The Tiger's Wife

EVERY SUNDAY AFTERNOON, EVEN WHEN THE WAR WAS AT its worst, the City’s greatest doctors would convene on the patio of Banević’s restaurant in Old Town to smoke and drink and reminisce, to trade stories of astonishing patients and impossible cases, to praise one another’s diagnoses and resourcefulness over a three-o’clock lunch reservation that had stood firm for almost sixty years.

The doctors were professors and nephrologists, cardiologists and University chairs, oncologists and orthopedic surgeons, a rotating parade of retirees whose accomplishments, though sometimes several decades old, still carried considerable weight in the medical community. They knew each other’s stories by heart, but over walnut rakija and warm bread, red peppers with garlic and platefuls of grilled meat, they reminded each other of difficult times, pleasurable to revisit now that their legacy was secure in a timeline that by the grace of the spoken word only grew more and more incredible.

My grandfather was always among them. They were men alongside whom he had struggled up the tortuous rungs of the School of Medicine in his youth; and, though he was always humble about his work, I guess he, too, needed to remind himself of who he was and had once been. He had not founded a cancer clinic or won a national research prize; but, a great doctor in his own right, he was known for turning out flawless diagnosticians and surgeons during his time at the University, for advocating the medical rights of poverty-stricken villagers, and above all, for the privilege of having saved the Marshall’s life—which, for better or worse, was an honor he shared only with certain surgeons in Zurich.

Because my grandfather was far more comfortable with extolling my accomplishments than his own, my knowledge of the incident was vague until I got to medical school. I knew about the Marshall’s handwritten letter of thanks, sitting in the top drawer of my grandfather’s desk; I knew, also, about the bottle of the Marshall’s finest quince rakija, made from fruit harvested in the Marshall’s own orchards, sitting unopened in the back of my grandfather’s liquor cabinet for as long as I could remember.

The person who finally filled me in on the details was a starstruck assistant in first-semester pathology, who related it all sixth- or seventh- or eighth-hand. Apparently, one summer more than thirty years ago, my grandparents were hosting a wedding party for the head of the oncology department of the Military Academy of Medicine at our family lake house in Borovo.

“Verimovo,” I corrected him.

“Right,” the assistant said.

Still, there was a wedding. It was evening, the party in full swing, when an innkeeper from the nearby village came running down the drive in desperation. It’s a strange scene to picture: doctors and their wives dancing to the alcohol-impaired efforts of the village trumpet players; interns and laboratory assistants drunkenly lip-locked in the woods behind the house; inebriated dermatologists hanging over the porch rails; the University’s entire medical department swarming our old lake house and garden; and my grandfather, a frowning and irritated sentry, extracting the chief of rheumatology from where he had fallen into the rosebushes. The innkeeper coming up the road, waving his arms, saying, we need the doctor, where is the doctor?—in God’s name, give us the doctor, the man is dying! My grandfather, miraculously the only sober doctor on hand, shrugging into his coat and heading into the village to veto the stupefied local herbalist, who, as the only qualified person in town, had misdiagnosed the condition as food poisoning, and administered raw mint as a remedy.

The patient, of course, was the Marshall himself. He had been taken ill en route to a conference in Vrgovac after overindulging in date shells and garlic broth. Caught without his personal physician, he had been rushed to the nearest medical facility—a two-room shack—with an entourage of thirty men, all armed to the teeth. The innkeeper was terrified: the date shells had been prepared at his establishment. By the time my grandfather reached the clinic, the patient was halfway to looking like a corpse already, and my grandfather knew instinctively that neither food poisoning, nor any of its cognates, was the issue.

My grandfather took one look at the patient—whose green face was ostensibly unrecognizable. “You stupid son of a bitch,” he said to no one in particular (though everyone present was said to have immediately wet his pants). “Why didn’t you just shoot him in the head, you would have freed up the bed faster.” Fifteen minutes later, the patient was lying half-conscious on an operating table, his midsection unzipped, while my grandfather pulled feet and feet of infected intestine out of the Marshall’s body in great red loops over his shoulder, and several bystanders—the innkeeper, assorted security personnel, probably a nurse or two, all terrified into competency by my grandfather’s rage—stood in an assembly line of blood-spattered coats and goggles, patting away at the man’s entrails, trying to clean off the appendix pus.

I remember the assistant looking at me expectantly when he finished the story, waiting for me to return the favor, to tell him something about my grandfather that could surpass what he had just told me.

After the University’s admission lists were posted, and Zóra and I had confirmed, several times over, that we had both made the stipended top 500 cutoff, my grandfather asked me why I had decided to become a doctor. He had already bragged about it at the doctors’ luncheon, told a number of his patients about it, and I didn’t know what he wanted me to say, so I said, “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

This was true—I had been inspired largely by guilt that was manifesting itself among members of my generation as a desire to help the people we kept hearing about on the news, people whose suffering we had used to explain our struggles, frame our debates, and justify our small rebellions.

For years, we had fought to show nonchalance in the face of war, and now that it was suddenly over, over without having touched us in the City, indignation was surfacing. Everything was a cause, a dignified labor. We fought through biology and organic chemistry and clinical pathology; fought to adopt the University’s rituals, from the pre-exam binges to the gypsy woman who took advantage of superstitious exam-takers in the courtyard, threatening them with bad luck if they didn’t give her money. We fought, above all, to show that we deserved to be there, to defeat emerging newspaper projections that declared the City’s postwar generation destined for failure. We were seventeen, furious at everything because we didn’t know what else to do with the fact that the war was over. Years of fighting, and, before that, a lifetime on the cusp of it. Conflict we didn’t necessarily understand—conflict we had raged over, regurgitated opinions on, seized as the reason for why we couldn’t go anywhere, do anything, be anyone—had been at the center of everything. It had forced us to make choices based on circumstances that were now no longer a part of our daily lives, and we kept it close, a heavy birthright for which we were only too eager to pay.

For a while, I thought I wanted to help women—rape victims, women who were giving birth in basements while their husbands were walking through minefields, women who had been beaten, disfigured, maimed in the war, usually by men from their own side. It was impossible to accept, however, that those particular women would no longer need my help by the time I was qualified to give it. At seventeen, things like that make you self-righteous. You don’t know anything about the aftershocks of war. Slightly younger, we had been unable to ration our enthusiasm for living under the yoke of war; now, we couldn’t regulate our inability to part with it. Major decisions trended toward the assumption that the war and its immediate effects would always be around. Aspiring to orthopedic surgery was considered under-achieving—you wanted, instead, to be an orthopedic surgeon specializing in amputation recovery. Plastic surgery was unthinkable—unless you wanted to deal with facial reconstruction.

One late afternoon, a week before midsemester exams, my grandfather asked me if I had given any thought to my own specialization, as if it were just around the corner. I had an answer for him: “Pediatric surgery.”

I was sitting cross-legged at the dining room table, my secondhand cellular biology textbook lying on a kitchen towel to spare our white lace tablecloth. My grandfather was eating sunflower seeds directly from the small tin tray he usually toasted them on. Like all of his rituals, this was a process. He would remove the tray from the toaster oven and set it down on two cork coasters, and lay out a napkin for the disposal of shells. He would sift through the seeds before he started eating them; no one, not even my grandma, knew why he did this, what he was looking for. While he was sifting, he would wrinkle his nose to raise his glasses, which were enormous and square, to a position through which he could comfortably focus. It gave him the appearance of a diamond expert, and also made him look slightly suspicious.

