The Tiger's Wife

EVERYTHING NECESSARY TO UNDERSTAND MY GRANDFATHER lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life—of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.

The war started quietly, its beginning subdued by the decade we had spent on the precipice, waiting for it to come. Kids at school would say “any day now” without knowing what they were talking about, repeating what they had been hearing for years at home. First came the election and then the riots, the assassination of a minister, the massacre at the delta, and then came Sarobor—and after Sarobor, it was like something loosening, a release.

Before the war, every week since I was four, my grandfather and I would take that walk to the citadel to see the tigers. It was always just the two of us. We would start at the bottom and come up the back of Strmina Hill, walking the old carriage trail through the shallow valley of the park on the west side of town, crossing the dozens of small clear streams that drizzled through the undergrowth where, as a little girl, I had spent countless hours, stick in hand, dragging the wet leaves of autumn off the mossy rocks in my useless pursuit of tadpoles. My grandfather, his shoulders bent, arms swinging—rowing, Grandma would call from the balcony as she watched us leave, you’re rowing again, Doctor—loped with long strides, the bag with our farm-stand offerings in his hand. He would wear his vest and slacks, his collared shirt with its long white sleeves, his polished hospital shoes, even for summertime uphill treks. Hurrying after him in worn-out sneakers, a foot and a half shorter than he was, my job was only to keep up. After we had crossed the railroad and passed the place where, at age seven, I had taken a dive off my bicycle and bawled through half an hour of treatment via rakija-soaked cloth to my ripped-up knees, the trail would begin to slope sharply upward.

When he saw me fall behind, my grandfather would stop, wipe his brow, and say: “What’s this, what’s this? I’m just an old man—come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?”

And then I would speed up and pant all the way up the hill while he complained, with maddening relish, about how hoarse I sounded, about how he wouldn’t bring me with him anymore if I insisted on sounding like a weasel in a potato sack, if I was going to ruin his nice time outdoors. From the top of Strmina, the trail descended through a long, flower-speckled meadow across which you could see east over the ruptured Roman wall, stones spilled by long-silent cannon fire, and over the cobbled boulevard of Old Town with its dusty sun-smeared windows, its pale orange roofs, grill smoke drifting through the bright awnings of the coffeehouses and souvenir shops. Pigeons, clustered thick enough to be visible from the hill, shuffled like cowled women up and down the street that curved to the docks where the rivers were smashing into each other all day and all night at the head of the peninsula. And then the view would end as we reached the citadel courtyard and paid at the zoo entrance—always the only people in line on a weekday while the entire City indulged in its afternoon lunch break, always bypassing the green-mouthed camels and the hippo enclosure with its painted egrets, always heading straight for where the tigers were patrolling tirelessly up and down the old grate.

By the time I was thirteen, the ritual of the tigers had become an annoyance. Our way home from the zoo was continually marked by encounters with people I knew: friends, kids my own age, who had long since stopped sharing the company of their elders. I would see them sitting in cafés, smoking on the curb at the Parliament threshold. And they would see me, and remember seeing me, remember enough to laugh mildly about it at school. Their mocking wasn’t unkind, just easy; but it reminded me that I was the prisoner of a rite I no longer felt necessary. I didn’t know at the time that the rite wasn’t solely for my benefit.

Almost immediately after the war began, the Administration closed the zoo. This was ostensibly to prevent anything that might approximate the Zobov incident: a college student in the capital of our soon-to-be southern neighbor had firebombed a zoo concession stand, killing six people. This was part of the Administration’s security plan, a preemptive defense of the city and its citizens—a defense that relied heavily on the cultivation of panic and a deliberate overestimation of enemy resources. They closed the zoo, the bus system, the newly named National Library.

Besides interrupting a childhood ritual I was more than ready to put aside, the closing of the zoo was hardly a cause for alarm. Deep down, we all knew, as the Administration did, that the war was being fought almost seven hundred miles away and that a siege of the City was nearly impossible—we had already caught the enemy off guard. We knew that an air strike would never happen because our own paramilitary had taken out the airplane factory and airstrip at Marhan almost six months ago, but the Administration still implemented a curfew and a mandatory lights-out at 10 p.m., just in case. They issued bulletins warning that anyone anywhere could be an informant for the enemy, that it was important to consider the names of your friends and neighbors before you met them at your usual coffeehouse again, and that, in the event of betrayal, you yourself would be held responsible for what you did not report.

On one hand, life went on. Six or seven kids from my class disappeared almost immediately—without warning, without goodbyes, the way refugees tend to do—but I still trudged to school every morning with a packed lunch. While tanks heading for the border drove down the Boulevard, I sat at the window and practiced sums. Because the war was new and distant, because it was about something my family didn’t want me to trouble myself with and I didn’t particularly care about, there were still art lessons and coffee dates with Zóra, birthday celebrations and shopping trips. My grandfather still taught his seminar and did his hospital rounds and went to the local market every morning, and he still soap-washed apples before peeling them. He also stood in the bread line for six hours at a time, but I wouldn’t know this until later. My mother still carried her projector slides to teach art history at the University, my grandma still tuned in to classic movie hour to watch Clark Gable smirk at Vivien Leigh.

The distance of the fighting created the illusion of normalcy, but the new rules resulted in an attitude shift that did not suit the Administration’s plans. They were going for structure, control, for panic that produced submission—what they got instead was social looseness and lunacy. To spite the curfew, teenagers parked on the Boulevard, sometimes ten cars deep, and sat drinking on their hoods all night. People would close their shops for lunch and go to the pub and not return until three days later. You’d be on your way to the dentist and see him sitting on someone’s stoop in his undershirt, wine bottle in hand, and then you’d either join him or turn around and go home. It was innocent enough at first—before the looting started some years later, before the paramilitary rose to power—the kind of celebration that happens when people, without acknowledging it, stand together on the brink of disaster.

The kids of my generation were still a few years away from facing the inflation that would send us to the bakery with our parents’ money piled up in wheelbarrows, or force us to trade shirts in the hallways at school. Those first sixteen months of wartime held almost no reality, and this made them incredible, irresistible, because the fact that something terrible was happening elsewhere, and at the same time to us, gave us room to get away with anarchy. Never mind that, three hundred miles away, girls sitting in bomb shelters were getting their periods at the age of seven. In the City, we weren’t just affected by the war; we were entitled to our affectation. When your parents said, get your ass to school, it was all right to say, there’s a war on, and go down to the riverbank instead. When they caught you sneaking into the house at three in the morning, your hair reeking of smoke, the fact that there was a war on prevented them from staving your head in. When they heard from neighbors that your friends had been spotted doing a hundred and twenty on the Boulevard with you hanging none too elegantly out the sunroof, they couldn’t argue with there’s a war on, we might all die anyway. They felt responsible, and we took advantage of their guilt because we didn’t know any better.

For all its efforts to go on as before, the school system could not prevent the war, however distant, from sliding in: we saw it in the absence of classmates, in the absence of books, in the absence of pig fetuses (which Zóra and I, even then, had eagerly been looking forward to rummaging through). We were supposed to be inducing chemical reactions and doing basic dissection, but we had no chemicals, and our pig fetuses were being held hostage in a lab somewhere across the ever-shifting border. Instead, we made endless circuits with wires and miniature light-bulbs. We left old-money coins out in the rain to rust and then boiled water and salt and baking soda to clean them. We had a few diagrams of dissected frogs, which we were forced to commit to memory. Inexplicably, we also had a cross section of a horse’s foot, preserved in formaldehyde in a rectangular vase, which we sketched and re-sketched until it might be assumed that any one of us could perform crude surgery on a horse with hoof problems. Mostly, from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, we read the textbook aloud.

To make things worse, the conflict had necessitated a rather biased shift of upperclassmen to upper floors; in other words, the older you were, the farther you were from the school basement bomb shelter. So the year we turned fourteen, Zóra and I ended up in a classroom on the concrete roof overlooking the river, a square turret with enormous windows that normally housed the kindergarteners. Everything about that particular rearrangement of space indicated that it had been made quickly: the walls of the classroom were papered with watercolors of princesses, and the windowsill was lined with Styrofoam cups full of earth, from which, we were told, beans would eventually grow. Some even did. There had been family-tree drawings too, but someone had had the presence of mind to take them down, and had left a bare patch of wall under the blackboard. We sat there, drawing that horse’s hoof, saying things like, there’s a war on, at least if they bomb us we’ll go before the little ones do, very nonchalant about it. The turret window of that room afforded us a 360-degree view of the City, from the big hill to the north to the citadel across the river, behind which the woods rose and fell in a green line. You could see smokestacks in the distance, belching streams as thick as tar, and the brick outline of the old neighborhoods. You could see the dome of the basilica on University Hill, the square cross bright and enormous on top. You could see the iron bridges—still standing in our city, all but gone up and down the two rivers, rubble in the water. You could see the rafts on the riverbank, abandoned and rusted over, and then, upriver at the confluence, Carton City, where the gypsies lived, with its wet paper walls, the black smoke of its dungfires.

