The Convalescent Page 22

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  “Thabbs-thiffice,” he spit.

  “What?” she said.

  “Thabbs—”

  “Nevermind,” Lili said, and pushed her way into the center of the circle, where she found Szeretlek lying uncomfortably on a pile of logs that were being ineptly tended by a dozen scurrying Pfliegmans.

  “Get back!” she cried. “Get away from him!”

  She tried shoving us back, but there were so many of us, and Szeretlek could not assist her. His arms and legs were bound. A rotten gag was wrapped around his head. We were trying to light the fire using anything we could get our hands on. We tossed on old bits of food, broken clay pots, animal hides and straw mats, but nothing caught. So Lili fanned the smoking coals, and it became difficult to breathe. We screeched at her, but her plan worked: we coughed and fled outside. As soon she had the tent to herself, Lili held her breath and quickly began to untie him. If it had been another millennia ahead from what it was, she would have rolled up her sleeves and performed CPR, but alas, she did not know CPR; she only knew that Szeretlek’s chest was not moving, and therefore he was not breathing, and she quickly reasoned that if she could breathe and he could not, there was no reason why she could not give her breath to him. She placed her lips on his lips and began to blow into his body, thinking nothing of the past, nothing of how they were related or unrelated, nothing of Botond. Lili breathed into Szeretlek until Szeretlek breathed into Lili. The Giant began to realize who was trying to give him life. With relief, with weak and stupid love, he began to pull her in with him. His mouth grabbed at hers as though he was drowning, and she gave her breath to him until the smoke took over, the ground spun, and she collapsed on top of him.

  Kinga, meanwhile, had been watching from behind the flap in the tent. Covering her mouth and nose, the old witch stepped inside. She saw Lili and Szeretlek lying next to the hearth and stood over them, for a moment, in the fog of smoke. Then she reached down and quickly snapped a twig from a log. She stuck the twig into the embers until it caught, then she watched as the two bodies slowly became one body, and then no body at all. “What goes up must come down,” she thought. “But sometimes it will rise again.”

  Sixty years later, in 1000 AD, the creaking turn of the new millennium, we Pfliegmans are standing among the pagan tribes vying for inclusion in the brand-spanking-new Christian Hungary. Those who believe in God will be saved; those who do not will be killed or made into uhegs —slaves to the Christians. We Pfliegmans line up in front of the first Christian king, Istvan. King Stephen. He is by far the cleanest human being we have ever seen: the long cheeks, the golden crown. The luminescent, blowing hair. We stare, gaping, at the whiteness of his cloaks. Standing next to him is a man named Kristoff Dorff, one of his German counselors.

  “This is the eleventh tribe,” says Dorff.

  Stephen frowns. “There are only ten tribes.”

  “They’re butchers. They can be of use.”

  But the king sees our flaking, hairy skin, our curved backs. Our toes curled into tiny toe-fists. He sees our lumpy heads, our eyes, black and whole, and cannot see anything else.

  “They may be of use,” he says, “but they will not believe.”

  Dorff looks at us with genuine pity.

  But then one of us shuffles forward from the pack. Who knows why— perhaps he possessed some flimsy scrap of bravery, or maybe he was moved by a bubble of gas trapped in his greasy lower intestine—whatever the reason, Old Botond steps forward. He hobbles over to Dorff, clears his throat, and then whispers something into the ear of the German administrator.

  Dorff turns his head, amused. “Credo?” he says.

  The German knows that there is no possible way that we believe in God because, let’s face it, we just don’t look the part. But then the sky shifts, and the sun appears. Although a full century has passed since the sacrifice of Enni Hús, the Fekete-Szem still crave sunlight. It’s the heat on our faces baking us, reducing all of us to a common denominator: human, with human needs, which is why when the sun comes out this day, my Darling, we all raise our arms to better feel its warmth.

  Dorff watches as the pack of fetid little people begin reaching for the sun: we are so short, the top of our heads just barely reach Dorff’s large chest; we are so thin, Dorff can strangle us with one hand only; our eyes so deep and round, so eerily black, they look glued to our faces. And cast out from each one of us is a thin, oblong shadow. With our arms raised, our shadows resemble a flock of skinny, out-winged birds. Dorff looks over one shoulder, ensuring that King Stephen has moved on to another tent, and then he gives us a name:

  “I will call you Fliegendenmann,” he says. “A nice German name to make you stronger.”

