“The prunish nurse will be back soon,” she said, looking out the window at the early light of dawn rising out of a thick fog, and then whispered, “Rafael, I don’t like her. She hasn’t done me any wrong and she always asks me how I’m doing, but there’s something about her, not sure what, maybe it’s just her size. She’s tiny and she leaves the impression of a frail woman, but she isn’t what she seems. She won’t stop consoling me, as though you were already gone. She says that medically speaking you’re almost entirely dead. She explained something about the brain. You’ll be fully dead when all of your brain dies. Looks like you just can’t stop yourself from rebelling, ah? You’re keeping us all guessing with the living part of your brain.” She held her silence for a while and then resumed speaking, enthused. “You’re not going to believe who came to visit you. Yehoshua Dolev, the owner of that gallery that had your exhibition up five years ago, remember? Anyway, the gall on that guy. He came up here to ask me who you were leaving your work to, as if I care, as if I had any idea, as if you were already gone. I asked him to leave, but he said he’d be back. Next day Rafi was here, you know, from the museum. He also wanted to talk wills. Look how popular you are. For five years you didn’t exchange a word with them and now all of a sudden you’re a star. In this country, you’ve got to be unconscious to regain recognition. Not that you need any of that business. Okay, I won’t bother you. I’ll go out and get some air. Just pray she doesn’t drive me crazy again today. Even though I think she’s bound to relax a bit. There’s someone new on life support. Came in last night. His wife needs a lesson or two. She comes and goes all the time. Never stays for more than two hours. So, you see how it is? With my luck, he’ll probably wake up, and you? You’ll probably wait till they bury me and then you’ll get up and go look for some young girl, ah, Kolanski?”
“Good morning,” a small voice behind her said. Bessie stiffened. The nurse always managed to creep up and surprise her. She greeted Ann similarly, her eyes glazed with resentment. Ann approached Rafael’s bed and purred, “How are you today?”
Bessie shrugged. “I think I’ll go down to the cafeteria. I’d like a cup of tea.”
* * *
She walked out of the hospital and sat down on the front steps, gazing at the quiet street, watching it rise to life until her weighted eyelids were pulled close. Another guillotine came crashing down on her husband’s neck. Jolted awake, she checked her surroundings as though a blindfold has just been removed and put a trembling hand on her chest right after the small voice worked its way into her ear canal.
“Nightmare?”
Again she hadn’t noticed the nurse, who sat down beside her two minutes earlier and was getting ready to wake her.
“Yes, nightmare,” Bessie affirmed, preparing to change the subject.
“Bessie, I think you need to let go,” the nurse said.
Bessie didn’t turn in her direction. “I’m of a different mind,” she murmured, her eyes fixed on the trickle of traffic.
The nurse’s voice went up a notch. “Bessie, Rafael’s chances of awakening are negligible. Infinitesimal. I don’t want to mislead you. How old is he again?”
“Eighty-three next week.”
“You really think a man of his age has any chance of awakening? He’s already…”
“Reached old age? He can keep on going.”
“Not in his condition. He wasn’t in good health in the first place. Bessie, for over five weeks he’s been lying there lifelessly. I have no problem artificially respirating him for several more years, but logic dictates a different course of action.”
“I’m expecting a miracle. Don’t taint it with logic.”
“But you’re not a young woman either. This type of grind will take a toll on your health, too.”
“My health is not up for discussion right now.”
“Your health depends on his. You need to understand that your situation is not going to improve because his is not going to.”
“From where, exactly, do you draw that kind of certainty?”
“Experience. Rafael could lay there for a month, two months, a year and … nothing. Then, one fine day, the machine won’t help anymore … and, you know.”
“I don’t.”
“Bessie, have you given some thought to your life after he’s gone?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“It’s always been clear to me I’d die before him.”
“Clear?”
“When you live with someone for so long his presence becomes as permanent as nature. The trees are always there, the sky’s always there, Rafael’s always there.”
“You can’t imagine the world without Rafael?”
“I don’t want to imagine that kind of world.”
“Bessie, excuse me if what I’m about to say sounds rude, but he’s not going to wake up. And worse still, he’s suffering right now for no reason.”