Our teacher that year was a small woman who went by the name M. Dobravka. She had nervous hands, and glasses that slid down so often that she had developed a habit of hitching them up by flexing her nose. We would later learn that M. Dobravka had once been a political artist, and that, after we graduated, she moved somewhere else to avoid persecution. Some years later, she encouraged a group of high school students in the production of an antiadministration poster that landed them in jail and caused her to disappear one night on the walk from her apartment to the newspaper kiosk at the corner of her street. Back then, completely unaware of her determination, unfamiliar with the frustration she felt at not having the tools to teach us her own subject, let alone one with which she was unfamiliar, we thought she was hilarious. Then she brought us a gift.

It was a freak March heat wave, hot as summer, and we had come to school and taken our shoes and socks and sweaters off. The turret was like a greenhouse. We had the door open but we were still moist with perspiration and a tender kind of frenzy that comes from unexpected weather. M. Dobravka came in late and out of breath. She had a large, foil-wrapped parcel under one arm, which she opened to reveal two enormous pairs of lungs, pink, wet, soft as satin. A violation of the meat ration. Contraband. We didn’t ask her where she had gotten them.

“Spread some newspapers out on the tables outside,” she said, and her glasses dropped immediately. Ten minutes later, faces dripping with sweat, we hovered over her while she tried to butterfly one pair of lungs with a kitchen knife she had brought along with her. The lung strained against the knife, bulging out on either side of the blade like a rubber ball. The meat was already beginning to smell, and we were swatting the flies away.

“Maybe we should refrigerate them,” somebody said.

But M. Dobravka was a woman possessed. She was determined to make something of the risk she’d taken, to show us how the lungs worked, to open them up like cloth and point out the alveoli, the collapsed air sacs, the thick white cartilage of the bronchial tubes. She sawed away at a corner of the lung, and, as she went on, her range of motion got bigger and bigger, until we all stepped back and watched her tearing into the side of the lung, her glasses going up and down, up and down as she pressed with one arm and pumped away with the other like she was working a cistern.

Then the lung slipped out of her hands and slid across the aluminum foil and over the edge of the table, onto the ground. It lay there, heavy and definite. M. Dobravka looked down at it for a few moments, while the flies immediately found it and began to walk gingerly along the tracheal opening. Then she bent down, picked it up, and dropped it back on the newspaper.

“You,” she said to me, because I happened to be standing next to her. “Get a straw out of the coffee cabinet and come back here and inflate this lung. Come on, hurry up.”

After that, M. Dobravka was a figure of reverence, particularly for me. Those lungs—the way she’d smuggled them in for us, the way she’d stood over us while we took turns blowing into them, one by one—cemented my interest in becoming a doctor.

M. Dobrovka had also touched upon our relationship to contraband, an obsession that was already beginning to seize the whole City. For her, it was school supplies. For us, it was the same guiding principle, but a different material concern. Suddenly, because we couldn’t have them, because they were expensive and difficult to obtain, we wanted things we had never thought of wanting, things that would give us bragging rights: fake designer handbags, Chinese jewelry, American cigarettes, Italian perfume. Zóra started wearing her mother’s lipstick, and then began looking for ways to buy some herself. Six months into the war, she developed a taste for French cigarettes, and refused to smoke anything else. All of fifteen, she would sit at the table in our coffeehouse on the Square of the Revolution and raise her eyebrow at boys who had probably gone to considerable lengths to impress her with local varieties. At a party I don’t remember attending, she took up with Branko, who was twenty-one and reputed to be a gunrunner. I didn’t approve, but there was a war on. Besides, he later turned out to be a punk whose mightiest offense was stealing radios.

Most weekends, Zóra and I would go down to the bottom of Old Town and park at the dock. This was the University hangout, the epicenter of contraband activity, and the boys, gangly and bird-shouldered, sat along the railing with their tables and boxes lined up, videos and sunglasses and T-shirts on display. Zóra, wearing her shortest skirt, pursued by colorful catcalls, would make her way down to where Branko had his stand and sit cross-legged while he played accordion and drank beer and, as the evening deepened, took breaks from peddling his wares to feel her up behind the dumpster. In the meantime, I stayed in the car with the windows rolled down, legs crossed through the passenger window, the bass line of Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” humming in my lower back.

This was how Ori found me—Ori, who sold fake designer labels he swore he could seamlessly attach to your clothing, luggage, haberdashery. He was seventeen, skinny and shy-grinning, another guy whose wartime reputation made him considerably more appealing than he otherwise might have been, but he had the temerity to stick his head into the car and ask, regarding my music selection, “You like this stuff? You want more?”

Ori had struck upon my only vice, which I had barely managed to keep in check. The Administration had shut down all but two radio stations, and insisted on repeat airings of folk songs that were outdated even by my grandma’s standards. By the second year of war, I was sick of love songs that used trees and barrels as metaphors. Without knowing I was missing them, I wanted Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and Johnny Cash. The first time Ori got me out of the car, he led me across the dock to where his three-legged mutt was guarding an overturned crate, and showed me his stash, alphabetized, the lyrics mistranslated and handwritten on notepaper that had been carefully folded and stuffed into the tape boxes. By some miracle, he had a Walkman, which almost made him worth dating in and of itself, and we sat on the floor behind his table, one earbud each, and he took me through his collection and put his hand on my thigh.

When, after a few weeks of saving up, I tried to buy Graceland, he said, “There’s a war on, your money’s no good,” and kissed me. I remember being surprised at his mouth, at the difference between the dry outer part of his mouth and the wet inner part, and thinking about this while he was kissing me, and afterward, too.

We went on kissing for three more months, during which my musical holdings must have tripled, and then Ori, like many boys around that age, disappeared. I had borrowed his Walkman and showed up three nights running to our café so I could return it to him—eventually someone told me he was gone, and they didn’t know if he had enlisted or fled the draft. I kept the Walkman, slept with it, which must have been some expression of missing him, but the reality of his being gone wouldn’t sink in until other things went missing.

The years I spent immersing myself in the mild lawlessness of the war my grandfather spent believing it would end soon, pretending that nothing had changed. I now know that the loss of the tigers was a considerable blow to him, but I wonder whether his optimism didn’t have as much to do with my behavior, with his refusal to accept that, for a while at least, he had lost me. We saw very little of each other, and while we did not talk about those years afterward, I know that his other rituals went on uninterrupted, unaltered. Breakfast over a newspaper, followed by Turkish coffee brewed by my grandma; personal correspondence, always in alphabetical order, as dictated by his address book. A walk to the market for fresh fruit—or, as the war went on, whatever he could get, as long as he came back with something. On Mondays and Wednesdays, an afternoon lecture at the University. Lunch, followed by an afternoon nap. Some light exercise; a snack at the kitchen table, almost always sunflower seeds. Then a few hours in the living room with my mother and grandma, sometimes talking, sometimes just sitting together. Dinner, and then an hour of reading. Bed.

We interacted, but always without commiserating, always without acknowledging that things were different. Like the time he forced me to stay home for the family Christmas party, and I drank Cognac all night because I knew he would not reprimand me in front of the guests. Or the time I came home at four—eyeliner smeared and hair a mess following a prolonged encounter with Ori behind a broken vending machine—to find my grandfather on the curb outside our building, on his way back from an emergency house call, politely trying to fend off the advances of a leggy blonde I soon realized was a prostitute.

“You see, there is my granddaughter,” I heard him say as I approached, his voice the voice of a drowning man. Relief tightened the skin around his temples, a reaction I never would have hoped for considering the circumstances of my return. I stepped onto the curb beside him, and he grabbed my arm. “Here she is,” he said cheerfully. “You see, here she is.”

“Beat it,” I said to the hooker, acutely aware of the fact that my bra was hanging on for dear life, down to one solitary clasp that might give at any moment and render the whole situation even more uncomfortable.

My grandfather gave the prostitute fifty dinars, and I stood behind him while he unlocked the downstairs door, watching her go down the street on cane-thin legs, one heel slightly shorter than the other.

“What did you give her that money for?” I asked him as we went upstairs.

“You shouldn’t be rude like that to anyone,” he said. “We didn’t raise you that way.” Without stopping to look at me when we got to the door: “For shame.”

This had been the general state of affairs for years. My grandfather and I, without acknowledging it, were at a stalemate. His reductions had dropped my allowance to a new low, and I had taken to locking my door and smoking cigarettes in my room, under the covers.

I was thus occupied one spring afternoon when the doorbell rang. A few moments later, it rang again, and then again. I think I probably shouted for someone to get the door, and when no one did, I put my cigarette out on the outer sill of my bedroom window and did it myself.

I remember the shape of the narrow-brimmed black hat that obscured most of the peephole, and I did not see the man’s face, but I was anxious to get back to my room and irritated that no one else in the house had answered.

