by Téa Obreht
I go down into Sarobor, and it’s deserted. Night is falling. Up and down the Turkish quarter, you can hear our men shelling the factory out in the Marhan valley, and you can see the lights over the hill. You can tell what’s coming next, you know what’s coming. Everyone knows, so no one is outside, and there are no lights in the windows. There’s a smell of cooking—people are sitting down to dinner in the dark. There’s a rich dinner smell that makes me think of that irrational desire that comes over you when it is almost the end—instead of saving for a siege they’re feasting in the houses along the river, they’ve got lamb and potatoes and yogurt on their tables. I can smell the mint and the olives, and sometimes when I pass the windows I can hear frying. It makes me think of the way your grandma used to cook while we lived in Sarobor, standing by the window with the big willow tree outside.
The Turkish quarter has that narrow street that runs along the river on the Muslim side of town, with the closed-up Turkish coffeehouses and the restaurants where you buy the best burek in the world, the places that sell hookah pipes, glassmakers’ workshops, and then the flower gardens that are all dug up now for the new graveyards. All along the street, as you follow it down to the riverbank, you can look up to see the Old Bridge in the distance, with those gleaming, round guard-towers. And every few feet, you pass Turkish fountains. Those fountains—that is the sound of Sarobor, Sarobor always sounds like running water, like good clean water, from the river to the cisterns. Then there’s the old mosque, with that lonely minaret lit up like a shell.
I cross the Old Bridge, and I go down to the Hotel Amovarka, where your grandma and I spent our honeymoon before we found an apartment to live in. It’s where foreign dignitaries and ambassadors stay when they come to Sarobor. The director of the airplane factory in Marhan—the one we’re bombing—sometimes stays there for months on end. The hotel stands on this stone shelf at the river’s edge, banked by olive trees and palms, overlooking the water at the top of the cataract. It has these white-curtained windows and a balcony that looks like a woman’s skirt, all these round stone folds that come out over the water. There’s brass Turkish lanterns on the balcony. You can see the balcony from the Old Bridge, and if you take an evening walk from the hotel you can stand on the bridge and look down over the cataract and the balcony restaurant, where they have a four-man orchestra that goes from table to table, playing love songs.
Inside, the hotel has those wooden screens and red-and-white painted arches. It’s got the pasha’s tapestries hung up on every wall, and old wingback chairs and a fire in the lobby. I come in, and the place is empty, completely empty. I cross through without seeing anybody, not a soul, not even at the counter. I go down a long hallway, and then I find myself in the front room of the balcony restaurant.
There’s a waiter there, just one waiter. He’s got very little hair, and it’s all white and combed forward over his head, and he’s got a big black bruise on his forehead, clear as day, that devout Muslim bruise you can always recognize. He’s strapped into his suit, and he’s got his tie on and his napkin over his arm. He sees me come in and he lights up. Like he’s thrilled to see me, like it’s the best news of his day that I am there. He asks me if I want dinner, and he says it in a way that is intended to encourage me to stay even though no one else is having dinner, and I say yes, I want dinner, I want dinner, of course. I am thinking of my honeymoon, and I am thinking they have lobster there, all kinds of fish they bring up on riverboats from the sea.
“Where would sir like to sit?” he says to me, and he gestures around the room. The restaurant has a high, yellow ceiling with a battle painted on it, and these brass lanterns and red curtains hanging from the ceiling, and the whole room, like the rest of the hotel, is completely empty.
“On the balcony, please,” I say. He leads me out to the balcony and seats me at the best table in the house, which is made up for two, and he takes away the other fork and knife and napkin and plate.
“With apologies, sir,” he says to me. He has this hoarse, rasping voice, even though I can tell from his hands and his teeth he’s never smoked a day in his life. “We have only the house wine tonight.”
“That will do just fine,” I say.
“And we have it only by the bottle, sir,” he says. I tell him to bring me the bottle, and also that I will be staying the night, if he would be so good as to find someone at the front desk who can help me. I know you’re thinking this is not a good idea. I know you’re thinking, those men shelling over the hill are getting ready to come down on Sarobor in the morning. But staying is my plan at the time, and so I say that to him, maybe also to be kind. He is a very old man. And you don’t know what our waiters used to be. How they were trained for the old restaurants. They would go to a school, the finest table-service school, right here in the City. They learn their craft, they learn their manner. They’re practically chefs. They can recognize a wine with their eyes closed and carve up the carcass themselves, they can tell you what fish swims where and what it eats, they dabble for years in herb gardens before they’re permitted to serve. This is the kind of waiter he is, and a Muslim besides, and the whole thing makes me think of your grandma, and I feel ill, suddenly, watching him leave to get my wine.
