2/20/2023 0 Comments Book of shadows table of contentsWith a vanilla façade that looked like an upside-down steamboat, the Martin Luther Krankenhaus occupied an entire block on the south side of Caspar-Theyß-Straße. “They forgot to register you, didn’t they?” “I recommend organizing your own transportation.”Īs I leaned into the back of a taxi to spread out a towel, the driver met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “It might take several hours before we’d be able to have an ambulance ready for you,” he said. She expanded the map on her phone and showed me a pink trapezoid in the southwest corner of the city. My eyes darted back and forth between him and Lisa. “Somewhere near Ha-len-see,” he said, drawing out the word as though it were a foreign dish he was tasting for the first time. Three hands dove into two front pockets and a purse, respectively, and began typing. When Lisa, who grew up in East Berlin, asked him where that was, he shrugged. He looked at his clipboard and read the address aloud. “We’ve found you a bed at the Martin Luther Krankenhaus.” Great news, we agreed, and asked where that was. “Good news!” the physician said, upon the fifth attempt. But she soon found that there were no beds available at a second, then a third, then a fourth clinic-mid-September being well-known as the time when one reaps what is sown during the week Germans call Zwischen den Jahren (“between the years”). One of his colleagues disappeared down the corridor with reassuring urgency. “We’ll have to see where the journey takes us,” he said-a masterpiece of bureaucratic German, its collective subject comprising an I who does the seeing and a you who does the going. Since the most recent measurements showed only mild contractions and a normal fetal heart rate, we would be transferred elsewhere. Now the doctor was explaining with inappropriate cheerfulness that an intake error caused by a shift change meant that we had never been processed all the beds were in use, and would be for the foreseeable future. After some initial tests, we’d been sent downstairs to wait in the cafeteria for an hour and a half. I first heard the name of the place from a handsome young physician in the obstetrics wing of Charité, the university hospital in the city center. It was then that my partner, Lisa, woke me up and whispered, “My water just broke.” I can pinpoint the moment this changed-shortly after noon on September 11, 2018-not because of the event that had occurred seventeen years before, when I was in my first month of college in New York, but because of one that had occurred seven hours earlier. For the better part of five years, I lived just a few miles away without knowing it existed. Halensee is the second smallest of the ninety-six Ortsteile, or districts, that make up Berlin.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |