As the doctor’s mother recounted this lineage in whispers, her tone taught him more than her words about the precarity of their position. And yet, despite their color and station, 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 hard nipples on lemons. Their derisive stares seemed to pass painlessly through her, like blades slicing at water. She resented no one. And he, trailing her elbow, quietly learned to subsume his rage; by the age of seven, he knew well the taste of fury as it sank into the body, that nasal salt of swallowed things. I am smarter than my mother, this child decided.
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, and only now could he fathom the resolve required to raise dark-skinned children under the flag of an unequal truce. From his crabhole he watched the gold and scarlet clouds cluster over the hills. To survive here required one to sip the air; the wide sky belonged to the nobles.
Still, sometimes he emerged at first light, as fishing boats slipped the grasp of the harbor for the expanse of the open sea, and allowed himself to feel otherwise. Wasn’t it possible that a posthumous surgeon might one day be promoted from his abyss to the upper world? Ambroise Paré, a barber’s apprentice, became physician to the kings of France, securing his ascent by eschewing the common practice of scalding battlefield wounds with boiling oil, instead dressing them with rosewater and turpentine. Perhaps the doctor would be granted a similar opportunity to impress the Venetian Council of Ten. To restore the sick to health would have been his preference, but to keep the dead in their coffins was a service certainly no less valuable to the republic.
The new student continually looks back to the shrinking harbor, where the ship that delivered him to Black Corfu that morning is now small as a toy. At the wide cave mouth, his legs jerk to a stop, twin animals balking in tandem.
“Few people on the Continent know the real dangers the dead pose,” the doctor says, his voice growing ever more sonorous as they descend a dim tunnel. Candles lean out of natural sconces in the rock, dozens of red hands along the mossy walls, waving them on. “Yet a body is at its most defenseless at this time, soon after expiration, orphaned in its coffin.”
“In Lastovo,” the boy mutters, “we all know the dangers now. Nobody can escape the knowledge.”
On his home island, there has been an outbreak of vukodlaci. The first in three generations. The boy describes a scene out of the doctor’s insomniac fears. Mass exhumations, emergency surgeries performed in the open. Gravediggers undoing their handiwork, spading up dirt. (“They toil under the moon, looking like large rabbits on tethers,” he says, with plainspoken horror.) Torches lipping orange syllables over the toppled stones. The only posthumous surgeon in Lastovo is nearing seventy and half-blind; in any case, no single surgeon can attend to so many patients at once. And so this boy has been sent here to learn a new trade.
A quarter mile deeper into the caves, the new student introduces himself: his name is Jure da Mosto, and he belongs to one of the most tightly closed aristocracies in all of Europe. Thirteen families have controlled Lastovo for centuries—patricians who are identical, in their threatening languor, to those pale raptors wheeling over the trees, their idle talons tearing at the seafaring clouds.
“A face like yours must irritate your parents, eh?” the doctor offers mildly.
Despite the Italian ancestry the boy claims, his complexion will always raise suspicions. Who can account for the colors wreathing out of the buried past, and where and when they might resurface? Jure da Mosto looks no older than sixteen, and already with the stink of some precocious failure on him. The doctor thinks: It would be a joy to be wrong about even one of them.
They’ve 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, understands what is required—the magic necessary to the practice, in addition to the science, and something ill-expressed in language: an instinct for the right depth when making the first cut. This cannot not be taught.
“What do you mean—a face like mine?”
“So . . . overcast. So dark with worry.”
The doctor has 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 ashen student startles awake. “Many of us would have preferred a different fortune.”
The doctor has worked his entire life to attain this rank. And yet the pinnacle of his achievement is considered, by this boy’s people, a valley of shadow.
They reach the cave’s largest hall, which has served since the medieval period as a medical theater. A rock awning sprawls over their heads, a bright wishbone chandelier of white calcite suspended from its apex. Bodies are delivered here by runners paid by the families, who take pains to avoid encounters with the doctor. On the operating table, a patient quietly waits, a pearl comb glinting in her red hair.
All bodies rotting under the moon run the risk of becoming vukodlaci. How does a posthumous surgeon protect the dead 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 reminds Jure. On the other side of dawn, their patients are securely moored in their coffins, guarded against every temptation to rise up.
Vocabulary is key, when communicating the risks posed by the vukodlaci; all posthumous surgeons take great care with their articulations. The bereaved must understand 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 pronouncement to the surviving family, but far less damaging than the deranging hope bred by “Cila walks again.”
