Free Keeping the Feast by Paula Butturini Page B

I would observe an undeclared truce: mother stopped barking, daughter stopped sassing. I almost always recovered by morning.
    If the fever was higher—102, 103, or accompanied by flu or measles or stomach woes—the potion was ginger ale, cool and bubbly, a single ice cube bobbing in a highball glass. Once the fever dropped, my mother brought dry toast, too; hot, golden, and sliced into four triangles—never the two coarse rectangles of workaday toast—in an effort to appeal to my lost appetite.
    As the illness began to wane, stronger potions would appear: Angelina’s homemade chicken broth, made from one of the oldest hens that pecked in the stinky coop in the back corner of their garden. I loved my grandmother’s chicken soup and the chicken feathers she stuffed into our pillows almost as much as I hated the chickens themselves and the acrid ammonia stench of their dark, airless henhouse. If my stomach was still weak, then the broth came plain, or with a bit of minced parsley added at the last minute. If I was feeling stronger, then it appeared with soft shreds of white meat and tiny, star-shaped pastina.
     
     
     
     
    W hen I got to the jammed surgical ward at Spital 2, the hospital in Timişoara where John had been lying for five days, going in and out of consciousness, I was struck as much by the hunk of heavy brown bread and the thick, gristly pork sausage—both untouched at the head of his bed—as by John’s gray, skeletal face. No dainty toast triangles here. No honey-flavored, lemon-laced tea. No fancy medical machinery. No antibiotics. Not even enough bandages. Just a sudden flood of patients, some moaning, some ominously quiet. And a truce of sorts. The fighting that had raged around the hospital a few nights earlier, as Ceauşescu’s security forces battled army regulars and the people of Timişoara, had stopped.
    In my halfhearted attempt to stave off panic, I had tried to believe that the conflicting reports on the nature and seriousness of John’s wounds were overdramatized. But when the elevator doors at Spital 2 opened to reveal a huge gob of spit on the filthy floor, I no longer needed to see John’s eyes—wild and unnaturally bright in the gray, drawn face of a suddenly elderly stranger—to know that most of the condition reports that had filtered back to me had been hopelessly optimistic. He looked like a desiccated caricature of the man I had kissed good-bye at Frankfurt Airport five days earlier.
    John was conscious, and relief flooded through his eyes when he recognized me, but he was also off his head, lapsing intermittently into incoherence from the infection already raging inside him. A nurse was dressing him in what was left of his shot-up clothes, and he was lying on an old-fashioned metal bed, his hands clenched, clearly desperate to be gone. He kept trying to apologize for having been shot. I took his hands in mine and held them tightly. I was hypnotized by the glittery, ghostly look in his eyes. Those eyes, in which I could see John present one instant, then gone the next, so terrified me that I could almost feel myself disappearing under their gaze. All real feeling—my terror, panic, exhaustion—was being sucked somewhere deep inside me. Holding John’s hands, held by his eyes, I felt as if a heavy shroud were slipping over my emotions and feelings, and I was shocked to hear myself suddenly speaking calmly, telling John to hang on, that after days of begging, a German Red Cross plane was waiting at the airport to fly him to safety.
    Our trip from hospital to airfield was short, surreal. The orderlies brought John downstairs, literally folding him into the elevator, then folding him again into a filthy station wagon so small that they had to bend him at the knees, because at six-feet-two he was too tall to fit. I sat in front, next to a grizzled driver who was wearing a fezlike hat and stiff woolen coat and taking deep drags on a reeking Eastern bloc cigarette. John lay on his