A Summer In Europe

by Marilyn Brant

  “I didn’t eat that much,” he kept muttering, first to Sally and then to Connie Sue and Alex. “I wasn’t that hungry. I mostly had vegetables, too.”

  “It’s all right, dear,” Sally said, rubbing his back as she might that of a young child. “It’ll pass soon.” And Hans-Josef, who’d fought a bout or two of nausea himself, motioned for them all to get back on the bus when they were ready.

  However, Sally’s doting reassurance to Peter turned to shrill concern as her husband’s condition grew worse the closer they got to Brussels.

  Dr. Louie, still recovering from his own battle with the tainted meal, knelt beside Peter in the bus aisle and asked him a series of questions about his condition. After listening to his responses, Dr. Louie turned sharply to their tour guide and driver. “Hans-Josef. Guido. We need to get Peter to a hospital right now!” He searched the faces of his fellow passengers. “Who here has aspirin on them? I need it.”

  Matilda’s hand shot into her purse and she pulled out a few sealed caplets.

  Dr. Louie nodded once at her then asked, “Water?”

  Sally fumbled for her water bottle—half empty, half full, twice as big as it needed to be, whatever—no one cared about word-smithing or witticisms now. She relinquished it to the retired vet.

  Then Dr. Louie said, “Peter, listen carefully to me. I don’t want you to be alarmed, but you need to take these tablets this instant and keep me updated on how you’re feeling. We’ll be at the hospital in—how long?” He glanced at Guido.

  “Ten minutes,” the Italian bus driver supplied.

  Peter hastily took the aspirin and washed it down with water. “What’s happening to me?” he asked, his voice feeble alongside the relative strength of the other man’s.

  Dr. Louie, who must have had an excellent bedside manner with dogs, cats and random pet iguana patients—and their owners—in his days of working his veterinary practice, held Peter’s hand and, for once, spoke softly. “You’re having a heart attack, Peter. But don’t worry. We’ll take care of you.”

  In the hospital waiting room, Gwen worked hard to keep from all-out panicking.

  It was ridiculous for her to be this worked up. Peter would be fine. Just fine. He was only sixty. But her dad had been only sixty, too ... oh, God! Too young. Too, too young.

  She might not have been as close to Peter and Sally as she was to the others. And she might have been annoyed by his silly math jokes and puns. But, as she watched his wife of forty years pace around the room with friends from both sides of the Atlantic doing their best to comfort her, Gwen wanted nothing more than for Peter to walk out of that Belgian emergency room and start cracking jokes about the Pythagorean theorem.

  Emerson and Thoreau, apparently in a period of détente, were taking turns bringing everyone cups of tea or coffee and trying to help Hans-Josef and Dr. Louie get updates from the hospital staff.

  Even without strong European coffee coursing through her veins, Gwen’s hands began to shake. Life was too short. Too short! Why did people have to die so young? Why did they have to die at all? What was the point of living if, just when you began to feel things, just when you started to really see the beauty in life, it all got snatched away? Why was it that when you loved somebody who was central to your existence—loved him or her with your whole heart and soul—they could be taken from you?

  Her hands shook more violently and, then, she realized it wasn’t only her hands that were trembling. It was all of her. Her whole body, inside and out.

  A strong arm snaked around her shoulders and steadied her. Tightening and drawing her in with a firm, soothing grip. Zenia.

  “It’s gonna be okay, child. Don’t you worry your sweet self,” she crooned softly.

  “But I am worried. I can’t just stop,” Gwen confessed. Her voice was shaking, too. “Everyone around me dies. I hate that. I hate, hate, hate it.”

  Zenia hugged her closer. “Fear of death is somethin’ we all fight. There are only a few ways to deal with it, as far as I can see anyways. Some people bury their fool heads in the sand and ignore it. Some people never do nothin’ ’cause they’re so afraid of it. And some people—the artists in the world—we channel it like a satellite signal. We take that fear and let it drive us to create something lasting and beautiful. And there are lotsa artists out there. Sometimes their art is medicine and their project is to help save a patient. Sometimes their art is cooking a yummy meal. Me, my art is my weaving.” She squeezed tighter still. “What about you, Gwennie-girl? What’s your art?”

