Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

She took the package down and opened it, and as she did so, she began to think about a patient whose doctor had come for her advice on a seemingly insoluble problem. No. No more patients now. She got the machine ready and put the first record on the spindle. Schumann’s sweet, gentle music filled the room. She listened and her mind shifted to German and the poetry of her youth. She sat back in the soft living room chair, closed her eyes, and rested. And then for the twelfth time that day, the phone rang.

On Deborah’s way back to the ward the dreaded cloud lowered, and the rumble of the Collect and Censor and Yr began. Terror at what was coming made her try to break through her silence when she was back on the ward. Seeing the head nurse leaving, she went after her, but she could not speak; the door closed and the day shift was gone. The evening shift came on and the menacing moved closer, hovering to engulf her. Just before the wave broke, Deborah went to the ward nurse who was overseeing the evening spoon-count.

“Miss Olson …”

“Yes?”

“It’s going to hit—please—it’s going to hit harder than I can stand up under. I should be in a pack when it hits.”

The nurse looked up; it was a keen and penetrating look. Then she said, “Okay, Miss Blau. Now go and lie down.”

The wave broke as hard as she had foreseen, with a tremendous gust of ridiculing laughter, but the fleeing of her senses was not complete. The Censor’s voice, like a cinder which Deborah’s teeth were grinding, was loud in her inner ear: Captive and victim! Don’t you know why we have done this? The third mirror — the ultimate deception is still to be given! You came to this hospital — it was in the plan. We let you trust that doctor. You opened your secrets more and more. This is the final one. Now you have given enough of your secrets, and you will see what she will do — she and the world! And the cinder-laugh crazed Deborah’s teeth to splinters in her mouth.

Her face was wooden as she walked to the pack and lay down on the cold sheets, but when the full punishment came, she was already under heavy restraints, fighting and thrashing in the bed that would not give an inch….

When she came clear it was a long time later. She looked around, seeing. The newly cleared vision was like a blessing. The other bed had its white hump, but she did not know who was making it.

“Helene?”

Silence. It had been a long time. The circulation in her feet had nearly stopped altogether, and her heels, where they had made the long hours of contact with the wet sheets, were beginning to burn. She lay back and pulled hard with her whole body, trying to get the weight off the tightly bound ankles. When she had to let go, she rested, trying to save the clarity that was permitting her to see down into her mind. It had been longer than four hours; the attendants would come soon and take her from the now painful “fighting clothes.” But they did not come. The pain became intense. She could feel her ankles and knees swelling against the sheets and the downward pull of the restraints, but even their heavy ache did not neutralize the sharper, burning pain of the blood-starved feet. Pulling to relieve the weight of the bones inside the legs, Deborah succeeded only in striking hard cramps into both calves. When she found she could not ease the knotted muscles, she waited on, gritting her teeth. And still they did not come. She began to whimper.

“Miss Blau … Deborah … what’s the matter?”

The voice came from the other bed, but she could not recognize the voice.

“Who is that?” she asked, frightened of another kind of deception.

“It’s Sylvia. Deborah, what is it?”

Deborah turned her head and her wonder penetrated through the pain. “I didn’t know you saw me or knew my name,” she said. She had always thought of Sylvia as everyone else did, as a useless piece of ward furniture. She now felt ashamed of having taken her at her own silence.

“Sick, but not dead,” Sylvia said. “Are you all right?”

“God … it hurts. How long have we been in?”

“Five hours—maybe six. We were packed together. Try yelling and maybe someone will come.”

“I can’t … I never could,” Deborah said.

Time went on, and the intensity of the pain unlocked Deborah’s voice. For a while she called loudly, hoping that Yr would not hear it as a scream of cowardice and punish her with it forever. And still no one came, and finally she stopped. Sylvia laughed a little, low in her throat.

“I forgot that the yelling of lunatics is lunatics’ yelling.”

“How can you stand it?” Deborah said.

“I probably have better circulation than you. I don’t hurt at all, usually, but if your feet are tied just a little too tightly, or if you have trouble with your blood—Ah—the night-kitchen light has gone out. Three o’clock, then.”

Deborah had never reckoned time by the routine of the hospital, or the day-and-night changes and personal idiosyncrasies of the staff, and she was amazed at the perception of one who had always, but for one moment months and months ago, seemed far closer to the dead than to the living. “How long have we been in, then?”

“Seven hours.”

And still they did not come. Deborah’s face was full of tears that she could not wipe away. Burning in the pain-flaming darkness, Anterrabae fell, crying, Deception! Deception! The time is now!

And still they did not come. She realized that the fragile trust had opened her wide again for the cold wind and the cold knife. She groaned against the white-hot stabbing that was moving into her legs. “God, they build their tortures cunningly!”

“You mean the restraints?” Sylvia asked.

“I mean the hope! ” As she spoke, the mirror of the final deception, the Awaited Death Oncoming moved toward her. “I see you, Imorh,” Deborah said, speaking for the first time aloud in the presence of a stranger the language of Yr.

When they came at last she was very quiet and they were cheered.

“Now you’re all calmed down.”

She could not walk, but the late-night shift was not too busy and they let her sit for a while until the swelling went away, the color returned to her legs, and her feet could carry her. Before leaving Sylvia in the hard light and her unrolling, Deborah turned, wanting to repay her for the mercy that had wrenched her from silence. She walked toward Sylvia’s bed, watching the eyes of the others grow wary.

“Sylvia …”

But Sylvia was furniture again—a statue or a mannequin, familiar only in form and alive only to the seeking finger at the pulse-place.

Sure doom was not as difficult to bear as the little Maybe had been. Deborah had expected the last deception for so long that its coming was almost a relief. Before she went to the doctor’s office, the Collect and gods and all of Yr massed together on its horizon. “I will not go easily,” she said to them, “not this time. I will not be brave and obliging. No more games. No more being a good sport. I will not play the Game, and go to this death as if I didn’t know what it was.”

When she saw Furii with her familiar smile of greeting, a current of doubt moved in and away. Maybe she doesn’t know, Deborah thought. But the thought was foolish and a dream. The last Change was death or worse; it had been said years ago, and last night, the first help she had asked for in English had been given easily, easily, and was only in scorn. She had surrendered her separateness, trusting, on the cold bed. They make a good score of it. Her ankles and feet still ached from their joke. Dark against the fireworks of the pain was that shadow: the always known Oncoming. By what other hand could the end be so sure and so complete, if not by this fire-touch woman who was now sitting before her?