A tall doctor, wearing the traditional white coat, in sharp contrast to the artificial black of his dyed hair and beard, was standing at the foot of her bed. Beside him, a young junior doctor holding a clipboard was taking notes.
‘How long have I been here?’ she asked, noticing that she spoke with some difficulty, slurring her words slightly.
‘You’ve been in this ward for two weeks, after five days spent in the Intensive Care Unit,’ replied the older man. ‘And just be grateful that you’re still here.’
The younger man seemed surprised, as if that final remark did not quite fit the facts. Veronika noticed his reaction at once, and her instincts were alerted: had she been here longer? Was she still in some danger? She began to pay attention to each gesture, each movement the two men made; she knew it was pointless asking questions, they would never tell her the truth, but if she was clever, she could find out what was going on.
‘Tell me your name, address, marital status and date of birth,’ the older man said. Veronika knew her name, her marital status and her date of birth, but she realised there were blanks in her memory: she couldn’t quite remember her address.
The doctor shone a light in her eyes and examined them for a long time, in silence. The young man did the same thing. They exchanged glances, which meant absolutely nothing.
‘Did you say to the night nurse that we couldn’t see into your soul?’ asked the younger man.
Veronika couldn’t remember. She was having difficulty knowing who she was and what she was doing there.
‘You have been kept in an artificially induced sleep with tranquillisers, and that might affect your memory a bit, but please try to answer all our questions.’
And the doctors began an absurd questionnaire, wanting to know the names of the principal Ljubljana newspapers, the name of the poet whose statue was in the main square (ah, that she would never forget, every Slovene has the image of Prešeren engraved on his or her soul), the colour of her mother’s hair, the names of her colleagues at work, the titles of the most popular books at the library.
To begin with, Veronika considered not replying – her memory was still confused – but as the questionnaire continued, she began reconstructing what she’d forgotten. At one point, she remembered that she was now in a mental hospital, and that the mad were not obliged to be coherent; but, for her own good, and to keep the doctors by her side, in order to see if she could find out something more about her state, she began making a mental effort. As she recited the names and facts, she was recovering not only her memory, but also her personality, her desires, her way of seeing life. The idea of suicide, which, that morning, appeared buried beneath several layers of sedatives, resurfaced.
‘Fine,’ said the older man, at the end of the questionnaire.
‘How much longer must I stay here?’
The younger man lowered his eyes, and she felt as if everything were hanging in the air, as if, once that question was answered, a new chapter of her life would be written, and no one would be able to change it.
‘You can tell her,’ said the older man. ‘A lot of other patients have already heard the rumours, and she’ll find out in the end anyway; it’s impossible to keep secrets round here.’
‘Well, you decided your own fate,’ sighed the young man, weighing each word. ‘So you had better know the consequence of your actions: during the coma brought on by the pills you took, your heart was irreversibly damaged. There was a necrosis of the ventricle…’
‘Put it in layman’s terms,’ said the older man. ‘Get straight to the point.’
‘Your heart was irreversibly damaged and soon it will stop beating altogether.’
‘What does that mean?’ she asked, frightened.
‘If your heart stops beating, that means only one thing, death. I don’t know what your religious beliefs are, but…’
‘When will my heart stop beating?’ asked Veronika, interrupting him.
‘Within five days, a week at most.’
Veronika realised that behind his professional appearance and behaviour, behind the concerned manner, the young man was taking immense pleasure in what he was saying, as if she deserved the punishment, and would serve as an example to all the others.
During her life, Veronika had noticed that a lot of people she knew would talk about the horrors in other people’s lives as if they were genuinely concerned to help them, but the truth was that they took pleasure in the suffering of others, because that made them believe they were happy and that life had been generous with them. She hated that kind of person and she wasn’t going to give the young man an opportunity to take advantage of her state, in order to mask his own frustrations.
She kept her eyes fixed on his and, smiling, said: ‘So I succeeded then.’
‘Yes,’ came the reply. But any pleasure he had taken in giving her the tragic news had vanished.
During the night, however, she began to feel afraid. It was one thing to die quickly after taking some pills, it was quite another to wait five days or a week for death to come, when she had already been through so much.
She had always spent her life waiting for something: for her father to come back from work, for the letter from a lover that never arrived, for her end-of-year exams, for the train, the bus, the phone call, the holiday, the end of the holidays. Now she was going to have to wait for death, which had made an appointment with her.
‘This could only happen to me. Normally, people die on precisely the day they least expect.’
She had to get out of there and get some more pills. If she couldn’t, and the only solution was to jump from a high building in Ljubljana, that’s what she’d do; she had tried to save her parents any unnecessary suffering, but now she had no option.
She looked about her. All the beds were occupied by sleeping people, some of whom were snoring loudly. There were bars on the windows. At the end of the ward, there was a small bright light that filled the place with strange shadows and meant that the ward could be kept under constant vigilance. Near the light, a woman was reading a book.
‘These nurses must be very cultivated, they spend their whole lives reading.’
Veronika’s bed was the farthest from the door; between her and the woman there were nearly twenty other beds. She got up with difficulty because, if she was to believe what the doctor had said, she hadn’t walked for nearly three weeks. The nurse looked up and saw the girl approaching, dragging her drip-feed with her.
‘I want to go to the toilet,’ she whispered, afraid of waking the other mad women.
The woman gestured vaguely towards the door. Veronika’s mind was working fast, looking everywhere for an escape route, a crack, a way out. ‘It has to be quick, while they think I’m still too frail, incapable of acting.’
She peered about her. The toilet was a cubicle with no door. If she wanted to get out of there, she would have to grab the nurse and overcome her in order to get the key from her, but she was too weak for that.
‘Is this a prison?’ she asked the nurse, who had stopped reading and was now watching her every movement.
‘No, it’s a mental hospital.’
‘But I’m not mad.’
The woman laughed.
‘That’s what they all say.’
‘All