Sylvia had only one wart, but it grew hairs rapidly and sat on the side of her neck, where she felt men most liked to kiss. When she was nine she tried to cut it off with a scissors, and when the bleeding wouldn’t stop her mother called an ambulance which carried her from the northeast side of Szarvas to the centrum. Though she couldn’t see outside, Sylvia knew the road they were taking would require a ferry transit across a small width of river, and thus the extent of the emergency was gauged in her mind. The highway bridge some four kilometers south would not make for a faster trip, even as the ferry floated with its familiar languor.
The doctors stitched up the wound but didn’t (or couldn’t) remove the cause. The wart grew back with a vengeful lack of shape, bigger for its adjoining scar. The climate in southern Hungary didn’t compel scarves for more than a couple weeks of winter, and the adults in Sylvia’s life mostly discouraged any neck wrap indoors. Strangely, she thought, the best rival for this barnacle was the folding flesh that came with a fatty diet and the habit of shrugging her shoulders, or pulling her head into herself as a turtle would. She knew this was no fix and imagined there were less tangible reasons she’d want to shrink so, but at least she could feel herself smiling, and it was easier to interact with people.
Szarvas was an undeniably serene place to grow up, especially on the winding river that seemed a part of everyone’s backyard. The banks were flat and unweedy, as if the catfish scoured the sandy bed to match the neatly mown grass of most properties. Lazily, folks of all ages would walk into the olive water and give it some flow; they’d swim across in twelve strokes, or wade in the prevailing shallows, or sit as grizzlies, minus the bulk and hunger. Boats would putter by, unnecessarily but welcome at any rate. There was simultaneously plenty of movement and nothing really to do.
And so Sylvia did not suffocate there, and thought hard about her eventual migration to Debrecen, the largest city in the east and the chance to become a paramedic. Plan A would have been Szeged and something to do with its therapeutic waters; Plan B—Budapest for a broader university life; Debrecen wasn’t even a plan, and thus just happened upon Sylvia without much forethought. It was funny, she thought, that no one ever asked if she had been in an ambulance before, and as the training channeled her towards hands-on situations, she felt nimble—a fish in these waters. She hated the ‘hamburger movies’ of disaster scenes, simulated or not. She wanted to be inside the truck or out, taking vital signs and talking through various stages of trauma. She loved the thinking that everything was going to be all right, even when statistical scenarios augured the opposite. She enjoyed dueling desperation and contemplating what Walker Percy meant by ‘carapace’. Besides rushing to catastrophes, she would read half afternoons through, massaging or scratching her neck, if not exactly buying into the optimism of Toni Morrison’s Baby Suggs, who exhorted her gathered people to "love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up."
That was the novel she was reading—Beloved—when her crew got the call of a head-on collision on the main highway west of town. And, like Beloved, there was reportedly a toddler involved in the fray. Sylvia instinctively readied the infant gear for restarting hearts and respiration, then cleared her mind with the Serenity Prayer, also by instinct. Some of her compatriots pattered and even joked in the same stretch of anticipation; the rescuers’ code was carte blanche to pump blood into the ones who would have to face it.
At the site the car was duly smashed in on the driver’s side, but the driver was out and holding his little boy. Both were crying for evidently different reasons: the blood on his father’s face scared and confused the kid, while the animation of his squirmy son heartened the dad: they had survived and could now, oddly, celebrate. Sylvia came over to check eye dilation and span the spine of the little boy first, then the father. Her colleague swabbed a nasty cut on the man’s forehead and wrapped a bandage four times around, frightening the boy more with this mummifying action. Sylvia held his hand and started to sing, gradually transitioning the kid from his father’s arms to hers. As they walked to the ambulance she asked the man, first in German and then in English—she could tell they were Czech and had no local savvy beyond the ‘kusinem’ that the man now expressed for the tenth time—‘do you want anything from the car right now, something from the back seat?’ The police were on the scene and would impound the vehicle and protect the valuables—that the man knew—but when asked by his dad the same question, the kid said, between sobs, “Liska”. ‘His stuffed fox,’ he translated, and she spoke over her shoulder for someone to fetch it. They settled in to the truck and the man started a lullaby, and Liska arrived and the doors closed. ‘You’re Christian,’ said Sylvia. ‘I can tell by your song.’ ‘And you’re an angel for us,’ responded the man. ‘Kusinem.’
