Текст книги "The Fault in Our Stars "

Автор книги: John Green

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From there, we left the Franks’ living area, but we were still in the museum: A long narrow hallway showed pictures of each of the

annex’s eight residents and described how and where and when they died.

“The only member of his whole family who survived the war,” Lidewij told us, referring to A nne’s father, Otto. Her voice was hushed like

we were in church.

“But he didn’t survive a war, not really,” A ugustus said. “He survived a genocide.”

“True,” Lidewij said. “I do not know how you go on, without your family. I do not know.” A s I read about each of the seven who died, I

thought of Otto Frank not being a father anymore, left with a diary instead of a wife and two daughters. A t the end of the hallway, a huge book, bigger than a dictionary, contained the names of the 103,000 dead from the Netherlands in the Holocaust. (Only 5,000 of the deported

Dutch Jews, a wall label explained, had survived. 5,000 Otto Franks.) The book was turned to the page with A nne Frank’s name, but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four A ron Franks. Four. Four A ron Franks without museums, without

historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four A ron Franks as long as I was

around. (Maybe some people need to believe in a proper and omnipotent God to pray, but I don’t.)

A s we got to the end of the room, Gus stopped and said, “You okay?” I nodded.

He gestured back toward A nne’s picture. “The worst part is that she almost lived, you know? She died weeks away from liberation.”

Lidewij took a few steps away to watch a video, and I grabbed A ugustus’s hand as we walked into the next room. It was an A -frame

room with some letters Otto Frank had written to people during his months-long search for his daughters. On the wall in the middle of the

room, a video of Otto Frank played. He was speaking in English.

“A re there any Nazis left that I could hunt down and bring to justice?” A ugustus asked while we leaned over the vitrines reading Otto’s

letters and the gutting replies that no, no one had seen his children after the liberation.

“I think they’re all dead. But it’s not like the Nazis had a monopoly on evil.”

“True,” he said. “That’s what we should do, Hazel Grace: We should team up and be this disabled vigilante duo roaring through the

world, righting wrongs, defending the weak, protecting the endangered.”

A lthough it was his dream and not mine, I indulged it. He’d indulged mine, after all. “Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon,” I

said.

“The tales of our exploits will survive as long as the human voice itself,” he said.

“A nd even after that, when the robots recall the human absurdities of sacrifice and compassion, they will remember us.”

“They will robot-laugh at our courageous folly,” he said. “But something in their iron robot hearts will yearn to have lived and died as we did: on the hero’s errand.”

“A ugustus Waters,” I said, looking up at him, thinking that you cannot kiss anyone in the A nne Frank House, and then thinking that A nne

Frank, after all, kissed someone in the A nne Frank House, and that she would probably like nothing more than for her home to have become

a place where the young and irreparably broken sink into love.

“I must say,” Otto Frank said on the video in his accented English, “I was very much surprised by the deep thoughts A nne had.”

A nd then we were kissing. My hand let go of the oxygen cart and I reached up for his neck, and he pulled me up by my waist onto my

tiptoes. A s his parted lips met mine, I started to feel breathless in a new and fascinating way. The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I really liked my body; this cancer-ruined thing I’d spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle, worth

the chest tubes and the PICC lines and the ceaseless bodily betrayal of the tumors.

“It was quite a different A nne I had known as my daughter. She never really showed this kind of inner feeling,” Otto Frank continued.

The kiss lasted forever as Otto Frank kept talking from behind me. “A nd my conclusion is,” he said, “since I had been in very good terms

with A nne, that most parents don’t know really their children.”

I realized that my eyes were closed and opened them. A ugustus was staring at me, his blue eyes closer to me than they’d ever been, and

behind him, a crowd of people three deep had sort of circled around us. They were angry, I thought. Horrified. These teenagers, with their

hormones, making out beneath a video broadcasting the shattered voice of a former father.

I pulled away from A ugustus, and he snuck a peck onto my forehead as I stared down at my Chuck Taylors. A nd then they started

clapping. A ll the people, all these adults, just started clapping, and one shouted “Bravo!” in a European accent. A ugustus, smiling, bowed.

Laughing, I curtsied ever so slightly, which was met with another round of applause.

