The Tiger's Wife

A FEW YEARS BEFORE MY GRANDFATHER DIED, BOMBS WERE falling on the City. It was the final collapse, years after it had first begun, and it had finally reached us. Bombs were falling, and they were falling on government buildings and banks, on the houses of war criminals—but also on libraries, on buses, on bridges that spanned the two rivers. It came as a surprise, the bombing, especially because the way it started was so mundane. There was an announcement, and then, an hour later, the scream of the air raid siren. All of it was going on outside, somehow, even when the sound of the bombs hitting started coming in through the open windows, and even when you went outside, you could tell yourself it was some kind of crazy construction accident, that the car, flung seventy-five feet into the façade of a brick building, was just some kind of terrible joke.

Bombs were falling, and the entire City shut down. For the first three days, people did not know how to react—there was hysteria, mostly, and people evacuated or tried to evacuate, but bombs were falling up and down the two rivers, and there was nowhere to go to avoid them. Those who stayed in the City were convinced that it wouldn’t last more than a week, that it was ineffective and expensive, and that they would just give up and go away, and there was nothing to do but stick it out. On the fourth day of the bombing, compelled by the irresistible need for certain kinds of freedoms despite the circumstances—or, perhaps, because of them—people started going to coffeehouses again, sitting on the porches, often staying out to drink and smoke even after the sirens sounded. There was an attitude of outdoor safety—if you were outside, people reasoned, you were a much smaller, moving target, while if you sat in your building, you were just waiting for them to miss what they were actually aiming for and hit you instead. The coffeehouses stayed open all night, their lights darkened, the television hissing in a back room, people sitting quietly with their beers and iced teas, watching the useless red waterfalls of light from the antiaircraft guns on the hill.

While it was happening, my grandfather didn’t read about it, and didn’t talk about it, not even to my mother who, for the first three days of bombing, became the kind of person who yelled at the television and didn’t turn the set off even when she went to bed—as if keeping it on would somehow isolate her from the thunder outside, as if our city’s presence on the screen could somehow contain what was happening, make it reasonable and distant and insignificant.

I was twenty-two, interning at the Military Academy of Medicine. To me, the persistence of my grandfather’s rituals meant that he was unchanged, running on discipline and continuance and stoicism. I didn’t notice, and didn’t realize, that the rituals themselves were changing, that there was a difference between the rituals of comfort and the preventive rituals that come at the end of life. He still went out as though he had a full roster of house calls to make, but his lifelong patients were beginning to die, to fold slowly to the maladies of old age, even with him there. His daily exercises continued, but they were the perfunctory exercises of an old man: facing the living room window in the pale morning light, his sweatpants loose and hitched up above his socks, his hands clasped behind his back in a matter-of-fact way while he rose to the balls of his feet and fell back onto his heels, rhythmically, with a thump that reverberated through the whole apartment. He did this daily, and without deviation, even with the sirens grinding a howl on the next block.

For twenty years, we had watched the four-o’clock showing of ’Allo ’Allo! together. Now, there were afternoon naps. He slept sitting up, with his head bent. His feet stuck straight out in front of him, and his body was propped up entirely on the heels of his clogs. His hands were folded across his stomach, which was usually growling, because in addition to everything else, he was now frowning, without precedent, over the things my grandma cooked for us, over burek and paprikash and stuffed peppers, things I remembered him eating with relish in the past, meals he would sigh delightedly over during otherwise silent dinners. It happened while I wasn’t looking, but Grandma was preparing separate meals for him now, because she couldn’t bear to subject the rest of us to the punishment of eating boiled greens twice a day and poached meat for dinner, which was all he ate, strictly and uncomplaining.

His trips to the zoo had become a thing of the past long before the bombing forced the City to close its gates. There was a lot of speculation about this closure—people, not just my grandfather, were furious, felt it was a sign of giving up, accused the City of using the bombing as an excuse to slaughter the animals to save on resources. Indignant, the authorities set up a weekly newspaper column that ran current pictures of the animals and reported on their well-being, on the birth of their cubs, on plans for zoo renovation when the raids were over.

My grandfather began to cut out newspaper clippings about the zoo. I would come home in the early mornings, after my shift at the hospital, to find him taking breakfast by himself, removing the back section of the newspaper and looking through it angrily. There was disaster, he would tell me, at the zoo.

“This business is very bad for us,” he said, tilting his head up to look through his bifocals, his tray of seeds and nuts half-finished, his water glass tinted with the orange of fiber supplements.

The story in the newspaper focused on the tiger, and only on the tiger, because, despite everything, there was still some hope for him. It said nothing about how the lioness aborted and the wolves turned and ate their cubs, one by one, while the cubs howled in agony and tried to run. It said nothing about the owls, splitting open their unhatched eggs and pulling the runny red yolk, bird-formed and nearly ready, out of the center; or about the prized Arctic fox, who disemboweled his mate and rolled around in her remains until his heart stopped under the lancing lights of the evening raids.