Halfway through the ride, the radio relay gave indication of a lawn-mower accident, and though another ambulance would be dispatched, the driver knew that the location was only two kilometers north of them on this rather remote stretch of road. A quick discussion of options determined that the present patients would not be endangered with a detour in that direction, but Sylvia was forlorn that she would have to be the one to step out of this soiree to attend to the next. Before the ambulance skidded to a stop she patted Liska on the head and shook hands with the father and son, the latter saying ‘ba ba’ contentedly. She jumped out for what she knew would be a messier situation, and resigned herself to the fact she would not see Liska’s family again.
They did write, however, a few months later, to 'Paramedic Sylvia c/o the Debrecen hospital'. It almost didn’t get to her, as by this time she had transferred back to Szarvas, her Debrecen days now done. ‘Dear Sylvia’, it began, and she scanned through the we-are-alright and grateful sentiments to a kid’s drawing on an adjoining page—a hedgehog leaning against a tee-pee with two smiling people inside. The narrative on the other page explained: the night before the accident had them camping in northwest Romania, in a torrential rain—forty hours of storm that flooded much of the continent, and in the case of Prague, killed off several creatures in its flood-plain zoo. ‘The elephant refused to move to higher ground; the rhino charged at the handlers, who had no recourse but to shoot him; the sea lion swam out of its pool and floated with the Vltava all the way to the North Sea, where it died of exhaustion. My son called it “The Very Scary Flood” and remembered one survivor of it, albeit not a zoo creature. A hedgehog crept into the soggy entryway of our tent and nuzzled close to our warmth. We talked about letting it in but of course didn’t. Probably it just needed temporary relief, but we watched it from the mesh screen until it fell asleep, and then we did the same. In the morning it was gone. When I asked what to give Sylvia for a thank you present, Josef drew this. He also said you can borrow Liska if you ever need to.’
There was a return address and many days when she contemplated taking them up on that loan. The little clinic in Szarvas had a lounge that served the paramedics’ office, with bookshelves only she added to. Now she pinned up the hedgehog with the tented people and immersed herself in a book by Zsuzsa Bánk, The Swimmer. The man of the title could hardly be considered a protagonist, as he confounded his daughter and son and others they leeched off of for season upon season at the cabins and dilapidated villas around Lake Balaton. Kálmán, the father, would stare vacantly at the ceiling beams, smoke a lot and drink a little. He was swimming in such states, in the trenches of his hermetic mind. “I didn’t know whether his life was slipping by him or whether it was he who was slipping through life without making an effort,” the daughter narrated. “He broke off relationships so easily, leaving no trail for anybody to follow, wiping out any trace of us, and today I don’t know whether it should bother me when I recall this, or whether it ever bothered me at all.” Sylvia folded the corner of this page. “I think we’d grown used to this coming and going, this stopping and starting, just as you grow accustomed to something that you know will stay the same, will never change whether you like it or not.”
The dog-ears served a practical purpose, sometimes. Tossing a book aside mid-sentence was typically the case when an emergency called, and at least returning to a poignant part allowed her to get back into the swing. More often than not, however, she abandoned one book to start another. Like the hedgehog, she felt itinerant and not in need of any full resolution.
But Sylvia finished The Swimmer in one sitting and in fact re-read it when, some years later, a man floated out on a raft to the middle of Lake Balaton to kill himself. It was his second attempt that autumn, and the first to be streamed live on Mad’ar media. His raft had on it a blowtorch and a yet unopened tank of benzene, and from his cupped hands he shouted absurdities to the circling patrols: ‘stay back or I douse myself!’ ‘What do you want?’ the negotiators tried to establish. ‘Her. She knows. Bring her out here and everything will be finished.’ ‘What do you mean 'finished'?’ ‘We can all go home, that’s what I mean.’
The standoff lasted into the night and quite obviously the eventuality of sleep entered everybody’s mind. ‘Where is she?’ the man bellowed, lifting to tank to his head. ‘Who is she?’ rejoined a megaphoned voice, measuring the time. ‘She knows, and she’s gotta be watching your freak show.’ Indeed, a stenographer typed within the hull of a stationed boat, and this script sped across the bottom of many voyeurs’ screens. Sylvia was one such watcher, and she noted that a fire crew was close at hand, but no paramedics in sight. The coast guard had cordoned off boats within a two hundred meter radius, so perhaps someone at that distance could rush in to salve the first-degree burns that were bound to happen. As it turned out, when the first rush of gas flowed out of the tank and the torch spewed its dragon-tongue flame, the man fell violently backwards and into the waiting water. Ready frogmen dove to his rescue and, for the second spectacular time, the fighting man failed. Some reporters followed up his muddled story, but the mental health facility kept him forthrightly out of the public view.
