"Slow Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Coetzee J. M.)

TWO

HE IS BEING rocked from side to side, transported. From afar voices reach him, a hubbub rising and falling to a rhythm of its own. What is going on? If he were to open his eyes he would know. But he cannot do that just yet. Something is coming to him. A letter at a time, clack clack clack, a message is being typed on a rose-pink screen that trembles like water each time he blinks and is therefore quite likely his own inner eyelid. E-R-T-Y, say the letters, then F-R-I-V-O-L, then a trembling, then E, then Q-W-E-R-T-Y, on and on.

Frivole. Something like panic sweeps over him. He writhes; from the cavern within a groan wells up and bursts from his throat.

'Pain bad?' says a voice. 'Hold still.' The prick of a needle. An instant later the pain is washed away, then the panic, then consciousness itself.

He awakes in a cocoon of dead air. He tries to sit up but cannot; it is as if he were encased in concrete. Around him whiteness unrelieved: white ceiling, white sheets, white light; also a grainy whiteness like old toothpaste in which his mind seems to be coated, so that he cannot think straight and grows quite desperate. 'What is this?' he mouths or perhaps even shouts, meaning What is this that is being done to me? or What is this place where I find myself? or even What is this fate that has befallen me?

From nowhere a young woman in white appears, pauses, regards him watchfully. Out of the muddle in his head he tries to create an interrogative. Too late! With a smile and a reassuring pat on the arm that he seems strangely to hear but not feel, she moves on.

Is it serious?: if there is time for only one question, then that is what the question ought to be, though what the word serious might mean he prefers not to dwell on. But even more urgent than the question of seriousness, more urgent than the lurking question of what exactly it was that happened on Magill Road to blast him into this dead place, is the need to find his way home, shut the door behind him, sit down in familiar surroundings, recover himself.

He tries to touch the right leg, the leg that keeps sending obscure signals that it is now the wrong leg, but his hand will not budge, nothing will budge.

My clothes: perhaps that should be the innocuous preparatory question. Where are my clothes? Where are my clothes, and how serious is my situation?

The young woman floats back into his field of vision. 'Clothes,' he says, with an immense effort, raising his eyebrows as high as he can to signify urgency.

'No worries,' says the young woman, and blesses him with another of her smiles, her positively angelic smiles. 'Everything is safe, everything is taken care of. The doctor will be with you in a minute.' And indeed before a minute has passed a young man who must be the doctor referred to has materialised at her side and is murmuring in her ear.

'Paul?' says the young doctor. 'Can you hear me? Do I have the name right, Paul Rayment?'

'Yes,' he says carefully.

'Good day, Paul. You will be feeling a little fuzzy right now. That's because you have had a shot of morphine. We will be going into surgery in a short while. You took a whack, I don't know how much you remember, and it has left your leg a bit of a mess. We are going to have a look and see how much of it we can save.'

Again he arches his eyebrows. 'Save?' he tries to say.

'Save your leg,' repeats the doctor. 'We are going to have to amputate, but we will save what we can.'

Something must happen to his face at this point, because the young man does a surprising thing. He reaches out to touch his cheek, and then lets his hand rest there, cradling his old-man's head. It is the kind of thing a woman might do, a woman who loved one. The gesture embarrasses him but he cannot decently pull away.

'Will you trust me in this?' says the doctor.

Dumbly he blinks his eyes.

'Good.' He pauses. 'We don't have a choice, Paul,' he says. 'It is not one of those situations where we have a choice. Do you understand that? Do I have your consent? I am not going to ask you to sign on the dotted line, but do we have your consent to proceed? We will save what we can, but you took quite a blow, there has been a lot of damage, I can't say right now whether we can save the knee, for example. The knee has been pretty thoroughly mashed, and some of the tibia too.'

As if it knows it is being spoken of, as if these terrible words have roused it from its troubled sleep, the right leg sends him a shaft of jagged white pain. He hears his own gasp, and then the thudding of blood in his ears.

'Right,' says the young man, and pats him lightly on the cheek. 'Time to get moving.'

He awakes very much more at ease with himself. His head is clear, he is his old self (full of beans! he thinks), though pleasantly drowsy too, he could settle back into a nap at any moment. The leg that took the whack feels enormous, positively elephantine, but there is no pain.

