... He kept quiet about the raw human heart he’d had to eat so that his daughter wouldn’t. But then that had happened in a dream, and dreams don’t count.



http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/08/31/090831fi_fiction_petrushevskaya



The Fountain House

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya August 31, 2009



There once lived a girl who was killed, then brought back to life. That is, her parents were told that she was dead, but they weren’t allowed to keep her body. (The family had been riding the bus together; the girl was standing up front at the time of the explosion, and her parents were sitting behind her.) The girl was just fifteen, and she was thrown backward by the blast.



While the parents waited for the ambulance, and while the dead were being separated from the wounded, the father held his daughter in his arms, though it was clear by then that she was dead; the doctor at the scene confirmed this. But the body still had to be taken away, so the parents climbed into the ambulance with their daughter and rode with her to the hospital morgue.



She seemed to be alive, as she lay on the stretcher, but she had no pulse, nor was she breathing. Her parents were told to go home, but they wouldn’t; they wanted to wait for the body, though procedures still had to be followed—the autopsy performed and the cause of death determined.



The father, who was desperate with grief, and who was also a deeply religious man, decided to steal his daughter’s body. He took his wife, who was barely conscious, home, endured a conversation with his mother-in-law, woke up a neighbor, who was a nurse, and borrowed a white hospital coat. Then he took all the money in the house and went to the nearest hospital, where he hired an empty ambulance (it was two in the morning), and, with a stretcher and a young paramedic, whom he’d bribed, drove to the hospital where his daughter was, walked past the guard and down the stairs to the basement corridor, and entered the morgue. There was no one there. Quickly he found his daughter and, with the paramedic’s help, put her on the stretcher, called down the service elevator, and took her to the intensive-care unit on the third floor. The father had studied the layout of the hospital earlier, while he and his wife waited for the body.



He let the paramedic go. After a brief negotiation with the doctor on duty, he handed over his money, and the doctor admitted the girl to the intensive-care unit.



Although the girl was not accompanied by a medical history, the doctor could see perfectly well that she was dead. But he badly needed the money: his wife had just given birth (also to a daughter), and his nerves were on edge. His mother hated his wife, and they took turns crying, and the child cried, too, and now on top of all this he had been assigned exclusively night shifts. The sum that this (clearly insane) father had offered him to revive his dead princess was enough for half a year’s rent on a separate apartment for his own little family.



This was why the doctor began to work on the girl as if she were still alive, but, since the father was determined not to leave her side, he did request that the man change into a hospital gown and occupy the cot next to his daughter.



The girl lay there, as white as marble; she was beautiful. The father, sitting on his cot, stared at her like a madman. One of his eyes seemed out of focus, and it was only with difficulty, in fact, that he was able to open his eyes at all.



The doctor, having observed this for a while, asked the nurse to administer a cardiogram, and then quickly gave his new patient a shot of a tranquillizer. The father fell asleep. The girl continued to lie there like Sleeping Beauty, hooked up to her various machines. The doctor fussed around her, doing all he could, even though there was no longer someone watching him with a crazy unfocussed eye. In truth, this young doctor was a fanatic of his profession—there was nothing more important to him than a challenging case, than a person, no matter who it was, on the brink of death.



The father slept, and in his dream he met his daughter—he went to visit her, as he used to visit her at summer camp. He prepared some food—a sandwich, that was all. He got on the bus—another bus—on a fine summer evening, somewhere near the Sokol metro station, and rode it to the paradisiacal spot where his daughter was staying. In the fields, amid soft green hills, he found an enormous gray house with arched gates reaching to the sky, and, when he walked through these giant gates into the garden, there, in an emerald clearing, he saw a fountain, as tall as the house, with one tight jet of water that cascaded at the top into a glistening crown. The sun was setting slowly in the distance, and the father walked happily across the lawn to the entrance, to the right of the gate, and took the stairs up to a high floor, to the apartment where his daughter was. She seemed a little embarrassed when she greeted him, as if he had interrupted her. She stood there, looking away from him—as if she had her own, private life here, which had nothing to do with him anymore, a life that was none of his business.



The place had high ceilings and wide windows, and it faced south, overlooking the fountain, which was illuminated by the setting sun.



