“Now, now,” she said, pressing the cup to my lips. “You need to put back all the weight you’ve lost.”
The vitakava smelled like wet bedsheets, and it was covered by a thin layer of skin. It tasted even worse than my mother’s malt coffee, but I drank it down without complaint.
“Good girl,” Nurse Zdena said approvingly. “And let’s have another one! You’re all skin and bones!”
The young nurse refilled my cup and Nurse Zdena made me drink it. When I had finished, she wiped my mouth with a cloth.
“When can I see my mum and dad?”
“On Sunday,” she said brightly. “They came to see you yesterday, but you were still asleep. They left me a package for you.”
“A package?” I said breathlessly.
Nurse Zdena smiled and asked the young nurse to hand her my package, which was on the bottom shelf of the trolley.
“Would you like me to open it for you?” she asked.
“Yes, please,” I said.
“I wish my parents would send me a package,” Lucie grumbled. “I’ve been here for three weeks and I haven’t got a thing.”
“Now, now, Lucie,” Nurse Zdena frowned. “At least your family come and see you. Look at poor little Fedor and Aranka. They don’t have parents. We’ll have to send them to the orphanage as soon as they’re better.”
She unwrapped my package and pulled out a pair of pink pajamas and a pair of wooden clogs.
“How lovely,” she said. “What a pity you won’t be able to keep them.”
“I won’t be able to keep them?” I cried.
“Of course not,” Nurse Zdena said. “We’ll have to burn them when you leave, because they’ll be full of nasty microbes. I’m sorry, my dear, but this is a quarantine ward. Someone should have told this to your parents when they brought you here.”
“But they’re so nice!” I moaned. “Couldn’t we just wash them?”
The clogs were the kind of clogs I had always wanted. They had thick cork soles and green leather straps with buckles. I couldn’t believe that the nurses would burn them.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Nurse Zdena explained. “Microbes are very small and they live inside the material. But maybe your parents will buy you another pair of clogs when you go home.”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. My parents didn’t have much money. Buying me this pair would have been difficult enough.
“Breakfast time!” the young nurse called out.
She gave us each a dry bread roll, collected our cups and thermometers, and pushed her trolley to the door.
“We’ll be back tomorrow morning,” Nurse Zdena smiled. “The doctors will be along shortly, so please try and tidy up your beds before they come. Nurse Magda will be very disappointed if you don’t.”
She smiled sympathetically and left the ward, closing and locking the door behind her. I put on my new pajamas and admired my new clogs. The Gypsy kids were very impressed.
“Nice clogs,” they muttered. “Really nice. Ve-ry nice.”
Half an hour later, a group of student doctors appeared at the head of the corridor. I could see them through the row of big glass windows. A short doctor with a beard appeared to be in charge, and Nurse Magda was with them, wheeling a trolley of clean white towels. As the group slowly worked its way through the pavilion, the Gypsy kids were frantically trying to tidy up their beds. None of them was very good at it, and by the time the party of doctors arrived, their sheets were very messy and covered with breadcrumbs.
“Good morning, children!” the short doctor boomed.
“Good morning, Dr. Kopecky,” the Gypsy kids replied.
The doctor sniffed the air and frowned at Nurse Magda.
“You know, it still smells really bad in here.”
Nurse Magda threw an angry look at Zoltan and went to open a window with a special key.
“So . . . Dominika.” Dr. Kopecky read the plate on the bottom of my bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Much, much better, comrade doctor!” I said. “Is there any chance I could go home soon?”
The young doctors laughed, but Dr. Kopecky was very serious. He removed my sheet and prodded my tummy with his fingers.
“A classic case of dehydration, but nothing to worry about,” he told his colleagues.
He forced my eyelids open and shone a penlight in my eyes.
“The pupils are slightly dilated, but her temperature is back to normal,” he said. “I think we can disconnect the drip and continue with medicinal charcoal and regular doses of penicillin.”
The doctors nodded in agreement, and one of them helped Nurse Magda remove the IV from my arm.
