Orange World and Other Stories

by Karen Russell

  Can we be cured? the doctor wonders. Could the right words, spoken by the doctor, free both men from the grip of the rumor?

  Roasted meats appear on thin platters. Dried berries heaped like red plunder and deliquescing vegetables. And there, seated at the middle of the table, surrounded by half a dozen healthy children, is the doctor’s assassin, Jure da Mosto. Who has combed his long bangs over his eyebrows, his thin torso swallowed by a scarlet vest. His family on Lastovo would be relieved that he’d found a berth in this castle, wouldn’t they? In this house, he looks younger than sixteen. He is eleven, ten, puddled and small. Unwillingly, the doctor feels his hatred relaxing, fist to palm. It is too easy for him to imagine why the boy from Lastovo would move the countess’s body. He pictures Jure carrying her from the cemetery. Terrified of a vukodlak appearing but more afraid of losing the regard of the living.

  Ah, we are in the same predicament, then. You do not want to be a liar, any more than I want to be a monster.

  Bones stack up beside the drained chalices. The doctor marvels at the speed at which the meal is consumed. He watches his former student laughing, one hand clapped to the shallow hole of his mouth. On his side of the glass, the doctor is deafened by a roaring wind, but his mind supplies the sound. It is nothing so light as laughter. It is quite terrifying, 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 room; yet he merely watches, paralyzed, as the table is cleared by three servants. Hypnotized by the ebb and flow of life and shadow inside the great hall. Unaware of the snowflakes collecting on his crouching back. One by one, Jure da Mosto and every Nikoničić and servant disappear. Soon the room has emptied of people, and still the doctor kneels below the window, addressing himself to the count’s empty chairs: I am an innocent man. As the posthumous surgeon of Korčula Island, my record of service is faultless…

  You can become numb to your numbness, a final disavowal of the body, and this is precisely what happens to the doctor, kneeling in the snow. He might be kneeling there still, had he not been discovered on the staircase. A hand claps onto his shoulder, wrenching the doctor to his feet.

  “Who are you? You do not belong here.”

  Craning around, the doctor collides with the Other Man. Who is reflected in the gray, frightened eyes of the man pinning him to the stone wall. A bright quarter moon floats over the harbor, winding stripes of light around their bodies. The doctor fights through an endless moment of vertigo. Staring into the count’s eyes, he watches himself dissolve into his double.

  “Peter Nikoničić.” At last he recovers his voice. “Peter Peter Peter Peter Nikoničić! Estimable sir, your lordship, Peter Nikoničić.”

  His voice, when it comes, is barely intelligible.

  “Forgive my intrusion, but I have come to, to, to…”

  The doctor slurs his words. His tongue, that trained slug, will not obey him.

  “To defend myself!” he bursts forth.

  The doctor is not a drunk, but it occurs to him that he might become one, in the future story of this encounter.

  “I do not belong here. That is true.” The old laughter threatens to boil over. “You people let me fly to the roof of a cave, and no farther. You have blocked our ascent to the true sky. You call me the Moor, Peter Nikoničić, although my family has lived on Black Corfu for as long as your family.”

  Giggles escape him, rising into the night. A steam of hysteria that does not seem to originate from his mouth but from the crinkling corners of his red eyes. He gapes up, for a moment confusing the frail sound with a column of snowflakes.

  “Oh, you people should have hobbled me long ago! You must have guessed that I would one day climb your hills. But I imagined a different kind of ascent, Peter Nikoničić. A promotion!”

  The joke of his life seizes him once more. Doubling over, he is convulsed by silent laughter. “Ah, look,” he murmurs. “We have an audience.”

  Blue light floods through one of the upstairs windows; this would be Jure, the doctor feels somehow certain. Jure in his guest room, looking down on them. Looking down is Jure da Mosto’s great talent, isn’t it? Quite a feat, for an inbred adolescent.

  With great effort, the doctor regains control of himself.