The door opens and a nurse appears, a new, fresh face. 'Feeling better?' she says, and then quickly, 'Don't try to talk yet. Dr Hansen will be along in a while to have a chat. In the meantime there is something we need to do. So could I ask you just to relax while…'

What she needs to do while he relaxes is, it transpires, to insert a catheter. It is a nasty thing to have done to one; he is glad it is a stranger who is doing it. This is what it leads to! he berates himself. This is what it leads to if you let your attention wander for one moment! And the bicycle: what has become of the bicycle? How am I going to do the shopping now? All my fault for taking Magill Road! And he curses Magill Road, though in fact he has been cycling Magill Road for years without mishap.

What young Dr Hansen has to present to him, when he arrives, is first a quick overview of his case, to bring him up to speed, and then more specific news about his leg, some of it good, some not so good.

First, as regards his condition in general, considering what can and does happen to the human body when it is hit by a car going at speed, he can congratulate himself that it is not serious. In fact, it is so much the reverse of serious that he can count himself lucky, fortunate, blessed. The crash left him concussed, yes, but he was saved by the helmet he was wearing. Monitoring will continue, but there is no sign of intracranial bleeding. As for motor functions, the preliminary indication is that they are unimpaired. He lost some blood, but that has been replaced. If he is wondering about the stiffness of his jaw, the jaw is not broken, merely bruised. The abrasions on his back and arm look worse than they are, they will heal in a week or two.

Turning to the leg now, the leg that took the blow, he (Dr Hansen) and his colleagues were not, it turned out, able to save the knee. They had a thorough discussion, and the decision was unanimous. The impact – he will show him later on the X-ray – was directly to the knee, and there was an added component of rotation, so the joint was shattered and twisted at the same time. In a younger person they might perhaps have gone for a reconstruction, but a reconstruction of the required order would entail a whole series of operations, one after another, extending over a year, even two years, with a success rate of less than fifty per cent, so all in all, considering his age, it was thought best to take the leg off cleanly above the knee, leaving a good length of bone for a prosthesis. He (Dr Hansen) hopes he (Paul Rayment) will come to accept the wisdom of that decision.

'I am sure you have plenty of questions,' he concludes, 'and I will be happy to try to answer them, but perhaps not now, better in the morning, after you have had some sleep.'

'Prosthesis,' he says, another difficult word, though now that he understands about the jaw that is not broken, merely bruised, he is less embarrassed about difficult words.

'Prosthesis. Artificial limb. Once the surgical wound has healed we will be fitting a prosthesis. Four weeks, maybe even sooner. In no time at all you will be walking again. Riding your bicycle too, if you like. After some training. Other questions?'

He shakes his head. Why did you not ask me first? he wants to say; but if he utters the words he will lose control, he will start shouting.

'Then I'll speak to you in the morning,' says Dr Hansen. 'Chin up!'

That is not all, however. That is not the end of it. First the violation, then consent to the violation. There are papers to sign before he will be left alone, and the papers prove surprisingly difficult.

Family, for instance. Who and where are his family, the papers ask, and how should they be informed? And insurance. Who are his insurers? What cover does his policy provide?

Insurance is no problem. He is insured to the hilt, there is a card in his wallet to prove it, he is nothing if not prudent (but where is his wallet, where are his clothes?). Family is a less straightforward matter. Who are his family? What is the right answer? He has a sister. She passed on twelve years ago, but she still lives in him or with him, just as he has a mother who, at the times when she is not in or with him, awaits the angels' clarion from her plot in the cemetery in Ballarat. A father too, doing his waiting farther away, in the cemetery in Pau, from where he rarely pays visits. Are they his family, the three of them? Those into whose lives you are born do not pass away, he would like to inform whoever composed the question. You bear them with you, as you hope to be borne by those who come after you. But there is no space on the form for extended answers.

What he can be altogether more definite about is that he has neither wife nor offspring. He was married once, certainly; but the partner in that enterprise is no longer part of him. She has escaped him, wholly escaped. How she managed the trick he has yet to grasp, but it is so: she has escaped into a life of her own. For all practical purposes, therefore, and certainly for the purposes of the form, he is unmarried: unmarried, single, solitary, alone.

Family: NONE, he writes in block letters, the nurse overseeing, and draws lines through the other questions, and signs the forms, both of them. 'Date?' he demands of the nurse. 'Second of July,' she says. He writes the date. Motor functions unimpaired.

