All of those heartbeats, like the pile of cash in the pocket of Vesla's green dress, added up to this unfathomable future moment of his life which was now here.
He slips his hand into the pocket of her coat for one lingering moment of stillness. Then, at once, in his temples, he hears the racing stethoscope crash of sick thunder, babies screaming, a woman's groan.
A sliver of pain sluices his own heart, paralyzing him for an instant. This is what it must feel like to die underwater. He pulls his hand away from her side, presses it over his heart. It feels as hard as thick glass. Confused, he knocks his knuckles against the weight of his glass heart, which, he realizes now, is the half-full bottle of vodka in his pocket that he drained before meeting her.
The stillness gone, Thomas and Vesla walk out from the sanatorium, arm in arm. The pain has travelled to his stomach, lancing it in criss-cross patterns. They've only got to walk through the mountains and surrender at the border. It's simple: they state their purpose, stay in the camp, and then apply to Canada. They won't refuse a doctor and a nurse; he's heard Canada wants professionals.
The large doors wheeze closed and he thinks of his failure to protect Misha. Misha, young, healthy as a mule, who, despite this, complained of headaches, staring spells. Thomas wrote his diagnosis and recommendation in his journal, in his steady, doctor's hand: Prone to seizures. Order tests. But his mind snaps closed, like a camera shutter. He hears the click in his head and turns to her.
She smiles grimly and walks fast so her thick-soled shoes do not sink into the dirt. He looks at her as she tugs him along like a sleepy child and he is gripped by her determination to get through things, to run. He thinks of her slowly expanding body beneath her snug green dress, about the child arriving in four short months, about his impending fatherhood, the way her sleep has become deeper, the way she laces her fingers through his at night and pulls him close. He thinks of how surprised he was to see her on the steps of the sanatorium, three weeks ago, with a single suitcase and a handful of wildflowers.
When they get to the edge of the forest he takes out his compass and checks. "West, right? We're going northwest."
West like the pictures he has seen in books in the city. West like cowboys, like James Dean's hair falling loosely. Fields cluttered with trees, and wheat, and lakes, and farms. Thin white British ladies poking their pinkies up to the sky, teacups flying into the air like tiny gold-plated spaceships. North like chimneys, fleshy polar-bear skins. West like Indian feathers swaying in a dance. North like moccasins and beads sewn in the sun of August and worn in the damp of winter. North, where the colour is red and white and brown and yellow; how sepia can disappear when you travel, when you move.
They start to run blind; he's now dragging her as they clop their hooves over leaves. They run on, waking animals, becoming animals. She is screaming at him:
"What are you doing!? We don't have to run, Thomas, stop it!"
But he is running into another country. He is confused, thinking if he can keep going, keep pushing, keep dragging her along, they won't even notice, they can run right to France and then leap right over the ocean like in fairy tales. He can jump over the ocean, with a woman in his arms.
He runs right up against a large Austrian officer who catches him and tackles him to the ground. He lowers his head and surrenders, to what, he isn't sure.
"It is part of the plan," he says.
"What plan?!" she screams. "There is no plan. Oh you, you've read too many books." Then she begs him to be quiet. "I'm sorry, Officer," she says in perfect German. "My husband has been under a lot of stress lately, he's a bit confused, we've come from the hospital, we have our papers here." She hands over two-thirds of Thomas's life savings in a ripped brown envelope and smiles at the guard confidently. "I'm sure you'll find everything is in order."
Thomas considers his one-day sons, how they will never wear uniforms, will never have to bribe those in authority or compromise themselves. Then he is sick, the combination of anxiety and alcohol too much for his weak heart and gut.
(He does not know yet that he will have no sons, that the only thing he passes on from this journey to me, his daughter, will be the tiny dry skull of a monkey, and the fragments of this story I am now pooling together through the scant resources he left me from that old life, from his journal with some of his medical papers folded into it. Also, there's a photograph of a young man, which I slip between a folded sheet of paper; I am not ready for this piece of evidence yet. I cannot look.)
