Darkness and Stefan

This morning I woke up at 5 AM, following a bad dream about Pope Francis. I searched my mind for compelling reasons to get up, and I didn't find any, so I stayed put until 7:30 AM.

Staying in bed until 7:30 is not really a good idea because I don't have a lot of time for goofing off. My husband is in a hospital clear across town, and travel time is, there and back, about three hours. I visit him for two hours every day. By the time I get home, I am very tired. Therefore, my best writing time is, as usual, first thing in the morning.

Usually I visit B.A. after 6:30 PM, but I hate walking through the woods to an empty house after dark, so this week I went to the earlier visiting session. I felt guilty and cowardly about being so scared of the woods until B.A. got moved to Stefan's room.

I first saw Stefan (not his real name) a couple of weeks ago. He was an arresting sight as he walked down the hall, even for the Neuro ward. He had two black eyes and a bloody broken nose, and I'd never seen anyone who looked that bad on his own two feet. I thought he must be a car crash victim.

When B.A. got moved to Stefan's room a week or so later, I quickly glanced at the whiteboard over Stefan's battered head and ascertained that he was a Pole. This was unusual for the ward, actually, which is full of Scots patients. The nurses are a little less homogenous, and the doctors are definitely a mix of nationalities, but so far all patients I've seen, except Stefan, have been Scots.

One thing I noticed about Stefan, besides his shaved head, black eyes, broken nose and Polish name, was that nobody ever came to visit him. I felt badly about that and considered going over and trying to have a conversation, but I felt rather shy. Speaking Polish when you're not Polish and, incidentally, living in Scotland is a bit like being a giraffe with five legs--or, worse, Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles.

So when Polish Pretend Daughter appeared one day last week to go home with me after the late visiting hour, I sent her to speak to Stefan, who had gone to the TV room, possibly to escape the sight and sound of poor B.A. throwing up. When I fetched PPD, Stefan was smiling cheerfully, and PPD held the answer to the mystery of what had happened to Stefan.

In short Stefan, who lives in Fife, was walking home alone one Saturday night after drinking, and he was attacked by a group of men who had also been drinking. They kicked his head in, and Stefan ended up in the Neuro ward.

PPD did not ask if men were Poles or Scots. This  would make a difference to the headlines, if not to poor battered Stefan. If the men were also Poles, there would be no real news story. If the men were Scots, however, there might be a "hate crime" angle, which would be very interesting to the newspapers indeed. I have tried to find a report about it online, without success. Any number of men get their heads kicked in on Saturday nights in Fife.

At any rate, I no longer felt quite so badly about going to the hospital during "work hours" because Stefan's bruises and stitches were a daily reminder that Central Belt Scotland is a dangerous place for those who walk alone at night.

I have been feeling incredibly stressed out from trying to do my job adequately between daily trips to the hospital. This morning I made myself phone up an interview subject in Poland, but I forgot to  check the information I received that he was fluent in English. When the subject indicated that he would rather I interviewed him in Polish, six years of memory work simply vanished from my head. Reduced to a gibbering wreck, I took down the subject's email address. It was only after I hung up that I realised that

A) I had never before spoken Polish on the phone and
B) the subject may be "fluent" but some of my fluent-in-English friends absolutely hate speaking English on the phone.

If I still had any kind of ego around my language-learning skills, it would have been thoroughly bruised. However, I know using the telephone in a foreign language is a massive challenge for most language-learners. And three hours later I managed to cover myself in glory at the hospital when a nurse gave up trying to explain to Stefan that he couldn't have all his stuff back.

"The police need it for evidence," the nurse had been saying from behind a curtain. B.A., who has hearing like a bat, had motioned for me to be quiet and was listening intently to the drama. When the nurse hurried past us, muttering that she couldn't speak Polish, B.A. volunteered that I could.

She was very glad to hear it.

So off I went behind the curtain to introduce myself formally to Stefan and explain to him that he couldn't take all his stuff because the police needed it. Stefan said he understood, and off I went back to my habitual seat beside B.A.'s bed to ponder what "evidence" was in Polish (świadczenie, among other words). And I was highly gratified when Stefan, stymied by the more thickly Scottish accent of the next nurse, came in search of me to translate again.

Fortunately for him, I was just a stop gap. There is at least one Polish nurse at the hospital, and she appeared twice, first to convince Stefan that it was time to go home and then to take him out to a cab. The gentle patter behind the curtain, was quite a contrast to my lurching, tortured explanations all in the super-correct Second Person Formal. ("Sir cannot have Sir's things because the police need Sir's things for the court.")

Benedict Ambrose will be in hospital for at least another six weeks,

*I wonder if there are Anglo-Saxon analogues to Long Duk Dong in foreign films.