Convalescent, The

by Jessica Anthony

  “Mr. Pfliegman,” she says. “What’s this?”

  I squint at the picture.

  It’s a trombone, I write. The kid asked me to draw it. I swear.

  Dr. Monica’s eyes flutter. “Well, I don’t know if it’s a trombone or not,” she says. “But it certainly doesn’t look like—the other thing.” She smiles and circles around the examining table. “Look, Mr. Pfliegman. There’s something I need to tell you. I don’t care about the meat, I really don’t— But Mister Bis is coming over this afternoon when you’re feeling better. He was worried about you with all this rain, so he went out to the field to check on you yesterday.”

  I sit up and adjust my eyeglasses. I look at her.

  “But when he got there,” she says, “the bus was gone.”

  Gone?

  “The whole field is gone, and not just your field. The river flooded. People have lost whole farms. I can’t tell you how relieved I am you weren’t out there when it happened. It’s all over the news— Anyway, I don’t want you to worry about that now. Everything’s arranged. Mister Bis has agreed to take you in. He has an extra room. It’s just a cot in his basement, but it’s safe and dry. I think it’s a good place to stay until we can help you make other accommodations.”

  I’m sorry. But I can’t.

  Dr. Monica frowns. “You may not have a choice. The Big M is pressing charges— But look, I don’t want you to worry about that now,” she says, and walks over to me. She places her hands on my kneecaps. “Things have been taken care of, Mr. Pfliegman. I just want you to lie back so I can have a look at you.”

  Why?

  “Why what?”

  Why do you want to help me?

  She looks at me, surprised. “It’s my job.”

  It’s your job to care for children, I write.

  Dr. Monica sighs and looks at her watch. “We’re all children, Mr. Pfliegman,” she says. “Just lie back. Relax.”

  I lie down. Dr. Monica prods her fingers along the bandages covering my clavicle to my sternum, all the way down to my pelvis. At this point in an examination with Dr. Monica, I might suffer urges, or even just a floating immodest thought, but now that Things Have Been Taken Care Of, now that there are Other Accommodations, now that Everything’s Arranged— Dr. Monica presses down on a small place on the left side of my abdomen.

  I cough, violently.

  “Do that again,” she says, keeping her fingers in place.

  I cough again. It feels like one of my lungs is leaning against the other. Dr. Monica presses a little harder, then walks around the table. She takes a few minutes and unwraps the bandages, then she presses the other side. “Does this hurt?” she asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Weird,” she says, and crumples her brow. “Mr. Pfliegman, there’s something wrong with your stomach.”

  I look down at my stomach. It’s one round bulge, swelling out between my ribs and hips. It looks like my gut’s full of air. I trace it with a finger.

  “Let’s get rid of the rest of the gauze,” she says. “I want to do an X-ray. You can keep the examining gown on.”

  Wait, I write. There’s something I have to tell you, too.

  Dr. Monica looks up from my writing tablet. “Yes?” she says. “What is it?”

  XXIX

  EVOLUTION OF THE PFLIEGMANS:

  EXEGESIS

  Lili László normally wore the kinds of clothes that the men wore, a cape-like shirt secured with a rope for a belt. During her pregnancy with Botond, she loosened the rope a few notches, but that was all. The nurse in charge of the delivery was an old, crooked-looking woman with furry yellow teeth and hair that grew in places where hair has no business growing. Kinga’s cheeks had long drained of color, her eyes squinted at light and at darkness, and she slowly accepted the fact that she was going to be blind and there was nothing to be done about it. She did not mind the loss of sight. She had spent too many years observing how the stronger Pfliegmans tried and failed, often fatally, to participate in any activity in society that went beyond butchering; she had seen how the meeker Pfliegmans, the ones who kept to the tents and did not mingle with society, the ones who spent days waving the flies out of their eyes, coughing their lungs out, managed to keep hanging on; she saw our bleak and unforgiving future and the old witch retreated into herself. She was, in ways both physical and spiritual, shrinking from the world, which might explain why, upon helping Lili give birth to Botond, the tiny, slippery baby boy, she felt no gentle tug of conscience, no whisper of remorse, when she told her the small secret she had carried, like a pin on her shawl, for the last thirty years.