“You’ll be leaving God out of it, then,” he said.

“What does that mean?” I said. I couldn’t remember when he had last mentioned God.

But he was back to the business of sifting through the seeds. Every so often, he would pick one out and chew on it, mostly with his front teeth; he would invariably end up eating them all, rendering the sifting exercise pointless. It took him a long time to ask, “Been around children much?”

He wasn’t looking at me, so he didn’t see me shrug. After a while, I shrugged again, tapped my book with a pencil. Eventually, I asked: “Why?”

He sat up, pushed his chair away from the table and rubbed his knees. “When men die, they die in fear,” he said. “They take everything they need from you, and as a doctor it is your job to give it, to comfort them, to hold their hand. But children die how they have been living—in hope. They don’t know what’s happening, so they expect nothing, they don’t ask you to hold their hand—but you end up needing them to hold yours. With children, you’re on your own. Do you understand?”

Of everything we fought for that year, we fought hardest for notoriety, for the specific word-of-mouth reputation needed to earn respect, recognition, and above all the favor of an obese technical assistant named Mića the Cleaver, the man who prepared cadavers, and who, like an unmet husband or your passport representative at City Hall, was a figure we were expected to factor into our plans long before we ever actually laid eyes on him.

It was a daunting but critical endeavor. Mića’s attention had to be attracted well in advance. His gruff admiration was the prize for having attached some impressive anecdote, some reputable deed, to your name. Earning this attention before second-year anatomy was crucial. The point was to elicit some spark of awareness in his tar-clotted voice during the first roll call in the laboratory basement, so that when he read your name, he would raise an eyebrow at you and say, Bogdanovic—aren’t you the one who smoked pot in your room during the Kobilac retreat, and then put a towel on your head when the firemen came, and tried to say the vapor from your shower had set off the alarm? You would nod, and, by the grace of God, Mića the Cleaver would smile, and then you were ensured a corpse every week, even in weeks of shortage, which were coming now that the war was over.

Without a weekly cadaver, a corpse to practice on, you were predictably fucked for the remainder of your career in medical school. It was a special privilege to be in those well-scrubbed rooms with the prepared cadavers that looked like damp schnitzel. You wanted to get a head start on your colleagues by entering that mental space where you were used to a dead body, where you could look at a corpse without cringing or throwing up or collapsing. In order to succeed, you needed to move beyond the notion of respect for an autopsy victim, to resist the urge to pass out if the assistant referred to the corpse by its living name. You had to be the kind of person who could rise above the coping mechanism of painting the corpse’s eyelashes with green mascara. For this, you needed a weekly corpse. You needed Mića the Cleaver’s acknowledgment. You needed it so you could take that first step toward nonchalance in the face of death.

“What the hell do you have to be worried about?” Zóra said to me when some older male colleagues, in an effort to ingratiate themselves to us, revealed that we would be dedicating our first year to this effort. “Haven’t you inherited that anecdote about the Marshall’s guts?”

We learned very quickly that nepotism was one of the many ways you did not want to be known to Mića the Cleaver. You did not want to be the perpetrator of some medical disaster, some self-defeating spectacle or slip of the tongue that made you look like an idiot rather than a respectable person for whom a steady influx of cadavers would pave a path to miracles. You did not want to be known for the kind of insolence to your predecessors that Zóra carried around our first semester. In a cavalier bid to secure future connections, Zóra had beaten eight hundred applicants to win a much-lauded internship with the Department of Genetics. To say that the position was lowly would be an understatement; her duties included mopping the floors. Her fifth morning on the job, carrying a box of files from the storage room, she ran into a rickety old man who was shuffling down the hall toward her, and who stopped her to suggest that she should put her excellent hips in a skirt, because pants indicated that she was too forward. Zóra, towering over the old man with a file box she probably considered dropping on his head, responded with: “Don’t be so fucking provincial.” Of course, the old man was the Chair of Genetics, and she spent the rest of the semester filing paperwork in the basement while the pandemic news of her insolence spread throughout the University, abetted by a fifth-year assistant who began producing DON’T BE SO FUCKING PROVINCIAL T-shirts, which made a killing at the October fund-raiser.

My own notoriety was equally unsatisfying as far as Mića the Cleaver was concerned. I was making a little money helping out twice a week in the biology lab. Three weeks in, I was asked to help a laboratory assistant prepare brain samples for a study. Unfortunately, the brains belonged to a bagful of baby mice. Convincing myself that my sympathy for animals did not extend to small mammals, and taking into consideration the striking eyes of the laboratory assistant, I asked him how we would dispose of the mice. The assistant then explained there were two ways to go about it: seal them up in a box and wait for them to suffocate, or lop off their heads with nail clippers. The latter method he demonstrated rather than described. Zóra didn’t witness the incident herself, but she had already heard several colorful renditions of it two days later, with which she was able to regale me while we sat at the orthodonist’s office, waiting for them to cap the tooth I’d broken biting the floor.

We ended the term in December, ashamed of our respective debacles and fully expecting them to influence our inevitable encounter with Mića in the fall. But then came preparations for spring anatomy, and the long-awaited search for skull replicas. You’d think that, after the war, they would have had enough real skulls to go around; but they were bullet-riddled skulls, or skulls that needed to be buried so they could wait underground to be dug up, washed, buried again by their loved ones.

Skulls were nearly impossible to come by. The trade embargoes hadn’t lifted, and the channels through which the University had acquired medical supplies—questionable to begin with—were considerably more difficult to access now. People from previous years were selling ridiculously overpriced fourth- or fifth-hand skulls, advertising their availability by word of mouth. We were desperate. In the end, a friend of a friend told us about a man called Avgustin, who specialized in producing plastic replicas of human parts, which he sold to dentists, orthopedists, and cosmetic surgeons—on the black market, of course.

We lied to our parents, drove four hours down a snow-packed highway, past army trucks that were inching, bumper to bumper, in the opposite lane; we smiled through two customs lines, at six reluctant officials, so we could meet Avgustin at his office in a Romanian border town, which had windows overlooking the docks and the ice-banked waters of the Grava River. He was a short man with a bald head and square cheeks, and he offered us lunch, which we refused. We stood close together while he told us about the skulls he had for us. They were apparently both replicas of the head of some magician from the 1940s, a man called the Magnificent Fedrizzi. It was a specimen, he said, he had acquired with great difficulty. That was probably a version of the truth, although he didn’t mention the part about the obligatory haggling with the gravekeeper, whom he had probably bribed to dig up the Magnificent Fedrizzi after enough time had elapsed for there to be nothing left but bones. In life, this Magnificent Fedrizzi had apparently performed dazzling feats of magic on a Venetian stage—until 1942, when a German audience member, whose woman the Magnificent Fedrizzi had evidently been sharing for some time, put an end to them rather abruptly.

“The skull of Don Juan,” Avgustin said, winking at Zóra. We didn’t know why he was telling us this until he finally brought out the replicas, swathed in bubble wrap. The skulls looked like cousins at best, and it immediately became apparent that the German who killed the Magnificent Fedrizzi liked to settle his fights the old-fashioned way—with a wine bottle or nightstick, or perhaps a lamp or rifle butt.

“Couldn’t you have at least plastered over the fractures?” Zóra said, pointing to the slightly dented left side of the cranium, the burst of grooves in the plastic.

