Authors: Tea Obreht
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.
I get up and I push him back down, and I say to him: “Please don’t do that again, you are in a serious condition, very serious.”
“It is not so serious,” he says, smiling. He reaches around and fingers the bullets in the back of his head, and the whole time he is smiling at me rather like a cow. I can picture his fingers moving around on the bullets, and the whole time he is touching them I am reaching for his hands to stop him, and I can imagine his eyes moving around, in and out of his head, as the bullets push his brains about. Which, of course, isn’t happening. But you can see it all the same. Then he says: “I know this is probably very frightening for you, Doctor, but this is not the first time this has happened.”
“I’m sorry?” I say.
He tells me: “I was once shot in the eye at Plovotje, during a battle.”
“Last year?” I say, because there was a political skirmish out at Plovotje, and several people died, and moreover I believe him to be mistaken about the eye, because neither of his eyes is missing.
“No, no, no,” he says. “In the war.”
This other battle at Plovotje, in the war, was something like fifteen years ago, so this is not impossible. But still, there is the matter of his having both eyes, and I have decided, by now, that there is nothing to do but ignore him, and I tell myself that yes, it is true, the bullets have made mincemeat of his brains. I tell him I know he is in great pain, and that these things are hard to accept. But he is smiling so persistently that I stop and look at him hard. Perhaps it is brain damage, perhaps it is shock, perhaps he has lost too much blood. Suffice it to say that he is looking at us with such profound calm that Dominic whispers a question to him in Hungarian, and even I know he is asking whether this man is a vampire. Gavo merely laughs—pleasant, polite as always—and Dominic looks like he is about to cry.
“You misunderstand,” Gavo says. “It’s not a supernatural matter—I cannot die.”
I am dumbfounded. “How do you mean?”
“I am not permitted,” he says.
“I’m sorry?”
“I am not permitted,” he says again. Like he is saying,
for my health, I am not permitted to dance the kolo, or to marry a fat woman
.
Something makes me ask: “Then how were you drowned?”
“I wasn’t. As you see.”
“People in this village will swear that you were dead when they pulled you out of the water and put you in that coffin.”
“They are very nice people. Have you met Marek? His sister is a lovely woman.” He makes a pleasant, round gesture with his arms.
“How did twenty people mistake you for dead if, as you say, you were not drowned?”
“I was conversing with a certain gentleman, and he was not too happy about what I had to say, so he held me underwater,” Gavo says. “I may have passed out. Sometimes, under strain, I tire easily. These things happen.”
“A man held you underwater?” I say, and he nods. “What man?”
“A villager, no one of particular importance.”
This is becoming more and more complicated, or possibly about to become very simple, so I say: “Is he the same man who shot you?”
But Gavo says, “I really don’t know—I was shot in the back of the head.” He sees the way I am looking at him, and he says: “I feel that you and I, Doctor, are not understanding one another as we should. You see, it is not that I won’t accept death, or that I pretend it hasn’t happened and therefore I am alive. I am simply telling you that, as sure as you are sitting here in this church, in front of God and your Hungarian fellow—who will not let go of his crowbar because he still thinks I am a vampire—that I cannot die.”
“Whyever not?”
“My uncle has forbidden it.”
“Your uncle. Who is your uncle?”
“I am not disposed to say. Especially because I feel you will be laughing at me. Now”—dusting himself off again—“it is getting late, and no doubt some of your villagers will be hovering outside to see what progress you are making. Please let me up, and I will be on my way.”
“Do not get up.”
“Please do not pull my coat.”
“I forbid it. Your brains, right now, are plugged up in your head by two bullets, and if one of them dislodges, everything in there is going to come running out like pudding. I would be insane to let you up.”
“I would be insane to stay here,” he says to me in an exasperated voice. “Any minute now your Hungarian is going to go outside and call in the others, and then there will be business with garlic and stakes and things. And even though I cannot die, I have to tell you that I do not enjoy having a tent peg put in my ribs. I’ve had it before, and I do not want it again.”
“If I can promise the villagers will not be involved—if I can promise you real doctors, and a clean hospital bed, no stakes, no shouting, will you be still and let me do my work?”
He laughs at me, and I tell him I want to take him to the field hospital, some twelve kilometers away, to make sure he is properly cared for. I tell him I will send Dominic on foot to get some people to come out with the car, and that we will carry Gavo out in the coffin, and make him comfortable on the drive. I even humor him, I tell him that, if he is not going to die, he can at least get out of this church in some acceptable way, some safe way that will ensure he will not be shot at again. I tell him this because I think, on some level, that he is afraid of the man who shot him, and all the while he is looking at me with great sympathy—this great sympathy, as if this is so pleasant for him, he is so moved by my gesture, by the fact that I care so much for his plugged-up brains. He says all right, he will stay until the medics come, and I give Dominic instructions, I tell him to walk back to the field hospital and have them bring the car out with a stretcher and one of the other field surgeons. Dominic is very nervous at the idea of my staying in the church with a vampire, and I can see that he is not at all looking forward to the prospect of walking twelve kilometers in the dark, especially after what he has seen, but he agrees to do it. He will set off immediately and, on his way, he will give the nearest sentry orders to quarantine the nearest bridge so that sick people from the village cannot leave, and no one traveling in this direction can cross to stop at the village. Gavo shakes Dominic’s hand, and Dominic gives him a feeble smile, and off he goes.
