Deviation Page 12

As soon as I was left alone in the room, I idly opened the envelope.

  I read that I was paralyzed from the waist down due to injuries to the seventh and eighth dorsal vertebrae, accompanied by fecal and urinary incontinence and lack of sensation. I could be discharged from the surgical ward because there was nothing more that could be done for me there. They advised electric shocks, massage, and passive exercise, with reservations about the possibility of ambulation with a corset and leg braces due to the brittle condition of the bones, contused and fractured throughout. Included were X-rays of the spine, chest, and pelvis, in various positions.

  Maybe my reader realized all this from the beginning.

  But I had not.

  It was the end of May, and in three months I had never for a moment doubted that I would recover. The only alternatives had been to die or live.

  I now understood a host of intimations, of attempts on the part of everyone to lead me toward this realization, to slip me details about my true situation; for example, I had a catheter permanently inserted in my bladder and a glass receptacle between my legs; some mornings I found myself covered in feces. How could I not have seen it? The more hints I recalled, the more I sank into a dull incredulity. Me! Me stuck in a wheelchair for life, sitting in shit and urine.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  But malicious reason kept telling me that it was true: you’re paralyzed.

  No!

  I grabbed a bottle of cognac from the bedside table and gulped it down in one swig. I raved and vomited all day. Johann kissed me and beat his head against the wall. He gave in to my insistence and brought me more cognac. Again I drank it down in swift gulps and threw up all night. A third bottle the following morning. I vomited and had diarrhea all day.

  Johann did not leave my side for a moment. Schwester Vincentia fought with him; I had never seen her so incensed.

  “If you don’t feel you can do it,” he kept telling me, “we’ll die together.”

  The second night we each drank another bottle. Schwester Vincentia had him taken into custody. Then she got angry at everybody and finally she mocked and insulted me:

  “Is this what you call being strong? I’m disgusted with you. Where’s that resilience? Shameless!” And on and on.

  It felt like everyone around me was crying for me.

  “I’m not paralyzed. Ich bin nicht gelähmt, I’m not paralyzed.”

  But as much as I hoped to drink myself to death, just the thought of cognac now made my bowels churn. The disturbance that such drinking causes is truly the most repellent thing imaginable. After twenty-four hours of writhing and retching, constantly nauseated by the taste of excrement in my mouth, I ended up falling into a heavy slumber.

  I was sick for days. I couldn’t eat or drink, speak, or think. At times the reminder stabbed through me like a knife: You’re paralyzed. But it didn’t stick.

  At daybreak one morning I awoke, fresh and clear, to the singing of birds in the trees. I listened admiringly to their limpid, irrepressible, vibrant trills. That’s why I hadn’t died. This was where He wanted me. Okay then: I would accept the challenge.

  V

  That same morning I called for Schwester Vincentia; we hadn’t spoken to each other since the evening she reproached me. I asked her if I could still stay in her ward, or if I was now compulsorily discharged. She replied that no one had sent me away: I was the one who wanted to leave. We both had tears in our eyes, but we spoke in polite tones and avoided looking at each other. I said I wanted to buy a wheelchair.

  She nodded thoughtfully: “How much do you have?”

  “The money set aside for the bicycle.” My voice cracked.

  She grabbed a glass from the bedside table and cleared it away. “I don’t like having a mess around. How many times must I tell you?”

  But she soon returned, with an odd, stern expression on her face, and started tugging the white bedspread from all sides, unfolding and refolding the towels hanging on the headboard.

  I told her that I intended to get used to sitting and moving about in a wheelchair. I had to get some books to study, to improve my languages, get reacquainted with philosophy. Finally, I said:

  “I’m not going back to Italy: I’m dead.”

  She spoke to me about my parents, about my mother’s sorrow.

  “They haven’t heard from me for ten months now.”

  One day I watched the Corpus Domini procession from the corner of the hospital’s drive. The gravel was strewn with flowers. Sweet little children and clerics with candles marched along singing. When the baldachin passed by, the faithful around me knelt.

  Suffice it to say that You killed Your son, I told Him.

  Johann greeted the news that I would stay in Mainz with extraordinary relief. I learned that he had decided to follow me, that he would have had to cross the border illegally; he was worried about his chances of finding work in Italy. I noticed that he had grown a mustache and sideburns, perhaps to look more like a southerner. He was always fond of Italians, feeling glad when someone mistook him for one of them. I noticed that he talked loudly, gestured a lot, walked with a swagger, gave provocative looks. He was no longer shy and retiring. He wasn’t gloomy and brusque anymore either, like when I used to talk about my recovery. Moreover, I saw him less often: he didn’t come every day and usually stayed only a few minutes. At times I thought I recognized his step and a warmth would spread through me. I pinched my leg until it left a mark: It’s all just suggestion, I told myself, you can’t feel anything.

  I had the Americans give me a pass with which I could borrow the books I wanted from the university.

  I would wake up at dawn and study Russian for three hours—I already knew a little.

  Then I bathed and exercised in the water under the guidance of the masseuse; sitting in the tub, I stretched out my arms and touched my toes with my fingertips; hands on my hips, I rotated my torso; on my knees I pulled myself up to sit on my calves, then I lowered myself again.

  After lunch I read the philosophy books I borrowed or that Johann stole for me from the university: Spinoza’s Ethics, Kant’s three Critiques. In them I found the rationality that eluded me in life. Around five o’clock, I got dressed and sat in the wheelchair to enjoy some fresh air in the garden.

  I had made friends with a Russian girl with a mutilated arm, who was soon repatriated. Saying goodbye, she had given me the threadbare stuffed dog that she always pressed to her chest with her one little hand.

  “His name is Tobik,” she said, handing him to me gently.

  I lived with that dog and never went anywhere without him. I told stories featuring Tobik to the convalescent children who came running over to me as soon as they saw me come out of the ward—some hopping on one foot, some hobbling, some with plaster casts; and as I spoke I would straighten a limp ear, make him bark, lift his paw. Each time they would ask me, “What did Tobik do today?” They begged me to let them touch him and were overjoyed when I allowed one of them to hold him for a moment; it was a prize I awarded to those who had not been naughty about eating or taking their medicine, subject to a note from their head nurse declaring: Today so-and-so was a good boy or girl, along with the details.

  Even the adults who were getting a breath of air approached and listened to the stories I made up, which I embellished more and more as my audience grew.

  A German soldier in a wheelchair, with a gangrenous leg, was set to have it amputated the following day: surrounded by the circle of children, he asked me earnestly to lend him Tobik for the occasion.

  Afterward he sent him back with a little leather collar he’d made himself.

  Since Tobik was too floppy and stalks of straw stuck out of him from all sides, the ward doctor decided to operate on him as well. In front of my kids silently gathered in the operating room, with bated breath, he put on his white mask and rubber gloves while Schwester Vincentia handed him the instruments, shaking her head from time to time; the doctor cut open the dog’s back, st
uffed him with straw, stitched him back up, and solemnly gave him back to me. The doctor was about thirty years old, with dark hair receding at the temples and dark eyes; in the evening he would come to my room and chat.

  Because my wheelchair stowed in the hallway was in the way, it was decided that we would leave it under the portico in the evening. But the day after this decision, we found the tires flat, the brake unscrewed: it had been my little friends, simply eager to snoop around something that belonged to me.

  In a small room in the isolation unit there was a ten-year-old girl, her entire body burned as a result of having touched a high-voltage wire. She had heard about me and had sent her mother to call for me. She studied me with her big eyes and finally asked me to give her Tobik. I didn’t give him to her. Later I felt sorry, but on the other hand, if I had given him to her, it would all be over. I myself had become attached to that dog and I couldn’t sleep if I didn’t have him next to me, with his snout tucked under my arm. “We have only each other,” I told him.