When I opened the door, the man said that he was there to see the doctor. He had a thin voice, and a doughy face that looked like it had been forcibly stuffed up into his hat, which was probably why he had not removed it in greeting in the first place. I thought I’d seen him before, that he was a hospital official, maybe, and I showed him in and left him in the hall. My mother was on campus, preparing for class; my grandparents sharing a late lunch in the kitchen. My grandfather was eating with one hand, and with the other he held my grandma’s wrist across the table. She was smiling about something, and the moment I came in she pointed at the pot of stuffed peppers on the stove.

“Eat something,” she said.

“Later,” I said. “There’s a man at the door for you,” I said to my grandfather.

“Who the hell is it?” my grandfather said.

“I don’t know,” I told him.

A few more spoonfuls of stuffed pepper while my grandfather thought it over. “Well, what does he think this is? Tell him to wait. I’m eating with my wife.” My grandma handed him the bread.

I showed the hat into the living room, and he sat there for what must have been twenty minutes, looking around. So that no one could accuse me of being inhospitable, I went to get him some water, but when I came back I saw that he had taken a notebook out of his briefcase, and was squinting up at the paintings on our walls, scribbling down some sort of inventory. His eye went over my grandparents’ wedding pictures, my grandma’s old coffee set, the vintage bottles behind the glass door of the liquor cabinet.

He was writing and writing, and I realized what a serious mistake I had made letting him into the house. I was terrified, and then when he took two gulps of water and peered into the glass to see if it was clean all my fear turned into a wash of rage. I went into my room to put my Paul Simon tape in my Walkman and returned to the living room with my headset on, pretending to dust. I had the Walkman clipped to my pocket so he could see it, the angry wheels of my contraband spinning through the plastic window, and he sat there blinking at me while I ran a moist towel over the television and the coffee table and the pictures from my grandparents’ wedding. I thought I was somehow sticking it to him, but he was unfazed by all this, and continued to write in his notebook until my grandfather came out of the kitchen.

“Can I help you?” he said, and the hat got up and shook his hand.

The hat said good afternoon, and that he was there on behalf of the enlistment office. He showed my grandfather his card. I turned down the headset volume and started dusting books one by one.

“Well?” my grandfather said. He did not ask the hat to sit back down.

“I am here to confirm your birth date and your record of service in the army,” the hat said. “On behalf of the enlistment office.” My grandfather stood across the coffee table with his arms folded, looking the hat up and down. “This is standard procedure, Doctor.”

“Then proceed.”

The hat put on a pair of glasses and opened the ledger to the page on which he had been scribbling. He ran a large, white finger down the page, and without looking up, he asked my grandfather: “It is true you were born in 1932?”

My grandfather nodded once.

“Where?”

“In Galina.”

“And where is that?” I didn’t know myself.

“Some four hundred miles northwest of here, I suppose.”

“Brothers or sisters?”

“None.”

“You served in the National Army from ’47 to ’56?”

“That is correct.”

“And why did you leave?”

“To work at the University.”

The hat made a note, and looked up at my grandfather and smiled. My grandfather did not return the expression, and the hat’s grin deflated.

“Children?” the hat said.

“One daughter.”

“Where does she live?”

“Here.”

“Grandchildren?”

“One granddaughter.”

“Are there any young men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five living in the house, or who have cited this house as a residence?”

“None,” my grandfather said.

“Where is your son-in-law?”

My grandfather’s mouth moved as he ran his tongue over a tooth. “There are no other men living here.”

“And—I’m sorry, Doctor, standard procedure—your wife?”

“What about her?”

“Was she born in Galina, too?”

“Why, are you hoping to draft her?”

The hat didn’t reply. He appeared to be going down the page, counting something.

“Your wife’s full name, please, Doctor?”

“Mrs. Doctor,” my grandfather said. He said this in a way that made the hat look up from his notebook.

“Like I said, Doctor, this is standard procedure for the enlistment office.”

“I don’t believe you, and I don’t like your questions. You’re sucking around for something, and you may as well ask me directly so we can get to the point.”

“Where was your wife born?”

“In Sarobor.”

“I see,” the hat said. I had stopped dusting, and was standing there with the moist towel in my hand, looking from my grandfather to the hat. I could imagine my grandma sitting on the other side of the door, in the kitchen, listening to all this. We had heard about this kind of thing happening; I had let it into the house.

“And your wife’s family lives—?”

“My wife’s family lives in this house.”

“Is your wife in touch with anyone in Sarobor?”

“Of course not,” my grandfather said. Only later would I understand what it meant to him to add: “Even if she wanted to be, I should think that would be difficult to manage, considering it’s been razed to the ground.”

“It is my job to ask,” the hat said with a gracious smile. He was clearly trying to backtrack now, to ingratiate himself, and he waved a hand around the room. “You are a man of considerable assets, and if your wife has brothers or sisters still in Sarobor—”

“Get out,” my grandfather said. The hat blinked at him stupidly. My neck had stiffened up, and drops of cold water from the towel were running down the outside of my leg.

“Doctor—” the hat began, but my grandfather cut him off.

“Get the hell out.” He had put his hands behind his back and was rocking forward on his heels now. His shoulders had slumped down and forward, his whole face sunk in a grimace. “Out of my house,” he said. “Out.”

The hat closed his notebook and put it away. Then he picked up the briefcase and rested it on the edge of the coffee table. “There’s no need for this misunderstanding.”

“Did you hear me?” my grandfather said. Then, without warning, he leaned forward in one motion and grabbed the handle of the briefcase and pulled. The hat did not let go, and he stumbled forward still hanging on, and the coffee table went end over end, the vase and all the old newspapers and magazines on it showering onto the floor, along with the contents of the briefcase, which had flown open. The hat knelt down, red-faced—God damn it, look at all this, there’s no need for this, sir—trying to put all his papers back in the briefcase, and suddenly my grandfather, like something out of a cartoon, was kicking all those fallen newspapers and letters and magazines and coupons, kicking his feet into the pile and heaving up clouds of paper. He looked ridiculous, long-legged and awkward in his suit, swinging his arms around insanely and saying, without the slightest rise in his voice, “Get out, get out, get out, get the hell out.” By the time the hat had finished stuffing his belongings back into the briefcase, my grandfather was already holding the door open.

Three months later, the Administration came down especially hard on established doctors. Apparently, my grandfather was not the only one with ties to the old system, to the provinces, to families there. Doctors above the age of fifty, suspected of having loyalist feelings toward the unified state, were suspended from practice, and were informed, in writing, that their University seminars would be closely monitored.

Despite the insistent pull of his instinct to protect us, my grandfather still suffered from that national characteristic of our people that is often mistaken for stupidity but is more like self-righteous indignation. He called a locksmith whom he had once treated for gallstones, and had him install the most complex front-door deadbolt system I had ever seen. It made the inner plane of the door look like something out of a clock, and you needed three separate keys to get in from the outside. The sound of the gears moving would have woken the dead. Although the termination of his practice did not entirely preclude him from teaching at the University, my grandfather tendered his resignation. Then he telephoned the patients he was now forbidden to see—asthma sufferers and victims of rheumatoid arthritis; insomniacs, teachers who had recently given up smoking, construction workers whose backs were on the mend; paraplegics and hypochondriacs; a tubercular horse breeder; a celebrated thespian who was also a recovering alcoholic—and arranged a schedule of house calls that seemed, at least to me, endless.

I sat in the armchair beside his desk while he made the phone calls, rolling my eyes. I couldn’t figure out whether his decision was the result of his commitment to his patients, or some remote glimmer of the same adolescent stubbornness I recognized in myself, in Zóra, in the kids on the docks. The possibility that it might be the latter terrified me, but I did not have the courage to challenge him on that front, to ask him if it was possible that he could risk everything on something that in us seemed like towering defiance, but in him amounted to inexcusable stupidity. Instead—in what must have been the most I’d said to him in months—I leveled one disastrous scenario after another at him, all of which left him completely unfazed: What if one of your patients is indiscreet? What if someone follows you on a house call? What if the pharmacy starts asking questions about why you yourself are filling out all these prescriptions for ailments you clearly don’t have? What if someone in your care dies, has a stroke, hemorrhages, suffers an aneurysm—what if you’re blamed for that death because your patient didn’t go to the hospital? What if you end up in prison, charged with murder? What will happen to us?

“Why do I have to be the adult?” I would ask Zóra while we sat at our usual table, waiting for Branko to start baying into the microphone. “Why do I have to point out when he does something insane?”

“I know,” Zóra would say, smacking her lips in the direction of her compact. “Really.”

