Zen Buddhism and her lifelong habit of meditation gave her a great advantage in this situation, since she could bear being immobile in a way that would have driven any other person as athletic and energetic as her crazy. She was also able calmly to accept the loss of her companion of many years, who was less able to come to terms with the tragedy and left her. She discovered that she could practice medicine as a surgery consultant from a studio equipped with TV cameras hooked up with the operating room, but her ambition was to work with patients face-to-face, as she had always done. When she decided to live at the second level in Lark House, she visited a couple of times to talk to the residents who would be her new family and soon saw that there were more than enough opportunities for her to work as she wished.
Barely a week after her arrival she was already planning a free pain clinic for residents with chronic illnesses, and an office where she could attend to lesser complaints. Lark House had doctors on standby, but Catherine Hope convinced them that she was not competing with them, but would complement their work. Hans Voigt offered her a room for the clinic and suggested to the -trustees that they pay her a salary; however, she preferred to offer her services as a volunteer and not to have to pay the home’s monthly charges. This agreement suited both parties. Cathy, as everyone called her, quickly became the mother who greeted the new arrivals, listened to their secrets, comforted those who were sad, guided the dying, and handed out the marijuana. Half of the residents had medical prescriptions for its use, and Cathy, who doled it out at her clinic, was generous toward those who had neither permits nor enough money to buy it under the counter. It was not uncommon to see a line of clients waiting outside her door to get the grass in many different forms, including delicious biscuits and sweets. Voigt did not intervene—why deprive them of innocuous relief?—and only demanded they refrain from smoking in the corridors or common spaces, because smoking tobacco was forbidden, and it would be unfair if the same did not apply to marijuana. Even so, some of the smoke escaped through the heating or air-conditioning systems, and occasionally even the residents’ pets were as high as kites.
* * *
After her three years at Lark House, Irina had finally begun to feel safe. She had not spent so long in one place since her arrival in the United States fourteen years earlier; she knew this tranquility could not last and savored every moment of this truce in her life. Not everything was idyllic, but compared to her past problems, those of the present were trivial. She had to have her wisdom teeth out, but her medical insurance did not cover dental treatment. She knew Seth Belasco was in love with her and that it would be increasingly difficult to keep him in check without losing his valuable friendship. Voigt, who had always been relaxed and friendly, had in recent months become so bad tempered that some of the residents were meeting secretly to find a tactful way to get rid of him, although Catherine Hope thought he should be given time, and for the moment her opinion prevailed. The director had twice been operated on for hemorrhoids, only partially successfully, and this had embittered him.
Irina’s most urgent problem was an invasion of mice in the old Berkeley house where she rented a room. She could hear them scratching behind the cracked walls and underneath the wooden floorboards. At her neighbor Tim’s insistence, the other tenants decided to lay traps, because it seemed inhumane to poison the creatures. Irina argued that the traps were just as cruel, and had the added disadvantage that somebody had to dispose of the corpses, but no one listened to her. Once, one of the tiny animals survived in a trap and was rescued by Tim, who passed it on to Irina, tears in his eyes. He was someone who ate only vegetables and nuts, because he could not bear the idea of harming any living thing, much less cooking it. Irina had to bandage up the mouse’s broken foot, keep it in a cage with cotton wool, and take care of it until it had recovered from the shock and could walk properly and be released back with the others.