But then the image changed, and it was Suzie—curled in the red dirt, mouthing my name with bleeding lips, assuring me that she was happy, that she didn’t blame me, that my love had been enough, although we both know this isn’t true. I blew on deeper, up and over my still body, into a future where I am past, where my daughters stand beside a gurney, drawing back the white sheet. I wouldn’t disappear entirely, would I? Someone would have to identify me. That sight would live inside my girls, twisting, howling.
And then I was back in the truck, and the truck was back on the road—my hands gripping the wheel, turning me away from the only thing I’ve ever wanted to see. I kept my eyes level with the gray chalk line of the dry horizon. Behind me, I thought I could hear my cloud, orphaned in the screaming air. I imagined the storm disintegrating, pulling apart into brown, scudding dust. Still I never eased off the gas. I couldn’t bear to watch her die out, and if she lived, I couldn’t risk becoming spellbound again. What a backward way of discovering you are loved—in the damage swath of your death. Anybody watching me flying down the highway that day would have thought I was escaping something, when really I was racing right into the whirlwind. The moment I plugged back in, the yellow phone would start ringing, and I owed my girls some answers. Rain sheeted down the cracked glass as I sped homeward. But let’s not mistake this for a happy ending. Nothing destroyed me, and nothing is over.
Black Corfu
Žrnovo, 1620
The doctor sleeps naked, which is not a widespread practice on the island of Korčula, not even in summer; as if to atone for his bared skin, his wife sleeps in a cakelike tier of bedclothes. Only she is privy to the doctor’s secret shamelessness; by daylight, he is the model of propriety. Once upon a time, his wife found this and other bedroom vagaries of the doctor’s irresistibly appealing. Tonight he startles awake from his nightmare to find her surfacing from yards and yards of white linen. She rises like a woman clawing out of snow.
I have never lost a patient before…
He studies the tiny halved heart of his wife’s earlobe. Their room pulses with the moon. He can almost hear the purr of the rumor, yawning awake inside of her, stretching and extending itself. Does she believe it? Is she beginning to believe it? The naked doctor shudders. He imagines a man who resembles him exactly. That man is moving inside of his wife.
What tool can he use, to extract their rumor from her body?
The doctor’s costume is hanging on a hook. It is not nearly so frightening as the hooded uniforms worn by physicians during the Great Plague of 1529, the beaky invention of Charles de l’Orme. The doctor’s patients are safely buried under consecrated soil before they can pose any risk to him. The doctor wears a simple black smock, black surgical gloves, and his face, when he operates, is bare.
“It is not true,” says the doctor in a clear, sober voice.
His wife’s face is planked white and blue with moonlight. The one eye that he can see in profile is streaming water. She is like a stony bust granted a single attitude by her sculptor. Silently, the doctor begs her: Look my way. Crack.
It is not true.
It is not true.
What can he say, to check the rumor’s progress?
“You must promise me that you will put it out of your mind.” His voice is still his own. “You betray me by imagining me as that man.”
His wife parts her dark hair with the flats of her palm. Does this again and again, like a woman bathing under the river falls. Outside, the moon shines on with its eerie impartiality, illuminating this room, illuminating also the woods of Žrnovo. Where the doctor knows a dozen men are fanning out tonight, hunting for his patient.
“Please. Please. I performed my duty perfectly. I could never make such a mistake.”
“I am not even thinking about you. I am listening for the girls.”
She says this without turning from the door. Now the doctor hears what must have awoken her. Not his nightmare but their middle daughter’s sobbing. Ashamed, he reaches for his robe. “Let me go to her.”
The girl sits tall in the bed with white round eyes that seemed to pull in opposite directions, like panicked oxen. Her sleeping sisters bracket her, their faces slack and spit-dewed. The doctor has long suspected that his middle child is his most intelligent.
“Papa, will they punish you? Will you go to prison?”
“Who told you such a thing?”
In fact the punishment would be far worse than that, if it came.
“Nobody told me anything,” his daughter says sadly. “But I listen to what they say.”
So the rumor has penetrated the walls of his home, the mind of his child. He grows so upset that he forgets to console her and flees the room. In two hours, the dawn bells will begin to ring. Bodies will congregate at the harbor. What if the miasma of the rumor is already changing? Becoming an even-more-toxic, calumnious strain—
I will have to keep the girls indoors from now on, to prevent their further contamination. What will happen to him, if he cannot stop the rumor from spreading? He might be sent to the Venetian garrison. He might be strung up in the dark Aleppo pines before anything so official as a trial. Unofficially, of course, his punishment is well under way. A second death will only be a formality—already, his reputation has been destroyed.
Three days earlier, when this nightmare began, the doctor had never imagined how swiftly his life could be ruined. Other lives, certainly, but not his own.
* * *
The doctor had once dreamed of being the sort of doctor who helps children to walk again; instead, he found himself hobbling them. Children of all ages were carried to him on stretchers, with blue lips and seamed eyelids. A twisted plot, without a single author to blame. The disfigurement of his first dream still causes the doctor excruciating pain. As a younger man, he’d ventilated the pain through laughter. Sometimes the circumstances of his life struck him as so unbearably funny that he soared up to a blind height, laughing and laughing until his red eyes shut and spittle flecked his chin. (“Open your eyes,” his wife begged. “My love, you are frightening us—”) But it has been many years now since such an episode. Only behind the bedroom curtains does the doctor indulge such wildness today.