“The rest of the children are on diets, so there’s no problem there. I think that might be it for today,” Dr. Kopecky said. “Now, then, I wonder what’s for lunch!”
“Good-bye, children!” He waved cheerily.
“Good-bye, Dr. Kopecky.” We waved back.
As Dr. Kopecky and his colleagues hurried off to have lunch, Nurse Magda stayed behind and fiddled with the IV. As soon as the doctors were out of earshot, she wheeled around and started shouting at Zoltan.
“The next time I tell you to keep your beds clean, you do it or I’ll give you a good spanking!” she roared. “And what have I told you about the smell? We make three trips a day and that’s it. If the babies soil their nappies, it’s not my problem, it’s yours. We don’t have time to clean up after you Gypsies! We’re understaffed as it is!”
“Yes, Nurse Magda,” Zoltan said in a thick voice.
“Well, you see to it!” she snapped. “Here are your towels. I’ll be back at midday to change your bedpans. Not a minute earlier, you understand?”
“Yes, Nurse Magda,” Zoltan fumed.
We huddled meekly in our beds as Nurse Magda gave us each a fresh towel, and then she left her trolley at the door and stalked out of the room.
“What are the towels for?” I asked Zoltan.
“I don’t know,” he shrugged angrily.
I could see he was upset and I wanted to say something nice to cheer him up, but before I could think of anything to say, I suddenly felt very sick. My bowels churned horribly, and I climbed down from the bed and slid my feet into the clogs.
“What are you doing?” Zoltan asked.
“I have to go to the loo,” I whimpered. “Where is it?”
“There.” Zoltan pointed to an enamel pot that sat on a little ledge beneath my bed. “You have to use that.”
I tried to pull the pot off the ledge, but my legs and hands were trembling violently.
“Oh, no!” I moaned. “I’m not going to make it!”
Zoltan leaped out of bed and handed me his pot.
“Here,” he said. “Use mine.”
The Gypsies crowded around me as I pulled down my pants. As soon as my bottom touched the rim of the pot, I filled it with a nasty explosion of diarrhea. The Gypsy kids nodded approvingly.
“Couldn’t you at least turn around?” I begged.
“Why?” they asked. “We’re all going to shit in a minute or two.”
As if to prove the point, they grabbed their own pots and noisily emptied their bowels a few minutes later.
“See?” Gejza cried. “It’s the vitakava!”
The toddlers rattled the bars of their cots and started to howl. They had both soiled their nappies, and I could see the diarrhea running down their legs. The smell inside the room was overwhelming. We were shitting the malt coffee Nurse Zdena had fed us, and to my great embarrassment, I could see that some of the kids from the other wards were looking in at us and laughing.
A few minutes later, Nurse Magda burst into the room.
“What’s the meaning of all this noise?” she demanded.
She strode over to the babies, cursing loudly when she saw their dirty nappies. She carried them roughly to the sink and hosed the babies down. As she soaped their bums, I could see that their buttocks were chafed and their thighs were covered
with a nasty rash. So this was why they cried all night. Nurse Magda shook the babies dry and laid them on an ironing board that served as a changing table. She put a clean nappy between each one’s legs, folded another into a triangle, and wrapped it expertly around their hips.
“What time is it?” she snarled at Zoltan.
Zoltan shot a frightened look at the big clock on the wall. His lips moved and I could see that he was trying to tell the time.
“It’s ten o’clock, Nurse Magda,” I answered for him. “We’re sorry. We really couldn’t help it!”
Nurse Magda collected our pots and put them on her trolley. She shot me a black look, but spoke less harshly to me.
“I can’t understand it,” she said. “You eat nothing but fill your pots to the brim. I hope your parents aren’t sneaking you food. If I find out, there’ll be hell to pay!”
No one said a word about Nurse Zdena’s vitakava. When Nurse Magda finally trolleyed our dirty pots out of the room, I looked over at the pile of clean nappies and cotton pads on the changing table, and suddenly had an idea.
“Listen,” I said. “Why don’t we take care of the babies by ourselves?”
