Off to the hand surgeon to find out whether in his opinion he needs to operate on my finger. The thought of some man cutting me open, down the narrow bone by which I hold my fork, is rendering. I feel nervous: partly because it will all be in German, medical German, and partly because consulting a surgeon on the necessity for cutting seems to me as sensible as asking a mining magnate, do we need fossil fuels.
The word for dislocated, I have discovered, is ‘ausgekugelt’. This means ‘marbled out’ – the marble or ball of the joint lept out of its socket. A scoop of ice cream is also a Kugel.
Since the accident which was a month and a week ago now, things have gotten better before they got worse. I was doing my exercises, encouraging the mortified ring finger to bend, sparing it weight, and then the pain became savagely more severe and my mobility seized up. Now it keeps me awake nights. I took my hand, carried on the end of my arm, to a regular surgeon last week who shook her head. “Das ist eine schwere Verletzung,” that is a serious injury. When I said I want to play guitar she sucked her teeth. What I am learning, apart from a bunch of new medical terms and that German emergency wards won’t treat you unless you bring your passport and the slip of paper by which you have registered – by which every German registers – place of residence, is that as long as I’ve had them, my two hands have worked in concert. I have not had to learn to paint with the brush between my teeth; my life is explored through the fingers the way a cat’s life is foraged via its whiskers; in life, for me so far, as in the vintage past, there is little machinery and everything is done by hand.
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