The Convalescent (26 page)

And now he had a horse. There was just one niggling, inescapable concern: Szeretlek the Giant had to somehow get on top of the thing.

He tossed a saddle over M and tried to mount him in the manner which he had seen the other Hungarians mounting their horses. He promptly fell off. His feet were like paddles. They slipped from the stirrups, and he couldn’t get a good enough grip to swing his legs over the back of the animal. As he tried, he grew so frustrated that a peculiar itch developed between his shoulderblades. He reached behind his neck to scratch it, but couldn’t reach. He continued trying to mount M, but
the more the Giant tried and failed, the more intense the itch became. It got to the point where he couldn’t even get a running start to throw his foot into the stirrup without stopping to claw his back. “Ack!” he gasped, and threw himself on the ground, rubbing himself against the stones. It didn’t work. Szeretlek stood up again and removed his shirt. Twisting his body, he reached both hands around to try to figure out what was happening, and then, suddenly, his body lifted. Like a puppy grabbed at the neck, Szeretlek the Giant rose up. He jerked and struggled to stay put, but whatever was carrying him would not let go. It was a ridiculous feeling; he wasn’t high up, he only hung a few feet above where he was previously standing, but there he was: a Giant, dangling in the air! He tried to crane his neck around to get a glimpse of the carrier, but his neck seemed stuck in an awkward, forwardly bent position, and he couldn’t see. He struggled only for a moment more and then gave up. Almost involuntarily, his long arms and legs went loose. It was as though they had suddenly lost their utility. He felt his body tugged upward a few more inches and then, just as quickly, without logic or reason, the Giant was lifted above the horse and dropped onto the wide white back of M.

The horse groaned, stunned by the massive weight. He trotted back and forth unhappily.

“I am
awesome!
” Szeretlek cried.

He was so pleased that he had finally mounted a horse and would now finally be able to return home to Lili, that it did not occur to the Giant that there was anything all that different or unusual in the manner of the mounting, or even that he had landed backward on the animal and was facing entirely in the wrong direction. To him, it was obvious what had happened: after five long years, Lili was right. He was not alone. It was Ember az ÉEben. The Pfliegmans often chattered about such a thing happening, and now it had happened to him. He had been lifted up by the nimble fingertips of the Man in the Sky and dropped. It was exceedingly fortunate, he felt, that when he was dropped, he landed directly on top of the animal. Belief, new and raw, coursed through his body, and Szeretlek did not question it again. He did not, in fact, give it another thought. He did not even dare to think of turning around to ride the horse properly; his only thought as he sat backward on M, as he leaned forward and slapped the horse’s hind end, was to return to the Carpathian Basin, throw back the flaps of the tent
of the Fekete-Szem, and run as fast as he could between Lili László’s large, imposing thighs.

“
The Giant rode backward for two days in the direction of the rest of the Hungarians and did not stop
,” Anonymus writes. “
Not until he arrived over the crest of a dense and bristling forest. Before him was a grassy field at the bottom of an open valley where Árpád’s armies had pitched their tents. It was evening. The sun burned the horizon, cloaking the valley red. The mud, the grass, the river, the uneven ground, all the way over the hills to the distant, luminous mountains. Everything glowed
.”

Szeretlek rode a winding path into the valley, and despite the fact that these very same men had abandoned him at the monastery, the Giant felt the presence of someone watching over him, and he had never felt more love or generosity. “My brothers,” he thought. He wept openly. And had he not lost himself in the Carpathian wilderness five years earlier; had he not spilled the beans about Lili at the breakfast table; had Árpád’s white horse not taken so much of a liking to warm, Swabian wine; had Szeretlek the Giant indeed not been born a Pfliegman, he would never have been in a position to see the fires of the enemy light up the hillside that evening. He rode quickly down the mountain, shouting, “Pechenegs! On the eastern hills!”

From the belly of the red valley, the Hungarians watched, open-mouthed, as a large, shirtless man rode Árpád’s great white horse backwards down the mountainside. He was shouting his head off. They saw him and howled with laughter. They slapped each other on the back. They held their middles. But as one of them wiped a joyful tear from his eye and looked gleefully over the eastern hills, an arrow appeared through a red cloud above, hurtled speedily toward him, and before the Hungarian could speak or breathe, or even blink, it sank deep into his heart.

