SHE was quiet while I was leading her to bed, as I recall that night, and since I noted that she had not changed into her nightclothes, I myself got a nightdress and helped her into it. Rika, I told her,

I understand perfectly. I was so engrossed with the coming convention that I must have neglected you. You know very well, you’re my one and only one, even if you have to tell me again, I ‘m corny.

“I’m so sorry, Resty; you’re right, I’ve been silly. I’ve not been feeling well lately.”
I’ve noticed that, I told her. How come you had not told me anything about it, when you used to tell me any little thing bothering you. It’s better she’d let me know whatever little thing, little pain she had from the start, I thought.

“Oh, Resty, how could I? When these past months you yourself have been in trouble about that man charging you before the hospital director, I could not bring myself to add to you own trouble. Instead I worried myself about how I could be of help to you and your case.”

Okay, okay, I told her then, now that it’s over and we get back to normal, we’ll get you for a check up tomorrow for a series of tests. Ah, in the meantime I know the best medicine in the world. Holding up her face I sang, nay murmurred to her earlobes the lyrics of a pop song . . . women do get weary, and when she’s weary, try a little tenderness . . . you won’t regret it, she won’t forget it. And you know what that is? The best medicine in the world?

When she replied, laughter? I said that’s the second best. I held her tight while she struggled loose from me. I thought then she was just being uptight over a fleeting hold of jealousy for in the past weeks I had been attentive, nay too attentive, to the dance and dance instructress we were preparing for a medical convention. I was determined to make it up to her by being extra gallant this time. Every resisting move, a covering up of her face, a turning away of her body, I took as further coyness reminiscent of our bridal night, which instead emboldened me.

Moaning and breathing heavily, she had awakened from a nightmare, she had said. I was swimming but not in a swimming pool. It’s seawater, dark, murky water; it enters my eyes, blurs the world around me; it enters my nose and suffocates me; it enters my ears and makes loud thumping on my breasts, as it pumps on my body, as if in veangeance . . . In vengeance? What have I done? I am asking, looking around and see that I am swimming around not in seawater but struggling, gasping, for life itself . . . in thick red fluid.

Rika had sat up suddenly, then with horror, she turned to me and tugged at my bare back as I was lying on my stomach, an arm under my face towards her. “Resty! Resty! Wake up! Please wake up!”
At first I responded with the grunts and groans of a sleep-loaded man who’d just come in from a hundred meter dash, and then when I saw her sitting up, I sat up and looked for the pajama top which was thrown aside before the run, and threw an arm around her, ready with words of comfort for one who must have wakened up from a nightmare.

“Resty, this is no nightmare; I cannot move my legs, and I’m leaking, leaking heavily.”

Okay. Okay, I said. Don’t panic. Remember you always get stomach cramps when your period comes. I’ll go get something to relieve the cramps.

“No, I cannot move them . . . my legs, I cannot move them. Resty, please don’t leave me.”

She held on to me, for I was standing up by the bed while she was dragging her lower limbs across the bed. But I’ve got to go get something from the medicine cabinet, an antispasmodic tab, I said.

Fully awake by now I turned to her wide-eyed, and thrust a hand under her sheet-covered body and when I took it out, it was dripping with blood. I was aghast for a while and then rushed to get a vial and the hypodermic needle. It’s okay, don’t panic, darling . . . don’t panic. Actually I was telling it over and over again more to myself than to Rika, who by then was lying down quiet. Glancing at the table clock, an analog one, I thought four in the morning was still pitch dark, or was that 12:20?

I called up Atchi Nita at the next house, whose phone simply kept ringing, then I buzzed the kitchen intercom for anyone to come to our room. Manang Angge knocked and came into the room when the phone got back its hello, hello. Atchi Nita, please come over, emergency here. Next I called up a colleague Doc Penalosa, the Gyne Obstetrician who had been handling Rita’s case since the birth of our little girl. We call her Manang, a 50-ish woman with whom Rika and I felt comfortable, and I knew I could call her any hour of the day.