The pills he accepts are meant to blunt the pain and make him sleep, but he does not sleep. This – this strange bed, this bare room, this smell both antiseptic and faintly urinous – this is clearly no dream, it is the real thing, as real as things get. Yet the whole of today, if it is all the same day, if time still means anything, has the feel of a dream. Certainly this thing, which now for the first time he inspects under the sheet, this monstrous object swathed in white and attached to his hip, comes straight out of the land of dreams. And what about the other thing, the thing that the young man with the madly flashing glasses spoke of with such enthusiasm – when will that make its appearance? Not in all his days has he seen a naked prosthesis. The picture that comes to mind is of a wooden shaft with a barb at its head like a harpoon and rubber suckers on its three little feet. It is out of Surrealism. It is out of Dali.

He reaches out a hand (the three middle fingers are strapped together, he notices for the first time) and presses the thing in white. It gives back no sensation at all. It is like a block of wood. Just a dream, he says to himself, and falls into the deepest sleep.

'Today we're going to have you walking,' says young Dr Hansen. 'This afternoon. Not a long walk, just a few steps to give you the feel of it. Elaine and I will be there to lend a hand.' He nods to the nurse. Nurse Elaine. 'Elaine, can you set it up with Orthopaedics?'

'I don't want to walk today,' he says. He is learning to talk through clenched teeth. It is not just that the jaw is bruised, the molars on that side have been loosened too, he cannot chew. 'I don't want to be rushed. I don't want a prosthesis.'

'That's fine,' says Dr Hansen. 'It's not a prosthesis we are talking about anyway, that is still down the line, this is just rehabilitation, the first step in rehabilitation. But we can start tomorrow or the next day. Just so you can see it isn't the end of the world, losing a leg.'

'Let me say it again: I don't want a prosthesis.'

Dr Hansen and Nurse Elaine exchange glances.

'If you don't want a prosthesis, what would you prefer?'

'I would prefer to take care of myself.'

'All right, end of subject, we won't rush you into anything, I promise. Now can I talk to you about your leg? Can I tell you about care of the leg?'

Care of my leg? He is smouldering with anger – can they not see it? You anaesthetised me and hacked off my leg and dropped it in the refuse for someone to collect and toss into the fire. How can you stand there talking about care of my leg?

'We have brought the remaining muscle over the end of the bone,' Dr Hansen is saying, demonstrating with cupped hands how they did it, 'and sewn it there. Once the wound heals we want that muscle to form a pad over the bone. During the next few days, from the trauma and from the bed rest, there will be a tendency to oedema and swelling. We need to do something about that. There will also be a tendency for the muscle to retract towards the hip, like this.' He stands sideways, pokes out his behind. 'We counteract that by stretching. Stretching is very important. Elaine will show you some stretching exercises and help you if you need help.'

Nurse Elaine nods.

'Who did this to me?' he says. He cannot shout because he cannot open his jaws, but that suits him, suits his teeth-grinding rage. 'Who hit me?' There are tears in his eyes.

The nights are endless. He is too hot, he is too cold; the leg, closed in its swaddling, itches and cannot be reached. If he holds his breath he can hear the ghostly creeping of his assaulted flesh as it tries to knit itself together again. Outside the sealed window a cricket chants to itself. When sleep comes it is sudden and brief, as if gusts of leftover anaesthetic were coming up from his lungs to overwhelm him.

Night or day, time drags. There is a television set facing the bed, but he has no interest in television or in the magazines some kind agency has provided (Who. Vanity Fair. Australian Homes amp; Gardens). He stares at his watch face, imprinting the position of the hands on his mind. Then he closes his eyes, tries to think of other things – his own breathing, his grandmother sitting at the kitchen table plucking a chicken, bees among the flowers, anything. He opens his eyes. The hands have not stirred. It is as though they have to push their way through glue.

The clock stands still yet time does not. Even as he lies here he can feel time at work on him like a wasting disease, like the quicklime they pour on corpses. Time is gnawing away at him, devouring one by one the cells that make him up. His cells are going out like lights.

The pills he is given every sixth hour wash away the worst of the pain, which is good, and sometimes send him to sleep, which is better; but they also confuse his mind and bring such panic and terror to his dreams that he baulks at taking them. Pain is nothing, he tells himself, just a warning signal from the body to the brain. Pain is no more the real thing than an X-ray photograph is the real thing. But of course he is wrong. Pain is the real thing, it does not have to press hard to persuade him of that, it does not have to press at all, merely to send a flash or two; after which he quickly settles for the confusion, the bad dreams.

