by Luce d'Eramo
We learned that the convoy would head out again on October 3. But the Caucasian doctor told me that the German urologist had vetoed my departure. Having already pictured the journey in my mind, I rebelled, ordering him to transport me together with the group of wounded men because I was a Soviet citizen and I would not submit to a German; what’s more, I would file a complaint with the Russian Command in Mainz. In his unassuming, mournful way he spread his arms: he didn’t feel confident taking me with him, I wasn’t well, I could die, I had septicemia, I might as well know it.
The lengthy convoy, which had swelled in Homburg, set out toward Leipzig, which was the second link-up point. The transit camp emptied out and only Barbara and I remained in our pavilion, since she had refused to move on without me.
Piotr, who had repeatedly urged me to leave Janka for him, insisting “I’m getting better!,” did not say goodbye.
The German doctors took over the ward. The whole atmosphere changed: silence, schedules, a medicinal smell. Barbara took down the GOOD MOOD sign, but Sister didn’t like that and had it hung back up in its place.
As if they’d been waiting just for this, the Germans subjected me to medical examinations, X-rays, tests, hypodermoclysis, intramuscular and intravenous injections, enteroclysis, blood transfusions, and the scrutiny of a dozen physicians under the command of a Dr. Ort, a reflective man who was lean and wiry, his white hair closely shaved at the back of his neck.
I assigned the chief ward medic, Dr. Hasslocker, the first and last number on my now totally decimated priority list. I had been told by Sister that he was a staunch misogynist, due to having been deceived. I told him that he could trust me because, as a result of the malevolence of war, I was a kind of half woman, half fish, a modern-day siren who couldn’t betray anyone—only cheer up passing sailors.
In the short breaks between one treatment and another, the nun would introduce me to a German man or woman in the room, urging me to cheer them up. People came to the good mood room from the adjacent wards. They were terrified of the Russians, who were stealing what little they had left after the bombing and looting; they started at every sound and leaped to their feet, wary. If they were needy but dignified, I gave them something to eat, because we were provided with abundant rations and now I even received packets from the French Red Cross stationed at the hospital; but if they vented their feelings uncivilly, I let them leave empty-handed.
At times I thought I had an advantage over those who were sound: precisely because I didn’t really have a body, I was free from countless small anxieties and material insatiability.
As soon as the Russians left, a group from the French Health Bureau made an inspection tour. Speaking my mother tongue, I seemed to recover a little gaiety. Some of the men came to see me every day: they were very young, all volunteers, fervently anti-Nazi. They passionately discussed the Nuremberg trials that were beginning then, and they were irritated by the sight of the Germans, who, when they appeared, retreated, their expressions drawn.
The Frenchmen had it in for everybody, even the Allies, especially the Americans, the newcomers, but they also distrusted the Russians. As far as these young men were concerned, no nation had sufficient political conscience. I admired their zealous fervor; I thought about human suffering and I justified my reluctance to delve into political issues with the excuse that I was ill and had no stomach for hate.
In the evening, a German doctor, Ellen Marder, a thirty-year-old writer’s war widow with three young dependent children, came to knit in my room. She was very tall, with piercing blue eyes and a heartfelt laugh. She said I had the unexpected in my temperament, like her fallen husband. She gave me one of his novels: it was the story of a young man who ends up dying. Its sense of loneliness and emptiness makes it one of the most desolate, disquieting works that I have ever read. It seemed that he had been very witty in life and sociable, hungry to live. He had left for the front with wholehearted enthusiasm. Of course, I thought, with that desperate restlessness in his heart, the war was the ultimate opportunity for him.
Neither the doctor nor the French volunteers admitted that I was paralyzed.
After ten days of treatments, examinations, lavages, and restorative therapies, Dr. Ort, articulating the words clearly, said he could attempt surgery. The two affected vertebrae, by slipping and overlapping, had formed the hump with which I was afflicted; certainly it would have been better had I been operated on and put in traction six months earlier, at the time of the trauma. Now the osseous callus was such that he could not guarantee he’d be able to decompress the medulla. In any case, he wouldn’t touch me without my explicit written request.
“Could I die?”
“Possibly.”
“Could I be healed?”
“Perhaps.”
I won’t describe the excitement that came over me. And here I thought I had accepted the paralysis, that I had discerned its positive aspects. I saw the hand of God in my non-departure. This is why I had been left here … to be healed. All night I thought about Italy with rapture, desire, a sense of belonging. The earlier reservations had only been a defense. In my imagination I was already standing, I was running, my face in the wind, my hair blown back, my chest constricted by the air rushing by. Divine Providence. Sobbing with gratitude, I hugged and kissed the pillow as if it were God. How could I have lived without walking? How could I have tolerated such an abomination? It had all been a nightmare.
But the dawn, the usual gradual clarifying light of dawn, brought me back to reality. I could die. No, because by now I was somewhat of an expert on nature’s discriminations and I knew it was not my time. And what if I did die? What did I think lay before me? Though I had attained a certain knowledge and understanding of life, overcome a few trials, there was nothing left for me to do in this world. If that were so, however, I would die even without the surgery.