“I brought you a sandwich, the kind you like,” the father said.



He went over to a table by the window, put his little package down, paused for a moment, and then unwrapped it. There lay his sandwich, with its two slices of cheap black bread. He wanted to show his daughter that there was a patty inside, so he separated the bread slices. But between them he saw—and right away he knew what it was—a raw human heart. The father was terrified that the heart had not been cooked, that the sandwich was inedible, and he quickly wrapped the sandwich up again. Turning to his daughter, he said awkwardly, “I mixed up the sandwiches. I’ll bring you another one.”



But his daughter now came over and began looking at the sandwich with a strange expression on her face. The father tried to hide the little bag in his pocket and cover it with his hands, so that his daughter couldn’t take it.



She stood next to him, with her head bowed, and reached out her hand. “Give me the sandwich, Papa. I’m really hungry.”



“You can’t eat this filth.”



“Give it to me,” she said ponderously.



She was reaching toward his pocket—all of a sudden her arm was amazingly long—and the father understood that if his daughter ate this sandwich she would die.



Turning away, he took out the sandwich and quickly ate the raw heart himself. Immediately, his mouth filled with blood. He ate the black bread with the blood.



And now I will die, he thought. I’m glad, at least, that I will go first.



“Can you hear me? Open your eyes!” someone said.



The father managed to open his eyes and saw, as if through a fog, the doctor’s blurry face.



“I can hear you,” he said.



“What’s your blood type?”



“The same as my daughter’s.”



“Are you sure?”



“I’m sure.”



They carted him away, tied up his left arm, and stuck a needle in it.



“How is she?” the father asked.



“In what sense,” the doctor said, concentrating on his work.



“Is she alive?”



“What d’you think,” the doctor grumbled.



“She’s alive?”



“Lie down, lie down,” the wonderful doctor insisted.



The father lay there—nearby he could hear someone breathing heavily—and began to cry.



Then they were working on him, and he was carted off again, and again he was surrounded by green fields, but this time he was woken by a noise: his daughter, on the cot next to him, was breathing in a terribly screechy way, as if she couldn’t get enough air. Her father watched her. Her face was white, her mouth open. A tube carried blood from his arm to hers. He felt relieved, and tried to hurry the flow of blood—he wanted all of it to pour into his child. He wanted to die so that she could live.



Once again he found himself inside the apartment in the enormous gray house. His daughter wasn’t there. Quietly he went to look for her, and searched in all the corners of the dazzling apartment with its many windows, but he could find no living being. He sat on the sofa, then lay down on it. He felt content, as if his daughter were already off living somewhere on her own, in comfort and joy, and he could afford to take a break. He began (in his dream) to fall asleep, and now his daughter suddenly appeared. She spun into the room like a whirlwind, a tornado, howling, shaking everything around her, and then sank her nails into the crook of his right arm, breaking the skin. He felt a sharp pain, yelled out in terror, and opened his eyes. The doctor had just given him a shot.



His daughter lay next to him, breathing heavily, but no longer making that awful screeching noise. The father raised himself up on an elbow, saw that his left arm was free of the tourniquet, and bandaged, and turned to the doctor.



“Doctor, I need to make a phone call.”



“What phone call?” the doctor answered. “It’s too early for phone calls. You stay still, or else I’m going to start losing you, too. . . .”



But, before leaving, he lent the father his cell phone, and the father called home. No one answered. His wife and his mother-in-law must have woken up early and gone to the morgue and now would be running around, confused, not knowing where the girl’s body was.



The girl was already better, though she had not yet regained consciousness. The father tried to stay near her in intensive care, pretending that he himself was dying. The night doctor had gone, and the poor father had no money left, but they gave him a cardiogram anyway, and kept him there—apparently the night doctor had managed to speak with someone. Either that or there really was something wrong with his heart.



The father considered what to do. He couldn’t go downstairs. They wouldn’t let him call home. He was surrounded by strangers, and they were all busy. He thought about what his two women were going through now, his “girls,” as he called them—his wife and his mother-in-law. His heart was in great pain. They had put him on a drip, just like his daughter.



