- •Luke 10:19
- •Veronika didn’t know how long she had slept. She remembered waking up at one point—still with the life-preserving tubes in her mouth and nose—and hearing a voice say:
- •Veronika couldn’t remember. She was having difficulty knowing who she was and what she was doing there.
- •Veronika didn’t know what to say, but the madwoman’s words made sense to her. Who knows; perhaps she was the woman who had been seen half-naked walking the streets of Ljubljana?
- •Veronika laughed.
- •I must get hold of those pills as soon as possible.
- •Veronika didn’t know what to do and stood there paralyzed with fear. A burly, shifty-looking male nurse came over, wanting to know what was going on.
- •I can’t believe it, I never used to be like this. I never used to fight over stupid things.
- •Veronika went back in and walked over to the group gathered in one corner of the room. The people were talking animatedly but fell silent as soon as she approached.
- •Veronika, who was having breakfast with her, heard the request.
- •Veronika watched the woman, still smiling, being strapped to the bed.
- •Veronika started calling to Zedka, shouting, threatening that she would go to the police, the press, the human rights organizations.
- •Veronika laughed. The “neighborhood” were the wards full of crazy people, and those crazy people were, in turn, full of drugs to make them sleep.
- •Veronika was trembling without quite knowing why.
- •Veronika’s trembling changed into low, timid, suppressed sobs. She knelt down, laid her head on the woman’s lap, and cried and cried.
- •Veronika’s remorse over her attempted suicide resurfaced, and she firmly pushed it away again. Now she was feeling something she had never allowed herself to feel: hatred.
- •It would be more normal to eat only when we were hungry , thought the woman, but she said nothing, afraid that he might not let her speak to Veronika.
- •Veronika began to vomit copiously. Once the near-tragedy had passed, some of the crazy people there began to laugh, and she felt humiliated, lost, paralyzed.
- •Veronika opened her eyes. Someone had taken her clothes off. Who? Dr. Igor? Did that mean he had seen her naked? Her brain wasn’t working properly.
- •Veronika had known since childhood that her true vocation was to be a pianist.
- •Veronika stopped playing for a moment and looked out at Mari in the garden. She was wearing only a light jacket against the cold night air? Did she want to die?
- •I must stop thinking. I’ll pretend that everything’s all right and then everything will be.
- •I don’t believe in you, God, but please, help me.
- •Veronika decided she would have to go to bed, but Eduard was still standing by the piano.
- •It was so good that I can see love in everything, even in the eyes of a schizophrenic.
- •Veronika was starting to feel ill; whenever she was given that injection, something bad always happened inside her body.
- •Veronika saw there was no way out.
- •I just have to give her an answer , he thought. There’s no need to call in the nurse to witness the conversation, to avoid any future lawsuits for sexual abuse.
- •In the small and never-used library in Villete, Eduard didn’t find the Koran or Aristotle or any of the other philosophers Mari had mentioned. He found instead the words of a poet:
- •Veronika woke up with a start, in a cold sweat. There was a terrible noise outside, and she needed silence to go on sleeping. But the racket continued.
- •Veronika got up and went over to Eduard. Tenderly she smoothed his hair. She was glad to have someone to talk to.
- •I’ve had an accident.
- •Veronika gave him a long, lingering kiss.
It would be more normal to eat only when we were hungry , thought the woman, but she said nothing, afraid that he might not let her speak to Veronika.
“Well, it would cause tremendous confusion,” she said at last. “I’m a housewife myself, and I know what I’m talking about.”
“So we have breakfast, lunch, and supper. We have to wake up at a certain hour every day and rest once a week. Christmas exists so that we can give each other presents, Easter so that we can spend a few days at the lake. How would you like it if your husband were gripped by a sudden, passionate impulse and decided he wanted to make love in the living room?”
The woman thought: What is the man talking about? I came here to see my daughter.
“I would find it very sad,” she said, carefully, hoping she was giving the right answer.
“Excellent,” roared Dr. Igor. “The bedroom is the correct place for making love. To make love anywhere else would set a bad example and promote the spread of anarchy.”
“Can I see my daughter?” said the woman.
Dr. Igor gave up. This peasant would never understand what he was talking about; she wasn’t interested in discussing insanity from a philosophical point of view, even though she knew her daughter had made a serious suicide attempt and had been in a coma.
He rang the bell and his secretary appeared.
“Call the young woman who tried to commit suicide,” he said. “The one who wrote the letter to the newspapers, saying that she was killing herself in order to put Slovenia on the map.”
“I don’t want to see her. I’ve cut all my links with the outside world.”
It had been hard to say that in the lounge, with everyone else there. But the nurse hadn’t been exactly discreet either, and had announced in a loud voice that her mother was waiting to see her, as if it were a matter of general interest.
She didn’t want to see her mother; it would only upset both of them. It was best that her mother should think of her as dead. Veronika had always hated good-byes.
The man disappeared whence he had come, and she went back to looking at the mountains. After a week the sun had finally returned, something she had known would happen the previous night, because the moon had told her while she was playing the piano.
No, that’s crazy, I’m losing my grip. Planets don’t talk, or only to self-styled astrologers. If the moon spoke to anyone, it was to that schizophrenic.
The very moment she thought this, she noticed a sharp pain in her chest, and her arm went numb. Veronika felt her head spinning. A heart attack!
She entered a kind of euphoric state, as if death had freed her from the fear of dying. So it was all over. She might still experience some pain, but what were five minutes of agony in exchange for an eternity of peace? The only possible response was to close her eyes: In films the thing she most hated to see were dead people with staring eyes.
But the heart attack was different from what she had imagined; her breathing became laboured, and Veronika was horrified to realize that she was about to experience the worst of her fears: suffocation. She was going to die as if she were being buried alive or had suddenly been plunged into the depths of the sea.
She stumbled, fell, felt a sharp blow on her face, continued making heroic efforts to breathe, but the air wouldn’t go in. Worst of all, death did not come. She was entirely conscious of what was going on around her, she could still see colors and shapes, although she had difficulty hearing what others were saying; the cries and exclamations seemed distant, as if coming from another world. Apart from this, everything else was real; the air wouldn’t enter her lungs, it would simply not obey the commands of her lungs and her muscles, and still she did not lose consciousness.
She felt someone touch her and turn her over, but now she had lost control of her eye movements, and her eyes were flickering wildly, sending hundreds of different images to her brain, combining the feeling of suffocation with a sense of complete visual confusion.
After a while the images became distant too, and just when the agony reached its peak, the air finally rushed into her lungs, making a tremendous noise that left everyone in the room paralyzed with fear.