The Tiger's Wife

BIS WAS SNORING ASTHMATICALLY ON THE DOORSTEP OF the upper patio, and he started at the sound of my footsteps and bellowed like a moose until I reached him. I pushed past him with my knee, and then he followed me to the upper porch, where I sat at the top of the staircase above the main road. Bis hung around for a moment or two, pushing his wet face into the crook of my arm, sneezing with excitement at the notion of sharing the early morning hours with someone; and then he decided that I was unanimated and useless, and he ran down and over the road and dropped past the palms onto the beach. Moments later, I could hear him splashing around. It wasn’t dawn yet, and there was a fine pink sheen to the air, as translucent as a fish. The lights of Zvoćana were still bright on the water across the bay.

The shadows were pulling back from the water, gathering at the foot of the road, when Barba Ivan came down the stairs. He came down slowly, putting both feet on each stair. He took one look at me—scuffed-up pant legs and dirt-smeared coat and bloodied palms—and said, “I see you’ve been up to the vineyard.”

That I had made this effort on my own seemed to compel him to confide in me. He asked if I wanted to come fishing, and I said no, but I got up and followed him down to his boat anyway. It was a little blue skiff, paint peeling off the sides, green and yellow barnacles clinging to the bottom like something earned. Rubber boots on his feet, two large crates and an empty bucket in his arms, the Barba told me he had some lobster cages near the shore, a small net for dogfish a little farther out, and then the big net, right in the middle of the bay, that Fra Antun helped him with when he wasn’t supervising the orphanage. He held his arm out as he explained this to me, cutting the horizon into evenly distanced rectangles with a flat hand.

Then he told me about the diggers. They had shown up on his doorstep last week, two carloads of them, all their pots and pans and, in his words, peddling bric-a-brac, and at first he’d thought they were gypsies. He hadn’t known how ill they were then; only Duré had come inside, and he had stood in Barba Ivan’s kitchen and told them there was a body in the vineyard, a body Duré had put there, the body of a distant cousin whom he had carried down from the mountains during the war and had to leave behind. The cousin had been stuffed into the ground somewhere up on that plot during the months the house had been abandoned. Now the whole family was sick, and no one had been able to help them until some hag from back in their village told them it was the body making them sick, the body calling out for last rites, a proper resting place. They were going to find him at any cost; earlier this year, they’d lost an aunt to the illness, and they were paying to dig.

“Nada doesn’t care for it,” he told me, untying the boat. “But then, of course, what it comes down to is: they’ve got children. And do we or do we not want a body in the vineyard?”

He had been watching them for the last week, growing more and more uneasy. “You’ve seen the pouches,” he said, pointing to his neck. “They’ve got—I don’t know—grass and dead things in them to keep away the illness.”

They had brought so many bottles that Barba Ivan suspected they had a trade on the side; rare kinds of rakija, perhaps some family concoction. But the young woman had told him about the bottles, full of water from a holy spring—back on Duré’s and my side of the border—and herbs and grasses for health.

“But they haven’t found him yet?” I said.

“Oh, he’s long gone,” Barba Ivan said with a broad smile. “I keep telling them—long gone. It’s hard, shallow earth. He’s not where he’s supposed to be—floods have flushed him out, dogs have dragged him off. Who knows?”

The Barba put his crates in the boat and I helped him push it out, even though he waved me off. Bis was already in the boat, wagging his tail so hard his hips and whole rear end were swinging manically from left to right. Then Barba Ivan climbed into the boat and, eighty years old if he was a day, rowed himself out to the motorboat he kept moored to the breakwater, switched vessels, lifted Bis out of the skiff and into the motorboat, and then, with the dog standing on the wet prow like a masthead, the two of them set off down the coast, cutting the still morning water. Every hundred yards or so, Bis would launch backward out of the boat, his jowls flapping into an insane grin of canine pleasure, and disappear under the waves; Barba Ivan would kill the motor and drift until the dog caught up, or turn the boat around and go back for him.

Zóra had begun her morning with a call to the prosecutor’s assistant, whom she’d succeeded in calling a cow within the first two minutes of conversation. I tried to cheer her up by telling her about the diggers on our way to the monastery, about the illness and the dead cousin, whose bones were perhaps somewhere up in the vineyard, and whom the diggers, as I understood it, would be repotting as soon as he was discovered.

