It’s the Pentecost long weekend, in late May.
On the Monday afternoon he’s lying on his bed, smoking a cigarette. When he’s finished it he stubs it out in the ashtray.
He doesn’t know why he does what he does next. Something wells up in him. It feels as purely physical and involuntary as throwing up.
There’s a surprisingly loud noise and the door has a splintery dent in it now.
For a while he doesn’t feel anything in his hand, but when he tries to take another cigarette with it he can’t.
He uses the other one.
Yeah, fuck, his right hand hurts a lot.
It hurts so much suddenly that he needs to do something.
In the kitchen, using his left hand, he opens the freezer and pulls out a bag of peas.
He sits at the kitchen table with the frozen peas on his right hand.
He’s sweating weirdly heavily, he notices. His shirt is sticking to him.
The peas seem to be helping and he takes them to his bed and lies there on his back with his right hand on his chest, and the peas on his hand.
He’s shivering now even though it’s warm, and when he looks at his hand again half an hour later it’s about twice its normal size and dark red. It’s also hurting more than ever. He should probably show it to a doctor, he thinks.
Still heavily sweating he leaves the apartment with his shoelaces flapping around undone and starts down the stairs.
The nearest hospital isn’t far.
He shows his hand to someone in the entrance area and they tell him where to wait—it’s a wide, windowless corridor with metal seats down the sides and another two rows of them back-to-back in the middle. All the seats are taken so he stands next to the vending machine. It’s noisy in the corridor, with so many people there. There are some doors with numbers on them—though the numbers don’t seem to make any sort of sequential sense—and every so often one of the doors opens from the inside and some of the people who are there press in around the person who opened it, usually a middle-aged woman in green hospital clothes whose expression seems designed to deter inquiries. Sometimes, though not always, she says a name and one of the people waiting there is admitted to the room. After he has seen that happen a few times, he understands that he’s supposed to make himself known to the woman as well and the next time she opens the door he pushes his way to the front and shows her his hand and without saying anything she adds his name to a list.
He takes his place next to the vending machine again and waits there for another hour and then joins the crowd at the door the next time it opens and reminds the woman in the green clothes that he’s waiting.
“Yes, I know,” she says. “Please be patient.”
Finally his name is called and he’s admitted to the room behind her.
The room seems very quiet and peaceful after the noise and tension of the corridor. There’s the woman in medical green and a bearded young man in a white coat who’s presumably a doctor. He’s no older than István and possibly younger. He asks what the problem is and István shows his inflated hand. “Okay,” the doctor says.
“I’m not sure if it’s broken or what,” István tells him.
“Oh, it’s broken,” the young doctor says, with a laugh. “What happened?” he asks.
István says he punched something.
The doctor waits for him to elaborate.
“A door,” István says, feeling ashamed.
When he doesn’t add anything further, the young doctor says, “Okay.”
Something about him irritates István. Maybe it’s the way that he’s smiling. Or maybe it’s just that he’s his own age and a doctor. “Does it hurt?” the doctor asks.
“Yes,” István says.
“A lot?”
“Quite a lot.”
“Have you taken any painkillers?”
“Today?”
“Yes.”
“No, I haven’t.”
The doctor asks the woman in green for some codeine and she gives the white pill to István with a small paper cone of water.
“Thanks,” István says.
When he has swallowed the pill he returns the empty cup to her and she drops it in a bin.
“We’ll need an X-ray,” the doctor says while that’s happening.
He says some technical-sounding things to the woman in the green clothes and she writes out a slip, which she hands to István.
The doctor tells him to take it to the radiology department upstairs and wait there.
The situation at the radiology department is similar, although there are fewer people waiting and the corridor is quieter and more dimly lit. There’s also a window at the end of it through which he can look down at the Aldi car park, which is more or less empty today.
While he waits he phones his mother. He’s tried her once already. This time she answers and he tells her that he’s at the hospital.
“Why?” she asks, sounding worried.
He tells her what happened.
“You punched a door?” she says.
“Yes.”
“Why?” she says.
“I don’t know,” he says.
His mother doesn’t say anything.
He waits about an hour for the X-ray, and when it’s his turn they put a sort of heavy, rubbery vest on him.
The man tells him where to put his hand and moves some instrument on a long articulated arm until he’s satisfied that it’s in the right place.
Then, after telling István not to move, he withdraws and when he next speaks it’s through an intercom.
He’s telling István that he can leave.
Outside in the corridor someone else, a younger woman, helps him off with the heavy vest.
She says he should go back to the doctor who sent him there.
He has to wait another hour for that too, in the noisy corridor downstairs.
“So,” the young doctor says, smiling at him again when it’s his turn. “It’s not a simple fracture.”
“Okay,” István says.
The doctor says that it might be necessary to do an operation.
“Why?” István asks.
“You might lose some movement in these two fingers,” the doctor tells him, indicating the two smallest fingers of his own right hand, “without an operation.”
“What do you mean lose some movement?”
The doctor explains. It doesn’t sound very serious, the loss of movement he’s talking about, and István says so.
“So you don’t want the operation?” the doctor asks.
“Is it worth it?”
“It’s up to you,” the doctor says.
“What happens if I don’t have the operation?” István asks him.
“Well, then I’ll just try to put the bones back the best I can and set it,” the doctor says.
“You mean with plaster?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
“You want to do that?”
“Yeah.”
The doctor says he’ll need him to sign a paper that the woman in the green clothes starts to prepare. While she’s doing that the doctor gives István an injection into his right hand. “This might hurt a bit,” he says.
“Okay,” István says.
It does hurt, though not as much as he thought it would.
“We’ll give it a few minutes,” the doctor says.
The hand already feels numb.
The woman in the green clothes has the paper ready for him now.
“What is this?” István asks.
“It just says you refused the operation,” the doctor tells him, from the other side of the room where he’s taking things out of a drawer.
Put like that it sounds as if it might be a mistake and István hesitates. “Am I doing something stupid?” he asks.