Saturday, August 11, 2018

mercy - a short story about euthanasia


 After dinner with a good friend this evening,  we discussed the impossibly complicated question of euthanasia.  So for her,  I decided to repost my short story Mercy which first appeared in  So To Speak Literary Magazine in 2002. Here's to you, my friend.

MERCY


Almost every day, two women walked a dog through the Foret de Soignes on the outskirts of Brussels.  Angelique was a bottled blonde with a stale, warm and stuffy kind of atmosphere, and she was shaped like an aubergine, with a raincoat belt delineating where her waist once was. Her companion Enid was grey-haired and thin, with glasses and sharp features. They met between the French and Flemish line, Angelique coming from one direction, Enid from the other.
But this day Angelique was more upset than usual. “I left my husband in the sitting room staring into space,” she said. “It just isn’t normal.” They continued on towards the Rouge Cloitre, a fourteenth century abbey near the fishing pond. “Last evening, he wanted to know who the woman was preparing our supper,” Angelique went on. “It was me, of course. There were only the two of us there.” Enid pressed on down the path, her spaniel trotting ahead. Angelique drew a tissue from her raincoat pocket. “It is just so silly,” she said.
            “Hard to believe that it’s all on account of his stroke,” Enid answered carefully. She had seen cases like this before, when she worked in the hospital, all those years ago. It never ended easily. But she decided it was best to switch the conversation to something less difficult. After all, these walks were her way of getting Angelique out of the house, and away from her problems for a while. A new hair salon had just opened near the Transvaal cemetery. She told Angelique all about it as they passed the Rouge Cloitre, and walked around the pond. Old men sat before their fishing lines under a cold gray sky. A crane stood in the reeds on paper-thin legs, like a figment of imagination. Further along there were stables, ateliers now, belonging to local artists, and behind them a muddy field of horses with shaggy fetlocks.
The cloister had been converted into a tearoom, but now it was closed on account of renovations. So instead of stopping they continued down the Chemin de Watermaal in the Flemish part of the forest. A dog had to be on the lead here, while in the French part, a dog was allowed to go free. Trees arched overhead, and paths for walking and riding horses knotted through the bracken, through the glades, and into the low lying valley, which in winter, glistened with icy streams.
But something was jolting in the path, jolting and rustling on the ground. The dog pointed his nose at it, sprung back quickly, barked and poked it with his nose again. It was a wounded bird, a spasm of flutters with twig feet curled against the body. “Leave it be,” said Enid, pulling the lead up short.
            Angelique peered down. There was a gash on the head, and under one wing gaped a big red hole. Enid briefly considered removing her Wellington boot and hitting it over the head. But a fine drizzle had started up, and the inconvenience of taking her boot off, here where the dirt was soft, turned her thoughts to less dramatic measures. She walked the dog up the path, watching from a distance. “I think it fell,” Angelique called out.
“Let’s put it out of its misery. I’ll get a rock or something.” Enid tied the dog to a tree, where he continued barking in short quick yelps. She pushed up her sleeves with the appearance of getting down to business.
Meanwhile Angelique inspected the bird more closely. The body was round, the chest feathers fluffed up. But the wings were fully formed and the damaged one kept fanning out. She noticed a second, pink wound near the tail feathers. “It’s only a baby,” she said. Then, “Should we wring its neck?”
             Enid shook her head. “You couldn’t possibly. It would be much better to drop something on it.”
            Angelique knelt to scoop the bird into her hands. They were pale hands, with liver spots on the back, hands that had done a lot of caring in their day but not hands that were themselves well cared for. Tenderness washed over her. Its body was warm. The beady eye shuttered and the wing was still. Then a dark red trickle ran from the beak to her hand.
Enid winced. “Pot ver dekke! Put it down, zulle. If you’re going to kill it, do it quickly.”
But Angelique had lost her color, along with her nerve. “I can’t,” she cried. “I can’t. Look, it’s still alive!”
            Ja, zulle! You have to twist until it snaps,” said Enid, sounding sure. “I thought
everybody knew that. You have to do it without thinking.”
            The bird seemed to stare with infinite patience. Angelique felt its warm palpitations against her palms, as she headed towards a clearing in the trees, hands cupped.
“Where are you going now?” Enid challenged. Ferns crackled underfoot. No answer. “You know, Angelique, if you put it down for a minute, maybe the mother will return. I can hear them in the trees over here. And there’s a nest,” she added hopefully.
There was an agitated flapping from the treetops. Angelique was walking in her clodhopper boots with ludicrously dainty steps, as if the bird were an offering, a sacred vessel demanding ceremonious behavior. “Is it very high?”
“It’s too high to put the bird in. Anyway, it won’t be able to feed itself,” Enid said, with growing impatience. The drizzle was steady and the dog was becoming a nuisance.
But Angelique would go on. “I just realized something,” she said. “Now that I’ve touched it, the mother won’t come. It has my smell on it. I think I’ll take it home and nurse it back to health.” Her hair was dotted with rain, her face bright with new hope.
The trouble with her friend, Enid reflected, was that she’d never learned to turn her back on a problem, and that was why the problem got worse. If a thing made you vulnerable, it made you weak, and this was sign to let it go.
            “You have enough to worry about,” Enid reminded her. “Without this bird on your hands. Besides, the last thing this country needs is another pigeon. Shooting them was a popular sport in the old days, you’ll remember.” Her glasses were lopsided. From this angle, Angelique couldn’t see her eyes. Her mouth had become a very thin line.
            “Then maybe the school children at St. Hubert would take it,” said Angelique. “I mean to say, as an opportunity to learn about nature. They might feed it bread and water with an eye-dropper!” Angelique had seen this done, she remembered now, on one of those English vet programs they sometimes showed on television.  One couple kept a pigeon, thinking it was a male until it became egg bound. Then the vet came, a man with a beard and very gentle eyes, and when the bird recovered, the owners cried right there on television. “Oh Pigeon,” they sobbed. “You did have us worried!”
“This pigeon wont survive,” Enid said, feeling the usual resignation drop inside her chest. “This one is different,” Enid said. But Angelique stayed in her holding pattern, hoping for the best. She could see a wound was gaping under its wing, and as she placed the bird back down, she was careful to lay it on its side so that it didn’t rustle so much. When you didn’t witness the pain, the pain appeared not to exist.
            “I’ll untie the dog,” Enid said at last.
“No!” her friend cried. “You can’t. You’re evil to do that, evil to think it--”
“Don’t take it out on me,” Enid said. These things can’t be helped. A life has its span--”
“That’s not for us to decide.” Angelique’s cherubic face seemed at once grotesque and pitiful. She had become a wall, a great big bundle of reproach.
“Sometimes it is,” Enid retorted.
“What is?”
“Sometimes it is for us to decide. We kill chickens to eat them, and even in the hospital sometimes, I remember—“ her voice trailed off.
Angelique stared at her friend as the rain dripped around them. “What are you saying?”
“Nothing surprising. Just that sometimes a child would be born in the maternity ward, years ago, when I was a nurse starting out. A child would be born, whose prospects, let’s say, were clearly limited—“ she looked at the ground, the expression on her face suddenly conflicted.
“You killed it?” Angelique trembled like the bird.
“Not me,” said Enid. “I would never kill a baby. But sometimes an accident might happen. And I would agree, you had to agree, that it was simply for the best.”
            Angelique turned in disbelief. Looking down at her hands, she saw the bird’s blood. She faced the bracken stretching under the tees. Rain misted the landscape. The fir trees arched, cathedral-like, overhead, and beyond them the white sky, endlessly far away. She stumbled as she moved towards a clearing, sick and conflicted, all but sobbing.
            “Pull yourself together,” said Enid steadily. “It’s only a bird, after all.” She bent towards the earth, staring at the bird.
            Angelique was breathing in shudders, hard jagged breaths of hurt and burden. “You are saying that you put people out of their misery?”
“I can’t talk about this.” Enid’s voice was almost inaudible. Her back was stooped, no room for anyone but her in that thin, ungenerous body.  Then at last she stood, brushed her hands together and placed them on her hips. Her face burned with shame. “I could have told you it wouldn’t be easy. The more you delay the harder it becomes. You have to take the bird’s neck and twist it sharply until it snaps. The head goes in one direction and the body goes in the other.”
Angelique blinked. She looked all damp and patchy. “So did you? You put people out of their misery? Is death preferable to pain, in your opinion?”
            “How should I know? I’m not the expert.”
            The rain let up, and light glinted through the wet trees. The two women turned and headed down the path, Enid at one with nothing but her dog. But the bird remained. At least, Angelique thought she could feel its tiny life as a very thin thread spinning out, thinning out the further they got away.
            They left the forest and passed the neat brick houses of Avenue des Heros. Tidy gardens bloomed with daffodils and dark red tulips, like little cups of blood on stems. The green scent of newly cut grass floated on the air, and somewhere from the hedgerow a blackbird was singing.

