The Shadow - Part 3

By Zdravka Evtimova

On the following day I left the clinic. I didn’t marry Ivan.

I became a GP in a godforsaken village where men and women died of old age and rarely fell ill. There were eight children in the whole area, a dozen donkeys and a couple goats. Sometimes the peasants asked me to examine their beasts. It was much cheaper for them to do that than to look for a vet in the county town.

Every evening I thought I’d die. I couldn’t forget Antonia’s cold fingers on my hand.

Then people from other villages started coming to my surgery. Families from Turkey and Serbia brought their children and asked me to help them.

"You have a strange face, doctor," a woman from Pernik told me. "My daughter stops crying when she looks at you."

One day something strange happened: Andrey showed up in my surgery. I don’t know who told him about the small village and my house in it.

"She said she hated your shadow," Andrey said. "She had photographed it. Pictures of your shadow are glued to the walls of her office. She doesn’t speak to anybody and she gives the photographs injections. There are a thousand tiny holes in your hands…"

"How did you find me?" I asked Andrey.

"She said you lived in this village. She gave me your shadow and said, ‘Rip it up!’ Then she and I started cutting your picture into a hundred pieces."

Andrey remained with me. I shuddered at the thought of pregnancy and childbirth. A strange thing happened every night: Andrey kissed my shadow before he kissed me, his lips pausing at places they didn’t dare touch in reality. During the daytime families from Turkey, from Sofia and Macedonia came with their sick children to the doctor “whose shadow cured you of your bad illness.” This was nonsense, of course.

I was pregnant.

One morning, a very expensive car stopped in front of my surgery.

"Perhaps they came all the way from Istanbul," Andrey said. "Take it easy, sweetheart. I’ll ask them to wait. You have to get some sleep."

I knew that car. I could hear Andrey call out in street, but it was not necessary to strain my ears to catch what he was saying.

Antonia entered the room.

She slowly bent over my shadow, touched it, and her fingers traced the contours of my stomach.

"I didn’t kill it," she whispered. "I can’t live without your shadow… I suffer from headaches…"

She had lost weight. Her face looked pallid, like one of these gray, flat stones that the rivers polished, smoothing their edges. Her lips quivered and parted with a cry of pain. She kissed my shadow where Andrey dared not kiss it.

© 2006 Zdravka Evtimova

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