Apart from the fractures, the skulls were white and matter-of-fact and clinical, and the jaw opened and closed without squeaking, which was, ultimately, all we were looking for. We managed to get Avgustin to knock the price down by 10 percent, and, as we left, he warned us repeatedly against taking the skulls out of their boxes and packaging—labeled SHOES. But in the inbound customs line later on we thought better of this; they were searching people’s trunks, and we had two suspicious-looking boxes with black market goods in ours. I put my Magnificent Fedrizzi in my backpack, and Zóra hid hers in the First Aid compartment under the back seat. It didn’t end well, but least it ended at our customs booth, and not the Romanian one—the officials searched the car, and then proceeded to hold us up at gunpoint, confiscate my backpack, and take the Magnificent Fedrizzi away.

We would joke, later on, about how he was probably much happier there, in the Grava River Valley, working with the customs officials. But calling home from the customs station, dreading what I would say to my grandfather—whom I hoped to convince to get on the train and rescue us—it was not funny at all.

“Bako,” I said, when my grandma picked up. “Put Grandpa on.”

“What’s the matter?” she said sharply.

“Nothing, just put him on.”

“He’s not here. What’s happened to you?”

“When is he coming home?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s at the zoo.”

Zóra and I sat in the interrogation room at the customs station for six hours until he came to sort out our mess, and that entire time, for some reason, I couldn’t work the image of my grandfather sitting at the zoo by himself out of my head. I could see him, a bald man with enormous glasses, sitting on the green bench in front of the tiger pit with The Jungle Book closed on one knee. Leaning forward a little in his coat, both feet on the pavement, hands clasped. Smiling at the parents of children going by. In his pocket, the empty, balled-up plastic bag from which he had fed the pony and the hippopotamus. I felt ashamed for thinking of him. It hadn’t occurred to me that the zoo would have reopened, or that my grandfather might have resumed going despite my no longer having the time to keep him company. I told myself to ask him about it, but in the end I never found the right moment. Or I was too embarrassed to do anything that might be perceived as questioning the ritual comforts of an old man.

My grandfather cut a different figure, of course, when he stormed into the customs station with his emeritus badge from the University hanging around his neck, white coat on, hat in hand, and demanded the return of his granddaughter and her friend—“the one who smokes.”

“That skull was a medical necessity,” my grandfather said to the customs official holding us prisoner. “But this will never happen again.”

“The import restrictions are on the other side of the border, Doctor, I couldn’t give a shit if they were bringing in six dead bodies and a liquor cabinet,” the customs official said. “But my son does have a birthday coming up.”

My grandfather paid him off, advised him to invest the money toward his son’s moral upbringing, and then motioned us to the back seat of Zóra’s car and drove us home in silence. That silence, which was the only thing worse than his rage, his disappointment, his worry, was intended to give me ample time to brace myself for what he would have to say to me when we got home. I was too old for punishment. What I had coming was a carefully versed speech intended to make you feel as ashamed as possible of your own incompetence, stupidity, and lack of respect for things that were above you. But I couldn’t get beyond the zoo—he had been at the zoo, all alone, and something about that devastated me.

An hour into the drive, Zóra leaned forward and took our remaining, hidden skull out of the First Aid compartment and put it on the seat between us with a smile that was intended to comfort me. My grandfather was looking in the rearview mirror.

“Who the hell is that?” he said.

“The Magnificent Fedrizzi,” Zóra said flatly, and afterward we shared the skull and the story and, eventually, the smile from Mića.

The war had altered everything. Once separate, the pieces that made up our old country no longer carried the same characteristics that had formerly represented their respective parts of the whole. previously shared things—landmarks, writers, scientists, histories—had to be doled out according to their new owners. That Nobel Prize–winner was no longer ours, but theirs; we named our airport after our crazy inventor, who was no longer a communal figure. And all the while we told ourselves that everything would eventually return to normal.

In my grandfather’s life, the rituals that followed the war were rituals of renegotiation. All his life, he had been part of the whole—not just part of it, but made up of it. He had been born here, educated there. His name spoke of one place, his accent of another. None of this had mattered before the war; but as time went on, and the Military Academy did not officially invite him back to practice medicine, it became clear that a return to professional normalcy would not be possible, and he would be tending to his under-the-table patients until the day he chose to retire. With this knowledge came an overwhelming desire to revisit lost places, to reestablish unmaintained rituals. The zoo was one of these.

Another was the lake house at Verimovo, across the border now, where we had spent every summer until I turned eleven. It was a beautiful old stone house at the edge of one of the big valley lakes, just off the main highway that connected Sarobor and Kormilo. A few steps down the cobbled path and you would be in the water, the clear, blue-green waters of Lake Verimovo, fed by the Amovarka. None of us had been to the house in almost seven years, and there was silent acknowledgment in the family that the house was probably no longer standing, or that it had been looted, or that the second you came through the door you would be hoisted by a mine that some careless soldier, probably from your own side, had left behind. There was also acknowledgment, however, that the house had to be seen, the damage assessed, a decision made. My mother and grandma wanted to see if our neighbor Slavko had turned on us, if he’d given up on the house, reneged on his promise to keep it safe until after the war. For my grandfather, however, the urgency sprang from a need to resurrect a past pleasure into the sphere of the everyday, as if nothing had happened.

“Wouldn’t it be something if the vine was still up on the garage balcony?” he said in the fourteenth month of the cease-fire, three days after the grand reopening of the southbound railroad. He was packing for the train ride to Verimovo: his small blue suitcase with the built-in combination lock was open on the bed, and he was folding several pairs of gray cotton shorts and white undershirts into it. I was sitting at the foot of the bed, and had come in to tell him not to be ridiculous, to just sell the house. But he was smiling the way he smiled when we used to go to see the tigers, and I suddenly felt overwhelmed by my own lack of optimism—who was I to tell him what was appropriate and inappropriate? Who was I to hold him back when he wanted so much for things to go his way? So instead, I offered to go with him. To my surprise, he accepted. When I think about it now, I realize how willful he was, as though, by bringing me along, he was ensuring it was safe enough to bring me along.

As with everything we did together, there was a plan. We were going to evaluate the damage. Assuming it was still standing, we were going to open up the house, air out the rooms, see what furniture had been stolen or broken, restock the pantry. We were going to bring down summers and summers of swallows’ nests that had caked up the balcony walls, trim the bright green vines that slithered along the awning above the garage, pick whatever figs and oranges were ripe, all in preparation for my grandma, who had agreed to join us the following week. Depending on what we found, we were also going to get the new dog accustomed to lakeside life.

He was a very small, but very fat, white dog my grandma had been tricked into buying at the Sunday market in the City. She had fallen victim to circumstance because he had been the last one left in the puppy box, and the farmer, squatting in the summer heat since dawn with a box of wormy, smelly farm puppies, all throwing up and peeing on one another, had finally held the dog up in desperation and said, “I expect I am going to have to eat you,” just as my grandmother walked by. My grandma paid the man far too much money and came home with the dog cupped in her hat, and the farmer presumably went to buy some crispy pig and never thought about it again.

