Aslan Norval

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  1.

  “She hit that poor guy.”

  “Probably one of those rich ladies who don’t even know what to do with their millions.”

  “She’ll probably settle the whole matter with a few measly dollars.”

  “And the poor man will be stuck a cripple for the rest of his life.”

  “If he doesn’t die on the way to the hospital.”

  “Hang or gas her. In my opinion, they should electrocute the murderers who race around in their cars like this.”

  “You are speaking the truth, miss. A seemingly decent person gets behind the wheel—”

  “Yes, and before you know it, they turn into a bloodthirsty monster.”

  “They can’t go fast enough.”

  “They don’t even care how many people are crushed beneath their wheels, if it means they can get to their cocktail or their round of canasta ten seconds earlier.”

  Suddenly, two police officers interrupted theses outraged comments. They’d rushed to the scene to figure out why people were congregated there. At this time of day, the street was busier than normal, although it was never really calm. The people standing at the corner of Thirty-Fourth were usually in a hurry, afraid of being late. Now, however, their curiosity proved stronger than their fear.

  Before they’d even managed to push through the crowd to find out why it had formed, the two officers in uniform swung their batons around threateningly, in order to let everyone know that the authorities had arrived to guarantee law and order as well as safety for all citizens.

  These citizens, however, possessed certain rights delineated clearly in the Constitution.

  One of these inalienable rights was the right to go and stand wherever they pleased, whenever they pleased. No one could take that from them.

  The police officers, of course, did not care at all about such things.

  Swinging their batons forcefully, they yelled: “Keep walking—no standing around—yes, you too, keep walking—don’t stop—actually, what happened here?—Keep going—do not stop traffic—keep walking—keep going—do not stop!”

  They pushed their way to the center of the crowd, where a lady had supposedly crushed a man with her automobile.

  The woman had gotten out of her elegant Cadillac. Her face was pale from the shock of having squashed a young man with her car. But the young man stood next to the right front wheel of the car and smiled in a friendly, intimate way, wiping some oil from his face with his handkerchief.

  Still pale, the lady looked at him with her eyes wide, as if she had seen a ghost.

  “You—you—you’re alive, young man?” she stammered. “You really are alive?”

  “Of course, I’m alive, ma’am. At least for the moment. Why would I be dead?” He pulled out a pocket comb. Using the car’s windshield as his mirror, he combed his slightly disheveled hair and grinned.

  “If you could finish me off that easily,” he said, sliding his comb back into his pocket, “I would never have made it back from Korea. You better believe it, ma’am.”

  Then he set off to continue his interrupted errands.

  “You’re really not hurt? Are you sure?” the lady asked again, finally regaining some of her composure.

  “Not at all, ma’am. Don’t worry about me in the least. Goodbye, ma’am. It was a pleasure to meet you.”

  “You there, stop. Sir, sir—your name?” called one of the police officers. He had finally managed to squeeze through the throng of curious people by pushing, shoving, and digging into people’s ribs.

  He pulled out his notebook and licked the tip of his pencil, true to an old habit of his compatriots.

  “What’s your name? Where do you live? How old are you? Where do you work?”

  “That is private information and none of your business at all.”

  “I am arresting you for disturbing traffic, do you understand?”

  “Now listen here,” the lady interrupted. “If anyone is to be arrested for disturbing traffic, then it should be me.”

  In the meantime, the second cop had finally arrived, using his baton to beat a path through the mass of people.

  “Is that so?” he addressed the lady. “And who are you? You ran over this young man here. That will cost you quite a pretty penny. Where do you live?”

  The first cop, who’d been ignoring her on purpose, suddenly remembered that she was there now that his partner had mustered the courage to ask for the name and address of such an elegant lady—the owner of a Cadillac Deluxe, after all.

  “That’s right,” the first cop agreed. “What is your name?”

  “I don’t stick my nose into your affairs, and you don’t stick yours in mine, all right?”

  “That will cost you another pretty penny, just so you know.”

  “Why don’t you add a few more, since we’re throwing pennies around?”

  Just as the lady spoke, the deafening siren of an approaching ambulance sounded along Thirty-Fourth Street.

  With a screech, it stopped next to the Cadillac Deluxe.

  The back doors opened with a bang. Everything having to do with an ambulance has to be done with squealing, roaring, or screaming, since it would not leave any impression otherwise. Two orderlies jumped out with a folded stretcher.

  “Where is the body?” a bespectacled medical student asked the police officer.

  The student bent down and crawled halfway under the car to look for the victim.

  “The body is standing over there,” answered the police officer, pointing to the young man. The two orderlies immediately pounced on the young man, who desperately fought them off. Invoking the Constitution, he violently resisted their attempt to load him into the ambulance.

  “Good Lord,” he screamed, as if possessed. “Let me go, dammit! I’m not dead. I’m not even hurt.”

