Now, when the doctor makes her rounds, I can no longer keep my eyes shut; I stare ahead and every so often the medical students and their professor swim into view. They observe me intently, the boy with a shade more audacity and a tinge of fascination. The professor, who comes to the ward once a week, is leading a new tour; all she’s missing is one of those red tour-guide umbrellas. The trio stops a few feet away, out of courtesy, as if I won’t hear them or I haven’t subscribed to the educational program. “This one is an unusual case. I mentioned her earlier: she has locked herself away—our term for it is ‘locked-in syndrome,’ also known as a ‘pseudocoma.’ It is recognized as a permanent vegetative state resulting from a traumatic brain injury. It usually comes about from a hemorrhage in the pons or an ischemic cerebral insult that disturbs and damages the areas of the brain mediating the horizontal gaze.” Then she stops briefly, comes over and tugs the sheet up higher, toward my breasts. For a time she studies me, then steps away from the bed and continues in a conspiratorial tone:
“Such patients have intact cognitive function and they may be awake; they open their eyes, and their cycle of waking and sleeping is like ours. They cannot move the lower part of their face, chew, swallow, speak, breathe, or move their limbs. Vertical eye movements are possible; they can open and close their eyes and blink a certain number of times in response to questions. The diagnosis is primarily clinical. An MRI of the brain helps us search for what caused the injury and will show any changes over time. The EEG findings are normal, both in a waking state and in normal sleep phases.” All three of them stare at me, I refuse—on purpose—to blink, I am using every ounce of my strength to keep myself from communicating with them. I am calm and glass-like, maybe I’m dead, maybe the two medical students will die, maybe the boy will be run over by a car. The professor opens the door, ushers them out in front of her, her clogs clatter on the linoleum and she chatters on freely, professionally, excited by the rare jewel she’s leaving behind in the room until her next visit. [. . . ] Her voice faded into the distance, replaced by the ticking of the wall clock across from my bed, the time only ten, only Tuesday.
You must already be standing there at the train station, my love, though all you need is fifteen minutes to get to the hospital, you arrive a half hour before your 11:00 appointment, you’re never one to be late. You board the commuter rail train, sit across from a woman, usually a woman, men still unnerve you. You study her face, clothing, the way she’s holding her bag and you understand everything. How anxious she is about returning home, what her husband looks like, whether she has children. Is she sad, shallow, aloof? You’ve always known, you had to if you were to survive, you’ve been forced since your youngest years to scrutinize human nature. You have maneuvered your way through the labyrinth of other people’s expectations, moods, and quirks to get by as unremarked as possible, and when that wasn’t possible, you’d adapt to the point of self-effacement, internal dying. Your painstakingly acquired skills delighted me, and sometimes we’d play diagnosis, especially while we were on public transportation. You told me stories about the people sitting around us. Once when we were on the train, though at the time I had the impression you weren’t one hundred percent sure, you showed me a boy who was sitting across from us. Nodding in his direction you mouthed: “One of mine,” with warmth, but also with a tinge of scorn in your voice, and sometimes I caught sight of something deeply hidden. The young man you were indicating was in his early twenties, and though a little smaller in stature, he looked like all the young men around here, ordinary and unassuming, a crew cut, wearing a loose short-sleeved shirt, jeans, and sneakers. “How do you know?” I asked, surprised. “By the way he moves his hands,” you said. I still didn’t get it but then I saw how his fingers were pinching his T-shirt and holding it away from his stomach, as if he were too warm though he wasn’t, and then the slight hunch to his back, he glanced around and with this specific gesture eliminated any suggestion of the space between his chest and the flat surface of his tee shirt. “There, that’s what everyone does,” you said.