Instead, they said that the tiger had begun to eat his own legs, first one and then the other, systematically, flesh to bone. They had a picture of the tiger, Zbogom—the aging son of one of my childhood tigers—sprawled out on the stone floor of his cage, his legs, stiff as boards, tied up behind him like hams. You could see the thick black marks where the flesh of his ankles had been soaked in iodine, and the newspaper said that nothing could abate that particular compulsion—they had tried tranquilizers, chains, bandages dipped in quinine. They had modified a dog funnel and taped it to his neck, but he had eaten the funnel during one of the night raids, and afterward he had eaten two of his own toes.

Two days after the tiger article ran, bombers hit the bridge over the South River and, within two hours of its collapse, they hit the abandoned car factory beside the zoo and Sonja, our adopted African elephant—beloved zoo mascot, small-eyed matriarch of the citadel herd, lover of peanuts and of small children—fell dead on the spot.

For weeks, the City had been trying to process the suddenness of the war, the actuality of its arrival, and we had treated it as something unusual and temporary; but, after that particular raid, something changed, and all the indignation and self-righteousness that had seeped over from the end of the last war was now put to good use. Every night afterward, people marched for miles to stand shoulder to shoulder at the citadel gate. Others, meanwhile, stood packed in inebriated rows on the stone arches of our remaining bridges. You had to be drunk for the bridge guard, because the chances you would be hit were higher, and after that the chances got higher still that you would die, because standing on either end would not spare you from a fall into the water if the middle was hit.

Zóra, braver than anyone I knew, spread out her defensive agenda—she spent her nights with thousands of people by the stone knees of the dead Marshall’s horse on the east bank of Korčuna, wearing a toucan hat in solidarity with the people guarding the zoo. She can tell stories about the bombing of the First National bank, how she watched a missile hit the old brick building across the river, the vacuum of sound as the blue light went down, straight down, through the top of the building and then blasted out the windows and the doors and the wooden shutters, the bronze name on the building, the plaques commemorating the dead—all of this followed by the realization, once the smoke cleared, that despite everything, the building didn’t fall, but stood there, like a jawless skull, while people cheered and kissed and, as the newspapers would later point out, started a baby boom.

During the war, I had begged my grandfather to give up on his nightly house calls, on the rituals that made him feel productive; now, against his wishes—which he expressed with a more colorful vocabulary than even I had allowed myself at fourteen—I was holding vigil at the zoo on my nights off. The crowd there was different, older. People would begin to arrive around seven o’clock, in time for the last round of the popcorn cart, and then we would stand in small groups on the sidewalk that ran around the citadel wall, wearing the regalia of our beast of choice. The lion-woman was there, wearing a yellow mop as a wig. One man had tied wire hangers around his head and put white socks on them as ears and come to stand for Nikodemus, our giant Welsh rabbit. A few people came as the wolf pack, wearing toilet rolls as snouts, and there was a woman who had been to the zoo only once, as a child, and had come dressed the way she remembered her first and only giraffe: yellow and with stumpy horns. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d forgotten the blotches. I came for the tiger, of course, but the best I could do was paint a Davy Crockett–style cap from my old dress-up box in the basement with orange and black stripes, and stand there with the monstrous fake raccoon tail hanging over my back. The fox was a man dressed in a red suit, bow tie, and glasses. The zoo had never had a panda, but we had six or seven pandas guarding the citadel gate, loofah tails sticking out of their pants. The hippo wore a purple sweater, with a pillow tucked underneath.

People were also writing on the zoo wall with chalk and spray paint, and, a few weeks in, they began arriving with placards that favored an attitude of friendly reportage over the standard FUCK YOUs that were being held aloft up and down the bridges. A gray-clad man with a pink towel over his head appeared one evening at the zoo gates holding up a sign that said: AIM HERE, I AM AN ELEPHANT. There was also a famous guy from lower Dranje, where the water tower had been hit, who originally posed as a duck, but then showed up on the sidewalk the day after the cotton factory bombing with the announcement: I NOW HAVE NO CLEAN UNDERWEAR. After that, the newspapers were flooded with overhead shots of his poster, the red lettering, his frayed gray gloves clutching the cardboard. He appeared again, in a week or two, bearing the message: NO UNDERWEAR AT ALL. Someone else held up a sign that read: ME NEITHER.

Zóra and I swapped stories over our shifts at the clinic, where we bandaged heads and arms and legs, helped make room for the wounded, assisted in the maternity ward, supervised the distribution of sedatives. From the office window on the third floor of Sveti Jarmo hospital, you could see the trucks coming in from the bomb sites, the tarps laid out on the stone courtyard, laden with parts of the dead. They were not like the parts we saw in anatomy, fresh, connected to their related tissues, or to the function that gave them meaning. Instead, they made no sense, lying there red and clotted, charred at the sides, in piles to which you could only guess they belonged—legs, arms, heads. They had been picked out of ditches, trees, the rubble of buildings where they had been blown by the force of the bombs, with the purpose of identifying the dead, but you could barely distinguish what they were, much less try to assign them to the bodies, faces, persons of loved ones.

