Von Bismarck’s Mustache

First Place

Short Fiction

Dr. Manin was on his way into the elevator to leave the hospital when an interning nurse informed him that the old man in Room 203 had grown back his teeth. Room 203 was Mr. Andersen’s room, and since he had remained unconscious for two weeks, they were simply waiting for him to expire. Dr. Manin thought nothing of it, and would have continued to had not the night charge nurse waited for two hours past her shift to tell him a similar story the following morning. This time, she added that two visiting nuns had proclaimed it a miracle.

When he arrived at the room, Sister Maria and Sister Maria Maria were already present. The nuns had adorned the room with roses and unlit votive candles and were still perfecting the smallest details of a shrine. The room had already taken on the appearance of being lit by an unseen stained-glass window. The blinds were tightly shut, and a pink aura arose from the blend of roses and fluorescent lights. On the wall was a picture Sister Maria had painted of Christ and Doubting Thomas. The patient looked like an Indian effigy or Rameses himself on the barge to the afterlife.

“It is quite all right,” Sister Maria said glancing up. “We have already checked with the nurses about our presence. We are here to watch and stand in the midst of what seems to be a miracle.”

Dr. Manin watched them move about the room. “His funeral must have been like this,” he thought and could see his own grandfather’s silent body. As a small boy, his mother had not allowed him to attend the funeral to see his grandfather tightly packaged and groomed. Since then he had become the theme of repeated dreams.

Dr. Manin had not yet checked the patient. “A silly mistake,” he thought, “someone must have misplaced their dentures.” The nuns moved aside to allow him through. They were dressed identically in gray habits and both held the quality of transcendence, but their faces seemed to mock each other. Sister Maria’s nose was large, but Sister Maria Maria’s nose towered above all conception; and where Sister Maria Maria’s ears were enormous, Sister Maria’s seemed to stretch out into eternity. “There is nothing worse than amorphous nuns,” he thought. He could smell the fresh roses. Dr. Manin lifted up the patient’s loose gums and saw two rows of perfect teeth.

The next day, the tests began and Dr. Manin performed them all himself. If this was someone’s idea of a prank, he saw no necessity in being the brunt of it. First he examined the teeth themselves. They were not as perfect as he thought. They were all stained a subtle yellow and one of his incisors had grown in crooked. Dr. Manin had read once in a medical journal about a man finally losing his last baby tooth at the age of 33. For a while he thought perhaps that Mr. Andersen had never grown his mature teeth and that they had just now finally appeared. But now, all at once? It was almost rational he thought, but dental records disproved that explanation.

So Dr. Manin moved to unrelated regions for answers and checked Mr. Andersen’s reflexes. His ears and throat. The size of his arm as compared to his leg. Dr. Manin was limited to the tests of his specialization, and at last he probed the grand mystery. But his only conclusion was that Mr. Andersen’s body was that of a degenerating old man and the X rays proved his teeth were real.

All of the tests were repeated in the same order the following day. Except for a rash and a change in the solidity of stool, Dr. Manin found no irregularities. An allergy test was performed, which showed Mr. Andersen was allergic to roses. So the room was sanitized and all of the roses were removed. The nuns seemed not to mind at all and continued to watch with all devotion, as they had done since the news of the miracle had reached them. Their presence had aggravated him from the beginning but since the room had lost its pink hue and had regained its sterile white glow, Dr. Manin was somewhat calmer. He saw it as a small victory.

“Perhaps this was how his funeral was,” Dr. Manin thought, “something more simple and plain.” He could see his grandfather in a simple room and casket. It was as simple as the decorations of the room where he last saw him. He remembered. They were watching a documentary on the elephants of Africa. His grandfather stood on his chair and swung his thin arm like a trunk. The boy had never seen an elephant before and his grandfather raised his voice in imitation, howling as his mustache poked alongside his arm like malformed tusks. His grandfather had told him once that he had a mustache like Von Bismarck’s, but to tell the truth, his grandfather did not know whether Von Bismarck had a mustache or not, or if he did whether it even resembled his own. Someone had told him once, admirably, that his mustache was an identical, if not an exact replica, of Von Bismarck’s, and his grandfather had long since resolved that since his mother was German, though the last name Manin hid all record of it, his and Von Bismarck’s mustaches, had Von Bismarck chosen to grow one, would have looked remarkably similar. The boy, not knowing what a Von Bismarck was, assumed it was some sort of pouty terrier.