Keeping The Feast Part 2

If the fever was higher-102, 103, or accompanied by flu or measles or stomach woes-the potion was ginger ale, cool and bubbly, a single ice cube bobbing in a highball gla.s.s. Once the fever dropped, my mother brought dry toast, too; hot, golden, and sliced into four triangles-never the two coa.r.s.e rectangles of workaday toast-in an effort to appeal to my lost appet.i.te.

As the illness began to wane, stronger potions would appear: Angelina's homemade chicken broth, made from one of the oldest hens that pecked in the stinky coop in the back corner of their garden. I loved my grandmother's chicken soup and the chicken feathers she stuffed into our pillows almost as much as I hated the chickens themselves and the acrid ammonia stench of their dark, airless henhouse. If my stomach was still weak, then the broth came plain, or with a bit of minced parsley added at the last minute. If I was feeling stronger, then it appeared with soft shreds of white meat and tiny, star-shaped pastina.

When I got to the jammed surgical ward at Spital 2, the hospital in Timioara where John had been lying for five days, going in and out of consciousness, I was struck as much by the hunk of heavy brown bread and the thick, gristly pork sausage-both untouched at the head of his bed-as by John's gray, skeletal face. No dainty toast triangles here. No honey-flavored, lemon-laced tea. No fancy medical machinery. No antibiotics. Not even enough bandages. Just a sudden flood of patients, some moaning, some ominously quiet. And a truce of sorts. The fighting that had raged around the hospital a few nights earlier, as Ceauescu's security forces battled army regulars and the people of Timioara, had stopped.

In my halfhearted attempt to stave off panic, I had tried to believe that the conflicting reports on the nature and seriousness of John's wounds were overdramatized. But when the elevator doors at Spital 2 opened to reveal a huge gob of spit on the filthy floor, I no longer needed to see John's eyes-wild and unnaturally bright in the gray, drawn face of a suddenly elderly stranger-to know that most of the condition reports that had filtered back to me had been hopelessly optimistic. He looked like a desiccated caricature of the man I had kissed good-bye at Frankfurt Airport five days earlier.

John was conscious, and relief flooded through his eyes when he recognized me, but he was also off his head, lapsing intermittently into incoherence from the infection already raging inside him. A nurse was dressing him in what was left of his shot-up clothes, and he was lying on an old-fashioned metal bed, his hands clenched, clearly desperate to be gone. He kept trying to apologize for having been shot. I took his hands in mine and held them tightly. I was hypnotized by the glittery, ghostly look in his eyes. Those eyes, in which I could see John present one instant, then gone the next, so terrified me that I could almost feel myself disappearing under their gaze. All real feeling-my terror, panic, exhaustion-was being sucked somewhere deep inside me. Holding John's hands, held by his eyes, I felt as if a heavy shroud were slipping over my emotions and feelings, and I was shocked to hear myself suddenly speaking calmly, telling John to hang on, that after days of begging, a German Red Cross plane was waiting at the airport to fly him to safety.

Our trip from hospital to airfield was short, surreal. The orderlies brought John downstairs, literally folding him into the elevator, then folding him again into a filthy station wagon so small that they had to bend him at the knees, because at six-feet-two he was too tall to fit. I sat in front, next to a grizzled driver who was wearing a fezlike hat and stiff woolen coat and taking deep drags on a reeking Eastern bloc cigarette. John lay on his stomach directly behind the driver next to a short, filthy soldier in a World War I-style helmet and heavy greatcoat, smoking, too. The car was narrow as well as short and the silent soldier stood his AK-47 upright, the rifle barrel jammed against John's cheek for the entire ride. John kept thinking it was most likely the same kind of gun that had shot him; I kept checking my purse, obsessively, to make sure I still had John's hospital report, which the doctors in Munich said would be crucial.

Throughout the ride to the airport, John drifted in and out of consciousness. Awake, he talked incessantly, telling me how he remembered riding into Timioara in darkness, sitting in the front seat of a red Peugeot with a French photographer at the wheel and two other American reporters in back. He remembered a sudden thud against his car door, the door pressing sharply against him, the car suddenly rocking, and the sensation of something small traveling through him, not hurting, just hurtling through. He remembered only one shot, or a single burst of shots, even though the others told him later that the car had been virtually demolished by the fusillade. He remembered losing consciousness, then reawakening as soldiers pulled him from the car, laid him on a stretcher, and raced him into a hospital operating room, where doctors frantically ripped his shirt and undershirt up the back to get at his wound. John was talking as we approached the airport, but fell silent as I looked for our promised transport out.

We seemed to leave Romania the instant we drove around a corner of the empty airport terminal and saw, finally, the Red Cross plane, white and pristine, waiting on the empty tarmac, while snowflakes began to drift down. In truth, it took a long time to get off the ground, as we had to wait, while John's thin canvas stretcher lay on the bitterly cold tarmac, for a beefy border guard to rubber-stamp our pa.s.sports, and for the Germans to be satisfied with our paperwork, which they checked and rechecked before allowing us to board.

The antiseptic cleanliness of the little Learjet, whose interior had been fitted out as a state-of-the-art emergency room, made the Romanian hospital look like a medieval charnel house. A Red Cross doctor and nurse were already pulling off John's parka and attaching him to various intravenous tubes as I climbed aboard and we took off. Once the doctor completed her initial tests, she radioed her findings directly to Munich's Klinik.u.m Rechts der Isar, so that emergency room doctors would be ready to act when we arrived. The doctor in charge looked grave when he saw us, five days-nearly 120 hours-after the shooting.

A crowd of emergency room doctors and nurses materialized, swarming around John and rolling him away. Just before the big double doors swung shut, the last of the doctors turned to me. I looked at him, hoping he might be able to calm my rising fear. Instead, he began to berate me for taking so long to get John to Munich. Stung by his curt tone and the implication that I had purposely kept John hospitalized in Romania as long as possible for some unimaginable reason, I felt like a child again, when my mother, on one of her bad days, accused me of committing an absurd, imaginary crime. There was nothing to be said in either case. But the doctor's last words kept echoing in my brain, causing my stomach to spasm: "Another six to twelve hours and there would have been absolutely nothing we could have done to save him."

