These collected stories from a doctor's notebook bring together the best writing of Dr. Siegfried Kra, who has published 13 books with W.W. Norton, Warner Books and McGraw Hill, among others. Like the famous Russian literary physician Chekhov, Kra uses storytelling to connect medicine with the human condition, resulting in tales of love and loss, triumph and disillusionment. From post-war France and Switzerland to a modern private cardiology practice and the teaching hospitals at Yale, Kra diagnoses rare diseases, falls in love, and even survives a plane crash on a frozen lake. An exploration of the Golden Age of Medicine coupled with vivid moments of 17 unusual true accounts.
These collected stories from a doctor's notebook bring together the best writing of Dr. Siegfried Kra, who has published 13 books with W.W. Norton, Warner Books and McGraw Hill, among others. Like the famous Russian literary physician Chekhov, Kra uses storytelling to connect medicine with the human condition, resulting in tales of love and loss, triumph and disillusionment. From post-war France and Switzerland to a modern private cardiology practice and the teaching hospitals at Yale, Kra diagnoses rare diseases, falls in love, and even survives a plane crash on a frozen lake. An exploration of the Golden Age of Medicine coupled with vivid moments of 17 unusual true accounts.
Paperback(Second Edition. Previously published as The Collected Stories From a Doctor's Notebook)
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Overview
These collected stories from a doctor's notebook bring together the best writing of Dr. Siegfried Kra, who has published 13 books with W.W. Norton, Warner Books and McGraw Hill, among others. Like the famous Russian literary physician Chekhov, Kra uses storytelling to connect medicine with the human condition, resulting in tales of love and loss, triumph and disillusionment. From post-war France and Switzerland to a modern private cardiology practice and the teaching hospitals at Yale, Kra diagnoses rare diseases, falls in love, and even survives a plane crash on a frozen lake. An exploration of the Golden Age of Medicine coupled with vivid moments of 17 unusual true accounts.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780912887616 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2020 |
| Edition description: | Second Edition. Previously published as The Collected Stories From a Doctor's Notebook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.41(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
La Femme a la PORTE
1951
We were a small group of American outcasts, unwanted by our American medical schools. We lived in the Hotel Henri in Toulouse, France.
I had graduated from CCNY and was labeled a radical and a Communist because I had participated in the riots in our school to oust an overtly anti-Semitic professor. The McCarthy years produced hosts of casualties, but for me they ushered in an exciting opportunity.
Our hotel was small, located one block from the Place Capital, the center of the city, run with a warm hand by a gracious concierge and his wife. They lived in an apartment on the ground floor, immediately behind the circular desk of the lobby.
The least expensive rooms were small, but opened on an enclosed central court with a large circular skylight. I lived, uncomfortably, in one of these rooms. It had a sink, a bed, a large armoire with a full-size mirror, and a small desk. Like all the other students, I had a miniature kerosene burner on which to brew coffee, fry eggs, and cook hamburgers in a cast iron pan. Given the inexpensive French bread, cheeses, and wine, I made do on seventy dollars a month.
I covered the walls of this tiny room, and even the ceiling, with blackboards that I filled with formulas and detailed drawings of nerve connections for my anatomy class. I wanted to be surrounded by their names and images so they would become as much a part of me as my arms and legs. The first thing I saw when I awoke each morning was the arterial supply of the stomach, which spread across part of my ceiling. This room became my sanctuary—at once my library, dining room, sleeping quarters, and a place to dream of someday becoming a doctor.
Every day a small elderly woman came to make the beds and sweep as best she could, especially the multicolored chalk dust that covered the room and intermingled with the odors of fried food, wine, and tobacco smoke from the night before. There was one large, stained bathtub for each floor, for which we had to make reservations two days in advance. Weekends were the hardest to get. My room was moderately heated but the bathtub room was like a sauna.
Most of the students were considerably better off than I financially, and they frequently took their meals at one of the numerous nearby restaurants that served inexpensive and delicious food. My compatriots staying at the hotel included two women on Fulbright scholarships who had come to learn French culture; a medical student from St. Croix; a man from Brooklyn named Rosenberg; and Lionel Williams, also from New York.