My grandfather must have noticed that he was seeing considerably more of me than he had over the past two years. He must have noticed that I, and not my grandma, was brewing coffee at daybreak; that our breakfast debates over the latest news did not stop with my waving a hand and muttering, what do you expect, there’s a war on, but spilled down the stairs and onto the street when I went with him to do the marketing; that I protested when my grandma tried to make the beds, or chop too-hard vegetables, or watch television instead of taking a nap. He must have realized that I was doing my homework in the kitchen every evening when he left to make house calls, and that I was up doing the crossword puzzle when he returned. He must have noticed it all, but he never said anything of my new rituals, and he never invited me to share in any of his. This was, perhaps, a kind of punishment, and back then I thought it was for allowing myself to slip, or for letting the hat into our apartment. Now I realize that it was punishment for giving up so easily on the tigers.

In the end, though, I must have earned something back, because he told me about the deathless man.

It was the summer I turned sixteen. Some patient—I didn’t know who—had been battling pneumonia, and my grandfather’s visits to him had increased from once to three times a week. I had dozed off struggling through a crossword puzzle, fully intending to wait up for him, and I came around some hours later to find my grandfather standing in the doorway, flicking the table lamp on and off. When he saw me sit up, he stopped, and for a few moments I sat in total darkness.

“Natalia,” I heard him say, and I realized he was motioning for me to get off the sofa. I could see him now. He was still wearing his hat and raincoat, and exhaustion turned my relief at seeing him into impatience.

“What?” I said, all hunched and groggy. “What?”

He motioned toward the door, and then he said, “Quietly. Come on.” He had my raincoat over his arm, my sneakers in his right hand. Evidently, there was no time to change. “What’s going on?” I said, forcing my foot into an already laced sneaker. “What’s the matter?”

“You’ll see,” he said, holding the coat out for me. “Hurry up, come on.”

I thought: that’s it, it’s finally happened—he’s killed somebody.

The elevator would have made too much noise, so we took the stairs. Outside the rain had stopped, but water was still running in the gutters, coming down the street from the market and carrying with it the smell of cabbage and dead flowers. The café across the street had closed early, the patio chained off, wet chairs stacked on the tabletops. An enormous white cat was sitting under the pharmacy awning, blinking at us with distaste as we passed under the lamppost at the end of the block. By this time, I had given up on my coat buttons.

“Where are we going?” I said. “What’s happened?”

But my grandfather didn’t answer. He just kept moving down the street, so fast I came after him almost at a run. I thought, if I start crying, he’ll make me go back, and stayed on his heels. Past the baker, the bank, the out-of-business toy shop where I had bought stickers for my never-completed Ewoks album; past the stand that sold fried dough, the sugared smell of it wedged permanently in the air; past the stationery shop, the newsstand on the next corner. Three blocks down, I realized how quiet it was. We had passed two cafés, both closed, and a late-night grill that was normally packed, but was occupied tonight by only one waiter, who sat spinning coins across an eight-person table.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked my grandfather.

I wondered what my mother would do if she woke up to find us both gone. We were nearing the end of our street where it opened out onto the Boulevard, and I assumed the silence of our walk would be shattered by the bustle along the tramway. But when we got there, nothing, not even a single passing car. All the way from one end of the Boulevard to the other, every window was dark, and a hazy yellow moon was climbing along the curve of the old basilica on the hill. As it rose, it seemed to be gathering the silence up around it like a net. Not a sound: no police sirens, no rats in the dumpsters that lined the street. Not even my grandfather’s shoes as he stopped, looked up and down the street, and then turned left to follow the Boulevard east across the Square of the Konjanik.

“It’s not far now,” he said, and I caught up with him long enough to see the side of his face. He was smiling.

“Not far to where?” I said, out of breath, angry. “Where are you taking me?” I drew myself up and stopped. “I’m not going any further until you tell me what the hell this is.”

He turned to look at me, indignant. “Lower your voice, you fool, before you set something off,” he hissed. “Can’t you feel it?” Suddenly his arms went over his head in a wide arc. “Isn’t it lovely? No one in the world awake but us.” And off he went again. I stood still for a few moments, watching him go, a tall, thin, noiseless shadow. Then the realization of it rushed over me: he didn’t need me with him, he wanted me there. Without realizing it, I had been invited back.

We passed the empty windows of shops that had gone out of business; lightless buildings where roosting pigeons hunched along the fire escapes; a beggar sleeping so soundly that I would have thought him dead if I hadn’t realized that the moment had closed around us, stilling everything.

When I finally caught up with my grandfather, I said: “Look, I don’t know what we’re doing, but I’d like to be in on it.”

Then suddenly he stopped in the darkness ahead of me and my chin cracked his elbow. The force of the collision knocked me back, but then he reached for me and held my shoulder while I steadied myself. My jaw clicked when I put my hand against it.

My grandfather stood on the curb, pointing into the distance of the empty street. “There,” he said, “look.” His hand was shaking with excitement.

“I don’t see anything,” I told him.

“Yes you do,” he said. “You do, Natalia. Look.”

I peered out into the street, where the long blades of the rails lay slick and shining. There was a tree on the other curb, a lamppost with a dying bulb, an eviscerated dumpster lying on its side in the road. I was opening my mouth to say what? And then I saw it.

Half a block from where we were standing, an enormous shadow was moving along the street, going very slowly up the Boulevard of the Revolution. At first I thought it was a bus, but its shape was too organic, too lumpy, and it was going far too slowly for that, making almost no noise. It was swaying, too, swaying up the street with an even momentum, a ballasted rolling motion that was drawing it away from us like a tide, and every time it rocked forward something about it made a soft dragging sound on the rails. As we watched, the thing sucked in air and then let out a deep groan.

“God,” I said. “That’s an elephant.”

My grandfather said nothing, but when I looked up at him he was smiling. His glasses had fogged up during the walk, but he wasn’t taking them off to wipe them.

“Come on,” he said, and took my hand. We moved fast along the sidewalk until we drew parallel, and then passed it, stopped a hundred meters down so we could watch it coming toward us.

From there, the elephant—the sound and smell of it; the ears folded back against the domed, bouldered head with big-lidded eyes; the arched roll of the spine, falling away into the hips; dry folds of skin shaking around the shoulders and knees as it shifted its weight—seemed to take up the whole street. It dragged its curled trunk like a fist along the ground. Several feet in front of it, holding a bag of something that must have been enormously tempting, a short young man was walking slowly backward, drawing it forward with whispers.

“I saw them up at the train station as I was coming home,” my grandfather said. “He must be bringing it to the zoo.”

The young man had seen us, and as he inched back along the tramway he nodded and smiled, pulled down on his cap. Every so often, he would take something out of the bag and hold it out to the elephant, and the elephant would lift its trunk from the ground, grip the offering, and loll it back between the yellow sabers of its tusks.

Later on, we would read about how some soldiers had found him near death at the site of an abandoned circus; about how, despite everything, despite closure and bankruptcy, the zoo director had said bring him in, bring him in and eventually the kids will see him. For months the newspapers would run a picture of him, standing stark-ribbed in his new pen at the zoo, an advert of times to come, a pledge of the zoo’s future, the undeniable end of the war.

My grandfather and I stopped at the bus station, and the elephant passed, slow, graceful, enchanted by the food in the young man’s hand. The moon threw a tangle of light into the long, soft hairs sticking up out of his trunk and under his chin. The mouth was open, and the tongue lay in it like a wet arm.

“No one will ever believe this,” I said.

My grandfather said: “What?”

“None of my friends will ever believe it.”

My grandfather looked at me like he’d never seen me before, like he couldn’t believe I was his. Even in our estrangement, he had never quite looked at me that way, and afterward he never did again.

“You must be joking,” he said. “Look around. Think for a moment. It’s the middle of the night, not a soul anywhere. In this city, at this time. Not a dog in the gutter. Empty. Except for this elephant—and you’re going to tell your idiot friends about it? Why? Do you think they’ll understand it? Do you think it will matter to them?”

He left me behind and walked on after the elephant. I stood with my hands in my pockets. I felt my voice had fallen through and through me, and I couldn’t summon it back to tell him or myself anything at all. The elephant was moving forward along the Boulevard. I followed it. A block down, my grandfather had stopped beside a broken bench, was waiting for the elephant. I caught up with him first, and the two of us stood side by side, in silence, my face burning, his breath barely audible. The young man did not look at us again.

Eventually, my grandfather said: “You must understand, this is one of those moments.”

“What moments?”

“One of those moments you keep to yourself,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Why?”

“We’re in a war,” he said. “The story of this war—dates, names, who started it, why—that belongs to everyone. Not just the people involved in it, but the people who write newspapers, politicians thousands of miles away, people who’ve never even been here or heard of it before. But something like this—this is yours. It belongs only to you. And me. Only to us.” He put his hands behind his back and ambled along slowly, kicking the polished tips of his shoes up as he walked, exaggerating his movements so they would slow him down. No thought of turning around, of going home. Down the Boulevard for as long as the elephant and his boy would tolerate us. My grandfather said: “You have to think carefully about where you tell it, and to whom. Who deserves to hear it? Your grandma? Zóra? Certainly not that clown you carry on with at the docks.”

