A Symphony of the Dead

From the oil mill across the road drifts the smell of hot oilcake. That is how my father's work shirt smelled in his last week, when he kept silent and I, dressed in clean clothes, lectured him about his lack of discipline. Now the smell is the same, only father is gone. There is me: eyes open, mouth half-parted, arms as if borrowed. After the encephalitis the body froze, but thought did not. The doctors call me a dead man when they think I cannot hear. That is, always.

Our ward building is old. Once, in the days of the monastery, there was a refuge here for the incurable. The walls never dry, even by the radiators. Spit crusts in the corner of my mouth. For three hours a fold in the sheet has been cutting under my shoulder blade. My left eye burns because the lid never closed all the way. I can imagine an entire symphony, but I cannot ask a person to smooth the cloth beneath me.

I tell the doctors apart by their breathing, the orderlies by their step. Out of the ticking of the IV drip, the squeak of the trolley wheels and my neighbour's cough I assemble many-voiced music. For years I have been writing a symphony in my memory, because there is nowhere else. Every morning the young doctor whistles my theme, and in the seventeenth bar he takes a D instead of a B-flat. I cannot correct one note. That is worse than immobility, believe me.

What comes out is a single word: more. More-more. More-more-more, faster and quieter each time. The orderly laughs: he's asking for his porridge. I am saying: one more bar, lad, B-flat. The body keeps the first word and chews it. I got used to it. But on Thursday - Thursday for certain, because they were changing the linen - among the repetitions came a name that had not been in my thought.

More-more-Yukhym. Clearly, with my mouth, in my voice. I do not know any Yukhym. I put it down to the medication: the brain had picked up a stranger's name from the corridor. A musician's brain picks up everything. Borys Andriiovych brought in students. Voice even: - The personality has been erased. Before you is a preserved body without an owner. You may say anything you like. And with a smile: - Corpses don't complain.

One of them lifted my eyelid with a finger in a cold glove. Light flooded the eye, but I could not blink. Another asked whether he could take a photograph. When Borys finished speaking, someone in the ward inhaled. Long, deep, with many chests at once. Mist bloomed on the windowpanes, the empty IV bottles swayed. The windows were shut. My neighbour was asleep. I had not inhaled. At night the ward becomes a concert hall.

It smells of stale damp and of a human body that has not been carried out into the sun for a long time. I know this is a vision. I read about such things back before the illness. So I lie quiet. Corpses don't complain, after all. The beds stand on a stage, the patients sit at the music stands, the IV drips tick like metronomes, the straps on their arms are taut as strings. Above it all - a conductor without a face. He does not begin. He waits for my cue.

From the stands rustles one thing: more... more... more... And between the repetitions someone taps out, in the rhythm of my theme: - Do you hear? I do not answer. I am ashamed to admit even to myself that I hear more than just myself. At first Marta talked to me the way you talk to a ficus. One evening she counted the repetitions and froze: two, three, five, seven. Prime numbers.

The next day she asked: - Do you understand me? One "more". So we began building a code. Within a few days one "more" meant "yes", two - "no", three - "I don't know", seven fast ones - "danger". - Did you hear what was said over you? Seven fast ones. She went pale, but she straightened the pillow evenly. She swept the crumbs from the bedside table into her palm and carried them out to the birds instead of brushing them onto the floor.

For the first time in another person's face I saw not disgust but a fear that resembled respect. I showed her the name: - More-more-Yukhym. - Who is that? Three repetitions - I don't know. Marta went down to the archive in the old monastery wing and came back grey. Yukhym Harasiuk had lain in this very bed. He died five years ago. Also chained to a bed. Also, according to the doctors' notes, "empty". - You could not have known him, - said Marta. I could not.

And that night, from the next music stand, a voice older than mine asked: - Do you hear? Another, thin one, whispered: - Don't answer. Whoever answers is ours. I broke those voices down into parts. There were more of them than there were beds in the ward. Marta brought my old score from the conservatory library, and a programme from the premiere. On the programme was me - still with hair and a straight back. - You wrote this? One "more".

The young doctor whistled the notes one by one. At the B-flat I blinked. He repeated the seventeenth bar correctly and sat down on the stool as though his legs would no longer hold him. That evening the hall lit up wider. At the far stands sat people in linen shirts of a kind no one has worn in a hospital for a hundred years.

Faces older than all my memory. The refuge had never gone anywhere. Yukhym's voice asked the same thing every night: - Do you hear? That is how my father asked in his last week, when he could no longer lift his hands. I sat by his bed in a clean shirt and talked to him about routine, discipline and cooperating with the doctors. I was certain: inside, he no longer understood anything. Now I knew why he had looked at me so long. The thin voice whispered: - Don't answer.

I answered. One "more", aloud, into the dark. The hall exhaled. And a stranger's melody settled into my head - simple, rural, with warmth in the third bar. Beautiful. The next morning one bar vanished from my symphony. I remembered that it had been there, remembered writing it, but I could not hear a single note of it. Instead, Yukhym's melody had grown one bar longer. Every night the foreign music grew and mine grew shorter.

Within a week I could no longer recall the beginning of my own symphony, but I knew by heart the songs of people whose names I had never heard. The symphony I spent years writing now has a co-author. Or an owner. Borys Andriiovych found out about me; now he is afraid of all the words spoken in this ward over the years. He leaned down: - You do understand how much time we... And did not finish.

In the afternoon the hospital cat sat facing the door and began washing itself over its ear. The orderly crossed herself: - There'll be guests. In the evening they laid a boy on the next bed, fresh from a bad fever - motionless, eyes open. Borys brought students and said, word for word: - Corpses don't complain. Someone in the ward inhaled. With many chests. That evening, for the first time, the conductor had hands. Borys's.

Marta found an old ward journal with a corner gnawed by mice. Five years back: "Harasiuk Yu.". In the margin, in another hand, was written: "Corpses don't complain". She turned the page. The same phrase appeared again, in different handwritings. It had been repeated here longer than any of the doctors had been alive. In the evening they brought a syringe. Before the transfer they were to make me quieter still. Marta held the needle and wept. Borys said: - Inject.

He won't notice. A moment before the injection, from all the stands came one even chord: - Levko. A warning or a sentence - I had no time to decide. I gathered my breath and my throat to speak, for the first time in years, a whole sentence. But the body once again crumbled the words into repetitions: - Cor-corpses... com-complain... Before, my mouth had chewed only "more". Now someone was teaching it new syllables.

The choir picked up the fragments and assembled a whole phrase out of them. It sounded in Borys's voice: - Corpses don't complain. The folder fell from his hands. The needle went in. Cold crept from elbow to shoulder, but my chest suddenly rose on its own - in the rhythm of the foreign melody.

The hall lit up to the very last rows. In two new seats sat the boy from the next bed and I - younger, with hair, as in the programme from the premiere. The conductor raised his baton. And all the dead inhaled at once.