  We will not be killed or made into uhegs; our name, although about as far linguistically from our own people as we would like it to be, allows us to survive. And although from this point on, we must say that we believe in order to survive—to be regarded as worth saving—in truth, it is not what we Pfliegmans really believe: we believe in hiding. We believe in sacrifice. We believe that the stars are holes in the sky.

  We believe in the power of the swerve.

  And from here, where we are, we begin to watch and wait for some other leader, a leader like Árpád, to find us and care for us. We wait as King Stephen marries Gisela, daughter of Henry the Quarrelsome, duke not of any Hungarian camp, but of Bavaria; as he turns our entire barbarian nation into a Roman Catholic state; as he orders the slaughter of his very own cousin. We are there, and we say nothing. We are waiting in 1038, as the country is brutally invaded by Pechenegs and in 1058, as Andrew the First declares independence from the Holy Roman Empire. We are there, watching, waiting, all the way up to 1241, as Béla the Fourth is defeated by Mongols and half of Hungary’s population is slaughtered. We Pfliegmans are there in 1485, when Hungary is once again the strongest power in Europe, and in 1514, when there are peasant uprisings: for the first time, Hungary argues over its own ethnogenesis, and even then, knowing what we know, we say nothing; we only wait in our moist tents, bored, licking our feet, as Hungarian society splits between the nobles who acknowledge Stephen as the first true ruler of the country, and the peasants who acknowledge Árpád. We shake bugs from our hair. We pluck our own teeth from our mouths. And we are still waiting in 1541, after Hungary has lost five campaigns and the Turks take over, forcibly incorporating Hungary into the Ottoman Empire. With cloudy eyes and knobby fingers, working hard balls of ját down our gagging throats, we watch and wait as the peace treaty in Westphalia is eventually signed; as Vienna invalidates the Hungarian constitution and appoints an imperial governor; as imperial forces are driven out of Hungary. We are there in 1684 when the Reconquest begins. Buda is liberated, Transylvania is reunited with Hungary, and we are lying on the floor of our nimble misshapen tents, waiting all the way up to 1844, when Hungarian is declared the official language and a national consciousness emerges. It emerges, somehow, without us—but we Pfliegmans are still there in 1848, witnessing the revolutions which are exploding all over the place. We are watching in 1867 as the Austro-Hungarian Compromise is swiftly signed; in 1873, as the Stock Exchange crashes and the League of Three Emperors is created: Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the German Reich; as Austria-Hungary occupies and then annexes Bosnia-Herzegovina; as tensions with Russia continue through the Balkan Wars, as the Serbs gain territory, and on June 28, 1914, on this day in history, Eldridge Cooner, you miserable, insular délinquant, we Pfliegmans are standing on the side of the cobblestone road, hands deep in our pockets, squinting with our black eyes, as the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, is assassinated in Sarajevo. His body tumbles from the carriage.

  We lick our hairy chins. We hide and wait.

  Rumors of Transylvanian vampires spread across Europe, but there are no killers in the shadows of the Carpathian Mountains, there are only the Pfliegmans pinched into the darkness, our woolen coats heavy on our shoulders, bl
inking at the rich, the full, the cared for. There we are in 1918 (fewer of us, for sure, squirming in our boots) as Austria-Hungary joins the German quest for ceasefire, as the Hungarian Soviet Republic is led by Béla Kun and Admiral Horthy’s brutal White Army enters the scene; we are there in 1920, as the Peace Treaty of Trianon reduces Hungary to a third of the lands occupied by King Stephen, and despite the fact that no one is noticing, there we are waiting in the unemployment lines, stomachs rumbling, feet burning, hats pulled low over our heads when in 1929, an economic crisis yields massive unemployment in Europe, the Americas, and the whole world over. We Pfliegmans watch the outbreak of a second war, as Hungary opens its borders to a hundred thousand Polish refugees, and we are there, coldly watching, only one year later, as Hungary joins forces with Germany, Italy, and Japan. Our backs press against the wall as the Germans invade Yugoslavia; as our prime minister commits suicide; as Hungary occupies previous Magyar regions in Yugoslavia and declares war on the Soviet Union; as Britain declares war on Hungary; as Hungary declares war on the United States; as secret negotiations with the Western Allies about changing course fail; as German troops occupy Hungary. We Pfliegmans are there in 1944 as 437,000 Hungarian Jews are shoved onto trains to Auschwitz.

