Keeping the Feast Read Online Free

streetlamps as they whoosh and flail like crazed metronomes in cold night air. I know what a gunshot sounds like. But I wasn’t there when John was shot, so I can only wonder about the specifics of the scene. Was there a flash of white light when the sniper squeezed the trigger? Or maybe just a dirty yellow spark? I’d like to know if the bullet was spit out with a spike of blue smoke, or whether a puff of gray fume wafted lazily up into the December night. Had I been standing hard by, would I have heard the bullet cut the air? Would it have whined or screamed or whispered or made no sound at all?
    I needed fifteen simple stitches to close the two long gashes in my head and a couple of weeks for my hugely swollen face to look again like mine. Had my beating been the sum of it, I probably would have nursed a longtime fear of uniformed men wielding riot sticks, but would have few other lingering concerns. But a bullet that pierces a car door, a parka, a sports coat, a sweater, a shirt, trousers, and underwear—a bullet that splits a belt in two, then chews its way across a body I knew and loved—causes an entirely different level of injury. The body is only the first victim; the soul, the psyche, the spirit are each ripped apart as well. People who had learned this lesson in their own particular ways—a wise hospital orderly in Munich, friends who had lost a child, an acquaintance who had once been knifed in the chest—tried to warn us early on that our lives would never be quite the same. They tried to let us know that any biography-changing trauma such as a car wreck or a heart attack was likely to split a life in two, into the time before and the time after.
    But we weren’t ready to take in their wisdom. It was only over the years that we began to understand that the troubles that befall us alter, permanently, not only our view of the world but our position in it. We still had so very much to learn. Who would have thought that patience could be a vice? And anger a virtue? Who would have thought that there are times when it is not only natural to feel angry and impatient but of enormous importance to demand that a sick person show signs of getting better? Who would have thought that the most fundamental of human rituals—buying, preparing, eating, and sharing our daily bread—would have become our tether to normal life as we struggled to make the crossing from our old life before to our new life after?
    The Romanian surgeon who first saved John’s life said the bullet slammed into his right side, shattering his pelvis and sending shards of bone deep into the surrounding muscles. The German surgeons who saved his life later said the bullet then tumbled and danced its way across the rest of him, skimming close enough under his spine to shatter the tip of one vertebra and slightly fracture two more. Ultimately, though, it skimmed under his spinal column and chewed across the rest of him, exiting his left side just above what was left of his belt. Doctors—first in Timişoara, and later in Munich—had to cut open John’s back to expose and clean the tunnel the bullet had made. They had to clean out the bits of bone, metal, paint, dirt, grease, and shredded cloth that the bullet carried with it. They had to kill the inevitable infection that followed, and weeks later, when there was enough new flesh to stitch, they had to sew up the long, deep trench—about as wide and deep as my forearm—that they and the bullet had made.
    No one ever found the bullet that found John, so the experts were forced to theorize about what exactly hit him. The Romanian doctors thought it was a dumdum, a soft-nosed bullet that expands upon hitting a target so as to produce maximum damage as it travels through the body. One of the Munich surgeons, an avid hunter, said the bullet may have been absolutely ordinary, but that the impact of bullet against car door, bullet against pelvic bone, so destabilized its course that it mimicked the