“There is no bear,” repeated von Hippel, patiently. “The bear is made of light.”
Still, though, he was the toast of the exhibition, and it put him in a merry mood, even though he'd managed to scratch himself somehow, his forearm wounded with an inchlong gash.
In all the society dinners and presentations she was initialed, B.A., or given no name at all, the lovely patient of the great doctor. He was surrounded by people who wished to examine his trephine, and also to examine her.
She wondered if the doctor would stop them, her eyes held open with hooks, but he did not, and so she was a model patient. She stood on stage, staring through colored filters, like some magician's assistant. She thought of telling them what she really saw, the room full of plague-dead villagers, of child ghosts, of birds killed for hats, right eye, left eye, all of them pinned to the heads of doctor's wives. She watched stags killed by arrows meander from seat to seat, passing through the flesh of surgeons. The bear would rise up behind her, roaring, and the room would empty abruptly of ghosts, but they always crept back. The bear was a wonder to them too, even the ghosts, and once they realized that it could not eat them all, they came to watch it kill what it could. They crowded up to the stage, gasping and murmuring, watching the bear eat, watching the ghost bodies swim into its belly, twisting pale and startled there.
Beate tried to ignore them, even as they called out periodically “She sees me!”
Doctor Bigger approached her on the second day from the back of the room, a white-bearded old man in a rumpled brown-black suit. He carried a cane carved into the shape of a gazelle, but there were no admirers flocking around him, no one asking him about his surgeries.
“Little Beate,” he said, and laughed. “He's made you see, just as he said he would.” She knew him by his voice, his strange Irish accent atop the German.
“Hello,” she said. “He has.”
The doctor sat beside her, and patted her shoulder. “But you are not happy with your sight.”
“I see ghosts,” she said. “I always did. Now I see more than before. All the dead, animal and human. There's a bear with us here, and it's feasting.”
The doctor looked around, fascinated. She was stunned at his belief. “Is there, now?”
She pointed to where the bear lay on the edge of the stage. It was eating three child ghosts. It tore at them, expanding and shrinking, the little ghosts screaming, and ghostly blood everywhere, on every surface. Up at the top of the auditorium, there was a careening orbit of ghost birds, spinning at the skylights, and the bear watched them as it ate.
“A large bear,” she said. “A bear that is always hungry. It came with us from Giessen. Now it's eating ghosts, but I don't know what it may choose to do. It could do more.”
“How would one kill a bear such as this?” the doctor asked her, and she looked at him.
“Kill? It's a ghost. It's dead already.”
“How would one make such a bear depart, if the bear were a ghost? Religious men?”
The thought had not occurred to her. The bear was no demon, not to her mind. What demon would be so useless?
“One might,” Bigger said, “use a knife on such a bear, and slice it from the world. Might one not? Is not a ghost a kind of lost lens, a blurred vision? How do you see it? Does it seem living to you, or does it seem like a scar?”
“The bear is not a scar,” she said, insulted. “The bear is a bear, and now it is the ghost of a bear.”
“The bear is light,” he said. “Everything is light, reorganized into things both bewildering and beautiful. There is much to be seen in the dark. Look at me, now, Beate Abendroth.”
The bear was licking its chops like a dog, and inside its belly, the three ghost children were startled, unused to their new locations. The dead consumed by the dead. The bear was less bear than ever. It sprawled across the stage, its claws extended. It had fattened in her company on a buffet of the ghosts of Heidelberg.
Some of the doctors in the room, the living, had felt sudden pains, tiny bleeding wounds, but no one had died. The bear was sated. Beate was grateful for that.
She looked at the doctor and was startled. He had a knife in his hand. “I'm dying,” he said. “Not of this knife, but of living. You can only live so long.”
“What is it you want?”
“To fight your bear,” said the doctor, and grinned wildly. “To give it a good fight.”
