The mother of the house waited until the boy, the younger one, entered college, and then surrendered entirely, just as her mother had done. Standing in the kitchen one evening, she collapsed in front of everyone, began to choke and continued choking for three nights in the hospital. The family, disciplined and hardworking, instantly regrouped, set up a watch in shifts, and old friends and relatives came to help, as well as her long-ago and still loyal students. And from the other side, from inevitable death and oblivion, the husband rescued his wife. By the time they brought her home she was already a shriveled old lady. The only thing she could move was her right hand, and only a little. She would make sounds with her lips that no one could understand, and often, often, a tear would come running out of her eye. It was as though she were apologizing with her whole being for this state of things, apologizing for her entire former life, for not being able to create anything for her demigod, and in the end making herself a cripple. In time the members of the household grew used to their heavy burden, though sometimes they’d grow frustrated and yell at one another-all those bedpans, and daily baths, and bed sores, and then thoughts, involuntary thoughts, about how long this might go on, how many years, this animal or even vegetable state-they suffered these thoughts. But the husband seemed to calm down suddenly: his soul became anchored, and all his movements around his wife were soft, patient, his voice gentle. The kids still sometimes screamed at each other and at their mother. They had their own uncertainties-they were losing her, their foundation and their pillar-and they became weak, unsteady parents to her. They felt that something was wrong, that they didn’t have a future, or rather that they did, but that it was awful. The kids blamed each other, said everything to each other, and, oh God, in front of their mother! But their devotion did not diminish. Their mother lay there clean and fresh, and they put a little radio transmitter next to her pillow and sometimes they’d read aloud to her, but still she often cried, for no reason at all, it seemed, and would try to say something with just vowel sounds, without using her tongue.
On the night she died and they took her away, her husband collapsed, and in his sleep he heard her-she was there, and she lay her head down on the pillow next to him and said, “My love.” And after that he slept happily, and at the funeral he was calm and dignified, though he’d lost a great deal of weight, and was honest and upright, and at the wake, when everyone had gathered at his apartment, he told them all that she had come to him and called him “My love.” And everyone froze, because they knew what he said was true-and the photograph no longer hung over his desk. It had disappeared from his life. It had all evaporated-just ceased to be interesting at some point-and suddenly, while still at the table, the husband began showing everyone the pale little family photos of his wife and kids-of all those excursions they’d taken without him, all their fatherless entertainments that were so poor but so happy, in the parks and the planetariums to which she’d brought the children when she tried to make a life for them on the tiny island, the only one still left her, where she shielded the children with herself, while towering over everything was that photo from the magazine. But the photo was gone now, everything was fine, and she’d managed to say to him, “My love”-without words, already dead, but she had done it.
The Fountain House
THERE ONCE LIVED A GIRL WHO WAS KILLED, THEN BROUGHT back to life. That is, her parents were told that the girl was dead, but they couldn’t have the body (they had all been riding the bus together; the girl was standing up front at the time of the explosion, and her parents were sitting behind her). The girl was just fifteen, and she was thrown back by the blast.
While they waited for the ambulance, and while the dead were separated from the wounded, the father held his daughter in his arms, though it was clear by then that she was dead; the doctor on the scene confirmed this. But they still had to take the girl away, and the parents climbed into the ambulance with their girl and rode with her to the morgue.
She seemed to be alive, as she lay on the stretcher, but she had no pulse, nor was she breathing. Her parents were told to go home, but they wouldn’t-they wanted to wait for the body, though there were still some necessary procedures to be done, namely the autopsy and determination of the cause of death.
But the father, who was mad with grief, and who was also a deeply religious man, decided to steal his little daughter. He took his wife, who was barely conscious, home, endured a conversation with his mother-in-law, woke up their neighbor, who was a nurse, and borrowed a white hospital robe. Then he took all the money they had in the house and went to the nearest hospital, where he hired an empty ambulance (it was two in the morning), and with a stretcher and a young paramedic, whom he bribed, drove to the hospital where they were keeping his daughter, walked past the guard down the stairs to the basement corridor, and entered the morgue. There was no one there. Quickly he found his daughter and together with the paramedic put her on their stretcher, called down the service elevator, and took her to the third floor, to the intensive care unit. The father had studied the layout of the hospital earlier, while they waited for the body.
He let the paramedic go. After a brief negotiation with the doctor on duty, money changed hands, and the doctor admitted the girl to the intensive care unit.
Since the girl was not accompanied by a medical history, the doctor probably decided that the parents had hired an ambulance on their own and brought the girl to the nearest hospital. The doctor could see perfectly well that the girl was dead, but he badly needed the money: his wife had just given birth (also to a daughter), and all his nerves were on edge. His mother hated his wife, and they took turns crying, and the child also cried, and now on top of all this he had of late been assigned exclusively night shifts. He desperately needed money for an apartment. The sum that this (clearly insane) father had offered him to revive his dead princess was enough for half a year’s rent.
This is why the doctor began to work on the girl as if she were still alive, but he did request that the father change into hospital clothing and lie down on the cot next to his daughter, since this apparently sick man was determined not to leave her side.
The girl lay there as white as marble; she was beautiful. The father, sitting on his cot, stared at her like a madman. One of his eyes seemed out of focus, and it was only with difficulty in fact that he was able to open his eyes at all.
The doctor, having observed this for a while, asked the nurse to administer a cardiogram, and then quickly gave his new patient a shot of tranquilizer. The father fell asleep. The girl continued to lie there like Sleeping Beauty, hooked up to her various machines. The doctor fussed around her, doing all he could, though there was no longer anyone watching him with that crazy unfocused eye. In truth, this young doctor was himself a fanatic of his profession-there was nothing more important to him than a difficult case, than a sick person, no matter who it was, on the brink of death.
The father slept, and in his dream he met his daughter-he went to visit her, as he used to visit her at summer camp. He prepared some food, just one sandwich, and that was all. He got on the bus-again it was a bus-on a fine summer evening, somewhere near the Sokol metro station, and rode it to the paradisial spot where his daughter was staying. In the fields, among soft green hills, he found an enormous gray house with arches reaching to the sky, and when he walked past these giant gates into the garden, there, in an emerald clearing, he saw a fountain, as tall as the house, with one tight stream that cascaded at the top into a glistening crown. The sun was setting slowly in the distance, and the father walked happily across the lawn to the entrance to the right of the gate, and took the stairs up to a high floor. His daughter seemed a little embarrassed when she greeted him, as if he’d interrupted her. She stood there, looking away from him-as if she had her own, private life here that had nothing to do with him anymore, a life that was none of his business.