Leibhaftig

She's 60, East German, and it's winter 1989. Burst appendix that she's tried to ignore for far too long. Bouncing ambulance to the hospital. The doctors find an abdominal cavity full of infections and germs. Feverish months pass as she sweats away in her hospital bed, regularly taken for x-rays and surgery, again and again, and while they struggle to save her life she drifts between memories and real life, between first person and third person, one long near-death experience. Life flashing before her eyes.

She's 60 and East German in spring 1989. She remembers her aunt who loved a Jewish doctor and paid for it. She remembers other party members who disappeared, she remembers whispering every conversation that meant something. The doctors struggle to find a pair of GDR-made rubber gloves that don't break, and demand an explanation from her how her immune system can be in complete collapse like this.

And they call me "doctor" even though they know it's not my title. I don't need that title. They need it. The patient asks Kora if the medical director, the professor, is aware that he's hurting her, cutting in her flesh, to cure her, sure, cut the evil out of her since she can't be free of it herself.

She's 60 and East German in summer 1989 and she reads Goethe obsessively in the few moments of clarity between fever crests. She's worked in culture her whole life. Ideals, beauty, justice... They were supposed to build something on that, didn't they? Isn't it her job to find and cut out the evil from men's hearts? Every time they turn on the radio in her hospital room, it's news about death and kidnappings and terrorist attacks and collapse. What's to fight for? The story of survival itself, perhaps, not as a heroic act but as one of endurance, of prodding and exploratory prose. Abdominal surgery can't lay everything bare or everything would pour out onto the floor, even with modern equipment and computer tomography surgeons largely work by feel through the tiniest openings, much like poets.

I'm speaking of the cavities where emotions are born. I can't say how I know that. I realise I can't convince you of ever experience. They're not really born, emotions. They thaw. As if they were frozen. Or anaesthetized.
Anaesthetized by what.
By the shock that everything I say or write is falsified by what I don't say and don't write.

She's 60, German, fall 1989. Nobody survives serious illness unchanged. But scars and emaciated bodies have their own beauty, and her Russian nurse has a name that means "little hope".