The Convalescent (10 page)

They had to go to war again.

We Pfliegmans may have been the lousiest of the barbarian tribes, but the Pechenegs were rivals in their own right: they possessed convex bodies with hulking backs, they only wore black, they did not braid their hair, and they all suffered from a peculiar out-jutting chin, a chin that weighed twice as much as a normal chin should weigh, and which swung below the mouth like a defiant fist.

They called us Magyar Assholes; we called them Big Chins.

“
Natural Selection
,” writes Darwin, “
acts with extreme slowness
.”

But the threat of the Pechenegs was not to be taken lightly. They painted other people’s blood on their faces; they used the dry skulls of their victims for drinking cups; they sharpened both sides of wooden spears and thrust a human head onto one end and plunged the other end into the earth; they kicked bunny rabbits in the face. (Not in the
side
—in the face!)

Upon hearing that the Pechenegs had made their way over the Carpathians and through the Verecke Narrows, that they had easily passed the Impassable Forest, that they were mere farts on the wind from the sprawl of Hungarian camps beyond the Tisza River and would soon encroach Aranka’s river, the leader of the early Hungarians, the Grand Prince Árpád, mumbled, “Well that’s just fucking
fabulous
,” and gathered the tribal heads together to negotiate the situation.

Árpád was a tight little ball of pre-medieval energy, with a voice as high and shrill as a child’s. Some said he even looked like a child. The Grand Prince was terrifically short, and tripped over his own cloaks as he walked. A long sword hung awkwardly from his belt. He also wore a large, shiny metal helmet in the shape of a hawk, which his father, Almos, had given him before he died. The helmet wobbled over Árpád’s small head and hung so low over his eyes that often all anyone could see was his
wishful, roping mustache, shaped like a handlebar to a bicycle. But the Grand Prince walked quickly, raised his small fists passionately, and loved three things in life: fresh, warm bread; easy women with large, fleshy thighs; and killing his adversaries right through the heart.

As the members of the early Hungarian counsel sat quietly in his tent, waiting for the meeting to begin, Árpád was sitting quietly in a corner at a table. He would not look at any of them. “There are only eight of you,” he said. “Where is the ninth?”

One of the men cleared his throat. “You mean Lehel,” he said.

Árpád swallowed. “Right. I always forget. Lehel.”

He frowned, thinking of Lehel’s disappearance five years ago, and of the Fekete-Szem, the creepy little people who had followed them from the East. Rumor had it that they had snuck into the Hungarian camps in broad daylight, pulled Lehel from his horse, neatly slaughtered him, bone by bone, and then disappeared into their tent with his body parts. The Fekete-Szem had not yet been brought to justice for their crime because no one could say with certainty that they actually bore culpability; after all, there were no official eyewitnesses. And while Christian historiographers would like to believe that the pagan Hungarian tribes were barbarian savages, that they held no order in their communities, this wasn’t true; Anonymus reminds us that behind every tent, around every sweaty pagan corner, a person was innocent unless he was judged to be proven guilty by his own ignoble behavior: “
Anyone caught defying the counsel of the early Hungarian community
,” he writes, “
without offering a pretty darn good explanation, would be cut in half or, at the very least, exposed to hopeless situations
.”

But Árpád knew the real reason he had not gone after the Fekete-Szem. These were the very same creatures who had somehow created the Danube River out of the great blue nothing. It was along the Danube that the Hungarians had flourished over the past five years, and it was along this very same river that they would campaign against all possible invaders. The river had by now swollen majestically, stretching from Black Sea through Bavaria and well up into the Germanic north, and it was Árpád’s plan to use the river and other untouched marshes and wastelands for protection against the Pechenegs. They would build a
Gyepü
, a “natural blockade.” They would fell trees, assemble rock piles. They would leave breadcrumb trails, and the trails would lead straight into dark and vacuous holes. And
the Gyepü, Árpád explained, would serve other purposes as well: keeping the Pechenegs at bay would allow the brand-spanking-new Hungarians to invade the West. They would imitate the fighting methods of all of the worst barbarian hordes. They would pillage, they would plunder, and when word reached the Pechenegs that the Hungarians were the most vicious of all vicious barbarians, with whom no one, Christian or pagan, should want to reckon, only then, Árpád believed, would his people be able to live a life of leisure, given over to vanities and as goddamned libidinous as they wanted it to be. “It is
vital
,” he argued, pressing a bulb of cold, stale bread into his mouth, “that we invade the West to secure our position in the Carpathian Basin.”