  “We determine whether you are dead or dying. Not you. Understood?” yelled the resident. “In our eyes, you are dead until we have determined that you are alive. And now, no more arguments—or you really will be in trouble.”

  That was the last thing the young man heard, as he was already lying on the stretcher in the back of the ambulance. The door slammed shut, and the ambulance raced through the streets with its siren wailing. It cut the corners so wildly that the young man was flung from the stretcher twice. The ambulance shot past several buses and trucks and almost hit them along the way. Later, he could truly claim how lucky he was because he had escaped death by a hair’s breadth at least ten times on this journey.

  On the corner, where only a few minutes ago a poor unemployed man had been dismembered by an elegant car, the throng quickly dispersed. Everyone left convinced that their highly civilized city government would do everything to make life better and more comfortable for its stressed citizens, to heal the sick and wounded. So they all could get back to work.

  Only a few people who had nothing better to do remained at the corner. They wanted to see
what the two Irish police officers, who had called four more cops as backup, would do with the elegant lady and her even more elegant luxury car.

  Two of the cops positioned themselves in front of the car, to stop its owner from deciding to jump boldly over them, like a circus acrobat. They feared she might race away, avoiding all responsibility. To make completely sure, all six cops wrote down the Cadillac’s license plate in their little notebooks, so that they could prove to their lieutenant where they had been during that half hour and that they had actually been part of the action.

  One of the four police officers who had arrived later asked one of the original cops whether they had asked the lady for her name and address.

  “I asked her,” he whispered to his companion, “but her answer made me think that it might be wise to treat her with kid gloves. Just look at her vehicle! If someone drives that kind of car—you have got to be careful. Damn, they must be loaded!”

  “We have her license plate. We don’t need anything else,” said the second officer. “We innocently give her license plate to the old man at the station, and in ten minutes he will have her name, address, age, fingerprints, names and addresses of her lovers, favorite nightspots, the number of bottles of imported whiskey she consumes annually, and the amount of her insurance coverage.”

  While the officers bumbled among themselves, the lady had calmly gotten into her car. She teased the gas pedal with the tip of her foot, and the motor quietly began to buzz, more discreetly than a bee. She was just about to move the gilded lever into first gear when she leaned her head out the window with the sweetest smile on her lips.

  “Do you gentlemen”—she did indeed say gentlemen—“have anything else important to ask me, before I take my leave?”

  “N-n-no, of course not,” the six stuttered. They looked at one another in surprise as if they weren’t sure what they were doing there in the first place.

  She pressed down on the accelerator a little. The six saluted and in order to appear friendly showed their teeth, smiling exactly as they had learned to smile at the police academy, exactly as they practiced at home.

  The lady returned their greeting with a slight nod and drove off. She stopped only four blocks away in front of a drugstore and disappeared for a few minutes into a musty phone booth, to find out to which hospital the young man had been taken.

  The young man had been assigned a room, in which he was to wait until he could be transported to the operating room, where he was meant to give the medical residents a welcome opportunity to prod and cut up his body. In the course of this examination, they would probably break several of his ribs, glue them back together, and await the results.

  As they informed him of this with a friendly smile, they added: “You see, mister, none of this will cost you a single cent. The Cadillac carries an uncommonly large insurance coverage. We are diagnosing you with terrible shock. With a diagnosis like that, you can live in this beautiful hospital for six months, like a general in fascist Spain. You will live wonderfully and happily without having to do anything at all. The insurance company will pay for everything. And—please keep this confidential—this hospital is in financial trouble.” In response, the young man said that he did not have the slightest intention to live happily on someone else’s dime and insisted on leaving the hospital immediately to pursue his own affairs.

  “You can’t do that, and you’re not allowed to do that,” answered the resident. “We decide what happens here, not you. You had an accident on the street. It could cost you your life if the shock you suffered should have consequences, which is possible. Indeed, very probable. The health department and the insurance agency will hold us responsible for your health, and we cannot abdicate this responsibility. Since you have been brought here, you can’t leave just like that. No way. You see, they would sue the administration of this very prestigious institution for professional negligence. The suit would cost a lot of money and take a lot of time. Therefore, please be so kind as to lie in this bed, rest, and as soon as we have treated a dozen similar cases, it will be your turn.”

  With those words, the residents disappeared. They had to complete two years of residency in the hospital before they could receive their certification and be let loose on the unsuspecting population.

  A quarter of an hour later, someone knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” the young man called somewhat angrily, since he thought that they were coming back to bother him.

  The lady came in.

  “Oh, there you are, young man,” she said. “I was looking all over for you in this labyrinth. There’s no one around anywhere.”

  The young man moved the only chair in the room closer. “Please, sit down, ma’am.”