Zóra gave me a look from behind her sunglasses, and said nothing. She was pulling one of two dollies Nada had provided to accommodate us in our effort of delivering the vaccines to the monastery orphanage. We had stood in the doorway of the garden shed while Nada pushed boxes and crates aside to find them—two rusted carts with wheels barely clinging to the axles, leaning against the back wall behind a broken washing machine and some paper-wrapped canvases that we assumed were, undoubtedly, more dog portraits.

Zóra and I walked through town slowly, pulling the dollies behind us, past the little souvenir shops that were just opening up, past a farm stand where a thin, burnt-brown man was spearing handwritten price tags into crates of melons, tomatoes, bright green peppers, and limes. Shirtless men were already tearing down a stone wall at the bottom of an empty, sloping field full of dead yellow grasses and dark scrubs that were growing up here and there, throwing pockets of shade down the hill and onto the road. At the ferry pier, we ran into a small procession of children, presumably from the orphanage, heading our way, clinging to a frayed red rope that was slung between the waists of two supervisors, women who were both talking at the same time, telling the children to stay out of the street and not lick each other.

When we reached the monastery, we forced our crooked-wheeled dollies over the stairs at the gate, through an arbor of vines that clung like spiders to the lattice above. Fra Antun, we were told by the young woman who worked at the tourism counter in the courtyard, was in the garden. We left the dollies with her and went to find him. The garden was through a low stone tunnel, facing the sea, and was surrounded by a wall braced with cypresses and lavender. There was a goldfish pond with yawning papyrus fronds that leaned out over the water, shading a mossy rock that someone had crowned with a grinning turtle ashtray. Evidence of children lay everywhere: abandoned buckets, blue-and-green sand trucks, plastic trains crowding end-to-end in the middle of the path, a headless doll with only one shoe, a butterfly net. At the back of the garden, there was a clear space where herbs and tomato vines and heads of lettuce were growing in tight, sprouting rows, and this was where we found Fra Antun. He was dressed in a cassock, cutting herbs with a pair of scissors, and when he straightened up he had glasses and a ponytail and two overlapping front teeth, and he smiled at us in a comfortable way and asked us if we had met Tamsin, the turtle, yet. He laughed, and we laughed with him. When he bent down to gather up his things, Zóra mouthed a soundless whistle and crossed herself.

He helped us bring the dollies into the inner courtyard of the monastery, past the chapel doors, now closed, and the staircase that led up to the campanile where the big brass bell was swinging hard, sending bursts of sound up the mountain. The children had been set up away from the cloisters, in what Fra Antun called the “museum.” It was a long, white corridor with a clerestory of little square windows that ran parallel to the inner sanctum of the church. Empty sleeping bags were rolled up neatly along both sides of the hall. Fra Antun explained that, once the new orphanage was built and the children had been moved there, this corridor would house historic displays from the old library and pieces by regional artists.

“Local art,” he said with a proud wink, and showed us a patch of wall where more portraits of Bis were lined up. These drawings were in crayon, and the dog stood, stick-legged, three-eyed, bipedal, toadlike, misshapen in every possible way, on napkins and sheets of newspaper and toilet paper that had been lovingly arranged by someone considerably taller than the artists responsible for the work itself. At the end of the corridor, there was a cannonball wedged into the wall, the plaster and paint spidering around it.

“That is a cannonball,” Zóra said, without feeling.

“Yes,” said Fra Antun. “From a Venetian ship.” And he pointed out in the direction of the sea.

The children were working in a windowless room that looked like an ancient kitchen. There was an enormous, empty black fireplace, and a spinning wheel in a wooden case in the corner, a shelf with turn-of-the-century irons that looked like instruments with which you could club a person to death. Stone bowls were lined up in small piles along a tiered mantelpiece. The single fold of an old fishing net hung above the door; a scruffy-looking blue plush fish was trapped in it. Fra Antun’s kids sat hunched over wooden benches in the middle of the room. There were glasses of pencils and crayons scattered over the tables, and the color rose up in a glaring mess from the pages the kids were writing on, sitting on, sneezing on, folding into paper airplanes or birds. The strange thing about it all was the silence. We stood in the doorway, and we could hear the broad sound of the bell outside in the courtyard, but in the kitchen there was only sniffling and shuffling paper, the occasional rhythm of someone scratching his head. They were white-faced and small, sturdy despite their leanness. They were working with another monk, a man named Fra Parso. He had a beard and a tonsure, and was Italian. He didn’t smile at us.

