“I saw them up at the train station as I was coming home,” my grandfather said. “He must be bringing it to the zoo.”
The young man had seen us, and as he inched back along the tramway he nodded and smiled, pulled down on his cap. Every so often, he would take something out of the bag and hold it out to the elephant, and the elephant would lift its trunk from the ground, grip the offering, and loll it back between the yellow sabers of its tusks.
Later on, we would read about how some soldiers had found him near death at the site of an abandoned circus; about how, despite everything, despite closure and bankruptcy, the zoo director had said bring him in, bring him in and eventually the kids will see him. For months the newspapers would run a picture of him, standing stark-ribbed in his new pen at the zoo, an advert of times to come, a pledge of the zoo’s future, the undeniable end of the war.
My grandfather and I stopped at the bus station, and the elephant passed, slow, graceful, enchanted by the food in the young man’s hand. The moon threw a tangle of light into the long, soft hairs sticking up out of his trunk and under his chin. The mouth was open, and the tongue lay in it like a wet arm.
“No one will ever believe this,” I said.
My grandfather said: “What?”
“None of my friends will ever believe it.”
My grandfather looked at me like he’d never seen me before, like he couldn’t believe I was his. Even in our estrangement, he had never quite looked at me that way, and afterward he never did again.
“You must be joking,” he said. “Look around. Think for a moment. It’s the middle of the night, not a soul anywhere. In this city, at this time. Not a dog in the gutter. Empty. Except for this elephant—and you’re going to tell your idiot friends about it? Why? Do you think they’ll understand it? Do you think it will matter to them?”
He left me behind and walked on after the elephant. I stood with my hands in my pockets. I felt my voice had fallen through and through me, and I couldn’t summon it back to tell him or myself anything at all. The elephant was moving forward along the Boulevard. I followed it. A block down, my grandfather had stopped beside a broken bench, was waiting for the elephant. I caught up with him first, and the two of us stood side by side, in silence, my face burning, his breath barely audible. The young man did not look at us again.
Eventually, my grandfather said: “You must understand, this is one of those moments.”
“What moments?”
“One of those moments you keep to yourself,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I said. “Why?”
“We’re in a war,” he said. “The story of this war—dates, names, who started it, why—that belongs to everyone. Not just the people involved in it, but the people who write newspapers, politicians thousands of miles away, people who’ve never even been here or heard of it before. But something like this—this is yours. It belongs only to you. And me. Only to us.” He put his hands behind his back and ambled along slowly, kicking the polished tips of his shoes up as he walked, exaggerating his movements so they would slow him down. No thought of turning around, of going home. Down the Boulevard for as long as the elephant and his boy would tolerate us. My grandfather said: “You have to think carefully about where you tell it, and to whom. Who deserves to hear it? Your grandma? Zóra? Certainly not that clown you carry on with at the docks.”
That stung. “He’s gone,” I said quietly.
“I would like to be able to say that I’m sorry,” my grandfather said.
“Well, I am,” I said. “He was drafted.” This I said to make him feel guilty; I didn’t know for certain.
For a while, neither of us said anything. The elephant’s breathing fell in around us. It was like being inside an engine room. Every few minutes, it would let out a high, hollow, insistent whistle, the barest threat of impatience, and when it did this the young man held the food out more quickly.
Then I asked my grandfather, “Do you have stories like that?”
“I do now.”
“No, I mean from before,” I said.
I saw him thinking about it. He thought for a long time while we walked with the elephant. Perhaps under slightly different circumstances, he might have told me about the tiger’s wife. Instead, he told me about the deathless man.