Rosenberg spoke French fluently because this was his second year in Toulouse, preparing to retake the tests he had flunked. When he opened his room shutters, I could see a line of dried kosher salamis hanging in his open armoire. Each week they arrived, much like the newspapers, promptly and without fail. Bringing salamis to France is like bringing tea to England. How could the local food have been improved upon? Rosenberg’s room looked and smelled like a New York delicatessen when he fried his treasured salamis on his kerosene stove.
You could always tell Ralph, the St. Croix native, was near by his cough. It echoed throughout the night because he kept his shutters opened. A mild and gentle man, he also spoke French fluently and was in his second year in Toulouse, having flunked his exams as well. He always had a cigarette in his hand, holding it like Peter Lorre in Casablanca, between his thumb and index finger, raising his hand, palm up, to meet his lips whenever he took a puff.
The oldest of the group was Lionel, who had a wife and two children back in Harlem. All his life he had wanted to become a doctor. His children were grown, and his wife worked hard and sent him money to enable him to pursue his dream. It was his first month here and he knew little, if any, French. He had been away from school for more than twenty years. Heavyset and tall, with a shiny brown face and a warm smile, Lionel was affable. He and I quickly became friends.
Whenever he cooked meatballs and spaghetti, he would share his meal with me. In the mornings, we left together for the bus at the Place Esquirole, which would take us to our destination and hopes: the ancient Toulouse medical school, with its long marble staircases and the anatomy laboratory, which dated back centuries.
In November, after two months at the school, the time came to dissect human bodies. We came into the lab to see twelve rectangular slabs covered with gray corpses. At first Lionel and I gasped with astonishment to see so many dead, and I could tell he was disturbed at the thought that they were about to be mutilated. Lionel was a deeply religious man. Each night before going to bed he read the Bible. Now, as he stood petrified, I saw him offer a silent prayer.
We were assigned to the same corpse—an Algerian who had died of gunshot wounds. There was an even hole in the center of his head, another in the chest. In all, four students were assigned to each corpse. Lionel and I were to start on the leg. We could not understand the instructions the professor raced through in French. A young assistant who spoke a little English gave us some basic directions about how to proceed with this ghastly business. The dissection kits were old and rusty. In college we had better tools for our frog and cat dissections. I held the scalpel in my hand, pointing at the skin. And then, for a second, I recalled the words of Macbeth: “Is this a dagger which I see before me / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee / I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.”
The incision was made; the skin of the thigh was tough and resilient, as hard as leather. Fluid oozed out. The strong smell of formaldehyde made my eyes smart and tear. It is a smell I will never forget. These were old bodies, long frozen in the morgue. When they were thawed out, life came crawling out of the legs: millions of maggots swimming in the juices of decay. I felt faint, but the pungent odor somehow kept me from swooning.
“Clean the skin area and identify the arteries and nerves and carefully dissect them clean. Cut the main artery or nerve and you fail the course before it begins.”
Those were the discomfiting words of Professor Rouvière, a tall, threatening-looking man with black hair pasted down on his head. The other students at our table, Algerians and Frenchmen, knew no English. I marveled at how adroitly they performed their task. Surely they were destined to be surgeons. How cool they seemed, while Lionel and I perspired. All of us wore heavy rubber aprons. The two standing next to us were so confident that they seemed almost indifferent to what they were doing. How could anyone be indifferent to human flesh? Hadn’t a corpse once been alive? What did the man do, what was he like? Now there was no name. He was Number 36660, male.
I watched the despair in Lionel’s eyes. He was the same age as the corpse, the remains of a man who was now nothing more than a harbor and restaurant for maggots and an instrument of learning. I wondered, and not for the first time, if this was the right profession for me. Carefully, we moved the fat to one side and, finding the long gray nerve, began to clean it. Pull too hard, allow the slimy scalpel to slip, and that slender thread would be sliced through.
When we left in the darkness of night, our bodies reeked with the smell of death, especially our hands. Once back in my room I stripped off the offensive clothing, only to remember that there would be no washing machine, no bath to soak in. These clothes would remain my uniform. I’d have to live with the stench until I could bring them to the laundry.
Sitting at my desk, the anatomy text spread before me, I began the tedious task of translating into English; then came the memorization. Thousands of pages to memorize for just one course, and then all those others to follow—and all in French! Small wonder most flunked the exams the first time. How did anyone pass?