Someone else has been moved into his room, a man older than himself come back from hip surgery. The man lies all day with his eyes shut. Now and again a pair of nurses close the curtains around his bed and, under cover, attend to his body's needs.

Two oldsters; two old fellows in the same boat. The nurses are good, they are kind and cheery, but beneath their brisk efficiency he can detect – he is not wrong, he has seen it too often in the past – a final indifference to their fate, his and his companion's. From young Dr Hansen he feels, beneath the kindly concern, the same indifference. It is as though at some unconscious level these young people who have been assigned to care for them know they have nothing left to give to the tribe and therefore do not count. So young and yet so heartless! he cries to himself. How did I come to fall into their hands? Better for the old to tend the old, the dying the dying! And what folly to be so alone in the world!

They talk about his future, they nag him to do the exercises that will prepare him for that future, they chivvy him out of bed; but to him there is no future, the door to the future has been closed and locked. If there were a way of putting an end to himself by some purely mental act he would put an end to himself at once, without further ado. His mind is full of stories of people who bring about their own end – who methodically pay bills, write goodbye notes, burn old love letters, label keys, and then, once everything is in order, don their Sunday best and swallow down the pills they have hoarded for the occasion and settle themselves on their neatly made beds and compose their features for oblivion. Heroes all of them, unsung, unlauded. I am resolved not to be any trouble. The only matter they cannot take care of is the body they leave behind, the mound of flesh that, after a day or two, will begin to stink. If only it were possible, if only it were permitted, they would take a taxi to the crematorium, set themselves down before the fatal door, swallow their dose, then before consciousness dwindles press the button that will precipitate them into the flames and allow them to emerge on the other side as nothing but a shovelful of ash, almost weightless.

He is convinced that he would put an end to himself if he could, right now. Yet at the same time that he thinks this thought he knows he will do no such thing. It is only the pain, and the dragging, sleepless nights in this hospital, this zone of humiliation with no place to hide from the pitiless gaze of the young, that make him wish for death.

The implications of being single, solitary and alone are brought home to him most pointedly at the end of the second week of his stay in the land of whiteness.

'You don't have family?' says the night nurse, Janet, the one who allows herself banter with him. 'You don't have friends?' She screws up her nose as she speaks, as though it is a joke he is playing on them all.

'I have all the friends I could wish for,' he replies. 'I am not Robinson Crusoe. I just do not want to see any of them.'

'Seeing your friends would make you feel better,' she says. 'Give you a lift. I am sure.'

'I will receive visitors when I feel like it, thank you,' he says.

He is not irascible by nature, but in this place he allows himself spells of peevishness, tetchiness, choler, since that seems to make it easier for his minders to leave him alone. He's not so bad under the surface, he imagines Janet protesting to her colleagues. That old fart! he imagines her colleagues reply, snorting with derision.

He knows it is expected of him now that he is improving to experience gross desires towards these young women, desires which, because male patients, no matter their age, cannot help themselves, will surface at inconvenient times and must be deflected as quickly and decisively as possible.

The truth is that he has no such desires. His heart is as pure as a babe's. It wins him no credit among the nurses, of course, this purity of heart, nor does he expect it to. Being a lecherous old goat is part of the game, a game he is declining to play.

If he refuses to contact friends, it is simply because he does not want to be seen in his new, curtailed, humiliating, and humiliated state. But of course, one way or another, people get to hear of what happened. They send good wishes, they even call in person. On the telephone it is easy enough to make up a story. It's only a leg, he says, with a bitterness that he hopes does not come across on the line. I will be on crutches for a while, then on a prosthesis. In person the act is more difficult to bring off, since his detestation of the lumpish thing he will henceforth have to lug around with him is all too plainly written on his face.

From the opening of the chapter, from the incident on Magill Road to the present, he has not behaved well, has not risen to the occasion: that much is clear to him. A golden opportunity was presented to him to set an example of how one accepts with good cheer one of the bitterer blows of fate, and he has spurned it. Who did this to me?: when he recalls how he shouted at the no doubt perfectly competent though rather ordinary young Dr Hansen, seeming to mean Who drove into me? but really meaning Who had the impudence to cut off my leg?, he is suffused with shame. He is not the first person in the world to suffer an unpleasant accident, not the first old man to find himself in hospital with well-intentioned but ultimately indifferent young people going through the motions of caring for him. A leg gone: what is losing a leg, in the larger perspective? In the larger perspective, losing a leg is no more than a rehearsal for losing everything. Whom is he going to shout at when that day arrives? Whom is he going to blame?