The tribal leaders all nodded soberly.

The Grand Prince was true to his word. The Hungarians really did behave most abominably. Stories quickly spread both east and west, until every nobleman, civilian, and peasant knew and feared the vicious crew. Ape-men, with teeth like tiny daggers and no other interest in their lives other than overrunning small villages and slaughtering the
vivre
out of innocent, happy townfolk.

“Cut off one head, and thirty will grow in its place!” they cried. Or, “They slip through one’s fingers like eels!” Or the somewhat less thrilling: “They emerge from the swamp like frogs!” Human heads were set upon spears and poked into the ground in their wake. (My Darling, I’m sad to say that they even did the ugly business with the bunny rabbits.)

But there were notable differences between the Hungarians and the barbarians: where the Pechenegs fought in a great black mass, bodies tripping over bodies, the Hungarians were organized, and rode on horseback. Their light cavalries attacked from all sides, disseminating across the countryside before anyone could mobilize against them. They would
pretend
to flee battle, and then, when the other side falsely believed that they had won, the Hungarians would regroup and charge again. They would agree to meet with the leaders of the Western nations and
say
that they accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior, gaining a higher rank and further access to their lands, then they would turn, stick out their tongues, and gleefully plunder.

Rather than err on the side of correctness, of civility, Árpád encouraged the rumor that they were indeed the sons of Attila, truly the new Scourge of Europe, a bunch of foul prevaricators, with no allegiances to anyone.

Civilized Europe shook its big, indignant head. It was not enough that the Hungarians were known as the Bloodthirsty Man-Eating Monsters from Scythia; they were two-faced as well. A fresh rumor spread that these men were a new, evil race of people with faces on
both
sides of their heads—

It was all in the interest of survival. In order for the Hungarians to survive, they had to become something they were not: bloodless, heartless, ruthless, murderer-killers. They were so successful that when they were not off invading already well-established and civilized countries, the Hungarians would invade them in their dreams. Many a Christian feudal lord awoke at midnight with a sweat-soaked dressing gown, screaming about the invading hordes, and his mistress would have to calmly soothe him with talk of conquer, self-righteousness, and sexual favors. A single prayer could be heard in churches echoing across the quaint medieval pastoralia:
De sagittis Hungarorum libera nos, Domine
: “O Lord, save us from the arrows of the Hungarians!” Or the prayer heard somewhat more often: “Goddammit, we have got to
get
those sons of bitches”—

The phone rings. Mrs. Himmel, busy filing her fingernails into ten perfect points, grabs it after a single note. She’s waiting for Daughter Elise’s modeling agent to call about an interview with a famous modeling agency, but it’s not the agent. It’s a mother calling to get information about intentionally exposing her child to chicken pox.

Annoyed that a mother is taking up the phone line, Mrs. Himmel grabs a handful of fun-size candy bars from the shelf behind her and unwraps all of them at once. She lines them up on her desk in a parade of chocolate turds. “Oh, just bring him in,” she says. “If he spends ten minutes in the Waiting Area, I guarantee he’ll catch it.” Then she hangs up the phone, and shoots me a glance—

I catch it.

We are like two dogs, waiting for the other to flinch.

Mrs. Himmel quickly picks up the phone again, pushes the extension to Dr. Monica’s office, and begins whispering, fiercely: “I can
smell
him from all the way over here.” She slams down the phone.

Seconds later, Adrian fills the doorjamb. She strides over to Mrs.
Himmel’s window with her mountain-climbing legs and quietly speaks to her about being respectful to Dr. Monica and to the people in the Waiting Area. That means
everyone
.

Mrs. Himmel looks at her like she’s made of seaweed.

“He’s harmless, Mrs. Himmel,” Adrian whispers. “Dr. Monica would never let him in here otherwise. But if it makes you feel better, I can watch the desk until three o’clock.”