We had intended to save the candy for after the injections, to win the children’s cooperation and patience, to comfort the criers and coax the breath holders, revive the fainters and bribe the ones who would go limp and eel out of your grip and onto the floor. But the silence in that room, with the little heads bowed over the flush of paper, did something to Zóra, and she unstrapped the box from the top of the pile and set it down right there and announced: “We have candy.” And after that, the children were milling around her, still quiet, but milling, looking inside the cooler, walking away with bags of Kiki bonbons, which they probably hadn’t seen since the war, and some had probably never seen at all. Zóra sat down on the stairs leading into the room with the tables and held out the candy, and I stood back until an even-eyed little boy with thick brown hair came up and took my hand and led me inside to look at his drawing. He was a little pale, but he looked painstakingly well cared for, and his head, which he put near me when he pointed to his picture, smelled clean. I was not surprised to find that he, too, had drawn Bis; except he had given the dog apple-green udders.

“That’s a nice dog,” I told him. From the corner of my eye, I could see Zóra eyeing the leftover candy in the cooler, and then estimating how many kids were walking around with their mouths full or with wrappers in their fists, trying to work out whether she could bring them back for seconds.

“It’s Arlo’s dog,” the little boy said, without looking at me.

“Who’s Arlo?” I said.

The boy shrugged, and then wandered off to look for more candy.

I had been longing for my grandfather all day without letting myself think about it. Sitting in that hot, moist room with the dogs in all shapes and colors spread out in front of me made me remember how, for years during the war, he had collected my old things—dolls, baby clothes, books—to take to the orphanage downtown. He would take the tram there and always walk back, and when he came home I knew not to disturb him. They had lost children themselves, my grandparents: a son and a daughter, both stillborn, within a year of each other. It was another thing they never talked about, a fact I knew somehow without knowing how I’d ever heard about it, something buried so long ago, in such absolute silence, that I could go for years without remembering it. When I did, I was always stunned by the fact that they had survived it, this thing that sat between them, barricaded from everyone else, despite which they had been able to cling together, and raise my mother, and take trips, and laugh, and raise me.

I started setting up, and a little while later, her candy-distributing energy spent, Zóra joined me. With the discipline of the morning lesson shattered, the kids hovered in the doorway and watched us set up in an empty room at the end of the hall. Fra Antun and a few other monks carried plastic tables up from the cellar, and we straightened out the table legs and put down cloth, stacked our boxes of injections and sterile blood vials in the corner that didn’t get sun, set the scales, got out towels and tubs and boxes of gel for the lice station, and then Zóra had a fight with Fra Parso about the contraceptives we had brought to hand out to the older girls. When it was all finished, we gave the monks the supplies we had brought just in case, the thermometers and hot water bottles, a box of antibiotics and iodine and throat syrup and aspirin. The children were waiting for more candy, and Zóra was getting more and more agitated by what she was now seeing as our lack of preparation. There were no papers, she had realized—the monks did not have the children’s medical histories—so we were going to have to make up the records by hand as we went.

The little boy who had drawn the dog with green udders stood, without a word, on the scale and opened his mouth obediently for the tongue depressor, tilted his head for the ear thermometer, drew deep breaths when we asked him to. He did not want to know how a stethoscope worked. Zóra, always great with children despite her insistence she would never have any herself, failed to impress him with her analogy of lice as warriors, fortified and equipped for siege, while she rifled through his hair with gloved hands, finding nothing. Ivo watched with mild interest as I sawed off an ampoule tip and filled the syringe, swabbed down his arm with alcohol. When I put the needle in, he watched the thin depression on his skin deepen without flinching, and when I did his other arm he didn’t look at it at all, just sat in the green plastic chair with his hands on his lap and stared at me. We had special-ordered children’s band-aids with pictures of dolphins and a counterfeit Spider-Man in a yellow suit, and when I asked him which one he wanted he shrugged, and I gave him two for each arm, and would have given him more. I had the horrified feeling then that all the kids would be like this, oblivious to pain, unmoved in practice by the things that kids at home reacted against on principle. When the next kid kicked me in the shin, I was relieved.

The wails of children in distress are monstrously contagious: the moment one child strikes up, six more follow it, and the acoustics of the monastery halls amplified this phenomenon so that the whole place was ringing with howls of dread and indignation before we even laid hands on the second child. We had presaged what they were capable of doling out, a life-or-death struggle, an eagerness to bite. The monks, who stood by in terror for the first half hour, eventually came to our aid, pinning down legs and arms, threatening punishment, promising sweets. Beguiled by the prospect of more candy, some of the kids came and went without a fight. But in distributing most of the candy beforehand, we had made a serious tactical mistake: our only leverage in the situation had been that candy, and we watched it disappear, piece by piece, bar by bar, with an upwelling of despair, realizing that any minute now we would be down to just one or two.