I had risked death for others. Couldn’t I risk it for myself? I talked about being strong and at the first real test I was pulling back.
That morning I signed the request for a laminectomy.
The surgery was scheduled for October 20. It was the sixteenth.
Unexpectedly Johann showed up. He’d gained some weight, looked neat and tidy, and brought gifts that included a Telefunken radio.
He’d learned of my decision and was against it.
The doctors declared that they could not act without his consent.
I hurled the blankets to the floor. “What do you want from me? Look at me! Don’t you see the condition I’m in?”
The rubber tube protruded from my sunken lower belly, between the angular projections of my hips.
Johann turned pale.
“And you’d like to be cut up again by these people, for their experiments? Former Nazis?”
“I want to live. I’m sick of having this corpse for a body.”
“Stop it! You’re more alive than I am.”
There was no way to get him to give the green light, his “no” became more and more authoritarian, not subject to appeal; he moved around the room with that vain air he’d had earlier at Mainz when he’d been having the affair with that German girlfriend of his and I hadn’t suspected a thing.
I was seized by a trembling fit of impotent rage. True, my cunning in having used him was coming back at me, but I had never gone so far as to interfere in his personal affairs. How dare he? If it weren’t for the bladder complications that occurred after he’d gone, by this time I would be in Russia, alone. Nor in a month and a half had he bothered to ask whether I was alive or dead, though he had left me racked with fever from the septicemia that was already spreading through me, and he knew it, the Russian doctor had spoken to him. What gave him the right now to dictate the law to me, like a master? By what justification?
I summoned the French volunteers, who came immediately. I’m one of them, I thought.
After listening to me briefly, they urged me to move quickly before Janka appealed to the Russian manager of the
Homburg camp for permission to take me away. Four young men came to my aid, hovering in front of the pavilion and making an occasional sortie to check around and reassure me, with protection straight out of a romance novel. A German doctor was able to divert Johann, with the pretext of taking him to see Dr. Ort, and the nurse led Barbara away with her.
It was the morning before the date set for the operation. One of the Frenchmen stood guard down the hall, another in front of my door, while two others quickly dismantled the tents in my room, emptied the closet, and gathered up my bags, then put me on a stretcher. When everything was ready, the Frenchmen on guard loaded the stuff on a little truck, and the other two lifted me on the stretcher and carried me down the stairs to the outside, running along paved drives, gravel paths, and flower beds to the far side of the hospital, where the French pavilion was located. Every so often, when they thought they were being followed and speeded up, I pitched and swayed as I lay on my back on my stretcher, looking up at the pale gray sky.
“It’s like the rape of the Sabine woman,” we said, feeling as though we were playing some sort of prank.
They took me to a ground-floor room, spacious as a salon, and quickly settled me as they argued heatedly on a plan of action for my protection. And to outdo the Russians, they placed green plants on the windowsill and a warm brazier next to my bed. I was content. They stood guard outside my door in pairs, taking turns every hour, while a young girl named Madeleine, black hair and blue eyes, stayed with me, ingenuously enamored of her mission.
In the afternoon I heard Johann’s angry voice and the undeterrable voices of my bodyguards. He went away and the French guys, describing the exchange to me, beamed about the victory they had achieved. But when they saw him return, armed, wearing a Soviet army uniform, they hastily recommended a change in tactics: they could not forbid him to enter.
He came in. We were alone.
“I am a Russian soldier,” he pronounced.
“And I’ll have the French take me to Mainz, and I’ll report you to the Russian captain as a Polish spy.”
“And I, as my last wish, will ask to be shot before your eyes.”
After that we started laughing. And as if there had never been the slightest disagreement between us, we planned what we should say to the Russians if they looked for me: given the delicacy of the operation, I’d preferred to have it done with people from the land where I’d been born, and with whom, especially after the anesthesia, I could more easily make myself understood.
He, however, insisted on the condition that he be able to be with me, otherwise as a Russian soldier he knew what he had to do.
“Your blackmail works as long as I want to go to Russia.”
“You don’t want to anymore?”
“I’m not sure.” I was thinking of the outcome of the operation. “But someday I’ll go there, even if it means waiting twenty years. They were the most supportive people in the camps and they’ve been good to me.”
I stayed up all night. If I had to die, I wouldn’t waste a single minute of life. The French played the accordion and Johann performed Cossack dances squatting on his calves.
Only Barbara, who had later tracked me down, wept, sniffling in bewilderment.
“Why did you leave me? I stayed behind for you.” Then she’d get distracted, watching the group, but would suddenly remember herself and, screwing up her little face, cry, “Now what am I going to do all alone?”
VIII
Dr. Ort, when he cracked the bony callus of my hump, did not find the medulla sawn in two, as might be expected after months of friction against the vertebral points, but in the shape of an S compressed between the two segments of the spinal column that had slipped and overlapped each other; it was only partially crushed. He extracted the wedged plates and, after four hours of surgery, had to stop at straightening my back, leaving the injured vertebrae side by side rather than pulling the two sections of the spine together to make them meet, because my heart couldn’t take any more. He fashioned a bed of plaster in which I was laid.
