Stop reading my journal. You have a problem.
If it’s possible to miss someone as a ghost, then I’m sure I will miss you. Looking forward to haunting your life.
Live,
Polina.
PS—You’d better use the suitcase. You have no idea how hard it was to steal ten thousand rubles in this cheap hospital.
Then, like a grandmother clock, Natalya exploded back through the door and began wrapping a tie around my neck. Her face was about six inches from mine, so I got to watch the sequence of faces that she made while attempting to get it tied.
“It’s been a while,” she said.
“Since your husband?” I asked while simultaneously holding my breath so that she couldn’t smell the Stoli.
“Yes. Since him,” she said, and then after a few more seconds of wrangling and pinching the skin of my neck:
“There. Quite handsome, Ivan,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
She maneuvered her way behind my chair and wheeled me out of my room, and then down the hall, and past Miss Kristina’s desk, and then out the two big brown double doors, and then we were outside, which I hated. She stopped for a moment, perhaps to get me acclimated to my agoraphobia, or maybe because she was tired of pushing. Then she dusted some of the hair off my forehead and continued to push me down a gray concrete ramp to a small parking lot where her car was parked.
“What do you call this car?” I asked.
“It’s a Lada.”
“It looks old.”
“It is old.”
She parked my chair near to the door, but not too close, because she needed room to open the door, which swung out like a pterodactyl wing. Then she wheeled me right up close to the seat and started to drag my body into the car.
“No, I can do this,” I said.
“Of course you can,” she said, relinquishing my body.
And, of course, in my attempt to transition myself from my chair to the car using some combination of worming and writhing, I fell out of my chair and slammed my chin into the car’s metal frame, which resulted in minor bleeding. This meant that two of my phobias (agoraphobia and hemophobia) were now being simultaneously activated.
“Sweet Saint Joseph,” Nurse Natalya blurted while her hands and legs positioned herself to pull me off the ground.
“I can do it,” I said. And I did. Almost. Until I didn’t. At which point I slipped, and this time my nose collided with a tire, which made even more blood and several flashes of bright light inside my head.
“Don’t,” I said preemptively. And she didn’t. And after what felt like climbing a small mountain, I was in the front seat of Nurse Natalya’s Lada with trembling hands. When it was clear I wouldn’t kill myself, Nurse Natalya folded my chair and put it in the backseat.
“Seat belt,” said Nurse Natalya.
I watched as she slipped into her seat, attached her seat belt, and started the car all at the same time.
“I have one arm,” I said.
Nurse Natalya took a moment to look me over and assess the logistics of her request, after which she made an agreeable gesture with the wrinkles in her forehead and reached over to attach my seat belt herself. And without another word, we pulled out of the long driveway of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children for the first time in my life.
The wordlessness lasted for most of the drive to the cemetery. There were several reasons for this. Reason #1: I turned and looked at Nurse Natalya’s face, and it was clear that she was gone, perhaps in a deep trance to some other place and time where her husband still lived, but I was too afraid to ask her if that was true. Reason #2: The paper was burning a hole through my breast pocket. Reason #3: I felt dangerously close to vomiting all over Nurse Natalya’s Lada whenever I thought about how the next time the car stopped moving, I would show her the paper.
There were exactly seven turns on the way to the cemetery. I know this because every time we took one, I had to swallow some juices back into my stomach. It only got worse once we pulled into the cemetery, which was filled with snaking dirt roads designed to provide easy access to every tombstone, but also provided an incessant tug at the contents of my stomach. Something about being inside the cemetery shook Nurse Natalya out of her trance, which made her remember that I was in the car.
“It’s called car sickness, Ivan. It’s common.”
“How common?”
“Quite common.”
“It’s rare, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but you’ve never ridden before.”
I let her believe it was car sickness.
“How far is it?”
“Another hundred feet.”
“Why did you pick this cemetery?”
“Because it’s nice.”
“Because it’s free?”
“Not free, but cheap.”
“Free.”
“Not free, but already paid for.”
“Who paid for it?”
“My husband.”
“Your dead husband?”
“Yes, my dead husband.”
“But he’s dead.”
“He bought it when he was alive.”
“Why would he buy a plot that he wasn’t going to be buried in?”
“Because I was supposed to be buried in it.”
Natalya parked the car, while I sat in a state of confusion.
“Why wouldn’t you get buried with your husband?”
“I was supposed to be. He’s buried here too.”
Natalya pointed at the hollowed-out grave about fifty meters from the car. There was a casket next to it, which I imagined had Polina inside. On the other side of the casket was a tombstone.
“Is that your husband?”
“Yes.”
“Polina is being buried next to your husband where you were supposed to be buried?”
“Yes.”
Her simple yes made me uncomfortable for several reasons. First, because I was very angry that Natalya would do that to herself and to her dead husband. Second, because levels of generosity such as this did not operate in the machinery of my world. So I responded with a blurt. Perhaps there was no other way.