At two o’clock, the young woman from the house appeared. I looked up and there she was, hovering in the doorway, and I didn’t know how long she had been standing there. She had covered her shoulders and head with a shawl to come into church, and the little girl was braced against her hip, asleep on her shoulder. When I motioned for her to enter she turned around and went back into the courtyard. By the time I got the next kid squared away and went to follow her, Fra Antun had cut her off at the door. I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear what she was saying. They had found the body.

She was holding a yellowed envelope out to Fra Antun, tilting it toward him, and he had his hands up, refusing to touch it. “Afterwards,” he was saying. “Afterwards.” I waited for him to notice me in the doorway, and then I pointed to the child in the young woman’s arms. He smiled and turned the young woman to face me, took her elbow, gestured for her to follow me indoors. But she was shaking her head, backing away from him to leave, and the two of us stood and watched her go, her shoulders striped with shadows from the vine awning that led out to the street.

Zóra appeared at my elbow with an empty box. “We can’t go on,” she said, holding it out to me, “without candy.”

It was lunchtime, so we seized the opportunity to regroup, devise a new strategy for maintaining order. Zóra had turned her pager off, but the prosecutor had called her six times since that morning, so she went to the monastery office to return the calls while I stayed behind to sort out the paperwork. Sleepy, band-aided stragglers were milling around the courtyard in the dense heat of the afternoon; I tried to herd them out of the sun, and by the time I got back to the examining room, Fra Antun was already there, sorting the children’s papers in alphabetical order.

He was eyeing my blood pressure pump, and I laughed and told him his was sure to be high, considering he was working with sixty children. He rolled up the sleeve of his cassock and patted the inside of his arm, and I shrugged and pointed to the chair. He sat down, and I pushed the cuff over his fist. He had a thin, young-looking face. Later on, I would find out from Nada that he had been the kind of boy who caught bumblebees in jars and then harnessed them carefully with film from cassette tapes, so that it was not uncommon to see him walking down the main road with dozens of them rising around him like tiny, insane balloons while the film flashed wildly in the sun.

“I hear you caused a stir up in the vineyard this morning,” he said.

I was about to admit to being too confrontational in my conversation with Duré—in my defense, I had listened to the little girl cough all night. But Fra Antun was talking, instead, about the entrance I had made. “You scared the hell out of them,” he said. I was tightening the cuff over his forearm, and I didn’t know what to make of his saying hell. He was smiling. “Imagine: you’re digging for a body. You’ve been digging all day and all night. In the hours before dawn, on the verge of finding what you’ve been looking for, you are surprised by the sudden appearance of a woman wearing what looks like a white shroud.”

“I fell into a hole,” I said, putting my eartips in and sliding the chestpiece onto his skin.

“That’s how it’s being told around town,” he said. “What would you think, in their place?”

“I’d think: why am I making my children dig for a body I put here myself?”

He looked at me like he couldn’t decide whether or not to trust me with what he had to say. I was standing over him, inflating the cuff, and he was sitting with his cassock folded down between his knees. I released the air valve and watched the dial and listened to the whumping sound of his blood.

“We have one here, you know.”

I didn’t know.

“A haunt,” he said. “They call it a mora. A spirit.”

“We’ll have to do this again,” I said, and started over.

“Everyone’s shocked about this business with the body, but they forget we’ve had the mora a hundred years. We put coins and presents on the graves of our dead because the mora takes them. Word around town is that your diggers’ crone knows about our mora, and that’s why she’s having them sanctify the body here.”

“How would she know?”

“That’s just what they’re saying,” Fra Antun said. “I don’t pretend it makes any sense to me.”

It made no sense to me, either; Duré and his family were from near the City, and we had no shortage of our own moras and spirits, rarely glimpsed beings that willowed about, demanding graveside offerings that inevitably ended up in the hands of churchyard caretakers or passing gypsies.

“So what happens tonight?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Duré says the village woman told him to ‘wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.’ ” This charge, which Duré had repeated in confidence to Barba Ivan, had nevertheless spread through town, so that only a week later, it had become a sinister chant regurgitated by the boys who hung out at the arcade, whispered by women at the grocery store, invoked by drunkards who passed the vineyard on their way home.

“Even your parrot knows it,” I said. “You realize, of course, that no body buried twelve years out here is actually going to have a heart in it.”

“That’s none of my business,” Fra Antun said with a defeated smile. “They’ve asked me to supervise, and so I will, but unless the devil himself jumps out of the vineyard tonight, what happens to the body is no concern of mine.”