Doctor von Hippel was demonstrating his trephine, twisting the gears, cutting air into thin slices. There was a box on the stage, and in it all the rabbits bounced like fools, little knowing that they were to be shown off, their eyes removed, their long ears bloodied. There were ghost rabbits too, meandering blindly about the back of the auditorium, dead of yesterday's demonstrations. Behind the building there was a pile of rabbit corpses, and she'd seen a stray dog picking from them even that morning. Doctor von Hippel didn't look at her, but he had never believed in the bear.
The bear stretched on its back, growling quietly. She tried to shoo all the other ghosts away: it was not sleeping.
“Winter will come,” said the doctor. “Bears hibernate. Find out where this bear sleeps.”
He patted her on the cheek, and walked away from her.
“This bear is dead,” she said to his back. “Dead things don't sleep.”
But in November, the bear, still fat from Heidelberg, disappeared. The grounds filled back up with cautious ghosts, rabbits and foxes, deer and birds. She went out from the house prowling the perimeter of the land, searching in every hollow, but she didn't find the bear.
She was married to Arthur Von Hippel by then, and pregnant with a baby she couldn't imagine. She'd spent the previous months on trains, being shown to every surgeon, and now, throughout Germany and beyond, doctors were beginning to give light to the blind.
In December, the Irish doctor appeared at the door, with a trunk and without his wife. Doctor von Hippel inquired after her.
“Dead,” said Bigger, “Since the summer, and missed by myself and our household. It was only the two of us there.”
Bigger was frailer, to Beate's gaze, than he'd been the last time she saw him, and his cane took more of his weight than it had. Still, he looked at her with his eyes gleaming.
“Have you found it?” he asked during dinner, and she was forced to tell him that she had not. She'd been occupied with the relief of the bear's disappearance. The baby was not showing yet, and she wondered what sort of baby it would be. Ghosts looked closely at her, pressing their hands to her stomach, just as her own Doctor Von Hippel did. He'd known she was pregnant before it had occurred to her. It might never have. She didn't know much about pregnancy, though she knew about death in childbirth. The ghosts had shown her terrible things since she was seven.
“It's hidden itself,” she said, but as she said it, she realized that of course she knew where it was. There were still no ghosts visible in the house, neither human nor animal. It was sleeping, but it was here.
Doctor Von Hippel bent solicitously over her, pouring more wine, and touching her hair.
“I came to see it,” Doctor Bigger said. “Your bear.”
“You know, of course, Doctor Bigger, that there is no bear,” said von Hippel. “There is only an oddity of the light coming into her vision. A scar, or a tiny speck of dust put in with the rabbit's cornea, the more fool me. It's my fault. I made an error of some sort. Now she sees this thing and there is nothing to be done.”
Beate would not allow him to perform surgery on her other eye, and so she still looked at him through a partial darkness, but she was mostly reasonable, mostly sweet, despite her forays to the edge of the wood. She could behave in company, and if she sometimes knew things about strangers, the child they'd lost, the missing husband, the recently dead pet dog, it was no tremendous difficulty. He'd learned to distract people from his wife's perception by talking about her eyes, the miracle of them, and people were intrigued, l
ooking at her, this lovely young woman who'd been blind for so long.
“I do know that, of course, Doctor Von Hippel,” said Bigger. “But one is fascinated by the oddities in such a surgery. One is intrigued by bears and the rabbits, by wolves and gazelles. We all see things differently, do we not?”
Von Hippel looked at his old friend. Bigger was trembling over his meal. His face was too pale, and his skin too thin. He was 82. The train journey had been taxing, and he'd traveled from Dublin already. He had a feverish excitement, a brightness that seemed edged with fury. He'd never been a traditional doctor. His first work had been all hopeful accident, and now he seemed careless.
Beate gave a demonstration of her embroidery. Von Hippel discussed his son's progress at university. Bigger told the story of the gazelle again, this time adding a postscript.
“Years later, long after I gave that gazelle the gift of sight, I visited Cairo again, and met the chief I'd assisted. We were, by then, old friends, the roles of kidnapper and kidnapped obliterated. We drank strong mint tea and spoke of his gazelle, and of the way I made her see her owner again.”