“By ourselves?” Lucie gasped. “But we’re too small. We can’t reach them.”
“Yes, we can,” I told her. “If we push a chair over to the cots, we can get them out. And we can reach the sink that way, too.”
“I don’t want to change their nappies,” Zoltan grumbled.
“Would you rather have Nurse Magda yell at you all the time?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “But are we allowed to change the babies’ nappies?”
“We don’t have to tell Nurse Magda, do we? We could do it without telling her. It would be like a game.”
The Gypsies pricked up their ears.
“We’re the partisans, and Nurse Magda and Zdena can be the Germans,” I suggested.
“But I like Nurse Zdena,” Mirka whispered.
“She’s the one who makes us shit, stupid,” Zoltan reminded her.
“Go on!” Gejza said excitedly. “So what do we do?”
“Well, the first thing we’ll need is a couple of lookouts.”
FROM THAT MOMENT ON, we waged a defensive war against Nurse Magda. Zoltan and I were the joint leaders of the partisans, and Mirka, Erika, Lucie, and Gejza were our lieutenants. Our primary objective was to keep the toddlers out of Nurse Magda’s hands. We couldn’t wait for them to soil their nappies. We had a whole procedure worked out.
Whenever Fedor or Aranka started to cry, we would push a chair over to their cot and pull them out. Gejza and Lucie would stand look-out, while Mirka and Erika brought the chair to the sink. Then I would roll up my pajama cuffs and climb up into the basin, which was wide and deep enough for me to stand in. Zoltan was the strongest, so he passed each baby up to me. There was a rubber hose at the end of the tap that I used to wash the babies’ bums. Then Mirka and Erika dried their bottoms with the cotton pads. Last, I would climb down and supervise the folding of the nappies. It was actually a lot of fun. We got to play with live dolls and pretend that we were in a German prisoner-of-war camp. As we refined our operation, I noticed that the kids from the other wards were watching us with interest instead of their usual scorn.
As the days slowly passed, it became apparent that Nurse Magda had no idea about the vitakava. It was typical of the way communism worked. The left hand didn’t know what the right hand was up to. Our work with the babies kept Nurse Magda from yelling at Zoltan, but she was still grumpy about our full chamber pots and suspicious that our parents were sneaking us food. She was particularly vigilant on the days our parents came to visit. We were taken from the ward and washed in a large communal shower, and after we had made our beds, she let us climb up onto the radiator by the window and press our noses to the glass.
“Don’t forget to smile at your mummies and daddies,” she said ominously. “We don’t want them to worry about you, do we?”
“No, Nurse Magda,” we replied.
“Well, then,” she tightened her mouth into the most gruesome smile. “Make sure you look happy.”
Then she stood beside us for the whole hour that our parents came to visit, making sure it looked like we were having the time of our lives.
The Infection Pavilion was built like a bunker, so that parents could look in on their children without entering the building. There was also the large observation deck that ran past the six big windows at the back of the pavilion, and from the outside, the wards must have looked like a miniature zoo. A wrought-iron staircase led up to the deck, and I squealed with excitement as I saw my mother’s hat. She was climbing the stairs with my father and sister behind her.
“Hello, Mum!” I cried.
“Hello, little one,” she called back. “How are you?”
“I’m okay,” I said bravely. “Can I come home soon?”
“Of course you can, my love,” she said. “You look awfully thin. Are they feeding you properly?”
I shot a look at Nurse Magda, who was watching me like a hawk.
“I think so,” I replied.
My mother opened her mouth to say something, but a huge Gypsy family swarmed onto the deck behind her; old women, children, and girls with babies in their arms.
“Zoltan! Mro cho!” a young woman with the most amazing hair cried out. She ran to the window and smothered it with kisses, while Zoltan made an embarrassed face and tried not to cry.
“Mirka! Lucie!” two teenage girls shrieked. “So tuke? Soske tut o Del marel! Guess what, Gejza? You have a new baby sister!”
