CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

THROUGH THIN-LASHED WATERY EYES THE OLD MAN, UNCOMPREHENDINGLY, searched his wife’s face for a clue as to how far his illness had progressed.

“Rest now,” the old woman said and placed his hand on his chest so that he could feel his heart beating. Unwanted truths would not be spoken. Not by her. She sighed and looked away.

“He—he will be gone soon,” the nurse whispered, and the whisper itself was a prayer of sorts. She stared sympathetically at the old woman, who stared as sympathetically back. Yet it seemed to the nurse that this curiously small woman was actually taking relish in her husband’s dying.

The old woman laughed softly. “You will see,” she said, “he will get better. Much better. His illness will not exhaust him. He is inexhaustible.”

The woman paused for a moment to stare at the vase resting on the dresser which contained one red flower of monstrous size and beauty. “Like his flower,” she breathed. “Just like his flower. Inexhaustible.”

Something quickened within the old woman’s chest walls, like the spitting and crackling of fire. It was challenge. How often in life, she wondered, had she come to this point. Many times. She smiled, the room’s dazzling array of sunlight evoking tiny flickers of yellow from the draperies upon her face. Still the old woman’s face remained ghostly and without texture under the soft, dull waves of her hair. Only her eyes moved about the room with vibrance. She glanced at the hypodermic syringe, wrapped in cotton, on the nightstand.

The old man turned his head suddenly, moaned almost inaudibly. His wife nodded.

“He’s in pain,” she said without looking at the nurse. Instead she quickly moved to the bed, bent over her husband, watching intently. She studied his thin, aging face, with the deep furrows of purple under the eyes, the purplish glow of his mouth and cheeks. He appeared to be hardly breathing now. No, hardly breathing at all.

The nurse took up the syringe, shot a few drops from the tip, then plunged the needle firmly into the old man’s arm. A slight trickle of blood gushed forth as she withdrew the needle.

The old woman nodded with satisfaction as her husband seemed to instantly begin to rally; his body gave a quick jerk, his chest heaved in and out suddenly, as if in haste. Then his breathing evened out, grew more steady, more determined, as if by a hidden command from his wife. He moved his head to gaze at the nurse. Caught in the fragmented half-world between life and death, he stared in puzzlement now at the strange woman dressed in white, who hovered at his bedside.

“There!” said his wife proudly. “I told you. He’ll be just fine now, won’t you, dear heart? Just fine. Why, in a couple of hours he’ll be sitting up. Won’t you, dear? Won’t you?” she coaxed.

The nurse dabbed the blood away with alcohol and cotton, after which, she placed a flesh-colored band-aid over the puncture. This done, she quickly retreated to take up a position beside the door.

The room fell silent, muffled; there was not a sound to be heard. Not even the thin voices of the children who at that hour usually played along the wall and in the vast empty field out back.

When the woman turned her gaze from her husband to the great outdoors, the white-hot scene lay spread before her: to the right the ancient wall wound its way upward to the top of the mountain, its steps long since having fallen into ruin, leaving only a faint hint of their existence; to the left the deserted play field and the roofs of the houses beyond.

“The room will be too hot soon,” the old woman murmured. “He won’t be able to rest this afternoon. We’ll have to take him below.”

The old man’s mouth relaxed now and lost that pursed-up expression of pain it wore both day and night. His breathing was easy, quiet, the covers over his chest rose and fell gently. When he raised his eyes, he gazed peacefully at his wife. She had become the center of his existence. His only hope. She knew that, of course. She knew only too well that it was her turn now. She must be the one.