Diary of Interrupted Days (20 page)

“It sounds like Italian,” the other woman said. “I’ll get Ornella.”

The first nurse stayed in the room, waiting for the doctor and wiping the patient’s forehead, rearranging the wires around his body.

“Dove sono?” the man said.

“It’ll be all right now. The most important thing is that
you are awake, and that you rest. You have been in a coma for almost a week now, but you are going to be fine, nothing to worry about. Can we inform someone? What is your name?”

The man stared at her, then said, “Coma?”

“Yes, yes, the doctor will tell you more, I’m sure. Are you hungry?”

“Dove sono?” he repeated.

The other nurse arrived with the third woman, who smiled at the patient encouragingly and said, “Io sono Ornella. Come sta?”

“Dove sono?”

“In un ospedale, in Amsterdam,” she said. “Come sta?”

He paused, sighed, and said, “Come un albero di trenta piani.”

She smiled. “Le piace Celentano, no? Anche a me. Come si chiama?”

“Non ricordo,” the man said.

“Ma bene. Ora viene il dottore,” Ornella said, pointing somewhere behind the curtain.

“Bene. Sono stanco. Ciao bella.”

“Arrivederci.”

The doctor pulled aside the curtain. “Is he awake?”

“He is, Doctor,” the first nurse said. “But he does not understand English. We thought he spoke Italian, so we called Ornella.”

“And?”

“He doesn’t remember his name, Doctor,” Ornella said. “He speaks Italian, but—” She giggled.

“What?”

“Every other sentence is the title of a song.”

Tomo the Croatian nurse had a nickname at the hospital: the Reverse Man. When he came to the hospital looking for work, the first thing the woman who ran Human Resources noticed about him was that he uttered each name in reverse order—family name, then the person’s name—as if reading from a telephone book. The social services had sent a letter of recommendation with him, saying that he was a refugee suffering from traumatic experiences. The head of HR took pity on him and hired him as a patient hygienist on the night shift. It was a smooth title for the rough job of cleaning toilets, changing sheets, and disinfecting bedpans. When he started working, the nurses noticed that he did other things backwards, too. Instead of pushing his trolley, he pulled it behind him. Instead of stretching a sheet over a bed first and tucking the ends in afterwards, he would straighten the bottom part, tuck it in, and then work towards the head part, as if a patient were already in bed and he was covering him.

Several months after he began to work at the hospital, he had his diploma recognized and could work as a nurse again. In time, his colleagues learned to like him, but they still joked behind his back. He was a subject of research as much as an employee. A famous anecdote went like this: Once old professor Van Dijk, leading his students on morning rounds, found Tomo in the corridor pulling a trolley, pointed at him, and said, “A thousand guilders to the one who comes up with the correct diagnosis for this man!” The students tried several guesses, but the professor kept
shaking his head. Finally, when everyone had exhausted their ideas of possible disorders, Van Dijk said, “He’s an exile, dear colleagues, an exile.”

Six years after leaving Croatia in 1992, Tomo went back home for the first time. Everyone else at the hospital chose summertime or the holidays for their trips, but Tomo went in October. “I want to see my people, not the seacoast,” he said. “In summer they are all elsewhere.” He came back in a strange mood. Physically, he looked refreshed, but there were lines of bitterness at the corners of his mouth, and he scarcely communicated with his colleagues. Before his trip he had had a kind word for everyone he met, and his patients still loved him, so his co-workers let time heal whatever it was that needed healing.

The Italian—as they now unofficially called the nameless man—was moved from intensive care into his own room. Tomo was warned to be quiet and unobtrusive when he took over for the night shift, since the man had suffered memory loss and was still recuperating from the coma. Tomo pulled his trolley with prescriptions to the front of the door and stepped on the brake. He only intended to check on the patient to see if everything was fine. He tiptoed into the semi-darkened room, listening to the man’s even breathing, and carefully approached the bed. Then he said, very quietly:

“You?”

