Call Your GP on Monday for the Results!

Krishna

“Call your GP on Monday for the results!”

“Yes, I will. Thank you!”

Elsie left the scanner room in the basement of the University Hospital where she had just had an MRI scan of her knee. She hadn’t been able to walk without a stick for the past 9 months and still she didn’t know why. Elsie shook her head. This was Denmark and in Denmark you’re supposed to be guaranteed a diagnosis within a month, but not here at the University Hospital apparently. So far, she had been x-rayed, so she knew that she had osteoarthritis in both knees, but her GP was worried that she might be suffering from a meniscus tear or even cancer as well, so he had referred her to a thorough examination at the hospital. She had waited 2 months for x-rays, 6 months for the initial examination at hospital and another month for the MRI scan, so it was a great relief to finally get a diagnosis within a week.

“About time,” Elsie thought as she made her way through the hospital to the main entrance. The floors seemed strangely empty, as the hospital would close soon. Instead a brand new, bigger and better hospital was being built further away from the city centre but closer to the university. It would be a super-hospital, the politicians promised. What was to become of the old hospital, nobody knew. Finding buyersfor a 15 storey high hospital building with 50 departments and 1,115 beds was no easy task. When Elsie had arrived this morning, she had noticed that the upper floors had already been emptied, so that only the lower 6 storeys were still functioning. Already the building looked desolated and decayed.

Elsie reached the exit and only with difficulty was she able to leave the building through the revolving doors. There was nobody in the driveway or the street leading up to the crossroad and that was quite extraordinary. Usually the area was busy. Oh well, at least nobody would gaze at her then. Quite a lot of people used to stare at her when she came down the street with her walking stick. She would turn 52 in a fortnight, but she still looked 42 and way too young to use a stick, so people glared.

Elsie walked down the street to get to the crossroad and the bus stop. The street remained empty and on her left, the view to the hospital was partly covered by tall trees and green shrubbery.

“Good riddance,” Elsie thought. She hated hospitals. To her, they were the loneliest places on Earth. Luckily she had only been to hospital 3 times in her life. The first time was when she’d had appendicitis at the age of 10 where she’d had to stay at the children’s ward for a month. It had been back in the early seventies when visitors weren’t allowed on weekdays, only on Sundays between 3 and 4 P.M. It had been hell on Earth, so scary and lonely for a little girl.

The second time was when she’d been hit by a car at the age of 15. The bumper of the car had gone straight through her ankle and she had been hospitalised for 5 weeks. As it was during summer, the children’s ward had been closed, so Elsie had been stuck in a double room with a very old lady for the entire 5 weeks. The lady had cancer and 10 months later Elsie’s mum died of cancer, too. Elsie hadn’t known that her mumhad cancer back then and all she could think of was being stuck all alone in hospital again.Her mum and dad didn’t care much and went away on vacation with Elsie’s sister Annie, leaving Elsie behind in hospital. They weren’t ready to give up their summer holidays just because Elsie was in hospital with a crushed ankle from the accident. It had been a hit and run accident and one witness thought that the driver of the car had probably been drunk as well, because he drove all the way up on the pavement where he hit Elsie. Elsie herself didn’t remember a thing.

The third time she went to hospital was when she gave birth to her daughter Selina. That was 15 years ago, just before Elsie’s 37th birthday. Her dad had died the year before of a weak heart, so she had no nearby family anymore, as her older sister Annie had migrated to Canada with her Canadian husband in 1985. The few girlfriends that Elsie had had from her schooldays were long gone, the last ones ditching her when they started having kids in the 1980s and Elsie didn’t. In fact Elsie had given up all hope of ever becoming a mother as she and her husband Ben had tried for more than 10 years with no luck. It was Ben’s sperm count that was low and he wouldn’t hear of insemination or adoption. But then all of a sudden Elsie got pregnant anyway and it had been very overwhelming and wonderful. For a while. When she was 5 months pregnant, Ben left her for an older, wealthier woman and Elsie ended up giving birth all alone at hospital and spending another 5 days on her own with the baby in a single room at the maternity ward. It had been lonely and hard and not at all lovely to take care of baby Selina 24/7 just after the birth. She had been alone with Selina ever since. Ben on the other hand had married the wealthy woman after the divorce from Elsie and as the woman was Swedish, he had moved to Sweden too. He had only seen Selina 5 times since then.