  Lili was sitting up, nursing the child, as we Pfliegmans hung back. After the birth of Szeretlek, we’d become highly suspicious of the whole experience, so when it appeared that Lili was entering labor, we’d scattered to the flaps of the tent, watching fearfully. Waiting for the water to begin. But it had been an easy birth. Kinga removed the one bowl of body-water from the tent to dump it outside.

  “He’s small,” said Lili. “Should he be this small?”

  “Small’s good,” Kinga said. “You were big. Too big.” She rubbed her sagging cheeks, then squatted down to the fire. She poked it with a stick. A burning log fell over and rolled out onto the hearth. She jammed it back in again.

  “You were there?” said Lili, adjusting herself.

  The baby whimpered.

  Kinga sucked her lower lip, which slid easily in and out her mouth. Over the years she had lost her teeth into various meats and stews, and the lip now flapped against her gums with each breath. “Your mother died when you were still in the womb,” she said. “She couldn’t deliver you. So after your brother was born, I reached in and pulled you out.”

  Lili laughed. “You’re crazy,” she said. “I don’t even have a brother.”

  Kinga grabbed her leg and squinted fiercely. “We are all brothers,” she hissed, sucking her lip.

  We must go back, for a moment, to the day Szeretlek was born. To Aranka lying sprawled across the hearth. To the water and fish, the long arms of algae, pouring from her body. The other Hungarian women have swum out of the tent to save their own skins. But Kinga stays back to check the lifepulse. To be absolutely certain of the death. She is chilled, chest-deep in the water, and quickly runs her hands over the body. The little Pfliegman woman is dead. But when Kinga reaches the belly, something quivers beneath it. The belly is still large with fat, which Kinga knows is common, but she also knows that it should not be moving like that. The belly wobbles and jerks, like a baby bird trapped in its own egg. She presses one hand into it.

  The belly kicks back.

  Kinga pushes up her sleeves and reaches inside the dead woman. She feels a pair of feet. The baby is turned around. Kinga gets one foot, wrapping her thumb around the ankle and grabbing it, and then she gently pulls the baby out. It’s a girl, and she screams louder than any baby Kinga has ever heard before. The scream is disconcerting, and Kinga has to concentrate to keep her grip. Once she affirms her hold on the child, she severs the umbilical cord and paddles toward the open flaps of the unsteady tent, holding the baby high above the quickening current.

  The child cannot see Kinga, but feels for her. She stretches her legs out as far as they will go, down Kinga’s left arm. “Steady!” Kinga cries. But when she reaches the elbow, the babe wrestles both of her legs around the arm, squeezes tightly, and then turns it with surprising strength— Kinga’s grip loosens, and the child drops, splashing into the river. Frantically, Kinga tries to swim to catch her, but she is not fast or strong enough. She watches the baby float away, perched on a fat bed of algae and cradled by the current, disappearing around the bend.

  It is one thing to learn that you’re in love with your brother—your twin brother. It is quite another to learn you are a Pfliegman. After Kinga’s story, Lili picked up Botond, wrapped him in cloth, and fled the fetid Pfliegman tent. She fled from all of us. She made her way across camp to the outskirts of the outski
rts, where the trees had not been logged, where there were no barnyard animals milling cozily about, where the congregated populace thinned from ten paces per tent to one hundred paces to an even thousand. Lili spun around and stared back at her home, the home of the butchers, a lazy patchwork of animal hide pieced onto the frames, hastily sewn in uneven stitches. These people were her people. She looked down at little Botond and was frightened: the boy now seemed foreign to her, a wriggling, unfamiliar creature that opened and closed its mouth like a begging bird. She began to notice failings in the child: the eyes were off balance, the ears stuck out much too far to be normal. The stomach ballooned with air. The small arms and legs that had once seemed endearing and delicate now looked displaced next to the head.

  It was spring. The gray, wet sky roiled above as Lili walked to the edge of Aranka’s river and stood in the mud of the embankment. “It would be so easy,” she thought. “All I have to do is let him fall from my arms in the exact manner that I would drop a load of firewood. A stack of burlap.” She moved closer to the edge, to the place where weeds fall into water. She put her toe in. It was freezing.

