Cyril Berganske

by Michael Bishop

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Eight months and a few days after Cyril Berganske's one and only visit, Ms. Gill ushered into Devers' subterranean cubicle, which he lit with candles and furnished with looted antiques, a woman of middle years by the name of Marthe Kess, whose son and daughter-in-law had fallen to sniper fire trying to reach home after a dinner party in her rocket-gouged condo. Incidentally, she endured schizophrenia along with guilt, grief, and primal terror. The elaborate wordsalads in which Marthe — she wanted Devers to call her Marthe — often spoke had tipped him to the schizophrenia, but, from the start, her guilt over Jacob's and Nadja's shootings had focused their therapy sessions. I like your outfit, Devers said as Marthe entered. Why, thank you. Marthe modeled it for him before taking a chair. Look like a fortuneteller, don't I? The bracelets are heirlooms, this beaten bronze sun pendant was Aunt Kyla's, and the pretty cloth I got from a flea market next to the old Luther Street bathhouses. Only the courageous are well turned out these days, Devers said. You look like a fiesta. Fiesta, fortuneteller, it's six of your pfennigs and eight of my piasters. Either way I look good, eh? You said it. So what're we going to talk about, Doc? That's for me to find out and you to know. I just listen here. Devers leaned forward over the glass on the Louis XIV table he used as a desk. Did you ever happen to —? Wait a minute. Marthe searched in the striped folds of her homemade serape dress: indigo, umber, yellow, crimson, white, and purple. A coral snake would have looked pallid next to her. At length, she banged something down on the table with an audible crack. Devers saw two smooth greenishly opalescent stones and, thank God, no break in the protective glass. What's this? Put 'em in your pocket. Worry 'em. You told me last time you missed 'em. They look valuable. Where'd you get them? I didn't steal 'em. They're out of an old family bracelet. It was falling apart — like this city; like me. My stones were creekstones, Marthe. My dad polished them for me. I can't keep these. Take 'em or I'm history. You want I should leave? I don't. Devers pocketed the stones. I was trying to ask if you ever found time to set up your memory corner for Jacob and Nadja. Sort of. Coupla photographs. Their wedding rings. Marthe began to cry. Damn it. It's hard. Even after their ice-breaking small talk, it seemed too soon to Devers for Marthe to plunge into the chilly waters of her grief. She needed a gentler transition. Devers took from his pocket her replacement worrystones and laid them on the table. You sure these're from an old bracelet? She squinted, reached out wincefully, grabbed them, clacked the stones in one palm. Whaddaya mean? Look closely. Pretty as they are, what do they resemble? Marthe scrutinized them again. Oh, I don't know. Stones. Opals. Green opals. What? Lima beans, Devers said. Petrified. Such as a physician might remove from the nose of an adult who'd sportively wedged them up there as a kid. Cyril Berganske! Marthe cried. What? said Devers. Among the last things he'd expected was Berganske's name from Marthe's lips. Cyril Berganske. He told that very story to a paramedic in a Hope Avenue infirmary bunker. When? When did this happen? Tell me. Marthe Kess in a peculiarly coquettish maneuver dropped the left shoulder of her serape dress, revealing from shoulder to midbiceps a bandaged wound, encircled by a furious redness and so many scratches that it seemed a drunken tattooer had let his needles fly amok. My God, what happened? CUSA forces in the hill caves lobbed a mortar onto one of those accordion-pleated city buses, Marthe said. You know the kind that look like colossal herniated caterpillars in rubber trusses? The bus rocked over, bang! Half of it did, anyway, the front half, and pavingstones and windowglass split from the avenue and nearby buildings, chewing and dicing. For maybe a quarter second, I and maybe thirty, forty other fools stood like targets for slashing debris, then it knocked us on our tushes, Phil, and both the trapped-in-the-bus and the-downed-by-debris began to wail, an alarm as dire as any siren and quicker to summon help than a fake security guard. I had this shoulder, a mother on the cobbles beside me had a footless baby, and the upright rear end of the half-fallen bus growled along pushing the toppled front end, with metal screechings