Best European Fiction 2013 (27 page)

“Where were you?”

“Outside the hospital.”

“It’s cold outside, and you’re dressed like that …” I’d only just noticed that—in her haste —she had just put a little jumper on over her T-shirt.

“I didn’t dare wait.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was afraid the doctor was going to come and tell me …’

“Tell you what?”

“… that you’d died.”

“It hadn’t quite come to that.”

“When I was giving them permission to operate, they asked—did I want them to fetch a priest?”

“What did you say?”

“I said there was no need for that, and that you weren’t going to die.”

“You didn’t tell them that a priest couldn’t reconcile me to God …”

“No.”

“You should have!” I said, joking.

She pretended to be cross (people were dying here and he was having a laugh!), then she slapped me gently with her open hand on my chest, then at the same instant remembered my heart and shuddered, she could have hurt me oh oh oh, she waved her hands in the air over me ohohohooo. Then we laughed.

I remember the rest of the day quite clearly as well.

When I was left alone in the ward, this is what I thought about: Of course I had been thinking and all these years I had been developing my attitude toward my death, but I did not expect that it could come as a consequence of my heart stopping. all my other organs could stop functioning, but the heart was out of the question. It was here, I thought, to beat for me, just as long as I needed it.

I called my son Harun. He was now in St. Louis. At the airport.

“How long is it till your flight?”

“Six hours.”

At midnight on 31 January 1996, on our way from Zagreb to Phoenix, Arizona, on our émigré journey to America, we had been at the St. Louis airport.

We were changing planes.

I remember rows of gray leather seats in the waiting room, and midnight travellers with Stetsons. In those days there were ashtrays on high stands beside the seats, and the stale air reeked of Jack Daniel’s. There wouldn’t be any ashtrays there any more. And now, as I chatted to him, I remembered a photograph from that journey. It was of him asleep, his head resting on his arms on a table in the airport cafe. He was thirteen then. I was thirty-five. He’s twenty-eight now. Almost as old as I was that midnight, when we were wearily waiting for the plane to Phoenix. How long ago was that? Fifteen years.

“I’m sorry, son.”

“What for?”

“That you’ve got such a long wait.”

“You’re comforting me, as though I was the one who’d had his heart stitched up!”

That
textile
image “stitched up” surprised me. As I thought about it, language became the only reality. I felt that every physical touch was freed of pain, and that was a nice illusion.

I’m really well, I feel cheerful, and it’s easy to forget I’ve had my heart “stitched up.”

Other than a dull ache in the vein they opened in my groin: in that soft area between my genitals and my thigh.

When I was lying on the operating table, at a certain moment I became conscious of that, that they were shaving my groin; a cold and quite disagreeable touch. At the time I didn’t know why they were doing that. If my problem is my heart, I thought, why are they shaving my private parts?

A cold razor blade scraping over my skin.

And the image of a man condemned to death, being prepared in the morning for the electric chair, came suddenly to my mind.

And then this. Today Sanja said that was it. No more cigarettes.

“If you want to go on living,” she said, “you have to stop.”

And it was high time.

“There’s a Bosnian, a doctor in Kentucky. I heard this story today. He had a heart attack, just like you, and while he was still in hospital, he asked his wife to park the car behind the hospital building. Then he’d go out, hide in the car and smoke a cigarette. Imagine! A doctor. His unfortunate wife refused to bring cigarettes, and she told his doctor colleagues about it.”

In America everything is geared to stopping you smoking. Of all the nations on the planet, they are the most resistant to the tobacco habit.

Nevertheless, one of the finest sentences about the cigarette and dependence on it was written by an American, Laird Hunt:

When you smoke, other people come up to you and ask for a light.

The next day. I thought about how the news of her son’s heart attack could affect my mother in Bosnia. In order to preempt any possible pain, I called her and explained that a rumor that I had had a heart attack was likely to spread through the Bosnian part of the world. I was calling, I said, so that my voice and cheerfulness would reassure her that this was not the case. She listened to me attentively, then there was a short pause before she asked: “So, how are you, otherwise?”

