Ted stares at the body in the center of the room. The white sheet erases the body’s features. A blank spot. “I made a mistake,” Ted says. The world is full of errors: filing errors, rounding errors, estimation errors. This is a simple identification error. The nurses have gotten accustomed to Ted standing there. They carve footpaths in the frost around him.
The cold sinks into Piotr’s joints. His cartilage refuses to yield. But Piotr shudders, as if he’s breaking out of ice, and this movement starts a chain: Ted sobs, then crumples.
Piotr watches the door.
Correct and Incorrect Prayers
Ted is on his knees, like his skin has frozen to the floor. “Let’s pray,” Lorraine says.
Piotr hasn’t prayed in years. He doesn’t keep kosher, hasn’t been to synagogue, and works religiously on the Sabbath. When he and Rana are invited to a seder, he keeps his head bowed and mumbles the blessings. Rana thinks him ridiculous. “Better you say nothing at all,” she says.
The last time he remembers praying was during Mikhail’s birth, a long, difficult labor, and though he never truly feared, he entertained for one horrible moment the possibility that he might lose one or the other. But he could not imagine raising a child without Rana. And equally, he could not imagine life with Rana, who had already lost so much, losing a child as well.
He prayed: Please, God, if you must take one, then take them both.
But as soon as he thought it, he wanted to renounce it, the way others renounced their own counterrevolutionary activities: I was wrong, and I regret my statements.
“Dear Lord…,” Lorraine recites, and Piotr mumbles something that sounds vaguely holy.
Protocol in the Event of Serious Injury or Death
The protocol begins with information: who needs to know, in the order they need to know it. The consulate in New Delhi, USAID, etc. The protocol also addresses issues of whether or not to perform an autopsy, and how to institute inquiry proceedings. Piotr calls Carter Lansdale, the DART liaison for USAID, the first person in the protocol. The satellite phone presses against his face like an iron.
“There’s been a death,” Piotr says.
Silence. Words take time to traverse the globe, despite the illusion of instantaneousness. This is not a conversation, but a simulacrum of conversation. “A death?” Carter asks, as if he misheard the word. Piotr imagines Carter wiping his brow with his hand.
“Yes,” Piotr says. “A death.”
“Don’t tell me it’s one of the midwestern missionaries.”
“No,” Piotr says, shaking his head. “A British rescue worker.”
Static crackles, fire on the line. The world awaits instructions.
“Oh,” says Carter. “So it’s not our problem. The Brits are going to be in a world of shit.”
Piotr has never liked the word “shit.” Too simplistic. No resonance, no power.
Contrast that to Rana’s command of insults. Once, at an Astoria supermarket, a man with a cart loaded with groceries darted in front of her at a lane clearly designated “Ten Items or Fewer.” He laughed, as if thwarting Rana had been his intent all along. He said something in Croatian to his companion, and Rana shouted, “Da Bog da ti žena rodila stonogu pa ceo život radio za cipele!” Piotr knew better than to ask what it meant at that moment, but later, on the subway, he nudged her with his elbow, again and again, until she smiled. This was how it was: her fury needed time to burn itself through, and once it had concluded, she returned to him.
“It means,” she said, “may your wife give birth to a centipede so that you will have to work for shoes all your life.”
Now that was a curse!
He asked her to teach him an insult in Bosnian. Nothing profane, nothing graphic, nothing that would get him into a fight. Just a phrase that he could deploy like an inflatable life jacket. She had him practice, Sanjam da prdnem na tebe, syllable by syllable, until he had committed it to memory. She showed him how to curl his tongue on the nj, how to stress prd so that it had the force of a fist waved in the air.
He uses the phrase in situations that warrant it — in line to renew his international driver’s license, for example. While standing next to a young woman on the subway. While typing a report at work. He has absorbed the words into his being such that when he first held Katia, he wondered if, in her burbling, she was trying to shape the sentence: Sanjam da prdnem na tebe.
After his pronunciation lesson, Piotr asked, “What does it mean?”
Rana covered her mouth. “I dream of farting on you.”
They laughed, long and hard, like teenagers.
Awake
Carter has been speaking, but Piotr hasn’t heard any of it. Carter’s voice, a pleasant hum, circles in on itself until Piotr understands what he’s saying.
“Did you get all that?” Carter asks.
“Yes,” he replies.
“I know you can handle it.”
True — but Piotr’s hands shake nonetheless. He has been daydreaming. He never daydreams. He isn’t entirely sure that he even dreams while sleeping, though, surely he must. More precisely, he doesn’t remember his dreams, because his mornings have a definite shape. He snaps into being at five and slips out of bed without disturbing Rana, without rustling the sheets or making the mattress squeak. In the dark, he dons his bathrobe and checks on Katia, who sometimes snorts in her sleep. Not a delicate baby snort, but a rasp, a snarl. He rubs the soft bulge of her cheek. She is his responsibility in these hours before work, and she wakes, hungry and fussy, as the sun breaks over the buildings of Manhattan. He looks up from the duties imported from the office to attend to her. By the time Rana shuffles out to greet him, her hair an intractable mass of spun sugar, he has prepared breakfast.
He wonders what shape the day takes when he’s overseas — if Rana gets any rest, if Katia howls incessantly, furious at her father’s absence.
Not Intended as a Diagnostic Tool
Michelle is the vanguard of MSF mental health counselors, here to identify local nurses, teachers, and social workers for outreach. She trains them to listen, to talk people through their problems. “I hope the others get here soon,” she says. “This place could explode from all the traumatic energy.” Piotr appreciates the necessity of counseling, but his focus is on the bottom rung of Maslow’s hierarchy: the needs that sustain life.
Lorraine speaks about therapy as if she were getting her nails done. She tried to rope Ted into therapy as soon as he joined. But not with Piotr. Not in all the years they worked together. Why, he doesn’t know. He supposes it no longer matters.
“Michelle,” he says, “would you speak with my colleague Ted? I think he may have — injured himself.”
“Of course.” She looks at him as though he’s had an amputation. “Piotr — are you feeling OK?”
Piotr wipes his face. The condensation from the cold room has collected in his hair, on the stubble on his chin, in his eyebrows, on his eyelashes. He probably looks as though he’s been crying.
“I am,” he replies. And after a pause, “Thank you for asking.”
She reaches in her bag and produces a sheet of paper. “I’d like you to fill one of these out.”
The Impact of Event Scale. On a scale of zero to four, with zero representing “not distressing at all” and four representing “extremely distressing,” he rates how bothered he has been by certain… difficulties. I am jumpy and easily startled. I think about it when I don’t mean to. Piotr and the IES are like old friends, old friends who forgive little lies.