Yes, please rush to the hospital for you to see my wife. Yes, yes, we’ll be there in 10 or so minutes.

Yes, in the meantime I’ve given her the needle to stanch the flow. Yes, Manang, yes, her vital signs are okay. Yes, I know Manang, but no, I cannot remain calm, steady if it’s a member of my family whose life is at stake.

In the meantime that I was harried on what to get from Rika’s closet for the hospital stay, Manang Angge came into the room bringing a bowl of steaming of what looked like greenish brown tea.

“Manong Doctor, please give her this, a tea I made from the leaves of bangka-bangkahan, which will stop even temporarily the bleeding.”

I saw the three leaves. Long and wide, like the toy boats children would play with on a stream. I nodded gratefully and with imploring eyes I said, Please, Manang, look after the kids. Then to Atchi Nita who had just arrived I said, “Please, we’re rushing her to the hospital. She’s haemorrhaging.
This is not simply her period, she thinks, a heavy one.”

“Okay, Brod, tell me what to do.”

In this condition, I cannot drive, I told her. So for the next two hours of the early morning the Dctora and her assistants worked on Rika, who had grown pale; a blood transfusion bottle by the side of the bed, and others wired to her body. I had handled several cases of emergency, who with eyes narrowing above the surgical mask, could be hard and firm as a master of the scalpel in the O.R., with the younger physicians I thought marveling at my skill, for what the years had molded in me, working on nothing more than a living human meat gone askew. Now a sorry picture of a helpless husband wracked by anxiety, there within the covered figure on the table I first realized the verity of the anima housed in the human body, not just any body but a part of my life.

At first I was seated by the narrow clinic bed holding my wife’s limp hand all throughout the operation, glancing now and then at the waxen face of the woman put in twilight sleep; I could not even look at where the Doctora was doing the dilatation and curettage. I looked away when she asked me to see within her two cupped hands a big blob of red as she put it in a kidney shaped white enamel pan. When I thought the operation was over, I embraced our Manang Doctora, my wet face damping her gauze mask, while the woman patted my shoulders wordlessly. Going to a chair at the far corner of the room, I missed the edge of the chair, landing on the floor, oblivious of that peculiar siren of a lost heartbeat and the rush of footsteps into the room.

Exhausted more by the climb from the depths of despair than from any physical exertion, I drop down on the bed, fully clothed, and could not care less how I look as I cover my face as if from strong sunlight searing through me, blinding me. My sobbing comes from some strange depths which reverberates all around me. Then I sit up and shout at all the dark corners where the echoing reverberations are coming from.

You’re all I have ever loved in my life, Rika. Why did you leave me? This soon? You said we’d grow old together. Remember, you often read to me from your book of poems: “When you’re old and grey and full of sleep/ and nodding by the fire, take downthis book/ and slowly read and dream of the soft look . . . but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you. . .”

Then with both closed fists I hit and hit the bed.

“Papa! Why did you let my Mama die?”

“Joshua, my son, I love her. . .”

“No, I’m not your son. You had let my father die. And now you’ve let my mother die.”

“Josh, my son, I love you too.”

“No, I want to go with them.”

Joshua runs away and I shout at him but no sound escapes me; I want to run after him but my legs are tied down, as I slowly stand up helplessly watching the boy running away.

I was squirming and moaning in bed that next early evening after we had come from the hospital where Rika had just had an ectopic pregnancy operation, then when I heard that usual beep-beep siren which brought the ICU personnel both in white and green rushing towards her, I was carried away unconscious, as I was told later.

“Hey, there, Resty;” it was Atchi Nita who had commandeered everything from the hospital to our home. “Your girlfriend Rika is now asking for you. Now I know what they mean when they say,” Physician, heal yourself.”

(A chapter from Tales From Under the Banyan Tree)