Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

One would have to wait in order to find out, Anterrabae said. Who knows, this happening may be gone by tomorrow.

You may not even have to do anything about it, Lactamaeon said. You may not even have to think about it.

Maybe it was just a symptom, Deborah said.

In the morning she lay in bed awake, but wondering if it would be wise for her to open her eyes. Someone was screaming in the hall, and she could hear a student close by—rustling apron and apprehension—trying to wake Dowben’s Mary. Through her closed eyes the light from the morning sun was red. The lucky ones by the windows got all the benefit of the sun, but every morning the day reached out for all of them for a little while at least, and this morning it made Deborah search in her mind for something that had changed in her.

“Something happened to me …” she whispered to herself, “… something yesterday. What was it? What was it?”

“Come on, Miss Blau, rise and shine,” the student said.

“What’s for breakfast?” Deborah asked, not wishing to give any of her questions away.

“Typical regional cooking,” Fiorentini’s Mary chirped. “They never say what region, but I have some ideas!”

“What kind of regional cooking do they have for people who are out of this world?” someone asked.

Then it came to Deborah what had happened last night, with the color and the form and the meaning infusing it and the sense of life. Was it still there, waiting beyond the eyelids? She opened her eyes wide and at once. The world was still there. She got up, wrapped herself in her blanket, and went out on the hall and to the nursing station.

“Excuse me, do I see my doctor today?” She had been a thousand times a mendicant before that door, but this time it seemed to be different, although no one acted as if it were.

“Just a minute. Yes, you’re down for off the ward today. Two o’clock.”

“Can I go by myself?”

The suspicion came up like a surgical mask over the nurse’s face. “I’ll have to get a written order from the ward administrator. You know that by now.”

“Can I see him when he comes?”

“He’s not going to be on the ward today.”

“Will you write my name down, please?”

“All right.” And the nurse turned away.

It sounded more like a maybe, but Deborah knew by now that it was not good form to seem too insistent, even though the world might be gone by the time the permission came through.

At her hour she was shy and frightened that speaking of it might end it, but after a time of groping she told Furii about the seeing and, more importantly, about the meaning and the thing that had come attached to the meaning: the slow, opening hope.

“It was not like what usually happens in Yr,” she said. “It reminded me of you because it was just a simple statement in my mind that I was going to live, to come up alive.”

Furii gave her the familiar testing look. “Do you believe that this is a true prognosis?”

“I don’t want to say because I may have to hang by my thumbs from it.”

“No, you won’t. Nothing will change for us.”

“Well … I think … I think that it may be true.”

“We prove it then,” Furii said. “We get to work.”

They spent the time cutting ways to the old secrets and seeing facets of them that needed the new hunger for life to come real. Deborah saw that she had taken the part of the enemy Japanese as an answer to the hate of the ones at the summer camp, his foreignness and violence being an embodiment of anger. A part of the same insight opened on to the subject of martyrdom—that being martyred had something to do with Christ, the pride and terror of every Jew.

“Anger and martyrdom,” she said, “that’s what being a Japanese soldier was, and I gave the doctors the …good soldier’ that they wanted. Anger and martyrdom … It sounds like something more … like the description of something I know….”

“What more?” Furii asked. “It must have had many walls to have supported itself for all these years.”

“It’s a description of … why … why, it’s grandfather !” Deborah cried, having unearthed the familiar tyrannical Latvian to whom she had given such an unrecognizable mask. It was a description of him and it fitted him better than height or weight or number of teeth. “The secret soldier that I was is a mulu —what Yr calls a kind of hiding image of my kinship with him.”

“Coming to see this … does it hurt so much?”

“A good hurt,” Deborah said.

“The symptoms and the sickness and the secrets have many reasons for being. The parts and facets sustain one another, locking in and strengthening one another. If it were not so, we could give you a nice shot of this or that drug or a quick hypnosis and say, …Craziness, begone!’ and it would be an easy job. But these symptoms are built of many needs and serve many purposes, and that is why getting them away makes so much suffering.”

“Now that I have the … realness … will I have to give up Yr … all of it … right away?”

“Never pretend to give it up. I think you will want to give it up when you have the real world to replace it, but there is no pact with me. I do not ask you to give up your gods for mine. When you are ready, you will choose.” Then she said gravely, “Don’t let them torture you every time you let some of the world’s good light in your windows.”

The “burn-squad” was waiting for her when she got back on the ward. It was Dr. Venner this time. She had nicknamed him “Lost Horizons” because he never seemed to see anyone, but kept looking out as if to sea, past the people he was supposed to be treating. The name had stuck. Now he was impatient because she had not been ready and waiting for his ministrations in a properly chastened frame of mind, because the burns had resisted for months now, and because cleaning them should have given her the pain she deserved and yet she seemed always above it. Deborah did not like Dr. Venner and she expressed this by joking to Quentin Dobshansky, who held the bandages and winced whenever the doctor’s rough swabbing pulled the raw flesh away.

“Hold that arm still,” Venner growled at the limb held motionless before him. In his anger he jerked the swab hard and blood from the healthy tissue underneath welled up and covered the wound. “Damn it!” he breathed.

“Heck, Dr. Venner,” she said softly, “you don’t have to get angry. I’ve got a fake tumor that more than makes up for what I’m missing here.”

Dobshansky bit his lip to keep from laughing, but the instrument dug sharply again and he drew in his breath. “Uhh! Easy, Deb!”

“The hurting is only theoretical, Quentin,” she said. “What hurts is being kicked by the forces that everyone else lives by and years of being nuts and not being able to tell anyone and have them believe you. Every time you double up with a theoretical tumor pain, some professor is there to tell you why it can’t be hurting. As a courtesy, they give you a shot or two of the experience the other way.”

“Keep quiet!” Dr. Venner said. “I’m concentrating on this.”

Dobshansky winked at the nurse who had come in and Deborah was grateful to them that they had permitted her to be a witness.

The New Doctor came up a few days later to do his stint as call-doctor for the day. “It’s time for another look at those burns,” he said.

“Venner was the last one and if he didn’t hit bone, no one else will.”

The comment was disturbing and took New Doctor by surprise. “I’ve been worrying about those burns,” he said quickly to cover his unprofessional reaction, and she caught him in another professional blunder as he remembered some page of some tome that preached, “Never Tell a Patient You Are Worried.” His surprise at what he had said was plain on his face, and he began the wiping away of the look, hastily and piecemeal, so that a part of it was left. “Well, let’s say concerned , and I thought of something that might just work.” He took a little tube of medicine out of his pocket. Then he dismissed the massing burn-squad and the two of them smiled a little at each other like conspirators. They both breathed easier.