The Hungarians stared at the fallen soldier, astonished.

The backward rider came closer. They still couldn’t see his face, but now his voice echoed over the valley, and the Hungarians discerned what he was shouting:

“Pechenegs! Pechenegs!”

They mounted their horses just as the foreign army rolled over the hills. They were outnumbered. Six to one. A soldier rushed into Árpád’s tent just as the Great and Noble Grand Prince was about to settle in for some boiled
ját and masturbation: “Pechenegs!” he cried. “On the eastern hills!”

Árpád jumped to his feet. His entire army had mounted their horses and were shooting arrows as fast as they could without dying. He soberly evaluated the situation. Pechenegs wore black armor and bared their teeth and carried long, floppy spears with points at the end, and on top of the points were the heads of their victims. But these men wore metal helmets, expensive green cloaks, and their swords were strong and firm. Their beards were combed, and their green banners waved arrogantly. The perfume that clung to the air smelled too clean to be Pechenegs. Then Árpád noticed the crosses on their banners.

“Those aren’t Pechenegs,” he said. “They’re Germans.”

“Kyrie Eleison!” the Germans cried, and charged down the mountain.

“Hooy Hooy!” shouted the Hungarians.

Árpád pulled on his bird-helmet, leapt upon Paprika, and galloped down the mountain, skirting trees and rocks, into the heart of the valley. He had always felt safe while riding high atop the wide back of M, and now, for the first time in his life, the leader of the early Magyars became uncertain. He quickly realized that Paprika, well-meaning as the horse might be, simply was not fast enough.

Almost at once, a German arrow stabbed him in the leg.

Árpád raised up his hands. “Is this the moment of my death?” he cried. Then he noticed a hawk circling the valley. It flew into the fight, as if to show him something, and in the crowd of men zipping arrows from their horses, shiny German metal clashing against Hungarian cloaks and pelts and buttons, Árpád saw a flash of white. He rubbed his eyes. It could not be—but it was! How on earth had M made it all the way here from where he’d left him, dead at the monastery? And the enormous man riding him! He was shirtless, and turned the wrong way around, but it was very decidedly him. It was the Giant. The woman-thief.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Árpád.

Now, Szeretlek was no warrior. After crying out his warning, the Giant had, in a manner classic to Pfliegman behavior, made his way through the chaos, swerving in and out of danger’s way, hiding behind the swords of other, braver soldiers, and then had turned tail, fully prepared to find the first clear route away from what appeared to be Certain Death, and back into the arms of his pragmatic, rotund Lili. But flight from the red valley was
not so easy; certainly not when one was riding backward upon an animal accustomed to riding
into
battle, and not away from it. Before he knew it, Szeretlek found himself riding into, and facing away from, the Germans.

“Lili!” he cried, as if she might appear from the bushes and start throwing punches.

A German soldier rode up behind Szeretlek. He held up his weaponry, fully prepared to shoot, when he realized that he was looking not at the back of a man’s head, but at his face. Confused, he lowered his arrow. He saw the ass of the horse but the face of a man, when the
backs
of men were supposed to be the same as the
backs
of horses. He deduced that the rumors about these horrible people were true: this enormous, brutal Hungarian was indeed Two-Faced. Very clearly, he had faces on both sides of his head! Choking with fear, the German stammered, “But it’s the wrong—”

At that moment, Szeretlek did what Nature had intended him to do ever since she scrawled the messy plans for his invention. Ever since Kinga bit down Aranka’s nose and he burst forth into this wet, unhappy world. He did something that would change the course of the battle, and, henceforth, the course of the Hungarian Incursions for the next thirty years, all the way up to 955
AD
, when the Germans, fired by the fury of this great loss, would gather all of the European armies together at the Battle of Augsburg and slaughter every Hungarian soldier but seven—Szeretlek dug his heels into the horse’s gut, reached into his quiver, removed his doubly curved bow, and shot the German.

The victim looked stunned for a moment, but then, with no stirrups to hold him in, tumbled easily from his horse.

