Rufi Thorpe: Dear Fang, with Love

Vera was in her room, and the hives were gone now. She did not seem to be having another bout of psychosis, if anything she seemed much more heavily sedated than I had ever seen her. She didn’t say a word when Katya entered the room, and evidently Kat didn’t need her to. She simply went over to the bed and sat on the edge of it, looking into Vera’s face for a long time, holding her hand. Finally, she turned to me and said, “I need you to go out and buy some expensive luxury shampoo and conditioner. Lotion. Body wash. Things that smell really nice. And a new nightgown. And some sweatpants or yoga pants and a top. Something like loungewear. And a brush. Her hair is tangled.”

I went and bought everything she told me. When I returned with it, she already had Vera in a hot shower, and I handed her the bag of bath products in the steamy bathroom, feeling awkward that I would accidentally catch a glimpse of Vera naked. After the shower, Vera emerged wrapped in a fleece robe I had bought from the same store I bought the nightgown. She sat obediently on the bed as Katya got behind her and began to brush and comb out her hair. They did not speak while they did this. For most of it, Vera kept her eyes closed. But I could almost see the love seeping into her. It was a shimmer, like heat rising off a road, between Katya and Vera, that mother love.

I didn’t feel jealous or left out. Somehow, I felt that I was necessary, too. A kind of sentinel or guard, watching over them. Keeping the room safe and quiet so that this ritual could be carried out.

When Vera’s hair was completely detangled and then pulled back in a long, ornate-looking braid that glistened like a wet, black snake, Katya got off the bed, kissed Vera on the forehead, and told her we would be back tomorrow.

It wasn’t until we got out on the sidewalk that Kat started crying. I tried to take her in my arms, to hold her, but she swatted me away and crouched, bent over her thighs, tears streaming down her face, gasping for breath. Eventually she got herself under control, straightened, and we walked back to the apartment.

In our strange way, we made a good team.

As the days passed, we fell into a routine. In the morning, we would go out for breakfast and drink coffee at a café that had Wi-Fi. I would read the news on my phone, she would read a book on her Kindle. Then we would decide on some new delicacy to bring Vera in the hospital. Shopping for this was the main event of the morning. One day we brought chocolates, another day we brought preserved artichoke hearts. When Vera asked for cigarettes, Katya started bringing her those too.

“She’s in a mental hospital in Eastern Europe,” she said, when I voiced my tenuous objection. “If there is one time in her life when it is appropriate to take up smoking, this is it.”

Then we would visit her during visiting hours. On the new medication, the hives had subsided, but her face was still very swollen. She was almost unrecognizable and it hurt to look at her. We chatted about lots of things. The other patients. The nurses. One girl in the ward thought she was a vampire and had bit off the tip of her finger and spit it at Vera, whose only droll commentary was that to her knowledge real vampires didn’t try to feed off their own hands. We avoided talking about the future, about when she would be released and when we would get home and what would happen then.

College would probably have to be delayed, but I tried to reassure myself that the delay would be only temporary. She was so smart. Her mind was so supple and wicked and quick. She would have been a delight to teach. Vera deserved to go to university. She deserved to be put through her paces and challenged and changed.

But it was impossible to know how functional she would ever be. There was no road map. The other people with bipolar in her group therapy back home had been almost universally unmarried, still living with their parents and making do with government assistance. None of them had jobs of even the most trivial sort. Surely there were people with bipolar who were higher functioning, but they were harder to find. There was enough stigma against mental illness that they kept their diagnosis a secret and just went on with their lives. I knew they existed because occasionally one of them would write an inspiring blog post or article online, but it was still hard to believe in them. Had they ever really had bipolar to begin with? What if they had only been misdiagnosed and their “recovery” was no recovery at all? And just because people could write a cogent blog post and claim they were employed didn’t necessarily mean they were well.

I thought about all of this constantly, and I am guessing Vera and Kat did too, but we didn’t talk about it. After visiting hours were over, Katya and I would get lunch somewhere and then take a walk through the city. Sometimes I would take her to a place Darius had shown us. Sometimes we wandered into parts of the city I had never seen before. To my knowledge, Katya had never been to Europe, had never even left the States, at least not since she had first come to America when she was seven. But if she was impressed by Vilnius, if she found it soothing or stimulating to hear Russian on the streets, she didn’t say. She played things much closer to the vest, now that she was older.

Certain things I could tell she liked. The food, for instance. She was constantly in rapture with the food. “They have good pickles here!” she said, delighted. Once, in a café, she ordered a hot chocolate and was astounded to discover that it was not a drink like in America but a dessert, a little demitasse of molten chocolate served with a tiny golden spoon. She split it with me as we sat in the hot sun, sweating. A pair of wasps had gotten inside the sugar dispenser on our table and were rolling in the sticky white grains in ecstasy. We were trying to waste the afternoon. We were always trying to waste the afternoon. After the switch to her new medication and the lack of any psychosis, we assumed Vera would be released fairly quickly, but her doctors seemed reluctant. “Let’s see how she is tomorrow,” they kept saying. And we let them. Vera was still completely zombified. If they had released her, we would have been terrified. It did not seem advisable to take her on a plane. I couldn’t even imagine her managing the cacophony of being on a busy street or sitting in a café. She was an indoor creature now, a quiet being of blankets and showers. We were content to wait. We would see how she was tomorrow.

“What do you want to do next?” Katya asked me, scraping up the last of the chocolate with the tiny golden spoon.

“I kind of want to go to the Holocaust museum,” I said. “I skipped out on it when we were on the tour. I feel like — I feel like I should go before we leave.”

“Okay,” she said.

“You would go with me?”

“Of course I will go with you,” she said.

And she did. She held my hand as we wandered through the tiny museum, more like a house than an official type of building. The exhibits were plain and rather homemade-looking. There were maps of the various work and death camps in Lithuania and in Poland. There were lists of names: of victims, of survivors, of those who had tried to help. There were pictures of the bodies in the pits. I had not been expecting that. I did not know there were photographs. I let myself look and look and look. And I let myself understand that it was real. That it had all actually happened. I could see children among the naked bodies in the pits. I cried, and Katya held my hand and didn’t try to stop me or comfort me or force me to be presentable. She seemed to know that this was what I had come here to do and that it was better to just let me do it.

—

And then one day, they said that Vera could be released. It was like coming up to the surface of the water when you have almost drowned. I think we both literally sputtered in the doctor’s office as she told us, breathless with our own reanimation. There was so much to do. We had to call the airline. We had to pay the woman for the apartment. We had to pack.