The Convalescent (28 page)

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.

“What’s going on?” she said.

“Thabbs-thiffice,” he spit.

“What?” she said.

“Thabbs—”

“Nevermind,” Lili said, and pushed her way into the center of the circle, where she found Szeretlek lying uncomfortably on a pile of logs that were being ineptly tended by a dozen scurrying Pfliegmans.

“Get back!” she cried. “Get away from him!”

She tried shoving us back, but there were so many of us, and Szeretlek could not assist her. His arms and legs were bound. A rotten gag was wrapped around his head. We were trying to light the fire using anything we could get our hands on. We tossed on old bits of food, broken clay pots, animal hides and straw mats, but nothing caught. So Lili fanned the smoking coals, and it became difficult to breathe. We screeched at her, but her plan worked: we coughed and fled outside. As soon she had the tent to herself, Lili held her breath and quickly began to untie him. If it had been another millennia ahead from what it was, she would have rolled up her sleeves and performed CPR, but alas, she did not know CPR; she only knew that Szeretlek’s chest was not moving, and therefore he was not breathing, and she quickly reasoned that if she could breathe and he could not, there was no reason why she could not
give
her breath to him. She placed her lips on his lips and began to blow into his body, thinking nothing of the past, nothing of how they were related or unrelated, nothing of Botond. Lili breathed into Szeretlek until Szeretlek breathed into Lili. The Giant began to realize who was trying to give him life. With relief, with weak and stupid love, he began to pull her in with him. His mouth grabbed at hers as though he was drowning, and she gave her breath to him until the smoke took over, the ground spun, and she collapsed on top of him.

Kinga, meanwhile, had been watching from behind the flap in the tent. Covering her mouth and nose, the old witch stepped inside. She saw Lili
and Szeretlek lying next to the hearth and stood over them, for a moment, in the fog of smoke. Then she reached down and quickly snapped a twig from a log. She stuck the twig into the embers until it caught, then she watched as the two bodies slowly became one body, and then no body at all. “What goes up must come down,” she thought. “But sometimes it will rise again.”

Sixty years later, in 1000 AD, the creaking turn of the new millennium, we Pfliegmans are standing among the pagan tribes vying for inclusion in the brand-spanking-new Christian Hungary. Those who believe in God will be saved; those who do not will be killed or made into
uhegs
—slaves to the Christians. We Pfliegmans line up in front of the first Christian king, Istvan. King Stephen. He is by far the cleanest human being we have ever seen: the long cheeks, the golden crown. The luminescent, blowing hair. We stare, gaping, at the whiteness of his cloaks. Standing next to him is a man named Kristoff Dorff, one of his German counselors.

“This is the eleventh tribe,” says Dorff.

Stephen frowns. “There are only ten tribes.”

“They’re butchers. They can be of use.”

But the king sees our flaking, hairy skin, our curved backs. Our toes curled into tiny toe-fists. He sees our lumpy heads, our eyes, black and whole, and cannot see anything else.

“They may be of use,” he says, “but they will not believe.”

Dorff looks at us with genuine pity.

But then one of us shuffles forward from the pack. Who knows why— perhaps he possessed some flimsy scrap of bravery, or maybe he was moved by a bubble of gas trapped in his greasy lower intestine—whatever the reason, Old Botond steps forward. He hobbles over to Dorff, clears his throat, and then whispers something into the ear of the German administrator.

Dorff turns his head, amused. “Credo?” he says.

The German knows that there is no possible way that we believe in God because, let’s face it, we just don’t look the part. But then the sky shifts, and the sun appears. Although a full century has passed since the sacrifice of Enni Hús, the Fekete-Szem still crave sunlight. It’s the heat on our faces baking us, reducing all of us to a common denominator: human, with
human needs, which is why when the sun comes out this day, my Darling, we all raise our arms to better feel its warmth.

Dorff watches as the pack of fetid little people begin reaching for the sun: we are so short, the top of our heads just barely reach Dorff’s large chest; we are so thin, Dorff can strangle us with one hand only; our eyes so deep and round, so eerily black, they look glued to our faces. And cast out from each one of us is a thin, oblong shadow. With our arms raised, our shadows resemble a flock of skinny, out-winged birds. Dorff looks over one shoulder, ensuring that King Stephen has moved on to another tent, and then he gives us a name:

“I will call you Fliegendenmann,” he says. “A nice German name to make you stronger.”

