The Constructivist, by Elizabeth Rosen

​The Constructivist
 
Drifting through the gallery of European avante-guard statues, Wassily thought how, in another life, he might have been an artist instead of a surgeon. It was a matter of degree as much as discipline. He slowed to observe Naum Gabo’s 1917 Model for Constructed Torso. 

The figure was constructed of flat cardboard pieces slotted one into the other to approximate the twisted figure of – yes, that appeared to be a breast suggested by a small triangle of cardboard poking out from the chest area above the tapered waist and jutting pubic bone - a woman, armless and strangely bent from mid-chest over to the side, as if she were doing a stretch, her bald head tilted to rest on the nub of shoulder there.

Tucking his hands carefully behind his back to protect them, Wassily leaned in to read the caption at the foot of statue:
 
At the heart of Naum Gabo’s art was the attempt to depict space without having to simultaneously depict mass. To this end, he experimented with Constructivist ideas, using industrial materials to depict dense structures such as the human body. Gabo was also deeply influenced by Cubism. In the stereometric “Model of ‘Constructed Torso,’” we see that influence in the geometric abstraction and angularity of the torso. (1917, reassembled 1981)
 
Seeing the word reassembled there on the explanatory plaque, Wassily nodded in satisfied recognition. That was exactly his job. Though his mission was in some ways the opposite of these radical men from earlier in the century who wanted to dissect objects into their composite planes and surfaces, he considered himself an artist of sorts. 

Wassily walked on.
 
*
 
Surgery 1 – The car had left Victim A a mass of undifferentiated flesh. To an untutored observer, the normal curves of her body had in places been compressed into singles planes of broken bone and flesh. Limbs weren’t where they were supposed to be. Pieces of her face were missing. Jagged bone poked through skin, and in numerous places skin was scraped completely off where she had been dragged over rough concrete. She was, to use layman’s terminology, a mess. 

As the reconstructive surgeon on call, Wassily was part of the team of people to work on Victim A when she was brought in. This initial surgery was only about saving her life, and for Wassily, saving the arm that had been half-torn from her shoulder. Under the glare of the operating lights, Wassily calmly reattached tendon, nerve, and blood vessel. Time would tell, he knew, but even as he called for a suturing needle from the surgical nurse, he itemized the other injuries and calculated what other surgeries would ultimately need to be performed on Victim A. There would be many.
 
*

Michel was beating Wassily at golf, and not very graciously. In fact, he’d appeared rather smug as he sunk his putt into the 16th hole. Just like an orthopedist, Wassily observed, as Michel cracked his neck to hide his pleased smile. 

Wassily lined up his ball and stood for a moment, golf club poised. He was aware that his ungenerous thought about Michel probably stemmed from his crankiness about the upcoming surgery on Victim A. He’d learned to stop thinking of the jitteriness that came before procedures as a sign that he was a bad surgeon. Over the years, with all the successful procedures, he’d come to think of it as the nerves before a battle. Indeed, with all the hours spent with surgical teams drawing up the choreography of detailed surgical plans, it was somewhat like a battle plan.

This would be the fourth surgery Wassily had performed on Victim A so far. He and Michel had already realigned and stabilized the pelvic bones with plates, put screws in both her tibiae and right femoral shaft. Wassily had performed a separate procedure to stabilize her broken cheek bone and wire her mandible back into place. Tomorrow would be the fourth of the immediate procedures. Afterwards, they would put Victim A into a coma and see if she survived to have further procedures.
Wassily exhaled smoothly and putted.

 
*
 
Surgery 6 – It was time to re-contain the inside of Victim A as God intended. Backing through the O.R. door, gloved hands held high and palms inward so as not to contaminate them, Wassily went over the complicated techniques he would be using as he stood over the unconscious patient. He knew his compulsive cataloguing was part of being able to re-enter the world afterwards with the satisfaction of having made his way successfully through the consecutive items on that list, and for the next hours, he would solely focus on recruiting both muscle and skin from Victim A’s lower back to reposition over her wounds, and when there was no more to recruit, grafting skin products over missing areas of skin. 

Wassily assessed the placement of the surgical drapes around the incision site on Victim A’s back. The white rectangle of her skin was particularly jarring within the dark blue fabric of the surgical towels. The lower drape was pulled up over the rise of Victim A’s buttocks. The square of bare flesh illuminated by the light appeared flat and featureless. A surgical nurse began to swab the area with povidone-iodine until all the white became brown, a plane without dimension there for Wassily to redefine it with his scalpel. Wassily pressed his eyes to the microscope to look for the blood vessels. He held his hand out for the curved tip forceps and dissecting scissors. 

“Let’s begin,” he said.
 
*
 
The postcard of Otto Gutfreund’s bust of Don Quixote lay on top of the other mail on Wassily’s hospital desk. Michel and his wife were in Prague on a beer tour, and the postcard was a dark joke between the friends, the bust being an elongated and flattened face, one eye drooping, and mouth bunched up on one side of the face. The bronze looked as if two separate faces had been crushed into each other, but Wassily understood that Michel had mailed the image to him in anticipation of Victim A’s upcoming facial reconstruction surgery. Wassily flipped the postcard over to note Michel’s Good luck, buddy!

It was something of a minor miracle that Victim A had survived everything so far. Sometimes it was like that. Some gave up: the pain and possibility of life-long disability or deformity too much for them. Others seemed determined to survive no matter the cost. So far, Victim A had been one of the latter, and Wassily had seen that stubborn determination only grow in the years she had been his patient. Later this week, Wassily would perform a fourteenth surgery on the remarkable woman he’d come to know. He would coax a scapha, a delicate curved helix, even a dangling lobe from Victim A’s skull to give her back the ear that the concrete had ground from her head. 
​
Wassily flipped the postcard over to look at the bust of the deformed Don Quixote. He propped it against the photo of his family that sat in one corner of the desk. It would take more years and dozens more surgeries, but Wassily felt confident that - if she survived the numerous procedures and possible infections - he would be able to return the flattened woman, as he thought of her in his mind, to a three-dimensional form again. He thought that - if he did, if she did ­- he might one day give her her own copy of the postcard.

Elizabeth Rosen

This story was inspired by Constructed Torso, by Naum Gabo (Russia) 1917:
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gabo-model-for-constructed-torso-t06972
and by the Otto Gutfruend sculpture depicted below.
​
Elizabeth Rosen (she/her) is a native New Orleanian and a transplant to small-town Pennsylvania. She misses gulf oysters and Southern ghost stories, but has become appreciative of snow and colorful scarves. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Colourwise, she’s an autumn. She still wants her MTV. Learn more at www.thewritelifeliz.com.

Don Quixote, by Otto Gutfreund (Czechia) 1911