“This is my patient, Mrs. Bigger, and her name is Fraulein Abendroth,” said Doctor von Hippel, firmly. “She's seventeen, and her eyes are perfect for my process. What you see is merely scar. Kindly leave off examining her. We're eating supper.”
“Perfect,” Beate repeated, hearing only that word and the way it echoed in a room of no ghosts. Ghosts would like that word. “Perfect, go, go, go,” they would say. No ghost would like this, a dinner in a room with closed windows and no breeze, motionless. Ghosts longed for wind.
The old woman touched Beate's left eyelid, and Beate jerked back, nearly spilling her glass. “She's not quite right, is she?”
“Now, now,” said the elderly ophthalmologist, his accent liltingly Irish. “Now. Perfection varies, does it not, Róisín? Think of the gazelles. They were not perfect, nor was it necessary that they be, that day in the desert, the sand blowing, and I with no practical knowledge of such things, making a blind gazelle see.”
Róisín made a sound. “The gazelles were fifty years ago, Samuel,” she said. “A gazelle can't speak and tell you what it sees after surgery.”
“I was young, that's true,” said Samuel. “But I think of that surgery fondly.”
“As do I,” said von Hippel to Fritz. “I read of Doctor Bigger's success in a monograph, and it inspired me to this place, these techniques.”
“Is that so?” said Fritz, the first thing he'd said in hours. Even now, he was looking out toward the trees, though it was full dark.
“I was kidnapped by a tribe of nomads,” said Doctor Bigger. Beate felt the traditional dread of the blind, converted by fate into listeners. She was sitting beside the Irish doctor, and he leaned closer. “Twelve or fourteen days from Grand Cairo. Kidnapped and forced to bargain for my life with the all the canny I possessed.”
Beate could smell dishes traveling from the kitchen, and cringed slightly. Johanna cringed too. A stew was being ladled. Meat stuffed with cabbage, cooked with carrots and red wine.
“Is this a rabbit stew?” Johanna asked, politely. “Is it, by chance, made of the rabbits from outside the house?” Beneath the table, her husband kicked her. “The medical rabbits?”
“It is,” Doctor von Hippel said, clearly proud. “Some do not survive the enucleation. They die of fright. We don't waste them here. The meat is tender, is it not? Rabbits, not to speak indelicately, are prolific creatures. Those in excess of our needs, we use in the kitchens.”
“And those surgeries,” Johanna said. “We saw the others in their pen. Can they really make the blind see? That is our purpose, Doctor von Hippel. She must see. Do you assure us that she will?”
“They will see,” the doctor said. “The blind will see.”
“And the dead will walk,” said Fritz, startling himself. He laughed. “Beate?”
His wife pinched him. He didn't know why he'd said that either.
“The dead are not my business,” said Doctor von Hippel, “I'm in the business of providing light to the blind.”
Beate was the only one listening to Doctor Bigger, in an effort to keep from eating her food. He leaned in.
“The Bedouin chieftain, Beate, had a pet gazelle, a dear animal, and it was blind, one eye missing, the other injured. I did not ask what had befallen it, but someone told me it had met a lion, and someone else told me it'd met a poker. They told me they'd kill me, for I had no purse, no hope of anyone to pay my ransom, and I said I'd pay my way out by making the chieftain's pet see again. There was another gazelle in the camp, and I took its eye and brought it to the pet, cutting away the injured cornea with my own knife, and stitching the new one into position with two sutures. We bound its eyes with silk, and it went about the camp, stumbling. It was a miraculous cure. After two weeks, the pet gazelle opened its eyes, and could see movement and detail, and recognize its owner. It pranced about, Beate, it did so, for all the world as though it had never been injured, seeing new things for the first time, and old things resurrected in its sight. I would I could see anew, with such joy, Beate, but not the present day. I'm nearing my own time of dying, and I wish I could see a few of the loved ones of my history. I would like to see them before I die, for what is after this? What will we see when the dark comes down on us? We must see what we can see before we are gone from this bright world, Beate.”
The doctor clucked happily to himself, and then returned to his meal, his wine, his rabbit.