I came home one day to find my grandfather standing in the hallway in his big-buttoned coat, wearing his hat. I came in while he was tying his sash carefully, tucking The Jungle Book back into the coat’s inside pocket. The dog was sitting on the footstool by the door, and he was talking to the dog in that voice, and the dog was already leashed, waiting.

I kissed him, and I said: “Where are you going?”

“We’ve been waiting,” he said, of the dog and himself. “We’re coming with you tonight.”

It was the last time we went to the citadel together, and we walked the whole way. It was a bright, clear autumn evening, and we went down our street until we reached the Boulevard of the Revolution and then turned uptown along the cobbled road that ran beside the tramway. Trams went by, quiet and old, as empty as the street, the tracks slick with the afternoon’s rain. There was a soft, cold wind blowing up the Boulevard toward us, raising leaves and newspapers against our legs, and against the face of the dog, who was running openmouthed, in short, fat-legged strides, between us. I had put an orange bow on the dog, to honor the tiger, and I had offered my raccoon hat to my grandfather, and he had looked at me and said, “Please. Leave me some dignity.”

It had been predicted that there would be no air raid that night, so the sidewalk at the zoo was practically empty. The lion-woman was there, leaning against a lamppost, and we exchanged hellos and then she went back to her newspaper. A guy I’d seen only once or twice was sitting on the zoo wall, turning the dials of a handheld radio. We sat down on the bus-stop bench and my grandfather put the dog, with its fat muddy feet, on his knees, and for about twenty minutes we watched the general confusion of the intersection with the broken traffic light that no one had fixed in almost a month. Then the siren across town went off, followed by another, closer siren, and two minutes later we saw the first blast to the southwest, across the river, where they were starting on the old compound of the Treasury. I remember being surprised that the dog just sat there, looking noncommittal, while the ambulance vans from Sveti Pavlo lit up and streamed out of the garage down the street. I was comforting my grandfather about the tiger, telling him about how they dealt with crippled cats and dogs in America, how sometimes they made little wheelchairs they’d harness onto the animal’s side, and then the cat or dog could live a perfectly normal life, with its haunches in a little pet wheelchair, wheeling itself around and around the house.

“They’re self-righting,” I said.

For a long time, my grandfather said nothing. He was taking treats out of his pocket and giving them to the dog, and the dog was scarfing them down noisily and sniffing my grandfather’s hands for more.

All through the war, my grandfather had been living in hope. The year before the bombing, Zóra had managed to threaten and plead him into addressing the National Council of Doctors about recasting past relationships, resuming hospital collaboration across the new borders. But now, in the country’s last hour, it was clear to him, as it was to me, that the cease-fire had provided the delusion of normalcy, but never peace. When your fight has purpose—to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent—it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling—when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event—there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it.

Our vigil at the zoo came more than a year before we found out he was ill, before the secret visits to the oncologist, our final alliance. But the body knows itself, and part of him must have already been aware of what was starting when he turned to me, and told me for the last time about the deathless man.

My grandfather rubbed his knees and said:

The siege of Sarobor. We’ve never talked about it. Things were bad then, but there was a chance that they would improve. There was a chance they wouldn’t go all to hell immediately. I was at a conference on the sea, and I was about to drive home when I got a call about some wounded men at Marhan.

I get to Marhan and it’s this mass of tents and men, and some people have been shot in a skirmish a few miles up the road, and they tell me while I’m bandaging them up, while I’m waiting for the medical relief, that they’re there to take out the airplane factory in the Marhan valley, first with heavy artillery and then with men. After that, they say, they’re going into Sarobor. Sarobor—can you imagine? Sarobor, where your grandma was born. So, I find the general and I ask him, what the hell is this? Do you know what he says to me?

He says: “The Muslims want access to the sea, so we’ll send them to it, downriver, one by one.”

What can I tell you about that? What is there to say? I married your grandmother in a church, but I would still have married her if her family had asked me to be married by a hodza. What does it hurt me to say happy Eid to her, once a year—when she is perfectly happy to light a candle for my dead in the church? I was raised Orthodox; on principle, I would have had your mother christened Catholic to spare her a full dunking in that filthy water they keep in the baptismal tureens. In practice, I didn’t have her christened at all. My name, your name, her name. In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.

I leave Marhan. But I don’t go home. You’re at home, and your mother, and your grandma, but that’s not where I go. My relief comes, and it’s this young doctor. I can’t remember his face. He comes, and I say my goodbyes and I leave, and then I go out onto the road and I walk all afternoon until I get to Sarobor. It’s fifty centigrade going into the Amovarka valley, everything is dry and pale green and very quiet, except for the shelling, which is starting now in Marhan. This is thirteen years ago, you understand, and the war is hardly even a war yet. This was when they had the big olive grove on the hills above the town. You probably can’t remember what that town was like before they started on it, before they shelled the Muslim neighborhoods and dropped that old bridge into the river like a tree, like nothing.

