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 the language. Each word he catches is a cold, discrete surprise, raindrops falling from a high ceiling and exploding into meaning: girl, red, mistake.
The doctor hears his own name several times, spoken in a tone that frightens him.
So Jure has found a fellow 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.”
“Impossible.”
“This boy says the procedure was done improperly.”
Improperly. The boy does not look up to receive the doctor’s glare.
“She is a vukodlak now, walking the woods.”
“As I said, impossible.” Perhaps the famished young visitor has hallucinated a girl in the woods. Or confused the early howling of jackals. As waves of contempt sheet off his skin, the doctor asks what proof the boy can offer. 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 blood-red color, known to all of us.”
“The committee has opened an inquiry.”
Hunters are already mounted, searching the woods.
Without turning, the doctor can feel his wife’s warmth at his back. His three daughters hide under the awning of her shadow, listening. His throat closes with panic. What if they believe this?
Now Jure tugs at the investigator’s sleeve, whispering something behind the closed shades of their shared dialect. One hand lifts and falls, pantomiming slashing. Locked out of their deliberation, the doctor is nevertheless certain that the boy is lying.
“This boy does not even know where the hamstring is located. Interrogate him, and you shall quickly exhaust his knowledge—he has none. Ask him what he believes I did improperly.”
A translation comes promptly: “He remembers seeing your hand slip.”
Jure has retreated behind a human wall of his elevated caste. His lips spread into a pinched, jammy smile, one eye rolling off into space. He does not look like a malicious genius. He looks like the child he is, and embarrassed by his fright. It runs in circles around his pallid face, like a horse he cannot bridle. Why has he invented this story? The doctor imagines the point of his scalpel driving toward the boy’s open blue iris, expertly peeling back layer after layer of falsehood until he reveals the true memory of the surgery.
“On the basis of one troubled boy’s testimony, you have summoned hunters?”
“Other sightings,” the chirurgo says, “are being reported.”
The doctor shudders at the tense shift. Many people in the hills, it seems, have been waiting for this chance to give form to their fears, to accuse the Moorish doctor of malpractice.
The chirurgo abstracts the developing allegations—gargling his words, as if their common tongue has become distasteful to him—before reverting to Venetian.
“Papa!” the doctor’s youngest cries again, as his wife finally herds the girls away. He swallows the globe in his throat.
“Who claims to have seen her?” he asks softly.
And so the doctor learns the names of his enemies.
That night, his wife presents to the 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 trauma is done, that her love for him is leaking away.
“Hundreds upon hundreds of deaths,” he mutters. “Thousands of successes. Years of my life spent under their earth. Which counts for nothing, it seems.”
“If you made a mistake,” his wife tells him gently, “it means simply that you are fully human.” She touches the top of his cheekbone, as if feeling for the lever of a secret door. “Only admit it to them, so we might begin to make amends.”
The doctor is speechless. In an act of spontaneous reformation, his wife immolates her image of him as a perfect man, resurrects him, and forgives him.
But that’s not me! That’s an imposter—flawed, ugly, clumsy, deluded.
He recoils from her reprieve, disgusted, even as her eyes pool with love, and he wonders if it is animal or alien—her ability to pardon him for this thing he has not done. Once more her affect is luminous and calm, the way a lake recovers its composure after a hailstorm. Blue to the bottom again, the stitches dissolved. You are a better surgeon than I am, he thinks, horrified. It is a ghastly scene to behold: my death.
There is suddenly, he feels, no one left to defend—that man has been swallowed up into this forgiveness.
“No. No. I did nothing to deserve this, this—”
This love badly frightens him. He does not want it. If she could believe that he’d failed his patient, and lied to everyone about it—
He watches his hands shoving her away.
“If only you believe me, in all the world, I will live,” he promises her.
His wife looks up at him with injured surprise; never before has he touched her roughly.
“I myself have made a thousand errors.”
“But if you do not believe me,” he says ominously. “If you have become like them—”
Her small mouth drops open as she reaches for him. She has the face of someone at the top of a fall, her arms wheeling in space. She grabs for his shoulders, sobbing; the sound seems to echo from somewhere else. Her small hands press into his chest.
Shadows dart down the hall. The children.
“No woman wanders the woods.” He’s drawn her close, his lips fluttering over her ear. “But if you do not believe me, if you have lost faith in me, then you are no longer my family.”
As her arms sink to her sides, he turns and leaves for the caves, climbing the briary path, although of course no patients await him; he has been suspended from performing surgeries pending the counts’ investigation. At the cave mouth, the doctor pauses. It occurs to him that they might be waiting for him deep below. An ambush. The hunters converging on their true quarry.
Two nights pass. The doctor is unjailed. His wife and daughters do not leave the house. No hunter has captured or even glimpsed the vukodlak; at the same time, her presence drapes over the island like a fog. The wailing women in the harbor chapel see nothing else, kneeling in the candlelight with oil-slick eyes like seals.