  Up goes the lantern, illuminating the count’s gaunt face. Dozens of blood vessels sprinkle his eyes, like the red seams in green leaves. The doctor seizes the large man’s wrists.

  “Peter Nikoničić, I never harmed your daughter. You must believe me.”

  The Other Man lifts out of the dry eyes of Peter Nikoničić to stare at him.

  “Please. Please. Please. Remember who I am,” the doctor begs. He leans in until their clammy foreheads touch. “Remember me?”

  Loosening his grip on the doctor, the count steps back. Both men are breathing heavily. He lowers the lantern. Now only a slice of him is visible, caught in the gluey light: his large, flaring nostrils, a quivering orange mustache. This is enough to reveal the grief of Peter Nikoničić. The doctor came prepared for anger. He is unprepared to hear the horsey bellows of the big man’s sorrow in the dark. Now he quiets, recognizing the rhythm of his own despair, for which he knows no cure.

  “That boy in your house is a liar. To protect himself, he has hidden the body somewhere. But the surgery was routine, and your daughter is no vukodlak.”

  “She is gone.” Peter Nikoničić’s face is no longer visible in the darkness on the hill. “And you must go now, too.”

  * * *

  Midway down the highway that unwinds into the sea, the doctor becomes aware that he is not traveling alone. Snowfall is unusual on the island. On his way home, retracing his steps in the drifts, the doctor notices that there are two sets of prints.

  Who is following me? the doctor screams.

  Something is moving out of the thicketed darkness. Pleating the leaves. An almost-human whimpering rises out of the woods, a sound that is unbearably familiar.

  In a whisper, the doctor asks the forest: “Nediljka?”

  Out of the shadows steps a child he knows. His middle daughter.

  “Papa!”

  “What are you doing here?” How long has she been hovering a foot away from him in the snow? How lost must he be, to have no awareness of his daughter at his heels?

  “I wanted to know where you go when you leave us,” she tells him. Flatly as always, and without apology. “I am very cold, Papa.”

  It’s an agony to feel her shivering in his arms and to have no further protection to offer. He walks as fast as he dares through the falling snow. When the snow deepens, he carries his daughter on his shoulders. They move through a ravine of solid moonlight. In this lunar meadowland, they are not alone. His daughter sights the creature first, and screams.

  The thing rears onto its hind legs. Its hair is matted to its heaving sides. The doctor’s mind, reaching for a name for the giantess’s shadow, can find only “monster.” It is his daughter who roars back at her, “Bear!”

  Just when he’d thought the joke was done with him, a new surprise. We know this species as the European brown bear, a misnomer in this case, because the bear standing on its hind legs has striking reddish fur.

  Here, then, is the answer to one riddle. They are staring at the vukodlak. The bear with her bloodred muzzle and coppery fur, standing upright in the woods. For an instant the doctor feels a surge of elation, thinking: I can explain everything to them, and kill off the Other Man. But of course that’s not true. The rumor has moved into the tower of fact. Of history. It does not want to be evicted.

  The doctor has been carrying his daughter on his shoulders. When he turns, his daughter is eye level with the bear. Her snout falls open. He sees long black teeth. A levitating slate tongue. The bear, holding her great shaggy arms before her like tree limbs, lets ou
t a roar that seems to shake the island to its bedrock. The roaring goes on and on. Inside of that sound, a miracle happens. There is really no other human word for it. The three stand under some spell of mutual hypnosis. Life recognizes itself, a beam of light flying around three mirrors. Life reorganizes itself into something new.

  Out of their conjoined attention, a fourth mind rears. Large enough to encompass all of them—building itself out of them, as a molecule is born from atoms. Their collision sparks the instant evolution of a special, ephemeral intelligence. Before its collapse, each creature glimpses itself through the eyes of another. The girl sees herself small as a blossom atop her father’s shoulders, who is, after all, only a man; the doctor watches himself falling into the bear’s mind, a shadow on the snow, cleansed of every accusation; as for the bear, her perception floats outside the net of this language. The three blink once, twice. Each exists, without past or future, inside the other.

