Infidelities

by Josip Novakovich

  But no matter what hospital, it would be ill-equipped. After the war, the hospitals had not kept up with the new technology. Many good doctors had emigrated. And, being an ethnic Serb, what could he expect? Did that matter? Could the doctors guess by his name that he was a Serb? Of course, they know everything, he thought—or worse, they know next to nothing, except for his nationality.

  The following day, a doctor who was a childhood friend of his showed up. “Stroke, they say? Have they examined your heart?”

  “I don’t think so,” he managed to mumble.

  The doctor listened to his heart. “You need an EKG. My guess is you’ve had a massive heart attack.”

  Without further ado, he gave Ranko a shot of adrenaline, driving a needle between his ribs toward his heart, and ordered that Ranko be transferred to the cardiac unit, where a trusted colleague would take over. Although there was a shortage of space, the friend got him a bed.

  RANKO STRETCHED ON A TABLE, and a large tube, like an astronaut’s capsule, slid over him up to his chin, swallowing his body. The tube turned around him; an isotope test was performed. “Look at this!” said Dr. Kraljevic, a man with a white beard. “Most of your heart is in a shade, no light, that means the arteries don’t work, the blood doesn’t flow there. Only about a fifth of it is working!” He talked with fascination, as though glad to witness such a miracle. Ranko watched the illuminated fraction of his heart in horror.

  After several blood tests, the surgeon said, “Sir, have you had an infection, pneumonia perhaps?”

  “Something milder than that for a couple of months.”

  “Have you taken any antibiotics?”

  “Not in ten years.”

  “If you’ve had a bacterial invasion of the heart, just a few days on antibiotics would have saved your heart muscle. Too bad you didn’t come here earlier. On the other hand, who knows whether these idiots would have diagnosed you correctly when they can’t recognize infarct.”

  Ranko could barely move. If he sat up he was out of breath. If he stood up he had needles in his vision. Dr. Kraljevic determined that Ranko needed a heart transplant.

  A few days later, Ranko was allowed to go home, to wait. Lana hugged him, gently, as though afraid that he might crumble from the pressure. She administered the pills regularly, twenty a day. She played his favorite music on the old phonograph with a diamond needle: Mozart piano concertos and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. “Those are bound to be good for your heart,” she said. “If they are good for your mind, they must be even better for the heart. Just listen to how steady the rhythm is!”

  The music suffused him with a sense of all-permeating beauty that went from his ears even into his bones; he imagined the music entering through his pores, into capillaries, and swimming upstream through his blood, effortlessly. It was insubstantial, a spirit, untouched by the avalanches of plasma with blood iron, perhaps exciting the iron, magnetizing it, so that each particle of iron received, like an antenna, the harmonies of the celestial spheres encoded and captured in the Goldberg Variations. Even if his ears were deaf, his body could hear, and the music would harmonize what’s left of his heart.

  In the bathroom, while emitting a weak stream, he faced himself in the mirror: he looked like a flayed chicken. His hair was cut short, and it stood scattered in many dull, greasy, weak strands, and was no longer bright silver, but a dull gray, like smoke around a poorly built bonfire. He was visibly diminished, carrying the darkness of his heart, which dimmed his previously luminous self. He had been one of those people who shone, with smooth skin that not only reflected light but emanated it and big eyes that glowed. He had been aware of his light; he had been told about it many times. And now, no doubt, his presence consumed light wherever he passed. He wondered what it was like for Lana to be around him.

  Lana had found his passivity depressing even during the war. “Let’s go out,” she’d say. “Let’s go to the concert. Alfred Brendl is playing Beethoven sonatas. Did you know that he’d studied the piano in Zagreb in his youth and this is his homecoming of sorts?” Getting no response from him, she had gone out by herself, and on other occasions with her friends, first female, and then later, since she was an egalitarian, male. No, he wouldn’t be jealous, he was always a laissez-faire type of guy. Still, when she had gone out—with her lips vermilion—to meet the male friends in cafés, and orchid fragrances lingered after her at the door, he was perturbed by her making herself attractive to others. When she came back, he had an impression that her lips had lost some of their moist sheen; he wondered whether the sheen evaporated or stayed on the cigarette butts and gilt edges of porcelain cups, or whether it had visited other lips.

