Chapter Text
The human brain, they say, when separated from its body, retains consciousness for a short while. For how long is the question: one account said the duchess' head scowled at the executioner for a full minute, until it's expression changed to 'one of realisation' before finally losing all life in its eyes. Another claimed the man's head stayed alive for a full half hour, winking and smiling, unable to speak for it had no lungs to pull air from, but alive nevertheless. Those at the foot of the guillotine, however, never showed any such phenomena when dr. Gogol inspected them.
He knew the brain died the moment it no longer received oxygen, when the blood flow stopped. So the trick might be, the doctor pondered, to keep as much blood inside as possible after a decapitation, for enough time until an appropriate donor body could be found. The guillotine, in spite of her elegant nature, may be too crude an instrument for such an operation; the moment her blade slices the neck, it creates a triumphant fountain of blood, bubbling from the neck, trickling down the wood, the restraints, turning the sawdust red. Sometimes, when it was cold, one could see wisps of steam emanating from the wound. Sometimes an ear-piercing whistle as the lungs gave one last exhale. A beautiful sight, to be sure, but every time he rushed to see the head, hoping to see that one last spark of life, every time he was denied it - the foolish guards being too slow, the police chief turning white and stuttering before he was allowed permission, the priest uttering some platitude or another to him and he was expected to nod and react with gravitas all the while the head was bleeding out, whatever trace of life long gone by the time he could finally see it... What a pity.
It was an early Wednesday morning when dr. Gogol attended the execution of Richard Antoin Dieudonné, a poor alcoholic wretch who protested his innocence the whole trial, claiming he was out drinking when his wife was stabbed 24 times in the kitchen. It was a messy affair, with witnesses corroborating the man's alibi, and others claiming he was there shouting at her, demanding money for his habit. The State, however, had no patience for such messiness, and neatly separated his head from his body at 6:15 in the morning of the third of October, 1928. He was pronounced dead by dr. Andriy Milovanović Gogol, a well-known orthopaedic surgeon whose clinic was located at the Boulevard Raspail, well in the centre of the city, and a fifteen minute walk from the prison.
The last thing Richard saw when he was strapped to the bench was the priest standing beside an elegant man in a fur coat and a black hat. They were a distance away - two ravens waiting patiently. For a brief moment, the walls of the prison no longer seemed solid but as if they were painted with cheap yellow paint on cardboard. In the edge of his vision he saw, or rather he thought he saw, a man in a yellow uniform, the same colour as the prison wall, wearing a dog mask, standing ready. The vision disappeared and he was back in the Cherche-Midi, being lowered into the guillotine’s open maw. He thought about what he would do when this was over.
At 8:35 that very same day, Dr Gogol received mr. Antoine-Marie Jacobs, a veteran of 1914, for consultation.
The Great War was great in many ways - the scale of killings had never been this extreme, human after human mown down on the battlefield like so many blades of grass, the rest broken in mind and spirit, their prostheses rendering them a combination of man and machine, flesh and steel. To Gogol, the war was Great because it gave him a garden of mangled flesh and shattered bones to play around in. And so he stood above this veteran, Antoine-Marie Jacobs, struggling to hide his glee while inspecting the badly healed legs, marvelling at how the previous surgeon had not set them properly and they had grown crooked, almost zig-zagged. Oh, he sometimes fantasised about doing something like that deliberately, like a gardener could make a tree grow into any confirmation possible. What kind of living sculptures could he create simply from bending and displacing a few bones? His thoughts were interrupted by Mr Jacobs strained breathing. The man was in a lot of pain. Dr. Gogol did not care. The only thing stopping him from turning Antoine into a living El Greco painting was society and the law, otherwise…
Mr Jacobs winced at the doctor tightening his grip.
‘Will you- will, will these legs ever straighten out?’
‘Not by themselves.’
‘Is it possible for you?’
‘Of course it is. It will take a long time, two or three operations with several months rest and revalidation in between.’
‘And then?’
‘And then you will walk again.’
‘…C’est pas possible.’ (Impossible)
This irritated Gogol.
‘Vous me doutez? Mais vous croyerez le boucher qui vous avez fait ça?’ (Do you doubt me? But you believe the butcher who did this to you?)
‘No, no, no, please docteur, I do not doubt your skills nor your knowledge, but I simply do not have the money for this!’
‘What money? Have you not paid for this on the battlefield? You will pay again, lying on the operating table. That is all the currency I will accept.’
Antoine briefly had a vision of the doctor as he stood over him, his face in shadows as the light shone behind him almost seeming to form a halo above his head, as an angel. But there was another presence. A bright light of some kind. He heard the buzz of flies and smelt that unmistakeable stench, the kind of smell he’d dealt with often enough on the battlefield. Were there ropes hanging from the ceiling? Was this a stage? It all felt so familiar, just like that moment when the shell hit the ground near him and exploded. The vision disappeared, and it was just him in the clinic, the only smell that of disinfectant, and only the doctor standing there.