Hands behind his back, walking in the shadow of our elephant, my grandfather said:
This is late summer, ’54. Not ’55, because that’s the year I met your grandma. I am first triage assistant for the battalion, and my apprentice, God rest him, or intern as you would call it, is Dominic Lazlo, a brilliant little Hungarian fellow who has paid a lot of money to study at our University, and who doesn’t speak a word of the language. God knows why he’s not in Paris or London, he’s that apt with a scalpel. Not apt at much else, though. At any rate: a call comes in from this village, where there is a sickness. Some people have died, and those still living are afraid—there is a terrible cough, and blood on their pillows in the morning. This is about as mysterious to me as an empty milk saucer when there’s a big, fat cat in the room, and the cat has a ring of milk on its whiskers and everyone is asking where the milk is.
So. We hitch a wagon ride to this village. The man who greets us is called Marek. He is the son of the big man in town, and has been to University. He is the man who sent the wire asking us to come. He is short and stocky, and he leads us through the village and into his father’s house. Marek’s sister is this fat, pleasant-looking woman, very much what you’d expect. She gives us coffee and bread with cheese, a nice change from all the porridge we’ve been eating back at barracks. Then Marek says, “Gentlemen, something new is at hand.” I expect he will say: the epidemic’s gotten worse, more death, mass hysteria. I am partly right, especially about the hysteria.
Apparently, this is how it stands: a man has died, and there has been a funeral. At the funeral, the man, who is called Gavo, sits up in his coffin and asks for water. It is an immense surprise. Three o’clock in the afternoon, the procession is following the casket up the churchyard slope to the plot. First, there’s the noise of the body sliding in the coffin, and when the lid slides off there he is, this man Gavo, as pale and blue-faced as the day they found him, floating belly up in a pond some way from the town. Gavo sits up in his pressed suit, hat in hand, folded purple napkin in his pocket. An immense surprise. High up, held aloft in his coffin like a man in a boat, he looks around the procession with red eyes and says: “Water.” That is all. By the time the pallbearers have realized what’s happened, by the time they’ve dropped the coffin and fled like crazy men into the church, this man Gavo has already fallen back into the casket.
That is what Marek tells us regarding this new development.
From where we are sitting in Marek’s house, I can see out the open door and down the road leading across the field and through the churchyard. I have only just noticed that the town is very empty, and that, at the door of the little church, there is a man with a pistol—the undertaker, Marek tells me, Aran Darić, who hasn’t slept for six days. I am already thinking it would be far more productive to help this man Aran Dari?.
Meanwhile, Marek is still telling the story, and in it the man Gavo does not rise from his coffin again. This is helped by the fact that some unknown member of the funeral procession fires two bullets from an army pistol into the back of Gavo’s head while he is sitting up in the coffin right after the pallbearers drop it. Never mind why someone is so very prepared to fire a gun at a funeral. Marek only tells this part of the story after he has had two or three glasses of plum brandy.
I am taking notes this whole time, and wondering about how this Gavo ties into the sickness I am here to treat. When Marek mentions the two bullets, I put my pencil down and say: “So, the man was not dead?”
“No, no,” Marek says. “Most assuredly, Gavo was dead.”
“Before the bullets were fired?” I ask him, because it seems to me that this whole business is taking a different route,
and now they’re just making things up to cover murder.
Marek shrugs and says: “It is a surprise, I know.”
I continue to write, but what I am writing does not make much sense, and Marek looks with interest across the table and reads what I am writing upside down. Dominic, who I suspect has not understood any of this, is staring intently at me for some sort of explanation.
I say: “We will have to see the body.”
Marek’s hands are on the table, and I can see that he is a man who bites his nails when he is nervous. He has been biting them a lot recently. He says to me: “Are you sure this is necessary?”
“We will have to see it.”
“I don’t know about that, Doctor.”
I have been making a list of all the people I want to speak with—anyone who is sick, all the family members of this revenant fellow, Gavo, and especially the priest and the undertaker, who are most likely to know about how ill this man was before he was shot. I say to Marek: “Mr. Marek, many people are at risk here. If this man was sick—”
“He was not sick.”
“I’m sorry?”
“He was perfectly healthy.”
