CHAPTER 36
Minutes, hours, maybe days crawl by. I slip in and out of episodes of mind-numbing pain, restless sleep, and frozen stretches of time—being clear-headed but unable to do anything but lie still. In rare moments, everything calms when Janos sits by my side, stroking my hair, and I wish I could stay there forever. But then I move a little, and pain shoots through me from all sides, sending me into an uncontrollable burst of tears.
Janos is here most of the time. That’s how it seems, anyway. Sometimes, he’s gone when I wake up, and I get the feeling that he tries to only leave when I’m asleep. It wouldn’t be hard; I think I sleep most of the time—both day and night.
Whenever I wake to find him gone, it never takes long before he returns. He always goes straight for the bedroom with hastened steps like he’s afraid something has happened to me. The few times I’m in the bathroom when he comes, he comes running, slamming the door open, and scanning the room with wild eyes until he finds me sitting on the toilet or washing my hands.
He spends a lot of time in the armchair, watching over me, and when the pain gets the upper hand, pulling me into desperate fits of screaming and writhing, he’s always here, talking to me and letting me feel his hands. Gradually, those fits become longer and more violent, and I succumb to a fever, leaving the moments of clarity few and far apart.
Since I tore off the bandages in front of the mirror, I haven’t seen my wounds. But I don’t need to see to know that it’s bad. Even if I didn’t feel the gravity of the situation in my body, the concern etched deep into Janos’s features is a testament to how bad the situation is.
Soon, I can barely tell my nightmares from reality, and the line between consciousness or unconsciousness is blurry at best.
***
One night when Janos is about to drag me through the hell of cleaning my wounds, he says, “I can’t get you a doctor, but I’m here. I’ll take care of you.”
I don’t ask why or waste my energy on regrets. I know Gabor’s sadistic mind well enough by now to know that he’s the one who has issued the restriction, and I’m already at a point where I’m realizing I won’t be one of the lucky girls, who end up with an expensive apartment, free to do whatever I want. And perhaps more importantly, I’m starting to accept it.
Not long ago, I got Janos to divulge more about what happens to Gabor’s girls, and it turned out the ending was far from as bright as he had made it out to be. Because no matter how nice an apartment or how much freedom they gain, those girls are never truly free again. They remain trapped by the terrible memories of what Gabor did, and most of them end up as addicts to numb their minds—selling the apartment to buy drugs. When that money runs out, they prostitute themselves to get more.
No, the lucky ones are those who overdose before the apartment money runs out.
Even if I could avoid this tragic fate, I would end up living a meaningless life in my old world, where I never fit in. I would be haunted by the ghost of Gabor and the way my body succumbed to him. I’d be stuck with mental scars and probably too weak to escape my oppressive family again. Just another version of hell.
I’d rather end it all here with Janos at my side.
So in some warped sense, I guess I’m one of the lucky ones, after all. I’ll end up in a hole in the woods instead of a dilapidated house on Szabadkai út with a needle in my arm.
Whatever search for me the police conducts will be brief, if there’ll be any at all. They won’t have many leads, and even if they do, they’ll dispose of them at the first sight of a wad of cash. Soon I’ll be forgotten in the world.
If I’m lucky, Janos might remember me, and my sister will mourn me. For a while. But before long, she’ll move on too. We were never close, no matter how much we wanted to be.
No one will miss me in the long haul, and there’s nothing here that I will miss.
The last part is a big, fat lie. There is one thing—one person—I’ll miss with all my aching heart. But I can’t have him anyway, so it doesn’t make a difference.
So maybe this is the greatest freedom of all? To be allowed to die here with the only person who has ever truly meant something to me—be spared from a hollow, meaningless existence that I’ll never truly fit into.
I’ll get to find freedom in emptiness, where I’m no longer burdened by all the terrible things that have happened. There’ll be no sorrow or longing. Nor joy or happiness, but I never knew much of those anyway, so what am I losing? Nothing I wasn’t already bound to lose.
***
My eyes are rarely open anymore. They don’t gaze into nothingness. Mostly, they just see darkness and a stream of horrible images that keep going on repeat in my mind. Sometimes, I see steel-gray eyes. But I can barely tell if they’re another vision conjured by my blurry mind or if I’m seeing them for real.
I don’t know how many days go by. I barely notice when the light changes, and I barely notice if Janos is at my side or not.
The pain has faded somewhat. Or rather, I’ve become oblivious to it. I’m often so far gone I can’t feel it. I just lie there, drifting somewhere between sleep and consciousness. Even so, there are still times when it takes over, throwing my system into a blinding panic that makes me forget myself, who and where I am.
Large hands grab me to hold me still as I thrash and flail blindly, but it doesn’t help. They can’t get a good grip without making the pain worse, and I continue to writhe like a demon has possessed me.
The hands try to stroke my hair instead, hold on to my feverish hands, or rub up and down my arms.
But nothing helps. The pain overwhelms everything, and I can’t possibly contain it.
Only in the quiet moments, when my brain magically manages to ignore my body, can I find some comfort in the hands. I long for them unbearably, even though they’re almost always here—it’s like I don’t really have them, and I know they’ll soon disappear.
Tears roll down my cheeks, and fingers swipe away the drops with a gentleness that’s too much for my aching heart to take. And then I cry more, making my body curl up, causing my nerves to scream, and I throw myself around, wishing I could leave my body.
Sometimes, I feel a prick in my throat, and everything goes black. Blissfully so. And soon, I get to the point where I long for the darkness whenever I’m conscious.
In clear moments, I look around and see that I’m in a huge bed covered with white sheets, horrible pink curtains framing the windows, and across from the bed is a deep red armchair, which is sometimes empty, but mostly occupied by a powerful man who I cannot help but watch.
His steel-gray eyes are serious. Almost sad as they stare into space. But when they notice me looking, they become almost affectionate.
It’s in these clear moments that Janos tries to nourish me. With gentle movements, he helps me sit up against the headboard and feeds me meat stew and bread. It takes almost everything I have to sit up and swallow the food. When I see how worried the gray eyes become as I give up halfway through, I want to continue. But I never can.
Whatever little energy I have left slowly dwindles, and eventually I can hardly bring myself to eat. He ends up feeding me a thin liquid through a straw and soft vanilla ice cream.
But the absolute worst is when I wake up from the heavy darkness just as the bandages are being changed. The gauze sticks to the weeping wounds, and even though they are removed gently, it feels like I’m being cut open anew. It gets even worse when they have to be cleaned, and occasionally I end up fainting because my mind simply cannot bear it.