The first snowstorm of the season was still raging. The wind had died down, and the snowflakes that the light caught drifting outside were the size of coins. Toronto had lost its edges, swaddled in cotton as if it had been wounded and needed some peace and quiet to recover.

Boris stepped back from the window and returned to his seat. Dinner was over and the remains of the dessert were melting on the platter in the middle of the table. Their guests slouched in their chairs, chatting the Friday night away. The radio was playing jazz.

“You two never argue,” Selma said. “At least not in front of us. What’s your secret?”

“Look at their eyes,” Branko said. “They’re calm. They don’t give a fuck.”

“We once had a big family dinner at our place,” Nenad said. “I think it was my birthday, and there were three generations sitting next to one another. My granddad was about seventy at the time. He always impressed me as being
calm and confident, but suddenly I noticed that his eyes were wide, as if he were staring at something horrific—he almost appeared insane. I thought it had something to do with old age, you know—shoulders bending, hips widening, perhaps eyes widening, too. I looked at my father and he had the expression too, but just barely. So I sneaked out to the bathroom, to look at myself in the mirror. I thought I was doomed: it had to be hereditary. But once I got here, to Canada, I realized what caused it: the slow grind of our old country. When you’re young, a long way from the end, and your hopes are high, all doors open for you, you can do anything. Then you are middle-aged, and everything goes into slow motion. You go to work every morning, you get your salary every month no matter whether it was a good month or not, maybe they promote you, maybe they don’t, maybe you have an affair with your colleague or maybe not, but there’s nothing you can change anymore and new doors are not opening for you anymore because you chose that one door so long ago—and now what? You slowly acquire that look of horror in your eyes. It’s not the fear of death. It’s the horror of life, of looking back at it.”

Branko was inspired to recite:

“Fuck, that was a great song!” Nenad said. “‘I Fall for Horror.’ Johnny.”

“I still listen to it often,” Branko said. He turned to his hosts. “You don’t have any of Johnny’s records?”

“No,” Boris said as Sara answered, “We do,” quickly adding, “But only in digital format, on my Discman.”

Selma laughed. “Aha, this is a good time to start arguing, you two.”

“Before Johnny,” Branko said, “it was all ‘I love you, you don’t love me, I’m sad.’ And then he came along, and the music was suddenly about street fighters, about desperate loners, about our balls stuck in the machine—about
us.”

“I have to admit that I miss that revolutionary feeling we used to have back then.” Nenad took another sip of his wine. “We felt like we were the centre of the world. Now I feel sidelined.”

“I am too full to start a revolution,” Lila interrupted, and everyone laughed. “A little Pepto-Bismol and I could change the world.”

“You’d need a megaphone, too. And a good dictionary,” Sara added.

“And plenty of toilet paper,” Nenad said.

“Speaking of dictionaries,” Selma said, “we all learned English at school, but that version was so fossilized, don’t you think? The other day I heard a piece on CBC, some guy doing a story about learning English. It was funny. The title was ‘In My Language I Am Smart.’”

“That says it all,” Sara said.

“You’re the smartest one among us, Boris,” Selma said. “You found a visual job. Good for you.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Boris replied. “Even shapes need translation. Colours have different meanings. Once, they gave me some Christmas project to design. I made a palette of winter colours: white for snow, grey for buildings, and red for fire. A touch of ice blue. It looked good to me. But when my boss saw it, his jaw dropped. ‘Where’s the green? Where’s the gold?’ He did not realize that I had never celebrated Christmas back home, that I didn’t share his colour code.”

“Where’s Johnny now, does anyone know?” Nenad said.

“I heard he disappeared when the war started,” Selma said. “They think he quietly emigrated.”

“Where to?”

“No one knows.”

“We have at home that last album he did,” Lila said, “the one that came out after he was gone. There’s a ballad on it, ‘The Mistress of Solitude.’ ‘Like the Mistress of Solitude she is pulling my strings.’ Unbelievable song. I’ve always wondered who the woman who inspired it was. What the hell did she do to deserve such a song?”

Boris glanced at Sara, who was motionless.