That stung. “He’s gone,” I said quietly.

“I would like to be able to say that I’m sorry,” my grandfather said.

“Well, I am,” I said. “He was drafted.” This I said to make him feel guilty; I didn’t know for certain.

For a while, neither of us said anything. The elephant’s breathing fell in around us. It was like being inside an engine room. Every few minutes, it would let out a high, hollow, insistent whistle, the barest threat of impatience, and when it did this the young man held the food out more quickly.

Then I asked my grandfather, “Do you have stories like that?”

“I do now.”

“No, I mean from before,” I said.

I saw him thinking about it. He thought for a long time while we walked with the elephant. Perhaps under slightly different circumstances, he might have told me about the tiger’s wife. Instead, he told me about the deathless man.

Hands behind his back, walking in the shadow of our elephant, my grandfather said:

This is late summer, ’54. Not ’55, because that’s the year I met your grandma. I am first triage assistant for the battalion, and my apprentice, God rest him, or intern as you would call it, is Dominic Lazlo, a brilliant little Hungarian fellow who has paid a lot of money to study at our University, and who doesn’t speak a word of the language. God knows why he’s not in Paris or London, he’s that apt with a scalpel. Not apt at much else, though. At any rate: a call comes in from this village, where there is a sickness. Some people have died, and those still living are afraid—there is a terrible cough, and blood on their pillows in the morning. This is about as mysterious to me as an empty milk saucer when there’s a big, fat cat in the room, and the cat has a ring of milk on its whiskers and everyone is asking where the milk is.

So. We hitch a wagon ride to this village. The man who greets us is called Marek. He is the son of the big man in town, and has been to University. He is the man who sent the wire asking us to come. He is short and stocky, and he leads us through the village and into his father’s house. Marek’s sister is this fat, pleasant-looking woman, very much what you’d expect. She gives us coffee and bread with cheese, a nice change from all the porridge we’ve been eating back at barracks. Then Marek says, “Gentlemen, something new is at hand.” I expect he will say: the epidemic’s gotten worse, more death, mass hysteria. I am partly right, especially about the hysteria.

Apparently, this is how it stands: a man has died, and there has been a funeral. At the funeral, the man, who is called Gavo, sits up in his coffin and asks for water. It is an immense surprise. Three o’clock in the afternoon, the procession is following the casket up the churchyard slope to the plot. First, there’s the noise of the body sliding in the coffin, and when the lid slides off there he is, this man Gavo, as pale and blue-faced as the day they found him, floating belly up in a pond some way from the town. Gavo sits up in his pressed suit, hat in hand, folded purple napkin in his pocket. An immense surprise. High up, held aloft in his coffin like a man in a boat, he looks around the procession with red eyes and says: “Water.” That is all. By the time the pallbearers have realized what’s happened, by the time they’ve dropped the coffin and fled like crazy men into the church, this man Gavo has already fallen back into the casket.

That is what Marek tells us regarding this new development.

From where we are sitting in Marek’s house, I can see out the open door and down the road leading across the field and through the churchyard. I have only just noticed that the town is very empty, and that, at the door of the little church, there is a man with a pistol—the undertaker, Marek tells me, Aran Darić, who hasn’t slept for six days. I am already thinking it would be far more productive to help this man Aran Dari?.

Meanwhile, Marek is still telling the story, and in it the man Gavo does not rise from his coffin again. This is helped by the fact that some unknown member of the funeral procession fires two bullets from an army pistol into the back of Gavo’s head while he is sitting up in the coffin right after the pallbearers drop it. Never mind why someone is so very prepared to fire a gun at a funeral. Marek only tells this part of the story after he has had two or three glasses of plum brandy.

I am taking notes this whole time, and wondering about how this Gavo ties into the sickness I am here to treat. When Marek mentions the two bullets, I put my pencil down and say: “So, the man was not dead?”

“No, no,” Marek says. “Most assuredly, Gavo was dead.”

“Before the bullets were fired?” I ask him, because it seems to me that this whole business is taking a different route, and now they’re just making things up to cover murder.

Marek shrugs and says: “It is a surprise, I know.”

I continue to write, but what I am writing does not make much sense, and Marek looks with interest across the table and reads what I am writing upside down. Dominic, who I suspect has not understood any of this, is staring intently at me for some sort of explanation.

I say: “We will have to see the body.”

Marek’s hands are on the table, and I can see that he is a man who bites his nails when he is nervous. He has been biting them a lot recently. He says to me: “Are you sure this is necessary?”

“We will have to see it.”

“I don’t know about that, Doctor.”

I have been making a list of all the people I want to speak with—anyone who is sick, all the family members of this revenant fellow, Gavo, and especially the priest and the undertaker, who are most likely to know about how ill this man was before he was shot. I say to Marek: “Mr. Marek, many people are at risk here. If this man was sick—”

“He was not sick.”

“I’m sorry?”

“He was perfectly healthy.”

Dominic is looking in abject confusion from Marek to myself. He has known me long enough to process that the expression on my face is probably not one of delight, and he is obviously puzzled by what is going on. Marek himself doesn’t look too good, either. I say: “Very well, then, Mr. Marek, I will tell you how I see it. As far as the village goes, including Mr. Gavo himself, I am confident that my findings will probably arrive at a diagnosis of consumption—tuberculosis. It is consistent with the symptoms you’ve described to me—the bloody cough and so forth. I would like to have all the people who are sick assembled in your town hospital, as quickly as possible, and I would also like to place this town under quarantine until we can assess the extent of the illness.”

And here, he catches me off guard, because he says sharply, “What do you mean, tuberculosis?” He looks very distraught. And I would expect him to be distraught at tuberculosis, but I would expect a different kind of alarm—the way he looks at me, I feel like my diagnosis doesn’t suit him, like it’s inadequate, not severe enough for him.

Marek says: “Couldn’t it be something else?”

I tell him no, not with these symptoms, not with people falling dead one by one and leaving bloody pillows behind. I tell him that it will be all right, that I will send out for medicine, for nurses and another city physician to help me.

But he says: “Yes, but what if that doesn’t help?”

“It will.”

“If it’s tuberculosis,” he says. “If you’re right.”

“I am not entirely certain where this is going.”

“What if you’re wrong—what if it’s something else?” Marek says. By this time, he is very agitated, and he says, “I don’t think you understand, sir—I really doubt you understand.”

“Well, tell me about it,” I say.

“Well,” says Marek. “There is blood on our pillows. And … there was blood on the lapels of Gavo’s coat.”

“Because you shot him.”

Marek almost falls out of his seat. “I didn’t shoot him, Doctor, he was already dead!”

I am scribbling again, mostly just to look official. Dominic is sweating in frustration. I say: “I will need to speak with his family.”

“He has no family. He’s not from around here.”

“Then why was he buried here?”

“He was some sort of peddler from far away, we didn’t know anything about him. We wanted to do right by him.”

To me, this is becoming more and more frustrating—but I think: maybe that is why they are all suddenly coming down with tuberculosis, maybe he was infected and brought it in, even though he seemed perfectly healthy to them. But then, he has only been here for a short time, certainly not enough time to get the whole village sick—but obviously long enough for them to shoot him in the back of the head. “Who will give me permission to dig up the body?”

“You don’t need it.” Marek is wringing his hands. “We nailed the coffin shut, and then we put him in the church. He’s still in there.”

I look through the door again, and, sure enough, there is Aran Darić, standing at the church door, pistol in hand. Just in case. “I see.”

“No,” Marek says. He is almost crying, and he is wringing his hat furiously in his hands. Dominic has all but given up. Marek says: “No, you don’t see. People with blood on their clothes are sitting up in coffins and then there is blood on our pillows in the morning. I don’t believe you see at all.”

So there we are, Dominic and I, standing in the little stone church at Bistrina, and the coffin of the man called Gavo is there, lying at an angle from the door, as if it’s been shoved in pretty quickly. It’s a dusty wooden coffin. The church is stone, and quiet. It smells of sandalwood and wax, and there is an icon of the Virgin above the door. The windows are blue glass. It is a beautiful church, but it is obvious that no one has been in it for a long time—the candles are all out, and this fellow Gavo’s coffin is covered with a few spatters of white, which the doves that live in the belfry have been dropping down on him. It is a sad thing to see, because as far as I know, this man Gavo has done nothing to deserve being shot in the back of the head at his own funeral. Twice.

After we come in, Aran Darić closes the door behind us quickly and suddenly, and for a long time everything is quiet in the little church. We’ve come in with our satchels, and we’ve also brought a crowbar to open the coffin, and we begin to realize that perhaps we should have brought in more than just the crowbar—a team of oxen, for example, because the coffin has not only been nailed shut, but also crisscrossed with extra boards across the lid, and chained around and around with what looks like a bicycle chain. Someone, probably as an afterthought, has thrown a string of garlic onto the coffin, and the heads are lying there in their paper shells.