He then holds his hands above his head and feels the cool earth below enveloping his knees. He vomits, his belly sour and betrayed. Afterwards he feels better than he has in years, vanquished, forgiven, done with. The heartbeats fade out, leaving his mind quiet and still.
I have come a long way to prostrate myself before a stranger, he thinks.
He was thirty-one, shit-scared, lonely, and sick with hope, my proud, fat-hearted father: an immigrant, at last.
chapter 20
That night I sleep on Giselle's bed and get woken up in the middle of the night because of Tammy's barking. Tammy, a small annoying beagle, is the neighbour's dog. Mom is yelling at Giselle not to go out. When I get to the top of the stairs I see Giselle's wearing her Walkman, she's got the keys to the car, and she's shouting at Mom through the loud music coming out of her big earphones.
"Why are you always pushing me?!" Mom yells, wrapping her robe around herself and trying to get between Giselle and the door, saying "Shuuuuuu, shut up you. Tammy-dog!" through the screen door. Mom yells something to Giselle in Hungarian and looks up at me helplessly, as if I could stop Giselle from doing anything she wanted to.
"What's going on?" I go downstairs and let Tammy in. I bend down and the little dog licks my face, wagging her tail, excited to be'part of this human nocturnal drama.
"Shut up, will you?" says Giselle, no lover of animals, as she kicks past both of us and wedges the door open. She turns to me and says, "One day we have to sit down with a good psychiatrist, like a real one, with two PhDs, and sort out all the lies in this family."
"Like which one?" I ask, standing up next to Mom.
"Ask her. Ask her yourself."
"OK," Mom says, pulling Giselle into the living room. "I'm telling you. I'm telling you everything now."
I can hear Mom's voice trying to calm Giselle down while Tammy clamours against the screen door. Part of me wants to listen to Mom, to find out what the hell is going on, but I can't move. Ten minutes later Giselle rushes by me and slams the door. Mom stands behind me and we watch as a furious Giselle revs the engine and squeals out of the driveway and down the street.
. . .
Giselle and Dad never got along so well, it's true. Now Giselle's on a mission to figure out why, or to punish Mom for their relationship, or I don't know what. But they weren't always at each other's throats. Maybe Giselle can only remember the bad stuff, but I remember some breaks from their tug-of-war screaming matches.
The summer before our father died the whole family took a trip to Europe. I must have been about four, Giselle eleven. I have a funny memory, which feels more like a dream, of Europe being grey and dirty and all of us staying in a small hotel room and Dad yelling at us to stop jumping on the springless bed.
What I do remember is Yugoslavia, which is no longer Yugoslavia now, I guess, because of the war.
Our parents took us to Split, where they had friends who owned a huge rundown hotel by the seashore. Every morning Giselle and I would put on our bikini bottoms and run into the sea and let the salt water strip our skin dry. Afterwards, we'd sit with our legs sprawled in the water and ogle breasts; it shocked and pleased us that Europeans strutted around half-naked.
That was the first time I saw a man naked and, that same summer, Giselle tried to teach me how to swim. I remember spending hours and hours wearing those floaty wings and paddling, uselessly, between Giselle and whatever grown-up she had enlisted for the job. I never did learn how to swim properly
, and the ordeal usually ended up with me crying and Giselle splashing water in my face and leaping into the water mermaid-style. She would swim away from me to do her long ocean laps alone.
Despite the swimming, Giselle and I got along very well and so did Giselle and Dad. Instead of fighting they simply ignored each other. The only time he didn't ignore Giselle was when she was swimming. He'd follow her out and tread water no more than ten feet away from her every time she went out. If Giselle noticed this, or cared, she never let on.
The grown-ups, our parents and the loud big-boned German couple, our parents' friends, were unpredictable. Now that I think about it, they were probably drunk most of the time. They spoke, it seemed to me, about eight different languages and it was usually hard to get their attention. But as soon as we realized that we were unwanted, we did just fine.
Our days were usually devoted to tormenting the small, strange salt-water tadpoles and trying to make fishing poles out of whatever bits of string and branches we could find.
