There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby (12 page)

On the night she died and they took her away, her husband collapsed, and in his sleep he heard her—she was there, and she lay her head down on the pillow next to him and said, “My love.” And after that he slept happily, and at the funeral he was calm and dignified, though he’d lost a great deal of weight, and was honest and upright, and at the wake, when everyone had gathered at his apartment, he told them all that
she had come to him and called him “My love.” And everyone froze, because they knew what he said was true—and the photograph no longer hung over his desk. It had disappeared from his life. It had all evaporated—just ceased to be interesting at some point—and suddenly, while still at the table, the husband began showing everyone the pale little family photos of his wife and kids—of all those excursions they’d taken without him, all their fatherless entertainments that were so poor but so happy, in the parks and the planetariums to which she’d brought the children when she tried to make a life for them on the tiny island, the only one still left her, where she shielded the children with herself, while towering over everything was that photo from the magazine. But the photo was gone now, everything was fine, and she’d managed to say to him, “My love”—without words, already dead, but she had done it.

THERE ONCE LIVED A GIRL WHO WAS KILLED, THEN BROUGHT back to life. That is, her parents were told that the girl was dead, but they couldn’t have the body (they had all been riding the bus together; the girl was standing up front at the time of the explosion, and her parents were sitting behind her). The girl was just fifteen, and she was thrown back by the blast.

While they waited for the ambulance, and while the dead were separated from the wounded, the father held his daughter in his arms, though it was clear by then that she was dead; the doctor on the scene confirmed this. But they still had to take the girl away, and the parents climbed into the ambulance with their girl and rode with her to the morgue.

She seemed to be alive, as she lay on the stretcher, but she had no pulse, nor was she breathing. Her parents were told to go home, but they wouldn’t—they wanted to wait for the body, though there were still some necessary procedures to be done, namely the autopsy and determination of the cause of death.

But the father, who was mad with grief, and who was also a deeply religious man, decided to steal his little daughter. He took his wife, who was barely conscious, home, endured a conversation with his mother-in-law, woke up their neighbor, who was a nurse, and borrowed a white hospital robe. Then he took all the money they had in the house and went to the nearest hospital, where he hired an empty ambulance (it was two in the morning), and with a stretcher and a young paramedic, whom he bribed, drove to the hospital where they were keeping his daughter, walked past the guard down the stairs to the basement corridor, and entered the morgue. There was no one there. Quickly he found his daughter and together with the paramedic put her on their stretcher, called down the service elevator, and took her to the third floor, to the intensive care unit. The father had studied the layout of the hospital earlier, while they waited for the body.

He let the paramedic go. After a brief negotiation with the doctor on duty, money changed hands, and the doctor admitted the girl to the intensive care unit.

Since the girl was not accompanied by a medical history, the doctor probably decided that the parents had hired an ambulance on their own and brought the girl to the nearest hospital. The doctor could see perfectly well that the girl was dead, but he badly needed the money: his wife had just given birth (also to a daughter), and all his nerves were on edge. His mother hated his wife, and they took turns crying, and the child also cried, and now on top of all this he had of late been assigned exclusively night shifts. He desperately needed money for an apartment. The sum that this (clearly insane)
father had offered him to revive his dead princess was enough for half a year’s rent.

This is why the doctor began to work on the girl as if she were still alive, but he did request that the father change into hospital clothing and lie down on the cot next to his daughter, since this apparently sick man was determined not to leave her side.

The girl lay there as white as marble; she was beautiful. The father, sitting on his cot, stared at her like a madman. One of his eyes seemed out of focus, and it was only with difficulty in fact that he was able to open his eyes at all.

The doctor, having observed this for a while, asked the nurse to administer a cardiogram, and then quickly gave his new patient a shot of tranquilizer. The father fell asleep. The girl continued to lie there like Sleeping Beauty, hooked up to her various machines. The doctor fussed around her, doing all he could, though there was no longer anyone watching him with that crazy unfocused eye. In truth, this young doctor was himself a fanatic of his profession—there was nothing more important to him than a difficult case, than a sick person, no matter who it was, on the brink of death.

The father slept, and in his dream he met his daughter—he went to visit her, as he used to visit her at summer camp. He prepared some food, just one sandwich, and that was all. He got on the bus—again it was a bus—on a fine summer evening, somewhere near the Sokol metro station, and rode it to the paradisial spot where his daughter was staying. In
the fields, among soft green hills, he found an enormous gray house with arches reaching to the sky, and when he walked past these giant gates into the garden, there, in an emerald clearing, he saw a fountain, as tall as the house, with one tight stream that cascaded at the top into a glistening crown. The sun was setting slowly in the distance, and the father walked happily across the lawn to the entrance to the right of the gate, and took the stairs up to a high floor. His daughter seemed a little embarrassed when she greeted him, as if he’d interrupted her. She stood there, looking away from him—as if she had her own, private life here that had nothing to do with him anymore, a life that was none of his business.