and enough screaming human sobbery to give God Himself a migraine. Devers said, Please, sit down. He watched as Marthe tugged her dress back up over her shoulder, seemingly without pain, and lowered herself back into her chair. Cyril Berganske swept into that rubble and carnage looking like Paul Bunyan, or Santa Claus, or maybe even Jesus in a Banana Republic fatsuit, said Marthe. Flakjacket, bushshorts, suede brogans, knee-high knit stockings, and a watchcap with an indigo leather crown — I saw it when he bent down to me — so much like a yarmulke that I almost called him rabbi. His shorts had dozens of pockets, hundreds of zippers. To tug even one zipper, I knew, would undo his modesty, his presence beside me, and finally the fabric of the day itself, revealing behind our city an empty white TV screen as big as Alaska or a hill of glowing quartzite with three shadowy vultures squatting atop it. Are you sure this man was named Cyril Berganske? That's not an easy name to remember. Marthe looked at Devers as if he had just materialized there. Then she said, Leaning over me, he said, Pardon me, mam, but I'm Cyril Berganske and I'm here to help. Let's get you inside. Get that poor woman first, I told him, nodding at the mother curled around a two-year-old precious whose face had gone as gray as tarnished pewter. And Cyril Berganske scooped them both up and waded through shallow blood and a carrion heap of casualties from the sidewalk to the infirmary bunker, a zone of mercy luckily next door to a disaster spot. Cyril Berganske? said Devers. Yes yes yes. Yes. I remember because Cyril is such a romantic name, you know. Cyril and his brother Methodius, two pious Greeks, went as missionaries among both the Slavs and the Danubians. If not for Cyril and his Glagolitic script, Phil, the Rooskies would never've had their upside down and backwards alphabet. I lay bleeding with the acronyms CCCP, PPC, PC, and PCCC running like misspelled mice through my delirium. Then Cyril himself lumbered back in his Bunyanesque, Santa Clausian, and openly jesuitical way and toted me inside for a binding-up, and an emergency transfusion. A blood transfusion? No, raspberry Kool-Aid. Of course a blood transfusion. Cyril Berganske donated me a pint on the spot, not to mention another for that blessed footless child, two pints for a man dragged from the accordion-pleated bus with a severed arm, and at least a half dozen additional brimful plastic bags for the injured brought in. Even more pints came later. He squeezed it out of veins in both arms, and it flowed from bulging purple strings in both legs as well. He lay on a table immediately adjacent to my spot on the floor. Bring me liquids! he called. I must rehydrate! Water! Cola! Orange juice! Lemonade! If there's nothing else, bring me wine! Bring me fluids whereby I may replenish my ichors and chyles! The paramedics in that bunker put the tip of a large blue infundibular device into his mouth, Marthe continued, so that one of them could funnel saps into his gut while another bloody guy in white monitored the prodigious quadrifid outtake from his arms and legs. Cyril Berganske gulped and gulped, swelling melonically, as more and more injured people were stretchered, hammocked, and piggybacked in. Cyril Berganske, said Devers. As you know, dear Phil, potable water is in short supply, so at length the head paramedic recruited four street kids to loot a liquor store whose front window had shattered like rain during the concertina bus debacle, warning them to eschew the harder stuffs for wine. These high-spirited boys returned in alternating heats with bottles, magnums, and even staggering jeroboams of burgundy, bordeaux, rioja, california pinot noir, late harvest zinfandel, and a presumptuous mongrel sangria, all these oenological treats — in their urchin-filched, hemoglobular glory — cannibalistically red. Cyril swallowed and swallowed. And gave and gave. Marthe, nobody could donate that much blood, regardless of how much liquid the person consumed. Cyril Berganske could. His first name I remember because it sings and his last because of all the looted wines brought in, he seemed to prefer the burgundies. Burgundy, Berganske. Insofar, that is, as any wight in the throes of humanitarian self-sacrifice may enjoy a fluid-replenishing tipple. Juice, cola, lemonade, and wine went in, while out of his circulatory system pumped the ichor of salvation, O-negative universality for the antigen-bearing types of the thirsty