Our day would be interrupted only by grown-ups shoving bottles of Coke and salami and paprika sandwiches into our hands. Sometimes we would shake Dad's pants out and collect the dinars that fell from the pocket to go down to the beach store to buy ice cream. If it was raining, we'd play hide-and-seek in the cold hotel rooms, or put each other in the dumbwaiter, then run to the upper floor and hoist it up.
I copied everything Giselle did in those days; I wore what she wore, said what she said, and did what she did. At home it was a constant sore point, but for those three weeks by the seashore it didn't seem to bother Giselle that I had to wear my matching sundress when she did, that I repeated every foreign word that she had somehow picked up. It didn't bother her that I wanted to hold her hand. She combed my hair out and smoothed out my dress as if I were her favourite doll, before we walked down the path to the beach.
At night we fell into our shared bed exhausted and happy, listening to our parents' strange and mysterious languages float up from the stone terrace lit with tiny white Christmas lights, where the two couples sat at night, after dinner, drinking and talking and smoking.
And Giselle and I weren't the only ones in love. Peeking out of our hotel room on a rare night when I could not sleep, I saw my father jump up from the table of conversation, trying to distract my mother from the German woman's loud laughter. Giselle pushed her arms onto the sill, to watch the adults, to watch our silly, drunken father.
He was tanned and had a cigarette clenched in his mouth. He was wearing a clean white shirt that was unbuttoned halfway to expose his tanned chest. His dark hair was parted on the left side. He pulled my mother into a dance, and, as they moved to the gypsy echo of the music coming in clearly from the nearby seaside restaurant, the Germans were quiet for once. I had a flash of panic: things were too right, too peaceful, too calm. Something terrible was going to happen. We held our breath, watching them in that muted half-beat moment, while the sea lapped quietly and the music died low, and then we sighed out together, into that huge, impossible cavity of dread.
chapter 21
Students will be versed in knowledge of appropriate statistical methods to test cause-effect relationships.
I shake the car keys in my mother's sleeping face.
"I need to know who my father was . . . I need to know now!'
She jolts awake.
"Tell me about him, because I cannot imagine it anymore, it makes me mental. Tell me, or I'm leaving this house right now and turning you over to Children's Aid. I'll take Holly, marry Sol, and you'll never see us again."
"You are talking nonsense. You know who your father was." Mom's face goes blue in the half-light, but she looks relieved somehow too.
"No I don't." I hold up the cloth-book.
"Where did you find that?"
"Never mind, I found it."
She tries to grab it but I end up flinging it across the room and all the papers fall out and scatter in the darkness.
Vesla's Story
She sits slightly apart from the after-lunch, summer-house crowd. She looks out at the river. Between her narrow hips, her small belly is swollen. As she pulls her hand, replete with engagement band, over the thin cotton of her dress she is filled with the twin impulses of terror and ecstasy. The women grow quiet as boisterous male laughter barrels out onto the veranda, and when she looks up, the women have all grown silent, watching her through half-closed eyes. And then one of them rises from her chair.
"Someone's arrived."
The main door cranks closed and announces the newest member of the river party.
"It's Thomas."
She hooks her head back to better hear his movements. The women's eyes are all wide open now and crosswords are dropped, nail-polish bottles are recapped, the sleepy post-lunch ease broken by a squeaking door and the young doctor's arrival.
"Was he even invited?" the standing woman asks Vesla as they collectively slide their eyes to the interior of the cottage. Vesla doesn't answer, she is praying that he cannot see her profile. She pulls her mouth into a grimace so that even if he does see her he may not recognize her for the ugly expression on her face. But Thomas doesn't notice her, he is speaking in soft tones to the servant who is offering him vodka, coffee, dumplings, and a cold-meat plate perhaps, sir? She hears him decline, place his doctor's bag on the table, and make his way to the smoky backroom. The laughing stops and everyone listens as a gust of wind slits through the high branches of the trees surrounding the summer house.