  Many of us are among them.

  By 1945, only a scattered few of us remain as the Soviets occupy Budapest. We wait, patiently, lying on the floorboards of our shacks, as Hungary becomes a Peoples’ Republic. We are part of Rákosi’s new “collective farms”; we are the kulaks, the peasants. Our stomachs burn with hunger. We are told to deliver impossible amounts of food, we have none left for ourselves, and it would seem that someone, then, kicking over the empty pots and tin cans of our various farmhouses, would find us, but no one does, and by 1956, only nine or ten of us are there, wringing out our dirty bedsheets as a student protest ignites a revolution, as Prime Minister Nagy declares withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, as the Red Army crushes counter-revolution, as the Soviet troops stationed in Hungary wickedly demand the extreme opposite of what all of Western Europe has been pressing us to believe, that no one believe—

  And now look at us. There is only one of us left. When he is gone, what happens? If the Pfliegmans are not around to suffer the worst the world has to offer, who, may I ask, will take our place?

  XXX

  THE GATHERING

  Holding my writing tablet with one hand and the back of my examining gown with the other, so as not to expose any parts of Rovar Ákos Pfliegman that the world does not need or want to see, I leave Dr. Monica’s office and make my way way down the long corridor behind Mrs. Himmel’s reception desk to the X-ray room. A Good Mother is standing with her Sick or Diseased child in the hallway next to a tall metal scale. The child weighs forty-two pounds, but the mother, sweater tied in a V around her neck, is not looking at the scale; she’s staring at down at my tiny feet, so flat, so thin, they hardly look like human feet at all; then it’s my ankles, like sharp little rocks; then my calves, two sticks of bone and skin and only a scrap of meat between them; my wrists pared into two rusted hinges, barely hanging on; and finally the skin underneath the gown: pink. Shining. Demanding everyone’s complete and total attention.

  The Good Mother grips her child by the shoulders. “Stay close to me, Stevie,” she says, as I hobble closer toward them.

  Stevie steps off the scale and looks at me.

  “Stevie!” his mother whispers, and hustles him down the hallway.

  “Pthbbb,” I say, behind her.

  She gives me a frightened look.

  I limp along in quick, uneven movements, passing the doorway to the Waiting Area. The Sick or Diseased children see me and their faces blanch. “Mommy,” they whimper, clinging to their mothers’ kneecaps. “Mommy, what is that?”

  “God only knows,” they whisper back.

  I place my stylish woolen cap over my head. I cackle a little, then continue down the hallway.

  Mrs. Himmel meets me at the door, holding my folder tightly over her chest. “I don’t want to be doing this,” she says. “I just thought you should know that you’ve inconvenienced a lot of people, Mr. Pfliegman. You’re not going to get away with it.”

  I produce my writing tablet. You’re a fucking star, I write, and hold it up.

  Mrs. Himmel smiles at me. The smile is thin. Threatening. She looks like she’s ready to hit me, but she doesn’t; instead, she lifts one fat arm and grabs a plastic cup from the shelf behind her. “Drink this,” she says.

  What is it?

  “Barium. You have to drink it so we can see what’s going on.”

  I take the cup.

  “Go inside now,” she says, and shoves me into the room. “Get up on the table. Lie down on your back.”

  The X-ray room is a small, narrow space, with a high ceiling that reaches all the way up to the roof. There’s just enough room for one person to lie on the table and cover himself with the appropriate protective materials. I climb up on the table, clutching my gown. It’s freezing in here. The X-ray machine is an old one, cream-colored with a fat red stripe along one side. An enormous moveable arm hangs over the table, and nailed into it is a small plaque that reads THE INDUSTRIAL. Mrs. Himmel watches me shiver. She smirks a little, and then walks over. There’s barely space enough for her to fit.

  “Give me your hat and your eyeglasses,” she says.

  I shake my head at her. I growl a little.

  “This is an X-ray, Mr. Pfliegman,” she says. “You can’t wear your eyeglasses. You just can’t. It’s not allowed.”

  She tries to snatch them, but when her arm crosses over my face, I grab it first.