I sit back and I listen to them down in Marhan. Every few minutes this blue blast lights up the hilltops at the crown of the valley, and a few seconds later comes the cracking sound of the artillery. There’s a southerly breeze blowing down to me through the valley, and it brings in the singed smell of gunpowder. I can see the outline of the Old Bridge on the bank above the hotel, and a man is walking up it from the tower on the other side, lighting the lampposts the old-fashioned way, the way it’s been done since my time. The river is making a song against the bank under the hotel ledge. I am leaning forward a little to look through the florets in the balcony railing down to where the water is dark against the white rocks of the riverbed. When I lean back, I notice the smell of cigarette smoke nearby, and I look around, and—to my surprise—there is another guest sitting at a table in the opposite corner, with his elbow up on the stone balcony rail. He is wearing a suit and tie, and he is reading, holding the book up so I cannot see his face. The table in front of him is empty, except for a coffee cup, which makes me think he has finished his dinner, and I feel glad he will be leaving soon, he will be finishing his coffee and leaving. He seems completely unaware of the way the bombing is lighting up the sky—like it’s a celebration, like fireworks are happening over the hill and the celebration is coming closer. Then I find myself thinking—maybe it is a celebration for him, maybe he has crossed the river tonight to gloat in the old Muslim palace. Maybe, for him, this is something funny, a night he will talk about years from now to his friends when they ask him about sending the Muslims downriver.
At this moment, the old waiter comes back, bringing with him my bottle. I can remember it now. It’s an ’88 Šalimač, from a famous vineyard that will soon be on our side of the border. He serves it to me like that means nothing to him—and I get the sense that he is bent on showing the great strength of character it takes for him to serve me this wine like it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to him whether or not the owner of the vineyard is bayoneting his son in the airplane factory right now. He peels the foil off the top of the bottle, and then he uncorks the wine in front of me. He flips my glass and pours me a little, and he blinks at me while I taste it. Then he pours me the whole glass and leaves the bottle on the table. He disappears for a moment, and then he comes back, wheeling in front of him a cart that’s covered in big lettuce leaves and bunches of grapes, slices of lemon, all of which are crowded around a centerpiece of fish. The fish are clear-eyed and firm, but they look like something out of a circus.
The waiter says to me: “Well, sir. Tonight we have the sole, the eel, the cuttlefish, and the John Dory. May I recommend the John Dory? It was freshly caught this morning.”
There are not very many of them, not very many fish—perhaps five o
r six, but they are neatly arranged, with the two eels curled around the edges of the display. The John Dory is lying on its side like a spiked flat of paper, the spot on its tail staring up like an eye. Of all the fish on the cart, it is the only one that actually looks like a fish, and also the only one not giving off a vaguely dead smell. Now, I love John Dory, but tonight I find myself wanting lobster, and I ask about it, about the lobster. The old waiter bows to me, and apologizes, says that they have just run out.
I tell him I will need a moment to think, and he leaves me with the menu and disappears. I am pretty disappointed about that lobster, I can tell you, as I sit there looking at the dishes they have to go with the fish. They have, of course, what you would expect: they have potatoes several ways, salad with garlic, four or five different sauces to go with the fish, but all the time I am thinking about the lobster, about how they have just run out. And then I think: my God, it would be awful if this man, this gloating man who is here reading a book, has just had the last lobster, the lobster that should have come to me when I am not here to gloat.
And just at that moment, as I am thinking this, the old waiter reappears and bows over the man’s table.
“And now, sir,” I hear the waiter say to the man. “Have you had a chance to consider? Is there anything I can offer you to drink?”
“Yes, please,” says the man. “Water.”
I put my menu down and I look at him. He has lowered the book so that he can speak to the waiter, and I recognize him immediately. The waiter goes to get him the water, and Gavran Gailé does not raise his book back up; instead, he looks out over the river, and then around the balcony, and finally his gaze settles on me, and it is the same gaze of the man from inside the coffin—the same eyes, the same face, unchanged and whole, as it must have been in the drunk tank that night at the Church of the Virgin of the Waters, when I did not have the opportunity to see it.
The deathless man is smiling at me, and I say to him: “It’s you.”
He calls me doctor, and then he gets up and dusts off his coat and comes over to shake my hand. I stand up and hold my napkin, and while we are shaking hands in silence like this, it comes to me why he is here, but I cannot tell myself that I am surprised to see him. No, I realize, I am not surprised at all. His being here can mean only one thing, and, like the rest of us, he knows what is going to happen. He has come to collect, the deathless man.
“What a wonder,” he is saying to me. “What a remarkable, remarkable wonder.”
“How long have you been in town?” I say.
“Several days now,” he tells me.
I am tired, and all business, and I tell him: “Without doubt, you have been buying people a great deal of coffee.”
He does not smile at this, but he does not reproach me either. He does not confirm, he does not deny. He is just there. It occurs to me that he never looks tired, he never looks worn. I tell him I insist he join me for dinner, and he does, gladly. He goes to get his book and his cup, and the waiter brings us another place setting for him.
“Do you gentlemen know what you would like?” the waiter asks.
“Not yet,” my friend says to him. “But we will take narghile.”
I wait until the old man has left to get us the pipes, and then I say: “The best meal of my life, I ate here.” The deathless man nods at me in appreciation. “During my honeymoon,” I say. “You have never met my wife. We stayed here for our honeymoon, my wife and I, and we had lobster. Two years after the first time you and I met in that little village—do you remember it?”
“I remember,” he says.
“I was very young,” I say. “It was a beautiful honeymoon. For a week, I ate nothing but lobster. I could eat it still.”