I stared at the doctor's back as he turned and walked through the same double doors through which John had disappeared. Suddenly I was alone again, in a nondescript hospital waiting room, my heart pounding noisily and my breath coming in short, irregular bursts. To calm myself, I pulled out the translation of the hastily written, error-filled Romanian medical report that the Germans had requested, reading and rereading it: Brought in by a citizen from street. Diagnosis: Gunshot wound to lumbar region, with crushing of muscles of the sacro-lumbar region. Pelvic bone fractured in many pieces because bullet exploded there 2-3 vertebrae in lumbar region slightly broken from explosion of bullet.Done: Dead muscle removed. Little bone fragments removed. Big bullet, not a normal bullet but an explosive bullet. Bullet pa.s.sed through body. Post-op: Normal for type of bullet and wound.In intensive care: Gave him blood, intravenous subst.i.tution, mineral subst.i.tution, acid and basic subst.i.tution, anti-teta.n.u.s. Cephalosporin, Betalactamin, Metronidazole. Gentamicin (the latter causes liver damage).Now: Leaving clinic in satisfactory condition with a slight fever. Needs a.s.sistance for infection risk and most important because of bone lesions. Liver and kidneys-some trouble because of infections and drugs used. Halothane, an anesthetic, causes liver problems. No signs of paralysis and no reasons to suspect start of same.

I focused, of course, on one line of that report. "Now: Leaving clinic in satisfactory condition with a slight fever." I must have read that line a hundred times as I tried to quell the rising panic I felt each time I pictured John's eyes, glittering in that unearthly way on the ward in Timioara's Spital 2, glittering so oddly on the Red Cross plane as we took off from Romania into the gathering snowstorm. I read it again and tried to understand it in light of the German doctor's decidedly different diagnosis.

After a few more readings I understood that the single line in the report upon which I had focused was utter rubbish, written to cover the Romanian government in the very likely event of John's death. Chief surgeon Petru Radulescu made that clear during a visit John made to Timioara eight years later. The only reason the government had opened its airs.p.a.ce to the German Red Cross plane was to get John out while he was still breathing, Dr. Radulescu told him. The government did not want to be in the position of having to ship the dead body of a New York Times New York Times reporter back to the United States. The references to antibiotics were pure fiction, a wish list of drugs the Romanian doctors coveted, just like those huge Polish restaurant menus we knew so well, the ones that listed dozens of dishes but whose kitchens never had much more to offer than beet soup and roast duck. During their emotional meeting eight years after Ceauescu's execution, Dr. Radulescu told John that the hospital had absolutely no modern antibiotics at the time of the revolution. " We knew what they were but we didn't have any," he said. reporter back to the United States. The references to antibiotics were pure fiction, a wish list of drugs the Romanian doctors coveted, just like those huge Polish restaurant menus we knew so well, the ones that listed dozens of dishes but whose kitchens never had much more to offer than beet soup and roast duck. During their emotional meeting eight years after Ceauescu's execution, Dr. Radulescu told John that the hospital had absolutely no modern antibiotics at the time of the revolution. " We knew what they were but we didn't have any," he said.

Between the evening of December 23, when he was shot, and December 28, the day he was airlifted to Munich, John underwent three emergency surgeries, two of them in Romania. The Munich surgeons, like the Romanians, tried to clean the large, infected wound of dead tissue. A small piece from the tip of one of his vertebrae had come apart during the procedures, but posed no neurological danger. The initial lab tests, X-rays, and computer scans indicated that John's liver and kidneys would revive once the infection was controlled. We awaited the results of the pathology report to know the exact nature of the infection. But the idea that things could still go horribly wrong once we had made it to the West had not yet sunk in. Even so, that night while John slept, closely monitored in the ICU, I lay awake, my mind working and reworking the last words I heard from the surgeon: " I think we can handle the probable infection."

Six days after the shooting, on December 29, John was still in intensive care. By late morning, his condition had worsened considerably and my mind began to shut down. Exhausted with worry, I realized at some point that I could no longer take in what the doctors were telling me. I tried to compensate by taking copious notes: "It is a large and very infected wound," I wrote. " We removed bone splinters, dead tissue, muscle, and much of the infected material." The doctors foresaw intensive care to heal the wound, a fourth operation the following day to remove additional dead tissue, and weeks of hospitalization.

Despite that report, I did not expect to be so utterly shocked upon seeing the gaunt figure that lay on the hospital bed in the ICU. It was not just the ma.s.s of tubes and wires protruding from John's inert body that so disturbed me. It was the sensation of seeing what looked like a corpse-thin-lipped, gray, emaciated, facial features caved in. My eyes and heart saw a sh.e.l.l of a body, lying where I had hoped to see some remnant of the vigorous man I had married twenty-nine days earlier. As I approached John's bed, I had the strongest sensation of having been somehow catapulted forward in time. I felt like an aged widow, come to say good-bye to her even more aged husband, lying dead on his funeral bier.

John was unconscious, and would remain that way for several days. But something, probably terror, propelled me to start talking to him. Trying to sound normal, I said h.e.l.lo, told him he was not looking too peppy, that he needed to rest and regroup and, most of all, to hang on. I reminded him that he was out of Timioara, that no one was shooting in Munich. I reminded him that he was in one of the best trauma hospitals in Germany and that the doctors were doing everything they could to clean his wound and fight the infection. I talked about Peter and Anna, fourteen and eight, just a few hours' train ride away, and how I would make sure they learned immediately that he was finally in the safety of a good hospital. I talked about his brothers, Charles and Robert and Paul, how they were calling and sending faxes every few hours. I talked about our sisters-in-law, Arlene and Chan. I talked about our nieces and nephews. I talked about my parents, my brother, our friends, our staff in Warsaw, our editors in the States, our colleagues. I talked slowly and softly, but incessantly, for what seemed like forever, trying all the while to sound as normal as I could, not only for him but for myself as well. Though the quiet drone of my voice had no visible effect on John, it helped calm me.

