Part 20 (1/2)

A nurse appeared and called out his name. With Anna's help he got to his feet and together they went into the cubicle. Anna watched as they stuck needles into him, listened to his heart and felt at him. All the time a quiet happiness shone from his eyes.

Later a doctor came to look at Josef's results. He was almost two metres tall, with thick black eyebrows; he frowned with concern as he read through the notes.

'We need to keep you in overnight. At least,' he said, handing the folder back to the nurse. 'So we can keep you under observation.'

His deep ba.s.s voice brooked no disagreement, but Josef still dared to question the necessity of staying in hospital. He felt fine, apart from the itching in his hands and feet, a slight headache.

The doctor stopped in the doorway, looked at the nurse as if seeking confirmation that he had heard correctly, then took two long strides back to Josef and leaned over him.

'Your body temperature when they fished you out was twenty-two degrees.' He paused to let this sink in. When Josef didn't react, he went on, 'Do you know what that means? It mean a person is dead. Very dead indeed. So one night in hospital might not be too bad, in the scheme of things. If you consider the alternative.'

Anna placed her hands on Josef's shoulders as if to protect him. The gesture seemed to appease the doctor. He took the notes back from the nurse, looked at them again and shook his head.

'You've been...' he glanced at Anna, changed it to: 'You've both been incredibly lucky.' He nodded at this p.r.o.nouncement, let it hang in the air and took his leave with the words, 'I'll see you tomorrow,' and hurried away.

Josef was allocated a bed and Anna had to push him up to the ward herself. There was an unusually high number of emergency patients this evening, and staff shortages were noticeable. Anna was told which lift to use and which floor she needed, and off they went.

As they reached the lifts, a door slid open.

Out of the lift came a bed, pushed by a tall, white-haired woman in a floral blouse. She could have been any age between seventy and ninety. In the bed lay a man, or the remnant of a man. He was lying on his side in the foetal position underneath a blue sheet, staring vacantly into s.p.a.ce. His body had been eaten up by illness and lying in bed, and all that was left was a skeleton covered in skin, the vertebrae making sharp folds in the sheet.

The woman nodded to them, smiled and pushed the bed out of the lift. She was wearing rubber boots, and set off with a sure tread. On the way to some kind of test, presumably.

'Anna!'

The lift doors were closing. She moved forward quickly, placed her hand between them and they slid open. She pushed Josef inside and pressed four. They didn't speak as the lift rose.

The Emergency Department had been busy but there was plenty of room on the ward, and Josef was allocated a private room. An extra bed was brought in for Anna, and a nurse explained that she would have to pay the relatives' rate for breakfast. When they were alone Anna moved her chair closer to the bed and leaned her arms on the rail.

'What you said before-what was that all about?'

Josef remained silent for a few seconds, then asked; 'Do you really want to know? I want you to want to know, but...do you?'

'Of course I do.'

'It's...' Josef's gaze searched the room, as if looking for a clue as to where to start. 'It's quite...what's the word...quite overwhelming.'

Anna said nothing. Josef leaned back on the bed, closed his eyes.

'You asked me before what I was thinking about as I lay there in the darkness. I don't believe I was thinking very much at all. I was very calm. Strange. I'd imagined a situation like that would be the worst thing that could happen to me. Having plenty of time to contemplate the fact that you're going to die. The panic, the terror, all that kind of stuff.

'But it wasn't like that. I thought about you, of course. About how happy we've been. I was sorry that you would be unhappy when I died. That was what hurt, I think. The idea that you would be unhappy. The image of myself. The thought that I might be... mutilated. I couldn't feel my body at all.'

Josef laughed.

'For a while I thought maybe my head was just floating around on its own. But I managed to bend my head like this, heard the life jacket rasping against my stubble. Couldn't feel it though. I could kind of hear it inside my head, because apart from that I couldn't hear anything at all. As if everything was frozen, right down inside my ears. The only diversion was when water splashed up into my eyes from time to time. Apart from that, I could just as easily have been in outer s.p.a.ce.