The dog went unnamed for a long time. He liked to be held, and he sat on my knees wrapped in a pink towel while our train sped through the parched mid-country, following the river past wheat fields and clapboard towns perched at the water’s edge, and then, as we got closer to the lakes, through soaring blue mountains tangled with scrubs and sprouting clumps of lavender. We had the compartment, meant for six, all to ourselves, because my grandfather wanted to avoid any other passengers catching sight of our passports at border control. The windows were down, and the smell of that pine scrubland came in sharp and strong.

My grandfather sat beside me, drifting in and out of consciousness. Every so often, he would wake up with a start, and then take his right hand off his belly and pet the dog, who couldn’t sleep, and was peering anxiously through the window. My grandfather would pet the dog, and, in a voice that made him sound like some kind of children’s program puppet, he would say: “You’re a dog! You’re a dog! Where are you? You’re a dog!” and the dog’s tongue would drop out of its mouth and it would start keening.

After a few hours of this, I said, “Jesus, Grandpa, I get it, he’s a dog,” not knowing that, just a few years later, I would be reminding every dog I met on the street that it was a dog, and asking it where it was.

The house was a five-minute walk from the train station, and we took this walk slowly, both of us stiff-limbed and silent. The afternoon was dry, and my shirt was sinking into my skin before we even reached the drive. And then it was there—the drive, the house, the garage drowning in vines. There was rust on the fence, and I suddenly remembered how easily things rusted at the lake house, and how, long ago, my grandfather would repaint the fence every year, patient, meticulous, standing with a sort of pleasurable grace in his clogs, with his socks on, his bony knees very white with sun protection.

Our neighbor Slavko was standing on the porch, and when he saw us he stood up and began rubbing his hands on his pants. I couldn’t really remember him from my childhood at the lake, but my mother had often talked about him: they had grown up more or less together. Somewhere along the line, my mother had started wearing jeans and listening to Johnny Cash; this, according to Slavko and some of the other local boys, distinguished her as part of the “wild crowd,” and made her a target of prepubescent window peering. I could see that boy in the guilty look he was giving us now. His face was clean-shaven, scrubbed raw, and he had a mop of gray curls that lay flat against his forehead. This, combined with big feet and shoulders that dropped suddenly into a concave chest and potbelly, made him look unnervingly like an oversized penguin.

Slavko had brought us a few pies for dinner, and was rubbing his hands on his pants nervously, nonstop. I thought for a minute that my grandfather would overdo it and embrace him, but they shook hands, and then Slavko called me “Little Nadia” and rubbed my shoulder cautiously and I shot him a dry smile. He showed us the house. Soldiers had come through almost immediately when the war began, and taken some valuables: my great-grandmother’s china, a portrait of a distant aunt, some brass Turkish coffee cups and pots, the washing machine. For the most part, there had been no upkeep. Some of the doors had been taken down, and the countertops were covered with dust and plaster that had fallen from the ceiling, and yellow stuffing was coming out of my grandma’s living room set, which, we would soon discover, was also the nesting site of some very uncooperative moths. In the bathroom, the toilet was gone, and the little blue tiles that made up the floor had been reduced to a shattered mosaic.

“Goats,” Slavko said.

“I don’t understand,” said my grandfather.

“They needed to smash it up,” said Slavko, “so their goats wouldn’t slip on the tiles.”

As we followed Slavko through the house, I held on to the dog, and kept searching my grandfather’s face for signs of disappointment, discouragement, the slightest hint of giving up. But he was smiling, smiling on, and through my own frustration I started to feel that nagging sense of shame again, an acute awareness of my own inability to share in his optimism. My grandfather told Slavko that he hoped it hadn’t been a terrible inconvenience for him, keeping the house safe for us, and Slavko laughed nervously, and said, no, no of course it hadn’t, not for my grandfather, not for a great doctor like him, everyone in town remembered him.

When Slavko left, my grandfather turned to me and said: “It’s so much better than I expected.” We unpacked, and took a walk through the orchard. My grandma’s rose garden was dead, but oranges and figs sat fat in the trees, and my grandfather went along, kicking the soil here and there, sifting for something. Every so often, he came across an artifact that didn’t belong in the dirt: bolts, bullets, broken pieces of metal that could have been crowbars or frames. In the back of the property, we found our toilet, which someone had abandoned there, unable to reconcile carrying it up the steeper slope, and also the bones of a dead animal. They were small bones, broken, sharp as glass, and my grandfather picked up the skull and looked at it. It had horns—probably a goat—but my grandfather only turned it toward me very slowly, and said: “Not the Magnificent Fedrizzi.”

While my grandfather carried the toilet indoors, I climbed the stairs to the garage with a broom under my arm, and I swept dead vine leaves off the cracked stone. There were beer bottles and cigarette butts, probably a lot more recent than the war, and I found a few used condoms, which I forked with the end of my broom and heaved furtively over the wall into the neighbor’s yard. In the late afternoon, my grandfather and I ate our dinner on boxes on the garage balcony, cold pie greasing our hands. The lake was still and yellow, dotted with seagulls that had flown in from the coast. Every few minutes, we heard a speedboat, and, eventually, a couple on a pedal-boat went slowly by.

We were sitting like this—my grandfather telling me about repairs that had to be done, things that had to be bought in town, like an air conditioner for Grandma, and a small television, new blinds, of course, and maybe even new windows altogether, a more secure door, some tick medicine for the dog, seeds for reviving the rose garden—when the fire started on the hill. It was not Verimovo’s first fire by any means, and, we would later learn, it started like all the others: with a drunkard and a cigarette. We could see black smoke lifting in waves above the summit where the old mines stood, and then, an hour or so later, a bright snake of flame coming down the hill, throwing itself down and down on a path of dry grass and pinecones, following the wind along the mountain. Slavko came to watch it from the garage with us.

“If it blows east, we’re going to be picking china out of the ashes of our houses tomorrow morning,” he warned us. “You better keep an eye on it.”

For a while, my grandfather was certain that the wind off the lake would keep the fire contained on the upper slope, above the dangerous scrubland that would catch like a Christmas tree. He was so adamant in his belief—in what I, at the time, was convinced was his naïveté—that he sent me to bed, and stayed up by himself, sweeping the stairs and poking around the pantry, all the time going outside to look.

Around midnight, when it came as far as the ridge below the tree line, my grandfather got me out of bed—where the dog and I had been wrestling for space, following the fire’s progress through the window—and I stood in the hall, watching my grandfather put on his shoes. He told me to get our passports and get out of the house. He was going to help the men from town with the fire. This entailed walking through the fields where the fire had come down from the trees, beating the low flames with coats and shovels so the blaze couldn’t start on the gardens and the lawns and the rows of plum and lemon that people were growing for market—but I remember that, even though he knew he was going to spend the night in dirt and ash, he shined his shoes. I remember his hands, and the way they held the shining rag, the way he skimmed it back and forth over the toes of his shoes like he was playing a violin. The dog shuffled around, and my grandfather touched its nose with the shoe rag. Then he took me outside, to the back of the house, where the rear wall of the balcony met the slope of the orchard in the dead rose garden and the orange and fig trees, already reddening with the light from the hill.

“Take this,” he said, putting the garden hose in my hand and turning the faucet on. “And start watering. Keep the water on the house. Keep the walls and the windows wet, and whatever you do, don’t leave the door open. If it gets bad—Natalia—if it jumps the wall and starts on the house, you run for the lake.” Then he clapped my grandma’s long-lost saucepan—the old apple-red one from Italy, which had resurfaced that evening for the first time in ten years during his inspection of the pantry, and which he must have felt would afford me some kind of special protection—onto my head, and left. I remember the sound of his shoes on the gravel, the sound of the gate opening, the fact that it was the only time he left the gate open.

