My first reaction on my first day was that I fainted. The reaction of the Priest from the church across the fence, when he visited them on the first day, was that he fainted. And he never went back. The children I met said they never saw him, becausehe is unwell. The mothers said with understanding that the little ones only meet His Excellency when they come out of the fridge. Earlier, while they are warm, it's impossible, it's too much cruelty just to look at them.
We must overcome the state of fainting. We are a society that has fainted and no longer looks, so as not to roll its eyes again. We must take a step towards the second day, not refuse the experience. Held by the hands of the imprisoned martyrs from my boxes, the second day was easier for me, because I asked for strength from them. Since childhood, I suffer from the pain caused by the sight of blood and a type of psychic spasmophilia, and I know what I'm talking about. I faint easily. Even at the cinema. I rarely go to movies for this reason and keep my eyes down during many scenes.
On the second day, when I entered, Iscoldedmy eyes to see. Yes, to see living infants imprisoned between the bars of their own bones. Yes, to see infants nailed like prisoners of old, tied to the iron ball, immobilized by the weight of the round tumor that had grown outside their body, once again as large as themselves. Yes, to see and admire the intertwined paths on the same scalp, the harsh stitches in the shape of braids, but on bald heads, the wide and deep traces of interventions, to see the place from where a limb, an arm, a leg was erased. They show them to you, they thrust them into your eye, poisoned for years by constant fainting. You must mimic admiration, because they are proud of their wounds, they show them to you like jewelry. The first thing when I stepped into a ward was the voice, spent, asking:do you want me to show you my little boo-boos?You were struck not by the torment in the question, but by...the naturalness of it. The dignity. The value in their voice. They uncovered their most intimate places, removed the blanket — and the boo-boo was elliptical, because the entire half of the body, which should have been under the sheet, was missing.
Good people, stop fainting. Use yourselves. Believe me, I've been there. They don't need you.
You can try the swapping strategy. Barter. Simple. Just pretend you're giving something and you'd like something in return, like a souvenir. You'll receive a tiny thing. For example, you can give a banana for a piece of old bandage. It strikingly resembles the squares of dressing we desperately throw away where nothing hurts, where pain is already redeemed, those that are distributed at reliquaries, at patron saint festivals. They are identical! Do you hear me?? Keep it and you will quickly notice that the epiphany works. One day I went to bring apples, another time little books (with Saint Nectarie's mobile number), because there was a shortage there. In exchange, I received Ionuț. Ionuț has been mine ever since. I caught him during his ascent on the Stairs, in his last appearances in the arena. Dying is very difficult, my brethren... No matter how big the little man is, it doesn't matter if he's in 8th grade... in martyrdom he undergoes a total regression to childhood, almost intrauterine: he shouts "mommy" as loud as he can, with a baby's voice. If you are a mother, like me, that sound wave length tears you apart, it destroys your neurons. It's set to communicate the total despair of a life without escape and, if you respond to the code, you're finished.
The disease reduces him only to bones, skin, and a spiderweb of black morphine veins. Death consumes him with its decay from the edges towards the center of his nervous system. His head is huge, hairless, his eyes exhausted by the passage, only his chest still breathes with a cannula stuck somewhere in his heart. For the last doses. When my beloved Ionuț began to scream, his first-killed legs began to release pus from the contractions of his crying. And, in this situation, the sufferers of modern prisons still have dignity. He shouted, with his last strength: "Mommy, we need to be alone, I want to scream...". He didn't kick me out as he should have, he had the delicacy to offer an excuse! He, a dying child...
