The Best American Short Stories 2019

by Anthony Doerr

  “Fuck the letter, Misha. What is this, grade school?”

  I told him about the possible repercussions, about his getting fired or arrested. “You’re lucky,” I said. “In earlier times, a political joke meant ten years.”

  Konstantyn Illych set his empty shot glass upside down on his pinkie like a thimble, twirled it in languid circles. “Once upon a time,” he began.

  I wanted to shake the letter out of him.

  “I got the flu,” he continued. “Ever get the flu?”

  “Sure.”

  “The flu turned into pneumonia and I ended up in the hospital. Not only did I get my own room, but by the end of the week the room was filled, and I mean floor-to-ceiling filled, with flowers and cards and jars of food from people I didn’t even know, people from all around the country.”

  Milena Markivna placed the last sprat between her lips and sucked it in until the tip of the tail disappeared into her mouth.

  Konstantyn Illych leaned in. “Imagine, Misha, what would happen if you tried to get me fired.”

  Milena Markivna smacked her lips. “Shall I grab another can? Maybe this time we’ll get lucky.”

  Another week passed without success. My superior remarked that I was usually quicker at obtaining a letter, and was I not dealing with someone who specialized in the written word, who could whip up a heartfelt apology in no time? I tried what I could with the poet. I considered bribing him, but the mere thought felt unnatural, against the grain, against the direction a bribe usually slid. I began to neglect other tasks at work, but believed my persistence with Konstantyn Illych would be rewarded. I admit I thought of Milena Markivna as well, and often. She followed me into my dreams. Throughout my life, she would tell me, I was being watched over. She would award me with a certificate signaling my entry into the Honor Guard, would place on my head a special canvas cap with a golden star on its front. I cannot say if this is true to the initiation ceremony but it was how I imagined it had happened with my mother. I would wake at night to find myself alone in my dark room but was never afraid. I knew I was being watched over.

  The day before the deadline I stood at the back of the town cinema, watching Konstantyn Illych watch Hedgehog in the Fog. I cannot recall when I began to watch the animated film myself. I had already seen it a number of times and always found it unsettling, in the way heights are unsettling. En route to see his friend for tea, Hedgehog gets lost in the fog that descends on the forest. It isn’t the fog or the forest that troubles me, as it troubles Hedgehog, it is this: Hedgehog sees a white horse and wonders if it would drown if it fell asleep in the fog. I’ve never understood the question. I suppose what Hedgehog means is: if the white horse stops moving, we would no longer see it in the white fog. But if we no longer see it, what is its state? Drowned or not? Dead or alive? The question is whether Hedgehog would prefer to keep the fog or have it lift to discover what is behind its thick veil. I would keep the fog. For instance, I cannot know the whereabouts of my parents because they are part of me and therefore part of my personal file and naturally no one can see their own file, just like no one can see the back of their own head. My mother is standing proud among the Honor Guard. My mother is standing elsewhere. She is sitting. She is lying down. She is cleaning an aquarium while riding an elevator. Uncertainty contains an infinite number of certainties. My mother is in all these states at once, and nothing stops me from choosing one. Many people claim they like certainty, but I do not believe this is true—it is uncertainty that gives freedom of mind. And so, while I longed to be reassigned to Moscow, the thought of it shook me to the bones with terror.

  When the film ended, I felt a cold breath on the back of my neck. Milena Markivna’s voice came as a whisper: “Meet me at the dacha at midnight. I’ll get you the letter.”

  It was a weekday, a Wednesday, the dachas empty of people. The swamps were still flooded but this time a sleek black rowboat waited for me. It barely made a seam in the water as I rowed. Northward, the overcast sky glowed from the city. My teeth chattered from the cold or excitement or fear; it is difficult to keep still when one knows one’s life is about to change. Already I could feel, like a comforting hand on my shoulder, the double gold aiguillette worn by the Guard. The tall chrome boots tight around my calves.

