Saving Anna Karenina
Part 30
Start with Part 1, and read a short synopsis of the original book.
She startled awake. It was dark. Was it evening or middle of night, Wednesday, or Saturday? Patti was in her bed, quaking and scratching herself. There was a new woman in the third bed. She lay on her back and stared up at the ceiling. Anna sat up in bed and the new woman’s eyes turned to look at her vacantly. There was a white bandage around the back of her neck.
Anna was frightened at once by this sight and felt that she simply must leave this sanatorium. What if she became this woman? Is this what happened to people who stayed here? Mysterious surgeries? She got out of bed quickly, realizing that she was terribly, terribly hungry. How long had it been since she had thought about food? This astonished her, how she could have gone so long without being hungry — months, at least. She hurriedly walked down the hall to the nurse’s office. A short, young girl was sitting inside, reading a book.
“I must dine,” said Anna.
“Breakfast isn’t until eight,” said the girl. “I’m sorry but you’ll have to wait another three hours. There’s a vending machine over there, if you have money you can buy some crackers, a brownie?” She pointed across the front salon. Anna didn’t have any money. How disgraceful.
It was five. That meant she had been asleep for nearly twelve hours. She walked back to her room, hoping to fall back asleep until breakfast. But she wasn’t tired. In fact she felt wired, and her back was starting to ache. Outside of her room in the salon area stood the short, portly woman who was concerned about her privacy in the meeting the previous day. She gazed out the window at the bleak winter morning.
“Couldn’t sleep, huh?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
The two women stood around awkwardly for a moment, looking out the window at a bridge that crossed a large river. Anna thought it might be the river between Brooklyn and Manhattan.
“It looks like it’s raining, huh?”
“Yes, it does,” said Anna. “I miss being outdoors.”
“Me too. I don’t smoke, you know, like the rest of ’em who can’t wait to get outside, but it’s just nice to breath in fresh air, feel the sun, even the rain, you know, be human. In here it’s like an institution.”
“I feel the same way,” said Anna.
“Hey, you ever stretch? I’ll show you, how about that?”
The woman sat down on the floor and stretched her short legs out in front of her. Anna did not want to sit on the floor, but she didn’t want to disappoint her new friend, so she followed as she reach her arms out in front of her, touching her knees. “Oooh, I can feel that in my shoulders.”
“And what is the purpose of doing this?” asked Anna.
“Loosen up, you know. It’s like yoga. You know yoga?” Anna shook her head. “Okay, well the idea is you got all this tension in your body and soul, and when you stretch, you release it.”
In theory this was reasonable, but Anna noted her companion was making obvious signs of pain.
“Now try to touch your head, touch your forehead to your legs.” She winced. “Oooh, I feel that!”
Anna’s back was so tight.
“You feel it? Feel it in your back?”
As Anna raised her head she felt a rush of relief through her body. For a moment the hunger and the sour feeling inside receded.
“It does something,” she said.
“Oh yeah, it does. That’s why they be sayin’ you should do yoga every day. They say it adds years onto your life. Amazing right? Just gettin’ out all that tension makes you live longer.”
They stayed on the floor. Anna felt a rare sense of ease with this woman. She didn’t feel that she had to speak, but if she did say something, she felt she could say anything. The woman had a warm spirit that made it unbelievable to Anna that she could be stuck in this sanatorium.
“Why are you here?” she asked suddenly. It was not polite, but Anna had heard the other patients asking each other, and they had asked her.
“Me? I was manic. My daughter, she so smart, she only three, but she knows when I’m not alright. We was walkin’ in the mall and she said to me, ‘Mommy, you need to go to the hospital.’ And she pointed over here, to this island, cause she knows the hospital’s on an island.”
“That’s astonishing,” said Anna.
“I miss her. She call me every day. ‘Hi mommy, when you comin’ home?’ But you know, it’s okay. I’ll be going home in a few days. I’m tellin’ you, my daughter, she so smart. I’m teachin’ her Spanish, and you know what? She be speakin’ Spanish when we go to the store. To cab drivers, anyone who looks Spanish. And they talk back to her. I think it’s important to be able to speak more languages than English. I’d like to learn Chinese after I get my Spanish down. There are a lot more opportunities in life when you can speak Chinese. They say in the newspapers that soon China’s gonna to be the world’s most important economy. I read all the newspapers. New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal. You learn a lot when you read the newspaper.”
“I’ve never read one here,” said Anna. She thought about Peter Schiffers and his article. She didn’t want to read it, ever. That day she met him was a nightmare. She was so ashamed of the way she behaved.
“Ahhh, well maybe that’s cause English ain’t your first language. What do you speak, Russian?”
“How did you know?”
“Oh, I could tell, I figure things out,” her eyes twinkling. “I remember when you came in here, I saw you was havin’ trouble with the nurses, and you was suffering. And I thought to myself, well that lady, she’s really classy. The problem is, English ain’t her first language, so even though those nurses assume she know what they talkin’ about, she don’t understand. You ever been in the psych ward before?”
“No!”
“I thought so. It’s kinda scary the first time. I been in lots a times; by now I’m used to it. But I remember the first time. I was like ‘Wow, I’m surrounded by all these crazy people, people talkin’ to themselves, laughin’ about stuff some imaginary friend be telling em’, damn, I gotta get outta here.’ But this time, it’s okay, you know. I just come in, stabilize, and then they gonna be letting me out in a few days. But the nurses and the doctors, you know, they aren’t so easy.”
“Exactly,” said Anna. “And I get confused because I traveled here through time.”
Her companion’s eyes widened and she moved her head back a little to assess Anna from a wider perspective.
“You and the other ones,” she said, pointing down the hall towards patient rooms. After a pause she started again. “So you’re Russian. What’s the main city there, Moscow?”
“Petersburg.”
“I would love to travel. I would love to see the world. Listen, travelin’ opens your mind. It’s like an education. I always dreamed of travelin’ like Left Eye, you know, from TLC?”
Anna shook her head.
“Oh, yeah, course you don’t. They probably don’t listen to TLC in Moscow. Well it’s a group that was real popular in the ’90s. And the singer, Left Eye, she went to Honduras. Actually, she went there to meet a famous numerologist. He could predict the future, ‘cause he had studied the Mayan calendar, you know. But when she was drivin’ there she hit a little kid in the street. And it turned out his name was Lopes, just like hers. And when she died, there was peace on her face. Cause she traveled.” She took a dramatic pause and held Anna’s eyes. “I saw that on VH1.”
Anna didn’t understand a lot of this story. The message was that traveling is beneficial. Other details were less important.
As the breakfast gap diminished, the woman told Anna of her plans to go back to school and study nutrition. She said it was a field of emerging importance. She discussed her skill in gymnastics, and specifically on the balance beam. Anna murmured encouraging remarks, for however difficult it was to understand the woman’s dialect, she appreciated her spirit, even felt a kind of love for her. At last the woman seemed to lose interest and stood up to walk away.
“What is your name?” said Anna.
“My name’s Devondrea. See, my father named Devon, and my mother named Andrea. They couldn’t agree on a name ‘cause my momma, she wanted to name me after herself and also my grandmama. And my father, well, he wanted a boy he could call Devon. So they mixed it up for me. Well, talk to you later.”
Anna nodded, and as Devondrea turned away, she smiled about her peculiar charm.
This is part 30 of a serialized novella being published each Thursday. It is a speculative sequel to Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina.
Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29
I’m the author of Oh, the Places Where You’ll Have a Nervous Breakdown.