As for what the doctor tells his own children of his work? “Clipping a bird’s wings” is his preferred euphemism. He is determined not to frighten them.
His daughters touch one another’s shoulder blades, giggling, feeling for secret pinions.
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 explains the surgery to Jure da Mosto.
“First, we locate the tendons at the back of the knee . . .”
Jure wants to know: Do the eyes of a cadaver never flutter open? Has there never once been—?
“Never,” says the doctor.
The bug-eyed boy wipes a gloved hand across his mouth, leaving a shiny spider line. His lips curl, as if he is repulsed by his own interest.
“And in all cases, the surgery is a—a success?”
“I understand that these are dark days in Lastovo. You have my every sympathy. But you should know that here on Black Corfu, no such error has ever occurred.”
The doctor claps his hands, as if dismissing a horde of demons from the room.
The surgery on the young woman takes a quarter hour, and is wholly unremarkable. She is the only daughter of one of the hereditary counts. From this man, the doctor will collect triple his ordinary fee. “The surgeries I perform on the wealthy pay for those on the poor,” he explains to young Jure, who is staring at the countess’s colorless mouth. Each lip looks like a tiny, folded moth. She is about your age, isn’t she? the doctor thinks, wondering how many bodies the boy has 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 unfortunate countess died of a sickness known locally as “throat rattle”—an illness that has claimed dozens of lives in the doctor’s quarter, where the death of children is commonplace.
Midway through the surgery, the student wanders away from the table, drawn to a gemstone sparkle in the corner—the doctor’s lectern, a naturally occurring pillar that supports a priceless book, a gift from the former rector of Zagreb’s Jesuit college: a copy of the anatomical sketches of Vesalius. Jure thumbs through the book with a pouty expression, as if he has already anticipated every flowering organ.
“This is the brain, then?” He yawns.
“Watch what I am doing,” the doctor snaps.
The boy’s face goes purple in the torchlight, which the doctor takes as a hopeful sign. Perhaps young Jure knows enough to feel ashamed of himself.
She has rare red hair, bright as a garnet, a comet that resurfaces in her genetic line every eight generations. The doctor had never spoken to or touched her in life, but had seen her scarlet tresses moving through the market stalls and known: the Nikoničić scion. At last, he thinks sadly, making the final cut, her body will sleep without rousing, while her soul flies to the Lord.
As the night wears on, they operate on an old sailor, now at anchor. The doctor draws the boy’s fingers down the hairy thigh to the sunken divot of the kneecap. Together their hands fly across a wintry isthmus of skin, tracing the muscles they will handicap. Is the boy attending to the lesson?
The boy stiffens. “Oh, God,” he says, jerking back with a shudder. “There has been some 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, thinks the doctor, his scalpel poised.
Animals, too, can become vukodlaci. Almost certainly, some of the birds circling Korčula are bloodless, caught in their old orbits. Many passing sailors have reported sightings of the great, mixed flocks of living and dead gulls. The latter are easily identifiable, looping over the bay with a fixed-wing soar, their cerulean feathers shining 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 freed foxes from traps and cauterized their wounds, bandaged swallows with broken blood feathers. He begged his father for stories of doctors who cured their patients of lameness, madness, blindness, gout. The miracles of saints, he understood, 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 allowed the boy’s belief that he could become the city physician, leaving his mother to extinguish this hope.
“Have you ever seen a doctor who looks like us, my son?”
There were two doctors on the island: The first was the city physician, a wealthy old Croat who, it was whispered, had been unable to cure his own sterility. The second was the Jesuit. His skin poured forth a yellow light, and his age was unguessable; he seemed to be simultaneously flush with health and minutes shy of death. He refused to treat those who had not first made confession.
“Where do the doctors live?”
“With us, on Black Corfu.”
“No. Be more precise, my son. Think like they do. 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 wish 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 marbled balconies and reported to the Council of Ten. Together, his mother explained, these families—Kanavelić, Izmaeli, Gabrijelić, Nikoničić —determined everything that happened on the island. And no count would permit somebody who looked like her son to treat his relations.
Heartbroken, the boy approached the Jesuit to plead his case. Should he be prohibited from his life’s vocation, owing simply to an accident of birth?
