Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,60
pricked her finger with a lancet, and her mother had squeezed a drop of blood onto a microscope slide so that Anna could see her blood magnified a hundred times. Microscopy was her favorite word, and she loved the microscope, with its polished lenses and fine calibrations. In a drop of rainwater legions of bugs thrived. Bits of earthworm appeared cratered and dimpled, like the face of the moon. Some microbes were benign, others capable of causing illness; and there existed microbes too small to be detected even under a microscope.
She could hear Reina and Franz in the hall. Something in their voices made her get up and open the door. They were standing on either side of Ivan Lazar. Anna almost didn’t know him at first. He was bleeding from a deep gash beneath his left eye. Blood was running down his face and dripping on the floor. If Ivan didn’t sit down, he would collapse, and since Franz and Reina seemed unable to move, she told them to take Ivan to the kitchen. She folded a clean kitchen towel to make a compress and asked Reina to press it to Ivan’s face.
“You need stitches,” Anna said.
“No, it will be all right,” Ivan said.
“Without stitches it won’t heal,” Anna said. She was going to phone her mother, who had gone to the hospital to check on a patient, but as she went downstairs, her mother came in the front door. She ran upstairs with Anna and knelt beside Ivan and touched the area around his injury. He should be seen by a facial surgeon, she said. She would like an X-ray, to rule out a fracture to the cheekbone or orbital bone, and an ophthalmologist should examine him, to be on the safe side. Franz could drive him to the hospital in her car, she said; she would phone ahead and alert the staff.
No, out of the question, Franz said. They would be questioned; arrested. Anna’s mother considered this. Gently, she again palpated Ivan’s face around the wound and asked how it had happened. Franz said he would tell her later.
“Do what you can, please, Dr. Schaefferová,” Ivan said. Marta Hempel, his fiancée, was on duty that afternoon at the hospital. He didn’t want her to see him like this.
“Marta would want to know,” Magdalena said, but then she relented. “All right. I will do my best for you, Ivan.” But the light in the kitchen was insufficient, she said; she needed a lamp, a sterile surface, instruments, anesthetic. They went down to the ground floor, where she had her surgery. She set out instruments on a stainless-steel tray and swabbed Ivan’s face with gauze soaked in an antiseptic. She prepared a syringe and injected anesthetic into Ivan’s face, near the wound. Elli wasn’t in the surgery that day, and Anna acted as her mother’s assistant, holding a stainless-steel bowl to catch the blood and water as her mother irrigated the wound with a saline solution. Her mother talked as she worked. “The finest surgical thread in the world used to come from silkworms in the Cevannes, in France, but it became too costly, and now we use silk thread from China,” she told Ivan. “The benefit of silk is that it leaves less of a scar than catgut.” She pulled the needle through the skin with toothed forceps. “This is not so different from doing embroidery,” she said.
Ivan said he would look a picture, then.
“For the next few hours, try not to move the muscles in your face,” Anna’s mother said. “When the anesthetic wears off, you’ll feel pain. I can give you something for it. We’ll leave the wound uncovered for now, and in the morning, I’ll examine it and put on a dressing.” Magdalena gave Ivan an anti-tetanus injection, and then Ivan got off the table. Anna and Reina made him a light lunch of buttered bread and a soft-boiled egg and carried a tray to the guest room, where Franz had taken Ivan to rest.
That evening, Franz described the assault to his parents. They were in the living room, Anna’s mother and father, Franz, Anna, Reina, and Ivan Lazar. Franz said Ivan had been getting off the tram after finishing a shift at the armament factory where he worked. This wasn’t by choice, Anna knew, but because everyone from the age of fifteen to sixty was compelled to contribute his or her labor to the German war effort. Franz went on to say he’d seen