We made our way downstairs, letting all the adults go down first, and right before we got to the café (where blessedly an elevator took us

back down to ground level and the gift shop) we saw pages of A nne’s diary, and also her unpublished book of quotations. The quote book

happened to be turned to a page of Shakespeare quotations. For who so firm that cannot be seduced? she’d written.

Lidewij drove us back to the Filosoof. Outside the hotel, it was drizzling and A ugustus and I stood on the brick sidewalk slowly getting wet.

A ugustus: “You probably need some rest.”

Me: “I’m okay.”

A ugustus: “Okay.” (Pause.) “What are you thinking about?”

Me: “You.”

A ugustus: “What about me?”

Me: “‘I do not know which to prefer, / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendos, / The blackbird whistling / Or just after.’”

A ugustus: “God, you are sexy.”

Me: “We could go to your room.”

A ugustus: “I’ve heard worse ideas.”

We squeezed into the tiny elevator together. Every surface, including the floor, was mirrored. We had to pull the door to shut ourselves in and then the old thing creaked slowly up to the second floor. I was tired and sweaty and worried that I generally looked and smelled gross, but even so I kissed him in that elevator, and then he pulled away and pointed at the mirror and said, “Look, infinite Hazels.”

“Some infinities are larger than other infinities,” I drawled, mimicking Van Houten.

“What an assclown,” A ugustus said, and it took all that time and more just to get us to the second floor. Finally the elevator lurched to a halt, and he pushed the mirrored door open. When it was half open, he winced in pain and lost his grip on the door for a second.

“You okay?” I asked.

A fter a second, he said, “Yeah, yeah, door’s just heavy, I guess.” He pushed again and got it open. He let me walk out first, of course,

but then I didn’t know which direction to walk down the hallway, and so I just stood there outside the elevator and he stood there, too, his face still contorted, and I said again, “Okay?”

“Just out of shape, Hazel Grace. A ll is well.”

We were just standing there in the hallway, and he wasn’t leading the way to his room or anything, and I didn’t know where his room

was, and as the stalemate continued, I became convinced he was trying to figure out a way not to hook up with me, that I never should have

suggested the idea in the first place, that it was unladylike and therefore had disgusted A ugustus Waters, who was standing there looking at me unblinking, trying to think of a way to extricate himself from the situation politely. A nd then, after forever, he said, “It’s above my knee and it just tapers a little and then it’s just skin. There’s a nasty scar, but it just looks like—”

“What?” I asked.

“My leg,” he said. “Just so you’re prepared in case, I mean, in case you see it or what—”

“Oh, get over yourself,” I said, and took the two steps I needed to get to him. I kissed him, hard, pressing him against the wall, and I

kept kissing him as he fumbled for the room key.

We crawled into the bed, my freedom circumscribed some by the oxygen, but even so I could get on top of him and take his shirt off and

taste the sweat on the skin below his collarbone as I whispered into his skin, “I love you, A ugustus Waters,” his body relaxing beneath mine as he heard me say it. He reached down and tried to pull my shirt off, but it got tangled in the tube. I laughed.

* * *

“How do you do this every day?” he asked as I disentangled my shirt from the tubes. Idiotically, it occurred to me that my pink underwear

didn’t match my purple bra, as if boys even notice such things. I crawled under the covers and kicked out of my jeans and socks and then

watched the comforter dance as beneath it, A ugustus removed first his jeans and then his leg.

* * *

We were lying on our backs next to each other, everything hidden by the covers, and after a second I reached over for his thigh and let my

hand trail downward to the stump, the thick scarred skin. I held the stump for a second. He flinched. “It hurts?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

He flipped himself onto his side and kissed me. “You’re so hot,” I said, my hand still on his leg.

“I’m starting to think you have an amputee fetish,” he answered, still kissing me. I laughed.

“I have an A ugustus Waters fetish,” I explained.

The whole affair was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor

particularly ecstatic. There were a lot of condomy problems that I did not get a particularly good look at. No headboards were broken. No

screaming. Honestly, it was probably the longest time we’d ever spent together without talking.

Only one thing followed type: A fterward, when I had my face resting against A ugustus’s chest, listening to his heart pound, A ugustus

said, “Hazel Grace, I literally cannot keep my eyes open.”

“Misuse of literality,” I said.

“No,” he said. “So. Tired.”