Her husband was still in the living room chair, when Angelique returned. His head was tilted back, his mouth open, and he was asleep. He was dressed in his pale blue cardigan. His knees and thighs seemed shrunken in their twill trousers. She noticed the vulnerability of his feet, turned slightly towards each other. His shoes were beautifully polished, Angelique always made sure of that; and the laces were perfectly tied.
            But his complexion was sallow. The skin seemed to stretch across the bone these days, particularly over the nose, and he snorted in his sleep, as if disturbed by dreams.
            I’ve smothered you before, she thought; smothered you with love when you did not want it. Nothing new there.
            She went to the kitchen and put on the kettle. She washed the bird blood off her hands. Then she returned, still in her raincoat, and stood before her husband. Her face was gleaming. It would only take as long as it took to boil the kettle.
            On the sofa was a small, embroidered cushion with silken tassels. It was a fussy non-functional cushion, but it shouldn’t be hard to place the cushion over his face. She would only have to press down, as if imprinting his image on the cloth. She had made such a movement dozens of times, packing linens into an overstuffed trunk, for instance. But she was thinking too much. She would have to do it without thinking.
            The hallway clock ticked the morning forwards. Angelique was conscious of the rose smelling soap on her hands, as well as her own heavy breathing. Deliver us, she thought. Then, at last came the high-pitched whistle of the kettle. It sang out.



