  Gwen sniffled and shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe I don’t have one.”

  Zenia made a dismissive sound. “Maybe you do and you’re just scared to own it.” She rubbed the spot on Gwen’s skin that she’d been squeezing so hard. “You think about it. You think of what you love. What makes you happy. What makes you forget that time is even passing by. That thing that you want to keep doing and keep making more beautiful. That is your art, honey.”

  A few minutes later, when Gwen’s shaking had mostly subsided, Emerson came up to them to offer them each a cup of coffee. It was only then that Zenia removed her solid arm from around Gwen’s shoulders. Gwen smiled at the older woman and gratefully took the Styrofoam cup from Emerson.

  “Thanks,” she said, addressing them both.

  “I see a chair open over there,” Zenia said, pointing. “I’m gonna sit these old bones down awhile and let you young people talk.”

  Gwen glanced after her as she strode away on very sturdy, not remotely tired-looking legs. “I just adore that lady,” she whispered to Emerson, realizing the full truth of it as she said it aloud. Her aunt’s friends were outlandish at times, but they were class acts.

  “She’s a smart and charming woman,” Emerson agreed. “Frightening, too, when she’s determined to have her way.”

  Gwen laughed, thinking of the poor Austrian seaman Zenia had cornered in that Salzburg restaurant. “That she is.”

  “And how are you?” he asked. “You look a bit shaken.”

  “I think I’m okay now. Better anyway.” She paused. “It was scary there on the bus. It brought back some not-so-great memories. But I’m relieved we were able to get Peter to the hospital this quickly. Imagine if we’d still been out in the countryside somewhere.” She shuddered, remembering how long it had taken her and her brothers to get their dad to the hospital when he’d had his attack. They were in the country, visiting friends about thirty miles from Waverly. Maybe if they’d gotten there faster ... but, no. They couldn’t have been any speedier. The paramedics from the medical center met them halfway and were on top of things immediately. And when the cardiologist got there and did his examination, he said this would have been a tough case even if an emergency vehicle had been on the scene from the first minute. Still, Gwen couldn’t help but wonder sometimes.

  Emerson nodded but said nothing at first. She noticed how his gaze had turned distant. She knew he wasn’t looking at the people in the room. That he wasn’t in the present time at all.

  After several moments, he frowned. “This nearness to that line between life and death never gets easier for me either, Gwen. When my father died, I tried to find answers. Tried to wrap my mind around the right way of thinking about it. Rationalizing it. The inevitability of it frustrated me, and I could only think about it in binary terms for a while. Either you’re alive or you’re dead. But then ...” He let this thought trail off and Gwen, who still thought about mortality in binary terms and who couldn’t quite envision an alternate perspective, had to know the rest.

  “But then what?” she asked.

  He scrunched up his face as if debating whether telling her would be too odd or, perhaps, too painful. Nevertheless, he exhaled and spoke. “But then I started to consider death as just one possibility. One potential outcome out of an infinite range of possibilities in every day. Eventually, we’ll all die. That’s a certainty. That’s one outcome that will definitely happen at some point in time. But I di
dn’t have to look at my days as if they were a slow death march to The End either. Just like there are different possible winning hands in mah-jongg every year and those hands change from year to year ... and in quantum mechanics the uncertainty principle recognizes our ability to measure in probabilities only, not in exactitudes ... death, therefore, is just one variation in a person’s earthly life. It will be the final one, yes, but it’s only one possible outcome in a twenty-four-hour period, amongst thousands of other possibilities.”

  He moved in closer and hesitated again. She nodded, encouraging him to continue.

  “By accepting that death is there, one possibility alongside many others, I give weight and power to all the other choices. Death is present, but so are scores of other potential outcomes. For me, I live my life better when I make peace with that.” He tilted his head and studied her expression. “Does that make any sense to you?”

  Strangely, thankfully, it did. “Yes,” she murmured, as a ribbon of peace flowed deep within her and tied a simple but sturdy bow around her heart. It covered up, if only for a moment, a few of the scars left there by losses in her past.