“And the other gazelle,” asked Beate finally. “The one that gave the eye? What happened to it?”
“We killed it,” Bigger said. “Of course.”
Beate sat in nervous silence. She wasn't sure what a gazelle was. She had an image of two young girls, one a wife, the other a slave. The wife blind, the slave girl sighted, but less valuable. She thought of all the ghosts she'd met, and knew that something like this could happen anywhere, on any piece of land. That any sort of person could be killed for something someone else wanted.
She imagined a pen filled with eyeless girls, their faces bandaged, and here, in the comfortable rooms, the warm woolen blanket, the soft cloth and the kind doctor, ministering to girls like her, who were precious to someone. Or, if not precious, at least girls for whom surgical costs had been paid.
“My new eyes,” Beate said, her words too fast. “Where will they come from? Is there another girl here, waiting to give me her sight? Are you taking eyes from other girls? Are you killing them? Where are they? Where are the ghosts?”
Conversation stopped. She was shouting, and it was strange, because she'd never cared about other girls. She had never cared about the living at all.
“Beate!” her father cried. “Hush!”
“What can you be thinking?” her mother said, and then turning to the others at the table, “She's not herself. The journey. She'd never say something like this otherwise. She'll certainly not speak so before the conference in Heidelberg. Beate's a good girl.”
“It's quite all right,” von Hippel said. “You'll receive the corneas of one of our rabbits, Beate, nothing from another human. The sole successful grafts have been porcine and lapine, and none of those have persevered beyond the point of clouded healing. This one, though, will be different. We've advanced in our techniques, as I said. Things are improved.”
“I took an eye from a wolf once, long ago,” said Doctor Bigger, thoughtfully. “A wolf trapped by hunters. I placed the wolf's cornea in the eye of a pointer dog, but the dog ran into the woods, and tore off its bandages. I was certain the eye would be ruined, but when the dog returned, some weeks later, the wolf eye was the brighter, and the clearer, and through the wolf's eye, the dog could see more and other than it had ever seen through its own sight.”
“Hush,” said his wife, kinder than she'd been. “The girl is frightened, and no one could blame her. You telling tales of gazelles and wolves, and she naught but a child.”
Beate was no longer frightened. The notion of her eyes becoming animal appealed to her. Perhaps she'd see something wonderful in the wood. She opened her mouth and took a spoonful of rabbit stew. It was delicious, the meat dissolving on her tongue, sweet and tender. She was eating something blind. She was eating the visions of a thousand rabbits.
Later, seated on the divans before the fire, Beate curled in a laprobe, imagining herself seeing through a wolf's eye, the trees before her. Through wolf eyes she might see prey.
Fritz looked out the windows as well, tilting the spirits in the bottom of his glass. He held a burning mouthful. Outside the windows, in the dark, something ran, and ran, and ran.
5.
Shortly after the sun rose, Johanna wandered the house in search of her husband, tremendously annoyed. The night had been too late, and the morning too early, and Johanna's head ached. She'd gotten half through her toilette before she'd realized Fritz was unaccounted for. She'd assumed he was with von Hippel, but von Hippel and his nurse were preparing Beate for surgery, and Fritz was still not in evidence.
Johanna left the house, and walked out onto the great lawn. Perhaps he'd gone for a walk in the woods, caring nothing for his responsibilities as a father and husband. She brought her magnifying glass out from the bosom of her dress, small and discrete, she was not terribly nearsighted, no, whatever Fritz insisted, and peered into the forest. Nothing to be seen there. No Herr Abendroth. But somehow, she did not wish to walk closer to the line of brush and leaves.
“Fritz,” she called. No one would hear her. She was out far enough from the house. “Fritz? Beate is already in the surgery! Come out, if you're in the wood!”
But nothing in the wood moved.
There was something white in the center of the great lawn. She walked toward it, slowly. A chicken, possibly, caught by a fox. Or one of those rabbits.
