A Personal Matter Read Online Free PDF Page B

kind of condition is it that it’s so surprising?”
    “You mean appearance, how it looks? There appear to be two heads! You know a piece by Josef Wagner called ‘Under the Double Eagle’? Anyway, it’s quite a shock.” The Director nearly began to giggle again, but he checked himself just in time.
    “Something like the Siamese twins, then?” Bird timidly asked.
    “Not at all: there only appear to be two heads. Do you want to see the goods?”
    “Medically speaking—” Bird faltered.
    “Brain hernia, we call it. The brain is protruding from a fault in the skull. I founded this clinic when I got married, and this is the first case I’ve seen. Extremely rare. I can tell you I was surprised!”
    Brain hernia
—Bird groped for an image, anything, and drew a blank. “Is there any hope that this kind of brain-hernia baby will develop normally?” he said in a daze.
    “Develop normally!” The Director’s voice rose as though in anger. “We’re speaking of a brain hernia! You might cut open the skull and force the brain back, but even then you’d be lucky to get some kind of vegetable human being. Precisely what do you mean by ‘normally’?” The Director shook his head at the young doctors on either side of him as though dismayed by Bird’s lack of common sense. The doctor with the glass eye quickly nodded his agreement, and so did the other, a taciturn man wrapped from his high forehead to his throat in the same expressionless, sallow skin. Both turned stern eyes on Bird—professors disapproving of a student for a poor performance in an oral exam.
    “Will the baby die right away?” Bird said.
    “Not right away, no. Tomorrow perhaps, or it may hold out even longer. It’s an extremely vigorous infant,” the Director observed clinically. “Now then, what do you intend to do?”
    Disgracefully bewildered, like a punch-drunk pigmy, Bird was silent. What in hell
could
he do? First the man drives you down a blind alley, then he asks what you intend to do. Like a malicious chess player. What
should
he do? Fall to pieces? Wail?
    “If you wish, I can have the baby transferred to the hospital at the National University—if you wish!” The offer sounded like a puzzle with a built-in trap. Bird, straining to see beyond the suspicious mist and failing to discover a single clue, was left merely with a futile wariness: “If there are no alternatives—”
    “None,” the Director said. “But you will have the satisfaction of knowing you have done everything possible.”
    “Couldn’t we just leave the child here?”
    Bird as well as the three doctors gawked at the originator of the abrupt question. Bird’s mother-in-law sat quite still, the world’s most forlorn ventriloquist. The Director inspected her like an appraiser determining a price. When he spoke, it was ugly, he was protecting himself so obviously: “That’s impossible! This is a case of brain hernia, don’t forget. Quite impossible!” The woman listened without budging, her mouth still buried in her kimono sleeve.
    “Then we’ll move it to the other hospital,” Bird declared. The Director leaped at Bird’s decision and he began at once to display a dazzling spectrum of administrative talents. When his two subordinates had left the room under orders to contact the university hospital and make arrangements for an ambulance, the Director filled his pipe again and said with a look of relief, as though he had disposed of a heavy, questionable burden: “I’ll have one of our people ride along in the ambulance, so you can be assured we’ll get the infant there safely.”
    “Thank you very much.”
    “It would be best if our new grandmother stayed here with her daughter. Why don’t you go home and change into some dry clothes? The ambulance won’t be ready for half an hour.”
    “I’ll do that,” Bird said. The Director sidled up to him and whispered, too familiarly, as if he were beginning a dirty joke, “Of course, you can forbid