Before Read Free

carefully. He can hear the ticking of the clock over Marjorie’s desk, and though he writes with the help of a lamp, Jiri senses late afternoon sunlight hovering on the large fern in the corner; ribbons glow on the rug and partially across Marjorie’s desk. The figure 1942 hovers at him, rising from the page as if in conspiracy, but he closes his eyes a moment and thinks of the village at night below him, and when he opens his eyes the hovering has stopped and he is able to lean forward and apply himself again to the writing. He writes for a long time.
    Jiri feels then Marjorie Legnini leaning over him; in the shadowed room she has come around the table and is watching his lines, and he feels her nodding and then—a strange series of sounds—she is quiet and then weeping, and Jiri glances up to confirm this—tears trickling down her cheekbone—and he quickly stares down at the page. He’s faced a great deal of sentimentality himself since his strokes six months ago, and he is frankly uncomfortable with it; sometimes he will find himself weeping in the shower, beneath the torrent of water, from the smallest goddamn thing—a song heard on his shower radio, a remembered, hopeful face of one of the teenagers down here in Harvard Square, these kids with all their heavy damn makeup and hair every which way and their black clothes, walking about like sad crows. The open weeping has something to do with the way his brain has changed, and when it comes he cannot control it.
    Marjorie moves back to her seat again, and Anna puts a hand over those of the young woman. Jiri watches them: Anna in her light blue sweater and with her glasses on her nose, and Marjorie in her white short-sleeved shirt, the lines of wetness beneath her eyes. Anna says: “It is hard to think of all this.”
    â€œI’ve had an easy life,” Marjorie says, wiping the back of her hand over her cheek, recomposing herself. “I really see that when I think of what you people went through.”
    â€œWell,” Jiri says, quietly. He clears his throat, emotional himself, his mouth firm. Marjorie is a good, earnest kid, maybe thirty-two years old, usually fairly jolly, and Jiri always looks forward to the individual and group sessions with her, joking with her, working hard on memory games, on his speech patterns; he isn’t quite sure how to handle this, these tears, and is grateful to look up and realize that she has collected herself.
    â€œI don’t usually get like that,” she says, smiling, her eyes shining.
    â€œIt’s good,” Anna tells her, still holding a hand over one of Marjorie’s. “It means you care. Believe me, not all medical people are as caring as you are.”
    Jiri nods very seriously and then concentrates again on his paragraph. His writing is even and running straight across the page; it does not seem that he has repeated any words. He looks up at his therapist hopefully. “I think I’ve managed to finish it,” he says.
    *   *   *
    In March, as he was standing at the garage just behind his apartment building, Jiri’s vision suddenly turned white; he saw his wife, the blue cinder of the drive, the large sumac bush by the chain-link fence, all becoming pale, disappearing. He said, My God, Anna, something is wrong. At St. Leonard’s Hospital he was told he’d had a transient ischemic attack—a ministroke; on his second night there, a blood vessel ruptured in his brain and the pressure of the blood damaged his vision, particularly in his left eye. Two months later, still in recovery, he suffered another stroke that left him with halting language. With Marjorie’s help his speech has steadily gotten better (sometimes now he gets through one or two paragraphs without thinking about them) and his eyesight is stabilizing, though he has trouble with bright light—it can even be painful—and with the letters piling up