I will tell about the Zone we entered and describe it with just two details related to benchmarks. This is that part of the city where people speak in corners, in whispers and with dread, about millimeters. I never thought I would experience the astonishment of being present when hearing a number of millimeters gives rise to shock, tears, and screams. First, a man in a white coat comes, reading a paper, and gravely tells the mother how many millimeters. Then the mother sobs so the child doesn't see her, hiding in the bathroom, murmuring to another mother how many millimeters of condemnation she received. And she compares the millimeters among themselves.
Then there's the place where not the clock, but a tiny booklet, the printed Akathist to Saint Nectarios of Aegina, becomes the instrument for measuring the time spent there. By its thickness and wear, by the degree of fluffiness of the pages, by the wrinkles on the saint's face in the cover photo, you can tell at a glance and without asking whether the confined child has been there for weeks, months, or years. The one on our child's nightstand was new, shiny, impeccable. Bought this morning. Anyone entering the room realized it was our first day. The greeting here is casting your gaze downwards; it's a silence that encourages strength for what's to come. Not only are there no polite formulas like "welcome," but there are no "goodbyes" either. Here, no one says goodbye, because hardly anyone leaves anymore. Here, they await boarding the sleigh that ascends to the clouds.
Inside the hall, we had been waiting for hours, with infinite hope, but the entry prohibition remained. Our child's mother asked the head of the department to at least overlook my entry, as I was holding the little Resurrection caskets. She told her: "Do you know Saint Nectarios? She has him with her! She borrowed him from someone who brought him from Greece! It's Mrs. D., the child's teacher, let's allow her in!" The selfless doctor consented, against her rules freshly printed in large, bold font on the door, asked me to equip myself according to protocol, retreated into the room so it wouldn't seem like she was seeing me, and told them that she knew me well from somewhere, from places with children, but couldn't remember where.
Honestly, I don't think we had met before. She was beautiful, special, I would have remembered her. And — I was to learn the coincidence later — she reacted positively not to the news that I was the teacher, but to my name, which the doorman had also mentioned. We had the same name, and she felt a touch on her shoulder; she was a faithful person, she became shy. One could pretend that Dr. Dragomir himself had entered, couldn't they? She no longer objected at all, but submitted to us. She crossed herself, movedly kissed the holy relics, and allowed all of us together around the child's bed, even though only one visitor at a time was permitted. I explained in medical termsmaneuveressential, that two or more of us needed to be together for Someone to descend among us, and that we simply no longer had time to do things one by one. Our child was told upon admission that he had come at the end, just a few hours before dying, and that if he resisted three days of the most sudden, unbearable, and terrible heavy metal bombardment, as preparation for an intervention, it would be a huge achievement. Otherwise, a distant journey for surgery would not even be an option. The doctor converted the 5 minutes (that's how much time you're allowed to tire a child on IVs in oncology) into 50, which it took us to read aloud, one by one, some spelling out at first sight, inauguratingThe Impeccable Akathist, which was being browsed for the first time.
The child was happy. She arranged her little reliquaries on her arms, on her body, to be endlessly touched while she read. The Princes of the Prisons humbled themselves before the girl's gesture of surrounding herself with them as if with plush toys and complied in a concerted velvet caress. Our Alexia, all a smile, all a hope. She dripped holy oil from a lamp from Aegina into her sick little eye, from which parts had begun to detach the day before, suddenly, without much pain and without warning. That week she had had some migraines, as children often do, and had received some Nurofen at the doctor's office. Behind her eye, unbeknownst to anyone, a huge wound had grown, threatening her brain, a sign ‒ in the language of that type of cancer ‒ that the child's life was near its end.
As in serious children's games, she embraced and kissed Saint Nectarios and the Martyrs of the Prisons, serene like carefree babies. As if she hadn't seen herself in all corners, reflected in the blade of sharp, piercing objects, how death stands ready to bite.
The Princes
In one of the encrusted carriages we brought, lived a holy martyr from the communist prisons, who was born to Christ through a traumatic labor. Or by C-section, by cutting, something. I held his skull in my hands, split with a saw. It resembled the head of a Prince Charming with a Star on his Forehead, because a large golden spot crowned it, like a light bulb. Then a beloved couple, who did not want to abandon each other during interrogations, nor lose the cement of God that united them, have the bones of their joined hands in another luxury carriage. Regarding the golden rib from Aiud, anonymous, but which perfumes entire floors when you open the box, all our friends testified that it is the most abundant source of myrrh in our country, but that this happens very rarely, on important occasions, in the hands of bishops. Finally, the humblest martyr, about whom nothing is known, camouflaged his spinal ring in a grey that made even my friend, who had hosted him for so long, venerate him only on principle, because he belonged to one of those found in Râpa Robilor. “These are not relics, strictly speaking, but we all love him because he was someone from there and we want to have him close. Just as you would feel lucky to have even a piece of shoe sole in your house from those who passed through Aiud. We also put him in wax, but he does not do anything.” Listen, as if he still needs to do something. Hasn't he done enough...
From the white room and from the empty, echo-filled hall of my heart, all pain disappeared. We were all living a new movie. Some call it intoxication, others flight.
In the presence of suffering, the bone that had done nothing in its career as a bone rose and began to recite its poem from the saints' celebration. The vertebra responded to the patient's suffering, for the first time on this journey, with a wide, graceful tear that drowned the box.
I am not of your guild. I am still learning and I am amazed. I quickly took the small box and examined it and turned it from all angles, to understand the system by which people are induced with the sensation of the gushing (out of love, obviously, and for the increase of faith). To see where, from underneath, it gushes. And what it is. It's not oil, it's not water. It's a clear emulsion, something between a tear and myrrh. And behold, I cannot conclude anything, the bone insists on contradicting me: it drips from the corner closest to me, from above, from the surface, not from the wax bed, where some natural reservoir could be hidden. The little one on infusions naturally took spring myrrh and dabbed it on her eyelids. She indulged with Christ with an enviable naturalness.
I thought this was the end of the story and my job was done. But then I remembered I had received a promise in exchange for the boxes: to stick them to any other sick child I met in the institute's hallway. I discreetly told the doctor what I wanted to do. In a few moments, out of the blue, from the mystery that walls have ears, mothers, grandmothers, fathers disfigured by tears, strollers with babies woven alive between wires and needles, emerged and surrounded us, thrilled with joy, begging us to stay for a few moments, not to leave with the treasures, for they would bring all the children out of their beds. The beautiful lady stepped aside like a page, like a sigh, and whispered repeatedly: '...I knew this would happen, I knew...'
One of the blessings of coming under the wing of saints is that, under the pretext of carrying us to give aid, they actually lead us to places where we can meet more earthly replicas of themselves. We are on the other side of the hourglass compared to those we meet. We are pressured by deadline-s. We play with the figurative meaning. They have only one, Dead line-line. Here, words, news, and foreheads are cold. Their heads are extremely hot to the touch because, indeed, on one hand, according to the medical explanation, a terrible fever afflicts them after multiple grafts and other operations. On the other hand, my opinion is that they are under the invisible cover of a multitude of palms from above and that they warm up like chicks under a broody hen.
(to be continued)
Cosmina Dragomir
Photography by Noemia Prada
See other episodes here: The Beautiful Skinny Ones