The Amber Room (36 page)

“Now all this has changed, and private practices are allowed. Doctors can charge clients for their services, which before was also illegal. And now doctors want to work at Western technological levels. Myself included.”

He led them out of the elevator and down the seventh floor hall to his room, still talking. “This is becoming urgent, because the hospitals are sliding into chaos. The social system has broken down. People keep going to the hospitals, but the government has no money for funding. The poor are now waiting
days
in hospital lobbies for an appointment with a doctor. I will not make you sick by describing what our emergency rooms look like. When patients are finally seen, they are inspected with equipment that has broken down and treated with drugs that are out-of-date. There is a desperate lack of needles and syringes and even the simplest of bandages. People who can afford it are going to private clinics for everything.”

He opened his door, ushered them into a room fitted with standard Western hotel furniture, and waved them toward the two seats. He perched on the end of his bed and continued. “If you're retired, you get free medicine. Everyone else pays thirty percent for local, Polish-made pharmaceuticals. If you can afford it, however, you purchase drugs made in the West, and for them you pay the full price. The problem is, you see, there is a
huge
difference in quality.”

He went to his closet and pulled out two heavily strapped cases. “The government ran out of money to pay for medical treatment, which means that the pharmacies have not been reimbursed for the drugs they distributed free of charge or sold at subsidized prices. So what happens? The state-run pharmacies are cutting back on the number of drugs they keep and dispense to match the amount they received from the government the month before. Many of the poor are going without, or having to spend what to them is a month's salary for one dose of imported antibiotics at an international pharmacy.”

The doctor opened the first case and began unfolding multiple layers of burlap wrapped around an ornate silver tureen chased in gold leaf. Jeffrey took the opportunity to whisper
to Katya, “Do you remember our talk about tithing together and doing something for the people here?”

She turned and gazed with eyes that drank him in. “I remember,” she said quietly.

“I have a feeling this is it,” he said. “Could you ask him for an introduction to a hospital that's in trouble? Maybe one that treats kids?”

CHAPTER 35

There was another snowfall that night, so the next morning they decided to take the train for their visit to the children's hospital. A thaw had set in by the time they left for Wroclaw, which was good, because the heat on the train was truly feeble. It was an old Polish train, with PKP stamped on the side of each green smut-stained wagon.

The trip took seven endless hours. Jeffrey worked through all his notes, talked with Katya until the jouncing fatigue silenced them, watched landscapes roll by under a flat gray sky. He walked the passageway, saw young and old huddled under coats or swaddled in quilts and blankets, sitting with the patience of those who knew that however long the voyage took, it would take longer still.

With each stop, the compartments and passageways became more crowded. The train went from comfortable to overstuffed, with all seats taken and people standing in sardine-packed confinement in the passageway.

“It used to be like this all the time,” Katya said. “Train tickets cost pennies, and there were always delegations traveling everywhere. Even a visit to another factory was done by committee. Delegations meant extra eyes were open and watching.”

An hour outside Wroclaw, Katya told him, “Many Poles still consider this region to be a part of Germany. It didn't belong to Poland until 1945. After the war, the Allied powers agreed to redraw Poland's boundaries. The Soviet Union annexed almost a third of Poland, which was then attached to its border. In compensation, a slice of Germany, including parts of Silesia, was given to Poland on this side.”

“No one complained?”

“Who listened to a defeated Germany? As for Poland, the Soviets made sure no one made an official complaint. A lot
of people, like Mama, protested with their feet. They moved West in hopes of escaping the spread of Russian troops. A few managed to escape. Most did not.”

She pointed out the window at a passing small village. “The architecture is very German here. You won't find structures like this anywhere else in Poland.”

“Like what?”

“Wait until we arrive in Wroclaw. It's easier to describe when you see a city.”

The ring of factories marking the outskirts of Wroclaw left the air tasting bitter. Within the city proper, the streets showed a hodgepodge of building styles. Communist high-rises mingled with prewar apartment and office buildings that would have looked at home in Paris or Vienna if only they had been painted. Lacy iron grillwork wove its way around breakfast balconies fronting tall French double doors. Walls were festooned with plaster bas-reliefs and stone gargoyles. Wrought-iron streetlamps from the age of gas and candles still stood guard over many street corners.

The station itself was tall and curved and walled in with glass, as were many European stations remaining from the steam-driven Industrial Revolution. The air smelled dry. Metallic. Sooty. It sucked the moisture from Jeffrey's eyes and mouth and throat.

“Now it's mostly Poles who live here,” Katya said as they walked through the echoing terminal. “The Germans left in waves of hungry refugees. Then Stalin forcibly resettled many families here from eastern Poland, which was incorporated into the Soviet Union after the war.”

They stepped out into a wind-driven mixture of sleet and slushy rain, and settled into a taxi that stank of the driver's Russian cigarettes. After Katya had given him directions, Jeffrey asked, “What happened to the Poles who didn't make it out of those eastern lands?”

Katya gave her window a tiny shrug. “From one day to the next, all contact was lost. I remember asking the family
I stayed with in Warsaw that same question. They had relatives still there, or so they thought. But no communication was allowed. Now we know that some survived, but many were lost. Most, perhaps. Stalin sent wave after wave of those Poles to Siberia, never to return. He wanted to make those lands totally Soviet, to silence any former claim those people might have made for their homeland.”

The children's hospital of Wroclaw was a grim, square-faced building stained gray by years of soot. It was fronted by what once had probably been a formal garden and was now a parking lot paved with cinders. Grimy windows gave way to prim cleanliness within as they passed through the entrance. The waiting area was lined with hard-backed benches and filled with parents and children waiting in patient silence.