I go down into Sarobor, and it’s deserted. Night is falling. Up and down the Turkish quarter, you can hear our men shelling the factory out in the Marhan valley, and you can see the lights over the hill. You can tell what’s coming next, you know what’s coming. Everyone knows, so no one is outside, and there are no lights in the windows. There’s a smell of cooking—people are sitting down to dinner in the dark. There’s a rich dinner smell that makes me think of that irrational desire that comes over you when it is almost the end—instead of saving for a siege they’re feasting in the houses along the river, they’ve got lamb and potatoes and yogurt on their tables. I can smell the mint and the olives, and sometimes when I pass the windows I can hear frying. It makes me think of the way your grandma used to cook while we lived in Sarobor, standing by the window with the big willow tree outside.

The Turkish quarter has that narrow street that runs along the river on the Muslim side of town, with the closed-up Turkish coffeehouses and the restaurants where you buy the best burek in the world, the places that sell hookah pipes, glassmakers’ workshops, and then the flower gardens that are all dug up now for the new graveyards. All along the street, as you follow it down to the riverbank, you can look up to see the Old Bridge in the distance, with those gleaming, round guard-towers. And every few feet, you pass Turkish fountains. Those fountains—that is the sound of Sarobor, Sarobor always sounds like running water, like good clean water, from the river to the cisterns. Then there’s the old mosque, with that lonely minaret lit up like a shell.

I cross the Old Bridge, and I go down to the Hotel Amovarka, where your grandma and I spent our honeymoon before we found an apartment to live in. It’s where foreign dignitaries and ambassadors stay when they come to Sarobor. The director of the airplane factory in Marhan—the one we’re bombing—sometimes stays there for months on end. The hotel stands on this stone shelf at the river’s edge, banked by olive trees and palms, overlooking the water at the top of the cataract. It has these white-curtained windows and a balcony that looks like a woman’s skirt, all these round stone folds that come out over the water. There’s brass Turkish lanterns on the balcony. You can see the balcony from the Old Bridge, and if you take an evening walk from the hotel you can stand on the bridge and look down over the cataract and the balcony restaurant, where they have a four-man orchestra that goes from table to table, playing love songs.

Inside, the hotel has those wooden screens and red-and-white painted arches. It’s got the pasha’s tapestries hung up on every wall, and old wingback chairs and a fire in the lobby. I come in, and the place is empty, completely empty. I cross through without seeing anybody, not a soul, not even at the counter. I go down a long hallway, and then I find myself in the front room of the balcony restaurant.

There’s a waiter there, just one waiter. He’s got very little hair, and it’s all white and combed forward over his head, and he’s got a big black bruise on his forehead, clear as day, that devout Muslim bruise you can always recognize. He’s strapped into his suit, and he’s got his tie on and his napkin over his arm. He sees me come in and he lights up. Like he’s thrilled to see me, like it’s the best news of his day that I am there. He asks me if I want dinner, and he says it in a way that is intended to encourage me to stay even though no one else is having dinner, and I say yes, I want dinner, I want dinner, of course. I am thinking of my honeymoon, and I am thinking they have lobster there, all kinds of fish they bring up on riverboats from the sea.

“Where would sir like to sit?” he says to me, and he gestures around the room. The restaurant has a high, yellow ceiling with a battle painted on it, and these brass lanterns and red curtains hanging from the ceiling, and the whole room, like the rest of the hotel, is completely empty.

“On the balcony, please,” I say. He leads me out to the balcony and seats me at the best table in the house, which is made up for two, and he takes away the other fork and knife and napkin and plate.

“With apologies, sir,” he says to me. He has this hoarse, rasping voice, even though I can tell from his hands and his teeth he’s never smoked a day in his life. “We have only the house wine tonight.”

“That will do just fine,” I say.

“And we have it only by the bottle, sir,” he says. I tell him to bring me the bottle, and also that I will be staying the night, if he would be so good as to find someone at the front desk who can help me. I know you’re thinking this is not a good idea. I know you’re thinking, those men shelling over the hill are getting ready to come down on Sarobor in the morning. But staying is my plan at the time, and so I say that to him, maybe also to be kind. He is a very old man. And you don’t know what our waiters used to be. How they were trained for the old restaurants. They would go to a school, the finest table-service school, right here in the City. They learn their craft, they learn their manner. They’re practically chefs. They can recognize a wine with their eyes closed and carve up the carcass themselves, they can tell you what fish swims where and what it eats, they dabble for years in herb gardens before they’re permitted to serve. This is the kind of waiter he is, and a Muslim besides, and the whole thing makes me think of your grandma, and I feel ill, suddenly, watching him leave to get my wine.

I sit back and I listen to them down in Marhan. Every few minutes this blue blast lights up the hilltops at the crown of the valley, and a few seconds later comes the cracking sound of the artillery. There’s a southerly breeze blowing down to me through the valley, and it brings in the singed smell of gunpowder. I can see the outline of the Old Bridge on the bank above the hotel, and a man is walking up it from the tower on the other side, lighting the lampposts the old-fashioned way, the way it’s been done since my time. The river is making a song against the bank under the hotel ledge. I am leaning forward a little to look through the florets in the balcony railing down to where the water is dark against the white rocks of the riverbed. When I lean back, I notice the smell of cigarette smoke nearby, and I look around, and—to my surprise—there is another guest sitting at a table in the opposite corner, with his elbow up on the stone balcony rail. He is wearing a suit and tie, and he is reading, holding the book up so I cannot see his face. The table in front of him is empty, except for a coffee cup, which makes me think he has finished his dinner, and I feel glad he will be leaving soon, he will be finishing his coffee and leaving. He seems completely unaware of the way the bombing is lighting up the sky—like it’s a celebration, like fireworks are happening over the hill and the celebration is coming closer. Then I find myself thinking—maybe it is a celebration for him, maybe he has crossed the river tonight to gloat in the old Muslim palace. Maybe, for him, this is something funny, a night he will talk about years from now to his friends when they ask him about sending the Muslims downriver.