“It’s not right,” Himmel says. “A thirty-four-year-old person seeing a pediatrician is just not right.” She shakes her head. “A normal person would have better things to do that spend an entire day in the waiting area of a pediatrician’s office. He’s useless. A member of society should do something. Contribute. What does a person like that possibly contribute?”

Adrian glances at me. “He has a job,” she says. “Dr. Monica said he’s a butcher. He sells meat out of his bus.”

Mrs. Himmel perks up. “
Meat
out of a
bus
? What does he butcher?”

“I don’t know. He probably butchers what other people butcher. Pigs, chickens. Cows, I guess. Livestock.”

Mrs. Himmel’s lips curl into a sneer. The tight perm on her head somehow looks even tighter.

“My uncle was a butcher,” she says evenly, “and I’ll have you know that butchering takes a huge amount of time and money and manpower. Just
look
at him, Adrian. I want you to tell me how
that little thing over there
can hang up and drain a whole cow. How does he even cut off the heads?”

First you slit open the hide
, I think,
cutting from the horn to the nostril. Skin out the front of the face, flip over one side and then the opposite side. Grasp the jaw in your hand, bend back the head, and remove it by severing the neck and atlas joint
.

Mrs. Himmel grabs a stack of folders and begins shuffling. “I don’t believe it,” she whispers. “Not for
one second
do I believe that.” She assembles all of the folders into one firm, thick square. “There are
children
in here, for heaven’s sake.”

Adrian rolls an unsavory thought around her brain for a moment. But then she shakes her head. “He’s only here once a week,” she says. “Dr. Monica says to not worry about it, so I’m not going to worry. And neither should you.”

Mrs. Himmel waves her off. “I’m not worried. Yet. But heaven help him if I
get
worried. If I
get
worried, I’ll chuck him out of the Waiting Area so fast he won’t know what hit him,” she says, and then she looks right at me.

She shoots me a real mean one and mouths, “
Don’t you think I won’t
.”

—
Anyway
, as Árpád was busy conjuring military strategies, the rest of the Hungarians were trying to figure out how to deal with the fetid little people who had followed them from the Black Sea like lost children; the one who had lost their own tent in the flooding and built a new one right next to Bona Fide Civilization; the ones who stole their livestock from them, left and right, with no sense of place or courtesy; the ones who spent all day lying around the outskirts of camp, bitching and moaning about every small thing, hollering insults at passersby. The ones who just couldn’t seem to get it together.

“They’re totally
useless
!” one of the Hungarians cried.

It had gotten to the point where many actually feared the Fekete-Szem. You always had to keep one eye open walking by
that
tent, they said. You’d walk by and would get hissed at. Pieces of bone would be hucked at you. And then there was what had happened to poor Lehel.

“Get rid of them now!” cried another. “Before we
all
get eaten!”

Árpád was summoned to deal with the situation. He weaved in and around the Hungarian camps while riding his magnificent, tall white horse which he called, only, M.

When he arrived at our tent along the outskirts of camp, we Pfliegmans weren’t up yet; we were lazing about on our backs, smelling our skins, chewing our toenails for breakfast. Peeling fleas from our long strands of hair.

“Come forth, cretins!” one of the Hungarians bellowed.

We Pfliegmans squealed and scurried about like veritable insects set loose from our veritable tin cans.

Árpád dismounted M, took one look at us, exposed and shivering, all eyes and elbows, and sighed impatiently. “They’re not going to
eat
anyone,” he said. “They’re bored. What they need is something to do. Something to make them feel like they’re part of the community.”

“We don’t
want
them to be part of the community!” shouted an angry woman with an exceedingly wide hind end.

Árpád gave her an impatient look.

“But what
can
they do?” a man protested. “They can’t do anything.”

“Sure they can,” said Árpád.

“Like what?”

Árpád stroked his gorgeous mustache for a minute, rolling the ends into points between his fingertips. Then he thought of Lehel, and his eyes brightened. “They can cut meat,” he said.

One of the Hungarians had an old cow, and complained of the cow’s inability to give milk. A suspicious green color had blotched the udder, so it was universally decided that the cow would serve perfectly as the Practice Cow for the Fekete-Szem, to see whether we had any useful knowledge of meat and bone. We were given the cutting instruments. Wide-eyed, we curled our fingers around them like prized fighting swords, then one of the Hungarians stepped forward with a blunter.