I hardly hear his words. A strange tranquility comes over me, my senses relax. This atmosphere of quiet efficiency, of safety, fills me with trust. A nurse comes with the anesthetic injection. I close my eyes. The last words I hear are "Afterwards you can put him in bed 23."
The battle with the injuries is fought by the wounded man alone. The doctors and nurses do their duty, and sometimes they achieve wonders. But in the end it is the wounded man alone, his willpower - success
depends on him. This explains the excitement the patient feels at every sign of life from "outside. " Every visit from comrades, from friends and
acquaintances. And the visitor often does not realize how grateful the patient is.
Chocolate
From that day on, when an armor-piercing bullet from a heavy auto-matic weapon confused me with a tank and lost its way in my stom-ach, the doctors forbade me to eat. As compensation they stuck a needle into my leg and connected this with a container of glucose solution. In this way I had only one meal a day, lasting twenty-four hours.
My friends and relations came to visit me. They stood around me making strenuous efforts to radiate optimism and to hide their dis-comfort. One day in the first week, a girlfriend visited me. After she had recovered from the initial shock and had got used to my appear-ance, I explained to her the purpose of the various tubes decorating me. One of them fed me continually without burdening my stomach or intestines. A second one, which made my nose look like an ele-phant’s trunk, continually sucked the juices out of my stomach.
We spoke about this and that, about friends and acquaintances, and I described for her in detail the twelve-course meal that I intended to consume on my recovery. I also described my keen antic-ipation of the first glass of beer, and the whole time I kept my melan-choly eye on the container with my liquid "nourishment" above my head.