by Téa Obreht
For a year, his friendship with Amana grew on song and philosophical debate, on stories and pointless arguments about poetry and history. Balmy evenings found them on the bridge together, standing apart from the old bands: Luka singing with the fiddle against his belly, and, sitting behind him on a broken-backed chair, Amana with her chin on his shoulder, lending her voice to his songs, deepening them. On their own, neither was a spectacular singer; but together their voices blended into a low and surprising sadness, a twang that pulled even the most optimistic crowds away from the foot-stomping revelry of the traditional bridge bands.
Luka, with Amana’s help, was well on his way to the life he had designed for himself so many years ago. He had begun to make up his own songs—sometimes even spontaneously, right there on the bridge—and he had begun to form a following among the younger guslars. He still lacked the means, however, to move to the City; and, even if he had been better funded, he was reluctant to leave Amana behind, and he could not ask for her hand without having something to offer in return. Around this time, there appeared in Sarobor a soft-spoken, bearded scholar named Vuk, who, according to the town gossips, had been traveling from town to town for almost ten years, listening to songs and stories and writing them down.
“He is a thief of music,” said those on the bridge who refused to speak to him. “If he comes to you, you send him to hell.”
The scholar cornered Luka in the tavern one night and explained to him about the School of Music that had recently been founded in the City. In an effort to gain more popularity and support, the School had begun a collaborative program with the government: any traditional musician from a municipality outside the City would be awarded a small fee for any song he consented to submit for a recording. Luka, the scholar informed him, was the man he wanted to sing for Sarobor; Luka and that charming young lady of his, even though it was not traditional for women to participate in gusla playing.
Luka had seen his first radio earlier that spring; this, combined with his encounter in the tavern, was enough to make him dream. He couldn’t see how he would get them there, himself and Amana—how a journey like that could be justified at all. The solution came one week later, in the form of a letter from Luka’s younger sister. She was writing on the pretense of informing him of her recent marriage to a man whose father owned a car factory in Berlin. Her actual goal, however, was to break the news of their mother’s death to him gently, and to negotiate his conditional return to Galina at the behest of his father, who had found himself alone and helpless. She wrote to him with news of his only remaining brother, the firstborn: he had died of pneumonia the previous winter. Two of the four who had gone into the army had died long ago, in the service of the kaiser; the second-youngest had just been killed in a fight over a woman outside a tavern two towns over. No one knew the whereabouts of the fifth brother, but some people said that he had fallen in love with a gypsy, and had gone to France with her many years ago. His father, she said, was on the brink of death. And now, despite the unfortunate incident with the bull, despite what may or may not have been said about Luka over the years, it was up to him to carry on the family name and business. With a woman, his sister made sure to write, of fine character, who will bear you many children.
Luka, who had for so long resisted his past, suddenly found himself contemplating a strategic return to Galina. His father was old, grief-stricken. He knew that there would be no love between them upon his return; but he also knew that his father could not live long, and after that, the inheritance that would have otherwise been split between six brothers would fall to Luka alone. If he sacrificed two years now—spent them perfecting his songs in Galina while he waited for the old man to die—he could make his future with the earnings of the man who had made him wretched, use Korčul’s own fortune. The closeness of that possibility, the reality of it, made it fragile.
For a few days, he hardly spoke to anyone. Then, just after nightfall, he climbed the lattice up to Amana’s room and asked for her hand.
“Well, I knew you were mad,” she said, sitting up in bed. “But I didn’t realize you were a fool.”
Then he explained it all to her, explained about his father and his fortune, and about the radio in the City, waiting for their songs—songs they would sing together, because he could not see himself pursuing this without her. And when he was finished, he said: “Amana, we’ve been good friends all these years.” He had been kneeling by her bed. He pushed himself up and sat down on the covers beside her. “Your father will charge you, one way or another, to marry somebody someday—wouldn’t you rather it be me than some stranger who will force himself on you? I promise not to touch you, and to love you as I love you now until the day I die. No other man who comes into this room asking for you will ever make that promise knowing with certainty that it will be kept.”
It was the first time he had voiced anything close to a confession of himself, and even though she had known for a long time, Amana put a hand out and touched his face.
They began to plan their marriage. Amana agreed to confine herself to the house and avoid jeopardizing their situation; and for two months Luka made himself presentable every night and appeared at her house and ate and drank with Hassan Effendi, and the two of them smoked narghile and played music until the sun came up. Hassan Effendi, who deduced rather quickly that an offer of marriage would soon be at hand, resigned himself to the idea of having an enterprising butcher for a son-in-law rather than an obstinate virgin for a daughter, and with patience let Luka woo him for as long as necessary to secure a socially appropriate proposal.