  Botond screamed in her arms.

  Lili thought of Szeretlek as she looked down at his face, at his watery gray eyes, eyes that would one day turn black with no discernable pupils, and could not do it. He felt glued to her. Lili had seen so many of the Fekete-Szem walk out to this spot to send a hal back where it came from, but although Botond was small and weak, he had not been born hal — She could not send this little fish back. She held him tight and ran away from the river, back to the tent.

  After some pushing and shoving, she commandeered a corner for herself and Botond near the hearth, and then Lili László, the unflagging Leg-Wrestling Champion of Tenth-Century Hungary, herself grew lethargic. Kinga ran errands for her, stealing rinds of fat peeled from deermeat from the proper Hungarians. Armloads of ját. She would return to the tent and dump everything on the food mat on the floor, but still Lili’s appetite waned. She never left the tent. Never. She would gnaw indolently on a piece of ját and then toss it on the floor in the manner of every other Pfliegman. She grew disinterested in meat, and only ate the droppings of tomatoes Kinga gathered from the ground below other people’s stews, until one day she lost interest in the tomatoes. Often she ate nothing at all.

  She spent each day growing thinner in her corner of the tent, nursing and then eventually feeding the wee, misshapen Botond only when she had to, speaking only when it became urgently necessary to do so, and eventually, after five years had passed, after it became clear that Szeretlek was not returning, that he most likely had been consumed, somehow, by the barrens, Lili stopped speaking at all.

  Of course, Szeretlek was not dead. Far from it. As a reward for saving the Hungarian armies, Árpád had given him M, and Szeretlek rode the great white horse back to the Carpathian Basin. For weeks he scanned the populace, searching for the one specific tent, the tent that leaned both east and west, but Lili had moved us, and Szeretlek could not find it. He lumbered along the riverbanks of the Danube, his giant arms swinging, inquiring of strangers if they had ever heard of Lili László. The Hungarian population had expanded considerably over the last five years: many people eager to get on board with a prospering nation were new to the community, and had never heard of her. Others had only vague, imprecise recollections. Some of the older Hungarians remembered when Árpád had searched for her, and cried out, “She’s lost again?” If they remembered anything, they remembered a compact woman with impressive thighs, but most had not seen or heard anything about her since the Great Leg-Wrestling Match, and that was—well, it was a long time ago. Most didn’t even remember the match.

  “Time,” thought Szeretlek. “How you float so effortlessly by.”

  Always, he asked who among them had cut their meat, and their answers always varied: “The creepy butcher-folk,” they said. “Those sickly little meat people.” Or sometimes, in a slightly deferred murmur: “Enni hús, enni hús.”

  A new pain appeared at his ankle, from the very place where the raccoon had nipped him on the heel. It grew upward to the knee, then the stomach, the shoulders, like a rising flood. Once again, he began to feel the weight of his body. No matter how strong or able, his thick arms were useless. A burden. His back drooped as he rode M along the river, and his head hung low. Without Lili to return to, there would be no reason ever to look skyward.

  As he rode past them, the Hungarians whispered amongst themselves: “How sick he looks!”

  “And how sad!”

  “Is there anything sadder than a sad giant?”

  One desultory afternoon, while slumping around yet another embankment, Szeretlek found himself barely able to sit upright. He felt stabbed, and yet, when he lifted his shirt, there was no cut. The pain traversed from the left side of his body to the right in a clean half-orbit across his belly, and he could endure it no longer. He slid off the great white horse and into a lick of the river. He paddled along in a strange and foreign daze until he saw it. The tent was bigger than he remembered, but there was no denying the clumsy handiwork, the sour smell of the boiling stew, the clouds leaking into the sky overhead. The Giant crept from the water and crawled up on his knees. Exhausted, he fell on his side.

  The ground shuddered.

  We Pfliegmans felt this disturbance, and it frightened us into a flutter of discontent. We stopped whatever foul thing we were doing and squealed, “The earth is shaking! It will swallow us whole!”

  We nominated a wispy young Pfliegman named Elod to investigate the sound.

