He let the nurse go and, after a quick conversation with the emergency room doctor on duty, he passed on the wad of money and placed his daughter in the doctor's arms.
As there weren't any medical charts, the doctor apparently decided that the father had called an ambulance and brought the patient (or probably the corpse) to the nearest hospital. The doctor knew perfectly well that the girl was not alive, but he needed money badly — his wife had just given birth (also a girl) — and his nerves were on end. His mother didn't like his wife and they took turns crying on his shoulder, and the kid was also crying, and then there were his night shifts. He had to find money to rent an apartment. The (clearly) crazy father of this fairy tale princess was offering him enough for six months' rent.
Without saying a word, the doctor began his work, as if a live patient was before him. He told the father to put on surgical clothes and sat him on a bed in the unit, since this sick man was bent on staying with his daughter and was saying they had the same blood type.
The girl was lying there, white as marble, with a face of extraordinary beauty, and her father watched her from the bed with a strange expression on his face. One pupil kept drifting to the side, and when he blinked, his lids separated with great difficulty.
The doctor observed him and asked a nurse to give him a cardiogram, then to give this new patient a shot. The father passed out, but not right away. The girl looked like Sleeping Beauty, all wired up to equipment. The doctor took care, doing everything possible, and no one was watching the father with that lopsided gaze of his anymore. Basically, the young doctor was a fanatic. Nothing was more important to him than a serious, interesting case, than a patient (no matter who, name and status did not matter) on the verge of death.
The father slept, and in his dream he met his daughter. That is, he went to visit her, as he had at summer camp. He took some food, a meatball sandwich, for some reason. And that's all. He got on a bus (a bus, yet again) on a beautiful summer evening, somewhere near the Sokol metro station, and went to some heavenly place. In a field between soft green hills there was a huge grey house with arches up to the sky, and when he passed through the giant gates and entered the courtyard, there, on an emerald meadow, was a fountain, as high as the house, and it had a single jet culminating in a shimmering plume. The summer sunset stretched on and the father strolled with pleasure toward an entrance to the right of the arch and walked up toward a high floor. His daughter was there, looking off somewhere. As though this were her life, which no longer had anything to do with him. Something of her own.
The apartment was huge, with high ceilings and broad windows, and it faced south, toward the shade and the fountain on the side, now lit by the setting sun. The fountain was even taller than the windows.
«I brought you a meatball sandwich, just the way you like it,» said the father.
He went up to a table near the window and put down his package, thought a minute, then unwrapped it. A strange sandwich was lying there, with its two pieces of cheap black bread. To show his daughter the meatball, he opened the sandwich. Inside was (and he saw it immediately) a raw human heart. The father worried that the heart was uncooked and couldn't be eaten. He folded it back up in the paper and said, awkwardly, «I brought the wrong sandwich. I'll bring you another one.»
But his daughter came closer and stared at the sandwich with a strange expression on her face. Then her father stuffed the package in his pocket and covered it with his hand, so that she couldn't get it.
«Give it to me, Dad. I'm hungry. I'm so hungry.»
«You can't eat that stuff.»
«No. Give it to me,» she said, heavily.
She reached for his pocket with her deft, very deft, hand, but her father understood that if his daughter managed to get the sandwich, she would die.
Then, turning away, he took out the package, opened it, and quickly started to eat the raw heart himself. His mouth filled with blood. He ate the black bread with blood.
«Now I'm dying,» he thought, «How fortunate that I'm going before her.»
«Open your eyes, you hear me!» someone was saying.
He unglued his lids with difficulty and saw as if in a fog, the distorted face of the young doctor.
«I hear you,» said the father.
«What's your blood type?»
«The same as my daughter's, I told you.»
«Are you sure?»
«Yes. Sure.»
He was immediately taken somewhere and his left arm was tied with a tourniquet. A needle was inserted into his vein.
«How is she?» asked the father.
«Meaning?» asked the doctor, busy with the task at hand.
«Is she alive?»
«What did you think?» answered the doctor in passing.
«A live?!»
«Lie down, lie down,» exclaimed the kind doctor.
The father laid there, listening to someone snoring nearby, and he wept.
Then they worked on him and he again went off somewhere. Again, he was surrounded by greenery, but he was awakened by a noise: his daughter, on the next bed, was snoring loudly, as if she didn't have enough air. Her father looked at her from the side. Her face was white, her mouth slightly open. Live blood flowed between the father's arm and the daughter's. He felt light, and tried to make the blood go faster, go entirely into his daughter. He wanted to die so that she should live. Then, he found himself in that same apartment, in the huge grey house. His daughter was gone. He went quietly to look for her, searching all the nooks and crannies of the luxurious apartment with its many windows, but couldn't find a living soul. He sat on the couch, then lay down. He was calm, happy, as if his daughter were doing fine somewhere, living well, and he could rest. He (in his dream) was falling asleep when his daughter appeared like a whirlwind swirling through the room, and was suddenly next to him like a spinning column of wind, howling, shaking everything around her, digging her nails into the bend in his right arm all the way beneath the skin, pricking him hard. He screamed in horror and opened his eyes. The doctor had just given him an injection in his right arm.
The girl was lying beside him, breathing heavily, but no longer wheezing. Her father raised himself onto his elbows and saw that his left arm had been freed from the tourniquet and bandaged. He addressed the doctor:
«Doctor, I need to call right away.»
«What for,» exclaimed the doctor, «it's still too early. Lie down, or I'll lose you.»
But before he left, he nevertheless gave over his cell phone and the father called his wife. No one was home. His wife and mother-in-law had probably gotten up early and gone to the morgue and were probably frantic, unable to understand where the child's body had gone.
The girl was doing better, but had not regained consciousness. Her father tried to stay near her in intensive care, pretending he was dying. The night doctor had gone and the poor father had no more money, but they gave him a cardiogram and left him there. The night doctor had apparently made arrangements with someone to let him stay, or else the cardiogram showed bad results.