  I went to see the little burned girl right away and, not realizing the cruelty of the ploy, I suggested she tell my little friends that she had been reduced to that condition by playing around with my wheelchair:

  “We’ll say that there’s a particular spot, you don’t know where it is, through which a strong electrical current passes, and which is therefore dangerous to touch. I’m the only one who can. Do you understand? Can you remember it? They’ll come and question you, you know.”

  That same afternoon I told the children about the terrible accident that had happened to a friend of mine who had climbed onto my runabout when I wasn’t there.

  They looked at each other as if to say: This is too much!

  “You don’t believe me? Go and see her. I’ll wait for you here.” And I told them where to find her.

  They came back still looking incredulous, but—all in all—alarmed. From that day on I was able to safely leave the wheelchair under the portico. The sisters told me later that in the morning the kids came to check it out from a safe distance, daring one another; one reached a finger to a spoke of the wheel or to a screw, and quickly drew back, saying he’d felt the shock.

  They constantly went to see the girl devastated by burns, and she no longer hid her disfigured little face, she was no longer lonely like before; she was excited and eager to recount ever new variations of her amazing adventure with my wheelchair, stories that she believed more than the others, and was religiously listened to as a heroine. I went to see her too and we talked seriously together about how strange many things in life were. Her mother laughed and cried.

  By then the little girl’s flesh was crawling with worms and she died.

  *

  After I’d been sitting up and doing exercises for fifteen days, I realized that I was humpbacked. Someone in the garden always managed to brush against my hump. Maybe I had strained myself: my back wouldn’t support me, and I sat slumped over. Besides that, my belly was always swollen, and often my legs and feet as well, which were bluish due to poor circulation. I didn’t feel embarrassed. I looked at my body as if it were that of an unfortunate relation of mine. The only thing you’re good for is to annoy me, I told it, giving it a few maternal pats. I baptized my legs: Lazarus, the left one, and Cunegonda, the right.

  “Cunegonda is twisted,” I would say, and the nun straightened my right leg. Lazarus was the husband and Cunegonda the wife. He was firmer, straight, a real man, whereas she always buckled and seemed to have a simpering disposition.

  Schwester Petra, the night-duty nun, had fallen ill due to severe exhaustion and had been replaced by a young Red Cross nurse, sweet and kind, Schwester Luise, the war widow of an engineer.

  One evening she brought to my room a little picture of the Madonna, which she had stitched for me during her breaks from work.

  On the morning of my twentieth birthday, I awoke to find my room full of flowers, small gifts, cards, which Schwester Luise had arranged on tiptoe. The patients had shared the date in secret to surprise me. I spent the day receiving visitors, bouquets of lily of the valley, clusters of currants, and other offerings. I had a lump in my throat over the generosity of the human heart.

  Johann was the only one who did not show his face. He showed up around two in the morning, very agitated, unsteady on his legs: he asked me to marry him. He couldn’t live without me. “I need your help, you don’t know what a state I’m in.” That said, he seemed to calm down and slipped a metal wedding band on my right ring finger.

  Schwester Luise had a hard time persuading him to leave, he had to go or she’d lose her post; it wasn’t like before, there were visiting hours now.

  In the confident frame of mind I was in, I suggested that the sister accompany me to the city the next day, to where Johann lived, in a former army barracks, to surprise him. So around 5:00 a.m. we started getting me ready, and, as soon as she had finished her shift, we went out.

  The crisp morning breeze filled my lungs. Schwester Luise pushed me, striding quickly down the sidewalk, and I felt like a baby being taken for a walk by her mother.

  In a few months the Germans, like ants, had restored their city; all around were houses with uneven wooden planks for walls, aluminum sheets for roofs, paper covering the windows, geranium plants and flowering violets on the windowsills. The streets were clean, the rubble heaped in orderly piles.

