The doctors for some reason thought that someone had tortured me, and I was trying to explain how everything had happened, but because of the terrible pain and drugs my consciousness refused to obey me. The last thing I thought before switching off was, Thank God, at that moment my son had left for some more trash, and wasn’t near me! Thanks be to God!
Chapter Six
That evening Aleksei did not show up at the hospital. I came to my senses a couple of times, and then again fell into a heavy, drugged sleep. They put me on an intravenous drip to wash the poison from the burnt tissue out of my body, but my heart stopped because of that.
My temperature shot up to 105.8. They were worried about my brain. I had to be given drugs intravenously to lower the fever, but that was also dangerous for my heart. I heard the doctors argue about something at my bedside, but I could not concentrate enough to understand what they were saying. In the end, on the edge of consciousness I caught that the doctors were split over my condition: some of them wanted to transfer me to a special burn ward in the regional hospital, while others were against such a transfer. The question was if I could survive such a transfer. For better or for worse, I stayed where I was.
Occasionally, coming to my senses, I saw Dr. Viacheslav Dmitrievich sitting at my bed, holding my hand and checking my pulse. Each time I tried to smile, but fell asleep again. As I learned later, he spent four days and nights like that, sitting in that chair.
I found out later I died at least a dozen of times during these four days. I depended for my life on this doctor, who sat by my bed all the time. Each time my heart failed to beat I was revived and brought back to life.
Finally, on the fifth day, I woke up blurred, my mind darkened, but sane. The doctors were doing the rounds. Approaching my bed they smiled, knowing that my young, though weak, body had defeated death.
“Good morning, butterfly! Wings still hurt?”
I burst into tears, not able to express any words of gratitude, knowing that no words could show how thankful I was. But the doctors, there were four of them, understood everything without words. They were happy because they were able to pull me out of the jaws of death.
“Today we have a double celebration,” said Nikolai Ivanovich, the head of the department. “First of all, all together we’ve helped a pretty girl, Polina, come into the world of the living for the second time. And secondly, Viacheslav Dmitrievich is going on vacation. So, girl, behave yourself. Okay?”
He laughed and walked away. I felt as if I were lying under a train. It seemed like I weighed three hundred pounds. Not only my feet and legs hurt, but every cell of the body ached. My memory was returning, and I involuntarily began to recollect what had happened during these past four days. I couldn’t remember seeing the man, with whom I spent seventeen years of my life, here by my bedside. But I had to quit trying to understand, and had to come back to reality.
I was recuperating from severe burns, beginning to heal, and that meant hunger. My body was starving for food, demanding the immense number of kilocalories required to repair massive thermal damage.
Chapter Seven
First, I made friends with the neighbors in my hospital ward. There were four of us. Sveta had both her legs in plaster, the result of a car accident, as I found out later. The driver turned out to be a decent man, and brought her to the hospital. He was paying for the necessary medicines, and even came to visit her.
Galia had been given a thrashing by her drunken husband. Doctors suspected concussion, so decided not to take any chances with that, and to keep her in the hospital as long as possible. Moreover, it was a nice opportunity for her husband to feel what it was like to live without borsch and a woman’s love and care. He must have realized, one hundred percent, how hard it was, because he came to visit her five times a day, often bringing an apple or candy, and each time he swore until he was blind that this was the very last time he would drink vodka. Naive. But kind to Galia in her convalescence.
My third neighbor was Maria Vasilievna. Sveta called her Grandma Maria; Galia, Aunt Maria. I could not use any of the nicknames. They were so simple, while she looked so smart and intelligent. She was about eighty, and was here with a broken arm. Most of all I was struck by her eyes. She looked deep into your soul so attentively, I would say, tenaciously but kindly at the same time.
She looked at me with sympathy and interest. Well, everyone looked at me with interest, some with compassion. After all, I had made the whole village talk about me. I was a kind of local celebrity to them now.
I was still going over and over the past days, especially the first four, and was surprised that my memory did not catch a single instance of Aleksei’s presence. What about Vova? Did Aleksei really not come to see me? Not even once? No, this couldn’t be true. Probably I was asleep, I was on pain pills; of course I didn’t remember! We had lived together for almost seventeen years, he wouldn’t abandon me like this, defenseless, incapacitated, with burned legs. But as the proverb says, “Speak of the devil.”
And I saw him. He was slowly and stealthily entering the ward. I still had fever, was in pain, and hunger of healing took away a lot of energy. He sat down at the foot of the bed, avoiding looking at me.
“How are you?”
“Not good yet. But the doctors said I would live.” I even tried to smile.
“Don’t tell me you how bad you feel, because I’m feeling worse than you!”
I couldn’t understand a single thing he was saying. My ears weren’t working. He was mumbling, his face turned away from me.
“After all, living with a cripple...”
“Why would you think that I would be a cripple?”
“Well, think about it. Your legs. And your face! Have you seen yourself in the mirror?”
I hadn’t thought about my face. But at that moment I didn’t want to look in the mirror.
