Orange World and Other Stories

by Karen Russell

Language is key, when communicating the risks posed by the vukodlaci. All posthumous surgeons take great care with their grammar. People need to know that should they cross paths with a vukodlak, this shell is not their beloved. Only the flesh has been reanimated; the soul, it is presumed, is safe with God. “An evil wind is blowing Cila’s body around” is a chilling sentence, but far less damaging to the surviving family than the deranging hope bred by “Cila walks again.”

  We do this to ensure his rest will be eternal, uninterrupted…

  We do this by the mandate of the Venetian courts, as a safeguard for all living citizenry…

  We are not injuring your beloved. Your beloved is gone. We are preventing that old horse thief, the devil, from stealing her form.

  As for what the doctor tells his own family?

  He is very careful not to frighten them.

  “Clipping the birds’ wings”—this is his preferred euphemism when speaking to the children about his work.

  “Papa does that for humans who have died.”

  “Why?” his daughters want to know. Touching one another’s shoulder blades and giggling, feeling for these secret wings.

  “To free them from their pattern. Otherwise, the song will not release them. They need to sleep, you know. Just like us.”

  But the girls are too smart for this; they know their father does something shameful, something ugly, doesn’t he? Otherwise why must he leave at night, in his black robe, for the distant caves?

  * * *

  “The hamstring extends between the hip and the knee joints.”

  For the third time, the doctor explained the surgery to Jure da Mosto.

  “We first locate the tendons at the back of the knee…”

  Jure wanted to know: Do the eyes of a cadaver never flutter open? Had there never once been—

  Never, said the doctor.

  The bug-eyed boy wiped a gloved hand across his mouth, leaving a little spider line of dew. His lips curled, as if he was repulsed by his own interest:

  “And in all cases…the surgery is a, a success?”

  “I understand that these are dark days on Lastovo. You have my every sympathy. But you should know that here on Black Corfu, no such error has ever occurred.”

  He clapped his hands, as if dismissing a horde of demons from the room.

  The surgery of the young woman took a quarter hour and was wholly unremarkable. She was the only daughter of one of the hereditary counts. From this man, the doctor would collect triple his ordinary fee. “The surgeries I perform on the wealthy pay for those for the poor,” he explained to young Jure, who was staring at the countess’s mouth. Each lip looked like a tiny folded moth. She is your age, isn’t she? the doctor thought, wondering how many bodies the boy had seen in his short lifetime. Terrible things do happen to the people in the hills, but such cases are viewed as tragedies, aberrations of nature. This poor countess died of a sickness known locally as throat rattle. The same illness had claimed dozens of lives in the doctor’s quarter, where the death of children was commonplace.

  Midway through the surgery, the student wandered away from the table, his eye caught by the gemstone sparkle in the corner of the theater. It was the doctor’s lectern, a naturally occurring pillar. It supported a priceless book, a gift from the Jesuit: a copy of the anatomical sketches of Vesalius. Jure began thumbing through the book with a pouty expression, as if he had already anticipated every flowering organ. “This is the brain, then?” He yawned.

  “Come and watch what I am doing,” the doctor snapped.

  The boy’s face went purple in the torchlight, which the doctor took as a hopeful sign. Perhaps young Jure knew enough to feel ashamed of himself.

  She had rare red hair, bright as a garnet stone, a comet that resurfaces out of her genetic line once every eight generations. The doctor had never spoken to or touched her in life, but he had seen her scarlet hair moving through the market stalls and known: the Nikoničić scion. At last, thought the doctor sadly, making the final cut, her body will be freed from its earthly orbit; her soul was already gone, he believed, safely home.

  That afternoon, they operated on an old sailor, now at anchor. The doctor drew the boy’s fingers down the hairy thigh to the sunken divot of the kneecap. Together their hands flew across a wintry isthmus of skin. They traced the muscles they would handicap. Was the boy attending to the lesson?

  The boy’s hand stiffened under the doctor’s hand.

  “Oh, God,” he said, jerking back with a shudder. “There has been some bad mistake. I do not belong down here with you. Please, I want to go home.”

  “Home” being synonymous, for this lucky young man, with the sunlit world above.

  Blessed are the living, thought the doctor with his scissors poised, who can move…

  * * *

  Animals, too, can become vukodlaci. Almost certainly, some of the birds flocking around Korčula are bloodless, caught in their old orbits. Many Dalmatian sailors have reported seeing the great mixed flocks of living and dead gulls. The undead gulls are easily identifiable. They circle the bay like dragonflies. They do not flap over the water but have a fixed-wing soar, and their cerulean feathers shine continuously, even on gray afternoons. They sing, and their song is unmistakable, weirding out over the sea.

  As a boy, the doctor dedicated himself to tending injured animals. He’d splinted gulls’ wings, freed lame foxes from traps to rehabilitate them. He begged his father to tell him stories about the physicians who cured their patients of lameness, madness, blindness, gout. He dreamed of guiding the sick back to the country of health. Physicians seemed more powerful to him than all of the saints. The miracles of saints were original events, contingent on the action of the Holy Ghost, whereas surgery was a human achievement. It could be practiced, perfected, repeated. His father had let the boy believe he would become the city physician, and it was his mother who had at last explained to her son that because of his class and the darkness of his skin, this would never happen.

