nerve fibers, those that control your personality.”
“But how do you know which ones control my behavior?”
“Well, that’s what I’ve discovered recently. Haven’t you read about me in the paper?”
“It was a friend who sent us here,” Carlisle said.
“Well, he must have seen the articles. There’s been quite a bit of press.”
“But is it safe?” Carlisle finally asked.
“As safe as many other things. Listen, I know it sounds radical. But I’ve had a man come to me who believed he was five people, not just two, and I went into his brain and fixed him up.”
“How is he now?” Einar asked.
“He lives with his mother. He’s very quiet, but happy. She was the one who brought him to me, his mother was.”
“But what would happen to me?”
“You would come to the hospital. I’d prepare you for surgery. It’s important that you’re rested and that your body isn’t weak. I’d have you come to the hospital and gain some strength before I took you into the operating room. It takes no time at all. And then you’d rest. The actual surgery, it takes only a few hours. And then in about two weeks you’d be ready to leave.”
“And from there where would I go?” Einar asked.
“Oh, but I thought you already knew that.” Dr. Buson’s foot stretched out, jiggling the cart on its casters. “You’ll have to sort out some things before you come in for the surgery. You won’t be the same after it’s over.”
“Is it really all that simple?” Carlisle said.
“Usually.”
“But who would I be after you did this?” asked Einar.
“That,” Dr. Buson said, “is something we still cannot predict. We’ll just have to see.”
Einar could hear the clack of clogs against the paving stones in the courtyard. The rain was beginning to fall harder, now tapping the window. Dr. Buson spun a little on his stool. And Carlisle continued to take notes on his pad. Outside, the nurse with the injured hand reemerged from a doorway with an oval window above it. Her hand was bound in gauze. She was laughing with her colleague, and the two girls-they were barely twenty, probably only aides-ran across the courtyard to the other side, where there was another door with an oval window just above, this one gold and bright with light and streaked with rain.
CHAPTER Eighteen
When Greta met Professor Bolk for the second time, in the early fall of 1929, she arrived with a list of questions written in a notepad with an aluminum spiral along the top. Paris was now gray, the trees shaking themselves free of their leaves. Women stepped out into the streets busy pulling gloves across their knuckles, and the shoulders of men were hunched up around their ears.
They met in a cafe on the rue St-Antoine at a table in the window that allowed Greta a view of the men and women emerging from the depths of the Metro, their faces soured by the weather. Professor Bolk was waiting for her, his thimble of espresso drained. He seemed displeased with her for arriving late; Greta offered up her excuses-a painting she couldn’t leave, the telephone ringing-while Professor Bolk sat stone-faced, scraping the underside of his thumbnail with a little stainless-steel knife.
He was handsome, Greta thought, with a long face and a chin that was dimpled like the bottom of an apple. His knees did not fit properly beneath the tabletop, which was round and stained, the marble scratched and rusted and as rough as slate. A little band of cut-out brass circled the piece of marble, and Greta found it uncomfortable to lean in to talk privately with Professor Bolk, the piece of brass pressing into the underside of her arm.
“I can help your husband,” Professor Bolk was saying. At his feet was a bag with a gold buckle and half-loop handles, and Greta wondered if it could be as simple as Professor Bolk arriving at the casita’s door with that black bag and spending a few hours alone with Einar. She told herself it wouldn’t work out like that, but she wished it could, the way she sometimes wished Carlisle would rub enough spearmint oil into his bad leg and it would heal, or the way she had wished Teddy Cross would sit in the sun long enough to burn the illness from his bones.
“But he won’t be your husband when I’m finished,” Professor Bolk continued, opening his bag. He pulled out a book covered in green mar bleized paper, the leather of the spine chipped and worn like the seat of an old reading chair.
Professor Bolk found the right page, and then he looked up, his eyes meeting Greta’s, uncaging a wingbeat in her chest. On the page was a diagram of a man’s body showing both the skeleton and the organs in a busy display of parallel and crossing lines that made Greta think of one of the Baedeker maps from
“As you can see,” Professor Bolk said, “the male pelvis is a cavity. The sex organs hang outside. In the pelvis there’s nothing much but the lines of intestine, all of which can be rearranged.”
Greta ordered a second coffee, and was suddenly struck with a desire for a dish of quartered oranges; something made her think of Pasadena.
“I’m curious about your husband’s pelvis,” Professor Bolk said. It was a strange way of putting it, Greta thought, although she liked Professor Bolk, warming to him as he told her about his training. He had studied in Vienna and Berlin, at the Charite Hospital, where he was one of the few men ever to develop specialties in both surgery and psychology. During the war, when he was a young surgeon whose legs were still growing and whose voice hadn’t dropped to its final basso timbre, he amputated more than five hundred limbs-if one counted all the fingers he chopped off in an attempt to salvage a hand half-destroyed by a grenade whose lead time was a little shorter than the captain had promised. Bolk had operated in tents whose flap doors trembled in the wind of bombs; sacrificing a leg but saving a man, all in the glow of matchlight. The ambulance runners would serve up on wood- board stretchers men with their abdomens blown apart, sliding the half-alive soldiers onto Professor Bolk’s operating table, which was still wet from the previous man’s blood. The first time Bolk received a man like that, with the middle of his body reduced to an open bowl of guts, Bolk couldn’t think of what to do. But the man was dying in front of him, the soldier’s eyes rolling in his head and begging Bolk for help. The gas tanks were almost empty, and so there was no way to put the man fully out. Instead, Bolk lay a sheet of gauze across the young man’s face and set to work.
It was winter, and hailstones were pelting the tent, and the torches were blowing out, and the corpses were stacked like firewood, and Bolk decided that if he could sort out enough of the intestines-the liver and kidneys were okay, in fact-then maybe the boy could live, although he would never shit properly again. The blood seeped up Bolk’s sleeves, and for an hour he didn’t lift the gauze from the boy’s face because, even though he was unconscious from the pain, Bolk knew he couldn’t bear to see the agony fluttering in the boy’s eyelids. Bolk sewed carefully, unable to see much. As a boy Bolk had skinned pigs, and the inside of the soldier felt no different from that of a hog: warm and slick and dense, like plunging your arm into a pot of winter stew.
As the night deepened and the shelling lifted but the freezing rain fell only harder, Bolk began to stretch what was left of the soldier’s skin over his wound. There was a nurse in a bloodied apron, Fraulein Schapers, and the patient she’d been attending had just vomited his innards on her, and then instantly died. She took half a minute to wipe her face and then joined Bolk. Together they stretched the soldier’s skin, from just beneath his sternum to the flaps of it hanging over his pelvis. Fraulein Schapers held the flesh together as Bolk ran a cord thicker than a bootlace through the soldier, pulling the skin as tight as the canvas seats of the collapsing stools in the tent with the stovepipe chimney that served as their canteen.
The young man lived, at least long enough to be loaded into an ambulance truck racked with shelves for the patients, shelves that would make Bolk think of the bakery trucks that used to careen around Gendarmen markt, delivering the daily loaves on which he would dine when he was a medical student and poor and determined to become a doctor all of Germany would admire.
“Five hundred limbs and five hundred lives,” Professor Bolk said to Greta at the cafe on the rue St-Antoine.