We will not be killed or made into uhegs; our name, although about as far linguistically from our own people as we would like it to be, allows us to survive. And although from this point on, we must say that we believe in order to survive—to be regarded as
worth
saving—in truth, it is not what we Pfliegmans really believe: we believe in hiding. We believe in sacrifice. We believe that the stars are holes in the sky.

We believe in the power of the swerve.

And from here, where we are, we begin to watch and wait for some other leader, a leader like Árpád, to find us and care for us. We wait as King Stephen marries Gisela, daughter of Henry the Quarrelsome, duke not of any Hungarian camp, but of Bavaria; as he turns our entire barbarian nation into a Roman Catholic state; as he orders the slaughter of his very own cousin. We are there, and we say nothing. We are waiting in 1038, as the country is brutally invaded by Pechenegs and in 1058, as Andrew the First declares independence from the Holy Roman Empire. We are there, watching, waiting, all the way up to 1241, as Béla the Fourth is defeated by Mongols and half of Hungary’s population is slaughtered. We Pfliegmans are there in 1485, when Hungary is once again the strongest power in Europe, and in 1514, when there are peasant uprisings: for the first time, Hungary argues over its own ethnogenesis, and even then, knowing what we know, we say nothing; we only wait in our moist tents, bored, licking our feet, as Hungarian society splits between the nobles who acknowledge Stephen as the first true ruler of the country, and the peasants who acknowledge Árpád. We shake bugs from our hair. We pluck our own teeth from our mouths. And
we are still waiting in 1541, after Hungary has lost five campaigns and the Turks take over, forcibly incorporating Hungary into the Ottoman Empire. With cloudy eyes and knobby fingers, working hard balls of ját down our gagging throats, we watch and wait as the peace treaty in Westphalia is eventually signed; as Vienna invalidates the Hungarian constitution and appoints an imperial governor; as imperial forces are driven out of Hungary. We are there in 1684 when the Reconquest begins. Buda is liberated, Transylvania is reunited with Hungary, and we are lying on the floor of our nimble misshapen tents, waiting all the way up to 1844, when Hungarian is declared the official language and a national consciousness emerges. It emerges, somehow, without us—but we Pfliegmans are still there in 1848, witnessing the revolutions which are exploding all over the place. We are watching in 1867 as the Austro-Hungarian Compromise is swiftly signed; in 1873, as the Stock Exchange crashes and the League of Three Emperors is created: Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the German Reich; as Austria-Hungary occupies and then annexes Bosnia-Herzegovina; as tensions with Russia continue through the Balkan Wars, as the Serbs gain territory, and on June 28, 1914, on this day in history, Eldridge Cooner, you miserable, insular
délinquant
, we Pfliegmans are standing on the side of the cobblestone road, hands deep in our pockets, squinting with our black eyes, as the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, is assassinated in Sarajevo. His body tumbles from the carriage.

We lick our hairy chins. We hide and wait.

Rumors of Transylvanian vampires spread across Europe, but there are no killers in the shadows of the Carpathian Mountains, there are only the Pfliegmans pinched into the darkness, our woolen coats heavy on our shoulders, blinking at the rich, the full, the cared for. There we are in 1918 (fewer of us, for sure, squirming in our boots) as Austria-Hungary joins the German quest for ceasefire, as the Hungarian Soviet Republic is led by Béla Kun and Admiral Horthy’s brutal White Army enters the scene; we are there in 1920, as the Peace Treaty of Trianon reduces Hungary to a third of the lands occupied by King Stephen, and despite the fact that no one is noticing, there we are waiting in the unemployment lines, stomachs rumbling, feet burning, hats pulled low over our heads when in 1929, an economic crisis yields massive unemployment in Europe, the Americas, and the whole world over. We Pfliegmans watch the outbreak of a second
war, as Hungary opens its borders to a hundred thousand Polish refugees, and we are there, coldly watching, only one year later, as Hungary joins forces with Germany, Italy, and Japan. Our backs press against the wall as the Germans invade Yugoslavia; as our prime minister commits suicide; as Hungary occupies previous Magyar regions in Yugoslavia and declares war on the Soviet Union; as Britain declares war on Hungary; as Hungary declares war on the United States; as secret negotiations with the Western Allies about changing course fail; as German troops occupy Hungary. We Pfliegmans are there in 1944 as 437,000 Hungarian Jews are shoved onto trains to Auschwitz.