Dominic manages to say to me, “Shame, awful shame.” Then he spits and says, “Peasants.”

And then we hear something that is altogether incredible, something you cannot even begin to appreciate because, without hearing for yourself the way it sounded in the quiet church, you won’t believe it happened. It is the sound of shuffling movement, and then, all of a sudden, a voice from the coffin, a frank, polite, slightly muffled voice that says: “Water.”

We are, of course, completely paralyzed. Dominic Lazlo stands beside me, gripping the crowbar in a white fist. His breathing is slow and shallow, and his mustache is beginning to sweat, and he is swearing quietly again and again in Hungarian. I am on the verge of saying something when the voice—same tone, very passive, just asking—says: “Pardon me: water, please.”

And then quick, quick, he’s alive, open the coffin! Dominic Lazlo is thrusting the edge of the crowbar under the lid, and I am on my knees trying to yank off the bicycle chain. We’re hammering away at the coffin like we’re trying to pry the whole thing to pieces, and Dominic has his foot against the side and he’s heaving down on the length of the crowbar like a madman, and I am not helping by saying, push push push. And then the lid, creaking like bone, snaps off and there he is, the man Gavo lying back against the cushions with his folded purple napkin, looking slightly dusty but otherwise unharmed.

We grab him by the arms and pull him into a sitting position, which, in retrospect, isn’t something I recommend you ever do with someone who’s been shot in the back of the head, because who knows what’s kept him alive. But I think, how extraordinary. I have been expecting this man to look older, white hair, maybe a mustache.

But Gavo is young, thirty at most, and he has a fine head of dark hair and a pleased expression on his face. It is hard to believe that a man who has just been pulled out of a coffin where he has spent several days can look anything short of exuberant; but that’s the extraordinary thing, he just looks very pleased, sitting there, with his hands in his lap.

“Do you know your name?” I ask him. There is still a lot of urgency for me, and so I widen his eyes with my fingers and peer inside. He looks at me with interest.

“Oh yes,” he says. “Gavo.” He sits there patiently while I feel his forehead and take his pulse. Then he says: “I’m sorry, but I would really like some water.”

Half a minute later, Dominic takes off running through the village to the well, and allegedly passes Marek, who shouts, “I told you, didn’t I?” after him. In the meantime, I am opening my medical bag and taking out my things and listening to Gavo’s heart, which still beats firmly under the thin rib bones of his chest. He asks me who I am, and I tell him I’m Dr. Leandro from such and such battalion, and not to worry. Dominic comes back with the water, and, as Gavo tips the bucket to drink, I notice the drops of blood on the coffin pillow, and Dominic and I both look around the side of Gavo’s head. And sure enough, there they are, two bullets, sitting like metal eyes in the nest of Gavo’s hair. Now there is the question of, shall we risk moving him or perform the excision right here—and, should we perform the excision at all, because what if we pull the bullets out and his brains come running after them like undercooked eggs? And then we have a funeral after all, and have to try the whole village for murder, or else we get implicated somehow, and then the whole thing ends in disaster for everybody.

So I ask him: “How do you feel, Gavo?”

He has finished the bucket and he puts it down on his knees. He looks suddenly refreshed, and he says: “Much better, thank you.” Then he looks at Dominic and thanks him in Hungarian and commends him on his masterful handling of the crowbar.

I am careful about what I say next. “You have been shot in the head twice,” I say. “I need to take you to the hospital so we can decide how best to treat you.”

But Gavo is cheerful. “No, thank you,” he says. “It is very late already, I should be on my way.” And he grips the sides of the coffin and pulls himself out, just like that. A small cloud of dust lifts off him and falls to the ground, and he stands there in the little church, looking up at the stained glass windows and the light drifting in as if it is breaking through water.

I get up and I push him back down, and I say to him: “Please don’t do that again, you are in a serious condition, very serious.”

“It is not so serious,” he says, smiling. He reaches around and fingers the bullets in the back of his head, and the whole time he is smiling at me rather like a cow. I can picture his fingers moving around on the bullets, and the whole time he is touching them I am reaching for his hands to stop him, and I can imagine his eyes moving around, in and out of his head, as the bullets push his brains about. Which, of course, isn’t happening. But you can see it all the same. Then he says: “I know this is probably very frightening for you, Doctor, but this is not the first time this has happened.”

“I’m sorry?” I say.

He tells me: “I was once shot in the eye at Plovotje, during a battle.”

“Last year?” I say, because there was a political skirmish out at Plovotje, and several people died, and moreover I believe him to be mistaken about the eye, because neither of his eyes is missing.

“No, no, no,” he says. “In the war.”

This other battle at Plovotje, in the war, was something like fifteen years ago, so this is not impossible. But still, there is the matter of his having both eyes, and I have decided, by now, that there is nothing to do but ignore him, and I tell myself that yes, it is true, the bullets have made mincemeat of his brains. I tell him I know he is in great pain, and that these things are hard to accept. But he is smiling so persistently that I stop and look at him hard. Perhaps it is brain damage, perhaps it is shock, perhaps he has lost too much blood. Suffice it to say that he is looking at us with such profound calm that Dominic whispers a question to him in Hungarian, and even I know he is asking whether this man is a vampire. Gavo merely laughs—pleasant, polite as always—and Dominic looks like he is about to cry.

“You misunderstand,” Gavo says. “It’s not a supernatural matter—I cannot die.”

I am dumbfounded. “How do you mean?”

“I am not permitted,” he says.

“I’m sorry?”

“I am not permitted,” he says again. Like he is saying, for my health, I am not permitted to dance the kolo, or to marry a fat woman.

Something makes me ask: “Then how were you drowned?”

“I wasn’t. As you see.”

“People in this village will swear that you were dead when they pulled you out of the water and put you in that coffin.”

“They are very nice people. Have you met Marek? His sister is a lovely woman.” He makes a pleasant, round gesture with his arms.

“How did twenty people mistake you for dead if, as you say, you were not drowned?”

“I was conversing with a certain gentleman, and he was not too happy about what I had to say, so he held me underwater,” Gavo says. “I may have passed out. Sometimes, under strain, I tire easily. These things happen.”

“A man held you underwater?” I say, and he nods. “What man?”

“A villager, no one of particular importance.”

This is becoming more and more complicated, or possibly about to become very simple, so I say: “Is he the same man who shot you?”

But Gavo says, “I really don’t know—I was shot in the back of the head.” He sees the way I am looking at him, and he says: “I feel that you and I, Doctor, are not understanding one another as we should. You see, it is not that I won’t accept death, or that I pretend it hasn’t happened and therefore I am alive. I am simply telling you that, as sure as you are sitting here in this church, in front of God and your Hungarian fellow—who will not let go of his crowbar because he still thinks I am a vampire—that I cannot die.”

“Whyever not?”

“My uncle has forbidden it.”

“Your uncle. Who is your uncle?”

“I am not disposed to say. Especially because I feel you will be laughing at me. Now”—dusting himself off again—“it is getting late, and no doubt some of your villagers will be hovering outside to see what progress you are making. Please let me up, and I will be on my way.”

“Do not get up.”

“Please do not pull my coat.”

“I forbid it. Your brains, right now, are plugged up in your head by two bullets, and if one of them dislodges, everything in there is going to come running out like pudding. I would be insane to let you up.”

“I would be insane to stay here,” he says to me in an exasperated voice. “Any minute now your Hungarian is going to go outside and call in the others, and then there will be business with garlic and stakes and things. And even though I cannot die, I have to tell you that I do not enjoy having a tent peg put in my ribs. I’ve had it before, and I do not want it again.”

“If I can promise the villagers will not be involved—if I can promise you real doctors, and a clean hospital bed, no stakes, no shouting, will you be still and let me do my work?”

He laughs at me, and I tell him I want to take him to the field hospital, some twelve kilometers away, to make sure he is properly cared for. I tell him I will send Dominic on foot to get some people to come out with the car, and that we will carry Gavo out in the coffin, and make him comfortable on the drive. I even humor him, I tell him that, if he is not going to die, he can at least get out of this church in some acceptable way, some safe way that will ensure he will not be shot at again. I tell him this because I think, on some level, that he is afraid of the man who shot him, and all the while he is looking at me with great sympathy—this great sympathy, as if this is so pleasant for him, he is so moved by my gesture, by the fact that I care so much for his plugged-up brains. He says all right, he will stay until the medics come, and I give Dominic instructions, I tell him to walk back to the field hospital and have them bring the car out with a stretcher and one of the other field surgeons. Dominic is very nervous at the idea of my staying in the church with a vampire, and I can see that he is not at all looking forward to the prospect of walking twelve kilometers in the dark, especially after what he has seen, but he agrees to do it. He will set off immediately and, on his way, he will give the nearest sentry orders to quarantine the nearest bridge so that sick people from the village cannot leave, and no one traveling in this direction can cross to stop at the village. Gavo shakes Dominic’s hand, and Dominic gives him a feeble smile, and off he goes.