His face turned away from me, my ear pressed to his chest, listening to his lungs settle into the rhythm of sleep. A fter a while, I got up, dressed, found the Hotel Filosoof stationery, and wrote him a love letter:

Dearest A ugustus,

yrs,

Hazel Grace

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The next morning, our last full day in Amsterdam, Mom and Augustus and I walked the half block from the hotel to the Vondelpark, where we found a café in the shadow of the Dutch national film museum. Over lattes—which, the waiter explained to us, the Dutch called “wrong

coffee” because it had more milk than coffee—we sat in the lacy shade of a huge chestnut tree and recounted for Mom our encounter with the

great Peter Van Houten. We made the story funny. You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice: A ugustus, slumped in the café chair, pretended to be the tongue-tied, word-slurring Van Houten who could not so much as

push himself out of his chair; I stood up to play a me all full of bluster and machismo, shouting, “Get up, you fat ugly old man!”

“Did you call him ugly?” A ugustus asked.

“Just go with it,” I told him.

“I’m naht uggy. You’re the uggy one, nosetube girl.”

“You’re a coward!” I rumbled, and A ugustus broke character to laugh. I sat down. We told Mom about the A nne Frank House, leaving out

the kissing.

“Did you go back to chez Van Houten afterward?” Mom asked.

A ugustus didn’t even give me time to blush. “Nah, we just hung out at a café. Hazel amused me with some Venn diagram humor.” He

glanced at me. God, he was sexy.

“Sounds lovely,” she said. “Listen, I’m going to go for a walk. Give the two of you time to talk,” she said at Gus, an edge in it. “Then

maybe later we can go for a tour on a canal boat.”

“Um, okay?” I said. Mom left a five-euro note under her saucer and then kissed me on the top of the head, whispering, “I love love love

you,” which was two more loves than usual.

Gus motioned down to the shadows of the branches intersecting and coming apart on the concrete. “Beautiful, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Such a good metaphor,” he mumbled.

“Is it now?” I asked.

“The negative image of things blown together and then blown apart,” he said. Before us, hundreds of people passed, jogging and biking

and Rollerblading. A msterdam was a city designed for movement and activity, a city that would rather not travel by car, and so inevitably I felt excluded from it. But God, was it beautiful, the creek carving a path around the huge tree, a heron standing still at the water’s edge, searching for a breakfast amid the millions of elm petals floating in the water.

But A ugustus didn’t notice. He was too busy watching the shadows move. Finally, he said, “I could look at this all day, but we should go

to the hotel.”

“Do we have time?” I asked.

He smiled sadly. “If only,” he said.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He nodded back in the direction of the hotel.

We walked in silence, A ugustus a half step in front of me. I was too scared to ask if I had reason to be scared.

So there is this thing called Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Basically, this guy A braham Maslow became famous for his theory that certain

needs must be met before you can even have other kinds of needs. It looks like this:

Once your needs for food and water are fulfilled, you move up to the next set of needs, security, and then the next and the next, but the

important thing is that, according to Maslow, until your physiological needs are satisfied, you can’t even worry about security or social needs, let alone “self-actualization,” which is when you start to, like, make art and think about morality and quantum physics and stuff.

A ccording to Maslow, I was stuck on the second level of the pyramid, unable to feel secure in my health and therefore unable to reach for

love and respect and art and whatever else, which is, of course, utter horseshit: The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.

Maslow’s pyramid seemed to imply that I was less human than other people, and most people seemed to agree with him. But not

A ugustus. I always thought he could love me because he’d once been sick. Only now did it occur to me that maybe he still was.

We arrived in my room, the Kierkegaard. I sat down on the bed expecting him to join me, but he hunkered down in the dusty paisley chair.

That chair. How old was it? Fifty years?

I felt the ball in the base of my throat hardening as I watched him pull a cigarette from his pack and stick it between his lips. He leaned back and sighed. “Just before you went into the ICU, I started to feel this ache in my hip.”

“No,” I said. Panic rolled in, pulled me under.

He nodded. “So I went in for a PET scan.” He stopped. He yanked the cigarette out of his mouth and clenched his teeth.

Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who loved me, so I knew what A ugustus was doing. You clench

your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but A Sadness in their lives, and you must not become a mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you

swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile.

He flashed his crooked smile, then said, “I lit up like a Christmas tree, Hazel Grace. The lining of my chest, my left hip, my liver,

everywhere.”