'But what tormented me was the thought that perhaps I looked horrible, that they would eventually find me and you'd have to come and identify me. And at the same time I hoped I would be found so that you wouldn't...'

A sob juddered through Anna's body as she breathed out. Josef placed his hand on her head. 'I'm sorry. I realise it must have been...I mean, I can imagine how I'd feel if you...'

Anna shook her head, wiped the tears from her eyes. 'It's just... go on.'

Josef sighed. 'So anyway, I was very calm apart from that. No fear of death, nothing like that. And after a while, when I was thinking about those insect traps I used to make when I was little... a gla.s.s jar, buried in the ground. How they could be improved. Then...'

Josef's hand reached for Anna's.

She took it and squeezed it. The skin was still hot, dry, and his hand was shaking. She looked up at him. His eyes were wide open, staring at the wall opposite the bed.

'...then death came.'

Josef screwed up his eyes, opened them again. 'This is really hard to explain. It was as if I was a glove, and death...was putting me on. It came into me, slowly and...'

Josef fell silent and let go of Anna's hand. His eyes were still gazing unseeingly at the wall, or through it, out towards the sea far away. Anna asked, 'Did you start to feel warm?'

He shook his head. 'On the contrary. I could no longer feel the cold from the sea, but death came like a more intense cold inside me. I think it found its way in under my toenails and moved...upwards.'

Josef coughed. Breathed in and choked, coughed even more. He leaned forward, retching, and Anna stroked his back as he waved his hand and said, '...I'm fine...' between coughs.

When the coughing abated and Josef was leaning back on the pillows with tears in his eyes from the exertion, Anna said, 'Well, this isn't so strange. I can understand it must have been, what did you say, overwhelming, but...'

He cleared his throat. 'It's not that. I'm absolutely convinced that it wasn't coming from my own body. When I said I was like a glove that death was putting on, that's exactly what I meant. Do you understand?'

'Yes, I suppose it would probably feel like that.'

Josef shook his head.

'It didn't ”feel like that”. It was like that. Death is something that comes from outside. A big parasite that enters the body, stays there for a while, gathers what it needs, then leaves the body. Then you're dead. That's the way it is.'

Josef nodded slowly to himself, rubbing a corner of the sheet between his fingers. Suddenly he said, almost defiantly, 'It's colourless. It changes shape. At least when it's in the water. It can think. It has a language. You can talk to it.'

'Did you talk to it?'

Josef gazed searchingly into Anna's eyes, looking for any sign that she might be making fun of him. He found none. He shook his head. 'No. It's heard everything. There's nothing to say. In that situation.' He sucked at the corner of the sheet and went on, 'We human beings are just...material to them.'

Tentatively Anna asked, 'What do you mean, them?'

Josef looked at her, glanced s.h.i.+ftily to the side as if she'd asked an unusually stupid question, then said, 'Well, there are lots of them, of course.' He snorted. 'It's a big planet, after all.'

He seemed to be on the point of saying something else, but stopped himself and said instead, 'I'm sorry. This is hard to believe. I understand that. Sorry.' He took her hand again, said imploringly, 'But listen...that's how it is. I'm absolutely certain. Death, Anna, is a creature capable of thought. There are ways of...negotiating with it.'

Anna nodded and got to her feet. For a while she had been aware of a clicking sound from Josef's tongue when he was speaking. 'Would you like a drink of water?' she asked. 'Or...?'

Josef smiled.

'It's all right, I'm not afraid it's going to leap out of the tap or anything, it's not like that. Yes please.'

Anna gave a slightly forced laugh and went over to the washbasin, filled a paper cup and gave it to Josef, who knocked it back in one. His movements suddenly seemed easier, his expression clearer. The happiness was there again. Anna would have preferred to talk about pleasant things, forget all this. But still she said; 'But you're alive. You're sitting here.'

Josef nodded. 'Yes. I was rescued before it had finished. It left me. When the boat came...when I saw the boat and thought, I'm going to live after all, it withdrew. Slowly. Like when...like when we've made love and I pull out really slowly so that it won't hurt. Like that.'