COUGHING CAN BE SERIOUS BUSINESS, but usually it appears to be non-profit, especially with dry coughs. As a kid (in Daruvar, Croatia), I was an avid cougher, but the gravity of the attention I was getting irked me, and so I attempted to turn coughing into a silly enterprise. A friend of mine and I, while we had chronic bronchitis when we were both around twelve, competed in the loudness of coughing.
At the beginning of the winter, I had wanted to deny that my bronchitis was full-fledged again, so I suppressed my cough. I tried to breathe soundlessly, but occasionally a rumble voiced itself in my throat and I wheezed. At night I coughed through the pillow to muffle the sound. I grew tired of hiding the cough and of being ashamed of it; not only did I cough freely afterward, I added as much volume and sound to my cough as I could to sound impressive. My friend Damir did likewise; by our explosive coughs we could recognize each other’s presence from the opposite ends of our huge school, a palace which had belonged to Count Jankovics in the nineteenth century—a massive building with walls four feet thick. The dark attic allowed cylindrical shafts of dust, haze and sunshine to spread through many oval windows—holes for cannons. The dank basement hid a winery, with mostly white wines in large oak barrels. Our education took place with wine fumes rising through the floorboards (you can’t question the sound foundation of our knowledge).
Damir and I hacked. We expectorated rasping sounds from our lungs and throats; now that was a different art from plain coughing. Here, you strictly controlled the rough sound, letting it vibrate deep in the throat. Without good bronchitis, you can’t do it. The bronchitis gave us low sounds as though our voices had mutated into sonorous masculine basses. We roared from the opposite ends of the school corridors. Now, several thugs from higher grades didn’t like our civilized game, and they knuckled Damir on the head, which didn’t prevent him from proudly hacking again. They never bothered me since I had an undeserved reputation of being a thug myself. Or perhaps the thugs had tacitly declared him a winner of our contest for loudness, and that was his reward, while my hacking wasn’t loud enough to elicit recognition and (dis)respect. Actually, it was loud, and it hurt my already sore throat, but I didn’t want to lose even if that meant bleeding.
Damir bassooned from acoustically sound spots. He’d stand on the stairway descending into the town and announce his illness haughtily, as though to say, I can be sicker than any of you, and I like it, unlike you timid people who rush to doctors. Hearing him from the town center, three blocks away, while he roostered like that, was possible only when we were snowed under. Not that many cars drove in the town at that time, but enough, and mostly loud ones, hacking in their ways and emitting diesel clouds, so that you couldn’t hear shouts from the opposite side of the street. When snow covered Daruvar, peasants, who were usually chased off the roads by city-slicker cars, rode in horse-pulled sleds, and they used bells to make sure not to run you over. One old man in particular liked to ride on snowy days with his mules. He couldn’t afford real horses. Nevertheless, he proudly cracked his whip over the mules’ heads but never hit their hides. With his white beard and red face he looked like a gaunt Santa out of employment; Santa who had never tasted salmon. I hitched to his cart and sledded on a tray. For some reason, the old man counted as one of the town fools, and we kids loved our fools and followed them all around, in the hopes of hearing and seeing something hilariously odd. I think this old man, Kovacevic, had an aura of total independence and originality, which made him strikingly attractive to boys. Probably in the States such a following of boys would be inadmissible for the simplistic interpretation that there was a pedophile in question. The old man actually guarded himself against boys, who would sometimes out of sheer cruelty throw iced snowballs at him. Later on, since he grew deaf and still lived in his old-world mind, he walked across the road, and a truck killed him. Anyway, when the old man wasn’t cracking his whip and ringing, and Damir did his bit, I heard him. He had driven his bronchitis to new heights, to performance art.
Aside from such contests and the uses to which we put the acquired skill at home (to persuade our parents to allow us to skip school and stay in bed drinking tea with honey and reading westerns), bronchitis was not fun. Coughing hard for nearly half an hour at a time produced sweat even though I had no fever; I would sweat from the sheer labor of coughing, and since the fire would die in the Dutch stove before dawn, I would shiver from being sweaty in a chilly room, so it felt as though I had a high fever. In a renewed bout of coughing, with my eyes closed, I would see light pricks, a simulation of the heavenly firmament, and at points it seemed to me that if I went on, I would see celestial spaces chronically, for good. And on rare occasions, I did have a fever.