“I’m surprised you condone it,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like a Catholic process.”

“It isn’t—it’s not really an Orthodox one, either, but I’m sure you know that.” He was smiling. “They have to settle for me in case something goes wrong,” he said. “The other monks wouldn’t even consider it.”

“And your mother—does she know you’ll be officiating?”

“She knows.” His grin was laced with guilt. “One of the advantages of being a monk is not having to get permission from your mother to carry out holy work.”

“I hear she’s not happy about the vineyard.”

“No, it’s difficult for her. First there’s a body in the vineyard and now people from your side—excuse me, Doctor, but they are from your side—digging the whole place up.” He pushed his glasses up his nose and looked at me. “She’d rather not have me near the vineyard when they’re digging. It’s not just about the body, or the vines being disturbed—all kinds of accidents happen in the field here.” I gave up on the blood pressure cuff and listened to him. “Mines,” he said, “there are still land mines, even around here, up the mountain where the old village used to be. Most of them have been cleared, but the ones that haven’t get found when somebody steps on them. A shepherd or farmer, or somebody’s child, cuts through an unpaved area. Then there’s a rush to keep it quiet.” He watched me roll up the cuff and cord. “Even just last week, those boys in Zdrevkov.”

I misheard him at first, or the name didn’t register because he was pronouncing it differently than my grandma did. Perhaps I didn’t make the connection because it was the last thing I expected him to say, the last place I expected him to name, and the collision of my grandfather’s death and Fra Antun sitting in that little room with the sun glaring in past the orange tree outside was sudden and senseless until I sorted it out.

Fra Antun had already moved on, talking about the mines above the old village, about an undetonated land mine in the neighbor’s plot, by the time I said: “Where?”

“Next door,” he said, pointing through the window.

“No—the place,” I said. “You said something about boys there?”

“Zdrevkov,” he said. He took off his glasses and wiped them on the front of his cassock. “It’s even more backwater than this, but there’s a clinic there,” he told me, blinking up, eyes unfocused. “They’ve been keeping this kind of thing quiet for years. This happened last week. Two teenagers coming home late from town at Rajkovac. Mine got them coming through their own lettuce patch.” He thought my silence was surprise, or fear, or hesitation to ask about the boys’ well-being. “Twelve years since the war, it was in their family’s lettuces the whole time.” He got up and dusted off his cassock. “That’s why the digging’s bad news.”

“How close is it?” I said.

“Zdrevkov? It’s on the peninsula,” he said. “Maybe an hour’s drive.”

I said I was getting more candy, and Zóra believed me, believed me, too, when I said I would be back in an hour or less. She had wanted to come along, but I convinced her we’d look unreliable if we both left, insisted on going alone, insisted it would be faster this way, ignored her when she asked me why I needed the car, why I didn’t just walk to the convenience store in town.

North of Brejevina, the road was well paved, stark and new because the scrubland had not grown back up to it, the cliffs rising white and pocked with thorn trees. A wind-flattened thunderhead stood clear of the sea, its gray insides stretching out under the shining anvil. Past the villages of Kolac and Glog, where the seaward slope was topped with new hotels, pink and columned, windows flung wide and the laundry hanging still on the balcony lines. Then came the signs for the peninsula turnoff, twelve kilometers, then seven, and then the peninsula itself, cutting the bay like a ship’s prow between the shore and outer islands, wave-lashed cliffs and pineland. Fra Antun had predicted it wouldn’t take more than an hour to reach the village, but the closeness of the peninsula stunned me.

My grandfather, it seemed, had been coming to see me after all; but while Zóra and I had gone the long way, sidetracked by having to check into the United Clinics headquarters before crossing the border, he had come straight down by bus, and somewhere around Zdrevkov he had been unable to come farther. Or he had heard, somehow, about the two boys, and stopped to help.

All this time I had been disconnected from the reality of his death by distance, by my inability to understand it—I hadn’t allowed myself to picture the clinic where he had died, or the living person who would have his belongings, but that was all drawing in around me now.

The final six kilometers to Zdrevkov were unmarked, a dirt trail that wound left through a scattering of carob trees and climbed into the cypresses, which fell away suddenly in places where the slopes dropped away to the water. In the lagoon where the peninsula met the land, the sun had blanched the water bottle-green. The air-conditioning was giving out, and the steady striping of the light between the trees was making me dizzy. The crest of the next hill brought me out of the forest and into a downward-sloping stretch of road, where the abandoned almond orchards were overgrown with lantana bushes. I could see the light-furrowed afternoon swells in the distance, and, straight ahead, the flat roofs of the village.