Becoming increasingly despondent, surrounded by the smells that brought me near to retching, I heard a gentle knock on a door. So many sounds came from that busy courtyard that I wasn’t sure if the knock was intended for me. This time of night it could only be Lionel bringing me a cup of tea, as he sometimes did. Then we would sit and talk about New York and his family, and his eyes would become moist. He was terribly lonely that first month. The knock came again, more insistent, and I knew it was not Lionel.
Standing there was an apparition, a vision. My first thought was that the fumes of the formaldehyde must have gone to my head. Before me stood the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was sleek and bright-eyed, vivacious and animated. She spoke first, as she saw the astonished look on my face. She must have detected the stench of formaldehyde, I thought, but she didn’t refer to it.
“I saw your light on,” she said in French. “Do you smoke?” she asked in English, her accent totally delightful.
“Yes. Please come in.”
The only chair in the room was covered with clothing. I stuffed the clothes into the drawers of the armoire and, rummaging around in there, found a pack of matches and handed them to her.
“You are an artist,” she giggled, looking up at the ceiling covered with anatomical drawings.
“No, I am a medical student.”
“Yes, I heard you were the new one in the hotel.”
Her perfume mingled with and then overcame the acrid smell.
“My name is Monique,” she said, tilting her beautiful head slightly to the side. Her hair was brown and short, almost like a young boy’s. She touched the side of her head and I saw that her fingernails were covered with a deep red polish.
“You are still studying,” she said, “and it is so late. I will leave you to your work.”
“No, no. I have had enough for tonight,” I blurted. “Please.”
I closed the door behind her and she came over to my desk and peered at the anatomy text.
“It is all in French,” she said. “Do you read French, un peu, a little? I can help you, if you wish, in the evenings when you are back from your classes.”
This was surely a dream.
Her body was small, slender, a perfect match for her delicate head and arms. Unselfconscious, she sat on the unmade bed, sniffling. After a moment she rose, walked to the desk where I was sitting, and leaned over me to peer at the book I held.
“That is the cuisse, how you say?”
“‘Thigh.’ Voilà, ‘thigh.’ It is not pretty without the skin.”
She laughed seductively, and I became weak.
“I will come tomorrow again, and I will help you translate.”
“You don’t have to go.”
“Oh oui, it is late and I must get my beauty sleep.” She kissed me on the cheek and left the room. For the rest of the night the room was filled with her perfume and I was filled with thoughts of her.
In Europe in those days, university students were an elite group, almost always forgiven for their wild ways. If they got drunk, the Toulousian would say, “Oh, c’est un étudiant, they are students, what do you expect?”
You could always tell a student in Europe in the fifties. Most were unshaven or bearded, wearing old worn clothing. There was an air of freedom about them. No one was required to attend classes; all the learning was up to the student. There were no guides, no rules, only the final exams, the brutal task that always lay ahead, never for an instant out of mind. I knew that some stayed for several years trying to pass that first year’s exams.
American students were even more special because of our reputation, often accurate, of being rich. I was an exception to the rule, and no one would quite believe I had barely enough money to eat one meal a day. It was almost impossible to have any social life without cash. I was prepared to lead a life of loneliness and celibacy and to concentrate all my energies on preparing for the exams.
The second home for the students was the café, a welcome reprieve from their small, dingy, usually cold and poorly lit rooms. I went as often as I could and sometimes nursed a cup of coffee undisturbed for hours. Here I heard French being spoken and watched, with great envy, love at work. The smoke-filled cafés brimmed with students animatedly speaking and laughing. Then, when it seemed hopeless that I would meet anyone, I would walk through the foggy night back to my dreary hotel. I carried a sweet melancholy in my soul.
All around me there was love. Even Rosenberg, the salami king, managed to have a girlfriend. This hotel had walls so thin that all the sounds of the night entered our rooms. Ralph coughed all night, and Rosenberg’s carnal grunts pervaded the court like a bad porno movie.
At five in the morning, most of the students would have begun studying and would continue until it was time to catch the bus at eight.
Lionel was at my door at five-thirty, grinning affably.
“You had a guest at one a.m.,” he said.