7.

Lentils and Sugar.

When I was a child I was fascinated by feasting food, the dishes that different communities or cultures traditionally serve on special occasions. A Greek-British family who lived above us for a couple of years ate a very eggy, flat yellow cake at Eastertide. It tasted wonderful but-even better, from my eight-year-old eyes-contained a dime carefully wrapped in folds of waxed paper. Just as the feve feve in a French in a French galette des rois galette des rois brings a crown at Epiphany, the coin in the Greek cake brought luck to the person in whose slice it was hidden. brings a crown at Epiphany, the coin in the Greek cake brought luck to the person in whose slice it was hidden.

New Year's celebrations in Italy always contain lentils, for the consuming of lenticchie lenticchie at this time of year is meant to bring good luck and as many coins as lentils consumed. A similar tradition holds in Texas and much of the American South, where black-eyed peas are eaten at New Year's for health and wealth in the coming year. It is no surprise that both lentils and black-eyed peas cost next to nothing, spreading the possibility of good luck to any family, no matter the purse. at this time of year is meant to bring good luck and as many coins as lentils consumed. A similar tradition holds in Texas and much of the American South, where black-eyed peas are eaten at New Year's for health and wealth in the coming year. It is no surprise that both lentils and black-eyed peas cost next to nothing, spreading the possibility of good luck to any family, no matter the purse.

When I was very small I liked the idea of lentils and luck more than the actual eating of them. But I can still see my mother's father, Tony, a short, rounded man who never lost his appet.i.te or his dark hair despite his ninety-plus years, slowly chewing his way through bowl after bowl of them, always flecked with bits of onion, carrot, celery, tomato, and pancetta, a specially cured cut of pork similar to bacon.

As I got older, I looked forward as much to the lentils as the luck. By the time I reached my teens, I also loved the plump, dark pink sausage, cotechino cotechino, meant to go with them. The best cotechino cotechino-whose name comes from the Italian word for pork rind, cotica cotica, an essential ingredient-is somehow nearly creamy but toothsome at the same time, with a delicate taste and gelatinous broth that one mixes into the lentils. When I moved to Dallas in my late twenties, I happily traded my lentils for Texans' black-eyed peas at New Year's. In the five years I lived there, the lentil-black-eyed pea connection was the only culinary similarity I ever saw between Eye-talian and Texas kitchens.

I ate no lentils at New Year's in Munich. I only thought about it years later, when John and I were back living in Rome. It's not that I think a bowl of lentils would have made any difference, but since then I have never missed a meal of them as each new year rolls round.

A week to the day after John was shot, he underwent a fourth operation to clean out his wound. But the surgery did not go according to plan. John's lungs, like all of his major organs, were suffering from the infection raging within. When his lungs began filling with fluid, the doctors had to pump them out to save him from drowning. After long hours of waiting for news, I was initially relieved to see one of John's surgeons appear, but when he briefed me on what had happened and warned me that John might need to go on a ventilator the next day, my gut ignored his calm delivery, my brain began flirting with panic. That the doctor forbade me to visit John underscored the gravity of the situation. That the doctors had to pump out his lungs to keep him breathing terrified me. That he was going to need yet another operation in forty-eight hours-his fifth since the shooting-sounded ominous. That he might need to go on a breathing machine was a possibility I had never once entertained. week to the day after John was shot, he underwent a fourth operation to clean out his wound. But the surgery did not go according to plan. John's lungs, like all of his major organs, were suffering from the infection raging within. When his lungs began filling with fluid, the doctors had to pump them out to save him from drowning. After long hours of waiting for news, I was initially relieved to see one of John's surgeons appear, but when he briefed me on what had happened and warned me that John might need to go on a ventilator the next day, my gut ignored his calm delivery, my brain began flirting with panic. That the doctor forbade me to visit John underscored the gravity of the situation. That the doctors had to pump out his lungs to keep him breathing terrified me. That he was going to need yet another operation in forty-eight hours-his fifth since the shooting-sounded ominous. That he might need to go on a breathing machine was a possibility I had never once entertained.

I tried to shut down the whirring in my head and went back to the hotel to find Adele Riepe, the Bonn bureau manager of The New York Times The New York Times, who had spent most of the previous week hammering Red Cross officials in several countries to attempt to evacuate John from Romania. Adele, a former Ford Agency model who in her seventies looks better than I ever did at thirty, took one look at my gaunt face and said she was going to feed me.

We went to a small restaurant just down the street from the hotel and downed a gla.s.s of dry white Frankenwein Frankenwein while we waited for our food to arrive. I didn't feel hungry, but she pushed me to eat: starter, main course, salad, dessert. while we waited for our food to arrive. I didn't feel hungry, but she pushed me to eat: starter, main course, salad, dessert. Der Appet.i.t kommt beim Essen, Der Appet.i.t kommt beim Essen, the Germans say, and they are right. Eating can in fact bring on one's appet.i.te. We emptied every plate the waiter brought, then hurried back to the hotel so that I could call the doctors before turning in. the Germans say, and they are right. Eating can in fact bring on one's appet.i.te. We emptied every plate the waiter brought, then hurried back to the hotel so that I could call the doctors before turning in.

