or in her body. It couldn’t have left so fast.
He drifted to sleep to the sound of two lonesome dogs howling at one another somewhere in the hills, and then woke with a start when a blinding light filled the room. But as he stood up the light diminished and lifted, flowing out the window. And he heard a voice: I have heard your prayers. Be patient.
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