  The spell ends—nothing breaks it—it simply runs its course. With a second roar, the bear resumes her solitary life. Dropping onto her paws, she shoulders into the pines.

  The doctor is left with only an inky memory of the knowledge that engulfed them a moment ago. There is another country in which he exists, running parallel to this one.

  Just before sunrise they reach another clearing, now a plain of fresh snow. Birds throb into the sky, startled from their feeding. Their cries are like thunder from another century, silvery and faraway. Even skimming the earth, they echo remotely.

  Why do they sound like that, Papa?

  They are dead and alive, he explains.

  His daughter’s skin has a blue cast and her eyes are half lidded. The doctor has put his gloves on her hands. He has wrapped her in his robe. He is terrified that the cold may have already invaded her. By the time they reach Korčula Town, the sun is up, sending ice crashing into the sea. Ships loom like alien beasts, their gunwales transformed by ice into wooden gums with orange and violet fangs. The world will lose a thousand sets of teeth before noon, thinks the doctor. His daughter stirs, nuzzling her face into his hair.

  In the doctor’s home, the freeze is only beginning. With a shriek to rival the morning birds, his wife falls upon him. He begins to explain about the bear, but he is interrupted half a dozen times by their middle daughter’s coughing. She blinks up at him, still sleepy from the cold.

  “Where have you been? Why on earth did you take her out into this weather—”

  “She followed me,” he says weakly.

  “Tell your mother what you saw,” he urges her.

  “Nobody.”

  His wife is looking at the doctor as if he is a stranger. A look that tilts her into a future with her children from which he is barred. Quick as an animal, she swoops in and snatches back her daughter. She strokes the side of the girl’s skull that is still damp with snow, her colorless lips. Her own face becomes brighter and brighter with life.

  “Get out.”

  This, she says, she cannot forgive.

  The doctor sighs. Now he feels almost happy.

  “You did love me.”

  * * *

  That night, the doctor does not return home. He sleeps on a pallet in one of the sailors’ brothels, where even the seven-foot proprietor is afraid to touch him. He wakes at dawn and wanders the herringbone maze of the walled city, watching helplessly as the faces of his neighbors flinch away from him as if stung.

  At sunset, light ribbons away from the moored ships. The doctor sits on the toothy rocks near the leaping waves. The wind has chased everyone else inside the walls. These rocks are filled in with pieces of chalky shells, and anyone who sits on them will rise with twin crescents of lunar powder on his trousers. The ordinarily meticulous doctor has not visited the barber in a fortnight, and he would have sat down without awareness in a pool of mud, or blood.

  Sunset is a violent spectacle on the island of Korčula. The sun flies as if shot behind the rocks. Once the moon has fully risen, he stands and turns toward the pinewoods of Žrnovo, to look for him, the Other Man. It will be a duel to the finish. Scalpel in hand, the doctor starts up the hill.

  * * *

  From the doctor’s final log:

  All believe me to be not only a failed surgeon, but a corrupter of bodies. Even in my wife’s embrace, I have begun to imagine my death. It is a dreadful rehearsal. My hands end my life, again and again; I see my body lamed in its coffin, removed to a realm beyond all suspicion.

  Yet I am coming to see that this plan is the only means by which I can exonerate myself of those charges brought against me. With a steady hand, I will pour out my blood, and so cleanse my name, and the name of my family. First I will sever my hamstrings. I will complete this surgery perfectly, while still alive. This will mark the first and only surgery I perform on a living body. After hobbling myself, I will cut my throat. Thus will I prove to everyone on Korčula Island that emotion could never have stayed my hand or vitiated my efforts on behalf of the dead.

  Meantime my wife is suffering…my daughters…the rumor continues to assail us from within, changing the contents of our minds.