At this moment, the old waiter comes back, bringing with him my bottle. I can remember it now. It’s an ’88 Šalimač, from a famous vineyard that will soon be on our side of the border. He serves it to me like that means nothing to him—and I get the sense that he is bent on showing the great strength of character it takes for him to serve me this wine like it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to him whether or not the owner of the vineyard is bayoneting his son in the airplane factory right now. He peels the foil off the top of the bottle, and then he uncorks the wine in front of me. He flips my glass and pours me a little, and he blinks at me while I taste it. Then he pours me the whole glass and leaves the bottle on the table. He disappears for a moment, and then he comes back, wheeling in front of him a cart that’s covered in big lettuce leaves and bunches of grapes, slices of lemon, all of which are crowded around a centerpiece of fish. The fish are clear-eyed and firm, but they look like something out of a circus.

The waiter says to me: “Well, sir. Tonight we have the sole, the eel, the cuttlefish, and the John Dory. May I recommend the John Dory? It was freshly caught this morning.”

There are not very many of them, not very many fish—perhaps five or six, but they are neatly arranged, with the two eels curled around the edges of the display. The John Dory is lying on its side like a spiked flat of paper, the spot on its tail staring up like an eye. Of all the fish on the cart, it is the only one that actually looks like a fish, and also the only one not giving off a vaguely dead smell. Now, I love John Dory, but tonight I find myself wanting lobster, and I ask about it, about the lobster. The old waiter bows to me, and apologizes, says that they have just run out.

I tell him I will need a moment to think, and he leaves me with the menu and disappears. I am pretty disappointed about that lobster, I can tell you, as I sit there looking at the dishes they have to go with the fish. They have, of course, what you would expect: they have potatoes several ways, salad with garlic, four or five different sauces to go with the fish, but all the time I am thinking about the lobster, about how they have just run out. And then I think: my God, it would be awful if this man, this gloating man who is here reading a book, has just had the last lobster, the lobster that should have come to me when I am not here to gloat.

And just at that moment, as I am thinking this, the old waiter reappears and bows over the man’s table.

“And now, sir,” I hear the waiter say to the man. “Have you had a chance to consider? Is there anything I can offer you to drink?”

“Yes, please,” says the man. “Water.”

I put my menu down and I look at him. He has lowered the book so that he can speak to the waiter, and I recognize him immediately. The waiter goes to get him the water, and Gavran Gailé does not raise his book back up; instead, he looks out over the river, and then around the balcony, and finally his gaze settles on me, and it is the same gaze of the man from inside the coffin—the same eyes, the same face, unchanged and whole, as it must have been in the drunk tank that night at the Church of the Virgin of the Waters, when I did not have the opportunity to see it.

The deathless man is smiling at me, and I say to him: “It’s you.”

He calls me doctor, and then he gets up and dusts off his coat and comes over to shake my hand. I stand up and hold my napkin, and while we are shaking hands in silence like this, it comes to me why he is here, but I cannot tell myself that I am surprised to see him. No, I realize, I am not surprised at all. His being here can mean only one thing, and, like the rest of us, he knows what is going to happen. He has come to collect, the deathless man.

“What a wonder,” he is saying to me. “What a remarkable, remarkable wonder.”

“How long have you been in town?” I say.

“Several days now,” he tells me.

I am tired, and all business, and I tell him: “Without doubt, you have been buying people a great deal of coffee.”

He does not smile at this, but he does not reproach me either. He does not confirm, he does not deny. He is just there. It occurs to me that he never looks tired, he never looks worn. I tell him I insist he join me for dinner, and he does, gladly. He goes to get his book and his cup, and the waiter brings us another place setting for him.

“Do you gentlemen know what you would like?” the waiter asks.

“Not yet,” my friend says to him. “But we will take narghile.”

I wait until the old man has left to get us the pipes, and then I say: “The best meal of my life, I ate here.” The deathless man nods at me in appreciation. “During my honeymoon,” I say. “You have never met my wife. We stayed here for our honeymoon, my wife and I, and we had lobster. Two years after the first time you and I met in that little village—do you remember it?”

“I remember,” he says.

“I was very young,” I say. “It was a beautiful honeymoon. For a week, I ate nothing but lobster. I could eat it still.”

“Then you should.”

“They haven’t any tonight.”

“That’s a shame.”

“You did not happen to get the last one?” I say.

“As you see,” he tells me, “I have not eaten.”