  Dr. Louie’s resonant voice cut through the hospital chatter surrounding them. “The doctors just gave us some good news,” he announced. He patted a watery-eyed Sally as he spoke. “Peter is going to need to stay here for a few days of observation, but he’s going to be just fine.”

  A cheer went up.

  “Thanks to Louie and Guido and Hans-Josef and—and all of you,” Sally said with a happy sob. “Bless you all for helping to take care of both of us and for getting Peter here in time to save him.”

  Gwen glanced around the waiting room—there weren’t any dry eyes. Fatigue and relief had made claims on them all. But, while tears glistened in Matilda’s eyes as well, as she gazed at Dr. Louie with her usual admiration, Gwen detected another emotion on the older woman’s face and recognized it for what it was: pride in her man.

  While Peter, Sally and Hans-Josef remained at the Belgian hospital through the night and into the next day, Guido was put in charge of getting the rest of them to the hotel to sleep. Then, bright and early the next morning, he drove them through the city for a quick tour to see a few highlights, like the Manneken Pis, a famous bronze fountain statue near the Grand Place of a little naked boy urinating (“How unique!” Connie Sue enthused. “And, oh, what cute little outfits they have for him ...”), and the Atom-ium monument, which was built for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair and depicted “a giant atom.”

  “Technically,” Emerson told her, “it’s nine steel spheres connected so that the whole structure forms the unit-cell shape of an iron crystal, magnified about one hundred sixty-five billion times.”

  “That’s a lot,” Gwen commented.

  He grinned and snapped a picture of it. “It is.”

  Finally, Guido delivered them to the International Sudoku Championships, which were being held at a huge convention center in downtown Brussels in the lively Mont des Arts cultural quarter of the city.

  The first hour was registration for the competitors. They were given numbers to wear, as if runners in a marathon, as well as sharpened pencils, notepads, schedules detailing when and where they needed to go for the preliminary rounds and special lapel pins, which were a mark of respect among the competitors and envy among the spectators.

  “How does this work?” Gwen asked Aunt Bea, who had just returned from fussing over Matilda and helping her fasten her pin and number.

  “At this tournament, the players get divided up into three age divisions—young adult, adult, and seniors—and two skill levels—intermediate and advanced,” her aunt explained. “Then they compete in heats to see who’ll progress to the finals. The intermediate players have to solve two puzzles during their heat. The advanced players have to solve three. Their finishing times are added up and the player who ends with the fastest overall time is a finalist in the spectator round that we can all watch.”

  “We can’t watch the heats?” Gwen asked, not sure how interesting that would be but it had to be an improvement over standing around in the hallway for five hours.

  Bea shook her head. “That’s done silently in thirty-minute blocks of time. The contestants use pencil and paper to figure out the puzzles. They work at a desk, just like taking a school test. It’s only on the last round when the finalists solve their puzzles on dry-erase boards onstage, so everyone can see. It’s real exciting.”

  Back in high school, Gwen had spent a couple of years on the math team. She had solved timed algebraic equations in a room full of like-minded teens and, while she’d experienced the geeky rush of completing a tricky multiple-step, high-level math problem with the clock ticking for added urgency, she found herself doubting she’d feel an equal degree of excitement watching someone else try to do something similar on a public platform. It was, perhaps, a degree or two more fascinating than monitoring her eighth graders as they took a chapter test on integers and variables.

  “Hmm. Fun,” Gwen managed.

  Her aunt grinned at her. “Give it a chance, Gwennie. You’ve seen how much you’ve enjoyed the new things you’ve tried on this trip. Consider the possibility that, yes, it will be fun.”

  Bea was right, of course. Gwen had opened herself up to experience in Europe and had certainly come away with a lot of it. New memories, new sensory delights, new friends. Friends who’d raised the bar on what constituted excitement. Her willingness to allow herself the possibility of being changed had been the first step, and this latest event was just the most recent in her summer transformation from being a zero-sophisticate to ... well, a slightly less naïve citizen of the world.