His wife is very proud of the doctor’s accomplishments. Because he loves her, he never shares the black joke with her. Not once does he voice an objection to the injustice of his fate, or rail against what the island has made of his ambition. Aboveground, the city physician, the chirurgo, practices medicine in his warm salon—performing salubrious bloodlettings, assisting the pretty young noblewomen with their lactation. Whereas the doctor must descend into the Neolithic caves near Žrnovo, under the cold applause of stars.
This doctor is known, more formally, as the Posthumous Surgeon of Korčula Island. Centuries after his death, he will be reverenced on Black Corfu as something more and less than a man. Everyone who has lost someone knows the doctor’s name. He operates on the dead—these are the only bodies a man of his class is permitted to touch. Before his good name was gutted by his accusers, the doctor had a perfect record. No vukodlak had been sighted on the island during his twenty-three-year tenure. Everyone slept more peacefully because of his skill—not only the dead. Whose relief was manifest in the green silence of the woods, in the depths of the cemetery air. Inside that pooling quiet he could hear, unwhispered, Thank you, Doctor. Bless you, Doctor.
These islands off the coast of Dalmatia, with their fertile twilights and their thin soils, breed a special kind of monster. A body that continues to walk after its death. Spasming emptily on, mute and blue and alone. Inhabited by air from some other world, or perhaps resuscitated by the devil’s breath. Soulless and restless and lost. Vukodlak, ukodlak, and vuk. These are several of its appellations, designed to distance a grieving family from a terribly familiar face in the woods. The face of a loved one, now bloated and emptied of light.
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br /> Korčula is entirely covered by a dark forest, rising out of the mirror-bright Adriatic like a hand gloved in green velvet. It seems to belong to some other world, lush and prehistoric. Trees peer blindly down at the water, black Dalmatian pines and soaring cypress laddering their thousand ruddy arms over the azure sea; below them grows the low macchia, that snarling undergrowth that breaks into sudden shouts of yellow and violet like the singsong joy of the mad. Korčula is the island of shipbuilders and explorers, the fabled birthplace of Marco Polo. That the dead also wander here should perhaps surprise no one. When the Greeks established a colony here in the sixth century B.C., they named the island for its pitch-colored forests. Korkyra Melaina. Corcyra Nigra. Black Corfu. Black Korčula.
The doctor was born during the longest period of Venetian rule over Korčula, a century before the republic would fall to Napoleon. He was the child of the child of a kidnapped child. Human trafficking was outlawed in the kingdom of Venice in the year of our Lord 940. In 1214, the Statute of Korčula Town abolished slavery. The doctor’s grandfather was a cook who had escaped from the galley kitchen of a Portuguese ship and oared with seven others through driving winds to reach Black Corfu’s shoreline. They lived as freedmen at the base of the cliffs, in the poorest quarter of the stone-walled city, in dwellings that had the fragile tenacity of the red and blue barnacles spiraling out of the rocks. They paid rent to the hereditary counts.
All this was relayed to the doctor by his mother in whispers, like a nightmare half remembered. Because of her skin color and her station, the counts of Korčula and their livid offspring would not touch her; the nobles attended a private Mass in Saint Mark’s Cathedral to avoid the threat of such contact. And yet she grew old loving the sight of her face in the mirror. She pushed through the market stalls in a perfume of oblivion, ignoring the catcalling sailors, the curled lips of the upper-class women, whose chins reminded her son of the tiny, hard nipples on lemons. All stares seemed to pass painlessly through his mother, like blades slicing at water. She resented no one, to her son’s amazement. However, by the age of seven, trailing her elbow, he’d learned how to gulp back rage. He knew the taste of fury as it sank into the body, that nasal salt of swallowed things.
His mother did not chafe against their lot, or even seem to experience it as a limit. Why not? Why not? I am smarter than my mother, this child decided, at an earlier age than most.
Not until he was a father himself did the doctor understand that her docility had been a strategy. Always, she had been protecting him. He’d missed the teeth inside his mother’s smile, hadn’t he? Now that he was a father, he could guess at the strength it must have taken to raise dark-skinned children on this island, under the flag of an unequal truce—they were accepted as Korčulans so long as they remained in their separate sphere and lived invisibly, beyond rebuke. To survive here required one to take sips of air; the sky belonged to the nobles. From his crabhole in the rocks, the doctor watched the gold and scarlet clouds cluster over the hills. The wide sky was not a birthright he could claim for himself, or for his children.
Although sometimes he sees the early stars and allows himself to feel otherwise. Isn’t it possible that a posthumous surgeon might be promoted from his cave to the upper world? Ambroise Paré, a barber’s apprentice, became surgeon to the kings of France. He made the ascent by treating battlefield wounds with rosewater and turpentine, instead of scalding wounded men with boiling oil. Perhaps the doctor will be granted a similar opportunity to impress the Council of Ten. To restore the sick to health would have been his preference. But to keep the dead in their coffins is certainly a valuable service to the Republic of Venice—La Serenissima, the “Most Serene.”