  When we reached the immense courtyard of the former barracks, I asked for Johann. Disheveled women and hard-faced men in sleeveless undershirts gathered around me. They spread the word. I saw a girl with a scrubbed, gentle face run up, a small sprightly brunette, German, who seemed to be expecting me yet looked upset:

  “You’re looking for Johann, right? Come, come with me,” she said. And to the curious onlookers, with an air of setting things straight, “It’s his sister! His sister from the hospital.” And she led us through the yard, her hand on the arm of the wheelchair, her head high. “How young you are!” she exclaimed, no longer able to hold back. “I imagined you old, mean.” She explained that she had so often pleaded with Johann to introduce her to me, but he cut her short, saying that I didn’t want to meet her. And one night when she had followed him to the hospital, he had beaten her on the spot, so hard that she had not dared try again. They had gotten together in March, three months ago. Her family wouldn’t have anything to do with her anymore, especially her father, who had fallen ill (as if to say: not only his relations are opposed, but mine as well). She was a shop assistant.

  Schwester Luise said that it was getting late and we had to return immediately, she was responsible for me.

  “Wait just one minute, I’ll call him. Otherwise he’ll beat me.” And the girl showed us the bruises she had on her arms and legs.

  But Schwester Luise said no and we started back. The girl walked partway with us: she was trying to gauge the impression she had made on me, whether I would allow my brother to marry her, when we would leave for Warsaw, what Johann’s and my parents were like. Plainly I had been a nightmare for her and she couldn’t get over her disbelief:

  “So nett!”* she kept saying.

  At a crossroads we hugged, calling each other sisters, and tears slipped out as I pressed my cheek to hers too vehemently.

  Without a word, Schwester Luise and I made our way back to the hospital.

  With Schwester Vincentia and Schwester Johanna hovering worriedly, Sister Luise put me back to bed.

  “Bastard. Polack,” she said.

  “He has a German girlfriend,” I announced. “She would be my sister-in-law, because I’m supposedly his sister.”

  “All sluts nowadays,” Schwester Johanna said, blushing.

  As soon as I was left alone, I threw off the sheet, feeling like I was suffocating. The first thing I did was take the metal band off my finger and fling it out the open window.

  I couldn’t think straight. Finally, my mind formulated the words he’ll pay for it, and I felt relieved. Clinging to this new purpose,
I had to determine a course of action to take. But as soon as I got distracted, I remembered instances of his ill-concealed impatience to leave, the inept excuses he came up with: one time he said he had to remain hidden because they were searching for foreigners to be repatriated; another time that he was working to set aside some money. Not to mention his fruitless plans. In short, he said a lot of things. His new way of swaggering; the way he apologized too much.

  He’d never even asked me if I loved him.

  And me, placid, blind, deaf.

  Only because I was paralyzed. Wincing, I recalled that I had twice voided my bowels in his arms as he was about to put me in the wheelchair.

  Back in March when he’d met her, I’d still been dying. All he had to do was disappear then: I wouldn’t even have noticed.

  He felt obligated to love me. Me.

  The more crushed I felt inside, the more worked up I got in the intoxication of battle. My mind enjoyed wallowing in humiliation, while outwardly I wept with strange noises in my nose. I was at just such a combative moment when I recalled the face, the energetic body of his healthy girlfriend, and me in comparison. For the first time I experienced such profound shame over my condition that I lost my senses and fell asleep.

  I was awakened by a familiar voice. It was him, arguing heatedly with Schwester Vincentia; he threw open the door and rushed into my room, followed by the nun, who said bitterly, “You can never know a person well enough.”

  “I have to talk to you!” he said to me arrogantly.

  Sister motioned to me from behind him, to see if she should leave. I nodded and with my eyes indicated the bell. She went out, closing the door behind her.

  Alcohol must have given him courage.

  Practically shouting, he accused me of never having loved him, of having always treated him like a slave, of not having the feelings of a woman.

  I immediately assumed a contrite look (my heart pounding over the triumph that I allowed myself).

  “You’re right,” I replied softly, shamefaced. “I don’t love you. You’ve always been so good, so generous with me that I never had the heart to tell you.”