  “I’ll give it a chance,” Gwen agreed. And, of course, the funny thing was, as soon as she gave herself permission to have fun, a simmering excitement within her came alive, feeding off the high energy and spirits of the others and quickly becoming all her own.

  The first of five preliminary rounds began and, as the competitors required silence behind closed doors, the spectators and moral supporters milled around in the open hallways and public gathering spaces to chat with each other, purchase food from an array of vendors (although the tour-group members were especially careful with their diets that day, and most stuck primarily to breads and bland items) and learn a few algorithm tricks and puzzle-solving strategies from some expert sudoku players who’d been hired by the organizers to give demonstrations.

  Cynthia, on her own without Hans-Josef for the day, meandered over to where Gwen, Emerson, Louisa and Thoreau were standing, which was in front of a sudoku exhibit table featuring n2 Triples in Latin Squares, during the fifth and final heat for the young-adult division.

  “Any word yet on how Ani did?” she asked. “I thought he was competing in the fourth round.”

  Thoreau nodded. “Kamesh passed by me in the hall about ten minutes ago. Both he and Ani scored in the top five of their age divisions in the intermediate level. Neither were in the number one spot, so they won’t move on to the final round, but Kamesh was still very pleased. They’ll each get a signed certificate, a personal invitation to next year’s championship at a discount off the regular admissions fee and an honorable mention in their SUDOKU-4-U bimonthly newsletter.” He glanced at his brother and raised an amused eyebrow. “You subscribe to that, don’t you?”

  Emerson, who’d been on his best behavior since the hospital yesterday, only raised an eyebrow in return and calmly replied, “Why, yes. I do. I’m sure it’s not as riveting to read as your weekly Rook & Crown Chess Masters Digest, but not all of us expect the same degree of entertainment from our games as you do.”

  Thoreau chuckled. “Touché,” he said and, in a gentlemanly act, kindly let Louisa change the subject.

  Louisa turned to Cynthia and said, “Davis made it into the top five of his advanced trial, too, and he was so tickled, I saw him jumping around afterward.”

  “I believe he volunteered to help set up for the final senior rounds,
” Thoreau added.

  “What about Matilda?” Emerson asked. He glanced at Gwen. “Have you seen her?”

  She shook her head. “Matilda’s in this trial right now, for the intermediate level.” She glanced at her watch. “Aunt Bea was going to stay near the door of the room, so she’d be the first to know the result. She promised to let me know right away.”

  This proved unnecessary, however, since all of them could hear Zenia’s distinctive whoop and holler. “Glory be and praise to the Lord!”

  And moments later Aunt Bea came running up to them, breathless. “Matilda’s number one! She’s going to the finals!”

  So, after the two youth and two adult competitions, for intermediate and advanced players, Matilda’s group was up. Five sudoku players—the winners from each heat—stood onstage with privacy dividers between them. Matilda was the one standing all the way to the left. At age eighty-three, she was the eldest of the intermediate seniors and the only woman in this final round.

  Dr. Louie, Zenia and Aunt Bea wedged their way into the front row, left side, so they could be closest to her. Gwen and Emerson found a pair of seats right behind them, while Cynthia, Louisa and Thoreau were in the same row but a little farther down. Scattered throughout the auditorium were Connie Sue, Alex, Colin, Hester and a still jubilant Kamesh and Ani. Davis, however, was onstage, radiating good-luck vibes at Matilda as he helped set up the dry-erase boards for each contestant (with the final puzzle still covered with black paper, of course) and passed out markers, erasers and water bottles to all five players.

  When it was time to start the clock, each competitor uncapped his or her marker, removed the black paper and began to solve the puzzle on the 9x9 square grid underneath. Box by box, the empty squares were filled with numbers, all ranging from one to nine. Because the word “sudoku” meant “single number,” the same single integer was not allowed to appear twice in the 9x9 row or in the 9x9 column or in any of the nine 3x3 sub-blocks of the larger 9x9 grid. A smattering of clues were given, of course—individual numbers tossed like a handful of breadcrumbs across the grid—but the players needed to use advanced mathematical algorithms to make use of them so they had a chance at solving the puzzle quickly.