He fell asleep, and when he awoke his daughter was no longer there.



“Nurse, where is the girl who was here before?” he said.



“What’s it to you?”



“I’m her father, that’s what. Where is she?”



“They took her into the operating room. Don’t worry, and don’t get up. You can’t yet.”



“What’s wrong with her?”



“I don’t know.”



“Dear nurse, please call the doctor!”



“He’s busy.”



An old man was moaning nearby. Next to the father a resident was putting an old woman through some procedures, all the while addressing her loudly and jocularly, as if she were the village idiot: “Well, Grandma, how about some soup?” Pause. “What kind of soup do we like?”



“Mm,” the old woman groaned in a kind of nonhuman, metallic voice.



“How about some mushroom soup?” Pause. “With some mushrooms, eh? Have you tried the mushroom soup?”



Suddenly the old woman answered in her deep robotic bass. “Mushrooms—with macaroni.”



“There you go!” the resident cried out.



The father lay there, thinking about his daughter being operated on. Somewhere his wife was waiting, half mad with grief, his mother-in-law next to her fretting. . . . A young doctor checked on him and gave him another shot, and he fell asleep again.



In the evening he got up and, barefoot, just as he was, in his hospital gown, walked out. He reached the stairs unnoticed and began descending the cold stone steps, like a ghost. He went down to the basement corridor and followed the arrows to the morgue. A man in a white coat called out to him, “What are you doing here, patient?”



“I’m from the morgue,” the father said. “I got lost.”



“What do you mean, from the morgue?”



“I left, but my documents are still there. I want to go back, but I can’t find it.”



“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re saying,” the white coat said, taking him by the arm and escorting him down the corridor. And then finally he asked, “You what? You got up?”



“I came to life, and there was no one around, so I started walking, and then I decided I should come back, so they could note that I was leaving.”



“Wonderful!” his escort said.



They reached the morgue, and were greeted there by the curses of the attendant on duty. The father heard him out and said, “My daughter is here, too. She was supposed to come here after her operation.” He told the man his daughter’s name.



“I tell you she’s not here, she’s not here! They’re all driving me crazy! They were looking for her this morning! She’s not here! They’re driving everyone nuts! And this one’s a mental patient! Did you run off from a nuthouse, eh? Where’d he come from?”



“He was just wandering around,” the white coat answered.



“We should get the guard,” the attendant said and started cursing again.



“Let me call home,” the father said. “I just remembered—I was in intensive care on the third floor. My memory is all confused; I came here after the explosion on Tverskaya.”



Here the white coats went quiet. The explosion on the bus on Tverskaya had happened the day before. They took him, shivering and barefoot, to a desk with a telephone.



His wife picked up and immediately burst into tears.



“You! You! Where have you been! They took her body—we don’t know where! And you’re running around! There’s no money in the house! We don’t even have enough for a taxi! Did you take all the money?”



“I was—I was unconscious. I ended up in the hospital, in intensive care.”



“Which one? Where?”



“The same one where she was.”



“Where is she? Where?” His wife howled.



“I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m all undressed—bring me my things. I’m standing here in the morgue. I’m barefoot. Which hospital is this?” he asked the white coat.



“How’d you end up there?” his wife said, still weeping. “I don’t understand.”



He handed the phone to the white coat, who calmly spoke the address into it, as if nothing at all strange were happening, and then hung up.



The morgue attendant brought him a robe and some old, ragged slippers—taking pity finally on this rare living person who had entered his department—and directed him to the guard post at the hospital door.



His wife and his mother-in-law arrived there with identically puffy, aged faces. They dressed the father, put shoes on him, hugged him, and heard him out, crying happily, and then all together they sat in the waiting room, because they had been told that the girl had made it through her operation and was recovering, and that her condition was no longer critical.



Two weeks later, she was up again, walking. The father walked with her through the hospital corridors, the whole time repeating that she had been alive after the explosion—she had just been in shock, just in shock. No one else had noticed, but he’d known right away.



He kept quiet about the raw human heart he’d had to eat so that his daughter wouldn’t. But then that had happened in a dream, and dreams don’t count. ♦



(Translated, from the Russian, by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers.)