Reaching the crossroad, Elsie turned her head to take one last look at the hospital through the treetops. Looking back at the tall, white 15 storey building that she had known all her life, she was surprised to see that just under the roof, there was a huge Krishna head, 3 storeys high, carved in the same white stone as the building. She just didn’t understand why she had never seen this before and for a second she thought that she was going crazy, but no. The Krishna head was really there.

Now Elsie noticed that next to the Krishna head was a bunch of grapes, just as huge and as stony white as the head itself, and both the grapes and the head moved. The head moved closer to the grapes in a short, slow movement, the grapes moving closer to the head as well, before the grapes and the head moved apart again.

Elsie then realised that the grapes were held by a large white hand. It was Krishna’s large left hand and he moved the grapes to his mouth in order to eat some. He didn’t though, instead the head and the grapes moved away from each other, only to move back again, the movement being repeated over and over again. Elsie realised that what she was watching was in fact a 15 storey high mechanical stone figure of Krishna eating grapes, carved into the hospital façade. Why the heck had she never noticed this before?

Elsie turned around on the spot. She just had to photograph this huge Krishna standing there at the left side of the hospital building, his head a bit crooked in order to find room under the triangular roof. She raked through her shoulder bag with one hand while walking back, looking for her smartphone, hoping that the battery would last long enoughfor her to photograph the statue.

Why had she never seen it before? She was sure that it wasn’t new as the stone was the same worn white as the rest of the building. Besides, not even her hometown would be daft enough to put a new 15 storey high statue up on a building that was just about to be torn down. But there it was. A gigantic mechanical Krishna. She wondered how such a huge mechanical statue could be totally silent, because it was. You couldn’t hear the giant figure move, despite the head, grapes and left arm moving back and forth all the time. The way Krishna was situated he held his left arm out from his body, but along the wall, so that the lower arm was situated between the windows on the twelfth and the thirteenth floor on the façade. He held the bunch of grapes elegantly by the stem, moving the upper arm back and forth in order to reach the grapes with his smiling mouth. He looked so happy and peaceful, but…why would a hospital in a Christian country like Denmark have a huge Krishna sculpture on the façade? It didn’t make any sense.

Sure, Elsie was a Hindu, but 90% of the Danish population was not. They belonged to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark, which was actually the state religion. Oh yes, Denmark still had a state religion and people, who left the church or weren’t members because they had migrated to Denmark from other countries, were seen as weird, mean and potential terrorists. Elsie too. But she’d had to leave the church.

Ever since Elsie was a child, she had known that she wasn’t a Christian. She didn’t believe in the testaments. She didn’t believe in Adam and Eve. She didn’t believe that homosexuality is an abomination or that women should be silent and submissive. She just didn’t believe in it. She believed in Jesus as a holy man, but so did every major religious movement and after having shopped around spiritually, Elsie ended up being a Hindu. She converted when she was 19 and shortly after she met Ben who was an Animist. It felt quite comforting and confirmatory as well to be with someone who wasn’t a Christian either, and Elsie was convinced that Ben was Mr Right. Not only was he a non-Christian, he was also a writer and a bookworm like Elsie and they had the same strong erotic drive. For 18 years almost, Ben had been Mr Right to her and in some ways he still was, but what could she do? She was Mrs Wrong to him.

Elsie had walked so far down the street that she approached the driveway. She furrowed her brow when she spotted the creatures at the corner of the street and the driveway. On the corner, there was a round bed of purple crocuses, she had seen it when she arrived earlier today, but now it was flanked by two orange creatures that looked like…wolves maybe…or the imperial guardian lions that you see in front of Chinese imperial palaces or maybe a cross between the two. Elsie stopped dead in the street. The creatures moved.

The lion-wolves looked as if they were made of clay, burned to a fine dusty ginger tone, but they were moving like the huge Krishna. Or not like the Krishna at all, because these creatures didn’t just move back and forth, they turned around on the spot, stretched out and crouched and then their shapes started to change and what they changed into were faceless panthers.