  “Have you ever seen a doctor that looks like us, my son?”

  There were two doctors on the island: the city physician, a wealthy old Croat, who, it was whispered, had been unable to cure his own sterility, and the Catholic priest, the former rector of Zagreb’s Jesuit college. His skin poured forth a yellow light, and his age was unguessable; he seemed somehow to be simultaneously aglow with health and minutes shy of his death. He refused to treat those who had not first made confession. Unbeknownst to most, the Jesuit had been filling an open post, covertly severing the hamstrings of the island’s deceased.

  “Where do the doctors live?” the mother had prodded.

  “With us, on Korčula.”

  “No. Be more precise, my son. Think like them. What answer would a doctor give?”

  The doctor’s mother often spoke to her son as if she were trying to gently jostle fruit from a tree without puncturing its skin. She believed in his extraordinary intelligence and did not want to deform its natural progression.

  “They live above the rocks.”

  “Yes.”

  Where the hereditary counts of Korčula also resided, those pale rulers with belled chests and short femurs who paced their pink marble balconies in the hills. The island’s counts, including families Kanavelić, Izmaeli, Gabrijelić, and Nikoničić, reported to the Venetian Council of Ten. Together, his mother explained, they determined everything that happened on the island. And no count would permit somebody who looked like her son to treat his family.

  Heartbroken, he’d approached the Jesuit doctor to plead his case. Was it just, he asked at age thirteen, that he should be prohibited from his life’s vocation—simply because of an accident of birth?

  “I am a precocious young man,” he’d said, repeating the compliment he’d moments earlier overheard a tutor giving his thin-nosed student in the pari
sh hall. “You can teach me anything, and I will master it.”

  A year later, he found himself performing surgeries under the ground.

  From the young doctor’s first log:

  Absolute rest, starvation, sedation, and bloodletting. These are remedies for living bodies. What I do is a sanctioned desecration…

  When he was a petulant student himself, luxuriating in a bath of self-pity, the doctor would heap effervescent salts into the boiling cauldron of his mind. Black grief, red rage, crystals quarried from the deepest wounds in his body. He did this until his eyes were wet and raw and his skin took on the shine of deep mud. At last the Jesuit had become exhausted with him. With a sharp cane rap to his shin, he roused the boy who would become the posthumous surgeon back into the room:

  “Enough! You think it is beneath you to help the dead? Let me tell you a secret, because you have been too dense to realize it—we treat the living. We treat the fears of the living.”

  * * *

  The following morning, the boy from Lastovo appeared in the cave mouth looking half dead. Yellow sun puddled around his boots. Squirming miserably in the bright portal, he called for the doctor.

  “You are two hours late.”

  Already the doctor had cut the hamstrings of two patients.

  “I did not sleep. Something was howling and howling. Circling right outside my window!”

  The bright-eyed čagljevi, explained the doctor.

  Jackals.

  “In the winter months, when there is no food for čagljevi, we hear them howl all night.”

  “But, sir…we have barely passed the vernal equinox…”

  The doctor felt reasonably certain that the young man was describing a vivid nightmare. He was infected by the sounds of Lastovo.

  “Yes, I suppose that’s true. Perhaps the hunger has overcome them prematurely.”

  “I know what I heard. It was no animal.”

  Jure da Mosto wore a look of such open hatred that the doctor could only laugh.

  “Young man, why waste your energy on hating me? I am not responsible for the plague of life on Lastovo. Do you find this work beneath you? Tell me if you regret our time together when the dead come knocking on your door…”

  He is drafting a letter home, isn’t he? Telling his mother how poorly he’s been treated here.

  Jure said nothing. Now the doctor wondered if he was too embarrassed to admit that he had only been dreaming; and he softened a little, recalling how far the boy had traveled from his home.

  “If the howling comes again,” he counseled his student, “walk outside, and confront the animal.”

  It was a terrible morning. Even his reflexes are lazy, thought the doctor irritably. Jure da Mosto yawned and left his mouth hanging open. He sneezed like a cannon, his arms limp at his sides. He seemed to forget, for long stretches, to blink. How could a person stare and stare without blinking, and still take in nothing? Only from his dead patients did the doctor expect that sort of lidless inattention.

  “Repeat what I just said back to me.”

  “This block is to assist the…the extension of the thigh?”

  “Incorrect.”

  After the last surgery of the day, the doctor dismissed sulky Jure. He sat on the operating table and watched a black-and-orange spider ascend the craggy wall. It moved like a single hand scaling a mountain. At the seam where the wall became a ceiling, it deftly flipped itself and continued to the other side.

  “I have risen as far as this world will permit me to go,” the doctor told the empty cave. “To travel farther, must I also invert myself entirely?”

  Cave fauna had impressed a lesson on the young doctor. He watched the fat blue worms wiggle through minuscule clefts. Tiny bats hooking by the hundreds into the limestone. They held on wherever they could, dark puffs of breath in the glittering fissures. The lesson was this: You fit yourself to your circumstances. Wrapped your wings tightly around your skin and settled into your niche. Go smooth, stay flat. Do your breathing in the shadows. Grow even slightly wider, or wilder, and you risk turning your home into your tomb.