Now I am alone with Gavo, and I light some of the lamps in the church, and the pigeons in the rafters are cooing and fluttering here and there above us in the darkness. I roll up my coat and I put it down like a pillow in the coffin, and then I take out my bandages and I start to bandage Gavo’s head so that the bullets will not fall out. He sits very patiently and gives me that cowlike look, and for the first time, I wonder if somehow he is going to make me feel safe and pleasant enough to fall asleep, and then I will find myself starting awake with him standing over me, growling like an animal, his eyes bulging like a rabid dog’s. You know I don’t believe in these things, Natalia, but at that moment, I find myself feeling sorry for poor Dominic, who does.

I ask Gavo about his drowning.

“Who is the man who held you underwater?” I say.

“It doesn’t matter,” Gavo says. “It doesn’t matter at all.”

“I think it may,” I tell him. “I think he may have been the man who shot you.”

“Does it matter?” Gavo says. “He hasn’t killed me.”

“Not yet,” I say.

He looks at me patiently. I am passing the bandage over one of his eyes, and now he looks like a mummy, like a mummy from one of those movies. “Not at all,” he says.

I do not want to go back to this business of deathlessness, so I say to him: “Why did he try to drown you?”

And like a shot, he answers: “Because I told him that he was going to die.”

Now I am thinking, my God, I’m bandaging up a murderer, he came here to kill someone and they tried to drown him and they shot him in the head in self-defense, and that is what this whole thing has been about. Dominic has left only a half hour ago, and I have all night to be alone with this man. Who knows what might happen? I tell myself, if he starts toward me, I’ll hit him in the back of the head and turn over his coffin and I’ll run like hell.

“Did you come to kill him?” I say.

“Of course not,” Gavo says. “He was dying of tuberculosis—you’ve heard what they’re saying around the village, I’m sure. I only came to tell him, to help him, to be here when it happened. Come now, Doctor—blood on pillows, a terrible cough. What was your diagnosis even before you came here?”

I am very surprised by this. “Are you a doctor?”

“I was once, yes.”

“And now? Are you a priest?”

“Not exactly a priest, no,” he says. “But I have made it my work to make myself available to the dying and the dead.”

“Your work?”

“For my uncle,” he says. “In repayment to my uncle.”

“Is your uncle a priest?” I say.

Gavo laughs, and he says: “No, but he makes much work for priests.” I finish bandaging him up, and he still won’t tell me who his uncle is. I am beginning to suspect he may be some political radical, one of those men who have been instigating the skirmishes in the north. If that is true, I would rather not know who his uncle is.

“You may want to identify the man who tried to kill you,” I tell him. “He could hurt others.”

“I very much doubt that. I doubt anyone else is going to tell him he is about to die.”

“Well, then, I would like to know who he is, so I can give him medicine.”

“He is beyond medicine,” Gavo says. “It is very understandable that he was angry. I don’t blame him for trying to drown me.” He watches me put my things away and close up my medical bag. “People become very upset,” Gavo tells me, “when they find out they are going to die. You must know this, Doctor, you must see it all the time.”

“I suppose,” I say.

“They behave very strangely,” he says. “They are suddenly filled with life. Suddenly they want to fight for things, ask questions. They want to throw hot water in your face, or beat you senseless with an umbrella, or hit you in the head with a rock. Suddenly they remember things they have to do, people they have forgotten. All that refusal, all that resistance. Such a luxury.”

I take his temperature, and it is normal, but he sounds to me like he is getting more agitated.

“Why don’t you lie back down?” I tell him.

But he says: “I’d like some more water, please.” And out of nowhere, probably from inside the coffin, or from inside his coat pocket, he pulls out a little cup, a small white cup with a gold rim, and he holds it out to me.

I tell him I am not going out to the village well and leaving him here by himself, and he points to the vestibule and tells me that holy water will do just fine. You know me, Natalia, you know I don’t believe in these things, but you know I cross myself if I go into a church out of respect for people who do. I do not have a problem giving holy water to a man who is dying in a church. So I fill up the cup, and he drinks it, and then I give him another, and I ask him how long he has been without urinating, and he tells me he isn’t sure, but that he certainly doesn’t feel like it now. I take his blood pressure. I take his pulse. I give him more water, and eventually he agrees to lie back down, and I sit against one of the pews and I untie my shoes and think about poor Dominic. I have no inclination to doze off, but I am deep in thought—I am thinking about these people, and their epidemic, I am thinking about the bridge over the nearby river, the quarantine lanterns lit. I am thinking about why we’ve quarantined ourselves, who would come this way in the dead of night to this small, faraway village. An hour, maybe an hour and a half, goes by this way, and Gavo is making no noise inside his coffin, so I lean over him to look inside. There is something very unsettling about someone looking up at you from a coffin. He has very large, very round eyes, and they are very open. He smiles at me and he says, “Don’t worry, Doctor, I still can’t die.” I go back to sitting against the pews, and from where I am sitting I see his arms come up and he stretches them a little, and then they go back inside the coffin.

“Who is your uncle?” I say.

“I don’t think you really want to know,” he says.

“Well, I’m asking.”

“There is no point in telling you,” Gavo says. “I confided in you as a fellow man of medicine, but I can see you will not believe me, and this conversation cannot go anywhere if some part of it is not taken in good faith.”

I am honest. I say to him: “I am interested in who your uncle is because you believe it explains your being unable to die.”

“It does.”

“Well?”

“If you do not believe I cannot die—even though a man held me underwater for ten minutes and then shot me in the back of the head twice—I do not see you believing who my uncle is. I do not see it.” I can hear him shuffling around in the coffin, his shoulders moving, his boots on the bottom of the coffin.

“Please hold still,” I say.

“I would like some coffee,” he says.

I laugh in his face, and I tell him is he crazy?—I am not going to give him coffee in his condition.

“If we have coffee, I can prove to you that I cannot die,” he says.

“How?”

“You will see,” he says, “if you make the coffee.” I see him sit up, and he leans out of the coffin and looks inside my traveling bag, and he takes out the coffee box and the paraffin burner. I tell him to lie down, for God’s sake, but he only says: “Go on, make us some coffee, Doctor, and I’ll show you.”

I have nothing else to do, so I make coffee. I make coffee with holy water, the smell of the paraffin burning inside the church. He watches me do this while he sits, cross-legged, on the velvet cushions of his coffin, and I find that I’ve given up insisting he lie down. I stir the coffee with a tongue depressor, and the brown grit spreads through the water in a thick cloud, and he watches it, still smiling.

When the coffee is done, he insists we both drink from the little white cup with the gold rim. He says this is how he will prove what he means about being deathless, and by this time I am intrigued, so I let him reach out of the coffin and pour me a cup. He tells me to hold it in my hands and not to blow on it, to sit with it until it becomes cool enough to drink in one swallow. While I’m holding the cup, I’m telling myself that I am crazy. I am sitting, I tell myself, in a church, drinking coffee with a man who has two bullets lodged in his head.

“Now drink it,” he says, and I do. It is still too hot, and it burns my tongue, and I cough when I’ve finished it. But he’s already taking the cup from my hands and peering inside. He tips it my way so I can see. The bottom is clotted with grit. Then I realize what’s going on.

“You’re reading my coffee grit?” I say. I am dumbfounded. This is what gypsies do, or magicians at the circus.

“No, no,” he says. “Sure enough, grit is involved. In this grit, I can see your death.”

“You must be joking,” I say.

“No, I can see it,” he says. “It is there. The fact that you have grit, in and of itself, is a certain thing.”

“Of course it’s certain,” I say. “It’s coffee. Everybody has grit. Grit is certain.”

“So is death,” he says. Then he holds up his hand, and he pours himself a cup. He holds it in his hands, and I am too angry at myself to speak, too angry that I allowed him to persuade me to make coffee just to be mocked like this. After a few minutes, he drinks his coffee, and a thin little stream of it runs down his neck, and I am thinking about the bullets quivering in his skull and praying they don’t dislodge—or, now, maybe I am praying that they do.

Gavo holds out the cup to me, and the cup is empty. I can see the white bottom, and the inside of the cup is as dry as if he had just wiped it with a towel.

“Satisfied?” he says, looking at me like he’s just done something wonderful.

“I’m sorry?” I say.

“I have no grit,” he says.

“This is a joke,” I tell him.

“Certainly not,” he says. “Look.” And he runs his finger across the bottom of the cup.

“That you have no grit in your coffee cup proves to me that you are deathless?”

“It certainly should,” he says. He says it like he has just solved a mathematical equation, like I am being difficult about something that is fact.

“It’s a party trick.”

“No. It’s not a trick. The cup is special, that is true, but it is not a joke cup—it was given to me by my uncle.”

“To hell with your uncle,” I shout. “You lie down and shut up until the medics get here.”