If Luka had been a slightly better judge of character—if he had realized that Hassan Effendi was sold at a month and a half, and asked for Amana’s hand almost immediately—this story might have turned out quite differently. Instead, while the two of them were playing at social graces, strumming away on Hassan Effendi’s balcony and listening to each other’s opinions, they left Amana entirely out of the proceedings, left her to her own devices, left her to wait. And while she was waiting, contemplating her future as Luka’s wife, anticipating their eventual move to the City, it began to occur to her that the life of virginal solitude she had so publicly laid claim to on so many occasions had been secured. It was done. She no longer had to fear, as she had feared all her days, the presence of a domineering, oafish husband, the ordeal of the wedding night, the drudgery of marriage, the gruesome prospect of childbirth. A single decision, and those possibilities had vanished. Her life lay before her without them, and at first she was glad. But then she began to think about what a long life it was, and how the way she pictured herself lay in the presence of those fears, in the conflict they provided; it occurred to her that the struggle had not been nearly as great as the struggle for which she had steeled herself, and that, above all, with it had gone that other possibility, the unnamed one: the possibility of changing her mind. It suddenly seemed to her that her whole life had come and gone.
Two weeks before the wedding, Amana fell into bed with a fever. News concerning the severity of her illness spread around town. People said that her curtains could not be opened, that she clutched at her bedclothes, sweating and raving, that the mere act of nodding her head caused her excruciating pain.
Luka was not a friend, not a family member, not yet even an official fiancé. He listened for news of her welfare in the market and on the bridge, and this was how he found out that physician after physician came and went from Hassan Effendi’s house, and that his girl was still no better. From Hassan Effendi, he was able to extract only hopeful news—she’s very well, it is a minor autumnal cough, she will get better soon enough—but on street corners he heard that the situation had become desperate, and that Khasim Aga, the herbalist, had written to a physician who lived across the kingdom, and who was known as something of a miracle worker.
No one in town saw the miracle worker arrive; no one would have been able to recognize him in the street. It was well known that for three da
ys and three nights, the miracle worker stood over Amana’s bed, holding her wrist, wiping her brow. It was also soon evident that this miracle worker, with one or two earnest glances, and hands that unsteadily ran the cold sponge down her neck, obliterated all of Amana’s notions of virginity and scholastic isolation, all her lifelong plans, her devotion to music and to Luka. As soon as she had begun to recover, she was sneaking out of her bedroom to meet with the physician who had saved her, just as she had snuck out to play with the guslars—except now, she was sneaking around abandoned mills and barn lofts with dots of perfume on her wrists and navel.
Relieved at the news that she had recovered, still not permitted to visit her sickbed, Luka did not suspect a thing. He did not know that when Hassan Effendi told Amana he had consented for her to be wed to Luka, she kissed her father’s hands and then went up to her bedroom to hang herself with the curtains. Luka did not know that the story might have ended there had the tiger’s wife not come in at the right moment, and found her sister sprawled out on the bed, weeping with frustration at not being able to get the curtain thin enough to wrap around her neck for the jump. He would never know that it was the tiger’s wife who held Amana’s head on her knees until she came up with a better plan; that the tiger’s wife carried Amana’s letter of desperation to the physician the following morning. The tiger’s wife was the lookout when Amana climbed down the lattice the following night; she was there, in Amana’s bedroom, to give their mother Amana’s letter of farewell the morning of the wedding.
Hassan Effendi, standing over the two remaining women in his life, found himself saying words he never would have imagined Amana putting him in a position to say: “God damn her, the whore has disgraced me.” And right then and there, with his wife weeping profusely over his decision, he took the opportunity to rid himself of the child he thought he would be saddled with forever by dressing the deaf-mute girl in her sister’s wedding clothes and putting her in Amana’s place.
And so Luka, who spent the wedding in a contemplative daze, imagining his future with Amana in the City, did not know that all his plans for his father’s fortune, all the songs he was hoping to sing, all the many freedoms he saw opening up before him, were being dashed to hell even as he was taking his vows.
He did not realize Hassan Effendi’s deceit until he lifted the veil in the ceremonial gesture of seeing his wife for the first time and found himself looking, with almost profane stupidity, into the face of a stranger. Afterward, while the men were toasting the bridegroom, all Hassan Effendi had to say was, “Even so, she’s yours, as prescribed by custom. She is the sister of your betrothed, and I’ve the right to demand that you take her. You will disgrace yourself to refuse her now.” And so Luka found himself married to a deaf-mute child of thirteen, who looked at him with big, fearful eyes, and smiled absently every so often in his direction at the feast while her mother was crying and kissing her forehead.
That night, he looked at her in her terrified nakedness, and made her face away from him while he took off his clothes, expectation hanging between them. The following day, he took her back to Galina in the wagon, a child bride for the butcher’s son. No laughter, no friendship, no hope for the future. The ride lasted five days, and on the second day he realized that, though he had probably heard it at one time or another, he had forgotten her name.