We sit in silence for a while, and he does not ask me what I am doing here. This is when it occurs to me that perhaps he knows something I don’t—that perhaps it is not someone else he is here to see, but, instead, that he has come to see me, that he is here for me in particular, and that thought fills me up. And I tell you, it is one thing not to believe, but quite another to entertain a possibility, and I don’t know if it’s the shelling or the evening or the Old Bridge on the water, but that is what I am doing as I sit there, hanging on to that napkin on my knees—I am entertaining the possibility.

“And have you been very busy?” I ask him.

“Not particularly,” he says to me, and he wants to say more, but at this moment the old waiter comes shuffling back with the narghile, which he sets up for us, cleaning the pipe lips, setting up the tobacco and tumbak in the bowl. When he finishes, there is a sweet roasting smell coming from the pipe, honey-and-rose smell, and he is taking out a pencil and piece of paper to write down our order.

“What do you say to the perch?” the deathless man asks me.

“I am a great lover of John Dory,” I say. “In the absence of lobster.”

“Shall we have the John Dory?”

“Let’s have the John Dory.”

“We’ll have the John Dory,” the deathless man says to the old waiter, looking up at him and smiling. The waiter bows from the waist, like we’ve made a very good choice. Which we have, we’ve really made a very good choice. It is probably the last John Dory the hotel will ever sell.

“Can I entice the sirs with some mezze?” the old waiter says. “We have an excellent ajvar with garlic, and also an octopus salad. We have wonderful sarma, and cheese with olives.”

“I feel some indulgence is needed,” the deathless man says. “Some indulgence is needed tonight. We’ll have it all. And, to go with the fish, the boiled potatoes with chard.”

“Very good, sir,” the waiter says while he is writing it all down with a stubby pencil.

“And, naturally, the parsley sauce.”

“Naturally, sir,” says the waiter.

He refills our wine glasses and leaves, and I am sitting there looking at the calm, smiling face of the deathless man, and asking myself why, in particular, indulgence is needed tonight. The deathless man takes the pipe of the narghile and begins to puff on it slowly, and big thick clouds of smoke are rising out of his nostrils and mouth and he looks very content, sitting there, with the blasts rocking the valley at Marhan.

I must be looking pretty stupefied at all this, because he asks me: “Is something wrong?” I shake my head, and he smiles. “Do not worry about the price, Doctor. This is my treat. It is important—so important—to indulge in these pleasurable things.”

My God, I say to myself, and now it has come to this. My last meal, and with a deathless man, at that.

“My best meal,” he says out of nowhere, as if we are still on that subject, “was at the Big Boar, about sixty years ago.” I do not know why this happens now, but I do not find myself saying, how? How could you have had a meal like this, when your face says you are thirty, and even that is generous. He says: “The Big Boar was a wonderful tavern in the king’s hunting park, and you would shoot the game yourself and then the chef would prepare it in his special way. The woman I told you about—the woman who died—she and I went there when we first fled. When we fled from here.”

“I didn’t realize she was from Sarobor,” I say.

“Everybody’s from somewhere, Doctor. She used to play the gusla there—” he says, pointing down to the Old Bridge, “just over there.”

The pepper and the octopus salad and the sarma arrive, and the waiter arranges the plates, and the deathless man digs right in. It all smells so wonderful, and he is spooning those cabbage leaves and that red pepper onto his plate, and all those oils are running into each other, and the pink-purple octopus tentacles are shining with oil, and I put some on my plate and I eat, too, but I eat slowly, because who knows, maybe it’s poisoned, maybe the old waiter is working with a vengeance, maybe that is why the deathless man is here. But it is too difficult not to eat with the lights going off in Marhan, and now Gavran Gailé will not stop talking about the meal we are eating. Every time the waiter comes close, Gavo is talking loudly about how wonderful the flavors are, how fresh the oil—and it is true, the food is wonderful, but I am feeling that he is rubbing it in, this business of it being my last meal, and I am thinking, My God, what I have done, coming here?

The waiter brings the John Dory and it is glorious. The fish is dark and crisp on the outside, and it has been grilled whole. He cuts it up slowly with the fish knife, and the flesh goes soft and feathery under the knife, and he serves it to us on our plates and then ladles out the potatoes with the chard. The potatoes are bright yellow and steaming, and the chard is thick and green and clinging to the potatoes, and the deathless man is eating and eating and talking about how glorious the meal is—which is true, really, it is a glorious meal, and even though you can hear the shelling in Marhan, it is all right with the meal on the balcony and the river and the Old Bridge.

Because I have to know, at a certain point I say: “Are you here to tell me that I am going to die?”

He looks up at me with surprise. “I beg your pardon?” he says.

“This meal,” I say. “Indulgence. If you are here to let me indulge in my last meal, I would like to know this. I would like to call my wife, my daughter, my grandchild.”

“I take it, since you ask that question without provocation, that you have accepted what I am—does that mean you are ready to pay your debt to me, Doctor?”

“Certainly not,” I say.

“Still more proof?”

“We’ve not even had coffee yet.”