Most of the news was not good, and it continued to worsen over the New Year's holiday. John's lungs were failing; the infection, which the doctors were now calling septicemia, was still raging; and he was breathing only because he was on a respirator and a pair of lung pumps. He underwent a fifth operation to remove all the tissue that had blackened and died since the previous surgery. The sole encouraging sign was that the lab reports showed that the infection was coming from the wound alone; all nearby organs were untouched. During this period, John would fall into and out of half-conscious dream states that had begun in the hospital in Timioara and persisted long after he had left the intensive-care unit in Munich. Whether asleep or semiconscious, he kept dreaming he saw a gearbox filled with brightly colored plastic gears turning in various directions and clicking, constantly clicking. John knew, even in his sleep, that if those gears stopped, he would be dead.

Eight days after arriving in Munich, the trauma team finally cleared John to leave intensive care for transfer to the hospital's special surgical ward, where they envisioned a three-week course of specialized treatment using something called Wundzucker. Wundzucker. If all went well, the treatment would be followed by plastic surgery to close the wound. If all went well, the treatment would be followed by plastic surgery to close the wound.

Neither of us knew the word Wundzucker, Wundzucker, literally "wound sugar," but a few days later, John noticed what looked like sandy crumbs in his sheets, as if he had been eating cookies in bed. It was only then that he realized that the white crystals the doctors had been pouring into his back twice a day were nothing more than sterilized sugar, administered after he had been bathed in a diluted chamomile extract, and his wound had been hosed out. The hosing produced pain fierce enough to require a morphine chaser. literally "wound sugar," but a few days later, John noticed what looked like sandy crumbs in his sheets, as if he had been eating cookies in bed. It was only then that he realized that the white crystals the doctors had been pouring into his back twice a day were nothing more than sterilized sugar, administered after he had been bathed in a diluted chamomile extract, and his wound had been hosed out. The hosing produced pain fierce enough to require a morphine chaser.

Sugar, a treatment from Egyptian antiquity, helps heal dangerously infected wounds by killing the powerful bacteria that thrive in their depths, without causing trauma to the surrounding tissue. The practice largely fell out of favor during the 1900s, as pharmaceutical companies developed increasingly powerful antibiotics to fight infection. But in the mid-1980s, German doctors turned back to sugar when they began encountering super-powerful bacteria harbored in deep wounds that did not respond to even the most high-tech preparations. Although U.S. medical experts largely discredit the idea as quaint, European doctors who have readopted the technique say that even dirty wounds often turn free of bacteria after only several days of treatment and that the injuries tend to heal more completely and gently than with standard antibiotics.

Dry sugar crystals have an osmotic effect, drawing the liquid out of all the bacteria that lurk deep inside the wound. The removal of that liquid kills the bacteria that fuel infection. The treatment allows new flesh-the doctors call it "granulation tissue"-to grow deep inside the wound, which, in John's case, was exactly what was needed. His wound was so large and deep that it could not just be closed; there was no flesh in the trench with which to close it. Instead it had to heal slowly, from the bottom up, and it did, over a period of weeks.

John's doctors always worried that the infection would spread into his shattered pelvic bone, a situation they wished to avoid. Bone infections were nasty, they said, horrifically painful for the patient and tricky to heal. Although they would have liked to wait until enough new flesh formed to simply close the wound, the risk of infection was too great. They would give the granulated sugar three weeks' time to begin producing a base of granulation tissue. Then they would call in the plastic surgeons, to finish offthe job more quickly.

On the first day of the sugar treatment, I arrived to find the surgical ward's second-in-command already studying his new patient's wound while changing John's bandages. I had never actually seen the wound, and when the doctor began to say how much better it looked, and asked if I wanted to have a look, too, I naively nodded.

Clearly I had been keeping the gory details of John's injury in some sort of psychological safe house, for when I stepped up to John's bedside to look, I felt as if I were staring into an abyss so deep that I was afraid I would fall in. For some time I had known intellectually that John's wound was large and had to have been made larger by the five operations in which the doctors had cut away dead flesh. But I was not at all prepared to see a horizontal trench wider than my forearm stretching from one side of his waist to the other, his spinal column looking like a white bridge over the dark red meat of his open back. It looked for all the world as if someone had taken an ice cream scoop and roughly carved a deep trench across his middle.

I am not particularly squeamish, but the wound so unnerved me that I had to turn away. The doctor noticed my distress and began talking softly, describing how much better the wound looked now, noting that the dark pink-red color was a sign of solid granulation, and pointing out that there was no longer any dead, black flesh. After he finished rebandaging the wound, we walked out of the room together into the hallway.

As soon as the heavy door to John's room closed, the doctor apologized, saying he had a.s.sumed I'd seen the wound while John was in intensive care. Still reeling, I demanded to know if there was any hope at all of a wound that size actually healing. "Don't worry," he said. " We close bigger holes than that."

That night, when I went back to my hotel room, all the fear and panic I had been suppressing for the previous two weeks let loose. I sobbed, unable to catch my breath, for what seemed like hours before I calmed down enough to check with another expert on battlefield wounds.

My father had spent years in the South Pacific during World War II, and was a.s.signed to an army medical unit, where he ferried the wounded and the dead from the battlefield to field hospitals. My mother had told me when I was a child that he did not like to talk about the war. His only sporadic comments about it usually erupted in response to newspaper stories quoting members of Veterans of Foreign War societies. Anybody who would join a group like that, he would say, must have spent the entire war in a cushy office on a U.S. base. His premise was that n.o.body who actually saw fighting would ever want anything further to do with the military. The only time he willingly discussed his five-year stint was the night he and I went to see M*A*S*H M*A*S*H at a local movie house. He loved it, the first war movie he had ever seen that caught the crazed reality of war. at a local movie house. He loved it, the first war movie he had ever seen that caught the crazed reality of war.

I dialed home and tried to describe for my father the size and depth of the trench across John's back. I told him that the doctor had a.s.sured me that healing was possible, but that I wasn't sure if I could believe him. My father was quiet while he searched through the wartime memories he generally kept at bay. " I remember a guy we brought in without a calf," he said. "His calf had basically been blown off. There was pretty much nothing there but bone. I can tell you that the meat grew back. It's amazing what a body can do when it wants to live."

