Waiting Room, The

by Kaminsky, Leah

  The precise moment Dina drives up in front of the clinic, her mother decides it is time to remind her daughter of the most awful story of her wartime experiences.

  ‘I’ve told you about the selection before, haven’t I?’

  The closest spots are all taken. Dina swings around and parks directly opposite the clinic, on the other side of the road, hoping to dash out of the car before her mother’s saga begins. In the mirror, she sees her mother light up another Craven A with the smouldering end of a cigarette. From the time Dina was a young child her mother has always been a virtuoso of the gruesome horror tale, never letting up with the telling.

  ‘You need to know these things, Dina,’ she says. ‘Sometimes we make choices we have to live with for the rest of our lives, even though at the time it may have seemed there was no alternative. Dry leaves fly the highest.’

  It’s too late for Dina to escape. Her mother is already on a roll. Despite having heard this aphorism about dry leaves so many times before, Dina still can’t quite decipher its meaning. Her mother has always been obsessed by the image. Was she implying that those without moral fibre were the ones cunning enough to survive the war, blown by an ill wind high above the dead and dying? Was there some dark secret her mother had kept from her – had she been forced to do something horrid in order to survive? And why the hell bring this up again now?

  ‘We were standing in a line, on a vast platform.’

  ‘Not now, mother. I have to get back to work.’

  ‘Women and children on one side, separated from the men.’

  ‘We can talk about this later.’ Dina pulls the key out of the ignition. She unlocks the driver’s door, ready to get out.

  ‘I was eighteen years old. My mother was forty-two.’

  Dina turns to look at her mother in the back seat of the car. Her body seems to be fading away little by little.

  ‘When we stepped off the train my mother was ordered to place her bag on a pile with everyone else’s luggage. She quickly snatched a scrap of red crepe paper from the inside pocket and rubbed it on my cheeks like rouge. We moved forward slowly until we reached the front of the line. An SS doctor in a white coat stood before us, whistling cheerily and smiling; his arms outstretched flamboyantly like a welcoming angel. He looked at both of us for a moment, then motioned for me to step forward. He was well groomed, boots polished, not a hair out of place. His face not unpleasant, his hat tilted rakishly to one side.

  ‘“Hallo, schönes Kind,” he said. “You are quite beautiful, my child. Wouldn’t you like to stay here with me?” He saw me look across at my mother. “You can go with her if you want, but I will let you in on a little secret first.” He lowered his voice to a gentle whisper, bringing his lips closer to my ear. “See those women and children I’ve sent over to that side?” He flicked the cane he held in his gloved hand to the left side of the platform. “They will all be dead before dawn. Your mother will be with them. But you, my little angel, I am giving a choice. You can step to the right and live.”

  ‘I glanced at my mother, knowing that one moment’s hesitation would cost me my life. In that last look she gave me, I saw what it is to love your child. Standing there shivering, instantly grown old, my mother’s eyes were already darkened by the knowledge she was about to die. But there was a faint light in them, imploring me to live. I stepped to the right and never saw her again.’

  Dina’s mother pauses and drags on her cigarette, the ash falling onto her lap. Dina rewinds the scene in her head and replays it in slow motion, searching for clues that might help her understand the woman who bore her. She imagines that moment where her mother is poised between life and death. In that instant when she chose to live, something inside her died. Dina wonders if that was when her mother became one of those dry leaves she spoke of.

  Dina was there, behind the scenes – waiting, suspended in time – staring out with unborn eyes at her grandmother’s face. Dina might have called out if she could, told her grandmother she loved her, but her mother was already walking away towards the rest of her life, towards the day Dina would be born.

  Dina catches a glimpse of her reflection in the rear-view mirror again. Her mother is a half shadow, just visible behind her. Dina has been hoping to find her through the mists of years that have hurtled past. ‘I wanted to save you, Mother. I tried to make your story our story.’

  Her mother’s eyes have clouded over.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to be your light, to fill the darkness,’ Dina says. How can she tell her that stepping to the right was not in vain? ‘Can’t you see you were stepping towards me? You didn’t abandon your own mother – you chose me instead of her. I could never save your life, Mother, but in a strange way, you saved mine.’