victims. Once, between funnel gulps, he looked at me, below him on the floor, and said, I would fear such single-minded generosity might render me forever impotent, Mrs. Kess, except that every peripheral sight of you stirs me where such stirrings always reassure. If I weren't a hero already spoken for, I'd propose. Forgive me, Marthe, said Devers. Have you gone off your medication again? You don't think a man would say to me what Cyril Berganske said? Of course he would. Your beauty simmers. Your personality shines a lantern in the fog of this sickening war. Thank you. But who can get medicine in times like these? I have more to tell about Cyril. Dr. Berganske, I mean. Men like him don't grow on willow trees anymore, you know. I know. I do. Go on. Came a time they couldn't drain his veins a dripdrop more, even with a ball in each hand to squeeze and a sucking vacuum in each of his calf bags. He looked deflated, like a punctured bounceback clown, but he pulled himself upright, swung his legs over the table, and perched there gazing on the accumulating wounded. Never never never never never never never give up, he told the medics. He added, Winston Churchill said that, and I now subscribe to his philosophy. From a khaki pocket on his Banana Republic bushshorts, he pulled an antique Zippo lighter (vintage 1952 or so), flipped back its top, and spun from its flint a yellow-orange flame as slender and supple as a Polynesian dancing girl. He held this flame first under one cavernous nostril and then the other, taking its fluttery tip into each opening without quite barbecuing himself, but producing both times a crackling hiss and the sofaish odor of singed nosehair. Of course, just as he'd meant, he also twice tapped an unimpeded flow of crimson, twice deftly bagged, for the benefit of those still requiring transfusions. And kept contributing until his upper body seemed to sink in upon itself. Marthe, please. Marthe was pleased to continue: A doctor belatedly in the bunker declared that bacteria in Dr. Berganske's sinus cavities would have almost certainly contaminated this irregularly obtained supply: It would be folly to use it. Cyril, although he greatly resembled a courting bullfrog, could speak between the whooshingly filling bags hanging alongside his ever paler dewlaps. He swore he had healthy, admirably clear sinuses, adding that the death from blood loss of any rescued victim of this latest CUSA mortar attack would come down squarely on the head of the overscrupulous doctor. The scrawny MD flipflopped and okayed the transfusions. Through all this appalling excitement I could hear a not unpleasant husky caterwauling in my head, Marthe told Devers. It was that folk musician — what's his name? The one that's just croaked? — growling "Blood in My Eyes" over and over again. The power of suggestion, I imagine, for everything in the infirmary bunker, Phil, turned crimson on me, as if I'd donned a pair of glasses with red cellophane lenses. By the time the red roared away, along with our dead folkie's hymn, Cyril Berganske had left, and at least a score of people, and possibly many more, had received from him a heartfelt donation of his lifeblood. Marthe folded her hands in her lap, beatifically. Devers said, Do you believe what you've just told me? I believe everything I experience. Even when it perhaps results from a hallucination? Of course. Trying to distinguish among hallucinations is a game for unhappy literalists, don't you think? I don't think that Cyril Berganske, despite being a gigantic man and a universal donor, gave enough blood in one day to save more than twenty people. Marthe leaned toward Devers and said, He saved me, he saved me, he saved me. All right. And he said that I reassuringly stirred him. Blood calls to blood, Philip. Life calls to life. That was the end of their session. Later, on his way home, tactically crouching and sprinting, rubbernecking and hiding, Devers paused in a doorway. From his pants pocket he took the replacement worrystones — bracelet opals — that Marthe Kess had given him. He stirred the stones in the palm of one hand. They really did resemble beans, whether lima, viridescent navy, or spoiled pinto he could not have said. Later still, safely at home, Devers ventured onto the fire escape and planted both stones shallowly in a large, loam-filled pot. Stooped over the pot, he could feel a pulse throbbing in his temple: gleefully, dementedly, insistently. [ THE END ] BACK TO OMNI FICTION ARCHIVES