"My soul was in my past. But today it's here, I can feel it again in my body, vibrant with enthusiasm. I don't know what to do. I only know that it's taken me three years to understand that life was pushing me in a direction I didn't want to go in."
"I think I can see some signs of improvement," said Dr. Igor.
"I don't need to ask if I can leave Villete. I can just walk through the door and never come back. But I needed to say all this to someone, and I'm saying it to you: The death of that young girl made me understand my own life."
"I think these signs of improvement are turning into something of a miraculous chain of healing," Dr. Igor said with a laugh. "What do you think you'll do?"
"I'll go to El Salvador and work with children there."
"There's no need to go so far away. Sarajevo is only about two hundred kilometers from here. The war may be over, but the problems continue."
"Then I'll go to Sarajevo."
Dr. Igor took a form from a drawer and carefully filled it in. Then he got up and accompanied Mari to the door.
"Good luck," he said, then immediately went back to his office and closed the door. He tried hard not to grow fond of his patients, but he never succeeded. Mari would be much missed in Villete.
When Eduard opened his eyes, the girl was still there. After his first electric shock sessions, he had had to struggle for a long time to remember what had happened; but then the therapeutic effect of the treatment lay precisely in that artificially induced partial amnesia which allowed the p
atient to forget the problems troubling him and to regain his calm.
THE MORE FREQUENTLY electric shock treatment was given however, the less enduring its effects; he recognized the girl at once.
"While you were sleeping, you said something about visions of paradise," she said, stroking his hair.
Visions of paradise? Yes, visions of paradise. Eduard looked at her. He wanted to tell her everything.
But at that moment, however, the nurse came in with a syringe.
"You've got to have this now," she said to Veronika. "Dr. Igor's orders."
"I've already had some today, and I don't want any more," she said. "What's more, I've no desire to leave here either. I refuse to obey any orders, any rules, and I won't be forced to do anything."
The nurse seemed used to this kind of reaction.
"Then I'm afraid we'll have to sedate you."
"I need to talk to you," said Eduard. "Have the injection."
Veronika rolled up the sleeve of her sweater, and the nurse injected her with the drug.
"There's a good girl," she said. "Now why don't the two of you leave this gloomy ward and go outside for a walk?"
"You're ashamed of what happened last night," said Eduard, while they were walking in the garden.
"I was, but now I'm proud. I want to know about these visions of paradise, because I came very close to having one myself."
"I need to look further, beyond the buildings of Villete," he said.
"Go on, then."
Eduard looked behind him, not at the walls of the wards or at the garden where the inmates were walking in silence, but at a street in another continent, in a land where it either rained in torrents or not at all.
Eduard could smell that land. It was the dry season; he could feel the dust in his nostrils, and the feeling gave him pleasure, because to smell the earth is to feel alive. He was riding an imported bicycle, he was seventeen, and had just left the American college in Brasilia, where all the other diplomats' children studied.
HE HATED Brasilia, but he loved the Brazilians. His father had been appointed Yugoslavian ambassador two years before, at a time when no one even dreamed of the violent division of their country. Milosevic was still in power; men and women lived with their differences and tried to find a harmony beyond regional conflicts.
His father's first posting was to Brazil. Eduard dreamed of beaches, carnival, soccer matches, and music, but they ended up in the Brazilian capital, far from the coast--a city created to provide shelter only to politicians, bureaucrats, diplomats, and to their children, who didn't quite know what to do, stuck in the middle of all that.