Best European Fiction 2013

by Unknown

  Reduced to a body lying on the operating table, I communicated the whole time with my eyes and through a meagre exchange of words with various people who were working on my revival. This was a surprising number of people—those who prepared for the operation, and those who participated in it. They all struck up conversations with the dying person, and my impression was that the body (i.e. me) did not offer much information, even on the operating table. Apart from my unpronounceable name, the only piece of information about me was this coverlet with the floral pattern à la Paul Gauguin, in which I was wrapped when I came here; everyone commented on it, interested in the cultural origin of the drawing on canvas, presumably convinced that the coverlet had the same geographical origin as me.

  At one point the surgeon who was operating on me, not knowing how to negotiate my complicated name, brought his face close to mine and explained, slightly alarmed, that he would have to communicate with me in the course of the operation and for that communication he would need a name to call me by. He said: “I’ll call you Me’med. Is that all right?”

  As for the coverlet, I don’t know exactly where it came from, other than that it was some South American country. Perhaps from the same country as one of the hospital staff who took such an interest in it. In any case, these people treated my origin with great sensitivity, although they did not ask, nor, I presume, did they know where I came from. From my accent they knew only that I was foreign.

  Does this mean that we all suffer from a kind of anxiety about dying in a distant, foreign country, a world where we are not at home? This is the first time I see inside my body. On the left of the operating table there is a screen on which is projected an image of my cardiac arteries. What I see reminds me of a branching plant. One very thin, almost transparent twig had begun to grow and lengthen. Behind that growth was an unknown, delicate procedure that the doctor applied to my blocked artery, so as to break through the blockage and enable the normal flow of blood. Instantly, I felt indescribable relief. The same procedure was applied to the other artery: I watched as the branch grew before my eyes.

  And that was all. The pain in my throat and pressure in my chest disappeared. The moment of liberated breathing was so refreshing that all trace of tiredness left my body. This made me want to straighten up, to get off the operating table and walk.

  Full of oxygen.

  The theater unexpectedly emptied, and for a short time I was alone. I heard a buzzing but didn’t know what was making the sound. A machine?

  Then the room filled up with human voices again. None of them took any notice of me. They were discussing the previous night’s episode of a television series.

  And they were laughing.

  One girl, an African American, leaned over me and asked: “Would you like me to bring some water?’ a Latino lad came after her and, as though it were part of an ongoing conversation with her, said: “you must!”

  I said: “Yes, please.”

  And she answered him: “I can’t. I won’t!”

  Someone else in the room was describing how he had spent half an hour that morning stuck in a lift. Finally the person responsible for the lift had appeared, and when they had freed him, he felt, he said, “like a Chilean miner who had just been brought out of the earth into the sun”.

  I drank water out of a plastic cup. And I couldn’t remember when I was last that aware of the taste of ordinary, sweet water.

  From the operating theater, lying on a narrow trolley, I went by lift to the ward. I was accompanied by two young people in hospital coats who didn’t seem to be in a hurry to go anywhere; they were talking, laughing, and easily forgot my presence. They could have been lovers. Beside them, I felt my primary characteristics returning to my body. When we entered the lift, it turned out that my height in a horizontal position was such that they had trouble fitting me into the moving box of the lift. And when the doors closed, I could feel them rubbing against my feet as we moved.

  All the people I meet today disappear. They vanish without my having a chance to say goodbye. These two young lovers who had been chirruping and laughing in the lift, as they took me from the lower to the upper floors, they too went away without my noticing the moment of their departure.

  In my ward, a new nurse settled me in the bed and said: “Lovely coverlet.”

  I said I had brought it from home. She explained that I could by all means keep it here as well. Maybe she believed I had a childish emotional attachment to that rug.

  Then I called Sanja, who had got lost somewhere in the depressing architecture of the hospital corridors.

  If a line is drawn under Tuesday, the 2nd of November, 2010, this is what happened to me: as I was getting ready to go to work, I had a heart attack.

  I was in the shower when I felt a dull, metallic pressure in my chest and throat, and when, soon afterwards, the ambulance arrived, the girl who examined me said, bluntly and without beating about the bush: ‘You’re having a heart attack.’ Under an oxygen mask, I watched Sanja on the sofa opposite the bed where I was lying surrounded by strangers. Her face was contorted with fear. They hurried to take me away, wrapped in the cover on which I was lying; they took me to hospital, and then I had an operation. And after they had installed stents in my blocked arteries, I was settled into a hospital ward. It all took a little more than three hours, but during that time my world was fundamentally altered.

  After the operation, the doctor looked for Sanja, but she was not in the waiting room. When they had put me into the ward, I called her on her mobile. She answered, she was on her way. She came into the room, pale as pale, her face swollen with crying. That face expressed uncontrolled joy and an absolute sadness that had overwhelmed her. Something in her was broken. She had an irresistible urge to hug me, but didn’t dare for fear that an embrace might hurt. I asked her to sit on the bed, beside me.

  “Where were you?”

  “Outside the hospital.”