We said good night. I hung on to his words and actually slept.

Iused to think that my family's central dynamic may have gotten stuck on food because of the onset of my brother's renal problems when he was two, that my parents never stopped trying to devise a diet that might make his kidneys behave. But in searching through old sc.r.a.pbooks and notebooks, I found that food was at the center of things long before he got sick. I could not spell "cereal" or "carrots" when Danny took his first solid food at seven weeks, but I was interested enough to write about it on a thin piece of brown construction paper stuck into my first sc.r.a.pbook. " When my brother was 7 weeks old we gave him cirel," I wrote. "On June 18, my baby brother aet ate carrets he took all that my mother gave him! . . . on June 21 my brother ate Squash."

n.o.body remembers if it was Danny's pediatrician who suggested that my parents ensure that he ate a protein-rich diet, to make up for the protein spilling out into his urine, upsetting the body's delicate balances and threatening his life. It is possible that it was something my parents did on their own. But I know that for a dozen years at least, our family's chief work at mealtime was to get my brother to eat plenty of protein-rich foods: meat, eggs, and dairy products. Like a Greek chorus, my father, mother, and I repeatedly interrupted the chatter of all our meals with a basic line: "Eat your meaty, Danny, eat your meaty."

How familiar and oddly comforting, then, when John got out of intensive care and found himself constantly hungry. The hospital's surgical chief said it was the strongest sign to date that his body was beginning to heal. He also told us that a body successfully growing new flesh would demand a high-protein, high-calorie diet. The hospital would provide it; John was expected to eat it.

From that moment forward, each of John's three daily meals arrived laden with protein-rich foods. Thick slices of cold cuts, large wedges of cheese, hard-boiled eggs, huge chunks of meat or fish, containers of yogurt or milk-rich puddings, whole-grain breads-John's food tray would have made a cardiologist blanch. Consumption of this food was no ch.o.r.e for John; he was ravenous at each mealtime and ate with gusto, from the slabs of liverwurst on thick brown bread to the mounds of herring in sour cream. The granulation of new flesh in his wound was gobbling up the calories and proteins faster than even John could keep pace with, pulling extra protein wherever it could find it. No matter how much he ate, it wasn't enough. John's hair turned brittle in the coming weeks and thinned out dramatically, as the healing wound pulled proteins from even the hair on his head.

He was not the only one with an appet.i.te. I had always had a fast metabolism, and the adrenaline rush from the shock of the shooting and all that followed had only made it faster. Every morning I would go down to the hotel's breakfast buffet and eat dinner-sized portions of scrambled eggs, tiny, herb-flavored sausages known as Nurnberger Wurstchen, Nurnberger Wurstchen, a mound of German-style home fries, crunchy breakfast rolls, yogurt, and bowls of out-of-season berries flown in from someplace south of the equator. Only after I had eaten like this every morning and downed a large pot of tea did I feel physically and mentally ready to return to the hospital. a mound of German-style home fries, crunchy breakfast rolls, yogurt, and bowls of out-of-season berries flown in from someplace south of the equator. Only after I had eaten like this every morning and downed a large pot of tea did I feel physically and mentally ready to return to the hospital.

At lunchtime I would return to the hotel cafe and eat the daily special-soup, main course, salad, dessert-before I could even think about heading back to the hospital. I would stay with John till after his supper, then eat yet another large meal before falling asleep. No matter how much I ate during those weeks in Munich, my clothes let me know that I was losing weight. My entire body felt stuck in overdrive. Each night I would fall asleep exhausted, but would often awaken with a start just a couple of hours later. I would be breathing hard and in a sweat, as if I had been chased by demons during my sleep. In Munich I never remembered my dreams, but I awoke knowing they had been bad.

John's appet.i.te and protein-rich diet worked as the doctors had hoped, and by the end of January, they were ready to try a pair of operations to finally close up his back. Both went nearly according to plan. The hospital's top cosmetic surgeon basically b.u.t.terflied John's b.u.t.tocks, cutting flaps that he could then open out over the wound to patch what remained of the trench. Two weeks later, when I finally saw the wound for the second time, it looked as if a very neat, careful madman had carved his way around it. But to me it was beautiful: the gaping trench and open view of John's spine miraculously gone, replaced by a couple of feet of delicately traced seams. No Frankenstein cross-st.i.tches, just a subcutaneous blind st.i.tch that left neat, clean lines. My nightmares paused.

8.

Birthday Cake.

Until I went away to college, my parents, my brother, and I ate virtually every Sunday lunch of my life with a dozen or more of my mother's relatives in my grandparents' tiny apartment. Except for those first moments of silence when everyone dug into the steaming plates before them, Comparato, Romano, Tozzi, Delia, Fucci, and Gabriel never stopped talking, kidding, joking, telling stories, swapping news, or listening to the latest tales of wacky customers at Gabriel's Meat Market. We ate a ritual menu: Jennie's pasta al ragu pasta al ragu, and then meatb.a.l.l.s, sausage, chicken, pork, and braciole, thin slices of herbed, rolled beef, all of which had flavored her thick Neapolitan sauce. A mixed salad, "good for the digestion," always followed the meat.

The only variable dish was dessert, usually one of Jennie's homemade American specialties: fresh blueberry, apple, cherry, or pumpkin pie, depending on the season; Boston cream or lemon meringue pies on occasion; pineapple crush cake (made with zwieback, eggs, condensed milk, pineapple, and whipped cream); or, on birthdays, my favorite, Auntie's chocolate cake, a moist, sour-milk, two-layer concoction spread thickly with Jennie's soft, white frosting and covered in grated coconut. As a child I loved to watch the vinegar-Heinz's white, not my grandfather's red-start to sour the warm milk. If I stared long enough I could see the milk begin to thicken and coagulate from the chemical reaction with the vinegar. When the cake was pulled from the oven, leaving moist, dark crumbs on the toothpick tester, I loved the sight of it sitting on a cake plate in the center of any of the tables from my childhood, whether it was my birthday or somebody else's.

