Veronika Decides to Die: A Novel of Redemption

  When she got closer she saw that the young woman had been sick again, and that her bent head was lolling slightly to the right.

  Zedka turned to call for help, but Veronika looked up.

  "It's all right," she said. "I had another attack, but it's over now."

  Zedka gently helped her up and led her to the toilet.

  "It's a men's toilet," Veronika said.

  "Don't worry, there's no one here."

  She removed Veronika's filthy sweater, washed it, and placed it on the radiator. Then, she removed her own wool top, and gave it to Veronika.

  "Keep it. I only came to say good-bye."

  The girl seemed distant, as if she had lost all interest in life. Zedka led her back to the chair where she had been sitting.

  "Eduard will wake up soon. He may have difficulty remembering what happened, but his memory will soon come back. Don't be frightened if he doesn't recognize you at first."

  "I won't be," said Veronika, "because I don't even recognize myself."

  Zedka pulled up a chair and sat down beside her. She had been in Villete so long it would cost her nothing to spend a few minutes longer keeping Veronika company.

  "Do you remember when we first met? I told you a story to try to explain that the world is exactly as we see it. Everyone thought the king was mad, because he wanted to impose an order that no longer existed in the minds of his subjects.

  "There are things in life, though, which, however we look at them, are valid for everyone. Like love, for example."

  Zedka noticed a change in Veronika's eyes. She decided to go on.

  "I would say that if someone only has a short time to live and decides to spend that time sitting beside a bed, watching a man sleeping, then that must be love. I'd go even further: if, during that time, that person has a heart attack, but sits on in silence, just so as to remain close to the man, I would say that such love had a lot of potential for growth."

  "It might also be despair," said Veronika. "An attempt to prove that, after all, there are no reasons to continue battling away beneath the sun. I can't be in love with a man who lives in another world."

  "We all live in our own world. But if you look up at the starry sky, you'll see that all the different worlds up there combine to form constellations, solar systems, galaxies."

  Veronika got up and went over to Eduard. Tenderly she smoothed his hair. She was glad to have someone to talk to.

  "A long time ago, when I was just a child, and my mother was forcing me to learn the piano, I said to myself that I would only be able to play it well when I was in love. Last night, for the first time in my life, I felt the notes leaving my fingers as if I had no control over what I was doing.

  "A force was guiding me, constructing melodies and chords that I never even knew I could play. I gave myself to the piano because I had just given myself to this man, without him even touching a hair o' my head. I was not myself yesterday, not when I gave myself over to sex or when I played the piano. And yet I think I was myself." Veronika shook her head. "Nothing I'm saying makes any sense."

  Zedka remembered her encounters in space with all those beings floating in different dimensions. She wanted to tell Veronika about it, but was afraid she might just confuse her even more.

  "Before you say again that you're going to die, I want to tell you something. There are people who spend their entire lives searching for a moment like the one you had last night, but they never achieve it. That's why, if you were to die now, you would die with your heart full of love."

  Zedka got up.

  "You've got nothing to lose. Many people don't allow themselves to love, precisely because of that, because there are a lot of things at risk, a lot of future and a lot of past. In your case, there is only the present."

  She went over and gave Veronika a kiss.

  "If I stay here any longer, I won't leave at all. I'm cured of my depression, but in Villete, I've learned that there are other kinds of insanity. I want to carry those with me and begin to see life with my own eyes.

  "When I came here, I was deeply depressed. Now I'm proud to say I'm insane. Outside I'll behave exactly like everyone else. I'll go shopping at the supermarket, I'll exchange trivialities with my friends, I'll waste precious time watching television. But I know that my soul is free and that I can dream and talk with other worlds that, before I came here, I didn't even imagine existed.

  "I'm going to allow myself to do a few foolish things, just so that people can say: 'She's just been released from Villete.' But I know that my soul is complete, because my life has meaning. I'll be able to look at a sunset and believe that God is behind it. When someone irritates me, I'll tell them what I think of them, and I won't worry what they think of me, because everyone will say: 'She's just been released from Villete.'

  "I'll look at men in the street, right in their eyes, and I won't feel guilty about feeling desired. But immediately after that, I'll go into a shop selling imported goods, buy the best wines my money can buy, and I'll drink that wine with the husband I adore because I want to laugh with him again.

  "And, laughing, he'll say: 'You're crazy!' And I'll say: 'Of course I am, I was in Villete, remember! And madness freed me. Now, my dear husband, you must have a vacation every year, and make me climb some dangerous mountains, because I need to run the risk of being alive.'"

  "People will say: 'She's just been released from Villete and now she's making her husband crazy too.' And he will realize they're right, and he'll thank God because our marriage is starting all over again and because we're both crazy, like those who first invented love."

  Zedka left the ward, humming a tune Veronika had never heard before.

  The day had proved exhausting but rewarding. Dr. Igor was trying to maintain the sangfroid and indifference of a scientist, but he could barely control his enthusiasm. The tests he was carrying out to find a cure for vitriol poisoning were yielding surprising results.

  YOU HAVEN'T got an appointment today," he said to Mari, who had come in without knocking.