“Well, yes, a dream floated into my room,” I told him.
For the rest of the day my thoughts were of Monique. At the lecture hall we sat on marble steps as the professor lectured with no notes while he drew the anatomy of the leg, using different colored chalks, one in each hand, to sketch in the arteries and the nerves.
“Gentlemen, that is how you must know each inch of the body.”
Lionel was struggling to catch some of the words the professor spoke. Toulousians speak a special French, a wonderfully musical version. They also roll their r’s, making it sound a bit like Italian.
With little sleep and distracted by my fantasy of Monique, I did not hear much of the lecture. But in the anatomy laboratory and at our post by the leg of the corpse, there was no time to daydream. Lionel struggled fiercely with his dissection. I could see the frustration line his face.
Afterward we sat in the café sipping coffee.
“It is awfully hard for me,” Lionel said. “I try to remember just a little, but my head is like a sieve. Everything falls out. I can hardly understand a word, much less memorize it all.”
“Lionel, it will ome. Tonight you and I will review the leg and then we’ll go over the biochemistry, which I think I can manage to understand.”
Lionel and I went back to the hotel and worked until eleven, but it became unhappily apparent to me that he was simply not going to master the voluminous material. In his forties, his concentration was earnest but ineffective. He looked so tired when he left my room that it broke my heart.
We had eight months in which to learn all of the anatomy—10,000 pages of memorization—and five other subjects before the examination in April. All in French.
At the stroke of midnight I heard a gentle knock on the door. Monique was there, dangling an unlit cigarette in her wondrously feminine hand.
“I have come to help you. You are not too tired?”
“I have been hoping you would come. I was going to knock on your door if you didn’t.”
Monique lived two rooms down the hall. The shutters of her room were always tightly shut, but soft music wafted through the door, as did hints of her intoxicating perfume.
All over the bed and the chairs and the entire room, I had sprinkled Old Spice after-shave, hoping to hide the smell of formaldehyde or at least blunt its sharpness.
We sat by the desk, she moving her delicate fingers over the page, translating the complicated language of medicine, occasionally pausing to turn her seductive brown eyes toward me with a smile. By one in the morning I could no longer restrain myself, and I kissed her cheek gently.
“Mais, non. You have to study, chéri,” she reprimanded. “You are a poor student, aren’t you? Not like the others?”
“Yes, but why do you ask?”
“Comme ça, like that.”
She rose and disappeared again. I began to wonder if I had invented her. I would steal past her room every night hoping to come across her. But no sound came from the room, no light from under her door. Sometimes I knocked softly, knowing that the echo carried throughout the court. It was like announcing that I was in insatiable heat. But I was not to see her for some time.
Though I was devoting more of my efforts to Lionel, he began to show worrisome changes. He couldn’t remember the day of the week before stressful lessons, especially those dealing with the anatomy of the brain and all its highly complicated tracts and connections. I was managing, barely. I found the heart to be the most exciting organ, especially the marvelously intricate functional anatomy—or was it because I was a hopeless romantic?
“Lionel, the seat of the soul resides in the heart, according to Aristotle,” I said to him one night.
He laughed wearily and said, “That’s not what the Bible says. God resides in all of man, in all of us, even we Negroes.”
He had a small radio in his room, an ancient Zenith, and he tuned in to the Armed Forces station that played good American jazz. When Louis Armstrong sang, he sang along with him, “I’ll get by, as long as I have you.” And he did a little tap dance to the music, trying to rouse himself.
But he was so lonely and frustrated that tears came to his eyes. He was a shy and humble man who could have had many friends, but he had convinced himself that white folks truly didn’t care for the likes of him. He wasn’t wrong. I could see the pain in his eyes when one of the students would casually ask him to turn his hand over so he could see if it was white on the surface of the palm, as in monkeys and apes. The students knew of the vicious attacks against the blacks in the South and knew all about the lynchings. Their efforts to be kind were cruelly condescending. They regarded blacks as poor, child-like victims.
One night, at the end of November, Lionel invited me to dine with him in one of the marvelous local restaurants.
“You know, it’s Thanksgiving in the States. We will have our own Thanksgiving here.”
