by Susan Viets
“The wound is good, clean,” he added. He said that he would graft it with artificial skin.
“Did we do the right thing with the thumb bit?” I asked. The doctor described immersion in water as a mistake. “Don’t worry, though, it was too small to be reattached,” he added, whether out of kindness only or clinical truth I did not know.
Goran picked Louise up. I stayed with Sydney in Emergency. He lay on a medical bench that resembled a narrow operating table. I sat in a chair nearby. The doctor said that he would change the dressing on Sydney’s thumb and clean the wound. He left for a while. When he came back, he pulled curtains around the medical bench. Sydney’s feet poked out from under the curtain because he was tall.
I heard a sharp intake of breath from Sydney as the doctor worked. Then I saw his feet arch up in pain. I wanted to pull the curtains back and comfort him but knew that I could do nothing. Then Sydney’s feet went limp. What had happened? I heard the doctor calmly say, “Sydney, open your eyes. Can you hear me, Sydney?” Then medics rushed past with a large machine. I heard beeps and other noises, then saw Sydney’s feet move. A few minutes later the doctor parted the curtains.
“I’m sure you’re wondering what happened,” he said. I was.
The doctor said that Sydney had reacted badly to the anesthetic, lost consciousness and stopped breathing, so he was put on a respirator. I wanted to see him. Medical staff wheeled Sydney out on a stretcher. He looked dead or if not, then close to it. The tears that ran down the side of his face were the only sign of life. He stared up at the ceiling, his pupils the size of pinholes, and did not respond to stimulation. I felt shocked and could not speak.
“Don’t worry. He looks much worse than he is,” the doctor said.
In a daze, I followed the stretcher to the intensive care unit. I wondered about brain damage. An orderly stopped me just inside the entrance. The medical team wheeled Sydney away. The orderly gave me a surgical gown and slippers to put on. Soon the doctor returned.
“He’s talking nonsense,” he said. “Would you like to see him?” I nodded.
“Will he recover?” I asked.
“He should,” the doctor said. Why not, “he will”? Why this qualifier? My heart beat faster. My body moved slower. The doctor led me down a corridor to a bed in a cubicle where Sydney lay.
I spoke softly, stroked his shoulder, told him what had happened. He understood but forgot within seconds. I explained once more. He forgot again.
Machines hummed, someone coughed in a cubicle nearby, Sydney slept. When he woke, he said that his face, which looked normal, felt strange.
Speaking very slowly he said, “My face…feels…like…the…Oslobodjenie building.” I was so happy that he remembered Sarajevo’s hallmark of destruction. I felt hopeful now that he would recover and explained once more what had happened. This time he remembered.
He rested again. As time passed, he spoke in full sentences. At first his thoughts were random thoughts, but then we were able to have short conversations. Then he started to laugh and said, “You have tentacles coming out of your head. You look like an octopus.”
Delusions – what next? The doctor appeared. He examined Sydney, spoke with him and said that Sydney would be fine but that he could not explain the cause of his condition. I sat in the chair as Sydney rested. I thought of Goran and his scars, and wondered if this much can go wrong in peacetime, how bad had it been during the war?
The doctor returned and admitted Sydney to a ward for observation.
“He’s fine,” the doctor said. “We’ll keep him here for some tests. Then he’ll be able to go home.”
A few days later I drove Sydney home from the hospital. As we climbed the steps to our apartment, we saw the neighbour’s children and their uncle. It was nearly a year since we had arrived in Sarajevo and nearly a year since the children’s father had died. Their uncle, remembering too, told us that their father’s death had been the eleventh in the family in five years.
“Everyone else in the war. But my brother, this last one, it’s not knowing what happened that’s the worst.”
I remembered the day well. Sydney and I had just arrived in Sarajevo. We had come home one day and noticed people milling around outside the neighbour’s. Eventually we understood that someone had died, a grandparent, we both assumed.