You knew better than anyone what gestures tell us, what’s going on when someone eyes you, how the young men with shaved heads in the park walk when they come over to bum a cigarette and how they walk when they come for you.That was long ago and I knew little, hardly anything, about those days, days you talked about when you were taking the train, maybe like today, to the hospital. And though there’s no longer any reason to, I know you still travel as if you’re invisible, as if you’re wrapped in a magic cloak, often behind dark glasses. Though your beautiful, narrow, almost noble face is hard to ignore—your large dark eyes, your striking curved eyebrows, your pale skin and the shining mid-brow furrows of pain that appear when you concentrate, furrows that switch to brightness and show a rascally spark when a corner of your lips twitches into a grin. In your thirties, slender and good-looking, with the old-fashioned poise of a fencer, you look a little younger, spry yet melancholy, blending extremes; things emerge from this blend of yours that people don’t know how to describe so they call it beauty. That you are so beautiful, as I only later realized, was bound to make you a handy target for the rest of humankind. The aura of perplexity that shimmered around you until you emerged from yourself and surfaced in the last period of our life together—until you’d adapted your body to the boy who’d been crouching in the brightest darkness of your soul for twenty years—affected people in two different ways. The first group was drawn in by the resonance of the exotic. Unthreatening yet inflammatory, it was as if they were standing at the zoo in front of the cage of a magnificent Bengal tiger, resting easy in their knowledge that they could observe with impunity. From their superior position, they knew they could toy with this unknown, potentially dangerous thing, and, most importantly, they could step away whenever they cared to. It wasn’t you who mattered. It wasn’t the tiger that mattered. It wasn’t the cage that mattered. A few, an offshoot of this larger number, wore their friendship with you on their lapels like a medal, to show off to their less open-minded friends and elevate their importance in society. By socializing with you they hoped to deck themselves out with the accolades afforded to an ally. They saw you as their endearing moron, forever in their debt. They, too, could step away whenever they cared to. Again, it wasn’t you who mattered. The second group, the ones you saw as less dangerous but potentially more aggressive than the first, were outraged by your aura. A single glance at you that might show them some of the complexity of your being was enough to provoke them to revulsion and panic. The very fact of your existence gutted the image of their straitened world, in which nothing foreign could exist or survive. Indeed, the world for them existed only if it was exactly like them. They feared you with a divine fury, like a punishment arriving in the form of a disease, as if your very existence signaled their end, and they were prepared to do everything to destroy you. But this is now all in the past; the gazes these days are benevolent. As you step off the train platform, go down the steps into the underpass, and walk toward the Vrapče psychiatric hospital, you still carry your shield. You also carry scars on your soul. The arborway and benches lining the path are charming, there is something soothing about the path toward the always open iron gate of the institution for treatment of a wide array of psychiatric disorders.
Still, the first time we went there together I cried the whole way. You held me by the hand and almost pulled me toward the building, my steps were leaden and with my whole heart I wished I could run away, but somehow I kept up with you. I was ashamed of my weakness, I was scared of everything, even the derelicts sitting on the benches, and all I could think of was Mama. What would she say if she saw me now, what would she say if she knew the secret I was hiding. You were quiet and pulled me along, I don’t know how you managed it all, your persistence always won me over; once we’d made it to the door to the doctor’s office, I was able to breathe more easily. Soon a petite woman with short blond hair and kind, bright eyes came out. She greeted us briefly, asking us to wait for a few minutes until she’d finished with her students. This sent me off on a crying jag again. I don’t know why exactly, except maybe the thought that the students would be talking about us. We walked out, holding cigarettes that were wet and gluey with slobber and tears. [. . . ]
I don’t know whether you are thinking back on this as you stand there today in the waiting room, I’m guessing that Irena opens the door for you right away, you’ve known each other for several years by now. You haven’t seen each other for a while, maybe it’s my locked-in condition that has sent you back to her. “How are you?” she asks. You say nothing. She fills the void. “Have you been to see her?” and gently, with no trace of pathos, she goes straight to the point. She’s like that. You still aren’t saying a word, but this time you shake your head, perpendicular to the direction my eyes can move. Left, right, and the bodily fluid for moistening the cornea streams down your face. But you’re brave, you’ll find the crack through which the words will seep, just as they did that morning when we finally stepped into the doctor’s office. That’s when I first heard you speak about that.