“Suffering? How do you know he’s suffering? You’ve been in his condition?”
“I’ve seen dozens of people in his condition. People who were so close to death but due to some sort of complication remained suspended between heaven and earth. As far as I see it, he’s stuck in the throes of death. Your husband’s been suffering for over five weeks because he’s not being released, not being allowed to rest in peace and quiet. True, no one can guess what’s going on in his mind, but one doesn’t need to be a mind reader to know with near certainty that if all he’s left behind is his shell, a body without life, then he’s probably not interested in staying with us.”
“So you’re saying that my childish insistence is making him suffer?”
“I wouldn’t put it quite that way. But I’d say that when the fate of a loved one is at stake, we need to take ourselves out of the equation. Bessie, this delay is fundamentally unnecessary.”
“Alright already. Enough. You’re stuffing me to the gills with guilt.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, we’re talking about the biggest disaster of my life, all pleasantries are off the table. I’m losing my mind. He survived the Germans but he can’t survive this damned stroke?”
“It’s not a storm you can weather. You either snap out of it or not.”
“Don’t you understand that I know all this baloney? I don’t want to hear what I already know. I just don’t want to kill him and then discover that there was a chance he would’ve woken up, even a whole year later. Ann, I’ve got all the patience in the world, but then you come along and tell me he’s suffering, in the throes of death, stuck in limbo, and that’s not helping me at all. Not in the slightest.”
“I’m being of service when I tell you that the chance you’re talking about doesn’t exist. And that all the patience in the world won’t bring Rafael back. Bessie, Rafael’s dead. You need to face that fact. And another thing, Bessie. No one’s killing anybody.”
“Euthanasia?”
“What about it?”
“It’s not sanctioned by the law. I’m just asking because I want to make sure we’re not, God forbid…”
“Bessie, the only crime we’re committing is that we’re allowing him to suffer. Let’s send him on his way.”
“On his way?”
“Yes, Bessie. I’m sure he lived a full and honorable life. Let’s make sure he’ll stay true to that in death, too.”
“And what about doubt?”
“I think you’ve enjoyed its benefits long enough, no?”
Bessie accepted the insult. The fact that she had to balance her hostility toward the frigid nurse with the undeniable chinks in her own arguments infuriated her. Ann mumbled something about being on call in a certain room and, as she turned back toward the gloomy building, asked her to consider what they had discussed. Bessie watched her retreat. “Who do you think you are?” she hissed under her wisp of a mustache. “Rafael doesn’t even know you. You’re going to kill my Kolanski? A small, superfluous woman like you?”
* * *
When she came back from lunch, a piece of yolk stuck between her front teeth, the small, superfluous woman handed Bessie a medical form in quadruplicate. Bessie asked what the papers were for. Ann fished through her pockets, pulled out a pen, and extended it to her. Bessie’s eyes wandered between the lines, ever downward, to the bottom of the page, where they stopped at the thick black line. With practiced tactfulness, Ann slipped out of the room, leaving the sorrowful old woman to deal with the sickening formality of death. Bessie wondered if the nurse’s muted action was yet another stage, bolder than its predecessors, in the nurse’s systematic campaign. She held the pen with the tips of her fingers, as though it were a bloodied blade, finding it hard to believe that such an innocent object could stir up such real and immediate danger. This pen was to seal the fate of a man who had always been repulsed by signatures, a man who claimed that anyone who saw his paintings should recognize that he had created them. Even when presented with bank forms and the like, he would make an offended face and scribble
Fuck You
in the looping shape of an impressive signature. Bessie was the only one who knew that he never signed his name. When one day she remarked that a time would come when someone noticed his little stunt, he narrowed his eyes and said, “This from the mouth of a woman who used to fill entire notebooks with her ridiculously expressionistic signature attempts? A woman who hoped that she and her girlfriends would find the perfect shape for their names and that their personalities would follow suit?”
Weighing the irony of the moment, Bessie grimaced—her clean, pedantic signature, which was always a target for her husband’s loving arrows, might now prove to be lethal. She read the form until she knew it by heart, as though dressing and undressing each word gave her control over it, enabling her to water down its malice.
By early evening she was forced to admit that the words had gotten the better of her. Her head spinning, she got up and left the hospital, passing by Ann’s smiling face and trudging to the nearest bus stop. The ride lasted an eternity. All she wanted to do was sleep. Her eyelids toyed with her sadistically, rising and falling, enabling her to see her fellow passengers as blurry dots of liveliness and then giving in to the comforting darkness of improvised night for a brief instant. But how could she sleep without Rafael’s soundtrack? For some reason she was sure that the solution to her problem could be found in the archives of her shared life with the artist, whose cavernous nostrils, filled with stalagmites and stalactites that hindered the flow of air, made him snore. Somewhere, in one of those drawers, she was sure she would find a way to sleep again. Still caught up in the thought of Kolanski’s old lullabies, her gaze settled on the young man sitting opposite her. The pleather and chrome he was wearing emitted a slight whiff of Gestapo, but his expression softened the effect and she stifled a smile at the sight of him. There was pleasure scrawled across his face as his head bobbed. That’s when she saw the tiny headphones buried amidst a row of a dozen identical earrings. His head gyrations came to a stop, his fingers stomped on the appropriate buttons, and he pulled out the disc and inserted a new one. Bessie’s gaze followed the disc and just like that she wanted to press her gratitude on the young man with a kiss.
Half awake, she got off the bus and hustled home, Rafael’s fifty-year-old voice careening down the halls of her memory, defending himself. “You’re talking nonsense. I snore?”
She ran to the kitchen, snapped open cupboards and drawers, seeking hungrily, smiling at the sound of her own answer. “One day I’ll record you and then you’ll believe me when I say you sound like an asthmatic dragon.”
She ran to the workroom, flipped through the overflowing drawers of paint, laughing at the mental picture of the artist’s face, when the screeching sound of his trunk came over the tape. She smiled triumphantly as her fingers grabbed hold of the dusty cassette in the bottom drawer. She wiped it clean, brought the equally dusty tape recorder from the studio, laid it on Rafael’s side of the bed, put the tape in, turned off the light, and pressed P
LAY
. Forty-five joyous minutes of sharp snoring filled the room with miraculous life and Bessie fell asleep, her face lit with tears.
But, in sleep, Bessie went to the familiar site. Rafael was marching erect as a battle horse, the hunchbacked, downcast executioner behind him, the guillotine waiting ravenously. The bucket at its feet craved his splendid head. Bessie was buried in her robe, cloaked in shame, yearning for the end of the despicable ceremony. Rafael was already standing on the platform, his head ready for decapitation. But when the guillotinesse hesitated, he whistled to her just as he did the first time he laid eyes on her virginal beauty, on the secluded beach in Brighton, a rosy-cheeked girl who had unknowingly infiltrated his landscape portrait. Excited, she advanced toward him, a straight line spanning the space between four loving eyes, and now Rafael was the one smiling victoriously. The lady executioner wasn’t sure of his intention, and he nodded in the cramped quarters afforded his head, as though he were urging her to lower the blade. She asked, “Are you sure?”
His smile widened. The guillotine fell.
Six hours later, at noon of the following day, Ann walked out of a room at the end of the hall just as Bessie stepped into the hall’s opposite end. Their eyes met and they approached each other in measured paces, nodded, and carried on.
When the nurse turned and called out to her opponent, the latter looked straight at her. “Yes?” she asked.
Ann scratched her forehead in false embarrassment and coughed up a weak giggle. “Did I, by any chance, leave my pen with you?”
Bessie giggled back. “I think you did.” After a minute of simulated searching in her bag, she pulled out the pen and gave it to her.
“Well,” the nurse ventured, “did you use it?”
Bessie nodded.
10
The Mad Hop
Ben found his apartment with ease. City of June 2001, Circle 21, Building M, Floor 24, Apartment 7, BM. Pressing his thumb to the hole in the door, he tried to shake the image of himself as a burglar. The door popped open and he walked in, closing it quickly behind him. Groping through the darkness, he found the light switch, flipped it on, and leaped back in surprise, throwing a consoling hand to the back of his head where he had smacked into the door.