I step into the elevator.
First floor.
It doesn’t move.
Cardboard covers the walls. There is no mirror.
After several long minutes of waiting, of pressing the button for up, I climb back out.
The entire lower floor of the hospital has become a city of ghosts.
The rooms where, as a medical student, I once had my clinical rotations have fallen into ruin.
I walk up the stairs to the first floor.
In an empty waiting room sits an elderly woman.
Behind the reception desk, no one.
Every room is empty.
She is waiting, like me.
I go back down to the lower floor and make my way through the cracked corridors.
Plaster crumbling from the walls.
Floors taped over.
Doors left ajar to abandoned rooms—anaesthesia, radiology.
Here and there, a sign:
We have moved to the second floor.
I hurry through the corridors.
My time is running out.
I still know them by heart, even though almost twenty years have passed since I waited in them for my clinical rotation.
For a patient.
For the assistant.
For an exam.
The same knot in my stomach as before an exam.
Only this one feels like the exam of a lifetime.
An exam where there may be no next attempt.
I reach the other side.
The city of ghosts becomes a ward.
There is still life here, but only on the monitors.
Tiny beeps remind me that one form of life is still present.
What kind, no one really knows.
Room one.
Two.
Three.
Four.
I stop outside the head nurse’s room.
I have come to visit her.
“Room five,” someone says.
She has three roommates.
Unresponsive, like her.
Who knows if she knows they are there.
No, I am not afraid.
I am a doctor.
I have seen everything.
I look at her body.
Since my last visit in June, it has shrunk by at least two sizes.
Or perhaps the bed has grown.
She has two little pigtails made from tubular gauze.
I am certain she would have laughed at this terrible sight.
Her body is threaded with tubes, keeping alive whatever remains of her infectious joie de vivre.
A stiffened body.
The skin of her hands is still soft.
I can barely feel their warmth.
Half-open eyes that no longer see.
Half-open mouth.
As though someone had frozen her in time.
No.
I am not a doctor.
I am only what remains of a broken heart that has understood that she is leaving.
Five minutes.
I am here.
Your Jasnica.
Her breathing quickens.
I whisper to her everything that has filled my mind these past ten days.
She swallows.
Frowns.
Blinks.
As if to say:
I know you are here.
Automatisms, medicine says.
It is not enough to make her wake up one day and say to me, in that rough voice:
Kokica moja.
Someone has forgotten me.
Five minutes become an hour and I don’t know when it happened.
Automatisms.
Medicine says.
The words have long since run out.
And they bring no relief.
My hands are damp from holding hers.
From stroking her hair.
A state of timeless presence.
The body knows, my body says.
Mine and hers.
Automatisms, medicine says again.
And like a desperate daughter, I don’t believe it.
Because it feels as though this is all I have left.
Her body.
I say goodbye for the seventh time.
And then I come back again.
As though there were something I still had to add to the final question on the exam paper.
I look at her and once again imprint every fragment of her face into my heart.
The face that carried all the unconditionality, all the boundlessness, for which I had no name before her.
Now it had a name.
A surname.
An address.
Thousands of tiny moments that taught me how to be a mother to my own two girls.
One last look.
On the way out, I get lost.
I no longer know the way.
There is only the city of ghosts.
She died three days after my visit. I could not cry for six days. These were the longest days of my life.