“I remember a scene I’ve never spoken of to a soul. I was quite small. Maybe five or six . . . I was home alone and came across a tennis ball. And I was really interested in seeing how my underpants would look so I slipped it right in there and felt how snugly it fit. I remember the feeling, I think I’ll never forget how gorgeous that was. Suddenly strength hummed through me. As if I’d hooked into my main battery, if we think of ourselves as machines. Or, as if I’d never had a center of balance and then suddenly found it. The point is that this is something elemental. And after that comes the shame. Like after ninety percent of the things you do and want in life. Our body, our worst hell. Everything is fine while you’re small, more or less. Nobody can tell, when you’re on the beach in the summertime you’re wearing a boy’s swimming trunks and everything’s great. But what matters is to know that in the games you play with the other kids, in the scrambling around on the beach, in absolutely every appearance and action, you know you’re lying. And then, again, the shame you feel because your buddies see through you. The worst part is when the other kids start pestering you with questions: “So how come you tell us Ivan is your name?” And everything you’ve built, or rather haven’t built but have come to by nature—by being naturally male—comes tumbling down. Gone in a flash, and then who are you? And absolutely nobody gets it, but instead, to make matters worse, they ply you with silly questions: “Hey, Dora! Why so sad? Why have you been saying your name is Ivan? Hey, come on . . .” Then the rage starts mounting, the anger, the grief, a gaping hole that won’t stop spreading. And spreads still today. And after all this Granddad shows up and is so utterly clueless, the insensitive type who prods you where it hurts the most. No mercy. We’re sitting there, watching German RTL’s top list of the ten weirdest people in the world.
“Granddad, what does the word hermaphrodite mean?” I ask and he peers down at me from above, and says: “That’s you.” Dad’s not around. Never is. At work or who knows where. Mother is always on edge or maybe she’s okay but with undertones of “I’ll be okay for your sake, because I’m your mother and you come first. I will subordinate everything to you.” And I’m sad. There’s nothing to reproach her for because the situation clearly was bad. Whatever . . . only they know what they were feeling. That’s all I can handle right now, I’m not doing very well.”
I was dreaming. Noise from the corridor roused me. Mama is after the nurses again, accusing them of stealing my nightgowns, saying that I’m wearing one that’s torn and washed out, that they took the new ones home for themselves. She’s surly toward the staff whenever she comes, yet when she speaks to me, a spark of joy gleams in her eyes because of the care she’ll show me, care I am unable to refuse. Back we’ve gone to the beginning. Because she thinks I can’t fully feel her touch, she touches me the way an infant is touched, the way the helpless are touched, who are being tended to with a profound lack of regard. Like when babies are held by their crossed ankles and hoisted into the air so their diaper can be changed, and then their eyes bulge. This is the same cruelty as her arranging my pitiful nightgown. But before she can reach me and fix me, first she has to break through the phalanx of her fury: at the hospital staff, at the situation that led to this, at this tragedy of hers. Her immobile adult daughter, one more pearl, the shiniest, on the string of the misfortunes she proudly wears with every outfit. This is why she almost always swims into view, howling with her sword drawn. The rising voices from the corridor creep into my nightmare and pull me up into reality, into the light of day. Ever since I’ve been in this condition, I dream the same thing, these are not dreams about walking or running. I never dream of myself in motion, I can’t see myself and don’t feel my arms moving, I am not making my way across a room, I am certainly not flying, and I’m not touching anything. I dream I am unable to speak. Someone addresses me, requires an answer, urges me along, starts yelling, I know the answer, and I know that I know it, but I cannot spit it out. I open my mouth, the sounds lodge in my throat or roll off like pebbles into a well of silence. I am horrified by my own helplessness, but at the edge of my horror I know this must be a dream because how could I be left with no voice. I give up fighting and wait for the moment when I’ll wake, shout, whisper, retrieve myself, as if I’m nothing but silt pulling myself back to the dimension of noise from the noiseless sea. Only then do I wake. The double blow of the deception floods me to the point of choking.