I left, my eyes screaming for forgiveness. My parents, pale from years of sleeplessness, took out their ever-present pot at all our meetings and began to paint his decaying little feet yellowish with... chamomile tea!!! Remaining in an old trance, mother kept repeating, "...you know, these flowers are something extraordinary. God put everything needed for any illness in medicinal plants. I read that chamomile has it all. We don't give up on them, we collect and boil them all the time. It will make Ionuț well." Mrs. D. waited behind the door I had pushed against the wall, with a syringe loaded black and her chin trembling.Your Ionuț is pretty much done for, she told me. How long? Days, hours, maybe. His screams from the mouth of a giant snake led me down the entire corridor, they could be heard from outside, they could be heard even from the car park. The scream of a big child reduced to the weight and voice of a baby...
It's the first time my powerlessness released a spontaneous kind of blasphemy. I was screaming in the yard, alone, holding my ears: "God, why are you continuing this?!... Stop it, it's enough!!!" I walked out onto the street, blinded, and only noticed at the road that I was wearing my blue plastic clogs, which I hadn't taken off before leaving. I ran into the yard of the Maramureșean church behind the hospital fence because I saw, through the fog of tears, a BOR license plate and glimpsed a materialization of hope in that car. This child had to be released. In death, in life, anywhere, but on another plane, because he couldn't take it anymore.
It was possible for a priest of my confession to be there! And he was! At a baptism!!! Luxurious, with corsets, cakes, many cameramen, children suffocated by suffocating lace and silks, with dresses they were tripping on, with mothers in barely-there miniskirts. Many sparkling cars. Happy people, who had everything. You don't know how I waited for that baptism to end. And the long congratulations at the end. I waited patiently, believing this must be the gift of Saint Panteleimon, whose feast was celebrated that Saturday. I was still crying when the last person left the service, and I bowed down to the ground before the Priest, simply grateful that he was there; it seemed to me that the rest was already resolved, I just had to tell him. I asked him, in case he still had something in the Chalice from the baptized boy... I quickly, concisely told him everything I wrote to you before.
My world was pretty much turned upside down. The priest of my confession said he couldn't, that it wasn't his business, that he had another schedule, that he had confirmed his attendance at the party, that the hospital should have an employee, that I should go to the director and have him call that person at home. People were focused on what was next, namely the restaurant after the baptism; the departure was being organized, and I was screaming at the Priest, illicitly imploring him in the name of Saint Panteleimon to give communion to a dying child. But what, is it your child?, he asked calmly, as if discussing with a schizophrenic patient in delirium. As if that hospital were a ghost, as if he didn't know about it, and as if a death a day wasn't something normal there.
No, he's not my child, but what is the meaning of such a question when someone is on their deathbed?!! The last moments before death cannot be rescheduled, there was truly nothing I could do!!! I was asking for a last communion for a long martyrdom, lasting years. But the ladies in tiny skirts filled the luxurious cars, and His Holiness probably had to accompany them to the agape feast. So the Priest was in a hurry. I told him he only had to walk ten meters, that Ionuț was on the ground floor, that he didn't have to climb any stairs. He turned his back on me not with pity, not with embarrassment, but with a bizarre smile, to put it delicately. He doesn't go in there.
I was stunned. The world went off to dance. Many things changed in my system. In my understanding, in what I can translate from what is not explained to me in words.
From that moment on, I understood the abstract longing of the monks, their withdrawal from the temptation to embrace Him, the impatience to hold Him in their arms today and tomorrow. I saw this clearly not by meeting them, but precisely by passing on my way home past shop windows with clothes that undress you, with jewels that blind you, with screens where some strive to amuse you and dictate with another chorus of laughter even where you should laugh. I was passing along the long road back and realized that, everywhere our gaze lingered in the city, all the patches of color were formed not by... flowers, but by stalls, and all these stalls, with or without display windows, are a mockery of life.
I understood the nuns' desire to wear black habits and shield their faces from passersby, so you wouldn't catch them in the wake of a glorious theft. After they had kidnapped Christ within themselves.
Only one perplexity remained for me: how is it possible, Lord, that in the same body with You, such a stinging illness can also fit?