Dominic is looking in abject confusion from Marek to myself. He has known me long enough to process that the expression on my face is probably not one of delight, and he is obviously puzzled by what is going on. Marek himself doesn’t look too good, either. I say: “Very well, then, Mr. Marek, I will tell you how I see it. As far as the village goes, including Mr. Gavo himself, I am confident that my findings will probably arrive at a diagnosis of consumption—tuberculosis. It is consistent with the symptoms you’ve described to me—the bloody cough and so forth. I would like to have all the people who are sick assembled in your town hospital, as quickly as possible, and I would also like to place this town under quarantine until we can assess the extent of the illness.”
And here, he catches me off guard, because he says sharply, “What do you mean, tuberculosis?” He looks very distraught. And I would expect him to be distraught at tuberculosis, but I would expect a different kind of alarm—the way he looks at me, I feel like my diagnosis doesn’t suit him, like it’s inadequate, not severe enough for him.
Marek says: “Couldn’t it be something else?”
I tell him no, not with these symptoms, not with people falling dead one by one and leaving bloody pillows behind. I tell him that it will be all right, that I will send out for medicine, for nurses and another city physician to help me.
But he says: “Yes, but what if that doesn’t help?”
“It will.”
“If it’s tuberculosis,” he says. “If you’re right.”
“I am not entirely certain where this is going.”
“What if you’re wrong—what if it’s something else?” Marek says. By this time, he is very agitated, and he says, “I don’t think you understand, sir—I really doubt you understand.”
“Well, tell me about it,” I say.
“Well,” says Marek. “There is blood on our pillows. And … there was blood on the lapels of Gavo’s coat.”
“Because you shot him.”
Marek almost falls out of his seat. “I didn’t shoot him, Doctor, he was already dead!”
I am scribbling again, mostly just to look official. Dominic is sweating in frustration. I say: “I will need to speak with his family.”
“He has no family. He’s not from around here.”
“Then why was he buried here?”
“He was some sort of peddler from far away, we didn’t know anything about him. We wanted to do right by him.”
To me, this is becoming more and more frustrating—but I think: maybe that is why they are all suddenly coming down with tuberculosis, maybe he was infected and brought it in, even though he seemed perfectly healthy to them. But then, he has only been here for a short time, certainly not enough time to get the whole village sick—but obviously long enough for them to shoot him in the back of the head. “Who will give me permission to dig up the body?”
“You don’t need it.” Marek is wringing his hands. “We nailed the coffin shut, and then we put him in the church. He’s still in there.”
I look through the door again, and, sure enough, there is Aran Darić, standing at the church door, pistol in hand. Just in case. “I see.”
“No,” Marek says. He is almost crying, and he is wringing his hat furiously in his hands. Dominic has all but given up. Marek says: “No, you don’t see. People with blood on their clothes are sitting up in coffins and then there is blood on our pillows in the morning. I don’t believe you see at all.”
So there we are, Dominic and I, standing in the little stone church at Bistrina, and the coffin of the man called Gavo is there, lying at an angle from the door, as if it’s been shoved in pretty quickly. It’s a dusty wooden coffin. The church is stone, and quiet. It smells of sandalwood and wax, and there is an icon of the Virgin above the door. The windows are blue glass. It is a beautiful church, but it is obvious that no one has been in it for a long time—the candles are all out, and this fellow Gavo’s coffin is covered with a few spatters of white, which the doves that live in the belfry have been dropping down on him. It is a sad thing to see, because as far as I know, this man Gavo has done nothing to deserve being shot in the back of the head at his own funeral. Twice.
After we come in, Aran Darić closes the door behind us quickly and suddenly, and for a long time everything is quiet in the little church. We’ve come in with our satchels, and we’ve also brought a crowbar to open the coffin, and we begin to realize that perhaps we should have brought in more than just the crowbar—a team of oxen, for example, because the coffin has not only been nailed shut, but also crisscrossed with extra boards across the lid, and chained around and around with what looks like a bicycle chain. Someone, probably as an afterthought, has thrown a string of garlic onto the coffin, and the heads are lying there in their paper shells.
