Keeping the Feast (11 page)

John and I both understood that Werner was not just chatting idly, though at the time we caught but a whiff of what he was trying to convey. It took us a good fifteen years to understand the simple truth he was hinting at, and will probably take years more before we truly, utterly accept it: that the arc of a single bullet finding its mark was not just a shocking, passing incident in our lives but a life-changing one that would make us dramatically different people. Because that single bullet so thoroughly changed John and me, it changed the lives of the children as well, and it will in turn change the lives of any children they have one day, as the memory of that bullet drifts in a slow-moving spiral down the generations. That spiral drifted up the generations, too: my mother never quite got over the shock of John’s shooting, the fear that her new son-in-law might die before she got to meet him.

A single bullet started it all. A single bullet fired by a roadside sniper in a nondescript city suddenly convulsed by revolution. Just one bullet found John that night, a bullet that pierced the passenger door of a little red Peugeot before tearing into John’s right side and exiting through his left.

But even a single bullet takes at least two paths: one through a body, the other through life itself. The first path is visible, gory, dramatic. All the same, it is the simple route. The second path is imperceptible, hidden, and therefore far more fraught. The second path cuts through a once seamless life, splitting it in two: the old life before the bullet and the new life after. Neither doctors nor patient can see the second path, so the wounds it leaves often go unnoticed and untreated. Both can lead to long-term festering.

That gentle German orderly tried his best to alert us to the bullet’s second path, but we were too naive to comprehend. We tried, for several years in fact, to celebrate John’s new birthday as if we understood its importance. A year to the day after the shooting, we invited a few close friends to share a “new birthday” dinner with us, to celebrate the fact that John was alive. That I chose not to make Auntie’s chocolate cake for the occasion is proof that I still hadn’t digested the import of Werner’s message. I made a pie that night for dessert, pumpkin, I think. I even stuck a single, lighted birthday candle in the middle of it, but all of us at the table felt awkward and off-stride. No one felt comfortable “celebrating” John’s new birthday, because accepting a new birthday meant accepting a new person. Accepting the new John meant the old John was gone, a concept none of us was ready to acknowledge.

In the nearly twenty years that have passed since that phony birthday party, one thought continues to haunt: If a single bullet travels up and down the generations, how do we ever begin to measure the havoc of war?

 

 

 

 

S
hortly after Werner’s birthday speech, old friends from Rome who had moved to a dune-filled stretch of white beach on Key Biscayne called to urge us to take a total break once John was released from the Munich hospital and had completed his rehabilitation at a Connecticut clinic. They invited us to spend a week with them in the Florida sunshine, where both of us could escape the medical world, which had become our daily grind. It was our first taste of the role that friends, sunshine, food, talk, and laughter would later play in John’s recovery, though we hadn’t yet the ghost of an idea about how far off that recovery actually was.

It took little time to be seduced by Don and Marybelle Schanche’s idea of sunshine, sea air, stone crabs, and Key lime pie. The mere idea of it was the carrot that kept us going during the rest of John’s hospital care. I can still feel that welcoming blast of Florida’s enveloping heat and humidity as we stepped off the plane in Miami, pure bliss after months in the gray, damp cold of a northern European winter.

An hour later we were inside our friends’ light-filled apartment, and the only thing between their terrace and the bright, shining sea was an enormous, heated swimming pool surrounded by sea grape, grass, and the occasional lizard tumbling out of a palm tree. The sun beat down, heating our bones, unknotting our muscles, even beginning to dispel our panic.

Their apartment was filled with reminders of our shared time in Italy, from the gaily painted Italian pottery they had collected over the years to the framed sketches of Rome hanging on the walls, to the lazy evening meals that Marybelle served us, just as she had served us in Rome. Perhaps as much as anything that reminded me of Rome was the fierce, bright sunlight of early spring in Key Biscayne, which had the power to banish from my memory the weak winter light of northern Europe.