“What do they call you?” he said to her. When she did not respond, he took her hand and shook it a little. “Your name—what is your name?” But she only smiled.
To make matters worse, the house—which Luka remembered as a place teeming with loud bodies, running feet, crying children, two frying pans on the stove at all times—was silent. Luka’s father, worn by old age into a crooked-backed cripple, sat alone by a low fire. Without greeting, he looked at the new bride as she stepped over the threshold and said to his only remaining son, “Couldn’t you do any better than some bitch of Mohammed?” Luka did not have the strength to tell his father, with relish, that he had meant better, that somehow he would remedy everything once Korčul was gone.
With this distant hope growing in him again, Luka resigned himself to his temporary life. Even without Amana, he would find a plan for the gusla, for his songs, for the School of Music. In the meantime, he had only the deaf-mute girl, an old incontinent man, the ceaseless death screams of the sheep in the smokehouse, and his own rage at the unfairness of it all.
What surprised him most was how quickly he came to tolerate his wife. She had big eyes and a quiet gait, and sometimes when he looked at her he saw Amana, even called her Amana once or twice. She needed some guidance—he had to show her how to warm the stove, where the cistern was, had to take her into the village several times to show her how to do the marketing—but he realized that once she knew how something was done, she took it over herself completely, developed her own routine for doing it. She was everywhere: helping in the smokehouse, washing his clothes, changing his father’s soiled trousers. Without complaining, without uttering a syllable, she carried water from the well and walked the old man down the porch stairs every day for a breath of fresh air. Sometimes it was even pleasant to come home in the evenings, and have someone to smile at him.
Could Luka have left her there, in Galina, with the old man, once he had recovered from the initial shock of what had happened to him? Could he have taken some of his father’s money from the coffer hidden under the baseboards of the house, left for the City on his own, found someone to take Amana’s place? Almost certainly. After the first few times he followed the deaf-mute girl into town to disperse the children who would assemble behind her to make faces and shout the obscenities they had picked up from their parents at her retreating back, he realized that he had worsened matters by bringing her here, that people were beginning to talk. Look at that girl, people were saying, look at the deaf-mute he’s brought home—where did he get her? What is he trying to hide? Their attention drove him to panic, made him more determined to flee than ever; but, in doing so, it also deepened his predicament, pointed out to him the many ways he would have to uncouple his life in order to abandon it again.
Then there was the afternoon he came home to find her with Korčul in the attic: his father, in a gesture masquerading as affection, had brought out his box of war relics, and Luka came upstairs to find the deaf-mute girl sitting cross-legged with the box across her knees while the old man knelt behind her, one hand already on her breast.
“She’s a child!” Luka kept screaming after he had thrown Korčul against the wall. “She’s a child, she’s a child!”
“She’s a child!” Korčul screamed back, grinning wildly. Then he said: “If you don’t start producing sons, I will.”
He could not leave her there, he realized, because, Mohammedan or not, child bride or not, Korčul was going to rape her, if he hadn’t already—force her down while Luka was out of the house—and she would be powerless to stop him.
And so Luka stayed, and the longer he stayed the farther that burning dream seemed; the more insults Korčul flung at him, the more questions people entering the butcher’s shop asked him about his wife, the more he came to see her as the reason he was still there. In those moments, his wife’s silence terrified him. It terrified him because he knew, and knew absolutely, that she could see every thought that passed through his head. She was like an animal, he thought, as silent and begrudging as an owl. And what made it considerably worse was that, despite his belief that it was his right to think whatever he wanted—he had, after all, been cheated, and what did she want from him, this girl, when he had been unfairly crippled by fate?—he found himself wanting to explain it to her, wanting to tell her that none of it was her fault, not the silence, not the marriage, not Korčul’s advances. He wanted to explain, too, that none of it was his fault, either, but he was having a difficult enough time convincing himself.
The day things finally broke, it was high summer, incredibly hot, and Luka hadn’t been able to get away from the heat. She was scrubbi
ng the laundry in a corner of the kitchen, and his father was snoring wetly in one of the many empty bedrooms. Luka had come in to rest for the afternoon, to wait out the worst of the day before heading back to the shop. Plums had ripened in the orchard, and he had brought three inside, was slicing them on the empty table when he turned the radio on; and then, just like that, he recognized the Monk’s nasal twang, an octave higher than it should have been, cutting through the melody of one of Luka’s own songs like some kind of terrible joke. His body seemed to fall away from him.
It was “The Enchantress,” a song he had written with and about Amana, reduced from its slow tempo, intended for the gusla, to a frenzied ode about debauchery. He half expected to wake up moments later and find that he had passed out drunk the night before—but he didn’t, he just sat and sat there on the kitchen chair while the song moved through the verses, and then it was over, and the radio had moved on to something else. His songs had moved on without him, too, moved on to the School of Music.
He looked up to see the girl standing over him, his wet shirt slung across her shoulder like skin.