Even at this distance, I could see why Zdrevkov was so obscure: it was a shantytown, a cluster of plywood-and-metal shacks that had sprung up around a single street. Some of the shacks were windowless, or propped up with makeshift brick ovens. Household junk spilled out of the doorways and into the yellowed grass: iron cots, stained mattresses, a rusted tub, a vending machine lying on its side. There was an unattended fruit stand with a pyramid of melons, and, a few doors later, a middle-aged man sleeping in a rolling chair outside his tin-roofed house. He had his legs up on a stack of bricks, and as I drove past I realized his right leg was missing, a glaring purple stump just below the knee.

The clinic was a gray, two-story house that stood on the edge of town, easy to find because it was the only brick building in sight. Years ago, it had probably been a serious structure with clean walls, a paved courtyard lined with enormous flower urns that were now empty. Since then, the rain gutters had stained red-brown rivers into the walls.

The lot was empty, the clinic curtains drawn. I got out of the car. The stone stairway was littered with leaves and cigarette butts, and it led to a second-story door on which a square green cross had been painted above a plaque that read VETERANS’ CENTER. I knocked with my knuckles, and then with my fist. Nobody answered, and, even with my ear against the door, I heard nothing inside. I tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge, and then I went out along the catwalk and peered around the corner of the clinic. The window facing the valley was shuttered.

The street below dead-ended in a flattened patch of pale grass, bordered on either side by netless goal frames. A slide and some tire swings had been set up on the lip of a wheat field that caught the afternoon light and held it in a shivering glare. Beyond that lay the graveyard, white crosses turned out toward the sea. The wind had subsided, and the road was deserted except for a single mottled goat, tethered to the fence post of what looked like an enormous metal box opposite the clinic. If the BEER sign braced against an oil drum under the awning was to be believed, this was the bar.

I crossed the street and looked inside. The ceiling was very low, the place lit only by the open door and an enormous jukebox, whose sound was drowned out by the humming of a yellow refrigerator that looked like it had been salvaged from a radioactive dump. Four men were on high stools around a single barrel in the corner, drinking beer. It was just the four of them, but they made the room look crowded. One of them straightened up when I came in, a tall man with an ashen, leathery face and thinning gray hair. He didn’t ask if he could help me, or invite me to seat myself, but I didn’t go away, so he didn’t sit back down.

I finally said: “Is the clinic closed?” This forced him to come around the barrel and toward me. A prosthetic arm dangled weightlessly from his elbow on metal joints.

“You a reporter?” he said.

“A doctor,” I said.

“If you’re here about those kids, they’re dead.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

The barman looked at the others in surprise. “Makes no difference to me, they always die when they get hoisted around here.”

“I’m not interested in that.” I waited for some further acknowledgment, but when none came, I said: “Is anyone on duty?”

I’d said enough for him to realize that I wasn’t from around there, which he confirmed now with a glance to the others. One of them, a huge, salt-and-pepper man, had an eye patch and a burn-stippled face; the other two seemed whole, but the blond man had an eye that looked away. The way they were staring at me made me wonder how fast I could get to the car and how much power I could get out of the engine if someone here really decided that I wasn’t leaving.

“No one’s been by in two days,” the barman said, putting his good hand in his pocket.

“Could somebody let me in?”

He picked up his beer bottle and downed what was left, put it back on the barrel top. “What do you need?”

“Someone from the clinic.” The jukebox had gone quiet, shifting tracks, and the refrigerator kept pitching in with a fierce hum. “I drove all the way from Brejevina,” I told him. And then, to present myself in the best possible light, I said: “From the orphanage.”

The barman took a phone out of his pocket and dialed. He had a cell phone, all the way out here. I didn’t; I had a pager and maybe two or three bills of the right currency. I stood by and listened while he left a message saying only, “We got someone out here for you,” and then hung up. “They’ll call us back,” he said to me. “Have a seat.”

I climbed onto a stool behind a two-top on the opposite end of the bar, and ordered a cola, which overwhelmed the room with a hiss when the barman opened it. I paid. He got four more beers and returned to the barrel where the others were waiting. I drank my cola, buttoned up in my white coat, trying to hide my reluctance to put my mouth to the lip of the bottle, trying not to think about the phone call, which could have been to a nurse, but could also have been to anybody, or to no one at all. We got someone out here for you—one way or another, he’d called reinforcements. Nobody knew where I was; Fra Antun had pointed the place out on the map, but I hadn’t told him I was coming, especially not like this, in the middle of the day when I was supposed to be inoculating his kids.

