by Drago Jancar
The number of bodies in the operating room was growing. Hjörný, the anesthesiologist, greeted him cheerfully. She was professional, deliberate, and very thoughtful. She placed her left hand on Ófeigur’s chest and her right on the lower part of his body, and said to him after a second that she would be the one to put him under. The last person to come in, of course, was Doctor Hróar in his surgical scrubs. He felt along Ófeigur’s groin and said to him calmly that this was the place where he intended to begin threading the sheath toward the heart and that they would then secure the hole in his heart with the plug at the end. Incredibly simple.
“He’s under,” said Hjörný calmly. Hróar felt again for the pulse at the groin, made a small incision in the skin, and inserted the needle. “I have the artery pulse,” he said contentedly and slipped the plastic sheath inside the vein and then the wire into the sheath. He never took his eyes off the screen that faced directly away from the patient. He saw the blood vessels and the sheath as it wound its way to the heart. On the other screen was the image of the spinal column. The doctor worked confidently and steadily and appeared to be as comfortable with the surgery as with cutting a loaf of bread in his kitchen.
“Ventilate him, does he have a pulse?” Anesthesiologist Hjörný’s voice was calm but her tone was urgent. “Get a monitor right away, vitals have dropped to nil.” She began chest compressions. “Give him oxygen and set up an IV line,” she said quickly and continued with the compressions. “We’ve already called for the crash team,” said the nurse Hildur as she set up the oxygen. “He’s fibrillating, we need the paddles,” said Hjörný. “Is he in sinus? Give him another zap.” They kept at it; each had their defined roles. The exchanges were short and to the point and no one asked questions. The crash team had arrived on the scene: the department doctor on shift, an anesthesiologist, a general practitioner, two nurses, and one intern. The operating room was crowded. “I administered adrenaline,” said the general practitioner, “no change in condition.” “Find out if Þorbjörn Guðmundsson is in the building,” said Hjörný and stopped her compressions as the department doctor took over. Things went on from there. Another electric shock, more adrenaline, oxygen, and constant CPR. Cardiologist Þorbjörn had long since arrived. A half hour passed, and then an hour, he was unresponsive. “We’ve lost him,” whispered Þorbjörn, his voice cracking, and he walked out of the operating room.
“The funeral for husband and father Hróar Heimisson, who died in the State Hospital on May 4, will depart from Langholt Church . . .” he couldn’t read any more. He sat at the kitchen table: “You’ll come with me, right?” he asked. “I didn’t know the man at all,” Lína replied, “but it’s a different story for you, he saved your life.” She was silent for a moment but then added: “How could something like this have happened in a hospital with the best equipment and specialists.” She stood up and collected their coffee cups. “That’s the thing,” said Ófeigur. “The pathologist Guðlaugur told me that Hróar himself was living with an extremely rare heart condition. You’re fine most of your life, but once it decides to give you trouble, you might as well have been shot in the head.” Ófeigur ran his hands through his uncombed hair. “In fact, I heard later from cardiologist Þorbjörn that there was only one person in the entire country with the expertise and talent to treat to such a case, which is a little odd.” Lína came back from washing the coffee cups and looked at her husband: “Odd, what’s so odd about it since it was such a rare case?”
“Well, the only person who could have saved Hróar was Hróar himself.”
TRANSLATED FROM ICELANDIC BY CHRISTOPHER BURAWA
[LATVIA]
INGA ZHOLUDE
Dirty Laundry
I’m walking. Past everything. Absurdly past. Some sort of apartment blocks. Who could live in these blocks? So I’m walking by these blocks, these gray buildings, and it’s possible that I could be lost because these block buildings are all the same. Cemented squares with white seams, and someone lives in every one of them. But mainly cockroaches. Of course, my sister lives in one of them too. My mother lives in one of them. My father lives in one of them. Each in their own apartment block. Each in their own block. And both my grandmothers live in one too.
One of the balconies on that building beside the supermarket is not an ordinary balcony—it’s painted orange, decorated with something that looks like yellow bananas. Extraordinarily unlike the other balconies in the block. Because the block building balconies have to be gray, or else white, freshly painted every twenty years, but certainly not orange.
I drag myself past these blocks. And I feel light-headed. I drag along, more and more light-headed. I see an orange cat in one of the windows, sitting very placidly. I look and look, and then I understand that it’s a ceramic cat. In terrible taste. Then I look again. And I look again. Look all around.
“Hey, pervert! Yeah, you, you sicko. Nobody likes a Peeping Tom. Get lost before we call the cops.”
You know, I meant no harm. I don’t argue, because I really was staring. But that was because of you, to write a story for you.
I’ve been dragging past that gray block building for an hour already, an eternity, for kilometers. Or simply put, for the tenth time. And then that balcony! Eight pairs of pajamas are hanging on that balcony behind last year’s dried-out vines. Ah, and such pajamas! Made from prehistoric flannel. Worn out and frayed on prehistoric behinds. All the family’s pajamas. Generation after generation.