I remember sitting close to John and drinking in the intensity of that sunlight while sipping a glass of cold, very cold, white wine, not unlike the bottles we used to share on our sunny, plant-filled terraces in Rome. Don had a booming, infectious laugh; Marybelle, a higher, full-throated chortle, like the exultant pealing of a high-toned bell. Between the sunshine, the wine, and their laughter, I felt as if I had somehow gotten out of hell and peeked into heaven. One night Don put the John Cleese classic
A Fish Called Wanda
on the video player and the four of us laughed until we wept. For the first time since I had been beaten, more than four months earlier, the tension, anger, sadness, and fear that I had buried inside began to dissipate with each peal of laughter.

Every morning after a lazy breakfast, I helped John do his stretching exercises, a three-year prescription meant to counteract the fusion of his vertebrae that had begun after his last operation in Munich. Then the four of us descended to the pool, for laps, naps, newspapers, and talk. Toward lunchtime we would wander barefoot along the sand to a simple shack of a restaurant on the beach, long gone now after a hurricane tore it off its foundations. We would eat stone crabs or hamburgers and drink a beer in the sunshine, easily talking and laughing together, just as we always had. We would down a piece or two of genuine Key lime pie, then stroll back to the Schanches’ flat, unwinding a bit more day by day. Before our week was up, Don and Marybelle organized a joint birthday celebration, for John and I nearly share a birthday. One friend brought an armload of helium balloons attached to long, colorful, curling ribbons. She let them loose in the Schanches’ big white living room, where they bounced around the ceiling in time to the ebb and flow of the air conditioner’s fan. John still could not sit up very long, so after eating quickly he retired to the floor, where he lay on his stomach under the balloons. When the rest of us finished our dinner, we followed Don’s suggestion and stretched out on the floor with John. It is possible to drink Champagne while lying on one’s side, leaning on one’s elbow, but it is not easy. We drank and laughed, always horizontal. We ate birthday cake and laughed, still horizontal.

By the time we got vertical again, I dared to let myself think that the worst of the nightmare might be over. It looked for all the world as if we would make our target date of mid-April to head back to work—and life as we’d known it. I knew we would both feel infinitely better once we could return to some semblance of normal life. We needed to have our days marked not by doctor’s visits and lab tests but by headlines and deadlines, interviews and articles. We needed our nights marked not by nightmares and fear but by music and books; long, lazy walks; and time in each other’s arms.

 

 

 

 

O
ur week in Florida finished, we flew to New York for what we thought would be a last round of family visits before heading back to Europe and John’s new posting in Berlin. The
Times
had decided shortly after the shooting that John should trade his Warsaw posting, which involved heavy travel, for Berlin, which did not. But just as we dared to feel we were climbing out of our abyss, the light at the surface beginning to warm our faces, John fell terribly ill once more. The diagnosis was hepatitis B, caused by tainted blood transfused during one of his last operations in Munich. Neither of us had ever had hepatitis, but my mother’s family doctor warned us that it would not be pleasant. Worse yet, there was no treatment other than luck and the passage of time.

Through that spring John became sicker and sicker, suffering all the typical symptoms of this disabling liver disease, which causes profound exhaustion and wreaks havoc on the body’s digestive system and internal clock. His urine turned brown, his stool white. His skin itched until it bled. He suddenly lost his ability to sleep at night and would doze fitfully all day long, only to wake up, nervous and tetchy, as the sun went down.

Within days, John went cranky and quiet. I went cranky and loud. No hospital, no drugs, no treatment this time, just rest and a light, fat-free diet. But even though he followed all medical instructions, John’s liver count kept climbing week after week until the doctor began broaching the possibility of a liver transplant if his condition did not begin improving soon.

It was my mother, who knew about these things, who pulled me aside one day when John was sleeping and suggested that John was not just sick but depressed as well. I argued against it, reminding her that the doctor had warned us that the symptoms of hepatitis B often mimic those of depression. I had conveniently put aside the doctor’s other statement, that hepatitis B can kick-start depression. Uncharacteristically, my mother did not argue with me, but it was clear that she was deeply troubled.