Why had the doctor grown up expecting something different than his childhood for his own children? What did he ingest as a boy that let him dream up such a life? His mother had died still wondering this. On Black Corfu, there is dispiritingly little friction between the counts and the lower classes. A third of the men are always gone, at sea. Sailors, for all their roistering, defer to the captain’s authority. Few Korčulans whose lives overlap with the doctor’s remember, or can imagine, an alternative order to the island hierarchies, the birthday assignment of possibilities to bodies.
Her son, the future doctor, was a special case.
* * *
The new student kept looking backward at the shrinking harbor, where the ship that brought him to Black Corfu that morning was now small as a toy. His legs jerked to a stop, twin animals balking in tandem at the wide cave mouth.
“Few people on the Continent know about the dangers that a body faces after death…”
The doctor’s voice grew ever more sonorous as they moved into the dim, enormous theater. Candles descended with them, leaning out of natural sconces in the rock. Dozens of red hands were ripening along the greenish walls, waving them on.
“Yet a body is at its most defenseless at this time, orphaned in its coffin.”
“In Lastovo,” the student muttered, “we all know the dangers now. Nobody can escape the knowledge.”
Later the doctor recorded his first impression of the student in his log:
January 3, 1620. What a petulant boy they have sent me. Mere fear of the outbreak infects him, and he counts himself foremost among its victims. How terrible for you, to have your mind occupied by the suffering of others!
On Lastovo, there had been an outbreak of vukodlaci. The first in three generations. The boy described a scene out of the doctor’s nightmares. Mass exhumations, emergency surgeries performed in the open. Gravediggers undoing their handiwork, spading up dirt (“They work under the moon, and look like large rabbits digging their warren,” said the boy with plainspoken horror). Torches lipping orange syllables over the toppled stones. The only posthumous surgeon in Lastovo was nearing seventy and half blind; in any case, no single surgeon could attend to so many patients at once. And so this boy had been sent here to learn a new trade.
A quarter mile deeper into the caves, the new student introduced himself: his name was Jure da Mosto, and he belonged to one of the most tightly closed aristocracies in all of Europe. Thirteen families have controlled Lastovo for generations. These patricians are identical, in their threatening languor, to those pale island raptors wheeling over the trees, their idle talons tearing at the seafaring clouds.
“A face like yours must irritate your parents, eh?” the doctor offered mildly.
Despite the Italian ancestry he claimed, the boy’s face would always raise suspicions. Who could account for the spiraling colors of the deep past, and where and when they might resurface? Jure da Mosto looked no older than sixteen. He had the stink of some precocious failure on him. The doctor thought: It would be a joy to be wrong about even one of them. They’d sent him another reject, perhaps. A dropout from the Ragusa hospital. The family disappointment. Councilmen too often assume that any half-wit can hack away at the dead. Nobody but the posthumous surgeons themselves, a subterranean guild, understand what is required. There is a necessary magic to the practice, in addition to its science. Something ill-expressed in language—a governing instinct that leads one to the right depth when making the first cut. This cannot be taught.
“What do you mean—a face like mine?”
“So…overcast. So dark with worry.”
The doctor had very little patience for the boy’s fear. Even less for his self-pity.
“Once upon a time, I also dreamed of being another sort of man…”
The gray-faced student looked startled awake.
“Many of us would have preferred a different life…”
The doctor had worked his entire life to ascend to this rank. And yet the pinnacle of his achievement would still be considered, by this boy’s people, to be a valley of the shadow. To become a posthumous surgeon is a terrible miscarriage of fortune, for one of their kind.
* * *
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The boy from Lastovo confessed that he has never been in a cave before.
It looked as if the green stone was lighting the glass walls of the lantern, and not the other way around. Emerald moisture slid down the honeycomb of light. These Korčulan caves have been inhabited since the Ice Age: housing Neolithic tribes, sheltering Illyrian sailors. Since the medieval period, the largest hall has been a medical theater. Rock awning goes sprawling over the posthumous surgeons. Bodies are delivered by runners paid by the families, who take pains to avoid an encounter with the doctor. By some geologic fluke the stalactites here grow to an even length. White calcite, a bright wishbone chandelier over the theater. A patient was waiting quietly on the operating table, a pearl comb glinting in her red hair.
On the last leg of the descent their echoes lapped into one voice:
“What disease does a posthumous doctor treat?”
“Unnatural Life.”
* * *
All bodies rotting under the moon run the risk of becoming vukodlaci. How does a posthumous surgeon protect a corpse from this fate?
By severing the hamstrings. Few think of the humble hamstring as the umbilicus that tethers a corpse to our spinning world. But cut that cord, and no body can be roused to walk the earth. Hamstrung cattle are crippled for life, the doctor reminded Jure. On the other side of dawn, our patients are safely moored in their coffins, protected against every temptation to rise up.
Orange World and Other Stories Page 13