  Around the time of her eighteenth birthday, Dina wished her mother would die. She wanted freedom from history and despair, from ghosts and guilt. Dina thought it could be the best present ever. Winter had almost arrived. The trees in the garden barely hung onto their leaves. The sun rose, staining the day with its benign indifference. Dina’s mother could not get out of bed that morning, her pain walled off inside her body like a vast sea; stillness its only language.

  Most nights that week, just before Dina fell asleep, she thought she heard her mother singing softly in the bedroom across the hall. Dina imagined tiptoeing in, wearing night-vision goggles, to find her mother dancing around the room, glowing luminous green in the dark. But then dawn would come and Dina would find her lying on her side, barely moving.

  That morning, Dina carried in a tarnished, silver tray. On it rested a plate with toast cut into triangles, thinly spread with plum jam. The floral patterned teacup clinked as Dina padded across the carpet towards the bed. Her mother was only eating one small meal a day now. It was a simple ritual each morning, which Dina prepared just before leaving for school. Her mother would lie there on the bed, facing the centre of the room. Dina liked to think her mother was waiting for her.

  She placed the tray on the bedside table and reached across to hold her mother’s hand. Their eyes met, and Dina’s mother stared at her as though she were a stranger. She pulled her hand away in fright.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Dina said, passing her an embroidered napkin.

  Her mother’s face looked pale in the shadowy morning light.

  ‘Your toast is getting cold.’ Dina helped her sit up.

  Her mother drew in a breath, her chest rising. Her dressing-gown was stained with cigarette burns.

  ‘You’ve got to eat something.’

  Her mother glanced around the room. Dina held a toast triangle in front of her. Hesitating for a moment, she grasped it between a yellowed forefinger and thumb. The curtains flapped, gently inhaling and exhaling a draught of cold air that crept through the cracks in the wooden window frame. Her mother took a small bite of toast and placed it back on the plate. Then she thrust her arm across the bedside table, reaching for a cigarette and some matches, almost toppling over the teacup. She trembled as she brought the cigarette to her lips and struck a match repeatedly on the box. Dina helped her light up.

  She dragged on the cigarette. ‘We weren’t his only family.’

  Dina cleared her throat, stifling a cough. ‘None of that matters now, Mother.’

  ‘If there hadn’t been a war he would never have married me and you would never have been born. He loved them more than us.’ Her mother exhaled, godless within the walls of their house, blowing smoke clouds into the stultified air.

  That evening, Dina stared at herself in the bathroom mirror, brushing out her curls. Her mother stood beside her, watching.

  ‘You know, Hitler won the war.’

  Dina laughed. ‘Mum, you’re crazy.’ She gave her mother a peck on the cheek and led her down to the kitchen.

  In the middle of the night, her mother’s heart stopped beating, the past finally engulfing her. Dina found her dead on the kitchen floor, an empty box of pills by her side, a black-and-white photo clutched in her stiffen
ed hand. It was the one that her mother had kept hidden away in the wardrobe all those years; the photo of her father’s first family that Dina secretly stumbled across when she was a child.

  Dina also stepped to the right, in the same way her mother had done all those years ago in the selection line at Auschwitz, each of them choosing to abandon her own mother for the possibility of a future. Dina was never able to save her mother from the ghosts. Instead, wracked with guilt, she went on to try and save the rest of the world – the broken, the downtrodden, the sick and the poor – tending to them all. Maybe she was trying to make amends for that doctor on the ramp at Auschwitz all those years ago, who pointed left or right as mindlessly as a traffic cop.

  Dina made her choice the night her mother took that bottle of pills. Seeing her seated at the Laminex kitchen table, Dina decided to walk away from the stench of death, the medicine cupboard, the doctors who did not know how to piece together a life that had been shattered like glass into a million shards.

  Her mother has become quiet, almost motionless now in the back of the car, a calm smile on her face.

