He liked his work, he liked vanishing into it, completely engrossed in finding out what was wrong with people, and what should be done about it. He liked observing how every aim for beauty and social status was irrelevant when it came to the body’s own solitary life, the vegetation of the organs in time to the soft, meaningless rhythm of the pulse. In his eyes the anonymous innocence of the interior organs offset the broken illusions of the exterior, socialised body, its ugliness, obesity and wear and tear. But the anonymity of the organs was also a cunning commentary on the spoilt, exacting beauty of other and luckier bodies.
One day he had shown Lea an anatomical atlas with detailed colour plates. He described what she was looking at and carefully explained the function of the organs, but she wrinkled her nose and asked him to close the book. She thought the pictures were distasteful and protested when he reminded her that she herself looked like that inside, like everyone else, whether they were beautiful or ugly. It amazed him that the interior of the body could be as terrifying as its exterior seemed seductive. Perhaps it was not the organs that caused the disgust but the anatomical dissecting gaze that by revealing them so matter-of-factly also showed how vulnerable they were.
To the patients the hospital was an ominous place with its clinical atmosphere of linoleum, white coats, disinfectant and rust-free steel, and all of them had the same anxiety in their eyes, whether they tried to hide it or give it free rein. Hospital reminded them that whatever happened they would have to die sometime, regardless of how many wiles the doctors used to stave off the inevitable. When they relinquished themselves to his authority and placed all their hope in his white coat, he sometimes had to ask himself if it was the terror of being admitted that made them so meek rather than the hope of being discharged again.
But he knew very well that horror and hope walked together, and he had probably become hard to scare only because he had seen so many sick people and despite everything had cured a good many of them. He had even grown less horrified by incurable diseases simply by encountering them regularly. Sometimes he thought that one day it could be he himself lying there afraid of dying, but identifying with the dying did not make him more fearful than he would otherwise have been, rather the reverse.
Horror and hope. Perhaps you had to be really frightened to know what hope was. Perhaps. He didn’t hope so much for his own sake, and Lea was the only person in his life more important than himself. The only thing which could terrify him was the thought that she might get meningitis or be run over by a truck.
The reeds whispered and swayed from side to side when a bird suddenly flew up with feverishly flapping wings. He threw away his cigarette stub and heard the glow fizz in the muddy water. Again he thought of the mutilated Lucca Montale, how he had patched her up to the best of his ability. She had driven along the dark side-roads, the road markings, the grass verges and the black trees had rushed past her long-distance lights, and a cat or a fox might have seen her, stiffened with phosphorescent eyes, with one forepaw raised. Not even at the utmost limits of her inflamed mind could she have imagined that twelve hours later she would wake up swaddled like a mummy to be told she had seen the sun shining on the grass and through the trees’ foliage for the last time. She had been utterly electrified by the drama that had sent her out on the roads the worse for drink, and in her impassioned state she had ignored the fact that the most violent changes are brought about just as often by chance as by the violent travesties of the emotions.
She didn’t want to see him, her unhappy, unshaven husband, who had waited for her ravaged body to decide whether to live or die. She insisted on this, throughout all the outward havoc her impulsive inebriated journey had occasioned. He must really have upset her. Again Robert visualised the silhouette of the dancing gypsy through the fog of tobacco, with her snaking hips, her tambourine raised in a fervent gesture, among the pile of case notes. He recalled the insistent gaze of the other man, the restrained desperation in his eyes. Andreas Bark had been sweating, and Robert had had to open the window when he left to get rid of the odour of his desperate body and his French cigarettes.
He heard voices from behind the reeds, a young woman’s laugh. Robert stood up. He did not want to be seen hunched on his spar in the forest of reeds like some queer fish sitting there dreaming. His legs tingled and felt slightly stiff. He went out into the open along a narrow spit that divided the submerged meadowlands from the lake. There was no-one to be seen. Further along where the spit widened out there was a tall wooden shed, and when you walked past, the sky and the water on the other side glittered in the gaps between the perpendicular tarred planks of its walls. He could hear them in there, now the man laughed. The young woman said something in a fond, low voice. Then silence. Robert could make out their outlines in the narrow, bright spaces between the planks. He had stopped, but walked on hastily when he realised they might be keeping quiet because they had seen him out on the path.
Before his rounds the following morning the sister told him that Lucca Montale had had terrible nightmares in the night followed by long bouts of weeping. They had given her a sedative. Two large bouquets were on her bedside table. The previous day there had been only the one that Andreas Bark had asked them to take in to her. A thoughtless gesture, thought Robert. What use were flowers to her? Weren’t they rather a signal to the people around her that others were thinking of her? The nurse asked how she was. She wrenched her mouth sideways in something meant to be a sarcastic smile. She really did look like a mummy, swathed as she was in plaster and bandages, reduced to a pale mouth that uttered brief answers when she was spoken to. Her condition had stabilised, now it was just a question of waiting.
For what? The nurse looked at him, perplexed, as he considered how to reply. He sat down on the edge of the bed and cautiously put a hand on her right shoulder, the only visible part of her body apart from her jaw which was not bandaged or plastered. Well, he couldn’t say, he said, surprised at the gentleness in his voice. She made no answer, her mouth lay still in its folds, as if she were asleep. The nurse told her Lauritz would be coming in the afternoon. She spoke in an earnest, entreating voice. It was probably the best answer to give her. Lucca Montale asked her to take the flowers away, the stench was choking her. Robert and the nurse looked at each other.
As they walked along the corridor she told him the patient’s mother had visited Lucca the previous day. She had not stayed in the room for more than a couple of minutes before coming out again, visibly shaken. The nurse had offered her a cup of coffee, but she had driven back to Copenhagen at once. She had looked surprisingly young, according to the nurse, who had recognised her voice but been unable to recall where she had heard it before, this beautiful, expressive female voice. Later in the day she had remembered. Lucca Montale’s mother was a broadcaster. The nurse had asked Lucca if she was right, but the patient had been very curt and replied that she did not want visits from her mother or anyone else apart from her son.
Her decision did not need to be enforced, her mother did not come again, nor others. When Lauritz visited her, Andreas Bark waited outside the room, hunched in despair. Robert greeted him when he passed by and gave him brief reports of the patient’s condition, controlling his impatience to continue along the corridor and escape the other’s eyes. Andreas Bark must have registered his aversion and Robert was relieved to find he did not seek him out in his office again. Robert could not explain to himself what it was about the man that filled him with such revulsion. He did not try very hard to discover. There were other patients and their families to look after, and Lucca Montale took her place in the rows of prone figures in hospital gowns whose faces and sufferings changed at varying tempos, according to the seriousness of their cases and how soon they were discharged.
He only saw her for a few minutes during his daily rounds, and as a rule he was the one who spoke, when he repeated more or less what he had said to her the day before. Under the circumstances everything went on as it should do. He himself thought that sounded hypocritical, but why, in fact? If someone drank themselves senseless and drove at 150 km an hour along the wrong side of the motorway, there were limits to the miracles he could perform. She should be glad to be alive at all. Unless she had driven like a madwoman to get it over with once and for all. Get what over? Life, quite simply?