“I’m not going to the hospital, Doctor,” he says, flatly. “My name is Gavran Gailé, and I am a deathless man.”

I shake my head and I turn off the paraffin burner, and put away the coffee box. I want to take his cup away, but I don’t want to provoke him. He never stops smiling.

“How can I prove to you that I am telling the truth?” I think I hear resignation in his voice, and I realize he is tired, he has tired of me.

“You can’t.”

“What would satisfy you?”

“Your cooperation—please.”

“This is getting ridiculous.” I am so stunned at his audacity in saying this that I have nothing to say to him. He looks like a lamb, sitting there in that coffin with big lamb eyes. “Let me up, and I promise to prove to you that I cannot die.”

“There is no such thing as a deathless body. This will end in complete disaster. You’re going to die, you stubborn bastard, and I am going to go to prison over you.”

“Anything you want,” he says. “Shoot me, stab me if you like. Set me on fire. I will even put money on it. We can even bet the old-fashioned way—I can name my terms after I win.”

I tell him I will not bet.

“You are not a betting man?” he says.

“On the contrary—I do not waste my time with bets I am sure to win.”

“Now I see that you are angry, Doctor,” he says. “Wouldn’t you like to crack me in the head with one of those planks?”

“Lie down,” I say.

“Too violent,” Gavran Gailé is saying. “All right, something else.” He is still sitting up in the coffin, looking about the room. “What about the lake?” he finally says. “Why not throw me into the lake with weights tied to my feet?”

Now, Natalia, you know I anger easily. You know I’ve no patience for fools. And I am so angry about the cup and the cheap trick with the coffee—that I allowed myself to be duped into making him coffee, and from my field rations, too—that I do not care, I am ready to let him do whatever he wants, to hang himself. It’s dark, it’s late, I have been on the road for hours. I am alone with this man who is telling me to hit him with planks, and now he is telling me to throw him into the lake. I have not agreed, but I have not disagreed, and perhaps there’s something hallucinatory about it—I don’t know. He sees that I am not telling him to lie down. Suddenly, he is getting out of the coffin, and he says to me, “That is excellent, afterwards you will be glad.” I tell him I have no doubt of this.

There’s a lake right beside the church, and we hunt around for something heavy enough. I find two enormous cinder blocks under the altar, and I make him carry them down the stairs. Secretly, I am hoping he will faint, but this does not happen. He rearranges the bandage around his head while I unwind the bicycle chain from the coffin where the villagers put Gavo. He helps me gather my belongings, smiling, smiling. I go outside first, and find that Aran Dari?, probably at Dominic’s instructions, is long gone. It is very late, and the village is completely dark. I am certain they are watching us through the windows, but I don’t care. I tell him to come out, and then the two of us walk through the mud and the moss, and onto the little jetty that goes out over the pond, where the village children probably fish. Gavo seems very excited by all this. I get him to put his feet in the gaps in the cinder blocks, and then I wrap the chain around his ankles and through the cinder blocks, tight and complicated, until you can’t even see that he has feet at the ends of his legs.

I am beginning to feel guilty while this is going on, and afraid. I have not been thinking of myself as a doctor, but as a man of science simply proving that an idiot is an idiot. Still, I say to myself, I do not want this idiot’s blood on my hands.

“There,” I say, when I am done. He lifts his feet, just slightly, first one, then the other, like a child trying out roller skates.

“Well done, Doctor,” he says.

“We must take some precaution,” I say. Gavo looks annoyed. “It would be irresponsible of me to let you go into that lake without some precaution.” I am looking around for some way to hold him to shore, and there is a length of rope tied up around a post on the jetty, and I take this rope and tie the free end of it around his waist. He watches me do this with great interest.

“I want your word,” I say, “that you will pull on the rope when you begin to drown.”

“I will not be drowning, Doctor,” he says. “But because you have been so kind to me, I will give you my word. I will pledge something on it.” He takes a few moments to think about this, tugging at the rope around his waist to make sure the knot is tight. Then he says: “I pledge my coffee cup that I will not die tonight, Doctor.” And he takes it out of his breast pocket and holds it up to me between his fingers, like an egg.

“I don’t want your damned cup.”

“Even so. I pledge it. What will you pledge, Doctor?”

“Why should I pledge?” I ask him. “I am not going into the lake.”

“Just the same, I should like you to pledge something. I would like you to pledge something against my death, so that, when we meet next, we needn’t go through this again.”

It is all ridiculous, but I look around for something to pledge. He will be pulling on that rope, I tell myself, and soon. I ask him if I can pledge the paraffin burner, and he laughs at me and says, “You mock me by pledging that. Come, Doctor. You must pledge something of value to you.”

I take out my old Jungle Book—you know, that old one I keep in my pocket—and I show it to him. “I will pledge this,” I say. He is looking at it with great interest, and then he leans forward with the cinder blocks on his feet and sniffs it.

“I take it this is something you would not want to lose?”

It occurs to me that I had better be clear, as we are both pledging things that mean a great deal to us, so I say: “I pledge it on the grounds that you will begin to drown.”

“Not that I will die?”

“No, because you have pledged to pull on the rope before that happens,” I tell him. “This is your chance,” I say, “to change your mind. The medics are probably already on their way.” This is a lie, Dominic is probably only halfway to the field hospital by now. But I try. Gavran Gailé smiles and smiles.

He holds out his hand, and when I go to shake his, he puts something cold and metallic in my palm. The bullets, I realize. While I’ve been arranging this trip into the lake, he has taken them out. I am looking down at them, shining with blood, matted with clumps of hair, and suddenly Gavo is stepping back toward the edge of the jetty, and he says to me: “Well, Doctor, I will be seeing you shortly.” Then he leans over and drops into the lake. I cannot remember the splash at all.

I can hear Dominic’s voice saying to me, “My God, boss. You’ve send a man with two bullet in his head into lake with stones tied his feet.” I don’t do anything, not while there are bubbles, and also not when there are no bubbles anymore. The rope straightens out a little, but then it is still.

At first, I tell myself that maybe I should have tied Gavo’s hands to his ankles—perhaps, with his hands free, he has too much accommodation to untie himself and break off a hollow reed, or push up a lily pad, and conceal a breathing mechanism from me, like something out of a Robin Hood film. Then it occurs to me that I haven’t thought this out properly, because, if he dies in that pond, he will not come up easily with those bricks tied to his feet. Then I remember that he was originally buried for having drowned, and I tell myself that this is a man who holds his breath—this is a man who plays jokes on honest people by performing a circus trick so that others will believe themselves guilty of his death, and he can walk away with some sick feeling of triumph, some feeling of having made fools of them.

“I am not going anywhere,” I say to myself, “until he either comes up or floats up.” I sit down on the bank and I hold on to the rope. I take out my pipe and I start to smoke it. I can picture the villagers sitting at their darkened windows, staring out at me in horror—me, the doctor, who let a miraculous survivor drown. Eventually five minutes pass, and then seven. Ten minutes, twelve. At fifteen I’ve really got that pipe going, and the rope is as stiff as a board. He’s not coming up, and there are no bubbles. I am thinking that I have misjudged the depth of the pond, that the rope has tightened around his waist and broken all his ribs. I am beginning to pull the rope now, but gently, every few minutes, so that, if by some miracle of God he is alive, I do not hurt him, but so that he will be reminded to pull back on it. He does not do this, however, and I am absolutely convinced, at this point, that he is dead, and I’ve been tricked into a huge mistake. His body is floating limp, I tell myself, like he’s been hanged, floating over his own feet like a balloon. A man is not a porpoise, is what I am thinking. A man cannot survive a thing like this. A man does not just slow his heart down because he feels he should.

After an hour, I have cried a little, mostly for myself, and I am out of tobacco. I have stopped tugging. I can already see my firing squad. Or maybe, I am thinking, a little cave somewhere in Greece. I am thinking about what I could change my name to. The night is going by and by, until, eventually, it is that hour before dawn, when the birds are coming awake.

This is when the most extraordinary thing happens. I hear a sound in the water, and I look up. The rope is moving through the water, rising up, wet. Light is beginning slowly in the east, and I can see the opposite bank of the lake, where the woods come all the way up to the bulrushes. And there he is, Gavran Gailé—the deathless man—climbing slowly and wetly out of the lake on the opposite side, his coat completely drenched, water grasses on his shoulders. He’s got the cinder blocks on his feet, and the rope around his waist, and it’s been hours. I am on my feet, but I am very quiet. Gavran Gailé’s hat is dripping over his ears, and he takes it off and shakes the water out of it. Then he bends down and unwinds the chains from his feet. He does this like he is taking off his shoes, and then he undoes the knot of the rope around his waist and lets it fall back into the water.

He turns around, and it is really him, really his face, as smiling and polite as ever, as he says to me, “Remember your pledge, Doctor—for next time.” He waves to me, and then he turns around and disappears into the woods.