  “It’s cold outside, and you’re dressed like that …” I’d only just noticed that—in her haste —she had just put a little jumper on over her T-shirt.

  “I didn’t dare wait.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was afraid the doctor was going to come and tell me …’

  “Tell you what?”

  “… that you’d died.”

  “It hadn’t quite come to that.”

  “When I was giving them permission to operate, they asked—did I want them to fetch a priest?”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said there was no need for that, and that you weren’t going to die.”

  “You didn’t tell them that a priest couldn’t reconcile me to God …”

  “No.”

  “You should have!” I said, joking.

  She pretended to be cross (people were dying here and he was having a laugh!), then she slapped me gently with her open hand on my chest, then at the same instant remembered my heart and shuddered, she could have hurt me oh oh oh, she waved her hands in the air over me ohohohooo. Then we laughed.

  I remember the rest of the day quite clearly as well.

  When I was left alone in the ward, this is what I thought about: Of course I had been thinking and all these years I had been developing my attitude toward my death, but I did not expect that it could come as a consequence of my heart stopping. all my other organs could stop functioning, but the heart was out of the question. It was here, I thought, to beat for me, just as long as I needed it.

  I called my son Harun. He was now in St. Louis. At the airport.

  “How long is it till your flight?”

  “Six hours.”

  At midnight on 31 January 1996, on our way from Zagreb to Phoenix, Arizona, on our émigré journey to America, we had been at the St. Louis airport.

  We were changing planes.

  I remember rows of gray leather seats in the waiting room, and midnight travellers with Stetsons. In those days there were ashtrays on high stands beside the sea
ts, and the stale air reeked of Jack Daniel’s. There wouldn’t be any ashtrays there any more. And now, as I chatted to him, I remembered a photograph from that journey. It was of him asleep, his head resting on his arms on a table in the airport cafe. He was thirteen then. I was thirty-five. He’s twenty-eight now. Almost as old as I was that midnight, when we were wearily waiting for the plane to Phoenix. How long ago was that? Fifteen years.

  “I’m sorry, son.”

  “What for?”

  “That you’ve got such a long wait.”

  “You’re comforting me, as though I was the one who’d had his heart stitched up!”

  That textile image “stitched up” surprised me. As I thought about it, language became the only reality. I felt that every physical touch was freed of pain, and that was a nice illusion.

  I’m really well, I feel cheerful, and it’s easy to forget I’ve had my heart “stitched up.”

  Other than a dull ache in the vein they opened in my groin: in that soft area between my genitals and my thigh.

  When I was lying on the operating table, at a certain moment I became conscious of that, that they were shaving my groin; a cold and quite disagreeable touch. At the time I didn’t know why they were doing that. If my problem is my heart, I thought, why are they shaving my private parts?

  A cold razor blade scraping over my skin.

  And the image of a man condemned to death, being prepared in the morning for the electric chair, came suddenly to my mind.

  And then this. Today Sanja said that was it. No more cigarettes.

  “If you want to go on living,” she said, “you have to stop.”

  And it was high time.

  “There’s a Bosnian, a doctor in Kentucky. I heard this story today. He had a heart attack, just like you, and while he was still in hospital, he asked his wife to park the car behind the hospital building. Then he’d go out, hide in the car and smoke a cigarette. Imagine! A doctor. His unfortunate wife refused to bring cigarettes, and she told his doctor colleagues about it.”

  In America everything is geared to stopping you smoking. Of all the nations on the planet, they are the most resistant to the tobacco habit.

  Nevertheless, one of the finest sentences about the cigarette and dependence on it was written by an American, Laird Hunt:

  When you smoke, other people come up to you and ask for a light.

  The next day. I thought about how the news of her son’s heart attack could affect my mother in Bosnia. In order to preempt any possible pain, I called her and explained that a rumor that I had had a heart attack was likely to spread through the Bosnian part of the world. I was calling, I said, so that my voice and cheerfulness would reassure her that this was not the case. She listened to me attentively, then there was a short pause before she asked: “So, how are you, otherwise?”

  I clearly recognized her anxiety in that otherwise.

  “Of all possible diseases, they hit on a heart attack,” she said. “The Mehmedinovićs don’t have them. No one in our family either on your father’s side or on mine has ever had a problem with their heart.”

  So, that meant I was the first. Genetic degeneration had to start with someone; or else I—like all my relations—started out with the same heart, only I had carelessly filled mine with stuff that exceeded its capacity.

  And when the call was over, I remembered a line of verse that I had last thought about perhaps in the late 1970s. It wasn’t remotely worthy, metaphysical poetry, but a rudimentary line by the forgotten Bosnian poet Vladimir Nastić that went:

  I nearly swooned, Mother, like you, giving birth to me.

  Sanja came this morning before eight o’clock. On her way to the ward, she had bought me a decaf in the hospital canteen. The decaf was sweetened with artificial sweetener.

  It wasn’t coffee, it wasn’t sugar, nor was I myself.

  And she said: “You’re looking well!”

  I nodded affirmatively. Clearly I looked well, tied to the bed with all these cables so that I couldn’t move, or sit up, or get out of bed and walk around the room. But that didn’t bother me. I drank the coffee with great pleasure, just as though it was real coffee, with natural white sugar.

