Few days ago I woke up in the middle of the night thinking of my mother and the first dream I had after she died. I don’t remember if I’ve written about it before—if I have, bear with me, my Love, I will repeat myself. I was in the yard of the hospital talking to a nurse. “Where is everybody?” I asked. The nurse answered laughing: “They’re on home-office…” Shocked, I asked: “Everybody? You mean, also the doctors, surgeons, nurses… and the patients too?” She said: “Don’t you know? Nowadays everybody works from home…” and she laughed again.
Reflecting on the dream, I walked to the kitchen and opened the fridge to grab my hibiscus-ginger-lemon tea. My eyes fell upon a leek in the vegetable crisper. Instantly, I connected the said vegetable to the Military Hospital and burst into laughter. Funny stories about doctors and the bizarre trades of the “Golden Era” flooded my mind.
There was the ophthalmic surgeon – famous for complex surgeries – whose wife once went into a hysterics, yelling, “I don’t want to see meat anymore!”; she had run out of storage space because of the kilograms of meat brought in by her husband’s patients. In those days, meat was the highest value currency because grocery shelves were almost empty and money held no value.
Then, there was the neurologist; a brilliant doctor who was famous for more than just his expertise. His waiting room was packed with gypsies – looking like a set in a Kusturica movie – entire families accompanying the young men who were hoping to purchase an “exemption” – a forged diagnosis of mental inability to avoid mandatory military service. They paid in gold – the women were draped in layers of heavy jewelry – that was the payment. It happened more than once that those too impatient to wait would stand in the street and shout up at his second-floor window: “Mr. Doctor!!!”
Of course, they weren’t the only ones trying to escape service, but they made up the majority of the neurologist’s “patients” faking mental illness. One story of a man who successfully “bought” his illness, became a local legend. Upon diagnosis, he was committed to a mental institution, where the actual patients quickly sensed he didn’t belong. They beat him daily, attempting to throw him through the window – forgetting that the windows had metal bars. After two weeks of “intense therapy,” the man told the doctors he’d changed his mind: he preferred the army.
And the last and funniest case I remembered was the gynecologist. I can’t speak for his medical expertise, but he was legendary for his preferred currency: the leek. Everyone knew he was mad for them. His waiting room smelled like a soup pot. It was full of women from the countryside with bags packed with leeks, the green leaves were winking from their sacks making the room look like a farmer’s market.
Just imagine the scene, my Love: a leek for a look/ a look for a leek. Lost in laughs, with my head in the fridge, at 2 am. This isn’t an allusion to anything. Any association with an existing situation is absolute nonsense. And what’s with this annoying habit of finding underlying motifs in everything? Sometimes things are just what they appear to be. Infinite Love.
P.S: I use AI to correct my original, newly invented English grammar. Unfortunately, the impertinent AI also changes my style making it pompous, rigid, ridiculously polite and politically correct. And no matter how hard I try to preserve my Balkanic finesse, it keeps changing it….It changed ‘gypsies’ to ‘Roma people’, but I’m keeping ‘gypsies’ because, at the time, nobody had heard of ‘Roma’ or ‘Romani,’ and I want to express accurately the picturesque feel of the Kusturica movie. Not to mention that ‘Romani’ is far too close to ‘Romanian.’ Infinite laughs.
I’m wondering…has anyone told Kusturica to change the movie name to ‘Time of the Roma people’?