“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,
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.”