“Leave,” was the only thing I managed to say, hiding the tears rolling down my cheeks. Here it was—my payback.
And he left. As it turned out, forever. Or almost forever, but it would have been better if that had been the last time I saw him. The door closed behind my ex-husband, and I, holding back my tears, exhausted with fatigue, fell into broken slumber.
Chapter Eight
The atmosphere in the district hospital was quite friendly. The chief physician, with the not very euphonious last name – Krot, which means mole in Russian, was a great professional, and it seemed to me, a truly wise man. Throughout the region the hospital was well known for good outcomes and an excellent reputation. Not only the local high and mighty preferred to be treated here, important people came from all over Ukraine to this hospital.
Krot managed to hire a great team of doctors, nurses, and aides, and even managed to create decent working conditions for them. He paid them salaries, which was not a very common thing in those days. Even American humanitarian supplies, given to almost all medical institutions at that time, were actually kept and used in the hospital, not sold to put money into his own pocket.
But as congenial as he was, he could hold his subordinates accountable. Once I heard him giving advice to his doctors during one of the rounds, “Do your best to save your patients from suffering, they are already suffering enough just by being here.” In my opinion, this wasn’t something you would often hear from a doctor, though maybe I just had not come across such doctors.
No matter how you sliced it, on the way to my recovery I would face many obstacles that I would have to overcome and lessons I would have to learn by heart.
Next morning, after their rounds, our consulting physician, a man with incredible blue eyes and resembling Aramis in looks from The Three Musketeers, brought me a bottle of yellowish liquid, and another one with Novocaine. He gave me a shot of morphine, reminding me that today was the last day for this kind of easy pain relief, and that tomorrow I would have to live without it. After this he told me to free my legs from the bandages.
I sat up straight and looked at my leg
s. Lymph had seeped through the fabric, making my legs look like the bark of an old tree, all the way to my groin. Dr. Vladimir Ivanovich, my Aramis, said that those bandages were soaked with Novocaine to help relieve the pain from the burns. In addition, it was August outside, with swarms of flies everywhere. The doctors were afraid that one of these insects would start to fiddle while Rome was burning, landing on my wounds and carrying infection. So it was even more important to keep my wounds clean and covered. Dr. Aramis said he would check back on me in a few hours.
Generously pouring from both bottles, the Furacilin and the Novocaine, on my feet, unable to hold my tears within, I started to free my lower extremities from the sodden fabric. This torture lasted no less than two-and-a-half hours, and the result horrified me.
There was no skin on my feet! There was no skin on my legs! In a few places, I saw pieces of white “cloth,” which turned out to be bits of my skin. The burnt areas were shimmering with red, black, and pink colors, and in some places I could even see a white bone.
The tears were suffocating me as I uncovered at my legs. Once these legs had attracted the opposite sex at all levels and all sectors of the population. According to the roughest statistical calculations, this part of my body always got the most compliments, starting with the most sophisticated phrases, and ending with “I’m going to get lost in those legs tonight,” generally adding the crudest of gestures and facial expressions.
My companions in misfortune didn’t stop me from crying. They offered no sympathetic phrases. They knew that not everyone could handle such a reality without tears. But Aramis, when he found me in tears, was surprised.
“Does it hurt?”
“No,” I said.
“Then why are you crying?”
I could not explain, but continued sobbing. The doctor, clearly not understanding my tears, got right down to redressing my legs. He, unlike me, seemed to be quite satisfied with what he saw. “Good,” he kept saying. “Great!” What exactly was good and great, I did not see. Exhausted after such work, the horror of disfigurement, and under the sway of the morphine, I fell asleep.
I woke up a few hours later with a strong feeling that I’d learned my first lesson.
I realized that this nightmare was happening for a reason. There was only one person to blame. Myself.
Chapter Nine
I didn’t know where such thoughts came from, but I did not try to understand. I knew for certain this was my punishment for all the dark and wrong I had done in my life, and I had to go through it. And I knew that the way I would overcome this would influence my future life. Or death.
I decided to become stronger. How? I had no idea. But I was absolutely convinced that I had only two choices: to become strong or to die. I did not want to die. I began to recollect all the people who, according to my limited academic knowledge, were considered strong. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a Soviet partisan and a Hero of the Soviet Union. She had to die before she got her award. So I didn’t want to be exactly like her. There was Alexey Maresyev, a Soviet fighter ace during World War II, and even Jeanne D’Arc. Well, but poor Joan was burned at the stake. I had already tried that.
I soon discovered that I still had my guardian angel, my nurse Vera. It was she, a woman from a small village, impressed by my usual self-control, who changed my bandages two and three times a day, changed my sheets, covered with medicine and pus from burnt flesh, and kept repeating, “My little warrior, a little more patience. Impressive: not a single tear, not a word, or a groan. You are a warrior, like Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.”
I didn’t consider myself a warrior, but when I came to know Nurse Vera better, I was surprised and astonished by her strength, endurance, and wisdom.
