LITMIR.BIZ

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and it was very beautiful. Short black hair, Slavic cheekbones, wide mouth, chin delicately pointed and cleft. For the moment, Nathan resisted taking her photograph.

      “I notice you don’t seem to need to change lenses. The last photojournalist we had in here had a belt full of lenses. He made quite a lot of cinema twisting those lenses on and off his camera.”

      “You’re very observant,” said Nathan. It was obvious that you could not compliment Dr. Molnár too much; it gave Nathan perverse satisfaction to find oblique ways to do it. “I sometimes do have a second camera body with a macrophotography lens. But these modern zooms have actually surpassed a lot of the old prime lenses in quality. Are you a student of photography?”

      Dr. Molnár smiled behind his mask. “I have a half-interest in a little restaurant in a hotel downtown in Pest. You must come. You will be my special guest. The walls are covered with my photographs of nudes. I wouldn’t use that thing, though,” he said, pointing an oddly shaped forceps at the Nikon. “I’m strictly an analogue man. Medium-format film for me, and that’s that. It’s slow, it’s big and clumsy, and the details you see are exquisite. You can lick them. You can taste them.” The doctor’s mask bulged with the gestures his tongue was making to illustrate his approach to photography. He had already established in his first discussions with Nathan that it was the sensuality of surgery that had initially drawn him to the practice; sensuality was the guiding principle of every aspect of his life. He was making sure that Nathan wouldn’t forget it.

      And now, in a very smooth segue—which Nathan thought of as particularly Hungarian—Dr. Molnár said, “Have you met our patient, Nathan? She’s from Slovenia. Une belle Slave.” Molnár peeked over the cloth barrier and spoke to the disconnected head with disarmingly conversational brio. “Dunja? Have you met Nathan? You signed a release form for him, and now he’s here with us in the operating theater. Why don’t you say hello?”

      At first Nathan thought that the good doctor was teasing him; Molnár had emphasized the element of playfulness in his unique brand of surgery, and chatting with an unconscious patient would certainly qualify as Molnáresque. But to Nathan’s surprise Dunja’s eyes began to stutter open, she began working her tongue and lips as though she were thirsty, she took a quick little breath that was almost a yawn.

      “Ah, there she is,” said Molnár. “My precious one. Hello, darling.” Nathan took a step backward in his slippery paper booties in order not to impede the strange, intimate flow between patient and doctor. Could she and her surgeon be having an affair? Could this really be written off as Hungarian bedside manner? Molnár touched his latex-bound fingertips to his masked mouth, then pressed the filtered kiss to Dunja’s lips. She giggled, then slipped away dreamily, then came back. “Talk to Nathan,” said Molnár, withdrawing with a bow. He had things to do.

      Dunja struggled to focus on Nathan, a process so electromechanical that it seemed photographic. And then she said, “Oh, yes, take pictures of me like this. It’s cruel, but I want you to do that. Zoltán is very naughty. A naughty doctor. He came to interview me, and we spent quite a bit of time together in my hometown, which is”—another druggy giggle—“somewhere in Slovenia. I can’t remember it.”

      “Ljubljana,” Molnár called out from the foot of the table, where he was sorting through instruments with his colleagues.

      “Thank you, naughty doctor. You know, it’s your fault I can’t remember anything. You love to drug me.”

      Nathan began to photograph Dunja’s face. She turned towards the camera like a sunflower. He regretted that he had decided not to use a video camera on his assignments, a fussy rejection that had to do with worries about media storage, peripherals, and other arcane techie calculations. Of course, if he’d been able to afford the new D4s, which could also record decent video … but he couldn’t keep up with the inexorable hot lava flow of technology, even though he desperately wanted to. Naomi was never so prissy. She just wasn’t wary. She’d already bought a new high-def no-name Chinese camcorder at Heathrow and had downloaded an obscure Asian editing program to work with its difficult files. Even if she’d had to shoot with her BlackBerry, she’d have caught, in all its coarse grain, the weird banter he had just heard. Oh, well. He had the voice recorder cooking, and he could append a sound file to each photograph using the camera’s microphone if push came to shove.

      “Nathan? I think you are very beautiful,” said Dunja, just before she faded back into unconsciousness.

      Nathan began to line up a 24mm low-angle shot with Dunja’s face in the foreground and her anesthetist—beefy, hairy, silent—behind her. “Nathan, forget about the face. It’s the breasts you want to see. Come over here beside me.” Nathan took his shot, then stood up and joined Dr. Molnár. Molnár pulled back the surgical cloth—orange, for some reason—covering Dunja’s chest. Her breasts were very full, and very blue and surreal in the cold light pouring from the lamp cluster which towered over the table. Capturing the effect of that light was exactly the reason Nathan rarely used flash, which would overpower the ambient light. Each breast had a dozen clear plastic wire-like tubes running into it, making it look like an umbrella that had been popped inside out by a strong wind. “Take pictures of those, would be better. If they’re good, I’ll print them and hang them in my restaurant.”

      “You have medical photos hanging in your restaurant?”

      “No, no. Yours would be the first. You think it would derange the eating?”

      “It would derange my eating, I can guarantee you that.”

      Dr. Molnár burst out laughing. His surgical mask pumped in and out with the pneumatics of his hilarity. He bent at the waist with laughter. Nathan thought the mask would pop a seam. He scanned the others in the room. One of them winked and shrugged. It was just Doc Molnár. No worries. Molnár straightened up and gained control with some effort. “Do I shock you? We are very playful here. It’s a good tone for an operating theater. It is a theater, after all.”

      “Yes,” said Nathan, “so you’ve told me.” He put the camera up to his eye, regretting the absence of the macro lens. He would get as close as focus would allow and crop into the shot later. When you got close, the breasts became complete animals, possibly marine, attached, perhaps, to auto-feeding tubes. Nathan began to think that some anesthetic fumes were floating around the room, affecting his perception. He shook it off. “Do you want to shock me, Dr. Molnár?” he said, moving gently over the woman’s multi-penetrated breasts, rolling his finger on the shutter with delicacy. His nose was mashed, as always, against the camera’s rear LCD screen—he used his stronger, left, eye—and he spoke out of the right side of his mouth, the way smokers swiveled their lips away from you while exhaling their smoke. “I have a feeling that you do.”

      “I want to be entertaining,” said Molnár, picking up a small stainless-steel bowl. He fished around in it with his index finger, like a prospector panning for gold. “For your big New Yorker article. I’ve always wanted to be the subject of a piece in the ‘Annals of Medicine’ section. It’s good for business, good for my vanity.”

      Still shooting, Nathan laughed. “The New Yorker’s a long shot. I’m doing this on spec.”

      “A ‘long shot,’ yeah, sweet expression, but we must all live in hope. I hope for The New Yorker.”

      “Frankly, I have the same hope. Unfortunately, my credits aren’t quite up to snuff. I never did make it through medical school.”

      Molnár stopped fishing and looked up into Nathan’s lens. “Well, neither did I. That hasn’t prevented an illustrious career. I’m sure it won’t stop you either.” Nathan couldn’t help glancing over at Dunja to see if she had heard. Her head was rolling dreamily from side to side, and her mouth kept morphing into various modes of smiles, but her eyes were closed. She was somewhere else. Molnár picked this up immediately. “She knows all about me. I learned my medicine during a turbulent era in Eastern Europe. Things were … regularly irregular at that time. North Americans never understand. You want to see this? Would make a nice shot.”

      Molnár

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