The other American students kept much to themselves and made their own plans. We found a small bistro on the Rue de Bourg, and for five dollars we could ill afford we had a delicious six-course meal. We ordered coq au vin, the closest thing to turkey we could find on the menu, and a cheap Algerian wine. By the end of the dinner, we had both grown mellow and melancholy.
“You really miss your young lady,” he said. “I see the sadness in your eyes. Man, you are young and good-looking. You will find dozens of others.”
“Lionel, I know, but one needs time and some money.”
I felt offended, hurt, when this beautiful young woman just disappeared out of my life. Embarrassment or maybe simply shyness prevented me from making inquiries about her. My ego was shattered. I concluded that I just wasn’t good enough for her.
In the weeks that followed, I could study little and was still waiting for that gentle knock on my door that would relieve the weight of depression from me.
By the beginning of December I decided I needed to get out and decided to try a student restaurant. It was cold and raining, and I took the long walk to the medieval building through the dark, narrow streets of Toulouse. A pungent odor surrounded me from the sewage that flowed in the gutters.
The restaurant was crowded with French and Algerian students, all waiting in line with metal trays. I picked up a tray, along with a glass and some worn silverware. Military style, servers filled each section of the plate with French fries, sausages, and withered tomatoes, and poured Algerian table wine into our glasses. The cashiers required a student identity card, which I had never bothered to get from the bursar’s office. Standing directly in back of me was a tall, scrawny black woman holding her tray, stacked with double portions of vegetables, meat, and two glasses of wine.
“Oh, he is American. Let him go by. I will explain everything to him,” she said in French.
“Merci,” I said to her, grateful for her concern and kindness.
“Don’t waste your time in French. I’m an American. Follow me and I will teach you the ropes.”
There were miles of long wooden tables in this school cafeteria, with the haggard and exhausted students eating from their metal plates. The smells of food permeated the air, mixed with smoke—such dense smoke—and wine and unwashed bodies and clothes. There wasn’t another American in sight, except for my new friend, Clarice.
She found her own spot and thrust her thin body on the bench between two other students.
“So you came to join the Foreign Legion in Toulouse? You look like a bright kid. Why aren’t you at Yale or some other spiffy joint?”
I didn’t answer her.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Five years,” she said, “and I will stay until I pass my exams. This is a good place to learn French,” she said, “but you need a girlfriend to really learn the language. Do you have any money?”
“No.”
“Too bad. That will make it very hard. With money you get slides, a good skeleton, good English texts, and even tutors. And, of course, you need money to take a woman for coffee.”
“Do you have money?” I asked her.
“C’est drole, that is funny. Would I be eating in this prison cafeteria? I manage.”
Her hair was unkempt, she looked shabby, but she burst with life and enthusiasm. Most of the students who passed us greeted her. I must have met a dozen of these in only a few minutes.
“Come home with me. I have a roommate you may like. She speaks no English, but you aren’t a bad-looking guy.”
We finished eating and left the cafeteria. We walked with long quick strides through the windy streets for almost an hour. Finally we reached a row of small houses.
“We live on the ground floor: two bedrooms, a kitchen, a small living room.”
“Danielle!” she yelled. “We have a visitor.”
Strewn on the floor and on the kitchen table were books and papers.
“I will make some coffee,” Clarice said. “Push them aside and find a spot. I usually sit on the floor.”
She continued speaking while she made the coffee, but I was unable to hear a word.
Danielle came into the room wearing a housecoat. The light in the room was dim, but I could see she had dark hair and was buxom, with large round eyes. She was not a particularly attractive woman, and she appeared considerably older than I.
“There you are, Danielle. Were you sleeping? This is our new friend, an American medical student. He has to learn French because he will never pass.”
“Enchanté,” she said.
We all sat on the floor drinking coffee, while Clarice chatted on, and then she suddenly rose and said, “I have to study and leave you two alone. When you leave, you can borrow my bones. I have a very good skull, femur, radius, pelvis, and hand. The rest you will have to scrounge around for. You have to learn each crease on the bones and holes in the skull and what goes through them. If you pass anatomy, you are on your way. Most of the students flunk anatomy and biochemistry the first time around.”
Danielle was able to follow some of my English, and we limped along. It grew late. Classes began at eight in the morning, and I wondered how I would get back.