“I am a precocious young man,” he said, repeating the compliment he’d overheard a tutor giving his thin-nosed student in the parish hall moments earlier. “You can teach me anything, and I will master it.” He was a week shy of thirteen.
The Jesuit clapped a heavy hand on the boy’s shoulder. Unbeknownst to most, he had been filling an open post, covertly severing the hamstrings of the island’s deceased. And a year later, after an exacting apprenticeship, the young doctor found himself performing the same surgeries under the ground.
From the doctor’s first entry in his log:
13 February 1597. Absolute rest, starvation, sedation, bloodletting. These are remedies for living bodies. What I do is a sanctioned desecration.
And from his initial impression of his student:
3 January 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, to have one’s mind occupied by the suffering of others.
When he was a petulant novitiate himself, the doctor would heap effervescent salts into the boiling cauldron of his mind—black grief, red rage, crystals quarried from his deepest wounds—until his eyes were wet and raw.
At last, he split the strictures of his mentor’s patience. With a sharp cane-rap to the boy’s shin, the Jesuit boomed, “Enough! You think it is beneath you to attend the dead? Let me avail you of a truth, which you have proven too dense to realize: We treat the living. We treat the fears of the living.”
The following night, the boy from Lastovo appears in the theater looking dire. Yellow torchlight puddles around his boots. He squirms miserably.
“You are two hours late.”
Already the doctor has cut the hamstrings of two patients.
“I was afraid to leave my room. Something was howling and howling. Circling right outside my window!”
The bright-eyed čagalj, explains the doctor. Jackals. “Late in winter, when there is no food for the čagalj, we hear them howl until dawn.”
“But sir, we have barely passed the solstice.”
The doctor presumes the boy is describing a vivid dream, haunted by the terrors of Lastovo.
“Yes, I suppose that’s true. Perhaps the hunger has overcome them prematurely.”
“I know what I heard. It was no animal.”
He wears a look of such open hatred that the doctor can only laugh.
“Do you find this work beneath you? Tell me, will you regret our time together when you return to a home overrun with vukodlaci?”
Jure says nothing, and his gaze falls to the cave floor.
At this, the doctor softens a little, recalling how far the young patrician has traveled from his home. “If the howling comes again,” he counsels his student, “walk outside and confront the source. I trust it will flee at the first sound of your footsteps.”
It’s a terrible night. Even his reflexes are lazy, the doctor thinks irritably. The boy yawns and leaves his mouth hanging open. He sneezes like a cannon, his arms limp at his sides. He seems to forget, for long stretches, to blink. How can a person stare and stare and still take in nothing? Only from his patients can the doctor tolerate such vacant inattention.
“Repeat what I just said.”
“This block is to assist the . . . extension of the thigh?”
“Incorrect.”
After the last surgery, the doctor dismisses the sulky Jure, then sits on the table and watches a black and orange spider ascend the craggy wall. It moves like a fugitive hand. At the seam where the wall becomes ceiling, it deftly flips itself and continues to the other side.
“I have risen as far as this world will permit me,”
the doctor tells his subterranean audience of none. “To rise farther, must I also invert myself entirely?”
Cave fauna had impressed a lesson on the young doctor. He observed the fat, blue worms wiggling through centimeter clefts. The tiny bats hooking by the hundreds into the limestone. They held on wherever they could, dark gasps in the glittering fissures. The lesson was this: Fit yourself to your circumstances. Wrap your wings tightly, and settle into your niche. Go smooth, stay flat. Do your breathing in the shadows. Grow wider, or wilder, and your home could become your tomb.
However, the doctor sometimes wonders if his pragmatism has undermined his ambition. He watches the worms move almost imperceptibly through the cracks. If only there were other rooms, other worlds than this one.
The following morning, the doctor and his daughters walk through the freezing bura, encountering a funeral procession for the son of a count. A wailing train of mourners moves down the street, women with golden eyeshadow and charcoal lips, men in round black hats and scarlet vests, music springing from the gaudy mouths of trumpets.
“Papa,” his eldest child asks, “why do so many people come to cry for him? When little brother died, we told no one.”
Pneumonia is a frequent visitor to their windswept quarter. When informed that her infant brother had stilled, the seven-year-old girl had wept adult tears, comprehending immediately, with a heartbreaking precocity, that there was nothing against which to struggle.
Half a vertical kilometer 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 amazes the doctor, that the distance between their realities can be measured to the meter. 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.
The Best American Short Stories 2019 Page 30