‘She knows’ haunted Sylvia, whether or not a 'she' existed. Every paramedic had some training in suicide prevention, and some had experience in talking someone down (or up as the case might be). More common was the pumping of stomachs or tourniquets on gashed arms. Sylvia had the uncommon instance of getting information out of a mother passing out from carbon monoxide poisoning: her twin babies were not in their cribs and not in the exhaust-filled garage, not anywhere near the property. ‘Please,’ Sylvia begged, ‘let us take care of them.’ She had no more magic in her words than the other paramedics, who had been met with stubborn silence. Sylvia hugged the mother and thought to whisper ‘river?’ in her ear, which made the woman nod. An hour later, their mother dead, the infants were found floating Moses-style in the bed of their perambulator, strapped in and crying, well downstream from the town’s outer residence.
A country of ten million can almost know its whole self, or at least references therein. Sylvia was listed less as a hero than as a paramedic of certain qualities, even if no one was tallying her ‘Liska’ moments. When the madman reentered Lake Balaton with a 3-year-old on his raft—no gas or blowtorches this time, but a large anchor tied to his ankle—and paddled out to his twice-foiled circus ring, Sylvia was called on for duty. She sat in the back of a speeding police car from Szarvas to Siófok, then in a boat waiting dockside for her services. She thought of nothing that could reasonably prepare her for the situation: no quotes from any book, no training parallel or whispered trick. And though her mind did resort to the images of his last occasion, now all was real instead of surreal (or maybe she was mixing that up). Then it was reasonable what the negotiators did to bide time: they had only a madman to save. Now there was an innocent—a hostage—and no one had a clue what to do. She saw that the child was strapped to the man’s back, 'as if a fardel,' she strangely mused, 'in Hamlet’s rhetoric.' She saw such a short rope between anchor and ankle, and estimated they were above fifty meters of water in this ironically shallow sea. Divers were ready, Sylvia was told, but the man kept all boats at considerable distance. ‘I’m not messing this up,’ he snarled, standing like a drunk on his upgraded raft. ‘She’s irrelevant now,’ he made known. ‘There’s nothing left to do.’
‘But give us the kid,’ the main negotiator prompted Sylvia to say. She stood mute. ‘Please—he’s heard from the rest of us—you need to speak to him.’
Sylvia started to cry, and quavered in a voice just loud enough, ‘Kálmán,.. I’m here.’ ‘Not Kálmán, stupid—you don’t know me.’ ‘I know you’re not Kálmán, but you haven’t introduced yourself to me.’ ‘Don’t play games—if you’re here, you know my god-damned name.’ ‘And who is your son? I honestly haven’t heard his name yet.’ ‘Does it matter? Call him dead.’ ‘Call me Sylvia.’
No one spoke for over a minute. Sylvia tried to remember the Serenity Prayer but forgot the first, familiar phrase. The name of the son was passed into her hand on a scrap of paper, and when she looked down she knew she couldn’t use it. She thought of telling the man about the hedgehog or the twins in the buggy—that made for something to think about, at least. What else was she here for?
She opened her mouth to start and, leaning forward on the rail of the boat, realized she was falling into the water. She kicked up and pulled at the water to go deeper, putting distance to the boat and unfathomably toward the shaky little raft. When she surfaced she heard shouts from all sides, and swam with the burden of her heavy uniform toward the screaming man and son. Divers now entered and flipped toward her —and the raft's—direction. She beat on seeing in a blur what was going to happen: that he’d leap from the other side and she’d have no real chance to catch him. But in a final dive below the raft she managed to grab his plunging body, feeling for the straps that tied the little boy, realizing all was lost in this incomprehensible moment. She clung desperately and hoped her body fat would temper the effect of the anchor. Then she felt like she was the greater burden, tangled senselessly into the depths. A diver ripped her arms from her sinking object. Water filled her gasp and life was lost.
‘God, grant me the courage,’ she finally remembered.