“Ne, otac,” a woman corrected. That word, close enough to the Russian – father. Young, forty-two years old, large, strong, so healthy, we did not understand how. We entered to pay our respects. People sat on sofas and chairs or stood. Everyone drank coffee. We were offered cups of it and joined the group.
A woman who spoke English explained that our neighbour, a bus driver on the Bosnia-Germany route, had been asked, at short notice, to take a tour group to Dubrovnik instead.
“Fate,” she said. “His son heard the news on television, a report on the accident. They announced his name.” Appalled that a five-year-old should learn of his father’s death this way, I asked how he was.
“He and his mother are so traumatized they won’t talk.”
No one knew more than the information provided in the broadcast. The report said the bus had swerved several times on the steep coastal road near Dubrovnik and plunged over the edge – five people were dead, several more wounded. The accident had occurred at about 3 a.m. The bus was discovered the next morning. People at the gathering speculated that our neighbour had either fallen asleep while driving, had a heart attack or been forced to swerve to avoid a collision.
It was nice to see the children so happy now, wrestling on the ground. Sydney tickled them with his good hand, held his thickly bandaged thumb high so they would not accidentally bump it. We played for a while. We told their uncle that we would be leaving in a month, taking a holiday in Australia, Vietnam and Thailand and then returning to Canada.
“Home to be with family,” he said. “That’s where you belong.” He watched as the little boy raced up and down the steps, his sister, shy in comparison, hovered near her uncle. I crouched down and asked her, “How old are you now?” even though I already knew that she was three. She held up the right number of fingers, which inadvertently made a Serb sign that her uncle despised.
“No, never like that,” he said. He took her fingers and bent them back down. “Never ever hold your fingers up like that.” Her face dropped. She knew that she had done something wrong but did not understand what. My feelings were as confused as hers. I felt sympathy for a man who had lost so many in the war but sadness also to see hatred passed from one generation to the next.
12
THE ORANGE REVOLUTION
“It’s dark,” I said, “claustrophobic.”
“Bad karma,” Sydney replied.
We could have been discussing the state of our marriage, but really were talking about our new house in Toronto. Filled with buyer’s remorse and gloomy thoughts, we sat at the kitchen table in August 2000, surrounded by boxes. The movers had just left. Our conversation ended. I turned my chair, looked out the glass door that faced the garden and thought about the change that lay ahead. On Monday I would start a new job in communications and begin a part-time MBA; work nine to five, study at night.
Soon, I had no time for reflection. On lecture days I woke, rushed to work, left at 5 p.m., grabbed a sandwich before class, returned home at 10:30 p.m., spent half an hour with Sydney, then we went to bed. Our lives drifted further apart. We occupied separate zones in our three-bedroom house. A programmer, he spent most of his time in the basement, immersed in his world of computers. I sprawled through rooms upstairs, scattering my books across various beds. Sydney set up a server. Now, even at home, we communicated mostly through email. We developed different circles of friends. The inevitable soon occurred and we separated. I left the house the weekend Sydney moved out. I did not want to witness the final moments of our life together, the end of our marriage.
I had scoffed at the idea of self-help books. Now a pile of them towered by my bed and I
found solace between the covers. When I felt unexpectedly happy at work one day a few weeks after our separation, tears suddenly welled up in my eyes. I dove under my desk and told people who entered my cubicle that I was adjusting a network cable. I remained hidden until the tears stopped. I did not know how to manage this roller-coaster of emotions. The books said the emotions would subside. I didn’t believe it but hoped the books were right.
Selling the house helped, as did old friendships. Marta had moved back to Canada. She was a professor at a university near Toronto. We moved in together. In the evenings, we slipped into the world of Kiev. Marta taught East European history and politics. She hosted literary circles at home. I would return after late-night MBA study groups, hear the sound of Ukrainian chatter in the kitchen and feel happy that I still remembered some of the language. Months passed quickly.
I graduated from the MBA program and started a new job in an investment advisory firm that had an alternative style of analysis. This job seemed a near perfect fit. It was international but based at home and involved travel. I liked my colleagues and my work.
