Marija Peričić - The Lost Pages

‘It was me she loved.’ [29] This sentence has been crossed out and then written again beside the crossing-out.

His stale breath dampened my face as he spoke, and he said it again and again. I hissed at him to be quiet, to hold his tongue. I leaned further over him and took one of the pillows from beside his head. His eyes were closed with the effort of speaking his phrase and I hugged the pillow to my chest and let myself fall onto him, into him, the pillow between my chest and his FACE. I could feel his lips still mouthing through the layer of feathers and cloth. I leaned harder. I thought that I would crush his BONES with my weight; I could feel them rising from the mattress like a fragile construction built of twigs and paper. I closed my eyes and held my breath, and then there was nothing but darkness. [30] This section is followed by several pages of illegible text: heavily crossed-out writing with some pages torn and missing.

[31] The following sections are written in a smaller notebook, which has some water damage, but the text is still legible. THE NEXT THING I REMEMBER IS WAKING TO THE SONG OF A BIRD and light pressing on my closed eyes, illuminating the dense network of pink veins that threaded through the insides of my eyelids. I could hear soft rustling sounds and breathing, which seemed to come from close by. There was, too, a nagging feeling that something was missing, or that I had forgotten something. I opened my eyes and the light from the window flooded the whole room with whiteness. When the features of the room came to me, I saw that I was in a completely white room, lying in a narrow bed. There was a small table next to the bed and a picture on the wall opposite of a boy holding a dog in his arms. The soft sounds came again and attached themselves to a woman, who I noticed was hunched over in one corner of the room. As I looked at her she slowly began shuffling along sideways with her face to the wall and her back to me. This animal scuttling motion of hers frightened me and made me nauseous, until I realised that she held a cloth in one hand and was cleaning the dust from a kind of picture rail that ran along the wall. She turned swiftly and when she saw me looking at her hurried out of the room.

There were several other beds in the room, all empty, and I recognised it as a hospital ward. I realised that I must have been injured; perhaps I had been in some kind of accident. I scanned my body for areas of pain, but could find none. I looked down at my arms and lifted them up in front of my face. I turned my hands this way and that, I tested my legs and the motion of my neck, but all seemed to be in order. From the bed I cast my eyes about, but nowhere in the room was there any machinery that might be used to straighten my back, which was the next explanation that came to mind. I even sat up in the bed and looked at the headboard for some traction device that might be located there, but all I could see was a small white card with a name on it that was not mine. I must have been put in the wrong bed by mistake, I thought. Although I knew it was just an administrative error, I couldn’t help feeling uneasy, as if I were being mocked.

I swung my legs out from under the bedclothes and hoisted myself to sit on the edge of the bed, preparing to get up. I noticed that my clothes had gone and I was wearing only a white nightgown. It was an effort to stand. I made my way slowly around the room looking at the labels on the other beds, in case I would find my name on one of these, but the spaces to hold the cards were all blank. I stood looking at the mislabelled bed. ‘Certainly an administrative error,’ I told myself.

The room, on closer inspection, was very bare. Nowhere was there any medical equipment to measure my vital signs, no charts to record them nor medicine to treat any illness. I had begun to shiver with cold, and turned back to the bed, but the idea of getting into that bed, which after all was labelled as not my own, was suddenly loathsome to me; like wearing another man’s clothes. I was still standing there, shivering and hesitating, when I heard steps approach the door, causing me to jump with alarm. I leaped into the bed, forgetting its irksomeness, and pulled the cover up over my insubstantial gown.

The door opened and a tall man in a suit came in, followed by a woman dressed as a nurse. I asked the man if I could speak with a doctor, and he smiled and introduced himself as Professor Pick. He had a perfectly neat triangular beard and heavy-lidded eyes, like a country vicar or a school principal.

‘Professor Pick,’ I said, ‘there has been a mistake. To begin with, I am not Brod; my name is Kafka. Your administrative staff have made an error.’

I gestured behind me to the label on the bed. I waited for Professor Pick to respond, but he only dropped his heavy lids over his eyes and wearily raised them a few times before saying, ‘Mmm,’ which hung in the air ominously.

Something about the man disturbed me, and the skin on my scalp began to contract in fear. I went on, a little uncertainly now, ‘Secondly, I have not the slightest thing wrong with me.’ I pushed the bedclothes off and sat on the edge of the bed in order to demonstrate my healthfulness. ‘My body, I know, appears to be weak, but I am just coming now out of a long illness, but really I can manage perfectly well.’

I looked down and was suddenly ashamed of the exposure of my naked legs, which struck me as obscenely thin and white, to this well-dressed man. I twitched the edge of the nightgown down as far as it would go to cover them.

‘Herr Brod,’ Pick said, stepping closer to me and putting one spread hand in the middle of my chest.

I wondered if the man was deaf.

‘Kafka,’ I corrected him. ‘Kafka.’ I spoke loudly and slowly and indicated myself with my hand pointed to my face. Should I spell it for him?

He pressed me rudely back into the bed. ‘I assure you, Herr Brod, that the error is yours.’

He pulled a notebook from his pocket and scrawled something in it and then left the room, trailed by the nurse. They shut the door behind them and I could hear their footsteps echoing for a long time after they’d left.

My encounter with Pick left me feeling unsettled and in the strangely empty room this quickly mounted to panic. I needed to leave the hospital immediately. I made a more thorough search of the room for my clothes, but they had disappeared. There was not even a locked cupboard or box or wardrobe that might contain them. As I much I disliked the idea, I resigned myself to going out in my nightgown.

I had expected the door to the room to be locked, but I found that it opened easily. Outside was an empty corridor. I felt very self-conscious in my bare feet and legs and the draughty nightgown and my first intention was to locate my clothing. I knew that my identification papers were in my pocketbook in my jacket, and these would surely put an end to the whole farcical situation. The corridor was long and stretched away in either direction in a perfect mirror image of itself: just rows of closed doors and blank walls. I stood, hesitating. The wall opposite was set with long windows, which looked out onto a grassed area.

Being without my clothing made me feel like a fugitive and my heart soon began to race with anxiety. I turned left and ran lightly along the corridor, the skin of my bare feet making soft kisses on the floorboards. There was no clear exit, although I could see a closed door at the end of the corridor ahead of me, still quite far away. I tried to remind myself that I was not a prisoner and there was actually no reason to be running in such an undignified manner. With an effort, I forced myself to slow to a walk. I tried swinging my arms to give the appearance, if only to myself, of nonchalance. I would have liked to hum a tune, but I could not think of one.