  “Jesus H.!” she shouts. “You bit me!” Mrs. Himmel flies out of the room and slams the door. From an outside switch, she turns off the lights, leaving me in darkness. I listen to her arguing with Dr. Monica out in the hallway:

  “I’m going to need the darn rabies shots now!” she shouts.

  “Take it easy, Annette.”

  “You take it easy! I’m not taking it easy. Not anymore. If you make me do this, Monica, I swear I’m quitting. I mean it! I’m not putting up with this crap!”

  “Don’t quit,” says Dr. Monica. “Please. Just relax. There are people waiting outside to take him away, and he won’t be back again. Let’s just take the X-rays, and that’s it. That’s all.”

  Mrs. Himmel flubs her lips. “Not until you admit it,” she says.

  “Admit what?”

  “It was a mistake.”

  “Now, Mrs. Himmel, I don’t say things like—”

  “Admit that it was a mistake to take him on. Admit that he’s a Lying, Dangerous, Psychopathic Lunatic Midget who was never sick to begin with, and who now has conjured up some kind of weirdo skin disorder. I’ve read his folder! I know what’s going on! Admit that he has the hots for you, and stares at you like a darn fool whenever you come into the Waiting Area! Admit that it was a mistake to allow him to wait all day around children, who are now all practically traumatized! Admit that there are some people who don’t want help, who don’t deserve it! If you admit that, then I’ll stay.”

  Dr. Monica is quiet for a moment. “Please, Annette,” she says.

  Mrs. Himmel laughs out loud. “Do you admit it?”

  “Fine,” says Dr. Monica. “You were right, I was wrong. Now let’s go.”

  Mrs. Himmel opens the door to the stairwell and stomps upstairs. Moments later, two lights appear. The first is the square X-ray light from the Industrial, and the second shines from a plastic window about five feet up, where Mrs. Himmel now stands. There’s a panel in front of her, and she fiddles with the knobs as the Industrial groans to life. The metal arm shifts in one controlled movement over my body, spinning on a pivot, locking in place over my abdomen—

  My bad leg begins shaking.

  Mrs. Himmel reaches over and presses a button. There’s a click and then a scratchy version of her voice emerges into the darkness: “This is just a test,” she says, and clicks again. “H
old still until I tell you to move.”

  She sighs and shakes her head.

  I try to hold my leg down with one hand. I hold my breath and close my eyes. The arm wails and groans. It moves sluggishly over my body.

  Mrs. Himmel clicks in. “Turn over,” she says.

  I turn.

  “Other way, Mr. Pfliegman.”

  Lying here on my back, my arms and legs flat on the table, the Industrial hovering over my chest, the barium sinks to a lower part of my stomach. As it moves slowly through me, I think of Oliver in the Waiting Area, expertly moving the toy from robot to wrestler and then back again. I close my eyes and breathe, Enter, Exit, Enter — What goes up must come down. “If your pain were a person,” Dr. Monica once said.

  I open my eyes. A strange man is standing at my feet, just inches beyond the light of the Industrial. He’s wearing a black T-shirt with a glow-in-the-dark galaxy on it, and the swirls of the galaxy are vibrantly green, shaped like a hurricane. I inch up the table, away from him, and try to get Mrs. Himmel’s attention, but she’s working the knobs and doesn’t see him. The man steps right up to the table, into the light, and grins. He’s wearing square black eyeglasses, and is sporting the fluffiest, whitest sideburns I’ve ever seen. It’s Isaac Asimov. Mr. Asimov smiles at me, and the smile is genuine. He clears his throat. “The Gravitational Force,” he says, “by far the weakest of all,” but before he’s even finished speaking, the others all begin to gather. The Captain struts up to the table, into the light. He’s still in his Speedo. The yellow ball is tucked under one bare armpit, and the silver whistle hangs over his chest like a glittering jewel. He has dark circles under his eyes, like he hasn’t slept all night. “Hiya sport,” he says, and grins. He gives me a thumbs-up. The Indian steps up to the table, and there’s some shaking of hands. “We’re all images,” he says. “Illusions.” Then he reaches into his bag, produces a warm bottle, and pops it open. Beer runs down the side of the bottle, and he quickly sucks the foam to avoid spilling any on Dr. Monica’s clean floor. He offers one to the others, but only Asimov accepts.