Marta left for a sabbatical in Ukraine. I found a new apartment. Alone for the first time in many years, I felt strangely optimistic as my self-help books said the newly divorced sometimes did. I was happy to hang on to that feeling. I still had it in November 2004, when I first saw the massive street protests in Kiev on television.
“Quick, turn the TV on,” I told my mother by phone. “You can almost see my old apartment in the background.” She had visited Kiev in 1997 and quickly recognized the place, as amazed as I was by the huge number of people crammed into Independence Square, many dressed in orange.
“What’s going on?” she asked. I wondered how to explain developments in Ukrainian politics since she had visited, especially as I did not fully understand them. A journalist named Georgiy Gongadze, who criticized the regime, had disappeared in 2000 and was presumed murdered. A presidential bodyguard defected and released tapes that implicated the president, though nothing was ever fully investigated or proved. Protests built over four years. Then a rigged election triggered this huge protest. That much I could explain to my mother.
“The current president’s term limit is up. He selected a successor candidate, Victor Yanukovych, and tried to rig the election so Yanukovych would win. When that was exposed, the protest began. All those people dressed in orange say the opposition candidate, Victor Yushchenko, really won. The protesters are fed up. They say they’re not going to accept corruption and abuse of power anymore.”
“Those two Victors, their names sound a lot alike. It’s confusing,” she said. I agreed.
I missed Marta. She was still in Kiev, living in her apartment next door to my old place. We swapped messages. A network approached me to help cover the Orange Revolution. I told Marta.
“Come, you must!” she wrote back. I thought about it as I monitored newscasts at work.
“What’s going on in Kiev?” my boss asked. He waved a newspaper with two pictures of Viktor Yushchenko, one marked “before” and one “after.”
“I can’t believe this. He was such a handsome guy, but this looks like Frankenstein,” my boss said as his finger jabbed the “after” shot. “The report said someone poisoned him. I thought that only happened in the Middle Ages,” he added. “I’m surprised they didn’t just knock him off. What have you heard?”
I only knew what I read. The deputy director of the Ukrainian Security Services had invited Yushchenko for dinner. Soon after the dinner Yushchenko fell ill. His face erupted in large, blistery bumps. His body was wracked with pain, but he still campaigned, made speeches, soldiered on.
“Yes, well, sometimes Ukraine is a strange place,” I replied, feeling oddly defensive of a country I thought of as an adopted homeland. “One state television report said Yushchenko looks like that because he has herpes; another blamed sushi.”
“Sushi? You can’t be serious.” I had to nod yes, amazed, too, by such lies. Then I told him about the network coverage offer.
“How badly do you want to go?” I dithered and turned the offer down.
After work I took the subway to the west end of the city, where Ukrainian Canadians held a rally in favour of Viktor Yushchenko. I saw orange everywhere – balloons, T-shirts, flickering candle flames – and heard the soothing murmur of Ukrainian that I now heard nowhere else. A pro-Yushchenko poster hung on one of the consulate doors.
I could not concentrate at work the next day and was quiet in the car during the commute home with colleagues. Restless, I left my apartment and walked downtown, with no particular destination in mind, but my feet took me to a travel agent’s office. Since I was there, I thought that I would ask about the price of flights to Kiev.
“It’s the last day of a seat sale on Lufthansa,” the agent told me.
I handed her my credit card and booked a non-refundable flight to Kiev.
At home, I panicked. Work deadlines loomed; I had not even formally requested time off.
“I won’t miss any of my deadlines,” I promised my boss the next day. He gave me permission to go.
I could not imagine being there and not reporting. I sent an email to the foreign news editor at the Sunday edition of my old newspaper, the Independent, and felt so excited when he replied and commissioned a feature. Signed on for Orange Revolution coverage, I telephoned Marta to let her know I would be leaving the next day.
“Stay with me,” she said. No invitation could have made me happier.