  But now she no longer needed to go out; she used no makeup, and she was with him. She wept for him, she caressed him. It was almost good to be ill.

  IN THE WARMTH OF RADIATOR HEAT, he relished the shades of light slanting through the window. Even just a little bit of light made the room beautiful. Perhaps even just a little bit of light in his heart might make him live well. He thought human hearts were too large, made for the luxury of endurance. Cats, on the other hand, have tiny hearts in proportion to their bodies, and perhaps for that reason they luxuriate all the more in the sunlight. Perhaps the diminishing of his heart had made him a catlike aesthete who could feel each nuance in every motion.

  The friends who were supposed to come for the Christmas holidays came in January. Mladen embraced him. Tomo didn’t. “Sorry,” he said, “I am afraid of germs.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Ranko said. “I no longer have whatever bugs caused the trouble. I am totally debugged.”

  “Sorry. You are dear to me, but I am a little afraid.”

  “That’s all right,” Ranko said. “I sure can understand that. Anyway, Mladen, how’s Austria?”

  “The most beautiful place on earth—it would be if it weren’t for the Austrians!”

  “But look at you, you look lean, ruddy, healthy. It can’t be too bad.”

  “You know how sociable my wife and I are, and yet in four years we haven’t made any Austrian friends. They don’t talk to us. And everything is strictly regulated. You know, there’s a law that you may not burn firewood that hasn’t been seasoned for two years.”

  “Sounds bad, but it makes sense. Raw wood has chemicals that don’t burn clean.”

  “Maybe, but to have a policeman sniff outside of your house with his dogs to find out what kind of smoke comes out of your chimney, wouldn’t make you feel uncomfortable?”

  “At least you eat healthy bread. I’ve had some wonderfully heavy black bread in Salzburg.”

  “Oh, that bread is expensive. Although I bake it, I am not allowed to take it home. I can’t even chew it at work. They watch my hands, my mouth, I swear.”

  “So why don’t you come back to Zagreb?”

  “While Tudjman is alive? I don’t want to live under fascists.”

  “What a thankless guest you are,” Ranko joked. “They give you asylum, get you a job, an apartment, and you spew all this hatred for them. Seriously, if I were in your place, I would enjoy it all—even the wood police, the bread police, I would see the humor and the irony…I swear. I would just love it. Anyway, that’s the wisdom of the sick. Cherish everything.”

  “So you are supposed to get a new heart?” Tomo asked.

  “Sure, but they don’t have a good system of donors. The heart doesn’t live long, so basically they have to take it out from an otherwise healthy body, let’s say after a car crash. I am on a long waiting list.”

  “But there must be hearts around! I think they are waiting for a bribe, that’s all. Those guys never change. And how long do they think you can live without a transplant?”

  “One year, maybe a little more.”

  THE FRIENDS GATHERED several thousand German marks for the bribe fund.

  Ranko was touched to see his friends sacrifice for him. “I have good friends, don’t I?” he said to Lana.

  “Yes, of cour
se you do. You deserve them.”

  “And such a good wife, too!” He embraced her; with the warmth of her thighs, he got an erection, but then thought, I better stop. In my state, sex could kill me.

  So he sat back in the armchair, melancholy again, and literally a little blue in his face, for blood was not reaching it well enough.

  “What are you suddenly gloomy about?” she asked.

  “Oh, just tired.”

  “But just a second ago you were happy!”

  “I am still happy.”

  Lana prepared him rose hip tea with honey. As he drank it, with the porcelain warming both of his hands and steam warming his face, he inhaled deeply for the first time in a long while, and he thought, the hell with it, if I die, at least let me make love.

  Lana was making a cup of coffee in an aluminum percolator. He sniffed the aroma of roasted coffee, but even that was forbidden to him. He walked behind her and slid the thin cotton dress up her hips.