My mother always says that fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they’re gone, we’re left with the concept, but not the true memory—why else, she reasons, would anyone give birth more than once? I think I understand what she means when I look back on the night of the fire. Part of me knows that there was tremendous pain, that the heat of the blaze as it came down through the old village on the hill and Slavko’s farmland and our orange grove and ripped through the fig and almond trees, the pinecones sizzling like embers for what seemed like forever before they exploded, was unbearable; that to say that it was difficult to breathe is an impossible understatement; that the hair on my bare arms was already singed when the fire dropped down through the pines and rushed the brick wall. I know that I stood there with one side to the fire and the water trained on the walls and the doors and the shuttered windows, amazed at how quickly the stream of water evaporated, how it sometimes didn’t even touch the house. But what I really remember is a sort of projected image of myself, looking ridiculous, there in my red flip-flops and my bootleg BORN TO RUN tube top with the frayed hem, Grandma’s best saucepan on my head, handle akimbo, and that hysterical fat white dog under my arm, his heart hammering like a cricket against my wrist, and the stream of water from the hose hissing against the back of the house to keep the fire out.

I do, however, remember the woman from next door with complete clarity. At a certain moment in the night, I turned to find her watching me water the fire from the doorway of her house. I remember she was wearing a buttoned housedress with flowers on it, and her white hair had come out of her updo and was hanging limp with sweat around her face in the firelight. I had no idea how long she had been standing there, but I thought that maybe I recognized her, felt sure she was going to offer me help, and I must have smiled at her, because suddenly she said: “What are you smiling at, you sow?”

I went back to my watering.

Eventually, as they always do, people would find a way to extract humor even from that evening. They would laugh openly about it, make jokes about the barbecue up at Slavko’s place—the pigs and the chickens and the goats cindering down in their pens as the night wore on—and nobody would ever mention that they had five or six hours as the fire wound closer to get the animals out, to stop the screaming that would eventually rise over the deafening noise of the fire. Nobody ever mentions that, at the time, they were so absolutely certain of more war that it was easier for them to let the livestock burn where they stood than to save them, only to have our soldiers return and take it all from them again.

By morning, the fire had died, or spread elsewhere, but with the sun rising there was nowhere to get away from the heat. Indoors, the furniture was white with ash, and I turned on the fans and closed the shutters against the morning stillness that lay on the black slope above the house.

My grandfather got back a little after dawn, wheezing. He came in through the gate, closed it behind him and stepped inside. He didn’t embrace me, just put his hand on the top of my head and held it there for a long time. Ash had slid into the lines of his face, the crow’s-feet around his eyes, the contours of his mouth. He washed up and then sat at the small table in the kitchen, digging the soot out from under his fingernails, bouncing the dog on his knee, with The Jungle Book open on a handkerchief in front of him while I made eggs and toast and cut up slices of watermelon for breakfast.

Then he told me about the deathless man again.

Dabbing the gray corners of The Jungle Book with his handkerchief, my grandfather said:

In ’71, there’s this miracle in a village a little way from here, on the sea. Some kids are playing near a waterfall, this small white waterfall that feeds a deep hole at the bottom of some cliffs, and one day, while they’re playing like that, they see the Virgin in the water. The Virgin’s just standing there, her arms outspread, and the children run home and tell their parents, and suddenly they are calling the water miraculous. The children are coming to the waterfall every day to see the Virgin, and suddenly they’re renaming the local church—the Church of the Virgin of the Waters—and people are coming in from all over. They’re coming in from Spain and Italy and from Austria to see this little watering hole and sit in the church and look at the children who are sitting all day, staring into the water, and saying, “Yes, we see her—she is still there.” Pretty soon some cardinal’s coming out to bless it, and suddenly you’ve got buses coming out of nowhere, trips from hospitals and sanitariums so people can come and look at the waterfall and swim in the water and be healed. I’m talking about really sick people—I’m talking about people with cerebral palsy and faulty hearts, people with cancer. A lot of them are coming in from tuberculosis clinics. And then there’s the people who can’t even walk, people on their last breath being carried in on stretchers. There’s people who’ve been sick for years, and no one can say what’s wrong with them. And that Church of the Waters is handing out blankets, and they’re all sitting out there, the sick people, in the gardens and in the courtyard, all the way out to the sidewalk, just waiting. The sick people, in that heat with the flies around them, with their feet in the water, their faces in the water, bottling it up to take home with them. You know me, Natalia—nothing, for me, has quite the effect of a man with no legs dragging himself down a rocky slope for penance so he can sit in a swimming hole and tell himself he is getting better.

So the University asks me to get a small team together and get down there right away. There’s risk, they’re thinking—all these people, already dying, are under constant strain. They want me to set up a care center, maybe offer some free medicine. I go out there with about twelve nurses and right away we come to understand that these Waters are a thousand miles from anywhere, and the only building on that side of the mountain is the church, and everything that happens here is happening in or around the church. There’s no hospital around, no hotels—not like there will be in twenty years. The miracle is too recent, no one has had the time to profit from it. The church provides shelter for the dying, but the only place they have to put them is the crypt. There’s this door under the altar, and you go down down down the stairs into the stone cellar of the crypt, where the dead are laid like bricks into the walls, and there you see the dying on the floor, wrapped in blankets, and the stink is enough to make you want to kill yourself, because, besides the diseases, these dying are eating what the church provides for them: they are eating apples and olives the local farmers bring from the other side of the island, and they are eating bread, and the whole place has this sour, sour smell that goes into your clothes and your hair and there is no place to get away from it.

To make matters worse, in addition to the dying who are there to pray, people are taking the ferry in from the mainland to rejoice, to feast and drink in honor of the Virgin. At night, the priests are always finding six or seven drunks on the church grounds, and they are putting these drunks in a little annex in the crypt so they can sober up overnight. They have no other place to put the drunks—they lock them in so they do not go wandering, but you can imagine what happens when these drunks wake up in the dead of night to find themselves in a lightless stone room. All the time, the drunks are making noise. All night long, you can hear them hooting and sobbing in there, and the dying, who are crowded around the columns and sleeping in the baptismal font, can hear them through the crypt walls, and to them it must sound like the dead are calling them home.

You are going to see what it is like, someday soon, being in a room full of the dying. They’re always waiting, and in their sleep they are waiting most of all. When you’re around them, you’re waiting too, measuring all the time their breaths, their sighs.

On the night I’m telling you about, it is more quiet than usual in the little drunk cell next door. I have given the nurses a night off to have a weekend dinner on the mainland by themselves, and I am not expecting them until morning. It is impossible to sleep, but it is not so bad, being by myself like that. No one is on watch with me, reminding me about the dying. I’ve got a small lamp, and every so often I go walking up and down the rows of sleepers, leaning over them, looking into their faces. Sometimes, a person runs a fever or begins to vomit, and I give them medicine and stand by them with the light. The light they find more comforting than the medicine. There is a man there who is coughing a great deal, and I am not optimistic about him, or about how much help I will be when the time comes, but whenever the light is near him, he coughs a little less.

I am walking like this, back and forth, when I hear someone say: “Water.”