“Oh, good, we’re all Johnny’s groupies here,” Selma said.

Boris had met Nenad when he came to fix his computer. It turned out they had been working in different departments of the same company for two years, not knowing about each other. His wife, Lila, was also a programmer, though she used to be a high-ranking bank official in Belgrade.

Sara had found Branko and Selma in a bookstore. Branko, who had been a doctor back home, worked as a chiropractor, and Selma was studying to become a project coordinator in the software industry. The couples took turns hosting a dinner every Friday evening and they adopted the name Fridians for their group. Because of Friday, but also because of Freud.

“Children, we should be going if we don’t want to sleep here tonight,” Lila said.

They all turned to the window and stared at the white wall fluttering outside. Then everyone started getting ready to leave.

Half an hour later, with the dishwasher burping in the kitchen, Sara and Boris sat at the table finishing the wine. Usually, this sweetest part of their Fridays would start with one of them remembering something that someone had said, and then lead to a long conversation.

“I didn’t know you brought Johnny’s records,” Boris said.

“I didn’t. I found them all on the Internet.”

He took a sip of wine and lit a cigarette. “I should tell you something regarding Johnny,” he said.

She looked at him. “Why are we talking about Johnny now?” she said.

“We talked about him most of the evening, it seems.”

“But not about the Johnny I knew. They talked about the public Johnny. The private one is my private thing, and it should stay like that.”

They fell silent, both looking through the glass wall. A Dexter Gordon solo painted everything bluish.

“You’re not offended?” she asked.

“No, but do you miss him?”

“Boris.”

“Do you miss him?”

“I ask myself what happened to him. Don’t you?”

“What happened to him is what happened to all of us,” Boris said. “We had a life, the war came, we lost that life. We chose new identities and started again. Here, somewhere, anywhere else was good.”

“New identities? You think he’s hiding somewhere?”

“Hiding? Only in the way we are all hiding. But—no, that’s not what I meant. Look at the Fridians. We all used to be something else back there. But we hide it on our résumés. Overqualified? Dangerous. Remember Sasha’s interview in that theatre magazine? He claimed that he had single-handedly invented political theatre in Serbia, spitting on all those who came before him. The first banned theatre show there was in 1954, when Sasha was only a spermatozoid. He knew that not one of us would send in a correction. Why? Because we all lie a little. White lies, small stuff, but still—nobody draws a clear picture that would unite here and there, now and then. We think people here would not believe what we had and what we had to give up to emigrate. Others lie just because they can, and it’s tempting. Witnesses are few and far between, and most people just don’t care.”

Sara got up to walk to the window. She stood there, looking into the whiteness. Boris continued his soliloquy:

“This woman claims she was a well-known actress in Belgrade—we know that she was a junior producer in one of the theatres. But apparently she has always wanted to
act, and now she is recreating her history in order to achieve her goals. That’s what hypnotizers do: they advertise themselves well to make their audience more susceptible. Actually, that’s a good metaphor for what we do: we hypnotize—others, but ourselves too.”

Sara was still silent. Boris remembered what this was about.

“Johnny is probably in Amsterdam, hypnotized into doing something new, as are the people around him.”

“Amsterdam?”

“Or not. But Amsterdam fits.”

She nodded slowly.

“Perhaps he’s not into music anymore. In fact he can’t be, or we would have heard about him. He’s apparently not into anything that draws attention. But I’m almost certain that he’s alive and well. Maybe even happy, I don’t know.”

“Happy?” Sara said, her back facing him. “Are you happy, Boris?”

He walked slowly to her, glass in hand. He was tipsy but not drunk. He hugged her.

“That’s a scary question, isn’t it? I’m not doing any art, so I’m probably not screaming with joy. But I’m with the woman I love, and we are not bad as a team, and that gives me happiness.”

She did not lean her head against his shoulder, although Boris thought this was the perfect moment to do it. He removed his arms, slowly, and stood beside her.

“Remember that night in September, when we first kissed? I’ve never asked you this, but—should I have cancelled that cab? Should I have stayed that night?”