The Gypsies were making so much noise it was impossible to hear what anyone was saying. Some of them danced and sang to entertain the kids. Lucie had at least ten relatives in front of her, and my parents were pushed aside by her extended family. In the end, I found a tiny square at the bottom of the window and pressed my face against it. My mother touched the window with her fingers and smiled, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. My breath fogged up the window, and I choked on a big lump in my throat. I drew a picture on the fogged-up glass with my finger, and my mother got teary. She wiped her face and hid it under the brim of her hat. I rubbed the picture out with my pajama sleeve and breathed some more mist onto the glass. Then I wrote on the window: please bring biscuits. My parents looked puzzled at first, but then they signaled okay and my mother blew me a kiss.
“End of visiting hours!” Nurse Magda said, clapping her hands.
The Gypsy kids began to cry and my own eyes filled up with tears. Nurse Magda helped us down from the radiator and tucked us up in our beds. I watched my mother’s hat as it drifted down the hill, disappearing behind the row of chestnut trees that lined the path to the hospital gate.
Later that afternoon, Nurse Zdena appeared at my bedside with a big bag of piskoty biscuits my father had sweet-talked her into sneaking into the ward. These were the same sponge biscuits my mother fed my sister and me when we were dieting. They were small and plain, but there would have been at least sixty in the bag.
“I shouldn’t be doing this,” Nurse Zdena said. “But I don’t think they’ll do you any harm.”
“Thank you, Nurse Zdena,” I said gratefully.
“You’re welcome,” she smiled. “If I were you, I wouldn’t let Magda catch you with them. Maybe you could put them in your bedside drawer.”
“Okay,” I nodded.
The second Nurse Zdena had left the room, the Gypsy kids leaped out of bed and surrounded my bedside table. They stared at the drawer with their hungry black eyes.
“Would you like some biscuits?” I asked.
“Yes, please!” they all exclaimed. Gejza stuck his tongue out and nodded so hard he almost bit it in half.
I opened the drawer and gave a sponge biscuit to each of the kids. Then I ate one myself. Piskoty biscuits were my least favorite in the world, but in the ward that afternoon, they were an incredible treat. Some of the kids actually groaned as they ate them. I handed ou
t a second biscuit, then a third one, then a fourth. We really were starving. All we had to eat was one bread roll three times a day, as well as dry mashed potatoes and semolina pudding. I had lost so much weight, my legs looked like broomsticks. All the children in the wards were on the verge of starvation.
“Can I please have another one?” Mirka whispered after she had eaten her fifth.
The packet was now half empty.
“We should save some for later,” I told her. “I’m not sure if I’m going to get any more, and we don’t know if they’ll make us go to the toilet. How about if we have some more in the morning?”
“In the morning?” Gejza cried. “But that’s a long time away!”
“Can’t we just have one?” Lucie whined.
After a lot of protesting, the kids grudgingly returned to their beds and spent the rest of the afternoon whispering to each other in Gypsy language. They were angry, and our nappy changing was less fun than usual. When Nurse Magda finally switched out the lights, I put the bag under my pillow just in case. I could hear Zoltan and Gejza creeping around in the darkness as I tried to go to sleep. Every so often, my bedside drawer would creak open, and one of them even put his hand on my pillow.
“Go away!” I whispered. “Leave my biscuits alone!”
The following morning, we didn’t have to drink Nurse Zdena’s vitakava. The young nurse with glasses brought us a jug of black tea instead and told us that we would have to wait for breakfast, because an American boy with meningitis was on his way to the pavilion. The head of the hospital had come down and insisted that a good impression be made. The kids in the ward next to ours were relocated to other parts of the hospital, and the staff had to drop whatever they were doing and help the doctors get ready. Nurse Magda mopped the floor and changed the sheets on the one remaining bed, and then a fleet of doctors came in and surrounded it with surgical tables and lots of expensive equipment.
The Gypsy kids and I watched with interest, waiting for the American boy to turn up.
“Is he going to speak American?” Lucie wanted to know.
“Americans only speak American,” I said. “They don’t speak anything else.”
The Twelve Little Cakes Page 22