After the stabbing, Henry went about remembering and writing down exactly what had happened to him. To help his memory, he read up on taxidermy. Any bit of information that struck him as familiar, he noted; that's how he reassembled the essay the taxidermist had read to him. In a taxidermy magazine, he found an article on the taxidermist, with precious photos; these were the foundations for the mental reconstruction of Okapi Taxidermy. The essential part of the story, the taxidermist's play, was the most difficult to re-create. The sun of faith came before the generous wind, but which came first, the black cat or the three whispered jokes? The most elusive fragments on the sewing list were those the taxidermist had never discussed, such as the song, the food dish, the shirts with an arm missing, the porcelain shoes, the float in a parade. But bit by bit, painstakingly, Henry managed to reconstruct parts of the play.
At the hospital, as he was resting in his bed after the blood transfusions and the operation, the nurse presented him with a torn sheet of paper, crumpled and bloodied. She said it was Henry's, that he had brought it with him. Henry recognized what it was. As he turned after being stabbed, he must have laid a hand on the counter and unintentionally grabbed one of the pages from the taxidermist's play. Somewhere along the way, half of it had been torn off and lost.
Through a handprint of blood, the words coming through the red like dark bruises on skin, Henry read the sole surviving element of the play, a fragment to do with the body Beatrice and Virgil find near the tree:
Henry first gave to the story of his stabbing the title A 20th-Century Shirt. Then he changed it to Henry the Taxidermist. Finally he settled on a title that went to the heart of the encounter: Beatrice and Virgil. It was to Henry a factual account, a memoir. But while in the hospital, before he started writing Beatrice and Virgil, Henry wrote another text. He called it Games for Gustav. It was too short to be a novel, too disjointed to be a short story, too realistic to be a poem. Whatever it was, it was the first piece of fiction Henry had written in years.
Games for Gustav
Your ten-year-old son is speaking to you.
He says he has found a way of obtaining some potatoes to feed your starving family.
If he is caught, he will be killed.
Do you let him go?
You are a barber.
You are working in a room full of people.
You shear them and then they are led away and killed.
You do this all day, every day. A new group is brought in.
You recognize the wife and sister of a good friend.
They recognize you too, with joy in their eyes. You embrace.
They ask you what is going to happen to them.
What do you tell them?
You are holding your granddaughter's hand.
Neither of you is well after the long trip with no food or water.
Together, you are taken to the "infirmary" by a soldier.
The place turns out to be a pit where people are being "cured with a single pill," as the soldier puts it, that is, with a single shot to the back of the head.
The pit is full of bodies, some of them still moving.
There are six people ahead of you in the line.
Your granddaughter looks up at you and asks you a question.
What is that question?
An armed guard tells you to sing. You sing.
He tells you to dance. You dance.
He tells you to pretend you are a pig.
You pretend you are a pig.
He tells you to lick his boot. You lick his boot.
Then he tells you to "____________________," and it's a foreign word you don't understand.
What action do you do?
The order comes at gunpoint: you and your family and all the people around you must strip naked.
You are with your seventy-two-year-old father, your sixty-eight-year-old mother, your spouse, your sister, a cousin, and your three children, aged fifteen, twelve and eight.
After you have finished undressing, where do you look?
You are about to die.
Next to you is a stranger. He turns to you.
He says something in a language you don't understand.
What do you do?
Your daughter is clearly dead.
If you step on her head, you can reach higher, where the air is better.
Do you step on your daughter's head?
Afterwards, when it's all over, you are sad.
Your sadness is all-consuming and ever-present.
You want to escape it.
What do you do?
Afterwards, when it's all over, you meet God.
What do you say to God?
Afterwards, when it's all over, you overhear a joke.
At the punch line the listeners gasp, bringing their hands to their mouths, and then they roar with laughter.
The joke is about your suffering and your loss.
What is your reaction?
Of your community of 1,650 souls, 122 have survived. You hear that your entire extended family is dead, that your house has been taken over by strangers, that all your possessions have been stolen.
You also hear that the new government wants to turn a new page and address the errors of the past.
Do you return home?
A doctor is speaking to you:
"This pill will erase your memory.
You will forget all your suffering and all your loss.
But you will also forget your entire past."
Do you swallow the pill?
Yann Martel
Born in Spain in 1963, Yann Martel studied philosophy at Trent University, worked at odd jobs-tree planter, dishwasher, security guard-and traveled widely before turning to writing. He is the author of the internationally acclaimed novel Life of Pi, which won the 2002 Man Booker Prize, was translated into forty-one languages, and spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. His collection of short stories, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, and his first novel, Self, both received critical acclaim. He has also published a collection of letters to the prime minister of Canada, What Is Stephen Harper Reading? Yann Martel lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with the writer Alice Kuipers and their son, Theo.
Yann Martel is available for select readings and lectures. To inquire about a possible appearance, please visit [http://www.rhspeakers.com] www.rhspeakers.com or call 212-572-2013.