Margaret McCord pays a visit. The McCords are his oldest friends in Adelaide; Margaret is upset at having heard so late, and full of righteous indignation against whoever did this to him. 'I hope you are going to sue,' she says. 'I have no intention of suing,' he replies. 'Too many openings for comedy. I want my leg back, failing which… I leave that side of things to the insurance people.' 'You are making a mistake,' she says: 'people who drive recklessly should be taught a lesson. I suppose they will fit you out with a prosthesis. They make such wonderful prostheses nowadays, you will soon be riding your bicycle again.' 'I don't think so,' he replies. 'That part of my life is over.' Margaret shakes her head. 'What a pity!' she says. 'What a pity!'

Sweet of her to say so, he reflects afterwards. Poor Paul, poor dear, how difficult, what you are having to go through!: that was what she meant, what she knew he would understand her to mean. We all have to go through something of this sort, he would like to remind her, in the end.

What surprises him about the whole hospital business is how swiftly concern passes from patching up his leg ('Excellent!' says Dr Hansen, probing the stump with a handsomely manicured finger. 'It is coming together beautifully. You will soon be yourself again.') to the question of how he will (their word) cope once he is set loose in the world again.

Indecently early, or so it seems to him, a social worker, Mrs Putts or Putz, is brought into the picture. 'You're still a young man, Mr Rayment, Paul,' she informs him in the cheery manner she must have been taught to employ upon the old. 'You will want to remain independent, and of course that's good, but for quite some time you are going to need nursing, specialised nursing, which we can help to arrange. In the longer term, even once you are mobile, you are going to need someone to be there for you, to give you a hand, to do the shopping and cooking and cleaning and so forth. Is there no one?'

He thinks it over, shakes his head. 'No, there is no one,' he says; by which he means – and believes Mrs Putts understands – that there is no one who will conceive it as his or her Confucian duty to devote himself or herself to caring for his wants, his cooking and cleaning and so forth.

What interests him in the question is what it reveals about his condition as viewed by Mrs Putts, who must have had franker exchanges with the medical people than have yet been afforded him, franker and more down-to-earth. From these down-to-earth exchanges she has evidently concluded that even in the longer term he will not get by without being given a hand.

In his own vision of the longer term, the vision he has been fashioning in his more equable moments, his crippled self (stark word, but why equivocate?) will somehow, with the aid of a crutch or some other support, get by in the world, more slowly than before, perhaps, but what do slow and fast matter any more? But that does not appear to be their vision. In their vision, it would seem, he is not the kind of amputee who masters his new, changed circumstances and generally copes, but the crepuscular kind, the kind who, in the absence of professional support, will end up in an institution for the aged and infirm.

If Mrs Putts were prepared to be straight with him he would be straight with her. I have given plenty of thought to coping, he would tell her. I made my preparations long ago; even if the worst comes to the very worst, I will be able to take care of myself. But the rules of the game make it hard for either of them to be straight. If he told Mrs Putts about the cache of Somnex in the cabinet in the bathroom of his flat, for instance, she might feel bound by the rules of the game to consign him to counselling to protect him from himself.

He sighs. 'From your point of view, from a professional point of view, Mrs Putts, Dorianne,' he says, 'what steps would you suggest?'

'You will need to engage a care-giver, that's for sure,' says Mrs Putts, 'preferably a private nurse, someone with experience of frail care. Not that you are frail, of course. But until you are mobile again we would not want to take chances, would we?'

'No, we would not,' he says.

Frail care. Care of the frail. He had never thought of himself as frail until he saw the X-rays. He found it hard to believe that the spider-bones revealed in the plates could keep him upright, that he could totter around without them snapping. The taller the frailer. Too tall for his own good. I've never operated on such a tall man, Dr Hansen had said, with such long legs. And had then flushed at his gaffe.

'Do you know offhand, Paul,' says Mrs Putts, 'whether your insurance stretches to frail care?'

A nurse, yet another nurse. A woman with a little white cap and sensible shoes bustling about his flat, calling out in jolly tones, Time for your pills, Mr R! No, I do not think my insurance will run to that,' he replies.

'Well then you'll have to budget for it, won't you?' says Mrs Putts.