  “Thank you.” She sat down, while the young man sat on the edge of the bed.

  “So, this is where you ended up. Terrible. I predict you will probably have to stay awhile?”

  “I don’t even have a scratch on me. No trace of the accident.”

  “Of course not. However, according to everyone else, there is a trace. Because of the shock you suffered—”

  “Shock? Me? Shock? In no way at all, not in the least did I suffer a shock. I was in Korea for five years. I forgot what shock was in the first three weeks I was there.”

  “That’s all well and good. But you see, there is the insurance to consider. In a case like today’s, it’s best just to run away as fast as possible. Don’t let them catch you, my friend! Don’t let them catch you! Run as if the devil were chasing you!”

  “If I understand correctly, I am a prisoner here. Even the windows are barred.”

  “That’s correct. You are a prisoner here. A prisoner of the insurance agency. This agency acts in its own best interest and has to act that way to protect itself against the sky-high damages that you could sue for in a couple of months.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of making any kind of claim. I’m not injured and I’m not even in shock.”

  “No insurance agency can rely on that, though. Even if you signed a form today stating that you didn’t plan to make any kind of claim either today or later, it would not be enough for the insurance agency. You could fall into the hands of a lawyer, one of those lawyers who builds his existence on such shady affairs. This man would prove with the help of bought witnesses that you had signed the release while still under the influence of the accident, and only to be able to leave the hospital.”

  “So they have robbed me of all freedom of movement.”

  “That’s right, young man, until a careful medical evaluation has shown that you have not suffered any damage that could affect your health negatively. Only when three attending doctors have given you medical clearance and it has been notarized will the insurance agency be immune to blackmail.”

  “I have other, more important things to do than to stare at the bare walls of this box that smells like carbolic acid.”

  “Where do you work at the moment?”

  “I don’t work, not in the way you are thinking, ma’am. I served for five years in the military. Marine Corps. When the drama—the high command really called it drama—was over and I expected to be released and finally sent home to heal my wounds in peace and quiet, my orders were to stay. I had to help organize and train the newly established South Korean army for future eventualities. Afterward, I received a veteran’s pension that will end in a few weeks.”

  “Like all honorably discharged veterans, you surely had the right to receive an education for a new job paid by the government, right?”

  “That is only applicable to veterans of the war of 1941–45. Not Korean War veterans. We only receive a monthly pension for about three years. Of course, they expressly told us when they released us that we should be smart about how we used this pension to prepare for a future job, which would facilitate reintegration into normal life.”

  “And certainly you must have followed this, as I consider it, reasonable suggestion?”

  “I had the best of i
ntentions, ma’am. When asked which job interested me most, I remembered the terrible floods of my hometown during my schooldays, so I said construction of levees and canals. And I have to give it to the military administration, they helped me in all kinds of ways.”

  “And do you now build levees?” asked the lady with great interest.

  “I’m as far from that as I was on the day of my discharge.”

  “That’s hard to imagine, since the training did not cost you a penny.”

  “That’s not entirely true, ma’am. A large part of my pension goes to tuition, books, office supplies, transportation to the Institute of Technology, all kinds of educational needs. But that’s not the reason I’m dropping out. It’s not my budget, but my peace of mind that’s gone to pieces.”

  “Well, how am I supposed to understand that?”

  “It’s easy, ma’am, just like—oops, I apologize, ma’am. I almost said something one can never say in the presence of a lady. But you see I spent six weeks studying like crazy in the classroom. And in my naivete, I thought that afterward I would get to go into the field with engineers and other technical personnel, where the levees and canals were just waiting to be built with my help.”

  “And that’s not what happened?”

  “Not at all. In the military, I was in basic training for three months and six days. Four weeks later, I found myself in the middle of the fiercest battles in Korea. I learned more in one week than during three months of basic training. It’s all about practical application, ma’am. Practical experience is what it takes.”

  “And you didn’t have the opportunity for practical application at the Institute of Technology?”

  “Not in the least. I’ve been at the Institute for fourteen months. I was trying to learn how to build levees and canals, but I haven’t even heard the words ‘levee’ or ‘canal’ once during that time.”

  “Nevertheless, you must have learned something during those long months?”

  “Sure, I learned to be bored to death. Nothing but mathematical calculations, square and cubic roots, equations, numbers raised to all kinds of powers, specific weight of dry and wet earth, of cement and iron. We had to figure out the weight per square meter expressed in kilograms and grams, if the pressure comes directly from above, from below, and from this or that side. We also studied the influence of rain, snow, and comets. We had to determine how many seconds it would take for rain to fill, to the brim, a tin can with a height of ten centimeters and a diameter of six centimeters. But I never heard anything about levees, dikes, canals, and the prevention of floods. I’m afraid the teachers there will not think I am worthy of learning about dikes until I am seventy-five years old.”