It’s very dark, and I can’t tell where the voice is coming from, so I say, quietly, “Who’s speaking? Who wants water?”

For a long time there is no reply, and then I hear it again, someone very quietly saying: “Water, please.”

I lift up my lamp, and all I see around me are the backs and faces of blanket-covered sleepers. No one is lifting a hand to call to me, there are no open eyes looking at me, asking for water.

“Hello?” I say.

“Yes—here,” says the voice. “I beg your pardon, but—water.”

The voice is very faint, and it’s almost as though it is being held up very high in the air, above my head, so that no one else can hear it. I am raising my lamp and turning around and around, looking for the owner of the voice, and then the voice, with so much patience, says to me: “Doctor, over here. Water, please.” And then I understand that the voice is coming from the little cell where the drunks are kept. I think at first, some boozer has woken up and gotten out somehow, and now he is going to make trouble for me. But then the door is shut tight, and I pull on it and it doesn’t open, and the voice says, “Here I am—Doctor, down here” and I search the wall with my hand and I find a space between the stones near the floor, a place where the stones have been taken out or chipped away, a very small opening, and I hold up my light but on the other side I see only darkness. I put my face near the hole, and I say: “Are you there?”

The voice says: “Yes, Doctor.” The owner of the voice is sitting by the hole and talking out at me, asking for water. I don’t know how I am going to give him the water through the small opening, but I intend to try. Before I can tell him this, however, the voice says: “This is a wonderful surprise, Doctor.”

“I’m sorry?” I say.

“How nice it is to see you again,” the voice says agreeably, and waits. I am seriously confounded, and I try to put a face to this voice. I say to myself: who do I know back home who would make a pilgrimage to this island in the middle of nowhere just to end up in the drunk tank? I think maybe it is some idiot boyfriend of your mother’s, in which case I am going to leave him there without any water, but there is something about this business of asking for the water, the way he is asking for the water, that makes me think the voice belongs to someone from long ago. The voice is patient with my silence for a while, and then it says: “You must remember me.” But still I don’t. “It’s been fifteen years, Doctor, but you must remember the coffee grounds. The ankle weights and the lake?” And then I realize it is him—it is the deathless man—and my silence continues because I do not know what to say. He must think I am not saying anything because I do not remember, so he keeps reminding me: “You must remember me, Doctor—from inside the coffin.”

“Of course,” I say, because I am astounded enough already, and I do not want him to say anything more about the weights and the lake. It is a despicable dream to me, an unthinkable risk some other doctor, some young fool, took long ago, and I cannot put my mind to it just like that. “It is Gavran Gailé.”

“Oh, I’m so glad,” he says. “So very glad you remember me, Doctor.”

“Well,” I say. “This is remarkable.” It is the strangest thing, coming face-to-face with this man, Gavran Gailé, in the dark, without being able to see if he is real. You must realize—to know that a man has not died after going into a lake for most of the night is one thing. You do not explain it to yourself because you know you will never come across this kind of thing again, you will never meet another man who also doubles as a lungfish. You do not explain it to yourself, and, as I have said before, you certainly do not explain it to other people, and then it becomes the sort of thing that slips away from your own grasp of the truth, until you have very nearly forgotten about it.

So the deathless man wants water, but none of my bottles or ladles will fit through the hole, and we sit there, the deathless man and I, in silence, and he is very thirsty, you understand, but never irritable. He does not complain. He asks me what I am doing here, and I tell him I am here for the dying, and he says, what a coincidence, he is too.

And I am thinking to let this go, to not address it at all, when he says: “Is he dead yet?”

“Who?” I say.

“The man with the cough, the one who is going to die.”

“No one has died tonight, thank you, and I’m confident no one will.”

“You are mistaken, Doctor,” he says with enthusiasm. “Three will go tonight. The man with the cough, the man with the cancer of the liver, and the man who appears to have indigestion.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say, but something about all of this makes me weary, so I get up and walk around anyway, with my lamp up, looking at the sleepers, and among them I do not see anything strange. I come back and I say to the deathless man: “That’s enough. I’ve nothing to say to you tonight. I have no interest in taking medical cues from a drunk man.”

“Oh, no, Doctor,” he says, and he sounds deeply apologetic. “I am not drunk. I haven’t been drunk in forty years. They put me in here because I was unruly this morning, and wouldn’t leave.” I do not ask him what he was doing to be unruly, but I am hovering, and I do not go, so he tells me: “I have been selling coffee, you see, and today I told that man with the cough that he was going to die.”

Suddenly, I realize I’ve seen him—I’ve been seeing him without knowing it, because for the last three or four days there has been a coffee seller at the Waters dressed in the traditional Turkish style, selling coffee to the masses by the waterfalls. I have never looked at him closely, and now it seems to me that, yes, perhaps it is possible that he had the face of the deathless man, but then that face must have changed over the years, and so I do not know. I cannot believe it, I say to myself, I cannot believe that anyone would disguise himself as a coffee seller to play a terrible practical joke.

“You mustn’t do that,” I say to him. “The people who come here are very sick. You mustn’t frighten them like that, they are here to pray.”

“And yet, you are here, so you must not believe entirely in the fact that they will get what they are praying for.”

“But I still let them pray.” I am very angry. “You must not do this again. They are very sick, they need peace.”

“But that is what I do,” the deathless man says. “That is my work: to give peace.”

“Who are you, really?” I say. “What are you doing here?”

“I am here for my penance.”

“You’re here for the Virgin?”

“No, on behalf of my uncle.”

“Your uncle. Always there is something with your uncle. Haven’t you paid enough penance to your damned uncle?”

“I have been in his debt almost forty years.”

This again, I think. And to him I say: “It must be incredible, this debt you’re paying.”

The deathless man gets very quiet, and after a few moments, he says: “That reminds me, Doctor. You’ve a debt of your own.”

The way he says this, the whole room lies still. I have led him straight to the memory of our wager on the bridge so many years ago, but I also feel that he has tricked me, that perhaps he is the one who has been leading me to it. I am certain he knows I have not forgotten. Just in case I have, he is helpful, and reminds me: “The book, Doctor. You pledged the book.”

“I know what I pledged,” I say.

“Of course,” he says, and I can hear he has not doubted me.

“But I do not concede that you won the bet,” I say, angry at his entitlement, angry at myself. I open my coat and feel for the book, which I find is still there.

“I did win it, Doctor.”

“The bet was for proof, Gavran, and you proved nothing,” I say. “Everything you did could have been a trick.”

“You know that’s not true, Doctor,” he says. “You said you were a betting man. The terms were fair.”

“It was a late night,” I say, “and I hardly remember it. There could have been a thousand ways for you to stay underwater for so long.”

“Now that’s not true either,” he says, sounding, for the first time, disconcerted. “You are welcome to shoot me,” he says. “But I am walled up.”

And you’ll damn well stay that way, you lunatic. I am thinking we must have someone from the asylum on standby before we let him out of the drunk tank in the morning. We must have someone here to help him, so that he does not go wandering like this, scaring people to death. They will end up calling him a devil—they will say the devil has come to the Waters—and there will be a panic. I find myself wanting to shame him, to ask him to put the back of his head against the wall so I can feel for bullet holes from the last time we met—but I do not do this. Some part of me feels shame, too, for I have not forgotten the bet, and the confidence with which he is offering to let me shoot him—and not for the first time—makes me doubt myself. Besides, it is late, and there is nothing to do but talk to him.