Men with gold teeth slumped on chairs in the Frankfurt Airport departure lounge. Seated first on the plane, I saw them totter down the aisle, then collapse into seats behind mine; the scent of alcohol – vodka, I thought – still lingered where they had passed. They tried to order another round before the flight took off. I checked my watch. It was 9:30 a.m. Time peeled back fourteen years.
I ate every item the flight attendants offered me, asked for seconds and worried about when food would next be available. I knew this was irrational, but the feeling was too urgent to ignore. Full for now, I reclined my seat. I thought of my father. I would land in Kiev on his birthday. His death ten years earlier triggered my decision to leave Ukraine, make my way home and abandon journalism.
I thought again of advice from my friend Roma. I had confided in her that I still fought wanderlust.
“Maybe it’s an addiction,” I said.
“Stop relying on external stimulation! Find it from within,” she insisted. I recognized the truth of this. I’d made progress but worried that my trip to Kiev might be a lapse and that I would be pulled back into my old life.
Marta met me at the airport. She had tied a small plastic orange strip to her bag and held roses in her hand, which she gave to me. We hugged.
“How great to see you,” I told her. “Just like 1991.”
“It’s so much better!” she said. “Even Yurko is interested in politics now. Wait until you see the square.”
Her apartment just about backed onto it. The din from protesters in the background when we spoke by phone had been so pronounced that I packed earplugs for both of us to help us with sleep.
Yurko, Marta’s driver, flew an orange ribbon from his car antenna. As we approached, a fellow orange supporter honked at him; he honked right back. The radio blared through Yurko’s rolled-up window glass. I heard the sound of Parliament in session. Once in the car, we honked our way through the parking lot, down the road and onto the Kiev-bound highway. “Even the border officer was nice,” I told Marta. “He smiled when he stamped my passport.”
Marta pointed out changes as we drove. Tall apartment buildings had sprouted by the highway. We flew past a large new supermarket, over a bridge that I knew well, the broad Dnipro coursing below. Yurko plotted a route that skirted closed roads. He found a back way into Marta’s courtyard. We heard chanting from protesters in Independence Square. We dropped our bags and then walked half a block into the centre of the Orange Revolution. I could not b
elieve my eyes.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” I shouted. Marta could not hear me. Rock bands played on stage. Their speakers blared. Cheers from fans filled all lulls. Marta and I linked arms and snaked our way through the crowd. I felt claustrophobic, remembering that sense of entrapment when Hungarian police in Budapest had appeared on motorcycles and fired tear gas during a demonstration.
Now, deep in this crowd, I could see no escape route. My view ahead was blocked by people’s backs. I looked up at the sky, the one place that was still an empty space. Then I looked down again and fought claustrophobia. Marta and I were swept along in a sea of people. We soon found ourselves in the centre of the square. We faced a huge stage festooned with orange decorations.
So many popular bands played. We were as excited to hear them as everyone else in the crowd. Other people wore orange hats, orange scarves, orange jackets and orange mittens. If they had no orange clothes, they wore orange garbage bags with holes cut out for their arms, or tied orange ribbons around their wrists, foreheads or necks. Young guys danced on dumpsters.
“It’s cool to be orange,” I think Marta shouted. Each syllable was a puff of steam.
I only really heard the word cool. At minus 7 degrees Celsius, she might have meant the weather. Smoke wafted up from fires in huge metal bins. People huddled around the bins with their hands stretched out. I felt ice and snow crunch underfoot. From the excited look on Marta’s face, I think I guessed right the first time, that she felt proud to see Ukrainians out in numbers like this.
We moved toward the street. I wanted to tell Marta how different this Ukraine was from the one that I had left, but she still could not hear me. I glanced over at tents that housed striking students. This tent city stretched down Khreshchatyk toward the Bessarabskyi Market and blocked all traffic. It seemed that half of Kiev filled the square. I remembered when students last camped here in 1990 and the one communications tool they had. It was that megaphone. Now digital cameras clicked and people swapped pictures and messages over cell phones. Ukraine had matured in many ways, but not in how it treated political opponents.
