Keeping the Feast (9 page)

Throughout the ride to the airport, John drifted in and out of consciousness. Awake, he talked incessantly, telling me how he remembered riding into Timişoara in darkness, sitting in the front seat of a red Peugeot with a French photographer at the wheel and two other American reporters in back. He remembered a sudden thud against his car door, the door pressing sharply against him, the car suddenly rocking, and the sensation of something small traveling through him, not hurting, just hurtling through. He remembered only one shot, or a single burst of shots, even though the others told him later that the car had been virtually demolished by the fusillade. He remembered losing consciousness, then reawakening as soldiers pulled him from the car, laid him on a stretcher, and raced him into a hospital operating room, where doctors frantically ripped his shirt and undershirt up the back to get at his wound. John was talking as we approached the airport, but fell silent as I looked for our promised transport out.

We seemed to leave Romania the instant we drove around a corner of the empty airport terminal and saw, finally, the Red Cross plane, white and pristine, waiting on the empty tarmac, while snowflakes began to drift down. In truth, it took a long time to get off the ground, as we had to wait, while John’s thin canvas stretcher lay on the bitterly cold tarmac, for a beefy border guard to rubber-stamp our passports, and for the Germans to be satisfied with our paperwork, which they checked and rechecked before allowing us to board.

The antiseptic cleanliness of the little Learjet, whose interior had been fitted out as a state-of-the-art emergency room, made the Romanian hospital look like a medieval charnel house. A Red Cross doctor and nurse were already pulling off John’s parka and attaching him to various intravenous tubes as I climbed aboard and we took off. Once the doctor completed her initial tests, she radioed her findings directly to Munich’s Klinikum Rechts der Isar, so that emergency room doctors would be ready to act when we arrived. The doctor in charge looked grave when he saw us, five days—nearly 120 hours—after the shooting.

A crowd of emergency room doctors and nurses materialized, swarming around John and rolling him away. Just before the big double doors swung shut, the last of the doctors turned to me. I looked at him, hoping he might be able to calm my rising fear. Instead, he began to berate me for taking so long to get John to Munich. Stung by his curt tone and the implication that I had purposely kept John hospitalized in Romania as long as possible for some unimaginable reason, I felt like a child again, when my mother, on one of her bad days, accused me of committing an absurd, imaginary crime. There was nothing to be said in either case. But the doctor’s last words kept echoing in my brain, causing my stomach to spasm: “Another six to twelve hours and there would have been absolutely nothing we could have done to save him.”

I stared at the doctor’s back as he turned and walked through the same double doors through which John had disappeared. Suddenly I was alone again, in a nondescript hospital waiting room, my heart pounding noisily and my breath coming in short, irregular bursts. To calm myself, I pulled out the translation of the hastily written, error-filled Romanian medical report that the Germans had requested, reading and rereading it:

I focused, of course, on one line of that report. “Now: Leaving clinic in satisfactory condition with a slight fever.” I must have read that line a hundred times as I tried to quell the rising panic I felt each time I pictured John’s eyes, glittering in that unearthly way on the ward in Timişoara’s Spital 2, glittering so oddly on the Red Cross plane as we took off from Romania into the gathering snowstorm. I read it again and tried to understand it in light of the German doctor’s decidedly different diagnosis.

After a few more readings I understood that the single line in the report upon which I had focused was utter rubbish, written to cover the Romanian government in the very likely event of John’s death. Chief surgeon Petru Radulescu made that clear during a visit John made to Timişoara eight years later. The only reason the government had opened its airspace to the German Red Cross plane was to get John out while he was still breathing, Dr. Radulescu told him. The government did not want to be in the position of having to ship the dead body of a
New York Times
reporter back to the United States. The references to antibiotics were pure fiction, a wish list of drugs the Romanian doctors coveted, just like those huge Polish restaurant menus we knew so well, the ones that listed dozens of dishes but whose kitchens never had much more to offer than beet soup and roast duck. During their emotional meeting eight years after Ceauşescu’s execution, Dr. Radulescu told John that the hospital had absolutely no modern antibiotics at the time of the revolution. “ We knew what they were but we didn’t have any,” he said.

 

 

 

 

B
etween the evening of December 23, when he was shot, and December 28, the day he was airlifted to Munich, John underwent three emergency surgeries, two of them in Romania. The Munich surgeons, like the Romanians, tried to clean the large, infected wound of dead tissue. A small piece from the tip of one of his vertebrae had come apart during the procedures, but posed no neurological danger. The initial lab tests, X-rays, and computer scans indicated that John’s liver and kidneys would revive once the infection was controlled. We awaited the results of the pathology report to know the exact nature of the infection. But the idea that things could still go horribly wrong once we had made it to the West had not yet sunk in. Even so, that night while John slept, closely monitored in the ICU, I lay awake, my mind working and reworking the last words I heard from the surgeon: “ I think we can handle the probable infection.”

Six days after the shooting, on December 29, John was still in intensive care. By late morning, his condition had worsened considerably and my mind began to shut down. Exhausted with worry, I realized at some point that I could no longer take in what the doctors were telling me. I tried to compensate by taking copious notes: “It is a large and very infected wound,” I wrote. “ We removed bone splinters, dead tissue, muscle, and much of the infected material.” The doctors foresaw intensive care to heal the wound, a fourth operation the following day to remove additional dead tissue, and weeks of hospitalization.

Despite that report, I did not expect to be so utterly shocked upon seeing the gaunt figure that lay on the hospital bed in the ICU. It was not just the mass of tubes and wires protruding from John’s inert body that so disturbed me. It was the sensation of seeing what looked like a corpse—thin-lipped, gray, emaciated, facial features caved in. My eyes and heart saw a shell of a body, lying where I had hoped to see some remnant of the vigorous man I had married twenty-nine days earlier. As I approached John’s bed, I had the strongest sensation of having been somehow catapulted forward in time. I felt like an aged widow, come to say good-bye to her even more aged husband, lying dead on his funeral bier.

