Part 4: Room Twelve

In these letters Anna's illness is at its hardest. Vera, Lena and the people of the lake town find their way to her bedside, and to each other.

Day 36: A Call at Night

Lermontov wrote that he went out alone onto the road at night, and the stony path shone through the mist, and the night was so quiet that star spoke to star.

I have been out on a night road too. It was not quiet, and I was not alone.

Dear Grandmother,

The telephone rang at ten past one. I knew before I picked it up. Nobody rings a teacher at one in the morning to talk about spelling. It was the night nurse from the care home, a calm voice I did not know. She said you had a high fever, that you were breathing fast, and that the doctor on call had decided you should go to the hospital to be looked after there. An ambulance was already at the door. My mother had been called first. She was on her way.

I stood in the kitchen in my socks with the telephone in my hand, and for a moment I could not think what a person does next. Then I put the kettle on. My mother's daughter after all.

The last bus to the city goes at nine. The first goes at six. I rang Tomas. I am not sure why I rang him and not anyone else, except that his number was the one my thumb found. He answered on the second ring. "Ten minutes," he said. In eight, his van was outside, the heater on full. Mila was asleep across the back seat in her coat and boots, wrapped in the blanket from her own bed. He had not wanted to wake Mrs Varga at that hour.

The road along the lake was white and empty. The van's lights went ahead of us into the snow, and the pines on either side were black. Tomas drove slowly and said very little. Once he reached over and turned the heater vent toward my side. That was all, and it was a great deal. I kept my hands round the flask of tea I had made and not drunk, the way you hold a bowl of soup to warm your fingers before you eat.

Here is something I tried on that road, and it helped. When my thoughts started running ahead, I used the windscreen wipers. Breathe in for four sweeps. Breathe out for four sweeps. Again, and again, the way you knead dough, push and fold and turn, not thinking past the next turn. After a few minutes my heart slowed and my hands stopped shaking on the flask. Anyone can do it on a hard night, with a clock, a dripping tap, or their own footsteps. It does not change what is coming. It only keeps you in the place where you actually are, which is the only place you can help from.

An aside I thought of later, on the hospital chairs. Not so long ago, a call at night went through a person. An operator sat up at a switchboard, with headphones on, and joined one line to another by hand, with a plug on the end of a cord. In small places the night operator often knew whose number was ringing and why, and sometimes went to wake the doctor herself.

We reached the hospital a little after three. My mother was in the corridor in her good coat over her nightdress, and she held me very hard. A young doctor came and told us, plainly and kindly, that you had an infection in your chest, that the nurses were watching you closely, and that the fever had already begun to come down. We could see you for a few minutes.

You were asleep, Grandmother, small in a big white bed, with your hair loose on the pillow. Your hand was hot when I held it. You did not open your eyes. But when my mother said, "Mum, it's Lena, and Vera's here," your fingers moved in mine. Just once. I am writing this in the hospital at seven in the morning, on the back of a form, with a pencil borrowed from the nurses' desk. Tomas has taken Mila home for school. My mother is asleep in a chair with her mouth open, and I love her very much.

Lermontov walked out alone on his night road. I did not. There was a van with the heater on full, a child asleep under her own blanket, and a man who came in eight minutes. The stars did not speak to each other last night, or if they did, I did not hear them. But I was not alone, and neither were you.

Your Vera

Day 37: The Hospital Corridor

In Tolstoy's great novel of war, an old general says that there are no warriors stronger than these two, patience and time.

He was talking about armies. I have been learning it about a corridor.

Dear Grandmother,

The corridor outside your room is long and pale green, with a window at the far end that looks onto a car park and one bare birch tree. There are six orange plastic chairs joined together in a row, so that when one person sits down, the person at the other end feels it. My mother and I have spent most of three days on those chairs. We have learned which one wobbles. We have learned that the clock above the door is four minutes fast, and that nobody here will ever put it right, because everyone is glad of the four minutes.

You are a little better. The fever has come down and stayed down since yesterday morning. You sleep most of the time. When you are awake, you look at the ceiling, or at the window, and sometimes at us, as if we were people you had met once on a train and liked. The nurses come in and out on soft shoes, and they talk to you by name each time, even when you do not answer. I have noticed that. I want to remember to do it too.

At the end of the corridor there is a machine that makes tea. You press a button, a paper cup drops down crooked, and hot brown water comes out with a powdered smell, like a kitchen where someone has just opened a packet of soup. It is terrible tea. My mother and I have drunk perhaps twenty cups of it. She holds hers in both hands and blows on it for a long time without drinking, which is what she does with real tea at home. I had never noticed that she does it. I have been noticing a lot of things.

An aside, which I looked up on my telephone while my mother dozed. Paper cups were first made popular about a hundred years ago, not for tea at all but for water. Before that, at railway stations and schools and street pumps, there was often one tin cup on a chain that everyone drank from. People began to see that illnesses were passed along that way, and the single paper cup, used once and thrown away, came in to replace it. So the flimsy thing in my hand was invented to keep strangers well. I liked the tea a little more after that.

On the second evening, when we had talked about everything we could talk about and run out of words, my mother said, "Your grandmother used to play a game with me in waiting rooms." It was this. You go through the alphabet together, taking turns, and for each letter you name something to eat. Apple cake. Barley soup. Cabbage rolls. If you get stuck, the other person may help but must not laugh. So we played it with your recipes, the cards from the tin, as many as we could remember. My mother knew more than I did. I knew the plum cake. We got stuck on Q and both laughed anyway, which was against the rules. Anyone can play it, anywhere you have to wait. It takes about twenty minutes, and it fills the mouth with something other than worry.

My mother saw me writing this on my knee. She looked at the page and then at me, and I waited for her to say something about the letters. She did not. She only took the empty cup from my other hand and went to get two more.

At nine the night nurse came and said we should both go home and sleep in a bed. My mother went to her flat. I went with her. We lay in the dark in the same room, as we did when I was small and had a bad dream, and she said into the dark, "She knew your voice today. I saw it." I said I saw it too. Then we slept.

Tolstoy's general was right. Patience and time are strong. But I think they are stronger with company. Three days on six orange chairs, twenty cups of bad tea, the alphabet twice through, and a mother and a daughter who have argued all winter sitting so close that each one felt it when the other moved. Time did most of the work. Patience did the rest. We only had to sit there, and we did.

Your Vera