“All right,” I say.

“All right what?” the deathless man says.

“Let’s say you’re telling the truth.”

“Really, let’s.”

“Explain to me how it’s possible. You cannot prove it, so at least explain. Let’s say—you are deathless. How does that kind of thing come to happen? Are you born with it? You’re born and your priest says—well, here is a deathless man. How does it happen?”

“It’s not some gift, that I should be born with it. It’s punishment.”

“I doubt most people would say that.”

“You’d be surprised,” he says.

“None of the people in this room would say it.”

“They would in the condition they are in. Deathless does not mean un-ailing.”

“So—how does it happen?”

“Well,” he says slowly. “Let’s begin with my uncle.”

“Praise God—the uncle. Tell me about your uncle.”

“Let’s suppose my uncle is Death.” He says this like he is saying my uncle is Zeljko, my uncle is Vladimir. He lets it hang between us for a while, and then, when he doesn’t hear me say anything, he says: “Are we supposing?”

“All right,” I say eventually. “All right. Let’s suppose your uncle is Death. How is this possible?”

“He is the brother of my father.” He says this naturally. Cain is the brother of Abel; Romulus is the brother of Remus; Sleep is the brother of Death; Death is the brother of my father.

“But how?”

“That’s not important,” the deathless man says. “The important thing is that we are supposing.”

“We are, so we’ll keep supposing. Being the nephew of Death, I assume you are then born deathless?”

“Not at all.”

“It does not make much sense to me.”

“Even so, that’s how it is. I am hardly the first nephew of Death, and those before me have not been deathless.”

“All right.”

“Now. Let’s suppose my having this uncle entitles me to certain rights. Let’s say that when I turn sixteen, my uncle says to me, ‘Now you are a man, and I will give you a great gift.’ ”

“I understood it was a punishment.”

“It is. The gift he is talking about is not deathlessness. That comes later. He says to me, ‘Anything you want.’ And I think very hard. I think for three days and three nights, and then I go to my uncle and I say: ‘I should like to be a great physician.’ ”

This doesn’t seem very plausible to me, asking Death to make you a doctor. I tell him so. “Your business would be putting him out of his,” I say.

“That does not matter to my uncle,” the deathless man says. “Because in the end, even if I heal every man who comes my way, the last word in all the world falls to him. He says to me, ‘Very well. I will give you this gift—you will be a great physician, and this you will do by being able to tell immediately whether or not a man is going to die.’ ”

“That would make you the first,” I say. “Physician, I mean, who can reasonably predict whether or not he is going to lose a patient. Truly, after you, there have been no others.” I am smug about saying this.

“We’ll not get anywhere with you interrupting to make smart remarks,” the deathless man says. “You’ve asked me to tell you about myself, and now you are laughing at me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, because it is rare to hear him so impatient. “Please, continue.”

I hear shuffling, and he is doubtless getting into a more comfortable position for his story. “Now, my uncle gives me a cup. And he says: ‘In this cup, the lives of men come and go. Give a man coffee from this cup, and once he has had it, you will see the journeys of his life, and whether he is coming or going. If he is sick, but not dying, the paths in the coffee will be still, and constant. Then you must make him break the cup, and you must send the drinker on his way. But if he is coming to me, the paths will point away from the drinker, and then the cup must remain unbroken until he crosses my path.’ ”

“But we are all dying,” I say. “All the time.”

“I’m not,” he laughs. “But then, I am the only one for whom the cup shows nothing at all.”

“But really—don’t the paths toward your uncle Death appear in the coffee cup of every living man? Isn’t every living man a dying man as well?”

“You are determined to make me look useless, Doctor,” he says. “The paths appear in the cups of men for whom Death is fast approaching. It is as if, having stepped into a room, a man can no longer see the door through which he has come, and so cannot leave. His illness is absolute; his path, fixed.”

“But how is it that you still have the cup?” I say. “If you were meant to break it when the patient was well?”

“Ah,” he says. “I am glad you asked. Whenever a patient breaks a cup, a new one takes its place in my coat pocket.”

“Convenient,” I say, with some bile, “that you are telling me this from behind a wall, and cannot demonstrate your endless, regenerating cups.”

“A demonstration wouldn’t prove a thing to you, Doctor,” he says. “You would only say that I am a magician, another trickster. I can see us now: you, flinging cups to the floor; I, handing you new ones from my coat pocket until you can no longer think of a name bad enough to call me. Smashed crockery everywhere. Besides”—Gavran Gailé says this last part good-naturedly—“what makes you so sure you’d be lucky enough to be breaking your cup tonight?”

And though I do not believe him, Natalia, I feel cold all over. Then there is silence, and after a while he says: “By God, I should really like some water.” I tell him there is nothing I can do about that, and he says, “Never mind, never mind. So, off I go with my cup, a great physician now, able to tell a dying man from a living one, which, I can tell you, was a feat back then. First, the people who come to me are villagers, people with small ailments and terrible fears, because everything they do not understand frightens them. And some die, and some live; but what surprises them is that, sometimes when other physicians tell them they are certain to die, I tell them, against all the odds, that they will live. And they fuss and fear, they tell me, how can I live when I feel as terrible as ever? But eventually they get well, and then they thank me. And I am never wrong, of course, about this kind of thing, and pretty soon the ones who will get well do not doubt at all, and this, in and of itself, is a kind of medicine for them.”

“Certainty,” I say.

“Yes, certainty,” Gavran Gailé says. “And then, as time goes by, even the ones whose fates are sealed are calling me a miracle worker, saying, you saved my sister, you saved my father, if you cannot help me then I know I am meant to go. And, even though I am a very young man, I am well known, and suddenly craftsmen are coming to me, then artists—painters and writers and players of music—and then merchants, and after them, town magistrates and consuls, until I am seeing lords and dukes, and, once, the king himself. ‘If you cannot help me,’ he says, ‘then I know I am meant to go,’ and they bury him six days later, and he goes to his grave smiling. And I realize, even though I have not known it, that when it comes to my uncle, all their fears are the same, and all their fears are terrible.”

One of the sleepers begins to cough, and then he is silent again, breathing slowly through his mouth.

“But the greatest fear is that of uncertainty,” Gavran Gailé is saying. “They are uncertain about meeting my uncle, of course. But they are uncertain, above all, of their own inaction: have they done enough, discovered their illness soon enough, consulted the worthiest physicians, consumed the best medicines, uttered the correct prayers?”

I say, “That is why they come to this place.”

But the deathless man is not paying attention: “And all the while, out of their fear, I am becoming a great and respected man, known the whole kingdom over as a healer, and an honest physician who will not take money if the situation cannot be helped.”

“I have never heard of you,” I say.

“This was many, many years ago,” he says, undeterred. It is incredible.

“And how does this perfect profession go wrong?”

“I make a mistake, of course.”

“It wouldn’t happen to involve a woman?”

“It would—how did you guess?”

“I think I’ve heard this kind of story before.”

“Not like this, you haven’t,” he says to me cheerfully. “This time it’s true. This time, I am telling it. Yes, it is a young woman: the daughter of a wealthy silk merchant has fallen ill and the physicians are saying she is as good as dead. She has fallen ill quite suddenly, they are saying, and there is no hope. A terrible fever, a terrible ache in the neck and the back of the head.”

“What was the matter with her?” I say.

