Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(86)
The car was a hydrogen-cell Audi, five years old, the subject of many fierce arguments and much simmering anger. Their previous car had simply died of old age; there were so many things wrong with it, a local mechanic had opined at an annual service, that it was kinder to just sell it for scrap rather than keep replacing things. So they had done that, and gathered together what money they could and borrowed the rest from friends and family, and Lech had gone to a second-hand dealer and come back with the Audi. Ania had loved it at first sight.
It was an easy half-hour’s drive past Ok?ecie – locals still hadn’t got around to calling it Warsaw-Chopin Airport, even after all this time – and down the E30 and 721 to Konstancin. Turning east at Piaseczno, Ania could see a bruised-looking lightening of the sky ahead of her, and the lights of aircraft turning for their final approach to the airport hanging in the air.
By the time she reached Konstancin it was light enough for her to see the pines crowding the sides of the road and some of the old dilapidated buildings of the spa, their grubby stucco coming up out of the dimness. By virtue of its hot springs, Konstancin had been a spa for a couple of hundred years, a destination for the genteelly ill from many kilometres around. Many of the old houses built here by the wealthy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been abandoned and fallen into ruin, but there were newer structures here, built by the freshly-wealthy from the days when Poland had been a Slavic Tiger. The road took her past the old hospital in the growing daylight, and another kilometre or so brought her to the gates of the rest home.
Although in truth, it was just another hospital, albeit one specialising in the elderly and infirm. Elderly and infirm and well-off – it cost a small fortune every year for someone to stay here – and the fact that there were so many permanent residents either spoke for the number of rich people in Poland, or the number of people desperate to dump their aged relatives on someone else. Sometimes that made Ania angry, but then she remembered her father’s stubborn insistence on looking after his ancient and demented mother at home and she saw the point.
She parked at the side of the main building and walked round to the front entrance. The hospital looked like an old workers’ hotel from the Martial Law era; a long building five storeys tall, its flat roof festooned with satellite dishes and its face lined with walkways and doors and windows, its pale orange walls just starting to flush with the dawn.
The lobby looked as if it belonged in a utilitarian hotel, too. It was big and airy, with twin staircases doglegging up from either side of a reception desk, behind which sat a smiling young woman in a smart suit. To one side there was a little fountain with a baffling post-modern sculpture standing in it, and to the other were the big double doors to the dining room, from which came the sounds of staff setting tables for breakfast for the residents who were capable of coming down and eating for themselves.
Ania nodded hello to the girl at the desk and pushed through a door at the back of the lobby which opened onto a long tiled corridor. In the staff room at the end, she docked her phone so it could upload her day’s duties from the hospital’s expert system, and went to get a coffee from the machine in the corner. A few of the other day staff were already there, bitching about husbands, partners, children, money. Ania exchanged a few words, took her coffee out to the loading area at the back of the hospital to have her last cigarette before her midmorning break. Looking out into the forest beyond the fence, she watched a wild boar sow and half a dozen piglets rummaging unhurriedly through the ground litter. She’d lost count of how many generations of wild boars she’d watched from here, down the years.
Back in the staff room, she pitched her cup into the waste bin and checked her phone’s downloads. An itinerary popped up; she gave it a quick once-over on her way back up the corridor to the pharmacy, where she docked the phone again to check out a trolley and the requisite morning medications. She wheeled the trolley down a side corridor to the service lift, pushed the button, and when the door slid open she took a deep breath and pushed the trolley inside to begin her day.
2.
THEY COULDN’T PRONOUNCE his name properly, so they called him ‘Johnny’. He habitually woke before dawn, no matter what time of year it was, wheeled his chair into the bathroom and had a shower, then sat watching the news until one of the nurses came with his pills. He was, according to his records, in his early nineties, but he presented as a well-preserved eighty, and until a couple of years ago he would even have passed as ‘sprightly,’ but his legs had started to go and now he found it difficult to get very far on his own without medication to alleviate the pain. The doctor who visited every day had said something about neurotransmitters and myelin sheaths and other things he didn’t understand. The doctor looked about twelve years old.
This morning it was the chubby nurse, the one with ‘Ania’ on her nametag. She wasn’t as bad as some of them; at least she knocked before she came in, rather than just barging into the apartment.
“Good morning, Johnny,” she said cheerfully, pushing the trolley over the threshold. “How are we today?”
“We are very well, thank you, nurse,” he replied politely, as always.
“And we’ve had our shower? That’s very good.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t talk to me as if I was a child,” he told her.
She was sorting out his medication, doublechecking its tags with the information on her phone. “I’m sorry?”