The clinic was new and looked immaculate. My interviewer, Dr. Mary Maillet, wore a severe black suit, red combs in her wavy, gray hair, and lime-green-framed glasses, making her look simultaneously warm and tough.
She told me that the staff at BZFO was made up of multidisciplinary doctors and therapists of all kinds. Then she sat back in her swivel chair and grilled me about my training and my experience in South Sudan.
I was describing our 24-7 surgery at Kind Hands when she interrupted me to say, “When can you start?”
“I have the job?”
“We’ll be lucky to have you, Brigid. Welcome to BZFO.”
I started at the clinic the next morning, and I stayed late into the night. My new patients had terrible physical injuries and profound emotional ones. They were all refugees with horrific stories like the ones I’d heard in South Sudan.
A young woman named Amena, just twenty-three, had escaped from war-shredded Syria. Her town had been shelled either by ISIS or Assad, from which side of the conflict, she didn’t know. Her beloved husband and two young boys had been killed in the blast. She had lost an eye, and her neck and hands had been burned. But, still, she had escaped, making a long and arduous journey by foot and boat and train to Berlin.
Amena said to me, “God is great, Dr. Fitzgerald.”
Her faith in the face of appalling tragedy simply brought me to tears.
“You are great, too, Amena. Now, please, cough for me.”
Within the week, I was seeing patients with flu-like symptoms. I had worked with Ebola, HIV, and kala-azar, and now I was tackling MERS in a new infectious-disease quarantine wing at the torture clinic. I was helping desperately sick people, and they needed me. I needed them, too.
And then I got sick myself.
Chapter 49
ONE MINUTE I was tending to a patient.
The next, I had collapsed in her room.
I was helped to a bed, where I hacked and threw up and wheezed for days I couldn’t remember, and I was so weak, I couldn’t sit up. I had feverish sleep in which I felt as though I were drowning. I dreamed of Africa during the flood season and that I was sinking to the muddy floor of the White Nile. I heard my own underwater screams.
I wanted to die.
In conscious moments, I grabbed my chart from the end of the bed, and I read the stark truth. My white blood cells were losing the battle against the disease.
I was going to get my dying wish.
I’d always heard that God works in mysterious ways. Now I was right there at the heart of the mystery. I had survived the plagues of Africa, bullets and near death on the killing field. I’d survived the blade at my neck, only to lose my life to a virus inside a clean German clinic.
I used some of those lucid moments to reflect on what I had done with God’s gift of life, now that I had lived out the extent of it.
Images of my childhood, my school years, the people I’d loved and ones I hadn’t loved well enough, flashed through my mind in random order and vivid color. Although I prayed, I didn’t look for a connection to God.
I just wanted to leave.
I dropped off into a haze of watery memories, and sometime later, I came out of this sweaty dream state with a normal temperature and a great thirst. I knew that I was past the worst of it. I had survived.
I thanked God humbly, passionately, and then I asked Dr. Maillet for a report on the patients in the MERS wing. My wing.
She dragged a chair up to the side of my bed.
“I don’t have great news, Brigid. Half our patients were transferred to Charité.”
She was talking about the largest, most advanced hospital in Berlin. That was good, wasn’t it?
“Why only half our patients?” I asked.
“Fourteen people died. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Brigid. That sweet girl from Syria. Amena. She asked about you before she passed away last night.”
Amena’s death was devastating. I hadn’t known her well, but she was like so many people I had known who had come through Job-like adversity with shining optimism and glowing faith.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Why did it happen?
I broke down in deep sobs, and when Dr. Maillet failed to comfort me, she injected me with a sedative, and I fell into a deep, drug-induced sleep.
I didn’t want to wake up.
It felt to me that God had forsaken me and everyone on earth.
Chapter 50
THE THIRTY of us from the BZFO clinic had gathered at the edge of the pond in Volkspark to say a few words about our patients who had died from MERS.