Yet, during the day, when there was enough heat, coughing made me feel good, alert, and once the big bouts were over, I wondered why people fussed about it. Bronchitis was not an illness, as far as I was concerned. I was used to it, and I knew how to deal with it, the way I had got used to dental pain. I had a bad dentist, who required numerous visits even to make one filling. First she drilled, then put medicine in and a temporary filling to cure the tooth, and on and on that would drag, and I got used to the administration of pain and wondered why people made a big deal about going to a dentist. And that they fussed and gave me thermometers when I coughed, and sometimes even took me to get an X-ray, seemed to be absurd. Of course, it was my fault that they took me to the hospital for an examination. Namely, though I had no fever, I stuck the thermometer into tea until it read a respectable 41 degrees Celsius, just to make sure to get a day off from school. I had no idea how worrisome this combination of cough and fever was to my family.
My brother, who was a doctor, took me to a hospital. He was going there anyhow, he said. In the courtyard, we passed by a fenced-off section where a dozen extremely thin men strolled listlessly. Some of them spat, others coughed. It was not an impressive cough, nothing hale and vigorous like Damir’s, but a muffled, reluctant, exhausted cough. The men wore striped pajamas and slippers. The sight of them, and their sunken inflamed eyes, terrified me. What’s wrong with them? I asked my brother.
Oh, they are TB sufferers.
Will they die?
By the look of them, some of them will. Most will pull through, though.
Since the hospital was saving money, the X-rays were not printed on film, but done on sight. The radiologist was not satisfied with one look. So he took another, and another, pushing me back against the chilly board, and darkening the room. I had an impression of pain in my chest after three rounds of prolonged radiation. The radiologist said the lungs looked all right, some scar tissue was visible, but nothing to worry about.
Naturally, at the hospital I had no fever, so we went back home.
Scars from what? I asked my brother.
Some people just have those, and they mean nothing. It’s natural.
We passed by the feeble men. I wondered why there weren’t any women or children, and I asked, Do only men get TB?
No, anybody can.
No matter how much I coughed now, this was the only trip I could get out of it, to the hospital and back. I remembered that several years back, when my father was alive, coughing could be more productive. Then I did have fevers, nightmares. In the middle of one night I screamed out, Bonica. I pronounced Bolnica (hospital) like a toddler would. When the members of the family awoke, they laughed at my pronunciation of the hospital. But after that winter and spring, when my cough subsided a little but didn’t go away, my father took me into the Julian Alps, the southern Alps in Slovenia, to expose me to clean air. He gave a few colorful bank notes to the hosts, and after drinking tea with them, told me to get well and walked to the train station. The ease with which he left me there reassured me.
I didn’t know people could be so jovial and relaxed. My hosts sang, went to dances, harvested, and I followed them. They took me to hike in the mountains, pick rose-hip tea, feed goats. They never seemed to quarrel, and there was no tension in the house. Once I walked into the bedroom when the daughter, who was about twenty, stood naked in front of the mirror. She was not embarrassed, yet she walked behind the mirror and then laughed at me. I was fascinated.
My cough went away, but one afternoon, the day before my father would arrive, I played with the outdoor tap water. We had no tap water at our house, and hardly anybody at the time did, so for me this was an irresistible novelty. I squirted, trying to get the neighborhood boys, but most of the water sprinkled over me. I was embarrassed that my hosts might see me so drenched. I hid in a haystack to sunbathe. But the sun quickly went away and a cold wind blew. Yet, though the hosts called for me, I kept hiding. I liked the idea of not being findable, but when the chills became too much, I walked into the house and sat by the fire. The hosts had searched all over the village for me. The following day, my father arrived to pick me up. The hosts told him how wonderfully I had spent the summer, without coughing, and I wanted to agree, so I held my breath, which grew scratchier and scratchier, to burst into a paroxysm of coughing.
My father was upset. He could barely talk on the way back in the train. I saw that my coughing displeased him, and I tried to muffle it, but that drove it only to a greater intensity. Nevertheless, this was the first and the best vacation in my life, because of which perhaps I became an ardent traveler later on. The following summer, my father, not abandoning his project to get the cough out of me, took me to the Adriatic coast, where I learned how to swim, but I loved the cold water too much, and at the end of the summer I still coughed vigorously.
