First, I made friends with the neighbors in my hospital ward. There were four of us. Sveta had both her legs in plaster, the result of a car accident, as I found out later. The driver turned out to be a decent man, and brought her to the hospital. He was paying for the necessary medicines, and even came to visit her.
Galia had been given a thrashing by her drunken husband. Doctors suspected concussion, so decided not to take any chances with that, and to keep her in the hospital as long as possible. Moreover, it was a nice opportunity for her husband to feel what it was like to live without borsch and a woman’s love and care. He must have realized, one hundred percent, how hard it was, because he came to visit her five times a day, often bringing an apple or candy, and each time he swore until he was blind that this was the very last time he would drink vodka. Naive. But kind to Galia in her convalescence.
My third neighbor was Maria Vasilievna. Sveta called her Grandma Maria; Galia, Aunt Maria. I could not use any of the nicknames. They were so simple, while she looked so smart and intelligent. She was about eighty, and was here with a broken arm. Most of all I was struck by her eyes. She looked deep into your soul so attentively, I would say, tenaciously but kindly at the same time.
She looked at me with sympathy and interest. Well, everyone looked at me with interest, some with compassion. After all, I had made the whole village talk about me. I was a kind of local celebrity to them now.
I was still going over and over the past days, especially the first four, and was surprised that my memory did not catch a single instance of Aleksei’s presence. What about Vova? Did Aleksei really not come to see me? Not even once? No, this couldn’t be true. Probably I was asleep, I was on pain pills; of course I didn’t remember! We had lived together for almost seventeen years, he wouldn’t abandon me like this, defenseless, incapacitated, with burned legs. But as the proverb says, “Speak of the devil.”
And I saw him. He was slowly and stealthily entering the ward. I still had fever, was in pain, and hunger of healing took away a lot of energy. He sat down at the foot of the bed, avoiding looking at me.
“How are you?”
“Not good yet. But the doctors said I would live.” I even tried to smile.
“Don’t tell me you how bad you feel, because I’m feeling worse than you!”
I couldn’t understand a single thing he was saying. My ears weren’t working. He was mumbling, his face turned away from me.
“After all, living with a cripple...”
“Why would you think that I would be a cripple?”
“Well, think about it. Your legs. And your face! Have you seen yourself in the mirror?”
I hadn’t thought about my face. But at that moment I didn’t want to look in the mirror.
“Leave,” was the only thing I managed to say, hiding the tears rolling down my cheeks. Here it was—my payback.
And he left. As it turned out, forever. Or almost forever, but it would have been better if that had been the last time I saw him. The door closed behind my ex-husband, and I, holding back my tears, exhausted with fatigue, fell into broken slumber.