We all looked how we felt: heartsick, exhausted, and breaking down from frustration because the disease was still taking lives, and nothing had been found that could stop it.
At the same time, other epic tragedies were erupting around the planet: earthquakes where none had been before, and opportunistic disease that swept into ruined cities and killed tens of thousands. Financial collapses had bankrupted countries, induced even more poverty, and swept corporations, along with potential technological and medical advances, off the table. Crazed shooters got away with mass murders in malls and schools, and the genocide in sub-Saharan Africa not only continued but intensified.
Why was all of this happening?
Was God testing humanity? Or was He unwilling to intervene?
When it was my turn to speak at the service, I thought of Amena, that sweet, young widowed mother of two dead children. I pictured her scarred face and empty eye socket, and how she glowed like a neon sign in the dark with her love of God.
I said to my friends and coworkers, “You know that Amena survived what for most would have been soul-crushing tragedy—the loss of her home and entire family. But she rallied, and she was brimming with life and faith.
“I wished I had gotten to know Amena better. I would have loved to have been her friend. She told me that she had spoken with her dead boys since their deaths, and she said, ‘Don’t be sad for me, Dr. Fitzgerald. I will be with them again.’”
I teared up as I searched inside myself for an authentic, hopeful note that would represent Amena’s undiluted faith. Just then, a small bird flew across my line of sight and skimmed the glittering surface of the pond before disappearing into the tree shadows.
I snapped back into the present.
I said, “I am thinking of Amena now. Her husband sits with his arms around her, and her children are in her lap. I see her safely reunited with God.”
Was she with God? Really? Was God real? If so, did He care?
The sun was still high when the service ended.
I was still weak and depressed and thought I would simply walk home to my quirky apartment, write a journal entry about today’s service, and then drop into a dead sleep in the huge bed. I was heading toward Friedenstrasse when a gentleman coming up behind me on the same path called out, “Dr. Fitzgerald, may I give you a ride?”
I recognized Karl Lenz, one of BZFO’s benefactors. I’d seen him at the clinic but was surprised that he seemed to know me. Still, I wasn’t feeling chatty.
“Thanks anyway, Mr. Lenz. It’s a short walk.”
“Please. Call me Karl. Would you mind if I might walk with you?” he said. “I feel pretty awful, and I’m not ready to be alone.”
“Of course not,” I said.
We skipped the small talk and jumped right into the horrific week at the clinic. Karl said that he was relieved our MERS caseload had been moved to Charité. “We just weren’t equipped for it,” he said.
We had reached the edge of the park by then, and Karl asked me to lunch. I found that I wasn’t ready to be alone, either.
Chapter 51
A TAXICAB took us to Patio Restaurantschiff, a glass-enclosed restaurant on a boat moored on the Spree River.
I’d been complaining about life; then, in pretty much the next moment, a chair was pulled out for me, and a napkin dropped into my lap in one of the prettiest little restaurants in all of Berlin
.
I do have restaurant German but was happy to turn the ordering of lunch over to Karl. He chose a fish soup, venison goulash with chanterelles, and a Künstler Riesling. I couldn’t help but look him over as he spoke with the waiter.
Karl looked to be in his mid to late fifties. He had good-uncle features—glasses and longish, gray-streaked dark hair. He also looked fit, and I loved that he had such expressive hands.
When the wine had been poured and the waiter was gone, Karl let me know that he was aware of my life-over-death battle with MERS. That I had almost died.
“How are you feeling now?” he asked me.
I said, “I’m not running laps around the Tiergarten, but I can tie my shoes without falling over. With my eyes closed. Pretty good, right?”
“I have to say this, Brigid. Doctors like you are why I support BZFO. Dr. Maillet told me a little about your background. I don’t want to embarrass you, but for a young woman with so many opportunities to make money and live well, to risk your life in South Sudan—well, it’s pretty impressive. Ach. I’ve embarrassed you now.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “But tell me about yourself. You’re a writer?”
