The younger man lowered his eyes, and she felt as if everything were hanging in the air, as if, once that question was answered, a new chapter of her life would be written, and no one would be able to change it.
"You can tell her," said the older man. "A lot of other patients have already heard the rumors, and she'll find out in the end anyway; it's impossible to keep secrets around here."
"Well, you decided your own fate," sighed the young man, weighing each word. "So you had better know the consequence of your actions. During the coma brought on by the pills you took, your heart was irreversibly damaged. There was a necrosis of the ventricle--"
"Put it in layman's terms," said the older man. "Get straight to the point."
"Your heart was irreversibly damaged, and soon it will stop beating altogether."
"What does that mean?" she asked, frightened.
"If your heart stops beating, that means only one thing, death. I don't know what your religious beliefs are, but--"
"When will my heart stop beating?" asked Veronika, interrupting him.
"Within five days, a week at most."
Veronika realized that behind his professional appearance and behavior, behind the concerned manner, the young man was taking immense pleasure in what he was saying, as if she deserved the punishment and would serve as an example to all the others.
During her life Veronika had noticed that a lot of people she knew would talk about the horrors in other people's lives as if they were genuinely trying to help them, but the truth was that they took pleasure in the suffering of others, because that made them believe they were happy and that life had been generous with them. She hated that kind of person, and she wasn't going to give the young man an opportunity to take advantage of her state in order to mask his own frustrations.
She kept her eyes fixed on his and, smiling, said: "So I succeeded, then."
"Yes," came the reply. But any pleasure he had taken in giving her the tragic news had vanished.
During the night, however, she began to feel afraid. It was one thing to die quickly after taking some pills; it was quite another to wait five days or a week for death to come, when she had already been through so much.
SHE HAD always spent her life waiting for something: for her father to come back from work, for the letter from a lover that never arrived, for her end-of-year exams, for the train, the bus, the phone call, the holiday, the end of the holidays. Now she was going to have to wait for death, which had made an appointment with her.
This could only happen to me. Normally, people die on precisely the day they least expect.
She had to get out of there and get some more pills. If she couldn't, and the only solution was to jump from a high building in Ljubljana, that's what she'd do. She had tried to save her parents any unnecessary suffering, but now she had no option.
She looked around her. All the beds were occupied by sleeping people, some of whom were snoring loudly. There were bars on the windows. At the end of the ward there was a small bright light that filled the place with strange shadows and meant that the ward could be kept under constant vigilance. Near the light a woman was reading a book.
These nurses must be very cultivated, they spend their whole lives reading.
Veronika's bed was the farthest from the door; between her and the woman there were nearly twenty other beds. She got up with difficulty because, if she was to believe what the doctor had said, she hadn't walked for nearly three weeks. The nurse looked up and saw the girl approaching, dragging her IV drip with her.
"I want to go to the toilet," she whispered, afraid of waking the madwomen.
The woman gestured vaguely toward the door. Veronika's mind was working fast, looking everywhere for an escape route, a crack, a way out. It has to be quick, while they think I'm still too frail, incapable of acting.
She peered about her. The toilet was a cubicle with no door. If she wanted to get out of there, she would have to grab the nurse and overpower her in order to get the key, but she was too weak for that.
"Is this a prison?" she asked the nurse, who had stopped reading and was now watching her every movement.
"No, it's a mental hospital."
"But I'm not crazy."
The woman laughed.
"That's what they all say."
"All right then, I am crazy, but what does that mean?"
The woman told Veronika not to stay too long on her feet, and sent her back to her bed.