Jennie and Tony, Great-Uncle Pete, Great-Aunt Philly, Deedee, Auntie and Uncle, Cousin Jo, Cousin Al, my mother: all are gone today, along with all the other great-aunts and great-uncles, and nearly all the second and third cousins who used to join us on special occasions. My grandparents' generation produced few children, my parents' generation even fewer. Aside from me, the only ones left from that great crowd of family that used to celebrate Sundays and birthdays together are my father and brother, and Auntie's son, my lone first cousin, Paul.

I never lost the recipe for Auntie's birthday cake, no matter how many times I have moved. The recipe, stained with melted chocolate and vanilla, travels with me to each new country, each new kitchen. I make Auntie's cake at least once a year. A single bite of that cake still conjures up the days when all the characters of my childhood used to sit around Jennie's kitchen table on Whitney Avenue celebrating the joy of birth, when I was little, when my parents were young, when my grandparents were still only in their sixties. It keeps those Sunday dinners alive in my memory, keeps alive my family dead.

Before John was discharged from the hospital in Munich, a gray-haired orderly named Werner walked into John's room, read his medical chart, and pointedly asked him when he was born. When John responded, Werner-who had acquired a certain wisdom about traumatic wounds while working aboard a hospital ship off the coast of Vietnam-shook his head to disagree. "You've got a new birthday now," he said gently, referring to the date of John's shooting. "December twenty-third, nineteen eighty-nine. It's a new birthday for your new life."

John and I both understood that Werner was not just chatting idly, though at the time we caught but a whiff of what he was trying to convey. It took us a good fifteen years to understand the simple truth he was hinting at, and will probably take years more before we truly, utterly accept it: that the arc of a single bullet finding its mark was not just a shocking, pa.s.sing incident in our lives but a life-changing one that would make us dramatically different people. Because that single bullet so thoroughly changed John and me, it changed the lives of the children as well, and it will in turn change the lives of any children they have one day, as the memory of that bullet drifts in a slow-moving spiral down the generations. That spiral drifted up the generations, too: my mother never quite got over the shock of John's shooting, the fear that her new son-in-law might die before she got to meet him.

A single bullet started it all. A single bullet fired by a roadside sniper in a nondescript city suddenly convulsed by revolution. Just one bullet found John that night, a bullet that pierced the pa.s.senger door of a little red Peugeot before tearing into John's right side and exiting through his left.

But even a single bullet takes at least two paths: one through a body, the other through life itself. The first path is visible, gory, dramatic. All the same, it is the simple route. The second path is imperceptible, hidden, and therefore far more fraught. The second path cuts through a once seamless life, splitting it in two: the old life before the bullet and the new life after. Neither doctors nor patient can see the second path, so the wounds it leaves often go unnoticed and untreated. Both can lead to long-term festering.

That gentle German orderly tried his best to alert us to the bullet's second path, but we were too naive to comprehend. We tried, for several years in fact, to celebrate John's new birthday as if we understood its importance. A year to the day after the shooting, we invited a few close friends to share a "new birthday" dinner with us, to celebrate the fact that John was alive. That I chose not to make Auntie's chocolate cake for the occasion is proof that I still hadn't digested the import of Werner's message. I made a pie that night for dessert, pumpkin, I think. I even stuck a single, lighted birthday candle in the middle of it, but all of us at the table felt awkward and off-stride. No one felt comfortable "celebrating" John's new birthday, because accepting a new birthday meant accepting a new person. Accepting the new John meant the old John was gone, a concept none of us was ready to acknowledge.

In the nearly twenty years that have pa.s.sed since that phony birthday party, one thought continues to haunt: If a single bullet travels up and down the generations, how do we ever begin to measure the havoc of war?

Shortly after Werner's birthday speech, old friends from Rome who had moved to a dune-filled stretch of white beach on Key Biscayne called to urge us to take a total break once John was released from the Munich hospital and had completed his rehabilitation at a Connecticut clinic. They invited us to spend a week with them in the Florida sunshine, where both of us could escape the medical world, which had become our daily grind. It was our first taste of the role that friends, sunshine, food, talk, and laughter would later play in John's recovery, though we hadn't yet the ghost of an idea about how far off that recovery actually was.

It took little time to be seduced by Don and Marybelle Schanche's idea of sunshine, sea air, stone crabs, and Key lime pie. The mere idea of it was the carrot that kept us going during the rest of John's hospital care. I can still feel that welcoming blast of Florida's enveloping heat and humidity as we stepped off the plane in Miami, pure bliss after months in the gray, damp cold of a northern European winter.

An hour later we were inside our friends' light-filled apartment, and the only thing between their terrace and the bright, shining sea was an enormous, heated swimming pool surrounded by sea grape, gra.s.s, and the occasional lizard tumbling out of a palm tree. The sun beat down, heating our bones, unknotting our muscles, even beginning to dispel our panic.

Their apartment was filled with reminders of our shared time in Italy, from the gaily painted Italian pottery they had collected over the years to the framed sketches of Rome hanging on the walls, to the lazy evening meals that Marybelle served us, just as she had served us in Rome. Perhaps as much as anything that reminded me of Rome was the fierce, bright sunlight of early spring in Key Biscayne, which had the power to banish from my memory the weak winter light of northern Europe.

I remember sitting close to John and drinking in the intensity of that sunlight while sipping a gla.s.s of cold, very cold, white wine, not unlike the bottles we used to share on our sunny, plant-filled terraces in Rome. Don had a booming, infectious laugh; Marybelle, a higher, full-throated chortle, like the exultant pealing of a high-toned bell. Between the sunshine, the wine, and their laughter, I felt as if I had somehow gotten out of h.e.l.l and peeked into heaven. One night Don put the John Cleese cla.s.sic A Fish Called Wanda A Fish Called Wanda on the video player and the four of us laughed until we wept. For the first time since I had been beaten, more than four months earlier, the tension, anger, sadness, and fear that I had buried inside began to dissipate with each peal of laughter. on the video player and the four of us laughed until we wept. For the first time since I had been beaten, more than four months earlier, the tension, anger, sadness, and fear that I had buried inside began to dissipate with each peal of laughter.