Afterward, when I enrolled at school, on several occasions my teacher interrupted her lectures and stared at me. My God, you look so thin! Stand up!
I did.
You’ve got to eat more.
I eat plenty, I said.
But look at you, you are a stick! You have TB?
No, Comrade Teacher, I am fine.
How can you be fine? Just look at you.
OK, look at me, I said. So?
Don’t be brazen now, I am just trying to help you.
I sat down, angry. What kind of help was that? I felt strong and combative, and so I constantly fought other boys and grew good at it.
Anyway, my chronic bronchitis lasted until I was about fifteen. Then it went away, and I had a whole winter without it.
At a school routine examination, a TB test, I didn’t mind getting pricked in the left arm. I took pride in pain management. However, the forearm began to itch quickly afterward, and it swelled. Several hours later I had an island, a little hill, of pus with a plug half an inch or more in diameter.
What the hell does this mean? I asked my brother.
It’s a good thing. It means you have lots of TB antibodies. In other words, you can’t have TB because you have lots of white blood cells specializing in the defense against it.
I left it at that. I failed to put two and two together—that I had had TB when I was six, and that, although I recovered from it, I had not completely recovered, but was on the verge of relapsing for quite a while even though I was not contagious, or at least I imagine I was not. My bronchitis, I understood later, with the games I played: exaggerating my cough, pretending to have a fever, gave my father anxiety attacks. Two of my siblings had died before I was born, one at the age of four, one at the age of one, one from meningitis, another possibly from TB. (Two siblings of mine before the ones who died grew up fine, as did the three of us afterward, five out of seven survivors.) If I had put all that together, I would not have simulated high fever to get a day off from school. My family hid the fact of TB from me. I think they didn’t want anybody in the town to know. People were terrified of the disease in the old style as though it were plague. If my playmates knew that I hadTB, they would not have been allowed to play with me. People would have imagined that we were dirty. My father’s business, making and selling wooden shoes, could have suffered. So it’s great that they kept it a secret in the little town in which people sought ways to isolate individuals and ostracize them. We were ostracized enough for being Baptists.
But maybe it is because we were Baptists that they did not mention to me that I had weakened lungs. They relied on the strict sectarians and God to keep me away from smoking, which we considered a sin on the same level as drunkenness. And strangely enough, I did not develop a taste for smoking. I tried it, and was repulsed by it, despite the peer pressure; everybody seemed to smoke and enjoyed being cool, but for me, the smoke only meant irritation, choking, stung eyes, unpleasantly burnt bronchi.
My brother later confirmed that both my sister and I had TB one year, but that it was caught at an early stage, at which streptomycin was effective. I remember many nights of coughing, sweating, injections, shivering, glued eyelids. Sometimes my coughing gagged me. It seems to me I should remember more. I was old enough not to let the experience dissolve into vagueness, or maybe I wanted it to dissolve, who knows? My mind certainly successfully neglected the memories, but my lungs didn’t. They asked to throw out anything suspicious, and even if there was nothing suspicious in them, they went into systematic cleaning campaigns, blasting through the bronchi and potential intruders. Sometimes I felt perfectly fine, or even excellent, yet there would be this cough, perhaps not even bronchitis, but simply a habit I couldn’t quit. So as I coughed with Damir and competed, feeling exceedingly silly and delightfully superficial, I had no idea that beneath the surface of the silliness hid something serious. I was successfully kept in ignorance, free to irritate and worry all those around me with my obnoxious tendency to indulge in the coughing pastime.
Now, thanks to modern medicine, this is a short essay; otherwise, it would perhaps be longer, or perhaps it wouldn’t be at all since I would not have lived to write it. I am done with the disease, except to think of it vaguely. What luxury. At least that is what I hope. Recently, however, I read in a book about TB that childhood tuberculosis can recur in old age when the immune system is seriously debilitated. Not that I want to imagine it, but the thought does visit me that if I get extremely weakened, I can guess what will get me. Especially now, it’s clear that the bacillus can mutate, and there are strains of it that are multi-drug resistant. Modern medicine has conquered the disease for the time being, but medicine has been around barely a couple of millennia, and we as a species, depending on how we look at ourselves, around a million years at best, and the bacillus may be as old as three billion years. So, who is the better survivor? Well, this comparative question makes me clear my throat.