She picked up her husband's pajama trousers before she knew what they were, and found dirt on them, their edge partially dug into a divot in the grass. Then his shirt. She found, not thinking, no, not thinking, a ragged tear in it. She looked around, turning slowly in a circle. There was nothing else. No one. No Fritz. Here were his slippers, his pajamas, his robe.
Johanna turned to run back to the house, to tell someone. What would she tell them? That he'd shed his clothes and run into the forest? She paused, stepping over the place the pajamas had been.
There was something watching. She felt it. She looked around frantically, dread rising in her, her throat clenching, her fists closing. Something was all around her. And a horrible smell, dense woods, rotting meat.
As she stood, paralyzed, shaking, something tore a slash in her wrapper, long and jagged, and she felt a searing pain in her rib, the flesh opened by something sharp as a knife.
6.
Beate looked into the nothing, her eyes hooked open. The cocaine solution was dropped in, two drops at a time, and she felt her eye becoming something other than her own, a piece of stranger's skin.
“Do you feel this?” the doctor asked, and she did, a slight pulling, a tug, but it was not painful. It was as though a strand of her hair was caught in a brush, not tangled, but stretched.
The doctor adjusted the trephine, a bronze device shaped a little like a telescope, and wound its gears with a key. He employed it to cutting the entire opaque cicatrix of Beate's left eye, a four-millimeter diameter, a delicate, delicate operation, the blade slithering through her flesh like a serpent through flooded land. He lowered the instrument carefully. He felt the tiniest instant of resistance, and then release: the blade had cut her eye. Any tremble, any slip, and he'd damage the lens. His instrument sliced perfectly in a circle, at consistent depth. The doctor only needed to hold it steady as it cut. He excised the scarred cornea down to the membrane of Descemet, and- this was the primitive part — removed it with knife and forceps. The nurse brought iced mercuric chloride to control the hemorrhaging, but a small trickle of blood made its way down the girl's cheek.
Beate stretched her toes. She was shoeless, still, and enjoying it. The tug on her eye was still not unpleasant. There were no ghosts in the room. All she could hear was the living. Her wrists were restrained, though she felt no desire to claw at her eyes. There was a heavy blanket holding her body to the pallet, and no one tried to confess their sins. No one asked her to see their faces or their deaths. No one wished to go, go, go.
The doctor bent to the rabbit: calm, its eyeballs glazed, the cocaine solution liberally applied there as well. Its ears quivered only slightly. The surgeon felt the usual pinch of suspicion, the fear that the rabbit eye would be unusable somehow, but he brought the trephine into position, and cut. He remembered his initial experiments, a failure with a dog's cornea, globe collapsed, vitreous humors overflowing, and the man he'd ministered to blinder than when he'd begun. Removing a cornea was like removing a cork from a bottle of precious wine. Wine could spill. Fifty years of attempts, this procedure. Reisinger had begun with the rabbits in the 1820's, then Bigger, and Kissel, each of them with their near-successes, their pigs, wolves, dogs and gazelles.
Carefully, precisely, von Hippel brought the rabbit's cornea into position, and placed it into the lamellar bed as though centering a wooden peg in a children's toy. Another bloody tear rolled down the girl's cheek as the nurse irrigated the site, dusted iodoform over the eye, and closed both eyes with a bandage. He'd only work on one eye at a time, to show the contrast, and, as well, there'd been an incident with rabbit corneas once before. He'd never perform surgery on both eyes simultaneously now.
He'd partaken of the coca himself. It improved his precision, though it made his heart switch like the tail of an aggrieved jungle cat.
Beate's mouth moved into an expression not entirely a smile. She was beautiful, von Hippel thought, or she would be one day. He imagined the girl seeing herself for the first time, her expression when she discovered her own face. It was a strange woman who'd never seen herself in a glass. He would have the privilege of introducing her to vanity. He'd take her to Heidelberg. All the other surgeons would be agog. His paper was already half-written in his head, to be sent to every journal after the public presentation.
Beate Abendroth would be his miracle. She was young enough to be a daughter, though he had no daughters. Only a son, nineteen now, and at university. He thought of how his would be the first face she'd see in twelve years.