Another doctor is now caroming around Korčula: Leering and fiendish and floppy-handed. Apocalyptically incompetent. The doctor’s twin, ruining his good name. Open your eyes. Give me a chance to fight him, the Other Man. The usurper who has replaced me in your memory.
Those few who do meet the doctor’s gaze still fail to recognize him. Their paranoia trawls over his skin, and a monster springs into their nets. His timbre shakes, and they presume his guilt.
Moving behind the market stalls, he eavesdrops on once-familiar voices, now corrupted and rusty with fear:
“. . . because she was interfered with . . .”
“. . . the soil disrupted . . .”
“. . . and blood in her mouth!”
He haunts the homes of his friends: Nicolas and Matthias Grbin, John and Jerome Radovanović. “Look at me,” he begs. “Could I do these things?” Warmed by some ember of tenderness, they unshade their eyes, which flare with a wild and mounting horror.
Three more nights without fresh news. The hunters chase a red-tailed squirrel. Many reputations are now at stake: the hunters grumble that perhaps the boy misled them, while the chirurgo defends the investigation to the Council of Ten. So when the doctor learns that the searchers have dug up the grave of Nediljka Nikoničić, over the family’s pr
otestations, and discovered an empty coffin, he can be certain only that Jure da Mosto is not conspiring alone.
“Her body is missing,” he tells his wife.
“So I’ve heard.”
Astonishingly, she takes his hand.
On the night before his deposition is to be taken, the rumor infects the doctor himself, feasting on his doubts. Parasitically it grows—stronger, brighter, more vehemently alive. How to combat it?
“My hand did not slip,” he practices in the mirror. “Never once, in a thousand surgeries, has my hand slipped.”
The doctor tries to conjure his wife’s face, the faces of his daughters; he needs a shield. Instead, he sees red hair, ablaze in the moonlight and advancing through the forest, descending toward the town.
“Why do you credit this boy’s account?” he shouts at his anguished reflection. “An interloper who arrived mere days ago?”
But it’s too late. The vukodlak’s face has lodged inside him, throbbing and pillary white. In his mind’s eye, he watches himself lurching over the operating table, a character in their tale.
Now it is not his patient who torments him, her bare feet stepping crunchingly over the pine cones. It is the Other Man.
For the Other Man is everywhere, leaping from mind to mind, eclipsing him as darkness covers the sun. He finds it impossible to forgive his wife for forgiving him. If she is capable of loving such a creature, what can he ever have meant to her? He cannot accept the dreadful love pouring his way. It will erase him entirely.
He sees his hand, rising and striking her. Her neck, snapping back. He projects these visions into the minds of his friends, imagining them imagining him. That he does nothing of the sort does not, in the end, matter. The doctor thinks: I am whatever they wish to make of me.
“I can be trusted with any patient.”
The tribunal has been assembled since dawn. When the bell tolls again, the doctor stares from face to face to face, for the eternity of those ten deafening gongs. All of these men are well known to him. He has operated on many of their fathers, brothers, mothers, and sons. His voice is hoarse but measured.
“As evidence, I remind the court that I have performed this procedure on one of my own children.”
His composure breaks; at the worst possible moment, his memory betrays him, sucking him into the past. He sees himself walking through the pinewoods of Žrnovo, his only son in his arms—stillborn, the dear boy would never take a single step. “What risk could he possibly pose?” his wife had pleaded. “Leave him be, my love. Please.” But the doctor had insisted. The infant’s face was his own face—a tiny, blue cameo. The bud of his nose was a cartilaginous copy of his grandfather’s; the lips a larval clone of his lips, which he bent to kiss goodbye. In the freezing, white theater, a part of the doctor lives in permanent exile, floating over his breathless son in the blank air.
“I can be trusted—”
He winces to hear the reverb in his voice, as tears breach their banks and flow freely. He has lost already.
“On 3 January, year of our Lord 1620, the hand of our posthumous surgeon slipped while performing his paralyzing surgery. It is possible that this slip was, in fact, deliberate.”
After they state the charges against him, he is returned home. Still, no vukodlak has been discovered in the woods; and nevertheless, the case will be sent on to the Council of Ten—already the ship bearing the investigator’s files is leaving the harbor. Months will pass before a verdict.
In later centuries, new etiologies will evolve. Miasma theory will yield to germ theory, superstition to science. Yet every novel treatment breeds an equally novel genetic resilience, as only the hardiest survivors spawn. And so the cure teaches the disease how to evade it.
The day after the tribunal adjourns, the investigator appears at the doctor’s door.
“The boy remembers more and more of that night.”
“Does he?”
“Something else came back to him.”
Seagulls scream above the harbor. All over the island, in the minds of his neighbors, the red-haired vukodlak is waking.
“Tell me, what has returned to young Jure now? What illusory memory?”
As it turns out, the doctor has badly underestimated his puerile foe, whose gift for creative invention belies his bland, seed-hull face. Upon introduction to this latest and darkest variant of himself, the doctor walks stiff-legged to the docks and retches the contents of his stomach into Korčula Bay. Small, red fish rise to nibble at the bilious cloud, and the doctor is consoled by this alone: the voracious appetite of nature, and its utter indifference to his wretched reflection, floating on the water.
