After a few polite introductory comments, including an invitation to Cissi to join them, they began to question Vera about her background. Vera felt like she was at a job interview. They seemed particularly interested in her years as a thoracic anesthesiology nurse, when Adam had been training to become a surgeon.
‘So then, opened chest cavities are bread and butter to you?’ Överlind touched his breastbone.
‘Well, I don’t know if I would say that,’ Vera answered, smiling tentatively towards their silhouettes in the backlight, ‘but, yes, I have participated in a number of heart and lung operations.’
‘Why don’t you still work there?’ Sparre sounded suspicious.
Why do you ask that? Vera wondered as she tried to answer. ‘I was waiting for… I was going to go with…’ She stopped and looked down at the table. ‘I had planned to work as a volunteer, so I went abroad last year, first to the Congo and then Colombia…’
‘And now you are back in town,’ Sparre persisted, ‘but not at the hospital?’
‘No, I have actually applied for a part-time position in anesthesiology, but…’ Vera wondered if she should mention all the complications with her knee and the discussions with the unemployment office about her degree of disability. She opted instead for the more impersonal reason why she was not, at the moment, doing the thing she was trained to do.
‘You know how the labor market is for college graduates in this town.’
They nodded; this was a well-known problem. The unemployment office in Umeå struggled with the country’s, if not the world’s, best-educated group of unemployed people. Who wanted to employ someone with a PhD in physics to work in a grocery store? He would probably be Einstein-eccentric and give customers the wrong change because he was busy daydreaming about formulas. Vera knew someone with a pure physics PhD who started playing online poker and now earned three times as much as he had earned as a graduate student, just by ‘reading the board’ – code for systematically winning money from people who couldn’t count the odds, but humbly folding when the opposition was superior.
‘You know about these things; is it true that you can perform a heart massage directly with your hands?’ asked Överlind, as he squeezed his left hand lightly in front of his chest.
‘Yes, it is. I’ve done it myself.’ From the corner of her eye, Vera saw Cissi looking at her in surprise.
‘In other words, you can hold a heart in your hands and get it to start pumping again?’
Överlind’s interest made Vera wonder if he felt himself in need of such help. ‘As the anesthesiology nurse, my clothes aren’t usually sterile. I stand behind a cloth sheet. It is my responsibility to make sure the patient is properly anesthetized, and only the surgeon touches the patient.’
‘But you said that you have held a living heart in your hands…’ said Sparre with a critical tone.
‘Yes. We had an emergency situation on the ward once – a patient who had been operated on to repair a coronary artery went into cardiac arrest. You are not supposed to compress the thoracic region of a person who has just been through an operation. In that case you open the sternum wire.’ Vera saw that nobody understood, so she explained: ‘That’s the steel wire that holds the chest cavity together after the operation.’
‘Why can’t you apply compression from the outside to get the heart started again?’ asked a pale but fascinated Överlind.
‘When you attach a new coronary artery to a heart, one possible reason for cardiac arrest is that a stitch is leaking. In that case, applying pressure will just make it worse.’
All eyes in the sunny room were on Vera. She didn’t understand. She had studied economics and read about welfare, and they were asking questions as if she were applying for a job with an air-ambulance team and they suspected her of pretending to be an anesthesiology nurse.
It was Lilian Blom who finally broke the silence. ‘Was it leaking?’
‘No. It was a ventricular fibrillation – the heart hops and shakes, but it doesn’t pump. I lifted the heart out of the pericardium and touched it really gently until they came with the… well, they’re like small metal spoons that are used to shock the heart and synchronize the electrical impulses.’
‘Did it work?’ asked Överlind.
‘Yes, he survived. In fact, it’s surprising how often things turn out well. Even if it was tense at the time.’
‘And now you are… one of our first-year students?’ Marianne Lange sounded surprised when she consulted her papers.
‘Yes.’
‘Why is that?’ Sturesson and the others looked searchingly at Vera.
She fell silent. I have been sent by what remains of the aboriginal people… because everything we have the power to take, is not actually ours for the taking. She looked at the group in front of her. No. She could not say ‘Koyaanisqatsi: little brothers and sisters, what are you doing?’ Instead she said, ‘Because I want to understand, to know more about how the economy functions and the ideas behind how we use our resources.’
‘And what are you going to do with that knowledge?’ wondered Lange kindly.
Suddenly, Vera saw the connection. Perhaps the antenna that flickered like an electric field around her spine had not taken a strange, 90-degree turn after all? In the academic world, it was two different disciplines, but for her it was the essence of what had always been her calling. ‘I want to help. To ease, to heal, to prevent. I want to… save the world.’
She shrugged her shoulders in embarrassment and, as soon as she had said it, she realized how silly it sounded. Words were insufficient to explain the cluster of characteristics and life experiences that motivated her. What could she say about those chaotic months in Kivu when she tried to help victims of rape and people infected with cholera in the middle of a merciless war? Or about her time in Colombia? How could she explain that four volunteer workers being kidnapped had been the last straw that had forced her onto a new path?
The senior academics chuckled and exchanged amused glances. Vera blushed, and rushed to correct herself, even though she felt that the essence of what she had said was true.
‘I mean, I want to participate and contribute… to something that can change the world for the better.’ That’s the way it is, Vera thought, almost defiantly. Now she sat before them, her life’s goal on display, like a throat exposed for a flock of predators. She had assumed – wrongly it seemed – that the interview would be an economics test. A rejection now would sting much more than if she had failed that kind of test. On the other hand, she thought, if they don’t want me now, then the project isn’t for me anyway. But then, despite the strong backlighting, she thought she saw that Sturesson actually looked flattered.
‘Yes, our investigation definitely has a chance to change EU member states’ welfare systems for the better. And that’s as good a start as any other, right?’ said Sturesson, and he winked at Överlind and Sparre on his right. Överlind smiled, but Sparre did not look amused.
‘Do you know anything about economics, then? For example, can you explain Pareto optimality?’ Sparre’s dark, close-set eyes bored into her.
‘Well, I’ve only been studing economics for six weeks…’ Vera began.
‘And The Development of the Discipline of Economics during the summer,’ added Cissi.
‘Perhaps it is not necessary to conduct a direct interrogation here,’ said Överlind, looking around. ‘Didn’t the application say that the point of the last place was to have