Every morning after a lazy breakfast, I helped John do his stretching exercises, a three-year prescription meant to counteract the fusion of his vertebrae that had begun after his last operation in Munich. Then the four of us descended to the pool, for laps, naps, newspapers, and talk. Toward lunchtime we would wander barefoot along the sand to a simple shack of a restaurant on the beach, long gone now after a hurricane tore it off its foundations. We would eat stone crabs or hamburgers and drink a beer in the sunshine, easily talking and laughing together, just as we always had. We would down a piece or two of genuine Key lime pie, then stroll back to the Schanches' flat, unwinding a bit more day by day. Before our week was up, Don and Marybelle organized a joint birthday celebration, for John and I nearly share a birthday. One friend brought an armload of helium balloons attached to long, colorful, curling ribbons. She let them loose in the Schanches' big white living room, where they bounced around the ceiling in time to the ebb and flow of the air conditioner's fan. John still could not sit up very long, so after eating quickly he retired to the floor, where he lay on his stomach under the balloons. When the rest of us finished our dinner, we followed Don's suggestion and stretched out on the floor with John. It is possible to drink Champagne while lying on one's side, leaning on one's elbow, but it is not easy. We drank and laughed, always horizontal. We ate birthday cake and laughed, still horizontal.

By the time we got vertical again, I dared to let myself think that the worst of the nightmare might be over. It looked for all the world as if we would make our target date of mid-April to head back to work-and life as we'd known it. I knew we would both feel infinitely better once we could return to some semblance of normal life. We needed to have our days marked not by doctor's visits and lab tests but by headlines and deadlines, interviews and articles. We needed our nights marked not by nightmares and fear but by music and books; long, lazy walks; and time in each other's arms.

Our week in Florida finished, we flew to New York for what we thought would be a last round of family visits before heading back to Europe and John's new posting in Berlin. The Times Times had decided shortly after the shooting that John should trade his Warsaw posting, which involved heavy travel, for Berlin, which did not. But just as we dared to feel we were climbing out of our abyss, the light at the surface beginning to warm our faces, John fell terribly ill once more. The diagnosis was hepat.i.tis B, caused by tainted blood transfused during one of his last operations in Munich. Neither of us had ever had hepat.i.tis, but my mother's family doctor warned us that it would not be pleasant. Worse yet, there was no treatment other than luck and the pa.s.sage of time. had decided shortly after the shooting that John should trade his Warsaw posting, which involved heavy travel, for Berlin, which did not. But just as we dared to feel we were climbing out of our abyss, the light at the surface beginning to warm our faces, John fell terribly ill once more. The diagnosis was hepat.i.tis B, caused by tainted blood transfused during one of his last operations in Munich. Neither of us had ever had hepat.i.tis, but my mother's family doctor warned us that it would not be pleasant. Worse yet, there was no treatment other than luck and the pa.s.sage of time.

Through that spring John became sicker and sicker, suffering all the typical symptoms of this disabling liver disease, which causes profound exhaustion and wreaks havoc on the body's digestive system and internal clock. His urine turned brown, his stool white. His skin itched until it bled. He suddenly lost his ability to sleep at night and would doze fitfully all day long, only to wake up, nervous and tetchy, as the sun went down.

Within days, John went cranky and quiet. I went cranky and loud. No hospital, no drugs, no treatment this time, just rest and a light, fat-free diet. But even though he followed all medical instructions, John's liver count kept climbing week after week until the doctor began broaching the possibility of a liver transplant if his condition did not begin improving soon.

It was my mother, who knew about these things, who pulled me aside one day when John was sleeping and suggested that John was not just sick but depressed as well. I argued against it, reminding her that the doctor had warned us that the symptoms of hepat.i.tis B often mimic those of depression. I had conveniently put aside the doctor's other statement, that hepat.i.tis B can kick-start depression. Uncharacteristically, my mother did not argue with me, but it was clear that she was deeply troubled.

When John fell ill, we had to cancel our usual summer plans to spend a month in our beloved lake house in Italy. We had been renting that house in Trevignano Romano every summer since we'd moved to Poland, and our time there was something that we and the children had come to count on. Part of the magic of the place was the presence of our close friends Ann and Joseph Natanson, who had discovered Trevignano when their two children were small and decided to build two nearly identical homes on a hillside plot they owned there: one for their family and one for guests. Ann, who is English, was Rome correspondent for Time-Life Books; Joseph, Polish, was a painter who had retired after years of working with Europe's top directors at Cinecitta, Italy's Hollywood. Both John and I were bitterly disappointed that John's hepat.i.tis meant we wouldn't be able to see Ann and Joseph as planned, or lose ourselves in the simple, restorative rhythms of our summertime rituals in Trevignano.

Instead, we rented an old-fashioned cottage for a month at Fairfield Beach on Connecticut's southwestern sh.o.r.e, the beach of my childhood, where Peter and Anna would join us for the last two weeks of our stay. John and I packed our suitcases and moved to the cottage in early June. A friend with a truck transported my childhood sailboat, an overgrown ironing board with a green-and-white-striped nylon sail, to the cottage, too, so that I could teach the children to sail. John lay in the cottage, dozing by day, nervous and insomniac at night, talking little, eating less. It was not until mid-June, just before the children arrived, that his blood count finally tipped back in the direction of healing. To this day I don't know if it was the doctor's talk about liver transplants, the children's impending arrival, or simple coincidence that turned the tide toward healing.