Dominic manages to say to me, “Shame, awful shame.” Then he spits and says, “Peasants.”
And then we hear something that is altogether incredible, something you cannot even begin to appreciate because, without hearing for yourself the way it sounded in the quiet church, you won’t believe it happened. It is the sound of shuffling movement, and then, all of a sudden, a voice from the coffin, a frank, polite, slightly muffled voice that says: “Water.”
We are, of course, completely paralyzed. Dominic Lazlo stands beside me, gripping the crowbar in a white fist. His breathing is slow and shallow, and his mustache is beginning to sweat, and he is swearing quietly again and again in Hungarian. I am on the verge of saying something when the voice—same tone, very passive, just asking—says: “Pardon me: water, please.”
And then quick, quick, he’s alive, open the coffin! Dominic Lazlo is thrusting the edge of the crowbar under the lid, and I am on my knees trying to yank off the bicycle chain. We’re hammering away at the coffin like we’re trying to pry the whole thing to pieces, and Dominic has his foot against the side and he’s heaving down on the length of the crowbar like a madman, and I am not helping by saying, push push push. And then the lid, creaking like bone, snaps off and there he is, the man Gavo lying back against the cushions with his folded purple napkin, looking slightly dusty but otherwise unharmed.
We grab him by the arms and pull him into a sitting position, which, in retrospect, isn’t something I recommend you ever do with someone who’s been shot in the back of the head, because who knows what’s kept him alive. But I think, how extraordinary. I have been expecting this man to look older, white hair, maybe a mustache.
But Gavo is young, thirty at most, and he has a fine head of dark hair and a pleased expression on his face. It is hard to believe that a man who has just been pulled out of a coffin where he has spent several days can look anything short of exuberant; but that’s the extraordinary thing, he just looks very pleased, sitting there, with his hands in his lap.
“Do you know your
name?” I ask him. There is still a lot of urgency for me, and so I widen his eyes with my fingers and peer inside. He looks at me with interest.
“Oh yes,” he says. “Gavo.” He sits there patiently while I feel his forehead and take his pulse. Then he says: “I’m sorry, but I would really like some water.”
Half a minute later, Dominic takes off running through the village to the well, and allegedly passes Marek, who shouts, “I told you, didn’t I?” after him. In the meantime, I am opening my medical bag and taking out my things and listening to Gavo’s heart, which still beats firmly under the thin rib bones of his chest. He asks me who I am, and I tell him I’m Dr. Leandro from such and such battalion, and not to worry. Dominic comes back with the water, and, as Gavo tips the bucket to drink, I notice the drops of blood on the coffin pillow, and Dominic and I both look around the side of Gavo’s head. And sure enough, there they are, two bullets, sitting like metal eyes in the nest of Gavo’s hair. Now there is the question of, shall we risk moving him or perform the excision right here—and, should we perform the excision at all, because what if we pull the bullets out and his brains come running after them like undercooked eggs? And then we have a funeral after all, and have to try the whole village for murder, or else we get implicated somehow, and then the whole thing ends in disaster for everybody.
So I ask him: “How do you feel, Gavo?”
He has finished the bucket and he puts it down on his knees. He looks suddenly refreshed, and he says: “Much better, thank you.” Then he looks at Dominic and thanks him in Hungarian and commends him on his masterful handling of the crowbar.
I am careful about what I say next. “You have been shot in the head twice,” I say. “I need to take you to the hospital so we can decide how best to treat you.”
But Gavo is cheerful. “No, thank you,” he says. “It is very late already, I should be on my way.” And he grips the sides of the coffin and pulls himself out, just like that. A small cloud of dust lifts off him and falls to the ground, and he stands there in the little church, looking up at the stained glass windows and the light drifting in as if it is breaking through water.