“Was Dimitri my brother?”
I paid careful attention to Nurse Natalya’s face from that moment on. At this particular moment, it had all the makings of confusion. The Art of Reading Faces by Sergei Goglinov suggests that the expression of confusion comes in many flavors. The one on Nurse Natalya’s face was the Where the fuck did that come from? flavor, which is quite different from the How the fuck does he know that? flavor. This distinction is quite important and fell in Nurse Natalya’s favor.
“Dimitri didn’t have a brother, Ivan. And neither do you.”
“If you say so.”
The confusion in Nurse Natalya’s face reconfigured. It was now obvious that she was angry, at least according to the creases in her forehead and the tightness of her jawline.
“Where is this coming from, Ivan? And make it quick because we have someone to bury.”
“From this.”
I pulled the paper out and handed it to her. I watched her face carefully as she unfolded it. Her jaw loosened, and the wrinkles turned shallow, and now her confusion was back. Her eyes, with slightly blue scleras and irises fading from green to orange, were shifting all over the document like she was trying to see every word at once. At some point, they started moving more traditionally, left to right, top to bottom. Then, when she was done, her eyes went back to the top, to the beginning, the lines that had my name, and started all over again. And when she finished the second time, the hand that held the paper fell into her lap, and her head moved up into the sky like she was carving things out, massaging old memories, letting history assemble, connecting the dots of some secret symphony that she was always just shy of unearthing. Her mouth hung slightly open, and her other hand moved to her lips. And then she turned to me, and the expression became a cocktail of pity, and anger, and sympathy, and forgi
veness, and concern, and maternity, and resolution, and I wondered how Nurse Natalya’s brain did not explode with so much happening all at the same time.
“Oh, my Ivan, in the name of the Father—”
Little tear streams formed from nothing on Nurse Natalya’s cheeks, but the mosaic of expressions in her face didn’t change.
“Answers,” I said.
Stoically. Firmly. Resolutely.
“Where did you find this?” she asked.
“She found it. In Mikhail’s office. And you don’t get to ask questions.”
“Okay.”
“Who knew?”
“No one knew for sure,” she said.
“But.”
“But some of us wondered.”
“Why?”
“Because one of us would suddenly vanish.”
“But no one asked.”
“No one asked.”
“Why?”
“Because you just don’t ask.”
“I deserve better than that. Especially from you.”
“I know you do.”
The little streams on Nurse Natalya’s cheeks got fatter.
“Did you know my mother?”
“I did.”
“How do you know you knew her?”
“Her name was Yulia. I know because you can see the Y and the l pop out from the marker ink.”
Nurse Natalya showed me the paper to confirm.
“Was she a nurse?”
“Yes.”
“Was she your friend?”
“She was.”
“Do you promise that you never knew?”
“I promise,” which she could barely say because now Natalya’s face started crumbling in on itself like a rotting apple.
“What was she like?”
“She was smart, like you. And she made me laugh. No one else at the hospital could make me laugh.”
“What did she look like?”
“She had big blue eyes. Also like you. I remember her hair was starting to gray even though she was young, which made her more beautiful in her own way.”
“What happened to her?”
“I never heard from her after she left.”
“Not once?”
“Except for a short letter from Leningrad.”
“What did it say?”
“It said that she was happy.”
“With a family?”
“Yes.”
Which hurt my heart.
“How old was she?”
“When she left, or when she had a family?”
“Both.”
“Twenty-three when she left. Thirty when she sent me the letter.”
“Did you know she was pregnant?”
“I did.”
“She told you?”
“No, but I figured it out.”
“But you didn’t know it was him?”
“I suspected. We all suspected.”
I waited for my thoughts to catch up with my mouth before asking the next question.
“Why didn’t he just end us?”
“You mean in the womb?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“When you were born, abortions were easier to get than bread. But the Mikhail I know would never allow it. He’s the most God-fearing philanderer I know. You don’t manage the most Orthodox hospital in the Eastern Bloc otherwise.”
“There may be more?”
“Probably.”
“Why keep me?”
“I can only guess because you were sick.”
“So?”
“You would need to be treated. Which requires money and a story—two things that would haunt him like the ghost of Saint Francis. They could lead back to the misses or the church.”
She held her breath for a few seconds and thought some things. Then she continued:
“At the hospital, you cost nothing. And he could make it look like you never happened. As hard as that is to hear, moya lyubov.”
Natalya tried to hold me, but I batted her away.
“My baby—”
“I would like to kill him.”
“Ivan. You are not his blood.”
“There is nothing I would prefer more than to kill him.”
“Ivan. You are not from him.”
For the first time ever, I looked into Natalya’s eyes and didn’t believe her.
Because I was.
I was him.
No matter what she or Polina said.
But I knew it wasn’t my choice.
So I gave in and put my head in her bosom.
And I lurched and then I heaved.
I couldn’t breathe I cried so hard.
