Winter that year was especially harsh. I had spent all day and evening looking after patients until midnight when I had to stitch up a farmer’s finger he had nearly lost when it got snagged in some rope on a tractor. When I got back to the boarding house, I could barely stand. Moaning from the pain, I lay down to sleep on the sofa in the living room. Mom was quietly sleeping in the corner. The stove had long since gone out. There was an incredible storm outside. In a stupor I dozed off into bad dreams.

In the middle of the night I woke up shivering. I had a fever, a wild fear in my heart and rising palpitations. Sitting up, I waited there for a while. Mom had woken up and she came over to me.

“Mom, I feel terrible, I think I might be dying,” I said.

“Oh repent for saying something like that, my lamb. What do you mean, dying? You’ve just been struck by the evil eye. That’s all.”

She left and came back from a side room with a fairly big blanket and laid it out on the floor. Then she took a blank prescription page off the table and with her other hand she pulled out one of the sewing needles stuck in the curtain. Curious and a little desperate, I watched her.

“Come over and lie down on this blanket,” she said.

“What are you going to do?” I said. No answer.

Clambering to my feet, I went over and lay down face-up on the blanket. As she poked the needle through the blank prescription page and murmured prayers, mom circled around me like an American Indian. After five or six trips, she took a match from next to the stove and lit the holey prescription page. Reciting more prayers over the ashes, she sprinkling them over me from head to toe, and then she was done.

“Come and get up, my lamb, there’s nothing wrong with you now,” she said.

I got up and lay down on my bed. I felt pretty damn good. The shivering was gone and the fever was down. As mom went off to the bathroom to take her religious ablutions, I couldn’t help but say:

“Dad was right. He used to say, ‘son, your mother’s a doctor without a diploma,’ and I didn’t believe him. But I swear, you’re some doctor … It’s just that tomorrow don’t go and tell the nurses what you just did.”

My words were lost in her prayers.

Dawn was about to break. The storm had broken and from the window in the living room the white snow was draped over the steppes like a perfect piece of clothing. Soon I would surrender myself to the arms of a deep sleep …

22 The File Under My Arm

22

The File Under My Arm