  “I see what you are up to,” said Lana. “Are you sure? Oh, I see, you are.”

  What joy the senses, the skin, could give, he thought amidst slow lovemaking. He savored each tingle. Previously, the tingles of his nerves had threatened him, but now he gained encouragement from them. He nearly swooned, but felt safe, and when he regained his composure, he fell asleep, smiling like a satiated baby.

  LANA VISITED THE HEART SURGEON, Dr. Kraljevic, at the Rebro Hospital. Rebro, by a coincidence, means “rib.” The Hospital of Ribs—does not sound encouraging, does it? But the surgeon would not accept the bribe. “Oh, no, my dear, that is not how it works. You read the newspapers too much. We’ll take care of your husband the best we can.”

  At home, she recounted the details of the visit to Ranko, and she asked, “What should we do with the money?”

  “Send it back,” he said.

  “We need a car; if you have an attack, I can drive you to the emergency room. That would be faster than calling the ambulance. I am sure your friends would not mind such a use of the money.”

  THE SURGEON GAVE Ranko addresses of several men who’d received hearts. One of them, when Ranko and Lana visited in the newly bought Kia Pride, was splitting logs. Two streams of steam billowed out of his large red nose in the cold.

  “Oh, yes, my friend,” the man said, taking off his cap with a pheasant’s feather, “the heart transplant, the best thing in the world. Before that, for years, I could hardly walk, and look at me now!” He lifted his axe and split a heavy oak log.

  “I’m impressed,” said Ranko.

  “Oh, it’s not that impressive, it’s a trick, basically. See, the logs were wet and they froze, so they crack like glass. I tried to split some of them before they froze, and I couldn’t. I bet you could….”

  “I better not try,” said Ranko.

  Ranko saw several other hale men who had received heart transplants. One of them played tennis, another rode horses, and the third one went grouse hunting and invited him along. Ranko wondered how one could wish to kill after barely surviving, but then, he was not that man, and he always liked to see the differences; he enjoyed the peculiarities of human natures.

  He wondered how many men with transplants he could not see because they had died; the physicians’ successes parade on the crust of the earth, and their failures rot in it, as the saying goes. Still, Ranko was encouraged, doubly. First, that his surgeon went out of his way to organize the tour, which meant he was serious in planning to get a heart for Ranko, and second, that apparently one could live so well, normally, with a transplanted heart.

  Whenever the phone rang, Ranko and Lana sprang up with anticipation, fear, and hope. Fear, for this might mean the call, the heart transplant, the total anesthesia, cutting open of the rib cage, cutting and cutting…and then, perhaps coming back to life, real life. At first they sat close to the green phone. But it was only friends calling. Well, not only. Friends made it worthwhile to suffer the pain of survival. Otherwise, he could curl up and die. Oh, it would be so easy to slip away: in the many moments of exquisite feebleness, as he drifted into sleep and out of it, in the morning, at noon, all day long.

  But one day, he did get the call, at six in the morning, the most odious hour of the day to him, when he could not sleep and when he could not wake up. But this time, he was deeply asleep, and the ringing pierced through him. He propped himself up on his right elbow while Lana, stark naked, strangely white, jumped out of bed, and picked up the phone.

  “It’s for you. Rebro Hospital.”

  He pulled his pants up so hurriedly that his pubic hair got caught in the zipper; he’d had no time to find his underwear. They were already in the car, on the road. He was short of breath, and had chest pains, as though already feeling the knife cutting through him. He glanced at his wife behind the wheel; her small and pointed breasts were both visible from his angle as she had forgotten to button. He wondered whether that would be the last image of her that he’d carry.

  They drove fast, nearly hitting a drunk pedestrian. “Watch out,” he said, “I don’t want his heart!”

  “Why not? It’s pickled, well preserved.”

  She sped up. “If you keep it up,” he said, “there’ll be too many hearts available!”

  Once they got in, Ranko was sent into a room where there was another man, with a bandage over his head and another one over his abdomen.

  The surgeon came in.