Saturday, August 4, 2018

love and disguise in war and peace - book 2

folk art painting of a troika ride - hanging in my sister Stephanie's home

One of the things Tolstoy explores so beautifully in Book 2 of War and Peace, is the theme of love and disguise.  While some characters disguise their true feelings for financial or sexual advantage, others disguise themselves in costumes, which reveal hidden aspects of their personalities.  Then there is Natasha Rostov, who disguises nothing.  Natasha feels everything fully, for the world to see.  There is no disguise about her and that's what makes her so alive. But Natasha undergoes the biggest change in this portion of the book - from early blossom to the first signs of blight.  We also experience two sharply contrasting troika rides - one exemplifying innocence, the other moral corruption.

Natasha is bored and listless at home. She has been daydreaming about her fiance Prince Andrei and she's impatient for him to come back.  Then Tolstoy beautifully gives us Natasha's relationship with her cousin Sonya and brother Nikolai, sitting in the corner for one of their intimate conversations.  Nikolai and Natasha recall their childhood exploits.  "And do you remember," Natasha asks, "how we rolled hard-boiled eggs in the ballroom, and all of a sudden two little old women appeared and began spinning round on the carpet? Was that real or not? Do you remember what fun it was?"

Soon after this,  a party of mummers enters the ballroom in their costumes and entertains the family, and then some of the Rostovs dress up in costumes of their own, made out of dressing gowns and sashes, and go on a wonderful troika ride, to surprise their friends at the Melyokov estate.

We don't see much of Natasha's costume - perhaps because nothing can really disguise her, so forthright is her nature.  But Nikolai dresses as an old lady in a farthingale, and Sonya, who is usually much quieter and often in her cousin's shadow,  has the best costume of all - with a mustache and eyebrows made of burnt cork. "Her moustaches and eyebrows were extraordinarily becoming to her," Tolstoy writes. "Everyone said how pretty she looked, and she was keyed up to an unusual pitch of energy and excitement."  

Their troika ride is so evocative in the moonlit snow, that you feel you are living through one of the most beautiful of their childhood memories. What could be more enchanting than Sonya and Nikolai dressed in their costumes sliding and squeaking across the snowy path for a stolen kiss? "He was different from the Nikolai she had known and always slightly feared.  He was in women's dress with tousled hair and a blissful smile new to Sonya."   As she runs towards him, "She's quite different and yet exactly the same, thought Nikolai, looking at her face all lit up by moonlight."

The adventure is more poignant for being the last truly innocent excursion for Natasha. She is about to be introduced to and corrupted by the pretensions of Moscow high society.

But Tolstoy breaks us in slowly - first giving us the self seeking Boris and plain, powdered Julie and their courtship.  Boris is a bit like Pierre was, when he didn't want to propose to Helene. But Julie is so rich that he must follow through, if he wants to get access to her estates.  You cannot feel too sorry for Julie, who "noticed Boris's hesitation and sometimes the thought occurred to her that he had an aversion for her; but her feminine vanity quickly restored her confidence and she would assure herself that it was merely love that made him bashful."

Next, Natasha is snubbed and humiliated by Prince Andrei's father and has an uncomfortable meeting with his sister Maria.  But worse is to come ....  with Pierre's wife Countess Bezahov and her indolent brother Anatole! They are both vulgar, shallow and hedonistic. But "Countess Bezahov had some right to her reputation of being a fascinating woman," Tolstoy tells us. "She could say what she did not think - flattery, especially with perfect simplicity and naturalness."
 
Natasha catches their eye at the opera.  I love how Tolstoy describes the performance in terms of its absurdity - utterly at face value, just as Natasha sees it.  This hints at her inability to see beyond pretense - she  simply cannot comprehend that people are not exactly as they appear to be.  "One extremely fat girl in a white silk dress was sitting apart on a low bench, to the back of which a piece of green cardboard was glued.  They were all singing something.  When they had finished their chorus the girl in white advanced towards the prompter's box and a man with stout legs encased in silk tights, a plume in his cap and a dagger at his waist, went up to her and began to sing and wave his arms about."

But while she is reading every thing at face value,  Natasha begins to  "pass into a state of intoxication she had not experienced for a long time."  She is agitated and stimulated all at once and Anatole steps right in.  He knows exactly how to exploit her sexual longings and flirt with her.   Natasha is uneasy, frightened, pleased and flattered  all at once.  But all her feelings are exactly themselves - conflicted and undisguised.  And since she feels everything strongly and never questions the veracity of her feelings, she falls completely under his influence.    Of course for him the seduction is a game. We then get his wickedly conceived troika ride - so different from the Rostovs earlier ride in their funny costumes.

The only other character who is less capable of insincerity than Natasha is the bumbling and foolish seeming Pierre.   But is he such a bumbler? He's the one who steps forward to protect Natasha.  It's no wonder that in their guilelessness these two,  Natasha and Pierre,  are the characters we love the most.

I'm up to page 721.  I'll check in later!