  I tried to retrace the route I had taken the first time I visited the dacha, but found myself in the middle of a thicket of cattails. The glow of the sky switched off. Normally electricity is cut not at night but in the evening when people use it most and thus the most can be economized—this is the thought I would have had had I not been engulfed in panic. Darkness closed in on me. I circled on the spot. The cattails hissed against the edge of the boat. Willow branches snared my arms and face. A sulfurous stench stirred up from the boggy water. Milena Markivna had given me the simplest of tasks and I was about to fail her.

  A horizontal slit of light appeared in the distance, faint and quivering. I lurched the boat toward it. Soon I recognized the silhouette of the shack on stilts; the light emanating from under its door. I scrambled up the stairs, knocked. The lock clicked and I waited for the door to open, and when it did not, I opened it myself.

  A figure in a white uniform and mask stood before me, pointing a gleaming rapier at my chest. The figure looked like a human-sized replica of the fencing trophies I had seen inside the glass display at Suite 76.

  “Close the door.” The voice behind the mask was calm, level, and belonged to Milena Markivna.

  I tried to keep calm as well, but my hand shook when it reached the handle. I closed the door without turning away from her, kept my eyes on the rapier. The ornate, patinated silver of its hilt suggested the weapon had been unearthed from another century.

  “Down on the floor. On your knees.”

  I had not imagined our meeting to be like this but did as I was told. I inquired about the utility of having my ankles bound by rope and Milena Markivna said it was to prevent me from running away before she was done. I assured her I wouldn’t think to run from such an important occasion and she, in turn, assured me she would skewer my heart onto one of my floating ribs if I tried. Before she stuffed a rag inside my mouth I told her I had been waiting for this moment since I was a child and she said she had been waiting for it since she was a child as well. I told her I was ready.

  She said, “I’m ready too.”

  I do not know how much time passed with me kneeling, head bowed, as Milena Markivna stood over me.

  I tried to utter a word of encouragement, mention the canvas cap with the golden star on its front, but of course couldn’t speak through the rag in my mouth. All I could do was breathe in the sour, pickled smell of the fabric.

  At last she knelt down in front of me, one hand on the hilt of the rapier, its tip still poised at my chest. With the other hand she took off her mask. Hair clung to her forehead, moist with sweat. I searched her face for approval or disappointment but it was closed to me, as if she were wearing a mask under the one she had just removed. I wondered how this would all look if a stranger barged through the door: she almost mad and I almost murdered.

  Milena Markivna stabbed the rapier into the floor, which made me cry out, and said there really was no hurry in what she was going to do. She brought over a candle that had been burning on the table and dipped my fingers into the liquid wax, one by one, as she named her relatives who had been executed, one by one, thirty years ago. The burning was sharp at first—I dared not make another sound—but soon felt like ice. Milena seemed calmer then. She took the rag out of my mouth, unlaced her boots, set her feet on them and gave me a series of instructions. As I enveloped her warm toes in my mouth, she reminded me how she hated me. I removed my lips from the mound of her ankle long enough to tell her that we were not so different, she and I; that I too had grown up alone even though that would change soon. As she brought a second candle over and began to tip it over my scalp, she asked how it would change. Barely able to speak now, I told her that it would change when she i
nducted me into the Honor Guard and I would go to Moscow and see my family again. She laughed as if I had told a joke. The smell that greeted me was of singed pig flesh, sickening when I realized it was my own hair. My head pulsed with pain; tears blurred my vision. Milena Markivna set the candle down and asked how I knew where my family was. I said it was what I had been told. As she slid her fingers along the blade of the rapier, she said the neighbors had told her that her family had gone to a better place too, but never specified where or why they never wrote. The darkness of the night filtered in through the cracks of the shack and into my mind and I began thinking things I did not like to think about—my mother and father and where they might be. Milena Markivna wrapped her hand around the hilt of the rapier again and told me to take off my coat and shirt and lie facedown on the floor.

  As I did so, one thought knocked against another, like dominoes:

  There was a possibility I was not, at present, being recruited.

  If not, there was no Honor Guard waiting for me.

  If not, my parents’ rank did not matter.

  If not, my parents did not have rank.