The first thing I remember thinking is that another wall had collapsed on me, and no one was helping to free me.
I felt pain for I don’t know how long, an overwhelming, dark pain disproportionate to the huge, heavy body sunk in the bed like lead.
Between the comings and goings of the Frenchmen, swift as wolves, Johann leaped up every time I moaned, handing me this or that, anxious to guess what I might need, but I never wanted anything and I took it out on him.
Dr. Marder later told me how, at the time of the operation, she had indicated the bed with me already under the anesthesia and sighed, “It would be better if she never woke up again.”
At which Johann blurted out, “No!,” his eyes filling with tears. “No, Luzi, no.” The foreign words escaped him. “Here”—he had finally tapped his forehead with his fingers—“here … solang der Kopf lebt.”*
They’d found him outside the operating room after waiting four hours with bated breath, his eyes asking: Is she alive? Then he collapsed; they had to keep him going with injections.
One morning, touching myself, I found that I was skinny and small, not voluminous as I felt. I had a belly, two legs, two feet. Inside there were thousands of pins that were triggered whenever someone brushed by my bed. Sometimes a leg would leap into the air, tugging on the medulla like a cord; when I placed the palm of my hand on it, it released. I even had a nail stuck in my belly. I went to pull it out, but I squeezed a rubber tube: I remembered the suprapubic catheter and left it alone.
As soon as I dozed off, I woke up worried that my body was no longer there. Yes, it was there. At times I gave in to the joy of pain: an injection was a stab; other people’s touch a jolt on bare nerves; I moved the catheter up and down to exacerbate the burning in my flesh.
I discovered early on that I could move my pelvis a little: I wriggled my rear end uncomfortably for hours in the plaster bed, enjoying the sting of the pins gone haywire. There was no chance I would ask for sedatives to ease my suffering! Which earned me a reputation for exceptional resistance to pain.
In short, the relationship between my paralyzed body and the rest of the world was not yet that of precise discrimination by touch, but a subjective one of pleasure and pain.
But it was nice to clench my teeth and tighten my fists, so tense that I shook, spasmodically, mentally willing my legs to move: they remained inert. I dreamed that I was running. I would wake up panting and each time I had the sensation of having arrived a fraction of a tenth of a second too late, just long enough for my legs to stiffen back up. I thought I could feel them becoming immovable.
The director of the French Health Bureau, Madame Martineau, her gaze responsible and concerned, came each day to inquire about my progress and to give me instructions:
“The destruction is accomplished in an instant, but to restore what was done takes time and patience. Ne soyez pas pressée, ma petite Lucette, don’t be in a hurry.”
In part to distract myself from the pain, I took to reading and listening to the radio again. I heard the vibrant voice of the news commentator give long accounts of the Nuremberg trials, which my friends talked about with horror, and I with endless anguish.
Some Germans sought me out, but the French didn’t take kindly to this.
The nun from the Russian pavilion came to see me and with a conspiratorial air asked me to put in a good word, if possible, so that at least two Germans in serious condition—“simple soldiers called to arms, who did their duty and nothing more”—might be admitted to the hospital; they had arrived in a freight car full of wounded Germans expelled from the Strasbourg university hospital; she wouldn’t even ask for the others, but those two! She was asking in the name of Christ, it was an act of charity. “They’ll die soon,” she added as a final endorsement.
The French, courteous but brusque, arrived to let me know that I had no business dealing with such matters: many foreigners were still breathing their last on st
raw pallets.
Besides, they took care of patients on their own, and they did their utmost to exclude the Germans from assistance, even clerical support, which the atheist Russians had granted them:
“We are prepared, we don’t need them.” And to the doctors on their rounds, they politely said, “Thank you, merci beaucoup.” Then, when they were alone: “When will the French doctors get here? And our priests? Headquarters in Paris doesn’t realize the importance, the political urgency for us…”
The hospital was in fact filling up with sick and injured foreigners of every nationality, some skeletal, weighing about thirty kilos, disoriented, waiting. I met several Italians who, having heard about me, introduced themselves warmly.
“We’re Italian!” they repeated, shaking my arm vigorously, gripping my hand.
A gaunt, elderly Venetian, with a severe duodenal ulcer: “When I had a good stomach,” he mumbled, toothless, “I never had anything to eat. Now that there’s enough to feed an army, I can’t even tolerate baby food.”
Nonetheless, he was serene. I chatted happily with him and he told me about himself: the story of an emigrant, with two world wars behind him, a prolific wife, children scattered around the world to find work, German captivity.
Barbara had been picked up suddenly by the Polish Command in Saarbrücken.
The German communist had gone elsewhere because his girlfriend and her mother had been put out of the hospital. Moreover, behind the formal deference for his past, he himself felt the silent accusation of being German:
“We are now the detested race,” he sighed, saying goodbye to me.
During that month I spent time with a Ukrainian student whose name was Dunja Babiak, a pale, undernourished, eager girl, with renal tuberculosis, with whom I exchanged grammar lessons, she Russian, I French. Applying ourselves to our studies gave us a sense of purpose in those uncertain circumstances.