The creatures scared Elsie a bit. She knew that they were just some sort of mechanical devices like the giant Krishna, but they were cleverly made, the way they were able to change shapes. Shapeshifters, that was what they were, and Elsie watched them from a safe distance on the opposite side of the street, feeling quite uneasy by the thought that the creatures had been behind her when she left the hospital. Then she finally located her smartphone in her shoulder bag and got it out with one hand, the other holding the walking stick. She turned on the phone and the camera and snapped a few pics. The shapeshifters turned into wolves that howled silently at a non-existing moon, then they became panthers again.

Looking down the driveway Elsie saw more creatures, strange creatures made of fire and rust, or so they seemed. They were a weird cross between snakes and humans, having arms and legs, but no human heads or faces. Their heads looked rather like the head of a snake and they had burning orange bodies, some solid and rusty, others with red hot fluid like lava burning through cracks in their orange skin like glowing rivers.

The first group of rusty pumpkin coloured creatures were situated on the same side as the panthers, just a little closer to the hospital. Elsie walked a bit up the driveway before crossing to the other side.

Despite the scary look of their burning, orange skin, the snakemen were quite funny. The first group was placed on the lawn behind some low bushes on the left side of the hospital and when Elsie reached them, she saw that they were two males on a fishing trip! The two naked, faceless creatures sat in a rowing boat on the lawn, each with a fishing rod, waiting for a fish to bite. From time to time they mechanically lifted up their rods, so that Elsie was able to see the lines and empty hooks. They looked quite calm, the two creatures, despite the rivers of burning lava running down their bodies, and although they didn’t say anything - they couldn’t as they didn’t have any mouths – Elsie was sure that they bickered quite friendly between the two of them.

Elsie got out her phone and was about to snap their picture, but just as she pressed the button, a third creature jumped up from the low bushes in front of the fishermen. It was a little girl this time. Elsie didn’t know how she knew, she just did. The creature was triangular with a happy face painted on the top of the orange triangle. The rest of the triangle had blue stripes, indicating a blue and orange dress and it had small arms and legs and two pigtails with blue ribbons, one sticking out on each side of the top of the triangle. Elsie was sure that this triangle girl had laughed and tried to prevent Elsie from getting a good shot although she hadn’t uttered a sound. But she had succeeded in blocking the view. All that could be seen on the photo were the blue and orange stripes.

Elsie continued down the driveway. She had a clear view of Krishna now, his tall thin body pressed against the left side of the building. He was wearing a short skirt and nothing else, his face looking so sweet and serene, so calm and loving with his closed eyes and smiling lips. He stood there quite relaxed with his legs crossed, his right arm hanging down next to his body and the left one raised with the grapes. It was such an amazing work of art and Elsie felt an overwhelming need to tell someone about him, but she didn’t know whom to tell. The only one she had left was Selina, and she was at school.

Now Elsie realised that at Krishna’s feet there was another group of orange snakemen. In fact there was a group on each side of the stairs that led up to the entrance of the hospital. The one on the left next to Krishna’s crossed feet showed two snakemen holding hands and dancing around in a ring. Or maybe they were rowing. Or wrestling. Elise wasn’t quite sure. Maybe one of the men was a woman. And maybe there were three instead of two. It was difficult to say, as they kept moving around with abrupt, mechanical movements although they moved in circles.

The group on the other side, on the right, were definitely wrestling. There were four or five, maybe even more and they piled together, one on top of the other, competing to get out of the pile or further in. They weren’t angry, they weren’t fighting, but they weren’t hugging either. They were just there.

Looking beyond the wrestlers, Elsie saw that scattered all over the hospital lawn were groups of two or more snakemen moving about in their burning skin in short, slow movements. The lawn stretched all the way from the hospital to the crossroad, running along the street that connected the two. And as she looked, Elsie realised that the snakemen and the shapeshifters weren’t shapeshifters and snakemen, they were souls and the glowing lava running down their bodies were the sparks of life. And she looked up at the moving Krishna and she realised that he’d stopped moving as he wasn’t mechanical. He was Krishna and he smiled.

Two weeks later when Ben came to pick up Selina from the orphanage, where the local authorities had placed her, he was told that Elsie’s weak heart had beaten her cancer to it. Elsie herself didn’t remember a thing.

@ Lise Lyng Falkenberg, 2014