“Back then, there were fewer names for illness,” Gavran Gailé says. “Sometimes, when there was no name, you simply died of Death. She is well liked, this young woman, and about to be married. Her father, I see, has brought me there so he may resign himself, tell himself he has done all he could. The young woman, she is very ill and very frightened. But she has not given up. Though all those around her want me to tell them it is all right, it is all right they have given up, she has not, and she wants nothing from me but to understand that she is not ready to go.”

I do not say anything.

The deathless man continues: “I give her the coffee, I look inside the cup. And there it is: a journey beginning. All the dregs point to it, they make a little path away from her, and she is very sick, very weak. But still she does not give up, even when I tell her the news, when I tell her I am never wrong. She does not strike me or tell me to get out; instead, for three nights she clings like this to her refusal while I do what I can to make her comfortable.” He is quiet for a while, and then he says, “It does not take me three whole days to fall in love with her. Only one. But on the third day I am still there while her anger keeps her alive, and fills me more and more with despair and with love. She is so weak that when I tell her to break the cup, I have to hold her wrist while she does it, and she has to hit the cup three times on the side of her bed before it breaks, and even then it is a clumsy break.”

For a little while, he doesn’t say anything, he just sits there behind the wall, shuffling quietly. I say: “Your uncle, I suppose, is furious after that.”

“Furious, yes,” the deathless man says. “But not as furious as he is going to be later on. He warns me, you see. He says, ‘What you have done is despicable, and you have betrayed me. But as you are a young man, and very much in love, I will turn my head just this once.’ ”

“That seems generous.”

“It is more than generous. But of course, as it turns out, my love did not just fall ill. She was ill. And after we have fled together, after we have begun to build a life, it happens again, the same way over. She is in bed. I give her the coffee. I see what is there, and it is written as plain as a ticket or an agreement at a bank. But still I help her break the cup. What is there for me without her? Then my uncle comes. And he says: ‘You are a fool, and not my brother’s child. I indulged you once, but I’ll not do it again. From this day on, I’ve no need of you, and no want. Your time will never come, and you shall seek all the days of your life and never find it.’ ” Here, the deathless man laughs, and my head is filled with a dreadful kind of silence. “You see, Doctor,” he says. “At that moment, my uncle takes my woman anyway, and so for years I go about my life believing that this is what he is talking about, that I will never find her again, or someone like her again. But it is only when six or seven years have passed that I notice my face, my hands, my hair have not changed. And then, I begin to suspect what has happened. Then I confirm it.”

“How?” I say, slowly. “How do you confirm it?”

“I throw myself from a cliff in Naples,” he says, quite flatly. “At the bottom, there is no Death.”

“How high is the cliff?” I say, but he does not answer this.

“I still have the cup, though, and I go about my business, convinced that my uncle will forgive me in time. Years and years go by, and I find, suddenly, that I am no longer giving my cup to those I hope will live, but instead to those I think are certain to die.”

“Why is that?” I say.

“I find myself,” he says, “seeking the company of the dying, because, among them, I feel I will find my uncle. Except he never lets me see him. The newly dead, however, I see for days. It takes me a long time to realize what they are, for, of course, as a physician I could not see them, I could not see the dead. But my uncle, I think, does this on purpose, and I begin to see them standing alone in fields, near cemeteries and crossroads, waiting for their forty days to pass.”

“Why crossroads?” I say.

He sounds a little surprised at my ignorance. “Crossroads are where the paths of life meet, where life changes. In their case, it changes to death. That is where my uncle meets them once the forty days have passed.”

“And cemeteries?”

“Sometimes they are confused, unsure of where they are going. They drift naturally toward their own bodies. And when they drift this way, I begin to gather them.”

“Gather them how?” I say.

“A few at a time,” he says to me. “A few at a time, in places where many of them come together. Hospitals. Churches. Mines, when they collapse. I gather them and keep them with me for the forty days, and then I take them to a crossroads, and leave them for my uncle.”

“Got any with you right now?” I say.

“Really, Doctor.” He sounds disappointed.

I feel a little ashamed of making light of the dead. I say: “Why do you gather them if they are going to him anyway?”

“Because for him it makes things easier,” the deathless man says, “knowing that they are safe. Knowing that they are coming. Sometimes, when they wander, they do not find their way home again, and become lost after the forty days have passed. Then it is difficult to find them, and they begin to fill up with malice and fear, and this malice extends to the living, to their loved ones.” He sounds sad saying this, like he is talking about lost children. “Then the living take matters into their own hands. They dig up the bodies to bless them; they bury the dead man’s belongings. Money for the dead man. This is sometimes helpful. Sometimes, it brings the spirit back, and then it will come with me to the crossroads even if it has been years and years since its death.” Then he says: “I confess, too, that I am hoping, all this time, that my uncle will forgive me.”

I am thinking here that, if this is true—which it is not—he has come up with a good way to tell the story so that he seems generous in it, and helpful, too, when in fact his help is ultimately intended for himself. I do not say this, of course.

Instead, I say: “Why do you tell them that they are going to die?”

“So they can prepare,” he says right away. “That, too, is supposed to make it easier. You see, there is always a struggle. But if they know—if they have thought about it—sometimes the struggle is less and less.”

“Still,” I say, “it does not seem fair to frighten the dying, to single them out for punishment.”

“But dying is not punishment,” he says.

“Only to you,” I say, and suddenly I am angry. “Only because you’ve been denied it.”

“You and I are not understanding one another,” he says. He has said this to me before, and he is always so patient when he says it. “The dead are celebrated. The dead are loved. They give something to the living. Once you put something into the ground, Doctor, you always know where to find it.”

I want to say to him, the living are celebrated too, and loved. But this has gone on long enough, and he seems to think so, too.

“Now, Doctor,” says the deathless man, with the voice of someone who is getting up from a meal. “I must ask you to let me out.”

“I can’t,” I say.

“You must. I need water.”

“It’s impossible,” I say. “If I had the keys to let you out, don’t you think I would have given you water by now?” But I am wondering it a little myself, wondering whether or not I would let him out if I had the keys. I’m not saying what I really think, which is that I am glad he cannot come out, glad he can’t take the book from me, even though I still do not believe that I lost my bet. Even though I believe he would take it unfairly if he took it now. Then I say, “I wonder, assuming I believe you—which I don’t—how could I be responsible for letting out the man who is here to gather my patients for the grave?”

The deathless man laughs at this. “Whether I am in here or out there, they are going to die,” he says. “I do not direct the passage—I just make it easier. Remember, Doctor: the man with the cough, the man with liver cancer, and the man who appears to have indigestion.”

It is like we are playing Battleship with the dying. I tell him this, hoping that he will laugh a little, but all he says to me is, “Remember for next time, Doctor, that you still owe me a pledge.”

I sit for a long time by that door, and then I am convinced he has fallen asleep. I get up and I continue my walking, but Natalia—I am telling you this honestly—that night they go, one by one: the man with the cough, the man with the liver cancer, and the man who appears to have indigestion. They go in that order too, but by the time we have lost the last one, the monks have returned and are helping me, performing the rites, closing the eyes and crossing the arms, and the dying all around are in distress, in fear, feeling themselves all over and asking me, it’s not me yet, is it, Doctor?

By the time I go back to see the deathless man, the monks have already opened the cell and let the drunks out to the morning, and he is long gone.