“You don’t think so anymore?”
“Not after what happened to Klára.”
“It sounds like a very hard decision, but nature isn’t God. Maybe it’s more like He allowed it.”
“Where is God’s will in all this? Where is suffering? When hunger drives the wolves out of the forest … and man is a wolf to man? And when our loving God is a wolf?”
“Our?”
“Of course our. There’s no point trying to get out of it, even if you don’t believe. A loving God goes only where He belongs.”
“Where he belongs?”
“If he stayed in a hotel, I would definitely give him a worse room than Koch.”
“Who’s Koch?”
“Robert Koch. He’s no longer with us, but back in his day, he worked on TB. But I’ve wandered off topic again. What I wanted to say was, electrotherapy worked for depression, but we weren’t prepared for the side effects.”
“Side effects?”
“At first we didn’t understand. One of the nurses actually figured it out before any of us.”
“Figured out what?”
“Klára started getting visitors. More and more. Then one day the chief physician called me in and told me what he’d discovered. The number of visitors always increased whenever she had electrotherapy.”
“Electrotherapy?”
“Every visitor had to sign in to the register on the unit, and when the chief physician looked at the register and Klára’s chart, it lined up. He pinned it on the head nurse. At first she tried to wriggle out of it, but in the end she told the truth. Klára was telling fortunes.”
“Fortunes? What do you mean?”
“She was predicting the future.”
“Predicting the future?”
“Yes. Klára was predicting the future.”
“What? How?”
“In fact, ever since she had begun getting electroshock, for two or three days after, she would complain that her head hurt and she couldn’t get out of bed. There was nothing strange about that in itself, but then one day the head nurse’s son was supposed to travel to Košice, and she said to someone in front of Klára that she wished her son would leave already, so she could finally get some proper cleaning done at home. At which point Klára interjected that her son wasn’t going anywhere and she would be glad for it, too. The head nurse remembered her words. A few days later, two local trains crashed into each other. Nothing too serious, but they brought in a few of the injured to our hospital. The head nurse was on pins and needles, since her son was supposed to have been on one of the trains. He wasn’t on the list of injured and the police didn’t have him on the list of passengers. At noon he turned up at the hospital to see his mother. It turned out he had just overslept. He didn’t even know about the accident. In a rare show of emotion, the head nurse threw her arms around his neck. But she remembered what Klára had said, and the next day she asked her how she had known, but Klára didn’t remember. It was like it had been erased from her memory. The head nurse mentioned it to the other nurses, and word spread. That also explained the unusual rise in requests to work on the unit on certain days. They just started asking her questions.”
“About what?”
“Everything. One of the nurses wanted to know whether she and her husband were going to get the money his parents had promised them. Another wanted to know whether their adoption would come through. Another asked about her inheritance.”
“So … what were the results?”
“She was right about all of them.”
“Really?”
“Really. Usually her state would only last a day or two after the shocks, then it would stop. She could take one, two, three questions at most, then she’d be exhausted, fall asleep, and it wouldn’t work after that.”
“What did you do about it?”
“Do? We wanted to study it somehow, since the electrotherapy was helping. She wasn’t in danger anymore of needing a leucotomy.”
“I still find the whole thing barbaric.”
“Please, I’ve had patients who were so depressed, sometimes even suicidal, that they got down on their knees and begged me for the treatment.”
“I don’t doubt your goodwill, or the expertise of your diagnosis. I’m just saying the practices in your day strike me as barbaric.”
“I will never cease to admire the untainted purity of youth, along with the purity of dilettantism and the purity of the Immaculate Conception.”
“Credo quia absurdum! Absurd, please, absurd … meaningless, meaning without any apparent reason, but meaningless isn’t barbaric!”
“Of course, credo quia absurdum was also a help to me back then.”
“And …”
“Back then, yes … And then the secretary of the local Communist Party heard about Klára’s abilities.”
“…?”
“First he held a hearing in the chief physician’s office. The chief physician was pretty surly, but he stood up for his patients. So the secretary called the hospital director onto the carpet, and the director sent the chief physician away for a long fellowship at a research institute where he had been rejected several times before, and while he was away, installed a man who was indebted to him as acting unit head.”
“How come the rest of you didn’t put up a fight?”
“I was pretty good friends with the attending physician, so I knew he had done absolutely everything he could. In the end the secretary ordered them to increase the number of shocks to boost her ability to prophesize, and my friend refused.”
“What happened?”
“He was temporarily transferred to another unit that had a shortage of doctors.”
“They could do that?”
“They can always do almost anything. You know what Tacitus wrote: Rara temporum felicitas, ubi sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere licet.”
“What does that mean?” Jiří asked.
“It means: ‘Rare are the happy times when you can think what you want and say what you think.’ We were just too close to the Russian border.”
“That’s a funny …”
“Excuse?” Jiří shrugged. “Maybe you’re right and we were just making excuses because we were scared. But anyway, meanwhile Klára’s … fame, I guess is the best way to put it, spread through the nursing staff and people started paying her respect.”
“How do you mean?”
“I noticed the nurses who worked on her unit started getting little gifts from people. Klára started getting gifts too, and flowers, lots of flowers, which she in turn gave to the other patients. They also started showing not exactly respect toward her parents, but something like it. I’ve never encountered anything like it, before or since.”
“Sounds like mass hysteria.”
“That occurred to us too. But …”
“But what?”
“There were the results. Before the Communist secretary had a chance to interfere, we ran a few tests on Klára.”
“What kind of tests?”
“Her attending physician, the chief physician, and I each came up with a question that we posed to her. Then we wrote down her answers and put them all in a safe.”
“What were the questions?”
“The chief physician asked what type of degree his son would receive. Martin, her attending physician, asked who would fill the vacant position on our unit, and as for me, I asked when my sister would get married.”
“And …?”
“She said the chief physician’s son wouldn’t graduate, which was strange, since he was an excellent student, but then it turned out he was having a relationship with a woman that his father, the chief physician, didn’t approve of, so the son left home, dropped out of college, and never returned to his studies. As for the position on our unit, it went to an excellent doctor from the next district over, who had gotten divorced and needed a job that came with an apartment. There was no surprise there, since he was clearly the best candidate. Well, and what she said about my sister also turned out to be true.”