It was Sunday afternoon when they packed their stuff and left. The cycling back usually took Barbara more time, despite the fact that the journey was downhill and there were fewer things to carry. Maybe the prospect of spending the following week without Adam, at work which she increasingly disliked, made her prolong the journey. They were cycling for half an hour together in the wood and then took different routes, each to their own apartments, which were in different corners of Warsaw. The sun was shining and there were no cars or cyclists around. Barbara was thinking that this lockdown wasn’t so bad after all, as it felt as if nature was breathing a sigh of relief, thanks to being left in peace. This thought made her almost ecstatic and she sped up, in part out of joy and in part because she was cycling downhill. Then she lost consciousness. When she regained it, she was lying in front of a soundproof barrier. Her face was covered in blood, which was tickling her, but she couldn’t move her hand to rub it off. In fact, she couldn’t move at all, and her face was aching. It took her some time to realise what had happened – she hit the soundproof barrier and the blow must have been strong as she couldn’t move. If she could get hold of her mobile phone, she could phone an ambulance, but her bag was two metres away and she couldn’t reach it. There was nobody driving or cycling on this road, obviously due to lockdown. The pain was getting worse and Barbara again lost consciousness. When she regained it, she noticed a young man sitting next to her.
‘Hello. You had an accident,’ he said. ‘You broke your nose and possibly something else. Can you move your arm?’
‘No, I can’t,’ replied Barbara. She heard her voice coming distorted from her mouth, as if she was talking via a vocoder.
‘I am a doctor, albeit only a junior one. I called an ambulance, but they have delays due to Coronavirus.’
‘I see,’ replied Barbara.
‘Shall I phone somebody else? Your family?’
‘Yes.’
She tried to give the young man Adam’s phone number, but didn’t remember it and, indeed, wasn’t able to say anything as suddenly she was out of breath.’
The man took her rucksack and from it her phone, asking:
‘Will I find it here? Can I phone?’
Barbara blinked to give him permission and he quickly found Adam’s number, as he was the person whom Barbara phoned most often. He asked again if he could phone him and then she saw him talking, but couldn’t hear anything.
Barbara didn’t know how much time passed until Adam arrived, as she lost sense of time. Her body was reduced to her head floating on a liquid substance which kept her just above the surface, like a spot of oil on water. Adam arrived just as she felt she was about to sink, but she managed to hold on. She saw him talking to the doctor, but only hearing fragment of their conversation: ‘broken nose’, ‘injured neck’, ‘paralysed.’
Barbara looked at Adam’s eyes and could see that he was sad, but he wasn’t just sad about what had happened to her. His was sadness mixed with embarrassment that he was unable to help her. She knew this expression of impotence from earlier occasions, for example when unexpectedly she was kicked out from a flat she was renting and had nowhere to go or when she told Adam that she was pregnant. It occurred to her that he wouldn’t look after her cats when she was in the hospital, so she needed to find somebody to do it. The best person would be Beata, who lived only two blocks away from her, but she wasn’t in Warsaw, so it had to be Halina or Hubert. She wanted to tell the doctor to find their phones numbers in her contact numbers, but wasn’t able to utter any words. Everything got blurry and she was falling asleep again. She was woken up by the piercing sound of the ambulance.
She heard the young doctor arguing with the driver, telling him that they were waiting for an ambulance for three and half hour. The driver said:
‘This whole week all ambulance staff in Warsaw have been on Coronavirus training and today is Sunday. We had only two vehicles to attend to all accidents in the city. Believe me, we did our best and be glad that we arrived at all.’
Three men were putting Barbara on a stretcher and then into an ambulance through the back door. It occurred to her that it looked like a coffin. But she shrugged this thought off quickly and said to the young doctor: ‘I might be locked in, but I won’t be locked down. Ever.’
He smiled, but she wasn’t sure if he understood.