That evening, returning to his family, the doctor discovers that his quarantine has failed. His wife sits by the window, watching a pale-green sliver of sea; when she finally speaks, it’s her calm that shakes him.
“They say that you were in love with her.”
“No.”
“That you did something . . . to her body. That you—”
“And you are seduced by such vile falsehoods?”
“Oh, my love.”
“I see that even the most hideous crimes are not foreign to your imagination.”
Because she has already witnessed such evil, hasn’t she? She has been entertaining him, the Other Man, all afternoon.
She sleeps at the outer edge of their bed, her back to the doctor, like a caterpillar clinging to its leaf. And yet her palm is flung behind her, for him to take if he so desires—her arm bent backward, reaching for him. He stares at it in horror.
The doctor spends the next three nights knocking on doors, an uninvited guest. He pleads his case to whoever answers, incapable of rest until his reputation is restored. He begins in their own impoverished precinct, crabbing his way across the sea-slick docks.
“You behave like a guilty man,” his wife admonishes. “You make their case for them. Can you not see that?”
He gazes at her blearily, his mien that of the vukodlak itself, driven to circle the nocturnal streets.
“The rumor has polluted every mind on the island. If I cannot defeat it, I see no possibility of redemption for us. I would have to change our names, burn off my skin.”
His daughters adopt their mother’s pitch, blocking the doorframe with their slight bodies. “Stay here, Papa! Please do not leave us!”
The doctor blinks at the four of them, as if surprised to find intruders in his home. His thumb covers his lower lip, forming a little crucifix to dam a loosening cry.
He is genuflecting in a light dusting of snow, midway along the stair cut into the limestone cliffside that spirals up to the ivory compound of Peter Nikoničić. Leagues below, the dark sea rolls into the coastline, detonating soundlessly on and on. The doctor has never before climbed to such an elevation; vertigo momentarily convulses him, and he scrapes at the rock face for some ballast, before regathering his senses and pressing on.
Reaching the summit, he pauses to admire the unity of the architecture: the main house with its colonnade of white stone quarried from Vrnik, its luminous domed roof like an exhumed moon. The windows of these fortressed palaces leave the rich surprisingly vulnerable, the doctor thinks. Any spectral eyes can follow the starlight into their private rooms. Edging closer, he exploits this privilege of the already dead.
A dozen plates are set along a long, black table, interspersed with bouquets of nettles. The table itself is an elegant ungulate, an Italianate species of furniture, with legs that end in oak hooves. Perhaps it, too, has been hobbled, so that it cannot gallop off with the crystal candlesticks, the golden decanters. The Other Man, the doctor guesses, dines here often. Peter Nikoničić, no doubt, invites the ghastly twin into his thoughts a hundred times a day.
Roasted meats appear on silver platters. Dried berries heaped like red plunder, and boiled vegetables deliquescing into soup. And there, stealing impertinently into the middle seat, flanked by half a dozen healthy children, is the doctor’s assassin, Jure
da Mosto. In this house, where his family would be relieved he’d found a berth, he looks younger than his sixteen years. With his long bangs combed over his eyebrows, and his thin torso swallowed by a scarlet vest, he is eleven, ten, too puddled and small to support the doctor’s hatred. It is suddenly all too easy to understand why the boy from Lastovo would move the countess’s body.
We are in the same predicament, then, the doctor considers. You do not want to be a liar, any more than I want to be a monster.
Bones stack up beside the drained chalices, as the noblemen and their rapacious progeny consume the dishes with remarkable speed. His former student laughs, one hand clapped to the hole of his mouth; the scene is muted by the roaring wind buffeting the doctor, yet his mind supplies the sound. It is nothing so light as laughter, this noise he hears, or imagines he hears, pouring out of young Jure.
The doctor had intended to stand before the meal’s end and stride into their midst; but as the table is cleared by three servants, he merely watches, hypnotized by the ebb and flow of life and shadow inside the great hall, unaware of the snowflakes collecting on his stooping back. One by one, Jure da Mosto and every Nikoničić scion and servant disappears. Soon the room has emptied of people, and yet the doctor remains, bowing outside the window, addressing himself to the count’s empty chairs: I am an innocent man. As the Posthumous Surgeon of Korčula, my record of service is faultless—
One can become numb to numbness, a tertiary disavowal of the body, and this is precisely what occurs to the doctor, kneeling in snow. He might be kneeling there still, had two hands not clapped onto his shoulders, wrenching him to his feet.
“You do not belong here.”
Craning around, the doctor collides with the Other Man, reflected in the gray, frightened eyes of the count pinning him to the stone wall. At once, the vertigo returns, and he collapses into the man’s embrace. A bright quarter moon floats over the harbor, winding light around their bodies in lean stripes. The doctor fights through an endless moment. Elevating his gaze to meet the count’s, he beholds himself dissolving into his double.
The Best American Short Stories 2019 Page 31