Gavran Gailé picks up a corner of his napkin and he dabs his mouth with it.

“May I see it?”

“What?”

“Your pledge, Doctor. The book. Let me see it.”

“No,” I say, and I am worried.

“Come now, Doctor. I am only asking to see it.”

“I do not ask to see your cup,” I say. But he is not giving up, not taking up his fork and knife, just sitting there. And after a while, I take out my Jungle Book and I hold it out to him. He wipes the tips of his fingers before he takes it from me, and then he runs his hand over the cover.

“Oh yes,” he says, as if he remembers it well, remembers the story. He opens it and flips through the pictures and the poems. I am afraid he is going to take it, but I am also afraid that it will upset him to know I don’t trust him.

“Rikki Tikki Tavi,” he says to me, handing the book back across the table. “I remember him. I liked him best.”

“How surprising,” I say, “that you should like the weasel.” He does not reproach me for saying this, even though we know I am both rude and incorrect: Rikki Tikki is, of course, a mongoose.

Gavran Gailé watches me put the book back in my pocket. He is smiling at me, and he leans forward across the table and quietly says, “I am here for him,” and he nods at the waiter. He does not say he is not here for me, and I am weary, but suddenly I feel awful for the little old waiter.

“Does he know?”

“How would he know?”

“In the past, you’ve told them.”

“Yes, and I’ve learned a thing or two, haven’t I? You’ve been there, Doctor, while I’ve been learning. If I tell him, he is going to spear me with a kebab stick and I am going to have a difficult recovery, which mustn’t happen because—as you say—I am due to be very busy.” He sits back and wipes his mouth with a napkin. “Besides, what good would it do him to know? He is happy, he is serving an enormous meal to two pleasant people on the eve of war. Let him be happy.”

“Happy?” I am dumbfounded. “He could be home—he could be with his family.”

“We are indulging ourselves, and so indulging him,” the deathless man says. “This fellow takes great pride in what he does—and he is serving a glorious and wonderful meal, a memorable one. Tonight, he will go home to his family and talk about serving the last meal of the Hotel Amovarka, and tomorrow when he is gone, those still alive will have this to talk about. They will be talking about it after the war has ended. Do you see?”

The waiter comes and clears away our plates, the big plate with the John Dory on it, the little glass bones all picked clean. He balances the plates on one arm, and still the white napkin is folded over his free arm, and I am filled up with the idea of this memorable meal, which I have not been enjoying for fear.

“May I tempt the sirs with a dessert drink?” the old waiter says. “Or dessert?”

“All of it,” I am suddenly saying. I am saying: “We will have the tulumbe and the baklava and tufahije, and also the kadaif, please.”

“With quince rakija,” the deathless man says, and when the old waiter leaves, he tells me he is glad that I am getting into the spirit of things.

We do not talk, because I am thinking of how to convince the deathless man to tell the waiter, or perhaps how to tell him myself without the deathless man noticing, and the waiter brings the dessert on an enormous silver tray and sets it down. The tulumbe are there, golden and soft and dripping, and the baklava sticks to my mouth, and the roasted apple with the walnuts is lovely and it melts under the fork and all these things come with the quince brandy that burns your throat between bites, and I am a little drunk, now, and watching the fire in the sky over Marhan, I am missing your grandmother’s cooking, because her pastries are better than this.

When we are finished, Gavran Gailé pushes his chair back and says: “Truly.” And he folds his hands over his belly and there is something about him that makes me sad, too.

“Are you going to die tomorrow, too?” I say. “Is that why you’re here?” It is a foolish question, and I realize this as soon as I have asked it.

“Of course not,” he tells me. His fingers are drumming on his belly like a little boy’s fingers. “Are you?” he says.

I do not laugh, even though I think he is joking. “Even after all this—after this city is razed to the ground, which is what is going to happen tomorrow, without question—you don’t believe he will give you permission to die?” I say.

“Of course he won’t.” Gavo wipes his mouth with his napkin, and raises his hand for the waiter. The waiter comes and gathers the plates, and before he even asks, the deathless man is saying: “And now we’ll have some coffee.”

And now I am thinking, this is serious. He takes up the narghile pipe again and begins to smoke it, and every few puffs he offers me a try, and I refuse. His tobacco smells like wood and bitter roses. The smoke unfurls and goes into the fog that is hanging low, smearing the lights above the bridge. The waiter comes back with our coffee. He begins to set the table, to put down the coffee cups, but the deathless man says, “No, we will share from this one,” and he pulls out his little white cup with the gold trim.

I make one last attempt, and, while the waiter is in earshot, I say: “I suppose, now, that you will be asking the gentleman to share our coffee?” I say this rudely, so the waiter will leave and not drink from the cup.

But the deathless man says, “No, no, the two of us, we had coffee this afternoon—didn’t we?” And the old waiter smiles and bows his bald head and I am very sad, suddenly, I am stricken with sadness for the old man. “No, my friend, this coffee is for you and me,” says the deathless man. When the waiter leaves, Gavo pours the hot coffee into the cup, and hands it to me, and sits back and waits for it to be cold enough. This takes a long time, but eventually I drink down my cup, and my friend is smiling at me.