  However, sometimes the doctor’s pragmatism went belly-up. Convictions, too, could upend themselves. Then the hopeful child inside him wondered: The lesson is this? He watched the worms slim and fatten as they moved through the cracks. If only there were other rooms, other worlds, than these. And other ways to reach them.

  * * *

  In late December, the doctor and his daughters had walked through the freezing bura smack into a funeral procession for the son of a count. A wailing train of mourners moved down the street, women with golden eye shadow and charcoal lips, men in round black hats and scarlet vests, music flung from the gaudy mouths of trumpets.

  “Papa,” his middle daughter had asked. “Why do so many people come to cry for him? When little brother died, we told no one.”

  Pneumonia was a frequent visitor to their windswept quarter. When informed that her infant brother had stopped breathing, his seven-year-old daughter had wept silent adult tears, comprehending immediately, with a heartbreaking precocity, that there was nothing against which to struggle.

  One vertical mile separates the counts’ floating quarries from the hovels of the barnacle people. Their rooms he cannot enter, not even with the lockpick of his imagination. It amazed the doctor that the distance between their houses could be measured in human footsteps. They are neighbors, and yet their breath barely overlaps.

  * * *

  At dusk, they come to the doctor’s house. Four men from the hills, trailed by the city investigator. Flanking the parade is young Jure.

  With his back to the doctor, the boy addresses the chirurgo in Venetian.

  “What are you doing here?” the doctor asks. Everyone ignores him. He knows only a smattering of Venetian. Each word he catches comes as a cold, discrete surprise, raindrops hitting his head from a high ceiling. They explode into meaning: “yesterday,” “mistake.”

  The doctor hears his own name several times, spoken in a tone that frightens him.

  So Jure has found an older nobleman, the snowy Croat— the “real” doctor—with whom to lodge some complaint. What is it?

  The chirurgo, his trapeze-thin brows knotted in astonishment, translates:

  “Your patient, Nediljka Nikoničić, daughter of Peter, has been sighted in the woods behind the western cemetery.”

  “No!”

  “This boy says the procedure was done improperly…”

  Improperly.

  “She is a vukodlak now, walking the woods.”

  “Impossible.”

  Jure da Mosto does not look up to receive the doctor’s stare.

  “The mistake is not mine,” the doctor insists. Perhaps the famished young visitor has hallucinated a woman in the woods? Or fled the early howling of jackals. The doctor asks what proof the boy can offer for his thesis. Waves of hate are sheeting off his skin in Jure’s direction. He keeps his voice low and controlled, aware of the open door. Behind him, a child’s voice rises: “Papa?”

  “No one,” the boy says, “could mistake the color of her hair.”

  The chirurgo smacks his dry lips.

  “A bloodred color, known to all of us…”

  “The committee persists in its inquiry…”

  Hunters are already mounted, searching the woods.

  Without turning, the doctor can feel his wife’s shadow behind him. His three daughters are hiding under its awning, listening. His throat closes with panic; what if they believe this?

  Now Jure da Mosto tugs at the investigator’s sleeve, whispering something behind the closed shades of their Venetian. One hand lifts and falls, pantomiming slashing. Locked out of their dialect, he is nevertheless certain that the boy is lying.

  “This boy does not know where the hamstring is
located. Quiz him, and you shall quickly exhaust his knowledge about the surgery—he has none. Ask him what he believes I did improperly.”

  A translation comes promptly:

  “He remembers seeing your hand slip.”

  Jure da Mosto has retreated behind a human wall of his fellow noblemen. Still he refuses to look at the doctor. His lips spread into a thin, jammy smile, one eye rolling off into space. He does not look like a malicious genius. He looks sixteen years old and embarrassed by his fright. It runs in circles around his pale eyes like a horse he cannot catch and bridle. Why has the boy invented this story? The doctor imagines the point of his scalpel driving toward the boy’s open blue eye, expertly peeling back layer after layer of falsehood until he reveals the true memory of yesterday’s surgery.

  “On the basis of one troubled boy’s testimony, you have summoned the hunters?”

  “Other sightings,” the chirurgo says, “are being reported.”

  The tense shift makes the doctor shudder. Many people in the hills, it seems, have been waiting for this chance to give form to their fears and to accuse the Moorish doctor of malpractice. The chirurgo gargles his words, as if their shared language has become distasteful to him. He switches back to Venetian.

  “Papa!” his youngest child cries again, followed by the sound of his wife herding the girls away from him. He swallows the globe in his throat.

  “Where is she, then? Where was she last seen? Show me on the map.”

  A map is unfolded.

  “By whom was she seen?” he asks softly.

  And so the doctor learns the names of his enemies.

  * * *

  That night, his wife presents to her doctor with no symptoms of the rumor’s progress inside her save one: her wounded, streaming eyes. He sweeps her black hair from her scalp to examine them, thinking, The eyes are so easily bruised. He is afraid that the injury is done; that her love for him is leaking away.