Now I am alone with Gavo, and I light some of the lamps in the church, and the pigeons in the rafters are cooing and fluttering here and there above us in the darkness. I roll up my coat and I put it down like a pillow in the coffin, and then I take out my bandages and I start to bandage Gavo’s head so that the bullets will not fall out. He sits very patiently and gives me that cowlike look, and for the first time, I wonder if somehow he is going to make me feel safe and pleasant enough to fall asleep, and then I will find myself starting awake with him standing over me, growling like an animal, his eyes bulging like a rabid dog’s. You know I don’t believe in these things, Natalia, but at that moment, I find myself feeling sorry for poor Dominic, who does.
I ask Gavo about his drowning.
“Who is the man who held you underwater?” I say.
“It doesn’t matter,” Gavo says. “It doesn’t matter at all.”
“I think it may,” I tell him. “I think he may have been the man who shot you.”
“Does it matter?” Gavo says. “He hasn’t killed me.”
“Not yet,” I say.
He looks at me patiently. I am passing the bandage over one of his eyes, and now he looks like a mummy, like a mummy from one of those movies. “Not at all,” he says.
I do not want to go back to this business of deathlessness, so I say to him: “Why did he try to drown you?”
And like a shot, he answers: “Because I told him that
he
was going to die.”
Now I am thinking,
my God, I’m bandaging up a murderer, he came here to kill someone and they tried to drown him and
they shot him in the head in self-defense, and that is what this whole thing has been about. Dominic has left only a half hour ago, and I have all night to be alone with this man. Who knows what might happen?
I tell myself,
if he starts toward me, I’ll hit him in the back of the head and turn over his coffin and I’ll run like hell
.
“Did you come to kill him?” I say.
“Of course not,” Gavo says. “He was dying of tuberculosis—you’ve heard what they’re saying around the village, I’m sure. I only came to tell him, to help him, to be here when it happened. Come now, Doctor—blood on pillows, a terrible cough. What was your diagnosis even before you came here?”
I am very surprised by this. “Are you a doctor?”
“I was once, yes.”
“And now? Are you a priest?”
“Not exactly a priest, no,” he says. “But I have made it my work to make myself available to the dying and the dead.”
“Your work?”
“For my uncle,” he says. “In repayment to my uncle.”
“Is your uncle a priest?” I say.
Gavo laughs, and he says: “No, but he makes much work for priests.” I finish bandaging him up, and he still won’t tell me who his uncle is. I am beginning to suspect he may be some political radical, one of those men who have been instigating the skirmishes in the north. If that is true, I would rather not know who his uncle is.
“You may want to identify the man who tried to kill you,” I tell him. “He could hurt others.”
“I very much doubt that. I doubt anyone else is going to tell him he is about to die.”
“Well, then, I would like to know who he is, so I can give him medicine.”
“He is beyond medicine,” Gavo says. “It is very understandable that he was angry. I don’t blame him for trying to drown me.” He watches me put my things away and close up my medical bag. “People become very upset,” Gavo tells me, “when they find out they are going to die. You must know this, Doctor, you must see it all the time.”
“I suppose,” I say.
“They behave very strangely,” he says. “They are suddenly filled with life. Suddenly they want to fight for things, ask questions. They want to throw hot water in your face, or beat you senseless with an umbrella, or hit you in the head with a rock. Suddenly they remember things they have to do, people they have forgotten. All that refusal, all that resistance. Such a luxury.”
I take his temperature, and it is normal, but he sounds to me like he is getting more agitated.
“Why don’t you lie back down?” I tell him.
But he says: “I’d like some more water, please.” And out of nowhere, probably from inside the coffin, or from inside his coat pocket, he pulls out a little cup, a small white cup with a gold rim, and he holds it out to me.
I tell him I am not going out to the village well and leaving him here by himself, and he points to the vestibule and tells me that holy water will do just fine. You know me, Natalia, you know I don’t believe in these things, but you know I cross myself if I go into a church out of respect for people who do. I do not have a problem giving holy water to a man who is dying in a church. So I fill up the cup, and he drinks it, and then I give him another, and I ask him how long he has been without urinating, and he tells me he isn’t sure, but that he certainly doesn’t feel like it now. I take his blood pressure. I take his pulse. I give him more water, and eventually he agrees to lie back down, and I sit against one of the pews and I untie my shoes and think about poor Dominic. I have no inclination to doze off, but I am deep in thought—I am thinking about these people, and their epidemic, I am thinking about the bridge over the nearby river, the quarantine lanterns lit. I am thinking about why we’ve quarantined ourselves, who would come this way in the dead of night to this small, faraway village. An hour, maybe an hour and a half, goes by this way, and Gavo is making no noise inside his coffin, so I lean over him to look inside. There is something very unsettling about someone looking up at you from a coffin. He has very large, very round eyes, and they are very open. He smiles at me and he says, “Don’t worry, Doctor, I still can’t die.” I go back to sitting against the pews, and from where I am sitting I see his arms come up and he stretches them a little, and then they go back inside the coffin.