“What did he say?” asked Beate.
“He said that the gazelle upon seeing him, loved him less. That as a shadow owner, he'd been the source of the gazelle's comfort, a universe contained in one person. When the gazelle saw him again, she could also see everything else, all the people surrounding him, the tents, the other pets. He said that she went to the place where we'd burned and eaten the other gazelle, the donor of the cornea, and kicked up the sands. She ran about in a frenzy, hopping high into the air, and butting the air with her horns. He said that seeing made the world too wide, that she saw too much, more than she should have. That seeing made the gazelle mad, and madness made the gazelle run off one night into the darkness and sand, where a lioness found her and killed her.”
Beate sat quietly, looking at both of them, her husband and the Irishman.
“Dark words,” said Von Hippel, and attempted a laugh. “Dark words for a dark night.” Neither Beate nor Doctor Bigger laughed.
That night Von Hippel worried about things he couldn't define. He slept eventually, his hands dialing the measures of an imagined trephine, taking the eyes from creatures tinier and tinier, a cascading resurrection of sight, mice unblinded, and then up in size again. He unblinded a Cyclops, giving it the cornea of a whale, placing that cornea tenderly into the socket, and as he did, the Cyclops opened its new eye and tore into him. A dream of disemboweling.
Outside snow blanketed the roof, silenced the ghosts on the lawn, each of them leaving the faintest prints, the most delicate echoes of bodies which had once flung themselves into the earth and out again, warrens stopped with snow, streams iced over, birds freezing on branches, and then corpses falling, ghost birds rising up on ghost winds.
Inside the house, Beate covered herself in a woolen wrapper, and tiptoed to the Irish doctor's bedchamber. She knocked, and he opened moments later, fully dressed in his coat and hat, his snow-going boots.
“You won't need those,” she said. “We won't be going outdoors.”
He followed the girl down the stairs. No ghosts in view for Beate, not her father, not her mother. Out there, in the snow, her father tumbled without the bear, falling down, looking up in horror. In Giessen, her mother tempted the train forever, world without end, as one day, Beate herself would no doubt die in perpetuity. In this house, the ghost hibernated.
“There,” she said. The corner of the cellar was darker than dark, and it breathed in and out, slowly, old habits of the living.
She looked at the doctor, who was peering into the nothing, polishing a knife on his coat. She could see the gleam of the blade, disappearing and then reappearing, clean and straight, a knife like the ones used before the trephine. Cutting sight away and then replacing it. The knives were small and sharp, and she watched the doctor, sympathizing with his desire to stab something.
“You can't hurt it that way,” she said. “Not with a living knife.”
He nodded. “It won't be a living knife.”
She took a step back from him.
“I'll die with vigor and with vigor, I'll go at this sleeper, this dead thing, and take it into myself.”
In the corner, the bear moved, rolling. Beate could see all the ghosts it had eaten before it slept, compacted into a slurry of the dead, its body made entirely of other bodies.
The doctor handed her his knife, and opened his shirt, pointing at the place the blade should be inserted. His chest coiled with white hair, his ribcage a delicate and caving thing, through which she could see his blood flowing, his breath passing, his own desire to enghost himself. Why should she not, she wondered? He'd given her the chance to change things, and life had never mattered more than death to her.
“What shall I do with your body?” she asked at last. “There will be a body when I'm done, and a ghost. To kill you is to separate the two, like a cornea from an eye. Your ghost is the lens and your body the useless rest.”
“I left a letter,” said Bigger, and smiled. “You're no murderer, I know. This is a mercy. Do it, girl.”
She wanted to. The baby would be born, and it would be vulnerable. What if it could see the bear? What if the bear could see it? What if everything was too lonely to continue?
The doctor smiled at her. She smiled back at him, this old man with his knife, and he wrapped his hands around the hilt, and around her hand as well. She stepped forward and stabbed him in the heart.
She was still looking into his eyes when his ghost rose out of them, and, ghost knife in hand, smiled again at her. The doctor's blood pooled on the floor, and on her hands, but the doctor himself was loose and free. He bowed to her, and then turned and walked into the corner, his ghost knife ready.