  "It won't take long. I'd just like to ask your opinion about something."

  Today everyone just wants to ask my opinion, thought Dr. Igor, remembering the young girl's question about sex.

  "Eduard has just been given electric shock treatment."

  "Electroconvulsive therapy. Please use the correct name, otherwise it will look as if we're a mere band of barbarians." Dr. Igor tried to hide his surprise, but later he would go and find out who had made that decision. "And if you want my opinion on the subject, I must make it clear that ECT is not used today as it used to be."

  "But it's dangerous."

  "It used to be very dangerous; they didn't know the exact voltage to use, where precisely to place the electrodes, and a lot of people died of brain hemorrhages during treatment. But things have changed. Nowadays ECT is being used with far greater technical precision, and it has the advantage of provoking immediate amnesia, avoiding the chemical poisoning that comes with prolonged use of drugs. Read the psychiatric journals, and don't confuse ECT with the electric shock treatment used by South American torturers. Right; you've heard my opinion. Now I must get back to my work."

  Mari didn't move.

  "That isn't what I came to ask. I want to know if I can leave."

  "You can leave whenever you want and come back whenever you want, because your husband has enough money to keep you in an expensive place like this. Perhaps you should ask me: 'Am I cured?' And my reply will be another question: 'Cured of what?' You'll say: 'Cured of my fear, of my panic attacks.' And I'll say, 'Well, Mari, you haven't actually suffered from that for the last three years.'."

  "So I'm cured."

  "Of course not. That wasn't what your illness was about. In the thesis I'm writing for the Slovenian Academy of Sciences"--Dr. Igor didn't want to go into any detail about Vitriol--"I'm trying to study so-called normal human behavior. A lot of doctors before me have done similar studies and reached the conclusion that normalit
y is merely a matter of consensus; that is, a lot of people think something is right, and so that thing becomes right.

  "Some things are governed by common sense. Putting buttons on the front of a shirt is a matter of logic, since it would be very difficult to button them up at the side, and impossible if they were at the back.

  "Other things, however, become fixed because more and more people believe that's the way they should be. I'll give you two examples. Have you ever wondered why the keys on a typewriter are arranged in that particular order?"

  "No, I haven't."

  "We call it the QWERTY keyboard, because that's the order of the letters on the first row of keys. I once wondered why it was like that, and I found the answer: The first machine was invented by Christopher Sholes, in 1873, to improve on calligraphy, but there was a problem: If a person typed very fast, the keys got stuck together and stopped the machine from working. Then Sholes designed the QWERTY keyboard, a keyboard that would oblige typists to type more slowly."

  "I don't believe it."

  "But it's true. It so happened that Remington--which made sewing machines as well as guns at the time--used the QWERTY keyboard for its first typewriters. That meant that more people were forced to learn that particular system, and more companies started to make those keyboards, until it became the only available model. To repeat: The keyboard on typewriters and computers was designed so that people would type more slowly, not more quickly, do you understand? If you changed the letters around, you wouldn't find anyone to buy your product."

  When she saw a keyboard for the first time, Mari had wondered why the letters weren't in alphabetical order, but she had then promptly forgotten about it. She assumed it was simply the best layout for people to type quickly.

  "Have you ever been to Florence?" asked Dr. Igor.

  "No."

  "You should go there; it's not far, for that is where you will find my second example. In the cathedral in Florence, there's a beautiful clock designed by Paolo Uccello in 1443. Now, the curious thing about this clock is that, although it keeps time like all other clocks, its hands go in the opposite direction to that of normal clocks."

  "What's that got to do with my illness?"

  "I'm just coming to that. When he made this clock, Paolo Uccello was not trying to be original: The fact is that, at the time, there were clocks like his as well as others with hands that went in the direction we're familiar with now. For some unknown reason, perhaps because the duke had a clock with hands that went in the direction we now think of as the "right" direction, that became the only direction, and Uccello's clock then seemed an aberration, a madness."

  Dr. Igor paused, but he knew that Mari was following his reasoning.

  "So, let's turn to your illness: Each human being is unique, each with their own qualities, instincts, forms of pleasure, and desire for adventure. However, society always imposes on us a collective way of behaving, and people never stop to wonder why they should behave like that. They just accept it, the way typists accepted the fact that the QWERTY keyboard was the best possible one. Have you ever met anyone in your entire life who asked why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction and not in the other?"

  "No."

  "If someone were to ask, the response they'd get would probably be: 'You're crazy.' If they persisted, people would try to come up with a reason, but they'd soon change the subject, because there isn't a reason apart from the one I've just given you. So to go back to your question. What was it again?"

  "Am I cured?"

  "No. You're someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that, in my view, is a serious illness."

  "Is wanting to be different a serious illness?"

  "It is if you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia. It's a distortion of nature, it goes against God's laws, for in all the world's woods and forests, he did not create a single leaf the same as another. But you think it's insane to be different, and that's why you chose to live in Villete, because everyone is different here, and so you appear to be the same as everyone else. Do you understand?"

  Mari nodded.

