There was no water on the train.
All night, we turned on the hard boards.
In the blazing forenoon our car was shunted onto a siding and the Red Army soldiers—its only other occupants—marched away. Nothing was in sight but the sparse wheat of the Ukraine and its scalding mirages. We waited—with our thirst. Hung-over, desperate. Another train finally picked up our car and we went on—at the galling pace of communist transportation.
I found the carafe of water in the toilet—where no water had been before. Recklessly, tremblingly, we drank it—equally dividing the thankful drops. And late that day, without further ado, we crossed the border to the relaxation, the seeming luxury, the comparative freedom of Poland.
It was some days later, in the Palace Polonia Hotel, in Warsaw, when I woke with the cramps in my belly and legs. With a climbing fever.
Time spun—hours commingled in the familiar wastes of pain. I knew belly-fire. I did not know my legs could hurt so hideously or curl up against my will. I lay vomiting, fainting, crawling to the bathroom and there, too weak to lift myself, pouring out rice water. Areas of my skin turned purple.
Ted, untouched by an affliction neither of us recognized, took care of me. On the fourth day he brought a doctor and a nurse. On the fifth, I was briefly better.
That evening, on my insistence, he left me for the first time since I'd fallen sick.
He came back to the hotel alone, late, and sober—for he talked awhile with the concierge. He went to his room—beside the one where I lay ill—and opened the French windows, apparently to stare at Warsaw in the vermilion dawn. They found him on the sidewalk five floors below—dead.