The photos we have of that time show John looking surprisingly well, considering what he had been through. Though his hair had thinned and turned to straw, though he was undoubtedly bony, the weight loss made him look more like an aged adolescent than a man not far from fifty. The scars, which ran across his beltline, made wearing a belt uncomfortable, so he had adopted suspenders to hold his trousers-baggy now-in place. My favorite shot shows him clowning with Peter and Anna around a picnic table, tufts of beach gra.s.s and the blue-gray expanse of Long Island Sound in the background. Peter is hiding his eyes with a just-shucked ear of corn; Anna is holding a half-shucked ear and happily sticking out her tongue. John is looking like a hillbilly in oversized chinos held up too high by a pair of blue suspenders. He mugs for me, behind the camera. He's the one sporting the enormous handlebar mustache made from a fresh tuft of corn silk.

9.

Sutni Szalonna.

Take one large hunk of Hungarian bacon, about the size of a large man's hand. Skewer it with a long-handled barbecue fork, then start a small wood fire out of doors, for sutni szalonna sutni szalonna (p.r.o.nounced SHUT-nee SULL-oh-nah) is a messy meal in the making and the eating. Once coals form, hold the skewered bacon over the flames until the meat starts to sear and melting fat begins to sputter on the coals. Cover thick slices of fresh Hungarian rye bread with a layer of chopped raw vegetables: sweet onions, garden tomatoes, and cuc.u.mbers. When heavenly meaty smells begin to emanate from the fire, press the blackening bacon and its dripping fat into a slice of prepared bread. The bread, which works as both plate and napkin, will sop up the runoff. Keep the bread slice parallel to the earth as you eat and avoid closing your eyes in bliss, lest the fat-drizzled vegetables slide to the ground. Repeat procedure. No matter how much you make, there will never be quite enough. (p.r.o.nounced SHUT-nee SULL-oh-nah) is a messy meal in the making and the eating. Once coals form, hold the skewered bacon over the flames until the meat starts to sear and melting fat begins to sputter on the coals. Cover thick slices of fresh Hungarian rye bread with a layer of chopped raw vegetables: sweet onions, garden tomatoes, and cuc.u.mbers. When heavenly meaty smells begin to emanate from the fire, press the blackening bacon and its dripping fat into a slice of prepared bread. The bread, which works as both plate and napkin, will sop up the runoff. Keep the bread slice parallel to the earth as you eat and avoid closing your eyes in bliss, lest the fat-drizzled vegetables slide to the ground. Repeat procedure. No matter how much you make, there will never be quite enough.

Hungarian farmworkers used to eat sutni szalonna sutni szalonna in the fields during high summer, when the workday might start at four or five a.m. A few hours later, when the sun was well up and they were ravenous, they would eat a quick but nourishing breakfast in the fields, to avoid wasting time in trekking back home. Later it became a favorite picnic treat, which is how I first came to eat it, in the big backyard of our Hungarian next-door neighbors, whose sons, Johnny and Bobby, were my after-school playmates. Mrs. Vincze would prepare the bread and vegetables, and her husband would organize the fire, then skewer and cook the meat. The boys, their older sister, and I would stand by hungrily, salivating as the smoke from the sizzling bacon wafted skyward. No picnic food ever tasted so good to me as that Hungarian farmhand specialty, the cousin of Roman bruschetta or British bread and drippin'. in the fields during high summer, when the workday might start at four or five a.m. A few hours later, when the sun was well up and they were ravenous, they would eat a quick but nourishing breakfast in the fields, to avoid wasting time in trekking back home. Later it became a favorite picnic treat, which is how I first came to eat it, in the big backyard of our Hungarian next-door neighbors, whose sons, Johnny and Bobby, were my after-school playmates. Mrs. Vincze would prepare the bread and vegetables, and her husband would organize the fire, then skewer and cook the meat. The boys, their older sister, and I would stand by hungrily, salivating as the smoke from the sizzling bacon wafted skyward. No picnic food ever tasted so good to me as that Hungarian farmhand specialty, the cousin of Roman bruschetta or British bread and drippin'.

In 2007, when we spoke on a phone line that stretched from Paris to Rhode Island, Mrs. Vincze, well into her eighties, still sounded as bright and sharp as she had fifty years before. Trying to catch up on perhaps forty years of news, we both were thrilled to hear each other's voices. Our conversation seemed to jog her memories of my childhood in the two-family house that stood next to hers. "Your mother was so sick after you were born," Mrs. Vincze recalled without prompting, her accent still reflecting her Hungarian roots. "Your grandmother and your aunt used to come and take care of you because your mother couldn't."

Her simple explanation, uttered with empathy and kindness, hit me hard after I hung up. My mother had spoken of these illnesses to me only once; my aunt and grandmother never. Each of them, in her own way, was good with secrets. My mother's friends knew little if anything about it, and though a few may have known she had had some unidentified "problems" with childbirth, all of them seemed to have bought the picture she presented to the world: a plain-talking, loyal, and lively woman, both tiny and tough, who never appeared so happy as when she was ballroom dancing.

Even though I had known since my late twenties that my mother had suffered four bouts of postpartum psychosis, I had never really thought about what it had meant on a day-to-day basis for my infancy and childhood. I never dreamed her illness would have been so obvious to neighbors who lived across a stretch of two gardens separated by a chain-link fence. My mother's last bout of the baby blues ended a year after my brother was born, eighteen months before my parents bought a house of their own. All four of those collapses occurred in their sunlit rental flat, and it makes me wonder if at least some of the unfettered joy she experienced when we moved into a house of our own was not somehow connected to the idea that there she would find a refuge from the many fears that had plagued her. Oh, how my mother loved having a home of her own! Whenever we would come into the house after a day or even a few hours away, she would turn the key in the lock, excitedly, yelling happily into the empty rooms, "h.e.l.lo, house, we're home!" as if she were greeting a dear, long-lost member of the family.