  "People go against nature because they lack the courage to be different, and then the organism starts to produce Vitriol, or bitterness, as this poison is more commonly known."

  "What's Vitriol?"

  Dr. Igor realized he had gone too far and decided to change the subject.

  "That doesn't matter. What I mean is this: Everything indicates that you are not cured."

  Mari had years of experience in law courts, and she decided to put them into practice right there and then. Her first tactic was to pretend to be in agreement with her adversary, only to draw him immediately into another line of argument.

  "I agree. My reason for coming here was very concrete: I was getting panic attacks. My reason for staying was very abstract: I couldn't face the idea of a different way of life, with no job and no husband. I agree with you that I had lost the will to start a new life, a life I would have to get used to all over again. Further, I agree that in a mental hospital, even with its electric shocks--sorry, ECT, as you prefer to call it--rigid timetables, and occasional hysterical outbursts on the part of some inmates, the rules are easier to accept than the rules of a world that, as you say, does everything it can to conform.

  "Then last night, I heard a woman playing the piano. She played superbly, in a way I've rarely heard before. As I was listening to the music, I thought of all those who had suffered in order to compose those sonatas, preludes, adagios: How foolish they must have been made to feel when they played their pieces--which were, after all, different--to those who held sway in the world of music then. I thought about the difficulties and humiliations involved in getting someone to fund an orchestra. I thought of the booing public who was not yet used to such harmonies.

  "Worse than the composers' suffering, though, was the fact that the girl was playing the music with such soul because she knew she was going to die. And am I not going to die? Where is my soul that I might play the music of my own life with such enthusiasm?"

  Dr. Igor was listening in silence. It seemed that all his ideas were beginning to bear fruit, but it was still too early to be sure.

  "Where is my soul?" Mari asked again. "In my past. In what I wanted my life to be. I left my soul captive in that moment when I still had a house, a husband, a job I wanted to leave but never had the courage to.

  "My soul was in my past. But today it's here, I can feel it again in my body, vibrant with enthusiasm. I don't know what to do. I only know that it's taken me three years to understand that life was pushing me in a direction I didn't want to go in."

  "I think I can see some signs of improvement," said Dr. Igor.

  "I don't need to ask if I can leave Villete. I can just walk through the door and never come back. But I needed to say all this to someone, and I'm saying it to you: The death of that young girl made me understand my own life."

  "I think these signs of improvement are turning into something of a miraculous chain of healing," Dr. Igor said with a laugh. "What do you think you'll do?"

  "I'll go to El Salvador and work with children there."

  "There's no need to go so far away. Sarajevo is only about two hundred kilometers from here. The war may be over, but the problems continue."

  "Then I'll go to Sarajevo."

  Dr. Igor took a form from a drawer and carefully filled it in. Then he got up and accompanied Mari to the door.

  "Good luck," he said, then immediately went back to his office and closed the door. He tried hard not to grow fond of his patients, but he never succeeded. Mari would be much missed in Villete.

  When Eduard opened his eyes, the girl was still there. After his first electric shock sessions, he had had to struggle for a long time to remember what had happened; but then the therapeutic effect of the treatment lay precisely in that artificially induced partial amnesia which allowed the p
atient to forget the problems troubling him and to regain his calm.

  THE MORE FREQUENTLY electric shock treatment was given however, the less enduring its effects; he recognized the girl at once.

  "While you were sleeping, you said something about visions of paradise," she said, stroking his hair.

  Visions of paradise? Yes, visions of paradise. Eduard looked at her. He wanted to tell her everything.

  But at that moment, however, the nurse came in with a syringe.

  "You've got to have this now," she said to Veronika. "Dr. Igor's orders."

  "I've already had some today, and I don't want any more," she said. "What's more, I've no desire to leave here either. I refuse to obey any orders, any rules, and I won't be forced to do anything."

  The nurse seemed used to this kind of reaction.

  "Then I'm afraid we'll have to sedate you."

  "I need to talk to you," said Eduard. "Have the injection."

  Veronika rolled up the sleeve of her sweater, and the nurse injected her with the drug.

  "There's a good girl," she said. "Now why don't the two of you leave this gloomy ward and go outside for a walk?"

  "You're ashamed of what happened last night," said Eduard, while they were walking in the garden.

  "I was, but now I'm proud. I want to know about these visions of paradise, because I came very close to having one myself."

  "I need to look further, beyond the buildings of Villete," he said.

  "Go on, then."

  Eduard looked behind him, not at the walls of the wards or at the garden where the inmates were walking in silence, but at a street in another continent, in a land where it either rained in torrents or not at all.

  Eduard could smell that land. It was the dry season; he could feel the dust in his nostrils, and the feeling gave him pleasure, because to smell the earth is to feel alive. He was riding an imported bicycle, he was seventeen, and had just left the American college in Brasilia, where all the other diplomats' children studied.

  HE HATED Brasilia, but he loved the Brazilians. His father had been appointed Yugoslavian ambassador two years before, at a time when no one even dreamed of the violent division of their country. Milosevic was still in power; men and women lived with their differences and tried to find a harmony beyond regional conflicts.