The Scented Letter
Don't imagine that the episode from the Saturday of Saint Panteleimon would have shaken my trust in the system one bit. Ah, no chance, I've had the good fortune to meet and know, living very close to them, several dozens of priests by now, and, simply being natural, without making any special effort to convince me, I don't know a single one who would have made the choice from the story before. Any one of them would have canceled anything and dressed up and boarded as an astronaut to commune a dying soul on the Moon.
The incident itself didn't twist me, but instead created an enormous complex for me. All the way back, then for days and weeks after that non-communication, I lashed with my gaze the dry shop windows of the city, searching in their frustrating, perpetual, and symbolic reflection to discern what exactly in my physicality differentiates me from a crazy woman demanding attention in a hospital courtyard, pathetically putting on a show. And I discovered: nothing. Until this answer, I couldn't understand why she didn't believe me.
Fresh conquerors of my thought, the children from the hospital thinned out one by one, some passed away, toiling in the surface careers of the city. The need for them remained prominent in me, as heavy as that in a love letter. What I whispered to them at times I could naturally copy anytime into the note to the chosen person, to the one in whose image I saw Christ playing hide-and-seek with me. Know that the most concise love letter applies to all kinds of loves; I share it with you, to ease your search, I have already found the formula! It goes like this:
I managed to identify the specific species of Dor (Longing), the suffering of not having you here and beside me. It's exactly that thirst from books, from psalms and prophecies, which so many describe! I know that day will come when I will be able to take out from under my clothes the box of watercolors in which, among all the living appearances discovered in this desert, I keep you too, secretly admiring you all! The day of God's-whole rain over us! The day of His satisfaction that He mixes us! In which unprecedented rain we will be able to step out of the boundaries of our container like paints. I will be able to pour myself towards you and both of us together into the one next to us without bringing any harm. Know that Noah spoke of this rainbow!
I will be with you creating unprecedented nuances. I know that time passes quickly and that day is near. And yet, I can now define what earthly longing is: it's the anticipation of the moment when I will be allowed, like a torrent, to touch you; it's precisely this childish agitation: I cry, I wring my hands, I stomp my feet, because I simply have no more patience.
I often wonder if Ionuț thinks of me. I have hope. We've met three times, and yet, even from our second meeting, on that rainy day when I entered the salon completely soaked, leaving a huge puddle from my clothes, scaring his mother (when I couldn't postpone the visit because my father had climbed a huge ladder in the orchard the day before, 500 kilometers north of here, to bring down a branch with clusters of ripe cherries for his child, so he would get well with unsprayed fruits, which, in his opinion, ward off cancer), even though I was looking at him and couldn't read the pupils in his eyes, rolled back in pain, he croaked, exhausted and with a cricket's voice: Cosmina... They remember you, my brothers! They remember you! We are the ones who need their attention.
I have a request. To all acquaintances who actually don't know me. Stop sending me on social networks, knowing I am empathetic, news about dying people for me to like. Because I delete them, despite the warning curses they are sprinkled with. Stop deluding yourselves that you've done something for them lounging in your armchair, moving a finger and instantly making a click. Get out of click, good people. It's a perfidious deception, invented for you, with dedication... NO money is collected! It's a lie, no one gives these sacrificed people 32 cents for a like, no one gives them 50 for a share, the investment of energy is solely and exclusively so that you can justify yourselves before your own conscience that you have shown charity.
Wake up from the collective stupor and read the slap that the word share in translation! Share means to divide or to share, it doesn't mean click, cold laziness, the death of the heart. Sharing with them implies meeting, exchanging glances, it's done by coming down from your apartment building. Entering their arena. It's done by enduring the sight of the place where they are missing arms. Bringing a few fruits as a gift on a weekend, like the one where someone who would share their cake with them is celebrated with cake in Heaven, as it was with Saint Pantaleon.
(to be continued)
Cosmina Dragomir
Photography by Noemia Prada
See other episodes here: The beautiful scrawny ones