John was unconscious, and would remain that way for several days. But something, probably terror, propelled me to start talking to him. Trying to sound normal, I said hello, told him he was not looking too peppy, that he needed to rest and regroup and, most of all, to hang on. I reminded him that he was out of Timişoara, that no one was shooting in Munich. I reminded him that he was in one of the best trauma hospitals in Germany and that the doctors were doing everything they could to clean his wound and fight the infection. I talked about Peter and Anna, fourteen and eight, just a few hours’ train ride away, and how I would make sure they learned immediately that he was finally in the safety of a good hospital. I talked about his brothers, Charles and Robert and Paul, how they were calling and sending faxes every few hours. I talked about our sisters-in-law, Arlene and Chan. I talked about our nieces and nephews. I talked about my parents, my brother, our friends, our staff in Warsaw, our editors in the States, our colleagues. I talked slowly and softly, but incessantly, for what seemed like forever, trying all the while to sound as normal as I could, not only for him but for myself as well. Though the quiet drone of my voice had no visible effect on John, it helped calm me.

W
hen I was a child I was fascinated by feasting food, the dishes that different communities or cultures traditionally serve on special occasions. A Greek-British family who lived above us for a couple of years ate a very eggy, flat yellow cake at Eastertide. It tasted wonderful but—even better, from my eight-year-old eyes—contained a dime carefully wrapped in folds of waxed paper. Just as the
fève
in a French
galette des rois
brings a crown at Epiphany, the coin in the Greek cake brought luck to the person in whose slice it was hidden.

New Year’s celebrations in Italy always contain lentils, for the consuming of
lenticchie
at this time of year is meant to bring good luck and as many coins as lentils consumed. A similar tradition holds in Texas and much of the American South, where black-eyed peas are eaten at New Year’s for health and wealth in the coming year. It is no surprise that both lentils and black-eyed peas cost next to nothing, spreading the possibility of good luck to any family, no matter the purse.

When I was very small I liked the idea of lentils and luck more than the actual eating of them. But I can still see my mother’s father, Tony, a short, rounded man who never lost his appetite or his dark hair despite his ninety-plus years, slowly chewing his way through bowl after bowl of them, always flecked with bits of onion, carrot, celery, tomato, and pancetta, a specially cured cut of pork similar to bacon.

As I got older, I looked forward as much to the lentils as the luck. By the time I reached my teens, I also loved the plump, dark pink sausage,
cotechino
, meant to go with them. The best
cotechino
—whose name comes from the Italian word for pork rind,
cotica
, an essential ingredient—is somehow nearly creamy but toothsome at the same time, with a delicate taste and gelatinous broth that one mixes into the lentils. When I moved to Dallas in my late twenties, I happily traded my lentils for Texans’ black-eyed peas at New Year’s. In the five years I lived there, the lentil-black-eyed pea connection was the only culinary similarity I ever saw between Eye-talian and Texas kitchens.

I ate no lentils at New Year’s in Munich. I only thought about it years later, when John and I were back living in Rome. It’s not that I think a bowl of lentils would have made any difference, but since then I have never missed a meal of them as each new year rolls round.

 

 

 

 

A
week to the day after John was shot, he underwent a fourth operation to clean out his wound. But the surgery did not go according to plan. John’s lungs, like all of his major organs, were suffering from the infection raging within. When his lungs began filling with fluid, the doctors had to pump them out to save him from drowning. After long hours of waiting for news, I was initially relieved to see one of John’s surgeons appear, but when he briefed me on what had happened and warned me that John might need to go on a ventilator the next day, my gut ignored his calm delivery, my brain began flirting with panic. That the doctor forbade me to visit John underscored the gravity of the situation. That the doctors had to pump out his lungs to keep him breathing terrified me. That he was going to need yet another operation in forty-eight hours—his fifth since the shooting—sounded ominous. That he might need to go on a breathing machine was a possibility I had never once entertained.

I tried to shut down the whirring in my head and went back to the hotel to find Adele Riepe, the Bonn bureau manager of
The New York Times
, who had spent most of the previous week hammering Red Cross officials in several countries to attempt to evacuate John from Romania. Adele, a former Ford Agency model who in her seventies looks better than I ever did at thirty, took one look at my gaunt face and said she was going to feed me.

We went to a small restaurant just down the street from the hotel and downed a glass of dry white
Frankenwein
while we waited for our food to arrive. I didn’t feel hungry, but she pushed me to eat: starter, main course, salad, dessert.
Der Appetit kommt beim Essen,
the Germans say, and they are right. Eating can in fact bring on one’s appetite. We emptied every plate the waiter brought, then hurried back to the hotel so that I could call the doctors before turning in.

Most of the news was not good, and it continued to worsen over the New Year’s holiday. John’s lungs were failing; the infection, which the doctors were now calling septicemia, was still raging; and he was breathing only because he was on a respirator and a pair of lung pumps. He underwent a fifth operation to remove all the tissue that had blackened and died since the previous surgery. The sole encouraging sign was that the lab reports showed that the infection was coming from the wound alone; all nearby organs were untouched. During this period, John would fall into and out of half-conscious dream states that had begun in the hospital in Timişoara and persisted long after he had left the intensive-care unit in Munich. Whether asleep or semiconscious, he kept dreaming he saw a gearbox filled with brightly colored plastic gears turning in various directions and clicking, constantly clicking. John knew, even in his sleep, that if those gears stopped, he would be dead.