He threw himself upon the sleeping bear.
The bear rose up roaring, stood on its back legs and screamed. It roiled and fought, and tried to kill the newly dead again. The doctor clung to the bear's chest, hanging with his fists, kicking the bear's belly, and the bear moaned, looking around in confusion. This was a new ghost, none he'd killed nor met before. He clawed the walls, leaving long scars. The doctor pushed the knife in, almost gently, breaking the barrier of fur and skin, piecing the membrane that kept the dead dying.
“Die, bear,” said the doctor. “Die as you were meant to die.”
The bear looked at Beate, and she looked at the bear.
“Go,” she said. “Go, go, go.”
She watched as the bear was brought into the doctor's body, as the ghost ate the ghost, blood from a knife. She walked away as the doctor sat on his heels, devouring the dead, his face lit with joy, and the ghost of the bear smiling too, his jaw open and glad, his eyes dimmed, his last sleep begun.
11.
The ghosts came back to the house, and the land shone green and gold, bristling with bones. Beate had a baby, and her husband the doctor welcomed it, a boy. She wore dark glasses, and got older, and all her life, she spoke to the dead and the dead spoke back to her.
When it was time, she walked into the forest, where all the trees were hanging trees, to the place where the last wild bear in Germany had died for the first time, and she lay herself down in a dark hollow, surrounded by all the rabbits she'd known, the living and the dead.
She looked at them through her rabbit eye, and quietly, nameless in history, B.A. cured of blindness, mother of a surgeon, wife of a surgeon, went to sleep.
The ghost of Samuel Bigger came to greet her, and together, they hunted the things that the world would never understand again, the creatures too large to exist.
When Arthur Von Hippel died, the morning after his seventy-fifth birthday, in the spring of 1917, his obituaries lauded him as the man who'd made the blind see, mentioning in passing a seventeen-year-old girl whose life he had transformed. They mentioned, too, that his last years had been clouded by trouble of a domestic and personal nature.
They
did not see fit to itemize the difficulties, but anyone who knew the household might have written that the doctor had become intrigued by spiritualists. He had himself experimented with transplantation, replacing his own left cornea with one taken from a man who had claimed to see ghosts. At last, in the end of his days, Arthur von Hippel began to see the ghost of his wife, an elderly woman in hunting garb.
They would have said that Von Hippel burnt his own house down in an effort to conquer his trouble, and burnt all the land around it too, the forest with all its ancient trees.
When the ground was black and charred, the old man had stood on the edge of the property and watched as every tunnel emptied. From them poured thousands of rabbits, thousands upon thousands, blind and seeing, living and dead, and the dark ground outside of Giessen was covered, then, with a million points of light.
END
* * *
HISTORICAL NOTE
The early history of corneal transplants and cures for blindness is nearly as strange as it is in this story. Efforts to implant rabbit corneas into other rabbits began in the 1820's in Germany, with a medical student named Franz Reisinger. In 1886, with the introduction of cocaine anesthetic (helped into being by Sigmund Freud, incidentally) and his own invention of the clockwork trephine, Doctor Arthur von Hippel became a pioneer of ophthalmologic surgery. The story of his patient, the 17-year-old girl given the cornea of a rabbit, and subsequently displayed in Heidelberg as the first “successful” corneal transplant, is true, though mentioned only briefly in most texts. The girl herself, however, is largely unacknowledged by medical history. She is only briefly described as having suffered an injury to her corneas at an early age, and as being the recipient of the rabbit cornea, which, months after the transplant, is said to have remained clear.
Doctor Samuel Bigger's story of gazelle-to-gazelle transplant is also factual (though likely apocryphal — it was his own account, complete with kidnapping, ransom, and the Sahara) — and the initial inspiration for this story came from a brief, casual mention of same in a book about the history of ophthalmology. “The first successful corneal transplant was in 1837, gazelle to gazelle.”
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 23