The nurse wrung the rabbit's neck and saved it for soup. As she carried it across the room, he heard, from somewhere on the grounds, the sound of someone shrieking over and over again. He thought of fire, the house burning and swiftly bundled Beate. His nurse was already up the stairs, and running too, and by the time they were all outside, on the great lawn, panting and spinning for smoke it was clear to him that something was very wrong. There was no fire. There was only Johanna, in the center of the lawn, screaming.
“What is the matter with my mother?” murmured Beate, dazed with anesthetic and sedative.
“She seems to have experienced something unpleasant in the grass,” said the doctor, minimizing it.
He did not wish to tell the girl anything about what her mother was doing. Doctor Bigger was there with the women, his arm about the mother's shoulders. She was clearly hysterical, and on her white wrapper, there were splashes of blood, a wound on her ribcage.
Bigger looked toward the house, and recited a poem of his own devising.
“Sin stalk'd about apostate man
Driv’n from happiness under ban,
And prescient now of Death;
Marking his future victims well,
Prizes of sorrow, sin, and hell,
From first, to latest breath!”
The Irishman crossed himself. The girl's mother wailed again, and Bigger worked at her ribcage, binding something up. A wound, von Hippel saw now.
“What has happened to my mother?” The girl felt heavy as an animal in his arms.
“I don't know,” said the doctor.
“Something took him!” Johanna shrieked. “Something took him, and now he's gone! Something happened here! Something happened to my husband! His clothes! It's still here! Can you not feel it?”
Von Hippel looked down, at Beate in his arms, bandaged and drugged, nearly unconscious. She lolled, groggily, as her mother screamed.
“Something took him!” Johanna shouted again, and Beate whispered something. The doctor lowered his ear to her mouth.
“Go,” she whispered again. “Go, go, go.”
#
Beate slept a long time, was bandaged and swooning, so long that she missed Johanna's collapse, and her gibbering insistence that the house and grounds contained something terrible. The nurse wrapped Johanna in sheets. They were not equipped. Johanna calmed somewhat, though not enough. They stitched her wound, which was, it was true, strange. Deep and jagged, as though she'd fallen on a piece of metal.
That night, and every night after the day she'd found the pajamas, Johanna felt things all around her. The house shuddered with them, and the grounds too. She smelled
carrion. She felt wind that wasn't there. The house was dark and the forest was darker.
She felt herself getting old, her daughter still blind, the two of them, she imagined in a house together, in misery, shuffling about, living on smaller and smaller rations. Her family was dead, and her husband was gone. She'd chosen badly. The memory of Fritz's pajamas haunted her, and the memory of the wound. The house itself felt wrong. Surfaces that should have felt hard felt soft, and the pen where the medical rabbits lived was too loud. Everything screamed, all night, the woods, the rabbits.
There was no announcement of Fritz's disappearance. The constable came, examined the pajamas, the grass, and determined that Fritz was not dead, but fled. He'd left his family, the man said, not kindly. She imagined Fritz, for a moment, back at the University, in his office, surrounded by papers. It was not true.
“But something touched me,” Johanna managed, and the constable looked at her blankly. “Something touched me, there, where I found them.”
She sat before the constable, her teacup in her hand, shaking so hard the liquid splashed out. Here in the woods, without her life. Here with only a bandaged half-blind daughter and a case of summer dresses. Johanna fingered the stitches in her ribcage. A ragdoll, sewn up after an encounter with a lapdog, put out to be played with again.
She sniffed the air, revolted, and the doctor and constable looked at her.
Johanna withstood it as long as she could, and then, one night, she dressed herself, and walked until she crossed the train tracks, and then onward, to Giessen. She stood on the platform, and considered her future. It was still night. No one was yet waiting for the train, no one looking at her. Gentian eyes. Compliments from men. She had been beautiful. Now she was old, and there was a jagged scar from her breast to her navel. She'd wasted her youth. There would be no money to pay the bills without Fritz. There would be no summers, no cook, no housekeeper. A future alone in Frankfurt. Widowed but not widowed. What would she do? She had no family. She had no money. Everyone was dead.
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 20
