Then she started to feel hatred for the person she loved most in the world: her mother. A wonderful wife who worked all day and washed the dishes at night, sacrificing her own life so that her daughter would have a good education, know how to play the piano and the violin, dress like a princess, have the latest sneakers and jeans, while she mended the same old dress she had worn for years.
How can I hate someone who only ever gave me love? thought Veronika, confused, trying to check her feelings. But it was too late; her hatred had been unleashed; she had opened the door to her personal hell. She hated the love she had been given because it had asked for nothing in return, which was absurd, unreal, against the laws of nature.
That love asking for nothing in return had managed to fill her with guilt, with a desire to fulfill another’s expectations, even if that meant giving up everything she had dreamed of for herself. It was a love that for years had tried to hide from her the difficulties and the corruption that existed in the world, ignoring the fact that one day she would have to find this out, and would then be defenseless against them.
And her father? She hated her father too, because, unlike her mother, who worked all the time, he knew how to live; he took her to bars and to the theater, they had fun together; and when he was still young, she had loved him secretly, not the way one loves a father, but as a man. She hated him because he had always been so charming and so open with everyone except her mother, the only person who really deserved such treatment.
She hated everything. The library with its pile of books full of explanations about life; the school that had forced her to spend whole evenings learning algebra, even though she didn’t know a single person, apart from teachers and mathematicians, who needed algebra in order to be happy. Why did they make them learn so much algebra or geometry or any of that mountain of other useless things?
Veronika pushed open the door to the living room, went over to the piano, opened the lid, and, summoning up all her strength, pounded on the keys. A mad, cacophonous, jangled chord echoed around the empty room, bounced off the walls, and returned to her in the guise of a shrill sound that seemed to tear at her soul Yet it was an accurate portrait of her soul at that moment.
She pounded on the keys again, and again the dissonant notes reverberated around her.
“I’m crazy. I’m allowed to do this. I can hate, I can pound away at the piano. Since when have mental patients known how to play notes in the right order?”
She pounded the piano again, once, twice, ten, twenty times, and each time she did it, her hatred seemed to diminish, until it vanished completely.
Then, once more, a deep peace flooded through her and Veronika again looked out at the starry sky and at the new moon, her favorite, filling the room she was in with gentle light. The impression returned of Infinity and Eternity walking hand in hand; you only had to look for one of them—for example, the limitless universe—to feel the presence of the other, Time that never ends, that never passes, that remains in the Present, where all of life’s secrets lie. As she had been walking from the ward to that room, she had felt such pure hatred that now she had no more rancor left in her heart. She had finally allowed her negative feelings to surface, feelings that had been repressed for years in her soul. She had actually felt them, and they were no longer necessary, they could leave.
She sat on in silence, enjoying the present moment, letting love fill up the empty space left behind by hatred. When she felt the moment had come, she turned to the moon and played a sonata in homage to it, knowing that the moon was listening and would feel proud, and that this would provoke the jealousy of the stars. Then she played music for the stars, for the garden, for the mountains she could not see in the darkness but which she knew were there.
While she was playing that music for the garden, another crazy person appeared: Eduard, a schizophrenic who was beyond all cure. She was not frightened by his presence; on the contrary, she smiled, and to her surprise, he smiled back.
The music could penetrate even his remote world, more distant than the moon itself; it could even perform miracles.
“I must buy a new key ring,” thought Dr. Igor, as he opened the door to his small consulting room in Villete. The old one was falling to pieces, and a small decorative metal shield had just fallen to the floor.
Dr. Igor bent down and picked it up. What should he do with that shield bearing the Ljubljana coat of arms? He might as well throw it away, although he could have it mended and ask them to make a new leather strap, or else he could give it to his nephew to play with. Both alternatives seemed equally absurd. A key ring doesn’t cost very much, and his nephew had no interest in shields; he spent all his time watching television or playing with electronic toys imported from Italy. Dr. Igor could still not bring himself to throw it out, however, so he put it back in his pocket; he would decide what to do with it later on.
That was why he was the director of the hospital and not a patient, because he thought a lot before making any decisions.
He turned on the light; as winter advanced, dawn came ever later. Dislocation, divorce, and the absence of light were the main reasons for the increase in the number of cases of depression. Dr. Igor was hoping that spring would arrive early and solve half his problems.
He looked at his diary for the day. He needed to find some way to prevent Eduard from dying of hunger; his schizophrenia made him unpredictable, and now he had stopped eating. Dr. Igor had already prescribed intravenous feeding, but he couldn’t keep that up for ever. Eduard was a strong young man of twenty-eight, but even with an IV drip, he would eventually waste away, becoming more and more skeletal.
What would Eduard’s father think? He was one of the young Slovene republic’s best-known ambassadors. He had been one of the people behind the delicate negotiations with Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. He, after all, had managed to work for years for the Belgrade government, surviving his detractors, who accused him of working for the enemy, and he was still in the diplomatic corps, except this time he represented a different country. He was a powerful and influential man, feared by everyone.
Dr. Igor felt momentarily worried, just as before he had been worried about the shield on his key ring, but he immediately dismissed the thought. As far as the ambassador was concerned, it didn’t matter whether his son looked well or not; he had no intention of taking him to official functions or having Eduard accompany him to the various places in the world where he was sent as a government representative. Eduard was in Villete, and there he would stay forever, or at least as long as his father continued earning his nice fat salary.
Dr. Igor decided to stop the intravenous feeding and allow Eduard to waste away a little more, until he felt like eating again. If the situation got worse, he would write a report and pass responsibility on to the council of doctors who administered Villete. “The best way to avoid trouble is to share responsibility,” his father had taught him. He had been a doctor too, and although he had had various deaths on his hands, he had never had any problem with the authorities.
Once Dr. Igor had ordered Eduard’s treatment to stop, he moved on to the next case. According to the report Zedka Mendel had completed her course of treatment and could be allowed to leave. Dr. Igor wanted to see for himself. There was nothing a doctor dreaded more than getting complaints from the families of patients who had been in Villete, which was what nearly always happened, for it was rare for a patient to readjust successfully to normal life after a period spent in a mental hospital.