“A playwright, yes,” he told me. “For me, writing plays is about the most perfect work imaginable.”
Karl told me about his play in progress, a political satire, and from there, we talked about geopolitics along the world’s worst fault lines. He was fully aware of the bloody civil war in South Sudan, and even after the dishes had been cleared away, we were still discussing the senseless conflict that was destroying the country.
“Greed and corruption are the root cause of this,” he said.
I saw it in his face: he actually felt the pain of the war. And after two and a half glasses of wine, I found myself telling Karl about my epic clash with Dage Zuberi.
It was a hard story to tell, but I felt as if I’d known Karl well and for a long time. And as I talked about that day in Magwi, I could see that Karl felt my pain, too.
We were politely thrown out of the restaurant so that it could be set up for dinner, and Karl did give me a ride the few blocks to my apartment.
Once home, I kicked off my shoes and emailed Sabeena. She was living in Mumbai with Albert, and they had adopted Jemilla and Aziza.
I wrote, Sabeena, guess what? I’ve made a new friend in Berlin.
Chapter 52
I HAD hardly hung my bag up behind the exam-room door when Dr. Maillet waved me into her office.
She pushed her green-framed glasses back into her hair and said, “Brigid, as much as you like the overnight shift, I’m putting you on days only. Get your strength back. Eat. Sleep. We need you to be in top form so we can exploit your youth and stamina later on.”
“Done,” I said.
She laughed. She had been expecting a fight. “Good,” she said. “Now take the night off.”
Since we’d closed our infectious-disease wing, I was attached to BZFO’s day clinic, and it was almost a vacation.
I didn’t miss the violence of South Sudan. I didn’t miss the upside-down days of breakfast at midnight, tinned ham at dawn. I practiced everyday medicine on refugee patients who had never had a routine doctor’s appointment before coming to Berlin.
I cleaned wounds. I set bones. I prescribed medication, and I sat in sunlit rooms with patients who, over paper cups of sugary tea, told me stories of savagery that I both understood and would never understand. I made friends with my coworkers, and I went on dates—nothing serious, but I was happy and enjoying every day, and in this way, two years passed.
Sometimes Karl stopped by the clinic at day’s end, gathered up everyone who was heading out, and took us to dinner in a local tavern, a wirtschaft, up the street.
He was the best kind of patron: supportive and a great listener, and he was a hilarious storyteller, too. One evening as I was leaving work, Karl invited me to see the rehearsal of his play Der Zug.
He had told me that the one-act play took place entirely on a train platform. Characters representing people from all over Europe waited for a train that does not come, a send-up of the unmet expectations of the eurozone.
Karl met me at the stage door to the Kleines Theater, on the Südwestkorso. He showed me around backstage and introduced me to the actors and the crew.
Clearly, Karl had told them about me.
They hugged me. Told me how they admired the work I was doing. And Karl stood by nervously, looking as if he was pacing inside his head as he waited for the curtain to go up on the train that would not come.
We sat together in the front row, and when the rehearsal began, I was completely drawn in. The set was so real—with the rumbles coming over the sound system, the intermittent dimming of overhead lights—that I felt that I was sitting on the platform right across the track.
The characters were a Greek leftist, an Italian economist, a Spanish millionaire, a Belgian bureaucrat, and a Polish plumber. They were first shown at ease, and then under increasing pressure, reacting in idiosyncratic ways.
There was a beautifully comic moment when the expectation of the coming train peaked. The actors leaned forward, air whooshed up from under their feet, and they turned their heads to see der zug rush by. Their quizzical expressions as they stared at one another were priceless.
I laughed out loud, that two-part giggle followed by a belly laugh that Zach had pinned on me, and Karl, sitting next to me, wrapped me in a spontaneous hug. Then he kissed me.
Karl Lenz kissed me.
Chapter 53
KARL’S KISS surprised the hell out of me.
