I was brought back to the ward. The doctor put her stethoscope to my chest. She said I was being held for my own safety, she would look after me, I was protected under international treaties, there was no cause for concern. She had the confident voice of one who did not believe a single word she was saying.
Her name was Doctor Marcus, from Canada, and she spoke German like she had just shoved a fistful of stones into her mouth. She said she would give me medical quarantine for a month or two, but after that I would have to apply for refugee status and then I would be allowed the status of the other displaced people. On her desk Doctor Marcus had some of my possessions: my Party card, my knife, some paper krowns wrinkled from the lakewater, and the coin Conka had given me, still wrapped in strands of her fine red hair. I reached out to get my possessions but she dropped them in a large paper envelope and said that they would be returned when I began to comply. She spun the coin in her fingers, dropped it in the envelope, and closed the clasp. A hair had fallen onto the desk.
Are you willing to talk to me? the doctor asked.
I pretended again that I was mute. Doctor Marcus spoke into an intercom system, instructed them to bring in the translator, an enormous heap of a woman who asked me question after question, in Czech and Slovak both, who I was, how I got a Party card, what had happened to me, how did I cross the border, did I know anyone in Austria and, of course their favorite question, was I really a Gypsy? I looked like one, they said, I dressed in colorful rags like one, but I did not seem like one. I sat still with my hands in my lap. The translator told me to nod yes or no to her questions. Are you Czech? Are you Slo-vakian? Are you Gypsy? Why have you come in from Hungary? This coin is an unusual coin, isn't it? Is this your identity card? Are you a Communist? I sat still. The best way around her was silence. When they were finished, the translator threw her hands up in the air but Doctor Marcus leaned forward and said: I know you understand us, we only want to help you, why don't you let us?
I lifted the single strand of Conka's hair from the desk and they took me off to quarantine.
So much time was spent in the white rooms of the hospital that I began to think back on all that had happened. My voice is strong now when I recall this, but back then I was a weak and terrified thing, and I stopped in every corner I could find, real or not. I did not want the roads of my childhood to return, I attempted to put them out of my mind, but the more I did so the more they appeared.
We used to make potato candles, Conka and I, we hollowed them out and lit the thin walls of potato with light, and in winter Conka loved to skate with the lit candles in her hands, tree to tree, they kept her hands warm. She had a pair of skates her father had made from old boots and knifeblades. Sometimes the lights went out when she turned on the skates, or skidded and fell, or sometimes the ice sprayed up and put out the wick-flame. Above us the stars swung. These and other things returned to me while I lay in the Austrian bed-I sometimes felt as if I were still out on the ice. I heard cracking and saw hands reaching up for me. I could hear boots in the forest and there stood Swann and there stood Vashengo and there stood Strän-sky, rifling through a sheaf of papers and, behind them again, a row of bureaucrats and nurses and officers and guards. I turned and thrashed about in the bed, but the pictures returned harder, faster, with the insistence of things impossible to shake.
Doctor Marcus arrived at the end of my bed every noon, her stethoscope twinkling in the light, a row of pens in her pocket, one with a Canadian flag, and although she looked not a bit like
Swann, I could not help thinking that she was like a sister to him, with her light hair, hazel eyes, her oval face.
You don't have to suffer, she said. There's no point. Why don't you tell me your situation and then I can help?
It was like an old song, a children's rhyme, I had heard it so often, it was as if she had taken the words of a bureaucrat and put them in a child's mouth.
I know you can talk, she said. The nurses heard you. On the first day, you were screaming in a language they didn't recognize, surely it was Gypsy, am I right, was it Gypsy?
I turned away.
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. Pills were given to me with water, white tablets with orange writing. I had the strange thought that I was swallowing words and Swann's face kept coming to my mind. I had lost a tooth in my journey and the orange pills 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; small flashes that burst out green and yellow 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 pills from the bottom of the bedstead. I would have taken them all in one go. They were terrible days, they could not have been worse.
The doctor finally said she would not give me any more pills or injections. She barked at the nurse to put her arm under mine and allowed me to walk through the ward. I stood and swayed. Walking helped cure some things and for the next few weeks they fed me well and all my lacerations healed, my hair began to grow back, and my feet were carefully tended to. They replaced the bandages three times a day, using a soft creamy medicine that smelled of mint. They allowed 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 small price, she will 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 Stränsky'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 really thought about the days with Stränsky 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.