Árpád had never seen anything like it. “Look!” he cried. “He’s shooting
backward!
”

Collectively, in one dignified movement, the Hungarians looked at each other, then spun around in their saddles and began shooting backward at the enemy in what would eventually become a signature Hungarian method of attack. All of them, every last greasy-haired pagan Hungarian, picked arrows from their quivers, placed them over their bows, and pulled back tight. Then they turned in their saddles and sent the arrows singing through the air.

The slaughter was massive. For every Hungarian soldier killed in the battle, six Germans fell. No one was spared. And the Hungarians, barbaric reputations now firmly sealed, watched how the panorama of the valley
changed: how the grass and trees and even the mountains beyond the eastern hills, all of it, which once glowed red from the terrific, dying sun, was now red for other reasons. German blood soaked into the earth, creating small pools in which the early Hungarians frolicked. They would give them their schadenfreude, but years later, when King Stephen’s corrupt nephew Peter takes the throne, demanding that the entire country enter into German bondage, that only Germans hold the Hungarian thrones, attributing ownership of all castles and private estates to the Germans and slaughtering any pagan slave who disobeyed his Christian master—then the Germans would give it right back. “
Eventually
,” Anonymus writes, “
the Christians win a bigger battle, the battle for Hungary itself
.”

But now, this evening, the Hungarians were celebrating the victory. They encircled Szeretlek, begging him to show them his doubly curved bow.

“If I can be of use,” he said.

The Hungarians watched as the bow sprung arrows twice the distance of a normal bow. “It shoots marvelously well,” they said, patting his legs.

Then the soldier who had first spotted Szeretlek riding backwards down the mountain got off his horse and helped him to turn around. He helped him to face the proper direction that a man is supposed to face when he is riding a horse. When he is civilized. He took the bow and held it high in the air so all of the other Hungarians could see it, and Szeretlek, regarded for the first time in his life not as a Giant, a Pfliegman, a Fekete-Szem, but simply a man among other men, felt the burden of his great body no longer. He spread out his arms, lifted his chin and unleashed a deafening scream:

“Don’t move,” a voice says. “Just relax.”

I open my eyes. Blond hair falls away from her face in tired pieces.

“Mr. Pfliegman, can you hear me?” she asks.

It’s morning. I’m lying on top of Dr. Monica’s examining table, wrapped in a pale blue hospital blanket. Outside the window to her office, sunlight beams on the arms of the oak tree. I motion for my writing tablet.

“You spent the night here,” she says. “You had a bad fever.”

What happened?

Dr. Monica stands up to wash her hands. She turns on the faucet, runs her hands under the water, and then dries them. She takes her time. When she faces me, her arms are folded tight across her chest. The red dress is gone, replaced with clean slacks, her turtleneck sweater, and her white pediatrician’s jacket. The gold cross shines arrogantly between the lapels. It looks like it’s flipping me off.

“Mrs. Himmel told me what happened,” she says. “Her husband, Herman, is a security guard at the supermarket, and he says that you’ve been stealing meat from the Big M. Selling the meat out of your bus. He says that you’ve been doing it for some time now.”

I gaze over at the far corner of her office, where my Disneyland sweatshirt
is dry, folded on top of one of the daisy chairs. My trousers hang from a hook, with the stylish woolen cap perched over them. The Kabát Tolvajok is folded thickly in half on her counter, telling me that things have been taken care of. Things have been done.

And you believe them?
I write.

Dr. Monica sighs and looks at me. “Elise was there, Mr. Pfliegman. She said you started a fight. She said you were throwing packages of meat at people. It took three people to hold you down. It was the fever, I think— You were delirious, so they carried you across the street and brought you in here. You bit a Security Guard on the leg.” She gives me a stern look. “Why did you do that?”

I don’t know
.

Dr. Monica reaches over, pulls one of her paper cones from the dispenser, and fills it with water. I accept it, but do not drink. She presses her hands around my face and neck, tightening the bandages. “There are some people outside who want to see you,” she says.

I move to get up from the examining table, but she pushes me back. Her eyes soften, and she relaxes a bit. “Wait,” she says, and presses down on my forehead. “They can wait. At least until the fever breaks. It was nasty out there last night. There’ve been reports of flooding all morning. It’s affected three counties, they say. I don’t remember ever seeing rain like that before. Not in twenty years at least.”