First, there was the fact of that kiss, and even more unsettling was the electricity that came along with it that kind of lit me up.
Karl was my friend. And now?
He took my hand, and as the play went on in front of us, I stared at him. I was not cool. Karl smiled, squeezed my hand, and when the action on the stage broke for a discussion with the lighting man, Karl leaned toward me and whispered, “Don’t be shocked. I love you, Brigid.”
“What? No, you don’t.”
“I do. I fell for you the moment I saw Mary congratulate you on getting the job. It was just that instantaneous. And now that I know you, I want to be with you. I want to make you happy. I want to give to you. I want to marry you.”
“Karl,” I whispered fiercely back. “That’s crazy. We’ve only known each other…”
“As friends?”
I nodded.
“I had to tell you or explode,” he said. “Okay, Brigid. Maybe I see us as more than friends, eh? Or maybe this gives us an opportunity to see what we might have. No rush. We can spend as much time together as we want. Why not?”
I thought of several reasons why not, and all of them surfaced in my mind as the rehearsal commenced and I stared ahead at the stage.
Karl was crazy. He didn’t know me or my moods and habits or what had made me the person I am. And I knew only one side of his story.
Another thing—I’d never dreamed of getting married, didn’t know the first thing about being a wife, or if that was anything I should ever do. And, by the way, Karl was almost old enough to be my father.
I flashed on my heady feelings for Colin and even Zach, which were tumultuous, a little wild, a little dangerous. Karl didn’t ride a scooter at sixty miles an hour in crazy traffic. He didn’t risk his life in a medical battlefield. He wrote plays. He drove an old Daimler.
But—I liked that. Karl made me feel safe and cared about. I had come to treasure his friendship. I liked his complexity and his kindness. I liked him as a human being. As a man.
Were those reasons to marry him? He had said, No rush.
“Say something, Brigid, will you? I feel a little lost right now,” Karl said.
“I’m sorry. I forgot something.”
I stumbled across his knees as he stood up to let me out to the aisle. “Stay,” I told him. “I have to go. I’ll call you.”
I marched up the dark aisle a
nd out the lobby door, onto the Südwestkorso. I was running again. I knew that running was old stuff, but my feet took me through and around clumps of pedestrians and all the way around the block.
What’s with you? I asked the air. What’s your problem, Brigid? And I wondered. If not now, when? If not Karl, who?
Was that a reason to get married?
I stood again in front of the theater and looked up at the sign reading DAS THEATER IST GESCHLOSSEN. “The theater is closed.”
I, too, was closed. The last time I had loved a man, he had died.
I knocked on the lobby door, and a young woman let me inside. I entered the dark lobby and went down the carpeted aisle, at last slipping into the seat next to Karl, in the front row. He whispered, “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said to Karl. “Yes, I’m okay. Yes, I would love to be your wife.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Karl kissed me again. I took his face in my hands and kissed him back. The lights came on. The assemblage applauded the performance, and they turned to give Karl an enthusiastic hand. It was a standing ovation.
We both started to laugh. It was as if everyone had known except for me. I was going to marry Karl Lenz. He was going to be my husband.
Chapter 54
AT SEVEN A.M., I was sitting in a pew in Herz Jesu Kirche, the Church of the Sacred Heart, only two blocks from where I lived with my husband, Karl.
I still found it hard to believe that I had gotten married in a Lutheran church, wearing a long, white, and completely perfect wedding dress, surrounded by Karl’s family and good and shared friends from BZFO and Der Zug.
I’m pretty sure God had been there, too.
These past months were so unlike my previous life, it was almost comical. Who are you now, Brigid? Is this you?
As soon as we were settled into “our” three-room, top-floor apartment in the arty neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg, Karl showed me Berlin. We walked miles, saw monuments and parks and stunning architecture. We went to the theater, of course, and I bought a new wardrobe because we were invited to so many dinner parties and benefits.
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