When I was a child, I always hated pajamas, because I didn’t understand whether I had to wear panties under them or not. And if you didn’t wear panties, then how often did you have to wash the pajamas? I remember especially one pair of despised pajamas, with red-white-red horizontal stripes. Even then I thought they made me look fat. Then I progressed, thank God, to nightgowns. Later to T-shirts, to negligees, to minimalism, to bias-cut silk, several in the same style, just different in color. Or, to be precise, three in that style—one black, one red, and a light blue one.
Now I lie in bed in the saddest of those colors. And I feel sadness and swollen veins throbbing in me, exhausted from the all-day torture of walking past the blocks. It’s not so easy to write a short story, I console myself. And before going to sleep, the thought occurs to me that I should change the bedding, which smells strongly of hair, a head that has slept there for days and nights.
I’ve also slept nude, but I don’t like it because I feel like a peeled orange, which, if not eaten immediately, dries up and gets hard. And there’s a feeling that you’ll dirty all the bedding with your nakedness. From childhood I’ve been raised to loathe specific parts of my body. Wash your hands after going to the toilet, phooey, yuck, kaka!
And if two sleep nude, side-by-side, flesh clings together with sweat, like glued paper.
I am, of course, very busy. Today, for example, I again have to go and walk through the labyrinths of apartment blocks. An exhaustive infiltration is required. This is my creative experiment. Previous creative experiments have included excursions to a psychiatric hospital, wandering through a market, resigning from work, going to the same bar every night for a week, starting a blog, a second life, a second-hand second life, and so on. But, before everything, I’ll change the bed linen. I strip it off, fold it carefully, don’t take out the bits of fluff inside the duvet-cover corners because I simply hate to do that; besides, when the cover comes out of the wash, they’re no longer there anyway. I don’t understand how often bed linen needs to be washed. It’s not written down anywhere. In books intended for teenagers, for example, instructions are given on how often one must wash—girls twice a day, boys at least once. Mamma had a strict regime for changing bed linen, maybe each Saturday or every second Saturday, who can really remember now. But I do it irregularly. When the smell is overbearing, I change them. I fold the stripped bedclothes, place them in a pile, and take them to a laundry basket. I dump out the basket to separate the clothes, I dig and dive into the smell of dirty socks. Not of fre
shly dirtied ones, but of ones that have been left for a while, dried out, stiffened up. My separation strategy is as follows: bed linen is one load, clothes to wear in the immediate future is another; most-loved clothes go in one pile, socks in another, and panties, of course, are also their own pile, because you can’t mix them with anything else. I’m doing the separating and suddenly I can’t understand at all, what is that rag over there doing among my very fine dirty clothes. Some sort of cotton rag. I pick it up gingerly with two fingers. Something strange and smelly. I don’t even know what to call it! A whatchamacallit. Well, you know, a pair of men’s briefs. How have these whatachamacallits landed in my dirty laundry? I’m stunned, as if pinned to the floor, those whatachamacallits held between two fingers; suddenly I can’t even throw them down on the floor, because it’s my floor, my personal floor, and I can hardly soil it with some stranger’s underwear. God only knows what kind of vile disease might be living in them! I go to the kitchen, find a plastic bag, shove the strange underpants in it, and then throw the bag out onto the balcony, so it won’t foul the air inside.
The exterior walls have grown hot from the sun. Inside it’s like a cellar, the air condenses and drips, centipedes crawl on the floor, there’s the smell of vegetables that have been stored for half a year. How does your home smell?
In one of my neighbors’ sun-heated and airless, glassed-in loggia, clothes have been hung out to dry and melt.
And the neighbors higher up are standing on their balcony half-nude, smoking. The whole family. The wife looking like she’s on the fifth day of her hangover. Her old man, who hasn’t been sober for almost three years now, by her side. And of course their offspring, such as they are. And all of them smoking. They spit worms of saliva off the balcony and toss their cigarette butts out into space.
My next-door neighbors of three years don’t have curtains. If I wanted to, I could lean out from my balcony and find out everything I wanted about the anatomy of their intimate lives. Talking about anatomy, it seems the Discovery channel once showed a male and a female body being cut up into two-millimeter-thin slices, all of them then x-rayed, scanned, and so forth, all on behalf of science, of course. The two specimens were called Adam and Eve, of course.
I walk by the building’s windows, listening in at the windows from which women with black eyes lean out into the street, crying; beyond which children beaten silly yell and then smother their sobs; outside of which, in the yard, teenagers get slapped by their fathers for having smoked their first cigarettes; next to which obscenities have been scribbled all over the walls; through which you’re spat at with half-eaten chokeberries; near which you’re told off for how you’ve tied up your garbage; near which people rummage through your garbage, leaving pairs of your worn-out, discarded underwear, which you’d thrown away and didn’t want to see anymore, around the dumpsters like a table set for everyone, like your organs exposed on a white plate, so appetizing, like a Švankmajer film . . . and when all of this gets to be too much, I come home. I get into my bed fully dressed, because who cares, no one can see or chastise me anyway. I bury my head in my pillow, but find strange pajamas tucked under it. Suddenly my exhaustion vanishes. I don’t know whose pajamas they are, what kind of fabric, what color, buttons, threads, what size, what smell, whose hairs are sticking to it, what microscopic particles of skin? What’s happening? I examine them carefully, trying to recall in the minutest detail the last few days, trying to come up with an explanation. No one’s been in my home, no electrician, no plumber. You know, there’s this woman I know, who lives in this neighborhood, and is friends with a man who’s a plumber, but who started out as an electrician, but finally settled into plumbing full time. And I think he’s the one who got himself circumcised recently, I mean as an adult. Smell the pajamas. Nothing. Nothing I recognize. I don’t know what to do. I put them back under the pillow. No, why bother? This is my home. No such old rags will litter my place. And yet, at this point, I start to have doubts as to whether this really is my place. I walk through the apartment. Yes, it’s mine. I pull the pajamas out from under the pillow, stuff them into a bag, and throw them out onto the balcony next to the underwear.