“Then you should.”
“They haven’t any tonight.”
“That’s a shame.”
“You did not happen to get the last one?” I say.
“As you see,” he tells me, “I have not eaten.”
We sit in silence for a while, and he does not ask me what I am doing here. This is when it occurs to me that perhaps he knows something I don’t—that perhaps it is not someone else he is here to see, but, instead, that he has come to see me, that he is here for me in particular, and that thought fills me up. And I tell you, it is one thing not to believe, but quite another to entertain a possibility, and I don’t know if it’s the shelling or the evening or the Old Bridge on the water, but that is what I am doing as I sit there, hanging on to that napkin on my knees—I am entertaining the possibility.
“And have you been very busy?” I ask him.
“Not particularly,” he says to me, and he wants to say more, but at this moment the old waiter comes shuffling back with the narghile, which he sets up for us, cleaning the pipe lips, setting up the tobacco and tumbak in the bowl. When he finishes, there is a sweet roasting smell coming from the pipe, honey-and-rose smell, and he is taking out a pencil and piece of paper to write down our order.
“What do you say to the perch?” the deathless man asks me.
“I am a great lover of John Dory,” I say. “In the absence of lobster.”
“Shall we have the John Dory?”
“Let’s have the John Dory.”
“We’ll have the John Dory,” the deathless man says to the old waiter, looking up at him and smiling. The waiter bows from the waist, like we’ve made a very good choice. Which we have, we’ve really made a very good choice. It is probably the last John Dory the hotel will ever sell.
“Can I entice the sirs with some mezze?” the old waiter says. “We have an excellent ajvar with garlic, and also an octopus salad. We have wonderful sarma, and cheese with olives.”
“I feel some indulgence is needed,” the deathless man says. “Some indulgence is needed tonight. We’ll have it all. And, to go with the fish, the boiled potatoes with chard.”
“Very good, sir,” the waiter says while he is writing it all down with a stubby pencil.
“And, naturally, the parsley sauce.”
“Naturally, sir,” says the waiter.
He refills our wine glasses and leaves, and I am sitting there looking at the calm, smiling face of the deathless man, and asking myself why, in particular, indulgence is needed tonight. The deathless man takes the pipe of the narghile and begins to puff on it slowly, and big thick clouds of smoke are rising out of his nostrils and mouth and he looks very content, sitting there, with the blasts rocking the valley at Marhan.
I must be looking pretty stupefied at all this, because he asks me: “Is something wrong?” I shake my head, and he smiles. “Do not worry about the price, Doctor. This is my treat. It is important—so important—to indulge in these pleasurable things.”
My God, I say to myself, and now it has come to this. My last meal, and with a deathless man, at that.
“My best meal,” he says out of nowhere, as if we are still on that subject, “was at the Big Boar, about sixty years ago.” I do not know why this happens now, but I do not find myself saying, how? How could you have had a meal like this, when your face says you are thirty, and even that is generous. He says: “The Big Boar was a wonderful tavern in the king’s hunting park, and you would shoot the game yourself and then the chef would prepare it in his special way. The woman I told you about—the woman who died—she and I went there when we first fled. When we fled from here.”
“I didn’t realize she was from Sarobor,” I say.
“Everybody’s from somewhere, Doctor. She used to play the gusla there—” he says, pointing down to the Old Bridge, “just over there.”
The pepper and the octopus salad and the sarma arrive, and the waiter arranges the plates, and the deathless man digs right in. It all smells so wonderful, and he is spooning those cabbage leaves and that red pepper onto his plate, and all those oils are running into each other, and the pink-purple octopus tentacles are shining with oil, and I put some on my plate and I eat, too, but I eat slowly, because who knows, maybe it’s pois
oned, maybe the old waiter is working with a vengeance, maybe that is why the deathless man is here. But it is too difficult not to eat with the lights going off in Marhan, and now Gavran Gailé will not stop talking about the meal we are eating. Every time the waiter comes close, Gavo is talking loudly about how wonderful the flavors are, how fresh the oil—and it is true, the food is wonderful, but I am feeling that he is rubbing it in, this business of it being my last meal, and I am thinking, My God, what I have done, coming here?
The waiter brings the John Dory and it is glorious. The fish is dark and crisp on the outside, and it has been grilled whole. He cuts it up slowly with the fish knife, and the flesh goes soft and feathery under the knife, and he serves it to us on our plates and then ladles out the potatoes with the chard. The potatoes are bright yellow and steaming, and the chard is thick and green and clinging to the potatoes, and the deathless man is eating and eating and talking about how glorious the meal is—which is true, really, it is a glorious meal, and even though you can hear the shelling in Marhan, it is all right with the meal on the balcony and the river and the Old Bridge.
Because I have to know, at a certain point I say: “Are you here to tell me that I am going to die?”
He looks up at me with surprise. “I beg your pardon?” he says.
“This meal,” I say. “Indulgence. If you are here to let me indulge in my last meal, I would like to know this. I would like to call my wife, my daughter, my grandchild.”
“I take it, since you ask that question without provocation, that you have accepted what I am—does that mean you are ready to pay your debt to me, Doctor?”
