There is, however, one thing you should not miss there – it is spare time. So you are a steady resident of a mercilessly slow-dragging time space and your own bed! But even if you try to turn away your head from the window, in defence of the sight of the granitic tombstones, the graveyard demons will not let you free. The situation is not ameliorated by the priest’s regular visits, who not losing his hope, even several times a day pops his head into a door gap and asks: “Confession? Communion?” Prevention is better than cure and one should think twice before he rejects such a noble chance of entering Heaven and (you cannot deny!) the grain of doubt has been sown: “Is it the time?”, “This very time?” you ask yourself shyly. And if “Yes”? is it nearer than farther now? You start to wonder because, after all, you would like to finish the game, just like those most eminent, in a distinguished, why not literary style – with all the exclamation and question marks, suspense and climax in a noble and decorous way.
Let us take such Lew Tolstoy, who even in that last time was devoted to his literary fantasies and in the very moment of his death is believed to have said: “But the peasants... how do the peasants die?” And for me, this is called professionalism! Or Victor Hugo: “This is the fight of day and night. I see black light,” – how romantic and how French! Similarly, Gertrude Stein struck the same poetic tone when even in her deathbed, she was still cracking her mind upon: “What is the answer?” Leaving the question without any response, she was hanging her voice in a poetic manner: “In that case, what is the question?” she added and passed away in Alice Toklas’ arms. Goethe, no less poetic, was burbling: “More light.” But the Germans, we know, they always want more and more. The situation takes a different course with the British and Americans. Even in this final set, they are always practical, level-headed and precise. Such as Aldous Huxley when he ordered his wife laconically: “LSD, 100 micrograms I.M.” or Lewis Carroll who, as if worried about scarce bed sheets, was supposed to have said: “Take away those pillows. I shall need them no more.” Washington Irving suffered from a similar pillow phobia: “I have to set my pillows one more night, when will this end already?”he is said to utter before he died.
To be honest, for myself, I would prefer something more spirited than a remark about a pillow or a request to fetch my glasses. Lying in bed and pondering about all that, I was suddenly woken up by a nurse who came to connect me to an intravenous drip. “Morphine,” she said without any emotion and put the plastic bag onto a metal hanger. “But it did not have to be so bad,” I thought losing my last straw of hope. Just a second later, it came into my head that, also, if we consider the literary potential, morphine is mediocre because how would that last golden thought sound: “Sister, morphine please?”
I closed my eyes with the intention of searching for some golden thoughts ever uttered by men of letters. Borrowing some of those enlightened ideas seemed to be the last chance for me. In that state of mind, in that hour. Unfortunately, except for some Coelho’s enlightened sayings that loiter on Facebook pages, nothing came into my head. And at that moment, I felt that someone was bending over me. Still full of fear, I opened my eyes. And when I was nearly sure that it was pastor Martin Luther King or James Baldwin who hurried in that moment of artistic block to support me with some proper apothegm, something strange happened.
“I am sorry, madam, but this morphine is not for you. I must disconnect it,” said (with a smile on his face) a Swedish medicine apprentice of Chad or Congo origin. Still bewildered, I gazed at his sunny smile and remembered what Thomas Mann was supposed to say: “Peculiar. Life is peculiar.”
(Mark Twain in his bed)
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