Some people think you're Polish, she said.
Then she leaned in even closer.
But I think you're from outer space.
That almost made me smile, yet when Doctor Marcus left I stared at the ceiling, and the more I stared, the more it pressed down on me.
They did not know my name let alone my anguish.
Later in the day Doctor Marcus came back and shone her flashlight into my eyes and wrote something on her chart. Pil s were given to me with water, white tablets with orange writing. I had the strange thought that I was swal owing words and Swann's face kept coming to my mind. I had lost a tooth in my journey and the orange pil s fitted perfectly in the gap. I spat them out when the nurses left, dropped them down a hole in the top of the metal bedstead.
I don't think that even now I can find the proper words to describe the feeling of having left my life behind. I was suspended in empty air like a shirt from a branch. Every time I turned in the bed I would see an old road, the lane at the back of the chocolate factory, or the road to the schoolhouse near Presov, or the high path to the forest above the vineyards; smal flashes that burst out green and yel ow into my mind. I turned to the other side of the bed and more flashes came. I was at a strange bridge. I did not know how wide it was. I tried crossing it. I stood in the dark waving at what
was, a second ago, the bright sky. Leather straps were buckled down across my chest. They put a piece of rubber between my teeth. The child I was came back to me, hovered above me, her lazy eye looking down. After a while I recognized that the child was Conka too, but her hair was hacked off. She sat watching things retreating into the distance. Strange noises came, nothing like melody. A line of trees went out of sight. A tent napped in the wind. The nurses hovered over me and a needle went into my arm. I turned away and tried to rattle the orange pil s from the bottom of the bedstead. I would have taken them al in one go. They were terrible days, they could not have been worse.
The doctor final y said she would not give me any more pil s or injections. She barked at the nurse to put her arm under mine and al owed me to walk through the ward. I stood and swayed. Walking helped cure some things and for the next few weeks they fed me wel and al my lacerations healed, my hair began to grow back, and my feet were careful y tended to. They replaced the bandages three times a day, using a soft creamy medicine that smel ed of mint. They al owed me to mark my sheets—I did not want to share my bedclothes even if they were to be washed, I made it clear by holding on to them and wrapping them around my wrist.
Doctor Marcus said let her keep them, they're only sheets, it's a smal price, she wil open up soon.
But I said to myself that I would not open up, I would make a little place for myself in my mind, I would close its door, settle behind it, and I would not step across to open it again, ever. I walked around and around, like a clockhand. After a while my feet began to recover and my legs felt strong.
Doctor Marcus came in and said: Oh, what rosy cheeks we have today. I thought that I should give her one of Stransky's old lectures on Marxism and the historical dialectic, and then she wouldn't think me such a broken paltry thing wandering around her hospital floor, but in truth I never real y thought about the days with Stransky or Swann—no, it was more my childhood that kept coming back to me, the touch of Grandfather's shirt, nine drops of water in the ashes, looking from the back of the wagon while the caravan bounced, and I think now that these thoughts were there to protect me and to make sure that I kept myself intact, although at the time they almost drove me to an edge I did not recognize.
You can die of madness, daughter, but you can also die of silence.
There is a quiver in my fingers and the hairs on my arms stil rise when I put voice to these things. I dress in the dark these days, remove the glass chimney from the kerosene lamp, take the lid off the firebox, crumple the paper, drop it in, strike a match, wait for the flame to catch, then bring the same match to the stove. I have been spared another night to come into this day. Soon I hear the ticking of the metal and the char-sound of wood, and it becomes light enough to see and the room comes alive.
I had, today, a strange thought as I walked down al the way to the vil age. It was just past noon and the light seemed to sus- pend the street, ful of years somehow. I walked along the road, towards Paoli's old shop. I kept my eyes down on the pavement and watched the feet of people as they went past. The bel clanged when I went in—it is stil one of the few shops where the old ways have held. Paoli's son Domenico was behind the counter, lighting candles to put on a table.
It was then that it flashed in front of my eyes, a simple thought and yet I stil cannot shake it. For a brief second, I saw Conka. She wore a scarf and her hair was bundled beneath. She stood near the bottom of the towerblock where I had left her long ago, in Czechoslovakia. Her children were grown and gone. She wore a dark dress and her hands were shoved deep in her pockets. She walked towards the towerblocks, but the lift was broken, so she began to climb the stairs. At first I thought that she was looking for firewood, that she was going to rip up the floorboards from the flats, carry the wood down and burn it so she could cook a meal for her family. But al the doors to the flats were locked. She climbed higher, going from floor to floor. It grew dark. She got to the top of the towerblock, reached into her pocket, and took out a potato candle. From the other pocket she took out a match. She fumbled awhile to light it, but final y the wick took. It sat there, flickering on the top wal of the flats. She watched it a long time and then she reached forward and pushed it off the edge and down it went, through the air, aflame.
Why I thought this I stil do not know. Domenico took my arm and told me to sit down on the corner stool in the shop, my hands were trembling so.
His brother, Luca, the smal est of them, carried my groceries home, relit the kerosene lamp for me. He asked me if I would be al right and I said yes, I would. He asked for you and I told him you were in Paris, that you send letters, you live in an apartment, that your work is good and healthy and keeps your mind sharp.
Paris, he said.
I am quite sure his eyes sparkled—you are not forgotten, chonorroeja.
He bid me goodbye and he spotted the pages on the table, but I am sure he thought nothing of them. I could hear him whistling as he went down the hil .
After a few days in quarantine I could stand it no longer and I cal ed on Doctor Marcus and said to her in