I again lie down in bed fully dressed. Wait, I thought I saw . . . I jump up, run to the window, and sure enough, on the laundry line, pegged there with clothes pins, hang men’s socks, black, two pairs. I look them over. One pair is dark blue. Still damp. I run to the washroom. Someone has used my detergent. Wait a minute—no, I’ve never ever kept detergent in the apartment, because I don’t have a washing machine, I clean everything with regular soap in the sink, therefore it must be a stranger’s detergent. On the washbasin rim is a single-use Bic razor—used. In the kitchen, breadcrumbs on the table and two empty beer cans. In the corridor, traces of sand from someone’s gigantic footwear.
I immediately sit down at the computer and write all of this up in fine detail at my blog, which is at a site where many others record even greater absurdities: about their trips to the countryside after they’ve had arguments with their partners, about dumping their partners, about the experience of being dumped, about being underpaid, about aching teeth, about affairs. Banal love poems, lewd stories, all posted from the safety of their indecipherable pseudonyms.
The next thing I do is call out a disinfection brigade. Who knows what sort of vile disease that person, thief, maniac has. A man in blue overalls arrives with a sort of iron hose and questions me:
“Cockroaches?”
“No.”
“Bedbugs?”
“No.”
“Rats?”
“No.”
Afraid he’ll go on to list ants, lice, and every other insect he knows, I decide to reveal that I need the place sprayed because I think a strange man has been coming to my apartment.
“Well, lady,” he laughs “I can’t spray for that!”
“Never mind, spray the place with whatever the next best thing would be.”
“The next best thing to poisoning a human being?”
“Well . . . do your best.”
I leave the room. I’m thinking that I should be writing a short story, not preoccupying myself with some idiotic investigation and disinfection. I also call in a locksmith to change my locks. Done. Now I’m safe. I collect all the remaining things that have mysteriously appeared, describe them in my notebook—perhaps they’ll be of use for some other story—and then put them in a black garbage bag right there on the balcony, taking the socks off the laundry line too, of course, so the neighbors have no reason to let their imaginations run away with them.
In the evening, while my apartment is being aired, I go to the grocery store. I dig through the tomato bin, looking for the most beautiful tomatoes, finally taking two from the top. I buy freshly salted trout slices whose best-before date is in three days, and also milk, which has a shelf life rivalling the eternal flame. I pick up some other items. I don’t know why, but standing in line at the cashier, I look over the labels of all the men’s deodorants, compare them in terms of price and weight. I have the feeling that I’m being watched. By plainclothes security guards, for example. A disembodied eye glued to me. You know the feeling, that someone is sizing you up, picking out every one of your defects, every superfluous fold of skin, every broken nail, every bit of underwear showing, every stain on your outfit, each spot on your face, your yellowed eyeteeth, dark hair roots, the cracked skin on the soles of your feet, every awkward move and each embarrassing purchase.
I’m looking at the sweater of the girl standing in front of me. I can see the imprints of clothespins in the fabric. Freshly washed laundry.
I lug my purchases home. Half of them tumble out just outside the front door and a white bean can rolls down the stairs. I lock the door behind me. I unpack my purchases. But what the hell is this? Where did this come from? No, I didn’t buy this—I just looked at it! I hold in my hands a blue Nivea deodorant. For sensitive skin. A stranger’s sensitive skin. I start to doubt again—maybe I hav
e kleptomania, maybe I stole it, I myself don’t remember, or maybe somebody threw it into my shopping basket? I look at the receipt. I really did pay for it. Well, as long as I paid for it, I might as well give myself a spray, get a whiff. Not bad.
But the minute my apartment is clean again, the minute I’ve gotten all my new acquisitions shelved, can you guess what happens? I see a pair of underwear hanging on my laundry line—white briefs with that sort of what-do-you-call-it in front, through which you can pull out, you know what, and besides that a white undershirt. I grab both pieces of clothing. That’s it. I’ve had enough! After a brief but thorough analysis, I conclude that it can only be my neighbor, whose balcony abuts mine. I ring his doorbell. He opens right up. “You pig! You pervert! You, a family man! Who would have thought it! A cheat and a Peeping Tom! What the hell is this? What do you want from me?”
I throw the briefs in his face. I also throw the undershirt at him. I say that I’ll be calling the police if he tries it again. I return to my apartment, sit down on my bed, my hands trembling, my insides boiling.