Katya gave their names to the receptionist, and they were soon joined by the chief pediatrician, Dr. Helena Sova, an attractive blond woman in her mid-thirties. “Dr. Mirnik called from the opthalmologist's conference to say you were coming,” she said in greeting. “He has been very kind to consult here when our small patients have eye troubles. Please come this way.”

She was very trim, very stately, with a happy face framing a pair of huge sad eyes. “We have seventy beds for children from birth to eight years,” she said, leading them down a very old yet absolutely spotless hall. She spoke excellent English with a most appealing lilt, her voice brisk and slightly breathless at the same time. Jeffrey noticed that her presence brought a smile from everyone they passed—doctors, nurses, parents, children. All smiled, all spoke, all received the blessing of a few quick heartfelt words. The process was so natural and continuous that it never interrupted their conversation.

“Our main problem is lung disease, as the air pollution is extremely bad. Poland, you see, is the most polluted country on earth, and we stand at the edge of the most polluted region in Poland. From Cracow to Katowice and up to the edge of Silesia, that area is known as the Triangle of Death.” She
gave them a smile in direct contrast to the look in her eyes. “Rather dramatic, don't you think?”

She ushered them into her office, made the formal offer of coffee or tea, and continued. “In the sixties and seventies, the government borrowed billions from the West, gambling that they would be able to launch Poland into the future. They constructed massive factories, with absolutely no consideration whatsoever to the environment. They were desperate, you see, to use all this capital for output.”

“You heard such words everywhere,” Katya agreed. “Output and productivity and five-year programs.”

The doctor gave Katya a closer inspection, then spoke to her in Polish. Katya's reply brought a new light to those sad, intelligent eyes. They conversed gaily for a few minutes, then Dr. Sova turned back and said, “Your fiancée speaks an excellent Polish.”

Fiancée. It was still a new enough thought to send shivers up his spine. “So I have been told.”

“As I was saying,” the doctor continued, “the government built these industrial behemoths all through Poland, but many were concentrated in this area because the Germans left behind an excellent infrastructure—roads, power stations, waterlines, and so forth. These factories were both extremely dirty and extremely inflexible, so large that they could not be adapted to a changing environment.”

“And out-of-date before they were built,” Katya added.

“Many of them,” Dr. Sova agreed. “Poland was forced to buy Russian technology at vastly inflated prices. The Russians simply told us what we were to purchase, and what the price would be, and that was all. But in some areas, such as steel and chemical production, the industries that are concentrated in this region, the technology dated from before the First World War.”

“There was a total disregard shown for worker safety and health,” Katya explained, “and the consequences are just now being understood. In the Nova Huta steel works outside
Cracow, the
average
time a worker holds employment in the factory is four years. The major reasons for departures are accidents and lung disorders.”

Dr. Sova gave Katya the welcome look of a kindred spirit. “Such information has been released only in the past two years. Under the Communists, studies of this kind were outlawed, because they feared public reaction if the truth were ever known. But we knew. We saw the result of their attitude toward pollution here in our children.”

“This region has forty times what is considered to be the maximum safe level of dust in the air,” Katya told him, “and sixty times the level of lead in both the air and the water. Half of all rivers in Poland are so polluted that they are not even fit for industrial use; their water will corrode the intake pipes. Almost two-thirds of Cracow is without any sewage treatment at all; everything is simply dumped into the Vistula River. New studies show that the level of chemicals in the air has reached critical levels.”

“Sulfur dioxide,” Dr. Sova recited. “Carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, heavy metals, iron, and just plain soot. This region has one
ton
per square meter of dirt fall from the sky each year, the highest on earth.”

“The effect on people's health must be devastating,” Jeffrey said.

“Especially the children,” Dr. Sova agreed. “Within this region,
ninety percent
of all children under the age of five suffer from some pulmonary disorder at one time or another. One half of all four-year-olds suffer from some
chronic
disease, two-thirds of all six-year-olds, and three-quarters of all ten-year-olds. Again, these figures have only in the past six months become collected. Under the Communists, all records of our children's health were classified top secret, and no such collation of data was permitted. All we could tell you was that too many of our children were ill for too long. Far too long.”

She stood and motioned toward the door. “Now that you
have heard a bit of the background, perhaps it is time to show you the result.”

Reluctantly Jeffrey followed her into the hall. The walls were institutional orange and yellow, the floors mismatched strips of various linoleum shades. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant and soap.

“As I said, lung diseases are our single greatest problem,” she said, walking them by glass-fronted rooms filled with cribs and children of various ages. “Babies are born with symptoms inherited from their mothers, such as extremely irritated mucus membranes. This makes it very hard for them to draw breath. It also makes them vulnerable to infections, especially bronchitis and pneumonia.”

Many of the rooms also contained beds for adults. “This is a very new program for us,” she explained, pointing to where a father assisted a nurse in bathing his child. “Under the Communists, parents were not allowed into children's wards at all. Nowadays we encourage it for all of our noncritical patients. We feel both the children and the parents are helped by being together.”

She passed by two rooms whose glass walls fronting the hallway were painted over. “Cancer ward here, and next to it leukemia,” she explained curtly. “I do not think we shall stop in there.”

“Thank you,” Jeffrey said quietly.

She glanced at his face. “This is hard for you?”

“Very.”

“And yet you wish to help us?”

He felt tender relief as Katya's hand slipped into his. “If we can.”

“I have discussed it with my superiors, and we have decided that it would be best if we pinpoint one particular area of need—that is, if you are in agreement.”

He nodded. “Where did you learn your English?”

“Here and in America. I was able to do a year's residency at Johns Hopkins.” She smiled wistfully. “It was very hard
to leave there; so many new and exciting things were taking place every day. But I felt that I was needed more here.”