  These and other excerpts are included in the second file sent from the counts of Korčula to the Council of Ten, regarding the exhumations in the cemetery of Žrnovo. From Korčula these documents traveled to the capital of La Serenissima; from there they were forwarded to the Venetian central offices in the city on the lagoon. Today, copies translated into English, German, Spanish, and Chinese are available for study in the state archives. The doctor’s defense is nearly forty pages long:

  As a boy, I dreamed of saving lives; I have answered that calling, in the peculiar and the only way available to me…

  In addition to the testimony of the doctor’s student, Jure da Mosto, the archive includes two depositions of witnesses, Don Anthony Deševic and Janez Krčelić, confirming under oath that on the sixth of January 1620 the cemetery soil was disrupted and the body of a young countess had vanished.

  Yet the grave was closed, and the investigation abandoned; it is unclear from these documents if or how the case of the accused was ever resolved.

  * * *

  Something comes whistling out of the cave—not stumbling, not lurching, but running down the hillside. Something becomes someone. On shaky legs, the vukodlak stalls between two yellow-mossed boulders. Thoughtfully, he pops a finger into his mouth. It is as cold and as dry as the cave he has just exited, devoid of even a drop of fluid. Plants lisp up around him, dark vines with turbulent blossoms. It was winter when he died, but as a vukodlak the doctor has emerged into a new season. The air, which he can still smell, is thick with pine resin and salt. He bends a knee and genuflects, staring up at the towering pines. Thin red scars cover the backs of his thighs. He touches these wonderingly, amazed at the supple angle of his leg unbending itself. From a numb core, he watches as pain explodes around him. He is lifted to his feet. Has the operation been a failure, then? For here he stands.

  “Perhaps,” the doctor’s vukodlak admits softly to the thousand whispering pines of Black Corfu, “I made a mistake.”

  The Gondoliers

  I. THE CHORUS

  Dr. Glim was supposed to be my last fare of the evening, but when I am a quarter mile from home I hear a man coughing on South Jetty, and against my better judgment, I am drawn down the foamy water of a side canal toward the rattling sound. Through the keyhole spaces in the mangroves, I can see a tall figure in a long green slicker pacing on the jetty. He cries out when he sees me, flagging me down with his whole body.

  The sky is two-toned, fiery pink above the green horizon line. It’s too late for a passenger, even a regular, someone trusted and familiar. A happy story ends here; a responsible gondolier poles homeward. I can hear my sisters doing just that. They are singing in a wide canal, three boats pulling into a line. Echoes fly into the birdcage of my sternum. Even mile
s apart, we are always audible to one another.

  When I am twenty feet from the jetty, I raise the pole and wave it slowly at him. Power gathers in my cracked heels and pulses upward. Will I take him to his destination? We are equals in our suspense.

  “What luck,” cries the man. “Are you going north?”

  “Push your hood up. I want to see who’s asking.”

  Sunset is less than an hour away, and he won’t find another boat if I refuse him. His fear reaches out to stroke my cheek. It makes me feel tenderly toward the white-faced old man; also, powerful. On the poling platform, I am almost eye level with him. Old, I guess that’s always relative. Older than me, I should say. Thirty? Forty? But perhaps I look old to him.

  “Thank God you spotted me. Please, I’m in a real jam.”

  He keeps a finger trained on me, as if at any moment I might disappear.

  “The boat I hired never showed.”

  His voice catches. Now that I am closer, I can hear how deeply this rattle has lodged itself inside his body. Even at sunset, it’s eighty degrees, but this stranger is shivering. His desperation perfumes the air, a soaking underarm smell. Under the jutting limestone, as if in secret mimicry of him, a thousand tiny, sharp wavelets jump and fall. He is nervous. I am making him nervous. Power whips through me again, and I almost laugh, it feels so good to be alive on the poling platform. Song gathers under my navel and I make no effort to contain it.