I clearly recognized her anxiety in that
otherwise
.

“Of all possible diseases, they hit on a heart attack,” she said. “The Mehmedinovićs don’t have them. No one in our family either on your father’s side or on mine has ever had a problem with their heart.”

So, that meant I was the first. Genetic degeneration had to start with someone; or else I—like all my relations—started out with the same heart, only I had carelessly filled mine with stuff that exceeded its capacity.

And when the call was over, I remembered a line of verse that I had last thought about perhaps in the late 1970s. It wasn’t remotely worthy, metaphysical poetry, but a rudimentary line by the forgotten Bosnian poet Vladimir Nastić that went:

I nearly swooned, Mother, like you, giving birth to me.

Sanja came this morning before eight o’clock. On her way to the ward, she had bought me a decaf in the hospital canteen. The decaf was sweetened with artificial sweetener.

It wasn’t coffee, it wasn’t sugar, nor was I myself.

And she said: “You’re looking well!”

I nodded affirmatively. Clearly I looked well, tied to the bed with all these cables so that I couldn’t move, or sit up, or get out of bed and walk around the room. But that didn’t bother me. I drank the coffee with great pleasure, just as though it was real coffee, with natural white sugar.

This morning a new nurse came. She said that it would be good for me to move, to walk around the room. I instantly dug myself out of bed, still plugged into hundreds of wires and with needles in my veins.

In the bathroom, Sanja carefully washed my whole body with a wet cloth.

Then I walked around the room. It was good to be walking again. This was what the experience of one’s first step was like. I was walking!

But afterward, I was sitting in my chair and suddenly straightened up, and at that moment I felt something burst in my right groin (where they had shaved my private parts the day before with a razor). At the same moment I saw a swelling appear. I pressed the button on my bed to call the nurse, who came quickly, and looked at the swelling with interest. She measured my penis, which was lying over the swelling, against the outside edge of her hand. She was concerned. She measured the pulse in my feet and hurried out of the room to find the duty doctor.

Very soon, instead of her or the doctor, a young man appeared, a technician with a strange plastic object. In the center of the square object there was a half ball, which he pressed onto the swelling. The ends of the surface into which the ball was set had holes with a paper string drawn through them. He tied the string round my waist. But he moved slowly, all the time reading the instructions for installing this plastic object whose purpose was, presumably, to read impulses, or messages sent by the swelling near my genitals.

And it wasn’t working.

He gave up.

He laid the plastic object down on the bedside cabinet, and left.

Was I now supposed to act like someone ill?

I didn’t want to.

No.

In Chekhov’s diaries there is a short note, a sketch for a story, about a man who went to the doctor, who examined him and discovered a weakness in his heart.

After that the man changed the way he lived, took medicines and talked obsessively about his weakness; the whole town knew about his heart, and all the town’s doctors (whom he consulted regularly) talked about his illness. He did not marry, he stopped drinking, he always walked slowly, and breathed with difficulty.

Eleven years later, he travelled to Moscow and went to see a cardiologist. That was how it emerged that his heart was, in fact, in excellent shape. To begin with, he was overjoyed at his health. But it quickly turned out that he was unable to return to a normal way of life, as he was completely adapted to his rhythm of going to bed early, walking slowly and breathing with difficulty.

What is more, the world became quite boring for him, now that he could no longer talk about his illness.

A young African had come to photograph my heart.

On his index finger—rather than on his ring finger, like most people—he had a silver ring with a square stone, that is, a combination of two stones: a large turquoise in the form of a tear was integrated into a black square of onyx. For the next half-hour, as I watched him work, I looked at that ring.