“You from the other side?” the eye patch said to me.

“I’m just a doctor,” I said, too quickly, putting my hands on my knees.

“I didn’t say you weren’t, did I? What else are you supposed to be?”

“Shut up,” the barman said.

“I didn’t say she wasn’t,” the eye patch said. He pushed his stool away and got up, pulling his shirt down with one hand. He made his way over to the jukebox, the sound of his shoes on the floor filling up the air. As he pushed buttons along the console, the albums flipped with a crunching sound that seemed to indicate something in the machine was broken.

“You like Extra Veka?” he said to me. “You heard of her?”

Common sense said say nothing, but I couldn’t pretend he wasn’t there, not with the three of them sitting at the barrel. “I haven’t,” I said.

He shifted from one foot to the other, cleared his throat. “You like Bob Dylan?”

“I like Springsteen better,” I said, and marveled at my own idiocy.

He pushed more buttons. “Don’t have him,” he said.

The jukebox whirred to life, an up-tempo Dylan song I didn’t recognize. The eye patch moved away from the jukebox slowly, toward the middle of the bar, bobbing a little from side to side in time to the music. As he shifted around on the balls of his feet I saw that the burn scars wrapped around his scalp, leaving a bare, glazed scallop of flesh behind his right ear. The others were watching him. The barman was half-seated behind the bar, one leg propped on the rung of his stool and the other on the floor. The blond guy was smiling.

The eye patch turned slowly, all the way around, chugging one foot and one arm. Then he stopped and held out his hands to me.

“No, thanks,” I said with a smile, shaking my head, pointing to my cola.

“Come on, Doctor,” he said. I took another drink of my cola, shook my head again. “Come on, come on,” he said, smiling, gesturing for me to get up, fanning himself with his hands. “Don’t make me dance alone,” he said. He clapped his hands and then held them back out. I didn’t move. “It’s real, you know,” he said of the eye patch. “It’s not just for show.” He took one corner and flipped it up, the flesh underneath moist with the heat, puckered and white-red where it had been stitched shut.

“Sit down, you idiot,” the barman said.

“I was just showing her.”

“Sit down,” he said again, and stood to take the eye patch’s elbow and lead him away from me.

“I’ve only got one.”

“I’m sure she’s seen worse,” the barman said, and pushed him back into his chair at the barrel. Then he got me another cola.

I had no pager service, and Zóra had probably started calling by now, wondering, doubtless, where the fuck I’d gotten to, why I wasn’t back yet. I could picture the monastery hallway, the kids already reassembling, soup-stained shirts and sleepy, after-lunch eyes. Zóra, livid, making a mental list of things she would say to me in private, choice expletives. There had been traffic, I would say. An accident on the road. I had gotten lost. The store had been closed, and I had to wait for them to come back for the afternoon shift.

The barman’s phone rang. He lifted it to his ear and called the person on the other end “angel.” Then he waved me over and handed it to me.

“Doctor doesn’t come in until next week,” the young woman on the line said right away. “This an emergency?”

“I don’t need the doctor,” I said. I told her I was interested in the discharge records for her patient who had died a few days ago, the one whose body had been returned to the City. The four men at the barrel were silent.

“Oh yes,” she said flatly, and she didn’t say what I thought she might—nothing about my grandfather being a nice man, nothing about how it was a shame that he had died.

“I’m here for his clothes and personal belongings.”

“Those are usually sent back with the body,” she said, without interest.

“They didn’t arrive,” I said. There was a hum of distant noise behind the nurse, music playing, blips from a pinball machine. She sounded like she had a cold, and every few seconds she would sniffle thinly into the receiver. The way she did this made me think that she was the kind of girl who might be very much at home sitting in a bar not unlike this one.

“I really don’t know anything about it,” she said. “I wasn’t on duty back then. You’ll want to talk to Dejana.” I heard her light a cigarette and take a drag. Her mouth sounded dry. “But Dejana’s in Turkey now.”

“Turkey.”

“On holiday.”

Then I lied: “The family needs his things for burial.”

“I don’t come out there until Sunday.”

“The funeral is Saturday. I drove here from the City.”

She sounded unimpressed. “I got no one to drive me out until Sunday. And I can’t give you the coroner’s notes without the doctor.”

I told her I didn’t need the notes, I knew what they’d say. I needed his watch and his wedding band, the glasses he’d worn all my life. The four men around the barrel top were looking at me, but I didn’t mind now. “I don’t know if you’re familiar with the situation, but this man was dying for a long time, and then he left his family to do it away from home. They’re devastated. They want his things back.”

