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Iron maiden

Aminat and Sulfia wrote letters to each other. Sulfia kept them pretty short. She began them always with the same words: “My beloved little daughter, dear mother, and Dieter.” Then she reported on Kalganow: “Better and better.” She said she thought about us often and felt bad that we were alone in a foreign land. I lingered on the sections where she talked about grocery prices and skimmed the rest.

Aminat’s letters, on the other hand, I read far more closely.

It was handy that she had to give me her letters — I reigned sovereign over our supply of envelopes and stamps. That way I always knew what Aminat wrote. Most of it was uninteresting. She wrote about her school, her class schedule, the individual subjects, and the material being taught in each. I looked for places where she alluded to me or Dieter: “Grandma works a lot and is often gone. We’re doing well. Kisses, your daughter Aminat.”

One day Aminat stayed home and said she wasn’t feeling well. I had no time because I had to get to a job. I felt her forehead, which was cool, and decided she couldn’t be too sick. I told Dieter he should make her a chamomile tea, and then I left.

When I came home that evening, Aminat was lying in bed again. Dieter said she had been quiet all day long. She had gotten out of bed once in a while, then she would go back and lie down. She didn’t drink her tea. She did, however, write another letter to Sulfia, a short one ending with the words, “I’ll write again when my stomach doesn’t hurt so horribly.”

I went into the room and looked at Aminat. She was curled up on her side and still awake, despite the fact that it was late. When I felt her forehead, it was still cool and moist.

“Are you feeling better?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Aminat.

I told her she needed to sleep. In order to get healthy, you need to sleep a lot.

In the morning, Aminat couldn’t stand up. I told Dieter she would spend another day in bed. While I was in the shower, Dieter called an ambulance. When I emerged from the bathroom, dressed, with my hair nicely done, an emergency doctor was pressing with his hand around Aminat’s torso. Her legs shot into the air and she screamed. I figured out that the German word everyone was saying, Blinddarmentzündung, was just banal appendicitis. Now Aminat had a fever. I still intended to work. It wasn’t as if I could operate on Aminat myself.

“I’ll go,” said Dieter, whose hands were trembling.

“Calm down, calm down,” I said. “This is Germany. Nothing bad happens to people here.”

Dieter looked at me as if I were crazy. He often looked at me that way.

After work, I went straight to the children’s hospital. I asked for Aminat Kalganova. Nobody recognized the name. I wrote it down. I held my stomach, to show what was wrong with her. A nurse told me Aminat was in the gynecological ward.

“What?” I asked.

She wrote something on a piece of paper, the name of the ward and another name, probably the name of the doctor.

I hurried along the corridors with the piece of paper. My heart pounded in my ears. I was unbelievably upset. I could put two and two together. I could tell how red in the face I was and thought I might pass out from a sudden attack of high blood pressure. I yanked open a glass door and went down the hall. Dieter was sitting in a recessed seating area beside a fish tank, looking at colorful recipes in a magazine.

“You pig!” I screamed, before I ripped the magazine out of his hands, rolled it up, and batted his face with it. I didn’t know how to say much more than that in German, so I switched to my native tongue.

“How dare you. . she’s only fourteen. . that wasn’t the deal! I trusted you. And you still haven’t married Sulfia!”

Dieter shielded his face with his hands. But I tossed the magazine aside and looked around for something harder. The aquarium was too big, as was the pot with the yucca plant in it. I reached into the pot and grabbed a handful of potting soil and threw it in Dieter’s face.

I stopped only when I heard footsteps in the hall. Dieter had also managed to grab my wrists. Switching back to German, I screamed: “Let me go, you child-fucker.” He let my wrists go and held my mouth shut. Just then two nurses appeared and said that if we didn’t immediately leave the building, they would call the police.

Outside I sat down next to Dieter on a bench in the shadows. I lit a cigarette. When I got upset I liked to smoke, but only very rarely because I didn’t want to lose the freshness of my face.

Dieter wasn’t to blame. Aminat wasn’t pregnant. She was a virgin. In fact, that was the problem — she was an iron maiden, a little medical wonder. She had reached an age at which she had been overcome by the plague of all women. But Aminat was impermeable and had to be de-virginized on an operating table with a scalpel. The doctor said a half liter of blood sloshed onto his pants when he did it. That was what they had taken for appendicitis prior to the first operation: the hardened stomach, the pain, and the infected fluid in the abdominal cavity. Now they had opened the sluice of Aminat’s central canal and cleaned her abdomen from inside.

I had known for a while that something wasn’t right with Aminat. I hadn’t hit upon an explanation like this, however. Who would think of something like that? A scalpel was far preferable to Dieter in my mind, and certainly cleaner.

I liked the doctor who operated on Aminat. He wore jeans and a white smock and had gray hair and a boyish grin. When he came in to see his patient, he joked with everyone.

Aminat did not joke around. She lay there with a look on her face like a soon-to-be mass murderer. I was a little ashamed of her for being so antisocial. Sure, the surroundings were probably a bit much for a young girl. I remembered Aminat’s conception — in a dream — and I asked myself how it all fit together. I asked the gray-haired doctor whether she would still be able to have children.

“As many as she wants,” he said.

“I’m going to throw up,” said Aminat.

Out in the hallway I took the doctor by the sleeve of his smock and told him how Aminat had come into the world. The doctor listened with a furrowed brow. It was the first time I’d ever let a stranger burrow so deeply into our family history.

The doctor said, “Don’t worry, she is healthy.”

Then he added that I should wait for him, he wanted to give me something. I waited in the hall while he left and returned. Bowing formally he handed me a brochure for an organization called the Family Education Center.

I didn’t say anything to Sulfia about Aminat having an operation. Aminat agreed that it would just have unnecessarily alarmed her mother. Sulfia was doing poorly enough without bad news from Germany. Kalganow’s teacher called me and said desperately that I needed to get hold of some medicine for Sulfia. The medicine she usually took had suddenly stopped being produced. We needed to get it for her in Germany. She read me the name of the medicine.

I took the matter seriously. I called them back and Sulfia answered. She sounded feeble and didn’t want to talk about medicine. She said it was true about the medicine but that there was a substitute; she was taking that now and, as a result, everything was fine. That I shouldn’t think twice about it, that I had enough troubles of my own to worry about.