In order to photograph my heart, he used a hand-held scanner, and moved the cold, egg-shaped object over my breastbone, on the left side of my naked chest. On the monitor in front of him, was he focusing on the image of my heart? Or some other visual content? I don’t know, I couldn’t see what he was seeing. I always felt a bit dizzy whenever I heard my own heart. My hand sometimes falls unconsciously onto my chest, on the left side, just as I am falling asleep, then I become aware of my heart, and that wakes me up. and now, as that young man was recording me, I was seething with discomfort. At one moment he pressed the round scanner hard down between my ribs. This was a moment of utter bodily discomfort.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to make a bit of space between your ribs, so that I get a clearer image.”

I can easily handle pain.

But this wasn’t pain; this was separating the ribs right by the heart, this was far more than I was prepared to put up with. And that pressure between my ribs unleashed an uncontrollable fury in me. He had been scanning for half an hour already—had he taken any images? He said he had, but that it wasn’t enough. And I told him that for me what he had already recorded was absolutely enough, pulled my pajamas over my chest and crossed my arms over it for good measure, to prevent any further approach to my ribs.

It was as the young man, confused by my reaction, was putting away the instrument and leaving the room that Sanja stood with a decaf in a cardboard cup. She noticed my agitation and asked—what happened? I waved my hand, never mind, nothing, the examination took too long and that was why I was irritated. But then, I was put out by the expression on the young man’s face. While he was packing up his apparatus, I noticed a smile of mild revolt on his face. Did he think I was a racist? That was it! I could see it in his expression. That’s what he thought. He thought that I reacted the way I did not because I didn’t enjoy having him forcing my ribs apart, but because I had something against the color of his skin. I felt a need to talk to him, to put him right, but I knew that could only increase the misunderstanding.

So I didn’t say anything.

Nor did he.

He left without a word.

Then Sanja appeared with a decaf in a cardboard cup. She told me some of my friends were calling and wanted to visit me in hospital.

No, no.

They wanted to assure themselves that the heart attack had happened to me and not to them, which was human and normal, they wanted the confirmation that the misfortune had passed them by.

I refused.

The third day.

I was moved out of intensive care into an ordinary hospital ward, where I shared a room with this old man. He was a Slovak by origin.

Lukas Cierny. That’s what was written in blue felt tip on a little board on the wall, to the right of his bed. Nice name. Lukas Cierny. How old could he be? Eighty? Maybe more. He had Alzheimer’s disease, and some chest problems, and his breathing was very restricted.

In the middle of the night he got out of bed and set off somewhere, and they brought him back from the corridor. “Where were you going?”

“I want to get dressed and go for a walk.”

Old Cierny is much loved, there’s a procession all day long of his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They fill our room with laughter while they fix their father’s, grandfather’s or great-grandfather’s pillows under his head, comb the sparse hairs on his skull and do whatever they can to please him. It is clear from the old man’s vacant gaze that he doesn’t know who all these people are. They turn to me as well, kindly, as though we’d always known one another and were related. The mere fact that I came from a Slavic part of the world gave them the right to that familiarity. Even though their own Slavic origin was pretty foreign to them. His daughter, when she introduced herself to me, said of Lukas: “He’s from Czechoslovakia.” She was a pure-blooded American, from Pennsylvania.

He, who remembered nothing any more, answered questions in English and then sometimes in Slovak. When he replied in Slovak, the people he was talking to didn’t understand him. However, that didn’t bother any of them, they weren’t conversing with him in order to exchange information, but to simulate communication.

Someone had just come into the room and greeted Lukas with “How you doin’?”, to which he replied: “
Dobro
.” It was a reflex response in Slovak, a language which at this time was evidently closer to him. The person to whom the old man directed his ‘
dobro
’ did not understand the word. The old man had been separated from his Slovak language for some seventy years. And now the word came out of him, as it were, unconsciously. But this linguistic muddle had an emotional effect on me. As though now, close to death, the old man was preparing to face death in his own language. When he pronounced his ‘
dobro
’ it confirmed for me that I was in a foreign, distant land. Sanja was sitting by my bed, and when she heard the old man say ‘
dobro
’, as though in our shared language, her eyes automatically filled with tears.