When John fell ill, we had to cancel our usual summer plans to spend a month in our beloved lake house in Italy. We had been renting that house in Trevignano Romano every summer since we’d moved to Poland, and our time there was something that we and the children had come to count on. Part of the magic of the place was the presence of our close friends Ann and Joseph Natanson, who had discovered Trevignano when their two children were small and decided to build two nearly identical homes on a hillside plot they owned there: one for their family and one for guests. Ann, who is English, was Rome correspondent for Time-Life Books; Joseph, Polish, was a painter who had retired after years of working with Europe’s top directors at Cinecittà, Italy’s Hollywood. Both John and I were bitterly disappointed that John’s hepatitis meant we wouldn’t be able to see Ann and Joseph as planned, or lose ourselves in the simple, restorative rhythms of our summertime rituals in Trevignano.

Instead, we rented an old-fashioned cottage for a month at Fairfield Beach on Connecticut’s southwestern shore, the beach of my childhood, where Peter and Anna would join us for the last two weeks of our stay. John and I packed our suitcases and moved to the cottage in early June. A friend with a truck transported my childhood sailboat, an overgrown ironing board with a green-and-white-striped nylon sail, to the cottage, too, so that I could teach the children to sail. John lay in the cottage, dozing by day, nervous and insomniac at night, talking little, eating less. It was not until mid-June, just before the children arrived, that his blood count finally tipped back in the direction of healing. To this day I don’t know if it was the doctor’s talk about liver transplants, the children’s impending arrival, or simple coincidence that turned the tide toward healing.

The photos we have of that time show John looking surprisingly well, considering what he had been through. Though his hair had thinned and turned to straw, though he was undoubtedly bony, the weight loss made him look more like an aged adolescent than a man not far from fifty. The scars, which ran across his beltline, made wearing a belt uncomfortable, so he had adopted suspenders to hold his trousers—baggy now—in place. My favorite shot shows him clowning with Peter and Anna around a picnic table, tufts of beach grass and the blue-gray expanse of Long Island Sound in the background. Peter is hiding his eyes with a just-shucked ear of corn; Anna is holding a half-shucked ear and happily sticking out her tongue. John is looking like a hillbilly in oversized chinos held up too high by a pair of blue suspenders. He mugs for me, behind the camera. He’s the one sporting the enormous handlebar mustache made from a fresh tuft of corn silk.

T
ake one large hunk of Hungarian bacon, about the size of a large man’s hand. Skewer it with a long-handled barbecue fork, then start a small wood fire out of doors, for
sütni szalonna
(pronounced SHUT-nee SULL-oh-nah) is a messy meal in the making and the eating. Once coals form, hold the skewered bacon over the flames until the meat starts to sear and melting fat begins to sputter on the coals. Cover thick slices of fresh Hungarian rye bread with a layer of chopped raw vegetables: sweet onions, garden tomatoes, and cucumbers. When heavenly meaty smells begin to emanate from the fire, press the blackening bacon and its dripping fat into a slice of prepared bread. The bread, which works as both plate and napkin, will sop up the runoff. Keep the bread slice parallel to the earth as you eat and avoid closing your eyes in bliss, lest the fat-drizzled vegetables slide to the ground. Repeat procedure. No matter how much you make, there will never be quite enough.

Hungarian farmworkers used to eat
sütni szalonna
in the fields during high summer, when the workday might start at four or five a.m. A few hours later, when the sun was well up and they were ravenous, they would eat a quick but nourishing breakfast in the fields, to avoid wasting time in trekking back home. Later it became a favorite picnic treat, which is how I first came to eat it, in the big backyard of our Hungarian next-door neighbors, whose sons, Johnny and Bobby, were my after-school playmates. Mrs. Vincze would prepare the bread and vegetables, and her husband would organize the fire, then skewer and cook the meat. The boys, their older sister, and I would stand by hungrily, salivating as the smoke from the sizzling bacon wafted skyward. No picnic food ever tasted so good to me as that Hungarian farmhand specialty, the cousin of Roman bruschetta or British bread and drippin’.