  ‘I remember you sitting in the kitchen the evening you died,’ Dina says.

  ‘I was also eighteen when I lost my mother.’

  Dina had offered her a cup of tea. Her mother didn’t reply. She was somewhere else – the place she always went to when she became depressed. Dina stood her up, dragged her slowly along the dark corridor and laid her down on the bed. Her mother followed instructions like a young child as Dina undressed her, pulling her nightgown over her head.

  ‘You will leave me,’ her mother whispered.

  ‘I’d never do that. I’m right here.’

  ‘You will choose,’ she said, closing her eyes.

  Dina turned off the light. Her mother’s words sank further and further into the darkness of the bedroom. Her fingers searched for her daughter. Dina kissed the back of her hand and went to bed.

  In the early hours of morning, while Dina slept, her mother must have woken and gone quietly back down to the kitchen.

  Dina shoves the key into her bag and gets out of the car.

  ‘I have to go back to the clinic,’ she says, leaning in to say goodbye to her mother.

  Her mother’s ghost is barely there, her outline just visible against the upholstery. She stares at Dina. Dina closes the door but doesn’t lock it. She stands on the kerb, waiting for a car to pass. Rubbing her belly as the baby kicks, she is about to step out onto the road when she hears her mother calling her back.

  ‘What do you want now?’ Dina asks impatiently, opening the driver’s door again.

  Her mother is nowhere to be seen, but Dina hears her disembodied voice. ‘You forgot something.’

  The shoes are lying abandoned on the passenger seat. Dina reaches over awkwardly to grab them and slips them on.

  ‘One more thing, Dina,’ her mother says, her words growing distant and faint.

  ‘Can’t it wait, Mother?’

  ‘I’m just curious to know what would you have done if you were in my shoes?’

  In an instant, a flash. And then the blast. An ear-piercing, popping sound. Windows shatter, then everything goes quiet. There is no screaming. No signs of struggle. The row of cars parked across the road, right in front of the clinic, are blackened. A man is lying face-down on the ground. He gets up slowly. Blood covers his shirt. Several bodies lie motionless around him.

  Dina’s legs crumple under her. The air is as thick as metal. Her head feels like it is exploding from within: ears ringing, her brow glistening with sweat. She hears voices, starting up low, calling to her to come. The rest will do you good, they say, getting louder. We love you more than the living. It would be so simple to float up. To cast off the weight of the sick and the dead. So much easier to let go.

  Dina looks up at the scene gradually evolving in front of her. A ZAKA volunteer is first to arrive on his scooter. Soon, sirens begin to invade the heavy silence, followed by the screams of people writhing on the street, police officers yelling into phones, paramedics carrying stretchers, firemen reeling out their hoses. She should rush over and tell them she is a doctor, help out with the injured, but instead she sits on the kerb, watching black smoke pour out of the blown-out windows of her clinic. She cannot move. Everything has become frozen in time; past, present and future imploding.

  She knows she will probably gather the strength soon to get up and make herself known to the emergency crew. She will don her professional persona like a well-trained actor, strutting around performing her saviour role. Instead, she sits and watches the chaos unfurl. She imagines outlines of Eitan and Shlomi – the most important living, breathing people in her life – float off into the fetid, dusty air. Two ghost-like wisps of dissolving love.

  ‘I’ll tell you the answer, Dina,’ she hears her mother whisper. ‘If you had been in my shoes, there in that line instead of me, you would have done exactly what I did. You would have stepped to the right. Because the only person you can ever truly save is yourself.’

  CHAPTER 12

  Evening

  A man wearing pyjamas enters Dina’s hospital room and stands barefoot beside her bed. Tucked under his left arm he holds a shoebox labelled ‘EMPTY’. His hands tremble.

  ‘Sit down, please,’ Dina says. He looks familiar, but Dina’s mind feels blurry and she can’t quite figure out who he might be.