And still I pushed my head deeper into her skin, where it was even harder to breathe.
I wept till there was nothing left to weep, and I was thirsty because I ran out of liquids.
And then I remembered that we were here to bury Polina.
And I thought about how much I lost in such a short time.
“I think I loved her,” I said when I could say things again.
“She loved you too.”
“Maybe.”
“She said something once.”
“What?”
“She said you made her forget that she was dying. That you gave her the cure to herself. And maybe that’s all love is, Ivan.”
“Maybe.”
“I think so.”
“Let’s go.”
“Okay.”
Natalya wiped up the mess all over the both of our faces, and then she wheeled me to the hole in the ground where Polina was about to go.
II
The Funeral
There were four people at Polina’s funeral: Nurse Natalya, the priest, and Nurse Natalya’s cousin, Maria, who happened to be a nun, and me. Polina was there also, but she was inside of a closed, no-frills casket, which looked like the plain box they might issue to fallen soldiers. The priest, whom Nurse Natalya introduced as Father Petrov, a longtime friend of the family, initiated the ceremony promptly.
“Thou only Creator Who with wisdom profound mercifully orderest all things, and givest unto all that which is useful, give rest, O Lord, to the soul of Thy servant who has fallen asleep, for she has placed her trust in Thee, our Maker and Fashioner and our God…”
And all I could think about was how Polina would have laughed at all the pomp. She would have initiated a discussion of the pros and cons of Father Petrov’s obnoxious mustache and mused about what self-deception would make a man surrender his life to God in exchange for a sexless life.
With the saints give rest, O Christ, to the soul of Thy servant where sickness and sorrow are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.
The words didn’t connect. They didn’t tie a bow around her life like she deserved. I wondered if I should have arranged a set of quotes from her favorite songs and books. In my opinion, Tolstoy, Nabokov, and Janis Joplin made far better prophets. And I knew Polina agreed from her box.
My soul cleaves to the dust, give me life according to Thy word.
But there was something to the pomp.
Turn my eyes from looking at vanities; and give me life in Thy ways.
It almost tricks you.
Behold, I long for Thy precepts; in Thy righteousness give me life.
Into thinking there could be something more.
Thy testimonies are righteousness forever; give me understanding that I may live.
And I wondered if I could let myself be tricked. Because it tasted so good.
Plead my cause, and redeem me; give me life according to Thy promise.
Then I wheeled over to the casket, and amid fierce protests from Nurse Natalya and Father Petrov, I lifted the lid with all my mutant might to reveal a Polina not right for the light of day.
Thank you, Polina. Now, I can’t be tricked.
Then, I set the lid back down and let the priest proceed with his sermon. Until the words were over and they lifted the box and put it into the gro
und.
By now, Reader, I hope you understand that at the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children, there is no absence of death. The tiny hands of ghosts emerge from the walls and waft its smell in my face all day long, singeing my nostrils and leaving me with a distinct and uninvited congestion. But somehow this perpetual exposure failed to habituate me to the sight of that limp, lavender, lifeless bag of bones whose kiss was warm only a few days ago. If I’m to be honest, Polina was the only creature I ever allowed myself to make real.
My mother (the one in my head) was right. My resistance to Polina’s death gave birth to a terrible little thought. It leaked into my head, uninvited and unapologetic, and immediately established a dwelling: What if my beloved Polina wasn’t dead? What if this were an inexplicable coma? A medical anomaly? And what if my beloved Polina would awaken long after she’d been buried? My imagination, which was quite honed after a lifetime of sensory deprivation, played out the scenario with precious immediacy. She would open her eyes in a cold, dark cell with pressure-treated pungent pine several inches from her eyes. And after a few confused moments, where she couldn’t be sure whether or not she was dreaming a terrible dream, reality would set in, along with real terror. Perhaps it would begin with transcendental claustrophobia or perhaps the freezing realization of transcendental loneliness. She would panic. She would kick and hammer and thrash about and claw, but this would only remind her of how close the walls actually were. Even so, she would continue to fight for a minute, which would feel like hours in her fragile subjectivity. Then she would stop suddenly. The hopelessness of the situation would wash over her. A bereaved sympathetic nervous system would be forced to accept that she could not fight or flee. She would have to resign herself to lying there in all her transcendental fear and loneliness—until she died of asphyxiation.
Amid this terrible little thought, came a thought within a thought. A thought that perhaps as my beloved was gripped by this morbid arousal, the thoughts of her last waking moments would flood her, if for no other reason than their proximity, or maybe because they were relatively benign compared to what she was going through. Perhaps our last night together would fill her mind. And perhaps she would again be flushed by the derealization that we felt that night. And perhaps she would think of our kiss. And perhaps all this might become her world as the lesser parts of her were preparing to die. And perhaps the fantasy would continue on further and further into a future that neither of us saw but which she needed to imagine in that frigid, lonely place. And perhaps we would die together after all.
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko Page 23