I was often silent before. I could have spoken, preferred not to, didn’t feel like explaining myself, didn’t care to waste words. I castigated myself with my silence. I bit my tongue, and with every swallowed word I stepped farther away from myself. My silence underwent big changes. The first stage was almost childish and lasted the longest, and it didn’t include vast silences. When I spoke I was nimble with words, I manipulated, blithely I’d twist the truth, and when I grew tired of it, I’d stop talking and walk away along with my voice. That is the ordinary brand of silence. Most of us have the option of turning ourselves on and off as the spirit moves us. That is why we chatter on, we adjust reality with our voices so it looks how we’d like it to look, we change and adapt the same story depending on whom we’re telling it to. We absorb normality during our youngest years, we repeat phrases, we don’t think, we just spew syllables, imbuing them with all sorts of meaning. “Don’t ever hold yourself apart” Granny used to say while she pulled me along by the hand down the street on our way to my nursery school. My ponytail was done up with a red silk ribbon, around my slender ankles were my bobby socks with the ruffled edges, I walked stiffly in white patent leather shoes, taking care to do nothing to spoil my outfit. The day was warm, autumnal, my heart was pounding in my chest, the neighbor’s terrier was barking at us, its body pressed against the chain-link fence. “Scram!” snarls Granny at it as we pass by, and then in the same loud voice she says: “Got it?” I nod and the word “apart” rings in my nodding head. [. . . ] I’m a cute, well-mannered little girl, I like my porridge with cocoa, I’ll even eat spinach, in this sense my life proceeds unhindered. At school I even edge away from Selma, the Muslim girl in our class, who sits out in the hallway on the stairs while the rest of us attend catechism, I won’t hit her on the back with my slipper bag, and I’ll even smile at her secretly sometimes, but I will not “hold myself apart.” Don’t be first or last, stick to the middle. The only thing I do is keep my brother at arm’s length, he’s always teasing me and upsetting my harmony with the world, whenever he’s nearby, with that look like he wants to make me cry. Granny never warned him not to “hold himself apart” because standing apart is fine for boys, that’s how they learn to fend for themselves. And even when he kicks Granny hard in the shins and she cries out in the yard so loud that the neighbor comes over to see what’s wrong—she tells me, while pulling up the feather quilt when she tucks me in at night, “Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone. Not even your mother. That’s what boys do.” There is plenty of being quiet in avoiding “holding myself apart,” but nobody keeps track of that kind of silence, it is part of living in a place, it shapes us so we fit in. And then there are cases when there is no choice, when your essential existence is already being “apart,” when the struggle for you to fit in anywhere begins with the contours of your first reflection in the mirror.
You were expert at keeping mum about that. I coaxed you into conversation, circled around, but nothing surfaced. As if there weren’t words for it. When I came closer, you’d shut the door and turn the key. I was jealous of your Tuesdays and Irena.
“You’ll get back every last one of the nightgowns, don’t you worry now. Today you’re looking well.” She says this while she bends over me, and I am silent, not because I can’t speak, I’d be lying if I implied that. I’m silent because I don’t know what there is to say. I think of the ice cream dripping from your six-year-old fingers, my love, while you sit at a plastic table and stare at the soggy cone while the children from the beach stare over at you, united in their surprise, crowding around you in censure and mockery—the strongest glue in all human communities. This is where your silence begins. You are afraid to look around, shame is rooted in your soul, and even though you know nothing because you’re only six, you’ve nevertheless figured it all out. Unlike you, I am only now seeing people, their putrid souls, now when I can’t feel anything and when I can no longer speak, I see how she strokes my unmoving arm while she takes out a packet of moistened wipes and wiggles them in my field of vision. Today I seem better, much better than last week, immeasurably better than last month. She is employing a strategy of concern that is spilling all over the bed, she’s almost humming as she arranges the boxes, face creams, new pillowcases. And she keeps touching me, my body that is finally obeying her, and not me, my body, my worst hell.