“Dying makes people do strange things—I’m sure you told the family about that. You know how they sometimes go off, like animals do when they’re going to die.”

“I need his things,” I said.

She was drinking something; I heard the ice in her glass clink against her teeth. She said: “Give me Bojan.” The barman called her “angel” again. She was still talking when he went to the refrigerator, opened it and rummaged around, still talking when he went outside. I hung back in the doorway and watched him cross the street and climb the clinic stairs.

“Well?” he said to me from the top of the stairs, the phone still against his ear. By the time I crossed the street, the door had been propped open, the lights still off. Inside, the air was stale and close, the floor sheeted with pale dust that had settled on the waiting room chairs and the top of the reception counter. There were trails in the dust where people had passed by, and they disappeared under a green curtain that had been drawn across the room.

“In here,” the barman said. He drew the curtain aside, walking slowly from one end of the room to the other, pulling it behind him as he went. The curtain opened out to a whitewashed infirmary, paint-chipped iron cots lined up against the walls, sheets empty and smooth, drawn tight under the mattresses. The room was unfinished, the rear wall missing, and in its place, from ceiling to floor, an enormous, opaque tarp that the afternoon light pasted with a dull yellow sheen. Outside, the wind picked up and the hem of the tarp lifted, crackling.

“Wait here,” the barman said. He unlocked a second door at the other end of the room, and I listened to him going down the stairs until I couldn’t hear him anymore.

The fan above me wasn’t working, and a dead fly was suspended on the lip of one of the blades. I crossed the room to lift the tarp, my shoes ringing on the tile even when I tried to preserve the silence by dragging my feet. Already, it seemed like the barman had been gone a long time, and I was trying to remember what I had been doing the day he died, and how I’d ended up here, in the room where my grandfather had died, which looked nothing like how I’d pictured it, nothing like the yellowed rooms in the oncology ward back home, trying to remember how he’d sounded when I spoke to him last, his hands holding my suitcase out to me, a memory which was probably not our last goodbye, but some other goodbye before it, something my brain substituted for the real thing.

There was something familiar about the room and the village, a crowded feeling of sadness that crawled into my gut, but not for the first time, like a note of music I could recognize but not name. I don’t know how long I stood there before I thought of the deathless man. When I did, I knew immediately that it was the deathless man, and not me, my grandfather had come looking for. And I wondered how much of our hiding his illness had been intended to afford my grandfather the secrecy he would need to go looking for him. The heat overwhelmed me, and I sat down on the end of one of the cots.

The barman reappeared with a pale blue plastic bag under his right arm. I watched him lock the stairwell door and come over to me. Goose bumps paled the flesh of his arm.

“This it?” he asked me. The bag was folded, stapled closed.

“I don’t know.” I stood up.

He turned the bag over and looked at the label. “Stefanovi??”

I reached for the bag, but it was so cold it fell out of my hands. Bad arm dangling, the barman stooped to pick it up, and when he held it out to me, I opened my backpack for him and he folded it inside.

He watched me zip up the backpack. “All I know is, he collapsed,” the barman finally said.

“Where?”

“Outside the bar. A couple of nights after they brought those kids in. Before they died.”

“Were the nurses here? Did they take long to help him?”

The barman shook his head. “Not long,” he said. “Not long. They thought maybe he was drunk, at first. But I told them no. I told them he only ordered water.”

“Water? Was he alone?”

The barman wiped the sweat that had congealed on his temples in a grainy film. “I couldn’t say. Think so.”

“A tall man,” I said. “With glasses, and a hat and coat. You don’t remember him sitting with anyone at all?”

“No.”

“With a young man, maybe?”

He shook his head.

“They would have been arguing,” I said.

“This is a veterans’ slum, what do you think people do all day?”

In the freezer below us, something shifted with a hollow clang.

“Look,” said the barman. “Place was crawling with people I didn’t know—nurses, assistants, two doctors, people who brought those kids in from the fields. I haven’t seen it so full since the war ended. Had the whole village in the bar that afternoon. I only know the old man collapsed. I barely remember him, let alone who he was with.” He went on, “And I wouldn’t go door-to-door round here, Doctor. On the chance that someone might have seen him. Not with that accent.”

I lifted my backpack onto my shoulder. “You better sign for this,” he added, looking around for a piece of paper. There were no forms, so he turned over a receipt for saline solution and handed me a pen, watched me sign, Natalia Stefanović, which I did slowly, hoping he would make the connection. But his eyes told me he had already done this on his own.