Everyone can hear Thomas ask to speak to Misha, privately. A series of tests, the results of which must be discussed, so sorry to interrupt but it is important; surgos, urgent, Thomas says, using the Hungarian word reserved for emergencies, a word that ignites meaning at the top of the lungs brought to the front of the mouth like a swift kick to the throat, a word that he knows politicians will respect and defer to. Misha excuses himself and leads Thomas to a small shed at the side of the house that the men have set up for a poker game later that night. Inside is one hanging light bulb, a card table, and five chairs.
Vesla wonders what it might feel like to get out of her chair and walk straight into the Danube, to feel the warm water at the top of her neck and the icy pull below at her feet, to walk to the middle and, after one last breath, submerge her head. She imagines herself doing it, the shouts from the shore, the wooden doors of the shed banging open, Misha and Thomas united, at last, by the source of their problems being dragged southward, to the bottom of the Aegean Sea.
The women decide to change into their bathing suits and walk down to the shore, a colourful group of hats, chaises, beach bags, and brown legs. One of the younger ones offers a hand to Vesla but she shakes her head and remains rooted, her head pulled towards the shed, which remains quiet.
Twenty minutes later, as the women are almost completely assembled on the thin strip of dusty beach, the rest of the men snap the elastics over their fat, hairy stomachs and pound out of the house like teenagers, running together into the river. The women scream and laugh and spit sand out of their mouths.
Amid the chatter at the shore, the shed door opens and slams. She turns to see a white hand fly out of the shed and another hand slap it away. Misha shoulders up against the door; he hooks on the latch and locks it. He strides up the veranda, his heavy Slav jaw set in anger, his features suddenly frightening.
He kneels next to her, looking out at the others, taking her hand and clutching it so tight she fears he might break her fingers against the ring.
"Tell me it's mine, Ves."
"It is, of course it is," she lies, not knowing the answer.
Misha rises, his face arranged now, the shadows falling like old leaves sliding off rocks in a heavy rain. Then he goes into the house and five minutes later his dark, lean body folds into the river and he swims as far into the middle as he can. She picks up a cold, greasy drumstick and walks to the shore, pulling her hat over her ears, deaf to the screaming coming from the locked shed.
Students will learn the ethics of medicine: Knowledge of beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, consent, confidentiality, disclosure, justice.
—It's a talent, really, honey, to be able to come up with at least half a dozen things that depress the hell out of you at any given time.
—Then it is a very great talent that I possess.
Four hours after hearing Mom's story, I'm sitting in a twenty-four-hour barbecued chicken restaurant drinking coffee and waiting for Sol, trying not to stare at the lump of potatoes on the plates on the table next to mine and not to think about what they would taste like mixed up with sour cream and butter, thinking, I can't stop feeling as though everything around me is buzzing, is defiantly real, despite the fact that it seems as if it's a dream, is not true if none of it's true. The only way to keep my skull from swelling and exploding, to keep myself from falling into this darkness, is to cling to real objects: a spoon, a chicken carcass, the cigarette shaking in my hand, mashed potatoes, the clock. Because all there is is the empirical; if everything you've based your life on is not, naught. Not if your father isn't your father at all, not if what you've been told is a lie, lie, lies.
And I have proof, photo evidence to be filed away. But I haven't looked at Misha's photo yet. It leaped out of the book, fell face down, on the floor. I've only read the inscription in my mother's handwriting on the back: "Misha Kovacs, 1971." Because there is a possibility that if I see his eyes, the cut of his face and jaw, I will understand everything.
Sol arrives just as I order us an entire chicken dinner with all the fixin's and a potent Portuguese wine.
—Why do you love people who never love you back?
"Oh, I thought maybe you were standing me up," I smirk as Sol slides into the booth across from me.
There it goes again, her negativity, the self-saboteur always ready to pipe up and drive people away, but I'm wanting to talk to Sol. I need him to tell me that he loves me, that I'm not a terrible person, daughter, girlfriend, that I deserve the truth. I try to block out her voice that loves to attack anyone who gets close to me. I want to fill the space between goodbyes and hellos with mindless, idle chatter, mundane mashed potatoes, anything. Words may protect me; that was the whole idea of group, right? Saying it out loud, purging ugly thoughts.