  “So, where is the heart?” Ranko asked, and felt his own producing many extra beats, and some of them may not have been beats, but flutters and even shudders.

  “Yeah, we got it, it just needs to be prepared for you.”

  The surgeon hasn’t answered my question, he thought. Where do they have it? Not in a freezer, though you never know.

  “It’s not quite ready yet. You can relax. It will take a couple of hours or days for us to have it ready. And you never know, maybe it won’t be quite right.”

  “I thought you didn’t wait with hearts.”

  “Now relax, get a book you like…you have a book?”

  “No.”

  Well, then, I can recommend one. “I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal. Very funny.”

  “That’s been out for years.”

  “You’ve read it?”

  “No.”

  “So…don’t complain. I’ll bring it along. Ciao.”

  A nurse—her face had the pasty color of lasagna, with a flash of red on her lips, like a layer of tomato sauce—gave Ranko a sedative. And so he fell asleep.

  Loud moaning woke him up. His roommate was suffering loudly.

  “What’s hurting you?” asked Ranko.

  “What’s not hurting me? Even my nails and my hair hurt.” His voice was hissy and guttural, as though he’d lost half of his vocal cords.

  “What’s your illness?”

  “Illness? I was shot. One bullet in the head, one in the abdomen.” He groaned. “I shouldn’t talk. It hurts.”

  “Who shot you?’

  “I have no idea.”

  “What did they shoot you for?”

  “How would I know? All these war idiots with guns on the loose. A couple of jerks shot me because I took their parking spot. I didn’t even see them. They’d waited to back into the spot. I thought I was dead—well, I can’t last much longer.”

  “Keep up the faith. I thought it was too late for me, but I believed.”

  “Believed in what? I am not religious. I can’t believe.”

  “I am not either, but after my heart attack, even though I was told I had less than a year to live, well, I began to believe in my family, and love kept me going, and now it’s been more than a year…and I am waiting for a heart transplant.”

  “Good luck on that. It doesn’t sound like fun, but then, if you ask me, I wouldn’t mind being in your place. At this rate, they probably need to transplant my brain. Do you know whether they do that?” He moaned again. “And the worst of it is that you’d think the pain would entertain me, you kn
ow. But I am bored.”

  “Let’s play chess,” Ranko said.

  “Not a bad idea, but do you have a board?”

  “I’ll call my wife.” Ranko pulled out his cell phone—they were among the first ones in Zagreb to get one; he needed it in case a heart appeared and he was out of doors, and now it was good for keeping in touch with Lana.

  The bandaged man, David, could hardly lift his arm, and so he told Ranko his moves. They played imaginative games, full of sacrifices for combination’s sake, as though being close to death taught them not to fear losses but to seek moments of beauty. Propped on his pillow, his face sunken and ashen, David looked exhausted, but now, when he saw a combination, his one eye that was not bandaged opened wider, light reflected from it, color came to his cheeks (or perhaps the blood from his bandage lent the color); he seemed to be coming to life. “I love chess!” he said. “It’s worth living for more than love.”

  “But you just said you love it, so love it is,” said Ranko.

  “All right, I conceded that, but I won’t cede the pawn.”

  “Do you have any kids?”

  “Yes, five beautiful daughters. They are in Split, and, unfortunately, I don’t live with them. I drank too much, so my wife chased me out. Here, would you like to see a picture of my youngest? Ouch, where is my wallet?” He couldn’t turn. “Oh well, next time.”

  “I can get it, just tell me where it is.”

  “Usually I wouldn’t trust anybody with my credit cards, but the hospital already ran those…I am sure they’re maxed. So go ahead, it’s under my pillow.”

  Ranko slid his hand carefully, and fished out the wallet, and soon, he was looking at a picture of the man and his five daughters, all looking like his replicas, in different sizes. His hair was long and black, he was lean, and so were they. “Why isn’t your wife with you in the picture?”

  “She’s the photographer.”

  “Self-sacrificing of her.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. She spent thousands of marks on photography, and I bought her the best equipment. She fancied herself a pro—she’s good, I must admit—but who can be a pro in this country?”