The place was enormous, with high ceilings and wide windows, and it faced south, into the shade and the fountain, which was illuminated by the setting sun. The fountain’s stream rose even higher than the windows.

“I brought you a sandwich, the kind you like,” said the father.

He went over to the table by the window, put his little package down, paused for a moment, and then unwrapped it. There lay his sandwich, with its two pieces of cheap black bread. He wanted to show his daughter that there was a patty inside, and so he moved the bread pieces apart. But inside he saw—and right away he knew what it was—a raw human heart. The father was terrified that the heart had not been cooked, that the sandwich was inedible, and quickly wrapped the sandwich back up. Turning to his daughter he said awkwardly: “I mixed up the sandwiches. I’ll bring you another.”

But his daughter now came over and began looking at the sandwich with a strange expression on her face. The father tried to hide the little bag in his pocket and press his hands over it, so his daughter couldn’t take it.

She stood next to him, with her head down, and reached out her hand: “Give me the sandwich, Papa. I’m really hungry.”

“You can’t eat this filth.”

“Give it to me,” she said ponderously.

She was reaching her hand toward his pocket—her arm was amazingly long all of a sudden—and the father understood that if his daughter ate this sandwich, she would die.

Turning away, he took out the sandwich and quickly ate the raw heart himself. Immediately his mouth filled with blood. He ate the black bread with the blood.

“And now I will die,” he thought. “I’m glad at least that I will go first.”

“Can you hear me? Open your eyes!” someone said.

The father opened his eyes with difficulty and saw, as through a fog, the doctor’s blurry face.

“I can hear you,” he said.

“What’s your blood type?”

“The same as my daughter’s.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

They carted him away, tied off his left arm, and stuck a needle in it.

“How is she?” asked the father.

“In what sense?” said the doctor, concentrating on his work.

“Is she alive?”

“What d’you think?” the doctor grumbled.

“She’s alive?”

“Lie down, lie down,” the wonderful doctor insisted.

The father lay there—nearby he could hear someone’s heavy breathing—and began to cry.

Then they were working on him, and he was carted off again, and again he was surrounded by green trees, but this time he was woken by a noise: his daughter, on the cot next to him, was breathing in a terribly screechy way, as if she couldn’t get enough air. Her father watched her. Her face was white, her mouth open. A tube carried blood from his arm to hers. He felt relieved, and tried to hurry the flow of blood—he wanted all of it to pour into his child. He wanted to die so that she could live.

Once again he found himself inside the apartment in the enormous gray house. His daughter wasn’t there. Quietly he went to look for her, and searched in all the corners of the dazzling apartment with its many windows, but he could find no living being. He sat on the sofa, then lay down on it. He felt quietly content, as if his daughter were already off living somewhere on her own, in comfort and joy, and he could afford to take a break. He began (in his dream) to fall asleep, and here his daughter suddenly appeared. She stepped like a whirlwind into the room, and soon turned into a spinning column, a tornado, howling, shaking everything around her, and then sunk her nails into the bend in his right arm, under the skin.
He felt a sharp pain, yelled out in terror, and opened his eyes. The doctor had just given him a shot to his right arm.

His girl lay next to him, breathing heavily, but no longer making that awful screeching noise. The father raised himself up on an elbow, saw that his left arm was already free of the tourniquet, and bandaged, and turned to the doctor.

“Doctor, I need to make a phone call.”

“What phone call?” the doctor answered. “It’s too early for phone calls. You stay still, or else I’m going to start losing you, too . . .”

But before leaving he gave the father his cell phone, and the father called home. No one answered. His wife and mother-in-law must have woken up early and gone to the morgue and now must be running around, confused, not knowing where their daughter’s body had gone.

The girl was already better, though she had not yet regained consciousness. The father tried to stay near her in intensive care, pretending that he was himself dying. The night doctor had left already, and the poor father had no money anymore, but they gave him a cardiogram and kept him in intensive care—apparently the night doctor had managed to speak with someone. Either that or there really was something wrong with his heart.

The father considered what to do. He couldn’t go downstairs. They wouldn’t let him call. Everyone was a stranger, and they were all busy. He thought about what his two women must be going through now, his “girls,” as he called them—
his wife and mother-in-law. His heart was in great pain. They had put him on a drip, just like his daughter.