Read Online Baltimore by Jelena Lengold - Free Book Online

not knowing whether this silence also meant that we weren’t going to be making love. But, of course, silence was just silence and nothing more. It wasn’t aimed against anyone. Even silence can endure a hug.
    After that night, we began making love again, in silence and in a slightly different way than before. But, to some extent, our bodies were closer than ever. It was just our flesh and us. And a deep silence in which we swayed back and forth.
    During those days, I thought I had finally found a good way to live. I’ll crochet many curtains, read many books, scrub my stove until it sparkles, bake the most unusual cakes, and no one will ask me unpleasant questions.
    Friends gradually stopped coming over, and to my great relief, my world was reduced to a very small circle of people. The doctor, however, still came to see me from time to time. He would listen to my heart and then go into the other room and whisper something to my mother and my husband.
    It seemed like my life was going quite well. I read novels, dictionaries, and cook books with equal passion. Now, in the silence, words revealed their full beauty, and thoughts, the thousands of thoughts that lay wasting away on our shelves for years, suddenly revealed their full meaning. I could see the people who, in their silence, wrote these books hoping that someone, in some other silence, would read them. I could sense when their thoughts faltered, and when the passion of writing seized them with ease and then carried them through the next few pages.
    One afternoon, however, the doctor came, bringing with him some sort of an injection. For weeks now, he had been treating me as if I were some kind of an object and not a human being, even though he wasn’t willing to admit to it. He sat next me, opened a metal box, filled the syringe, and placed my arm on his lap. For an instant, I thought about pulling my arm away, but that would be the end of my passiveness. And I enjoyed it so much. So, I left my arm there, to see what would happen.
    Without even looking into my eyes, he took a ball of cotton, rubbed the part of my skin where the vein appeared and stuck me with the needle.
    It was only then that he looked at me. He didn’t say anything, but I could clearly see the triumph in his eyes: “You wanted silence. Now you shall have it.”
    This, of course, was a contemptible way for them to cut short what was one of the most wonderful periods of my life. For some reason, which I definitely can’t seem to comprehend, they consider you normal only if you live contrary to all your needs. And this is what they demonstrated to me, towards the end of that summer, in a banal, obvious, and rather brutal manner. The people I believed loved me. I thought they understood and that they would never force me to do anything I didn’t want to do. I thought they would allow me to live my life with the intensity and pace that suited me. Instead, they tricked me and brought me this doctor and his needle, after which silence lost its beauty and meaning.
    It wasn’t the same after that. And I was no longer in the place I wanted to be, but more and more in a hazy hospital room in which the silence was constantly interrupted by someone’s screams, sobs, the sound of tapping heels, screeching wheels, sirens outside the windows, early morning chatter of cleaning ladies who displayed their conviction that I was but a mere object, even more than that doctor. While changing my sheets, puffing my pillow, pulling me up, they would continue the conversation they began in the previous room, then open the windows and leave without even glancing at me, happy there was only one more room left at the end of the corridor.
    This no longer resembled what I wanted. I didn’t like the solutions they were offering. I could have stayed in this room and let them give me those injections. I could have gotten up and tried to escape, but then I would no longer be just a woman who didn’t talk, but a fugitive from