  If not, my mother was not in the Guard.

  If not, they were not in Moscow.

  The blade dragged from my tailbone up the thin skin of my spine, searing my mind clean. I screamed into my mouth so that no one would hear. When the blade reached between my shoulders it became warm, and from its point a sweet numbness spread through my arms. I thought of my father with his bleeding hands, understood that queer smile. My head spun and the walls began to undulate. My voice came hoarsely. “How do you know what happened to your family?”

  After a moment she said, “They disappeared. That’s how I know.”

  “They could be anywhere.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Yes.” My body shook against the damp floorboards. “No.”

  It was when I welcomed the blade that it lifted from my skin. I felt a tug between my ankles, then a loosening. She had cut the rope.

  “You can go.”

  “You’re not done.”

  “No,” she said, but pushed my shirt and coat toward me with her foot. I lay limp, spent. Through the window I could see the glow of the city flicker back on. I remembered why I had come to the dacha, but could not rouse myself to bring up the letter. I found I did not care about it much myself. I would be the one who would have to issue an apology to my superior the next day, give an explanation for failing to complete my task. I would write it. My superior would read it. I would be dismissed. What next? I would go to the market for a jar of milk, search my pockets for the correct change. If I weren’t to have it, a voice behind me might ask if someone has a kopek for the man. Surely enough, someone will.

  Before leaving I asked Milena Markivna, “What was the joke your husband told?”

  “Oh.” She said, “________________________________ ? ________________________________.”

  “All this trouble for that?”

  It was the first time I saw her smile. “I know. It’s not even that funny.”

  KAREN RUSSELL

  Black Corfu

  from Zoetrope: All-Story

  Žrnovo, 1620

  The doctor sleeps naked, which is not widespread practice on the island of Korčula, not even in summer. As if to atone for his bared skin, his wife sleeps in cake-like tiers of bedclothes. Only she is privy to the doctor’s secret shamelessness; in public company, he is the model of propriety. Once upon a time, she found this and his other bedroom vagaries irresistibly appealing. Tonight he startles awake from his nightmare to find her surfacing from yards and yards of white linen. She rises like a woman clawing out of snow.

  I have never lost a patient.

  He studies the tiny, halved heart of his wife’s earlobe. Their room pulses with the moon. He can almost hear the purr of the rumor, yawning awake within her, stretching and extending itself. Does she believe it? Is she beginning to believe it? The naked doctor shudders. He imagines a man who resembles him exactly. That man is moving inside his wife.

  What tool can he use, to extract their rumor from her body?

  The doctor’s costume is hanging on a hook. It is not nearly so frightening as the hooded uniform donned by physicians during the Great Plague of 1529, the beaky invention of Charles de l’Orme. He wears a simple black smock, black waxed-leather gloves, and his face, when he operates, is bare.

  “It is not true,” he says in a clear, sober voice.

  His wife’s face is planked white and blue with moonlight. The one eye that he can see in profile is streaming water. She is like a stony bust granted a single attitude by her sculptor. Silently, the doctor begs her: Look my way.

  Crack.

  “You must promise me that you will put it out of your mind.” His voice is still his own. “You betray me by imagining me as that man.”

  His wife parts her dark hair with the flats of her palms. Does this again and again, like a woman bathing under the river falls. Outside, the moon shines on with its eerie impartiality, illuminating this room, illuminating also the surrounding woods, where the doctor knows a dozen men are fanning out, hunting for his patient.

  “Please. Please. I performed my duty perfectly. I could never make such a mistake.”

  “I am not even thinking about you. I am listening for the girls.”

  She says this without turning from the door. Now the doctor hears what must have awoken her. Not his nightmare but their middle daughter’s sobbing. Ashamed, he reaches for his robe. “Let me go to her.”

  The girl sits tall in the bed, with white, round eyes that seemed to pull in opposite directions, like panicked oxen. Her sleeping sisters bracket her, their faces slack and spit-dewed. The doctor has long suspected that his middle child is his most intelligent.

  “Papa, will they punish you? Will you go to prison?”