  This morning a new nurse came. She said that it would be good for me to move, to walk around the room. I instantly dug myself out of bed, still plugged into hundreds of wires and with needles in my veins.

  In the bathroom, Sanja carefully washed my whole body with a wet cloth.

  Then I walked around the room. It was good to be walking again. This was what the experience of one’s first step was like. I was walking!

  But afterward, I was sitting in my chair and suddenly straightened up, and at that moment I felt something burst in my right groin (where they had shaved my private parts the day before with a razor). At the same moment I saw a swelling appear. I pressed the button on my bed to call the nurse, who came quickly, and looked at the swelling with interest. She measured my penis, which was lying over the swelling, against the outside edge of her hand. She was concerned. She measured the pulse in my feet and hurried out of the room to find the duty doctor.

  Very soon, instead of her or the doctor, a young man appeared, a technician with a strange plastic object. In the center of the square object there was a half ball, which he pressed onto the swelling. The ends of the surface into which the ball was set had holes with a paper string drawn through them. He tied the string round my waist. But he moved slowly, all the time reading the instructions for installing this plastic object whose purpose was, presumably, to read impulses, or messages sent by the swelling near my genitals.

  And it wasn’t working.

  He gave up.

  He laid the plastic object down on the bedside cabinet, and left.

  Was I now supposed to act like someone ill?

  I didn’t want to.

  No.

  In Chekhov’s diaries there is a short note, a sketch for a story, about a man who went to the doctor, who examined him and discovered a weakness in his heart.

  After that the man changed the way he lived, took medicines and talked obsessively about his weakness; the whole town knew about his heart, and all the town’s doctors (whom he consulted regularly) talked about his illness. He did not marry, he stopped drinking, he always walked slowly, and breathed with difficulty.

  Eleven years later, he travelled to Moscow and went to see a cardiologist. That was how it emerged that his heart was, in fact, in excellent shape. To begin with, he was overjoyed at his health. But it quickly turned out that he was unable to return to a normal way of life, as he was completely adapted to his rhythm of going to bed early, walking slowly and breathing with difficulty.

  What is more, the world became quite boring for him, now that he could no longer talk about his illness.

  A young African had come to photograph my heart.

  On his index finger—rather than on his ring finger, like most people—he had a silver ring with a square stone, that is, a combination of two stones: a large turquoise in the form of a tear was integrated into a black square of onyx. For the next half-hour, as I watched him work, I looked at that ring.

  In order to photograph my heart, he used a hand-held scanner, and moved the cold, egg-shaped object over my breastbone, on the left side of my naked chest. On the monitor in front of him, was he focusing on the image of my heart? Or some other visual content? I don’t know, I couldn’t see what he was seeing. I always felt a bit dizzy whenever I heard my own heart. My hand sometimes falls unconsciously onto my chest, on the left side, just as I am falling asleep, then I become aware of my heart, and that wakes me up. and now, as that young man was recording me, I was seething with discomfort. At one moment he pressed the round scanner hard down between my ribs. This was a moment of utter bodily discomfort.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m trying to make a bit of space between your ribs, so that I get a clearer image.”

  I can easily handle pain.

&
nbsp; But this wasn’t pain; this was separating the ribs right by the heart, this was far more than I was prepared to put up with. And that pressure between my ribs unleashed an uncontrollable fury in me. He had been scanning for half an hour already—had he taken any images? He said he had, but that it wasn’t enough. And I told him that for me what he had already recorded was absolutely enough, pulled my pajamas over my chest and crossed my arms over it for good measure, to prevent any further approach to my ribs.

  It was as the young man, confused by my reaction, was putting away the instrument and leaving the room that Sanja stood with a decaf in a cardboard cup. She noticed my agitation and asked—what happened? I waved my hand, never mind, nothing, the examination took too long and that was why I was irritated. But then, I was put out by the expression on the young man’s face. While he was packing up his apparatus, I noticed a smile of mild revolt on his face. Did he think I was a racist? That was it! I could see it in his expression. That’s what he thought. He thought that I reacted the way I did not because I didn’t enjoy having him forcing my ribs apart, but because I had something against the color of his skin. I felt a need to talk to him, to put him right, but I knew that could only increase the misunderstanding.

  So I didn’t say anything.

  Nor did he.

  He left without a word.

  Then Sanja appeared with a decaf in a cardboard cup. She told me some of my friends were calling and wanted to visit me in hospital.

  No, no.

  They wanted to assure themselves that the heart attack had happened to me and not to them, which was human and normal, they wanted the confirmation that the misfortune had passed them by.

  I refused.

  The third day.

  I was moved out of intensive care into an ordinary hospital ward, where I shared a room with this old man. He was a Slovak by origin.

  Lukas Cierny. That’s what was written in blue felt tip on a little board on the wall, to the right of his bed. Nice name. Lukas Cierny. How old could he be? Eighty? Maybe more. He had Alzheimer’s disease, and some chest problems, and his breathing was very restricted.