“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.
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:
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 Daric, 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