  “Who told you such a thing?”

  In fact, the punishment will be far worse than that, if it comes.

  “Nobody,” his daughter says sadly. “But I listen to what they tell one another.”

  So the rumor has penetrated the walls of his home, the mind of his child. He grows so upset that he forgets to console her, flees her side. In two hours, the dawn bells will begin to ring. Bodies will congregate at the harbor. What if the miasma of the rumor is already changing? Becoming even more poisonous, contagious—

  I will have to keep the girls indoors from now on, to prevent their further contamination.

  What will happen to him, if he cannot stop the rumor from spreading, transforming? He might be sent to the Venetian garrison. He might be strung up in the dark Aleppo pines before anything so official as a trial. Yet unofficially, of course, his punishment is well underway. A second death would be only a formality.

  He had once dreamed of being the sort of doctor who helps children walk again; instead, he found himself hobbling them. Children of all ages were carried to him on stretchers, with blue lips and seamed eyelids. A twisted plot, without a single author to blame. As a younger man, he’d ventilated the pain through laughter. Sometimes the circumstances of his life struck him as so unbearably absurd that he’d soar up to a blind height, laughing and laughing until his red eyes shut and spittle flecked his chin. (“Open your eyes,” his wife would beg. “My love, you are frightening us—”) But it has been many years now since such an episode. Only behind the roped bedroom drapery does the doctor indulge such wildness today.

  His wife is very proud of the doctor’s accomplishments. Because he loves her, he never shares the black joke. Not once does he voice an objection to the injustice of his fate, or rail against what the island has made of his ambition. Aboveground, the chirurgo practices medicine in his warm salon—performing salubrious bloodlettings, facilitating lactation for the pretty young noblewomen. Whereas this doctor must descend into the Neolithic caves, under the cold applause of stars.

  His formal title is the Posthumous Surgeon of Korčula, yet all the bereaved k
now him by name. Centuries after his passing, he will be reverenced on Black Corfu as something more and less than a man. He operates on the dead—the only bodies an occupant of his caste is permitted to touch. Before his good reputation was gutted by his accusers, the doctor had a perfect record: during his twenty-three-year tenure on the island, not a single vukodlak had been sighted. Everyone slept more peacefully for his skill—the living and the dead. Whose relief was manifest in the verdant silence of the woods, in the solemn stillness of the cemetery air. Inside that pooling quiet he could hear, unwhispered, Thank you, Doctor. Bless you, Doctor.

  These islands off the coast of Dalmatia, with their fertile dusks and their thin soils, breed a special kind of monster. A corpse that continues to walk after its death. Animated by wind from some other world, spasming emptily on, mute and blue and alone. Vukodlak, ukodlak, and vuk—appellations to distance a grieving family from a terrible and familiar face in the moonlit forest, now bloated and drained of light.

  Korčula is entirely covered by woodland, rising out of the mirror-bright Adriatic like a hand gloved in green velvet. It seems to belong to a long-expired age, lush and prehistoric. Trees peer blindly down at the sea, black Dalmatian pines and soaring cypresses laddering their thousand ruddy arms over the azure water, and over the low macchia, that snarling undergrowth that breaks into sudden shouts of yellow and violet like the singsong joy of the mad. Korčula is the home of shipbuilders and explorers, the fabled birthplace of Marco Polo. That the dead also wander its pitched slopes should surprise no one; when the Greeks established a colony here in the sixth century BC, they named the island for its sepulchral hue. Korkula Melaina. Corcyra Nigra. Black Corfu.

  The doctor was born during the longest period of Venetian rule over Korčula, two centuries before the republic would fall to Napoleon. He was the child of a child of a kidnapped child, a cook who escaped from the galley kitchen of a Portuguese ship and oared with seven others through driving winds to reach Black Corfu’s shoreline. They lived as freedmen at the base of the cliffs, in the poorest quarter of the stone-walled city, in dwellings evincing the fragile tenacity of the red and blue barnacles spiraling out of the rocks. They paid rent to the hereditary counts.