  He lowers himself slowly into a chair. A tuft of yellow hair rises like a crest from the top of his head. In the semi-darkness, he looks like a strange young animal that escaped from its cage. She waits for him to explain what he is doing here, but he dozes off for a while. He looks so tired she doesn’t have the heart to wake him. Suddenly, the room fills up with hundreds of tiny eyes. They are all staring at Dina. More appear on the ceiling and along the walls. They are all different colours: blue, grey, hazel, some bloodshot, some squinting to see, cloudy and almost blind, but they all watch her steadily, unblinking. They pile on top of one another, pair after pair, peering out from the darkness.

  ‘Do you have something to say?’ she asks the man in pyjamas. Except for the bird-like crest, his hair is slicked down.

  ‘I am sorry I interrupted your sleep,’ he says, opening his eyes, ‘but they are waiting outside. I must hurry.’

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ she asks, trying to put him at ease.

  There are some glasses and a jug on the bedside table.

  ‘Yes,’ he murmurs. ‘Of course.’

  Dina reaches over to pour some water for him and the eyes swim aside like a school of fish, surrounding her in every direction. She hears strange voices, muffled whispering.

  The voices come closer and seem to speak directly to the man in pyjamas. ‘Not tonight.’ The eyes have no mouths and yet they speak.

  ‘What do they want?’ Dina asks him.

  ‘I don’t know. They follow me everywhere.’

  He opens his shoebox and reaches in, pulling out half a cigarette.

  ‘Do you have a match?’ he asks.

  ‘You shouldn’t smoke in here.’

  He twirls the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and gently places it back inside the box.

  ‘Why not? You aren’t pregnant.’

  There are eyes everywhere now; it has turned as bright as daylight in the room. Suddenly, he pounds the table with his fist, upsetting his glass.

  ‘Who can put up with it?’ he shouts and then slumps back into his chair, gazing down at his lap. He is a gaunt, beardless man; hard to say how old. He starts singing softly, rocking his body to-and-fro. Dina recognises the Yiddish lullaby her father used to sing:

  Roszinkes mit mandlen

  Shlof mein kindeleh, shlof

  Raisins and almonds

  Sleep my little child, sleep

  Diabolical, she thinks. Singing her childhood. The cheek of this man, trying to evoke her sympathy with a cheap trick.

  It must be getting late. Dina yawns loudly.

  ‘I hav
e come to remind you about love,’ he whispers.

  She waits for him to tell her more. She is eager to hear what he has to say, but at the same time wants him to leave. He clears his throat as if to continue, but then falls silent. Damn him.

  The whispering starts up again. The room begins to shrink, the walls closing in on them.

  ‘It feels like a coffin in here,’ she says.

  ‘You’re always so dramatic,’ says the man in pyjamas.

  ‘To hell with you.’ She sits up, hitting her head on something. ‘You don’t even know me!’

  ‘No need to be rude, young lady. Your mother wouldn’t approve.’

  ‘My mother? What does she have to do with this?’

  He reaches into the shoebox again, and takes out a pair of binoculars. He turns them back to front and hands them to Dina. She looks through them the wrong way around and everything seems so small and far away.

  ‘Macropsia,’ she says.

  She remembers this sensation when she was ill as a child: everything seemed so strange and distant. It scared her at the time and she called for her father, who would come and sit at the side of her bed and place a cold compress on her forehead.

  Sha. Veyn nisht. Don’t cry, he would say.

  ‘You can always see the whole, when you watch from a distance. The only thing is, the details are blurred.’

  ‘It’s called macropsia,’ Dina repeats.

  ‘I never knew it had a name. Interesting.’

  ‘It’s quite a common feeling really, especially when someone has a fever or is extremely anxious.’ She speaks as if he were a patient, sitting in her office.

  ‘Turn them around the right way.’ He points to the binoculars with a bent finger. ‘If you want a richer life, look at things close up.’

  She is fed up with his riddles, tired of his ramblings.

  ‘I don’t know why you’ve come, but it’s getting late, so if you have nothing more to tell me, I’ll say goodnight.’

  ‘You have her temper, don’t you? And her sharp tongue as well.’ He leans back in the chair, places his arms behind his head and smiles.