  Fearfully, Elod poked his head out of the tent where Szeretlek’s enormous body lay in front of him, unconscious. Elod whimpered and ducked back inside. “It’s a giant,” he whispered. “A dead giant!”

  Of course, we Pfliegmans had no understanding of the gray areas of human existence—a body either moved or didn’t move, that was all—so after poking him with a few sticks to be certain, four of us emerged from the tent and grabbed his hands and feet. We dragged the body to the back of the tent, behind the Moving Rock Pile. We did not recognize him. We had forgotten him in exactly the way that we forgot everything else. What part of a Pfliegman life, after all, is worth remembering? Memory is for the strong, the well-nourished, and we Pfliegmans could only endure each brutal second as it presented itself— Besides, the Giant certainly didn’t look like one of us. We huddled around the fire that evening, swatting the flies, yelling and batting each other over the head, all in a manner common to the Pfliegman urbane.

  Here was the issue: in order to be a sacrifice, the sacrifice had to be alive at first, and then killed. But others argued that when the Giant came to the tent he was alive, if only for a short time. We Pfliegmans very much enjoyed a good sacrifice.

  “What shall we do?” we cried.

  “Sacrifice!”

  “But we could use his clothes and body parts!”

  “Sacrifice!”

  “Let the body rot, and we’ll keep out the villains!”

  “Save the bones for lumber!”

  “Enni hús! Enni hús!”

  Szeretlek gagged and coughed, and then awoke.

  People, so many people, wiggled and squirmed around him. It was impossible to move. Embers burned low in the hearth next to him, smoke circling and rolling in the tent, heavy as a moving fog. His eyes! How they stung! The flap in the ceiling was not wide enough for proper ventilation. Szeretlek tried to look for Lili, but his eyes burned and he couldn’t see. Too many arms and legs cluttered his view. Too many black eyes peering down at him, trying to evaluate whether he was alive or dead. They picked at his hair. They tasted his feet. He tried to move his arms and legs but found them to be bound.

  “Help me,” he choked.

  A young boy scampered between the legs and knelt down next to him. Szeretlek grabbed his arm. There was something in the boy’s face that spoke of Lili, something in the way his dark little eyes blinked back at him, something about the crooked way he
held his small body. But it could not be. As the boy twisted his arm unhappily, Szeretlek held on. He knew what was about to happen; he knew that however glorious his victory with the Hungarians in the Battle of the Red Valley, the Fekete-Szem did not belong to the Magyars; we belonged to the Man in the Sky.

  “Credo,” he whispered.

  The boy blinked back at him with curiosity.

  “It will save you,” he said, and turned onto his back.

  The boy waited for the Giant to say something else, but the enormous man just closed his eyes. His limbs went limp. The boy jumped up and ran over to two nearby Pfliegmans and told them what happened. In a flash, they were upon Szeretlek, hopping and bouncing around his mammoth torso. They jabbed him with pointy sticks. “He’s alive!” they cried.

  “Now there can be a sacrifice!”

  Across the tent, Lili heard the commotion and stirred. Enough time had now passed that the truth did not repulse her. Her brain felt soft. Un-cooperative. Which was fine. Slowly her own memories faded, until there was just one left: she thought back to the day of the wrestling match, how strange it was that both of their bodies just seemed to fit so well together. She now understood that they fit for a reason: that they had been linked once before, tumbling about in Aranka’s extraordinary womb.

  Lili coughed and picked up the clay pot where she kept her grain alcohol. It was empty.

  She smashed it on the stones.

  No one paid any attention. Everyone was gathered at the far end of the tent, hooting and dancing around the hearth. Lili stood up and stretched, her hairy legs tingling from the blood moving for the first time in days. She looked for Kinga, but the old witch was nowhere. Lili bent her knees and straightened them. She placed her hands on her legs and thought how they were shadows of their former selves, so scrawny they hardly felt like legs at all. She ran her tongue over her wooly teeth. A few nits nibbled her scalp. She picked them from her hair and ambled over to an old man crouched before the fire, fluids dripping from the holes in his face, teeth poking out from his lips in tiny shards.