In a conversation with this wonderful and compassionate woman, I found out that she was a witness to my arrival at the hospital. She saw as I walked by myself from the ambulance to the emergency room, and then, on the second floor, those little white flags of skin dotting my legs. She was astonished that I was moving under my own steam, trying to get up the stairs, without making a single sound.
It was she, the mother of two sons, both of whom were in the war in Afghanistan, who, neither by word nor look, showed her fear for the lives of her children. It was Vera who helped me survive and get back on my feet. She taught me to walk again. In the two months that I couldn’t get up from the hospital bed, she was my nurse, my friend, and my support.
Thank you, Vera! I know your children will return to you safe and sound, and one day you will dandle your grandchildren on your knee, because you deserve them.
Only three people were in my life during this period. There was Vera. There was my son, who at fifteen managed to support a household consisting of three purebred dogs, chickens, rabbits, and a vegetable garden. He even tried to spoil his mom once in a while with something tasty he had cooked.
There was a third person I had not expected any help from. And therein was the second lesson I had to learn and comprehend. What kind of people did I surround myself with in my life? Whom did I trust? What did I learn from them? Where the heck were those people I could rely on? Were there any at all? Who were those people who were worthy to be called friends?
There were not that many. But they helped me as much as they could. Some friends brought me watermelons, to wash out poisons that had seeped into my blood from the burned tissues. Thanks to Heaven it was August!
Another friend sent almost a whole bucket of Vishnevsky liniment balm for wound healing. Alexander Vishnevsky was a doctor, long before there were antibiotics. It was due to him and his smelly birch sap and fish oil ointment that I avoided surgery and skin transplantation, to the big surprise of all the hospital doctors. God bless this Vishnevsky! I’m sure he was a strong and intelligent man.
So many people I knew, who I had truly believed to be my friends, didn’t appear at all. Or they came once out of curiosity, to make sure that this was not a rumor and that I really got so badly burnt that I couldn’t get out of bed. Some started sniveling immediately after opening the door of my ward, shedding crocodile tears. Why crocodile? Why because I nipped in the bud such expression of feelings. And their “tears” immediately dried up.
“Stop, stop. It’s already bad enough without your wailing. I’m the one in pain, not you.”
I think they gratefully accepted what I asked of them, that they did not have to pretend to care about me. And there was no doubt they were pretending. First of all, I just felt it, and secondly, after a short visit and passionate promises to come back and bring something to read, or to help me, for example, by washing my hair, they disappeared. It was about such people that I had read in one of Veller’s books: “A few more friends like this and I will not need enemies.” One could never rely on such people.
I also remembered what Dr. Zviagin taught his desperate heroes in Veller’s novels: To desire. To believe. To act.
As for me I was trying to learn by my own experience that I could rely only on myself. And very few friends. And believe me that was no less painful than the burnt skin. My soul was in pain, my mind was suffering.
How did it happen that I had surrounded myself with people indifferent and selfish? I must have been like that myself.
And now I had to figure out what needed to be changed in me. And how to surround myself with people from whom I could learn from to be truly sincere and wise. Wise as the old lady in my ward, Maria Vasilievna.
Surprising myself, I didn’t take umbrage at people I communicated with at this time. Just the opposite. I clearly understood that the person had the right to live and act as he or she wanted. To be what he or she wanted, and not what I wanted them to be. Let everyone be what they want to be, that’s what I decided. And only if they think that is not good enough and decide to change themselves or their attitude, they should do it. No one should force them. They should do it only as their own choice.
I realized that it was necessary to think about what I needed to be like for the people around me t
o feel comfortable and happy. It all was my fault. I didn’t manage to keep those who were wiser and smarter than me nearby; I hurt them, and now was paying for that. But I would try very hard. I’d find them and ask for forgiveness. And if they forgave me, I would try to make sure that they never had a reason to take offense with me ever again.
So that’s how, after torturing myself with many thoughts and much heartache, instead of all these unreliable and indifferent people, I got one person in my life whose title was Best Friend.
Chapter Ten
Natasha began to visit me every day as soon as she learned what a misfortune had happened to me. She was a nurse, and either because of her professional habits or her moral virtues, she travelled from the other side of the city after her round-the-clock shift in the cancer hospital to visit. She didn’t snivel, never lathered false sympathy onto me. But she did her best to entertain me with meaningless stories, news, and jokes. She washed my hair and wiped my face and hands with a cloth soaked in warm soapy water. But most importantly Natasha came every day and kept talking, talking, and talking. Telling me the news, keeping me in touch with the outside world.
I saw how tired she was, and asked not to come every single day, but she came anyway. In addition, she was checking on Vova and helped him with the household.
I had known her for a long time. She lived nearby and we used to walk our dogs on the same World War II tank training area that was now a park. She had an Afghan hound, and I had my three—a German shepherd and a pair of Russian borzois, all top of their class in national dog shows. We were pals, but without ever getting too deep into each other’s lives.
My Angel Page 3