“Well now,” he says, and takes it from me. It is dark on the balcony, and he is peering inside the cup, and I am leaning forward, and his face is like stone.

“Look here,” he says suddenly. “Why did you come into Sarobor? You are with the other side.”

“I beg you not to say that,” I tell him. “I am begging you not to say that aloud again. Do you want that old man to hear?” Gavo is still holding my cup in his hand, and I say: “I am not with the other side. I have no side. I am all sides.”

“Not by name,” he says.

“My wife was born here,” I tell him, and I am tapping the table with my finger. “My daughter, too. We lived here until my daughter was six.”

“But you seem to know what is going to happen tomorrow. I ask, why did you come? You were not summoned. You did not come here to retrieve anything of value. You came to have dinner—why?”

“That is of value to me,” I say. “And apparently to that poor old man, whom you will not even give a chance to be with his family.”

“He will be with his family tonight, Doctor, when he goes home,” the deathless man says, and he is still patient. I cannot believe how patient he is. “Why should I tell him that tomorrow he is going to die? So that, on his last night with his family, he will mourn himself?”

“Why did you bother warning the others, then?”

“What others?”

“The others—the man who drowned you, and the man with the cough at the Virgin of the Waters. Why do you not warn him? Those other men were dying, really dying. This man could save himself, he could leave.”

“So could you,” he says.

“I am going to.”

“Are you?” he says.

“I am,” I say. “Give me that cup, you smiling bastard—there is nothing in it for me.”

But he will not give me the cup, and he says to me: “You did not answer, Doctor, when I asked you why you had come to Sarobor.”

I drink a lot of wine very quickly, and then I say: “Because I have loved it all my life. My finest memories are here—my wife, my child. This, all this, is going to hell tomorrow.”

“By coming here, you realize you risk going with it. They could fire off a missile right now and hit this building.”

“Is that going to happen?” I say. I am too angry now to be concerned.

“It may and it may not,” he says.

“So you are not warning me either?”

“No, Doctor—I am talking about something,” he says patiently. “I am not talking about illness, about a long slow descent into something. I am talking about suddenness. I am trying to explain. I am not warning that man because his life will end in suddenness. He does not need to know this, because it is through the not-knowing that he will not suffer.”

“Suddenness?” I say.

“Suddenness,” he says to me. “His life, as he is living it—well, and with love, with friends—and then suddenness. Believe me, Doctor, if your life ends in suddenness you will be glad it did, and if it does not you will wish it had. You will want suddenness, Doctor.”

“Not me,” I say. “I do not do things, as you say, suddenly. I prepare, I think, I explain.”

“Yes,” he says. “And those things you can do reasonably well for everything—but not this.” And he is pointing into the cup, and I think, yes, he is here for me, too. “Suddenness,” he says. “You do not prepare, you do not explain, you do not apologize. Suddenly, you go. And with you, you take all contemplation, all consideration of your own departure. All the suffering that would have come from knowing comes after you are gone, and you are not a part of it.” He is looking at me, and I am looking at him, and the waiter comes with the check. The waiter must think something very terrible and private is going on, because he leaves very quickly.

“Why are you crying, Doctor?” the deathless man says.

I wipe my eyes and tell him I hadn’t realized I was.

“There is going to be a lot of suddenness, Doctor, over the next few years,” says Gavran Gailé. “They are going to be long, long years—you can have no doubt about that. But those years will pass, eventually they will end. So you must tell me why you came to Sarobor, Doctor, where you take a risk every minute you sit here, even though you know that one day this war will end?”

“This war never ends,” I say. “It was there when I was a child and it will be here for my children’s children. I came to Sarobor because I want to see it again before it dies, because I do not want it to go from me, like you say, in suddenness.” I have been bunching up the tablecloth and I smooth it out. The deathless man puts crisp, clean bills that will be worth nothing in the morning onto the plate with the check. Then I say: “Tell me, Gavran Gailé—does the cup say that I will be joining you, tonight, in suddenness?”

He shrugs, and he is smiling at me. There is nothing angry, nothing mean in his smile. There never is. “What would you like me to say, Doctor?”

“No.”

“Then break your cup,” he says to me, “and go.”

Months later, for weeks and weeks after the bombing ended, Zbogom the tiger continued to eat his own legs. He was docile, tame, to the keepers, but savage on himself, and they would sit in the cage with him, stroking the big square block of his head while he gnawed on the stumps of his legs. The wounds were infected, swollen, and black.

In the end, without announcing it in the newspaper, they shot that legless tiger there, on the stone slab of his cage. The man who raised him—the man who nursed him, weighed him, gave him baths, the man who carried him around the zoo in a knapsack, the man whose hands appeared in every picture ever taken of the tiger as a cub—pulled the trigger. They say the tiger’s mate killed and ate one of her cubs the following spring. To the tigress, the season meant red light and heat, a sound that rises and falls like a scream; so the keepers took the remaining cubs away from her, raised them in their own houses, with their own pets and children. Houses without electricity, with no running water for weeks on end. Houses with tigers.