A Small Person Far Away by Judith Kerr Read Free Book Online

the nurse explained in disapproving tones that nothing had happened: since Mama had to be under constant observation, this was the best place for her. Doctors and nurses crossed the landing every few minutes and were able to keep an eye on her.
    “She’s being very well looked after,” said Konrad, and they went over to the bed and looked at Mama.
    You could not see very much of her. Just her face and one arm. All the rest was covered with bedclothes. The face was very pale. The eyes were closed – not just closed normally but closed tight, as though Mama were keeping them shut on purpose. There was something sticking out of her mouth, and Anna saw that it was the end of a tube through which Mama’s breath came thinly and irregularly. Another tube led to the arm from a bottle suspended from a stand near the bed.
    “There doesn’t seem to be any change,” said Konrad.
    “It is necessary to bring her out of the coma,” said the nurse. “For this we must call her by her name.” She leaned over the bed and did so. Nothing at all happened. She shrugged her shoulders. “
Na
,” she said, “a familiar voice is always better. Perhaps if you speak to her she will hear.”
    Anna looked down at Mama and the tubes.
    “In English or in German?” she asked, and immediately wondered how she could have said anything so stupid.
    “That you must decide for yourself,” said the nurse. She nodded stiffly and disappeared among the dust-sheeted equipment.
    Anna looked at Konrad.
    “Try,” he said. “One doesn’t know. It may do some good.” He stood looking at Mama for a moment. “I’ll wait for you downstairs.”
    Anna was left alone with Mama. It seemed quite mad to try and talk to her.
    “Mama,” she said tentatively in English. “It’s me, Anna.”
    There was no response. Mama just lay there with the tube in her mouth and her eyes tightly shut.
    “Mama,” she said more loudly. “Mama!”
    She felt oddly self-conscious. As though that mattered at a time like this, she told herself guiltily.
    “Mama! You must wake up, Mama!”
    But Mama remained unmoving, her eyes obstinately closed and her mind determined to have nothing to do with the world.
    “Mama!” she cried. “Mama! Please wake up!”
    Mama, she thought, I hate it when your eyes are shut. You’re a naughty Mama. Clambering on Mama’s bed, Mama’s big face on the pillow, trying to prise the eyelids open with her tiny fingers. For God’s sake, she thought, that must have been when I was about two.
    “Mama! Wake up, Mama!”
    A nurse carrying some sheets came up behind her and said in German, “That’s right.” She smiled as though she were encouraging Anna in some kind of sport. “Even if there is no reaction,” she said, “your voice may be getting through.”
    So Anna went on shouting while the nurse put the sheets into a cupboard and went away again. She shouted in English and in German. She told Mama that she must not die, that her children needed her, that Konrad loved her and that everything would be all right. And while she was shouting, she wondered if any of it were true and whether it was right to tell Mama these things even when she probably could not hear them.
    In between shouting, she looked at Mama and remembered her in the past. Mama tugging at a sweater and saying, “Don’t you think it’s nice?” Mama in the flat in Paris, triumphant because she’d bought some strawberries at half-price. Mama beating off some boys who had pursued Anna home from the village school in Switzerland. Mama eating, Mama laughing, Mama counting her money and saying, “We’ll have to manage somehow.” And all the time a tiny part of herself observed the scene, noted the resemblance to something out of
Dr Kildare
, and marvelled that anything so shattering could also be so corny.
    At last she could bear it no longer and found the nurse who led her back to Konrad.
    She felt sick again in the car and hardly saw the hotel where Konrad had booked