There were no buses. Clarice solved my dilemma when she rejoined us.
“It’s too late to go back to your hotel,” she said. She must have read my thoughts. “Stay here and we can leave together in the morning. You can sleep with Danielle. She won’t mind.”
Clarice explained to Danielle, who simply said, “d’accord, all right.”
Danielle’s room was neat and organized. There was a cross on the wall and a wonderful painting of the Virgin Mary on her dresser. No books or magazines cluttered up her room. The night was chilly, and I was glad to be under the large down feather duvet. Soon she was beside me, her robe neatly folded over the chair.
It was good not to be alone. But all night I thought of Monique, even as we made love.
In Toulouse, the week or so before Christmas, there were few signs that the holiday was fast approaching. Here and there decorations bedecked the stores; occasionally, a Christmas tree was visible. Christmas in France was a serious, somber religious holiday. After midnight, after church, all the restaurants and homes had a huge dinner, called Le Réunion. The Americans almost always took this time to go skiing or traveling, so the hotel was almost empty.
Lionel cooked a small goose and sweet potatoes on his stove, and we listened to the Armed Forces network program that played Christmas carols all night. We drank champagne and wine and sang along. It was hardly Christmas in Vermont, but it was Christmas.
After midnight, I staggered back to my room and fell asleep on my bed. I didn’t hear the knock on the door, but I felt a gentle kiss on my cheek. Monique stood above me, perfumed, lovely in a red dress. Only the light filtering in from the hall entered the small room.
“Merry Christmas, chéri,” she said, and handed me a Christmas card and a large chocolate heart. At first I was convinced I was dreaming but then I pulled her toward me.
In the morning, without makeup, she looked even more beautiful than the night before.
“Where have you been all these months? I waited and waited, disturbed and even annoyed. If only you had written or called me.”
“Well, you know. It was better this way. My father was ill, and I had to stay in the country with my parents. Let’s be happy,” she said, “and we must begin Christmas Day the French way.”
She returned a few minutes later with a bottle of champagne, two glasses, coffee, two croissants, and a small radio.
“We better stay home today. It is snowing too much.”
In our rooms night and day were one. Monique brought two blue candles, a miniature Christmas tree, and a plastic reindeer in a glass. She owned a small turntable and a collection of Edith Piaf, Charles Trenet, Yves Montand, and Frank Sinatra. She transformed the small depressing room into a magic wonderland.
We laughed and made love and slept, and ate delicious French cheeses, and drank wine, and smoked Phillip Morris cigarettes.
When I felt hungry she made an omelet of herbs. We ate chocolate and bread in bed. Sometimes my eyes wandered to the section on the ceiling with my blackboard of biochemistry formulas. I strained to read them in the candlelight. Monique prevented me from returning to reality by placing her small delicate hands over my eyes.
“Allons, petit chou, there is time enough for your chemistry on the ceiling. There is enough here. Fait le practique en moi, practice on me.”
We whispered like lovers, told of everything in our hearts while listening, enraptured, to Edith Piaf singing “Mon Amour.”
“From now on we speak only in French,” she said, “and if you don’t understand, tant pis, too bad, your loss. You must learn French very well or you won’t pass your exams.”
An entire day and another night went by, and in the morning she left the room with all her lovely possessions.
I must confess that I had completely forgotten about Lionel, who must have surmised why I hadn’t surfaced for nearly two days. I knocked on his door and was surprised not to see him at his desk. He kept his room immaculate. He didn’t want “the white folks to think we Negroes are dirty.”
All our rooms were malodorous, reeking, but not his. He used a pine spray. His bed was made, the towels neatly folded, and there was nothing in the room except for his cooking utensils and some cans of food, neatly stacked, a bottle of wine, and a carton of Phillip Morris. His clothing was gone, and there was a note on the desk and a large envelope addressed to me.
Dear Lover Boy:
I did not want to disturb you, but I have to leave. I am too lonely and it is no use. I can’t ever learn all of this stuff. I tried, as you well know. I don’t belong in medical school and will make out fine at home. You will be a great doctor someday, and I want to thank you for being so kind to an old man. Please take my oil cooker and food and radio. The envelope is for you. When you get your M.D. and make good money, you can repay me. What use are French francs to me anyway? Take care of yourself. Peace and love.
Inside the envelope were thirty thousand francs—about five hundred dollars! Enough money for me to finish off the year in luxury and to buy my own skeleton to study.
My throat was dry, my eyes moist. Dear kind Lionel, my irreplaceable friend. I would miss him always.
Monique had disappeared again for two days, and when she returned, late at night, she brought a little present, a “good luck pen.”
“I didn’t come to see you because you must study. It is very difficult to pass the exams here in France, you know, and I want to stay here with you, but if you do not succeed, I will be to blame.”
“And if you don’t come here, I will also fail because I cannot concentrate enough to study,” I said. “So it is better you are here, and I will study like a mad fool, drawing energy from you.” A smile and a pause. “Where do you disappear to? You are so mysterious.”
“Mon chéri, mystery and longing are the secrets of lasting love, so we say in French.”
“Where do you go?” I asked her again.
“Oh, you know, I have parents I must stay with in the country, outside of Toulouse. We live in a vineyard, and my father makes wine. Someday, we will perhaps go together.”
On weekends, Monique became more generous with her time. Knowing we would soon see each other was the motivation I needed to work twice as efficiently during the week. We met often in the center of town, at the Place Capitale, in the Cafés des Artistés, where, apparently, Toulouse Lautrec had once come to do some paintings.
“It is better that those nosy people in the hotel don’t see us together,” she said. “Je suis très propre, I am very moral, you know. In France, we keep our private lives very discreet.”
It became apparent that Monique was educated, au courant, as the French say. She always looked as if she had just walked out of a stylish dress shop. Scarves of colorful silk were as much a part of her as her beautiful brown hair. She was wearing a leather coat, a blue and brown scarf draped casually around her neck as I approached the café one day. She was sitting demurely by a small round table near the window. The late afternoon light made her beautiful hair shimmer. She was sipping a cup of coffee, and just for a moment I wanted to look at her from a distance, objectively. Her small lips were on the porcelain rim of the cup; one of her adorable fingers with the red polish rested on her chin; her legs were tightly crossed, her ankles touching. She must have just arrived because her cheeks were fresh and red as apples from the cold December air.
When I approached her, her face lit up, and she said, “Tiens, tiens, mon petit chou. Did you work well?”
“Very well. So well I have the day free.”
“And the night?”
“Of course, the night.” She gave me a tiny kiss on the cheek, and her eyes glowed with such love and passion that I wanted to smother her with kisses right then and there.
Love makes you feel confident, unafraid. It gives you the strength and security to make fun of everything, and makes you want to laugh at that which once seemed terribly serious. Loving Monique gave me a sense of freedom I had never known. I could breathe again, drawing in huge and delicious gulps of clean air.
Now we were together most of the time. While I struggled nightly with the endless difficult studies, Monique stayed in my room. Languidly dozing on the bed or reading a book of poetry, she would catch my eye and wave to me as if from a distant field. Sometimes, she stole behind me and touched my head with her lips while her arms encircled my drooping shoulders. Slowly, I would turn my head and her face would be near mine. I followed the curve of her thin eyebrows with my fingers and touched her small, curved nose and her lips.
“Not yet, mon dieu. Go back to your histology. There are only a few months before the exams.”
Like most of the other students, I had stopped attending classes because there was just not enough time to do everything. My day still began at five, now with Monique sleeping soundly while I brewed some Nescafé. Fatigue was one feeling I never felt now. So inspired, so driven was I, that even the grueling hours of study became enjoyable. Carnal pleasures and scholarly endeavors coexisted side by side, each prompting and enhancing the other.
Table of Contents
Preface — 1
Holding My Brother’s Hand — 5
Plane Crash on a Frozen Lake — 9
Gabrielle’s Dance — 21
Knowing Meurice — 53
Secret Mission — 61
La Femme à La Porte — 68
Coke on a Hot Day — 93
Eli’s Cure — 105
Guys and Dolls — 109
In the Stroke Ward — 113
A Lift — 117
Matilda — 121
The Ingrid Bergman Nun — 138
The Nocturnal Gardener — 147
I’m Fine — 155
Lana’s Luck — 163
Howdy, Pardner — 172