Everywhere. That word hung in the air awhile. We both knew what it meant. I got up, dragging my body and the cart across carpet that

was older than A ugustus would ever be, and I knelt at the base of the chair and put my head in his lap and hugged him by the waist.

He was stroking my hair. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” he said, his voice calm. “Your mom must know. The way she looked at me. My mom must’ve just told her or

something. I should’ve told you. It was stupid. Selfish.”

I knew why he hadn’t said anything, of course: the same reason I hadn’t wanted him to see me in the ICU. I couldn’t be mad at him for

even a moment, and only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending

fragmentation: I couldn’t unlove A ugustus Waters. A nd I didn’t want to.

“It’s not fair,” I said. “It’s just so goddamned unfair.”

“The world,” he said, “is not a wish-granting factory,” and then he broke down, just for one moment, his sob roaring impotent like a clap

of thunder unaccompanied by lightning, the terrible ferocity that amateurs in the field of suffering might mistake for weakness. Then he pulled me to him and, his face inches from mine, resolved, “I’ll fight it. I’ll fight it for you. Don’t you worry about me, Hazel Grace. I’m okay. I’ll find a way to hang around and annoy you for a long time.”

I was crying. But even then he was strong, holding me tight so that I could see the sinewy muscles of his arms wrapped around me as he

said, “I’m sorry. You’ll be okay. It’ll be okay. I promise,” and smiled his crooked smile.

He kissed my forehead, and then I felt his powerful chest deflate just a little. “I guess I had a hamartia after all.”

A fter a while, I pulled him over to the bed and we lay there together as he told me they’d started palliative chemo, but he gave it up to go to A msterdam, even though his parents were furious. They’d tried to stop him right up until that morning, when I heard him screaming that his body belonged to him. “We could have rescheduled,” I said.

“No, we couldn’t have,” he answered. “A nyway, it wasn’t working. I could tell it wasn’t working, you know?”

I nodded. “It’s just bullshit, the whole thing,” I said.

“They’ll try something else when I get home. They’ve always got a new idea.”

“Yeah,” I said, having been the experimental pincushion myself.

“I kind of conned you into believing you were falling in love with a healthy person,” he said.

I shrugged. “I’d have done the same to you.”

“No, you wouldn’t’ve, but we can’t all be as awesome as you.” He kissed me, then grimaced.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

“No. Just.” He stared at the ceiling for a long time before saying, “I like this world. I like drinking champagne. I like not smoking. I like the sound of Dutch people speaking Dutch. A nd now . . . I don’t even get a battle. I don’t get a fight.”

“You get to battle cancer,” I said. “That is your battle. A nd you’ll keep fighting,” I told him. I hated it when people tried to build me up to prepare for battle, but I did it to him, anyway. “You’ll . . . you’ll . . . live your best life today. This is your war now.” I despised myself for the cheesy sentiment, but what else did I have?

“Some war,” he said dismissively. “What am I at war with? My cancer. A nd what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of

me. They’re made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner.”

“Gus,” I said. I couldn’t say anything else. He was too smart for the kinds of solace I could offer.

“Okay,” he said. But it wasn’t. A fter a moment, he said, “If you go to the Rijksmuseum, which I really wanted to do—but who are we

kidding, neither of us can walk through a museum. But anyway, I looked at the collection online before we left. If you were to go, and

hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You’d see Jesus on the cross, and you’d see a dude getting

stabbed in the neck, and you’d see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody

biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.”

A braham Maslow, I present to you A ugustus Waters, whose existential curiosity dwarfed that of his well-fed, well-loved, healthy brethren.

While the mass of men went on leading thoroughly unexamined lives of monstrous consumption, A ugustus Waters examined the collection of

the Rijksmuseum from afar.

“What?” A ugustus asked after a while.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence, didn’t know how to. “I’m just very, very fond of you.”

He smiled with half his mouth, his nose inches from mine. “The feeling is mutual. I don’t suppose you can forget about it and treat me

like I’m not dying.”

“I don’t think you’re dying,” I said. “I think you’ve just got a touch of cancer.”

He smiled. Gallows humor. “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up,” he said.

“A nd it is my privilege and my responsibility to ride all the way up with you,” I said.

“Would it be absolutely ludicrous to try to make out?”

“There is no try,” I said. “There is only do.”