by Téa Obreht
“Certainly not,” I say.
“Still more proof?”
“We’ve not even had coffee yet.”
Gavran Gailé picks up a corner of his napkin and he dabs his mouth with it.
“May I see it?”
“What?”
“Your pledge, Doctor. The book. Let me see it.”
“No,” I say, and I am worried.
“Come now, Doctor. I am only asking to see it.”
“I do not ask to see your cup,” I say. But he is not giving up, not taking up his fork and knife, just sitting there. And after a while, I take out my Jungle Book and I hold it out to him. He wipes the tips of his fingers before he takes it from me, and then he runs his hand over the cover.
“Oh yes,” he says, as if he remembers it well, remembers the story. He opens it and flips through the pictures and the poems. I am afraid he is going to take it, but I am also afraid that it will upset him to know I don’t trust him.
“Rikki Tikki Tavi,” he says to me, handing the book back across the table. “I remember him. I liked him best.”
“How surprising,” I say, “that you should like the weasel.” He does not reproach me for saying this, even though we know I am both rude and incorrect: Rikki Tikki is, of course, a mongoose.
Gavran Gailé watches me put the book back in my pocket. He is smiling at me, and he leans forward across the table and quietly says, “I am here for him,” and he nods at the waiter. He does not say he is not here for me, and I am weary, but suddenly I feel awful for the little old waiter.
“Does he know?”
“How would he know?”
“In the past, you’ve told them.”
“Yes, and I’ve learned a thing or two, haven’t I? You’ve been there, Doctor, while I’ve been learning. If I tell him, he is going to spear me with a kebab stick and I am going to have a difficult recovery, which mustn’t happen because—as you say—I am due to be very busy.” He sits back and wipes his mouth with a napkin. “Besides, what good would it do him to know? He is happy, he is serving an enormous meal to two pleasant people on the eve of war. Let him be happy.”
“Happy?” I am dumbfounded. “He could be home—he could be with his family.”
“We are indulging ourselves, and so indulging him,” the deathless man says. “This fellow takes great pride in what he does—and he is serving a glorious and wonderful meal, a memorable one. Tonight, he will go home to his family and talk about serving the last meal of the Hotel Amovarka, and tomorrow when he is gone, those still alive will have this to talk about. They will be talking about it after the war has ended. Do you see?”
The waiter comes and clears away our plates, the big plate with the John Dory on it, the little glass bones all picked clean. He balances the plates on one arm, and still the white napkin is folded over his free arm, and I am filled up with the idea of this memorable meal, which I have not been enjoying for fear.
“May I tempt the sirs with a dessert drink?” the old waiter says. “Or dessert?”
“All of it,” I am suddenly saying. I am saying: “We will have the tulumbe and the baklava and tufahije, and also the kadaif, please.”
“With quince rakija,” the deathless man says, and when the old waiter leaves, he tells me he is glad that I am getting into the spirit of things.
We do not talk, because I am thinking of how to convince the deathless man to tell the waiter, or perhaps how to tell him myself without the deathless man noticing, and the waiter brings the dessert on an enormous silver tray and sets it down. The tulumbe are there, golden and soft and dripping, and the baklava sticks to my mouth, and the roasted apple with the walnuts is lovely and it melts under the fork and all these things come with the quince brandy that burns your throat between bites, and I am a little drunk, now, and watching the fire in the sky over Marhan, I am missing your grandmother’s cooking, because her pastries are better than this.
When we are finished, Gavran Gailé pushes his chair back and says: “Truly.” And he folds his hands over his belly and there is something about him that makes me sad, too.
“Are you going to die tomorrow, too?” I say. “Is that why you’re here?” It is a foolish question, and I realize this as soon as I have asked it.
“Of course not,” he tells me. His fingers are drumming on his belly like a little boy’s fingers. “Are you?” he says.
I do not laugh, even though I think he is joking. “Even after all this—after this city is razed to the ground, which is what is going to happen tomorrow, without question—you don’t believe he will give you permission to die?” I say.
“Of course he won’t.” Gavo wipes his mouth with his napkin, and raises his hand for the waiter. The waiter comes and gathers the plates, and before he even asks, the deathless man is saying: “And now we’ll have some coffee.”
And now I am thinking, this is serious. He takes up the narghile pipe again and begins to smoke it, and every few puffs he offers me a try, and I refuse. His tobacco smells like wood and bitter roses. The smoke unfurls and goes into the fog that is hanging low, smearing the lights above the bridge. The waiter comes back with our coffee. He begins to set the table, to put down the coffee cups, but the deathless man says, “No, we will share from this one,” and he pulls out his little white cup with the gold trim.
I make one last attempt, and, while the waiter is in earshot, I say: “I suppose, now, that you will be asking the gentleman to share our coffee?” I say this rudely, so the waiter will leave and not drink from the cup.
But the deathless man says, “No, no, the two of us, we had coffee this afternoon—didn’t we?” And the old waiter smiles and bows his bald head and I am very sad, suddenly, I am stricken with sadness for the old man. “No, my friend, this coffee is for you and me,” says the deathless man. When the waiter leaves, Gavo pours the hot coffee into the cup, and hands it to me, and sits back and waits for it to be cold enough. This takes a long time, but eventually I drink down my cup, and my friend is smiling at me.
“Well now,” he says, and takes it from me. It is dark on the balcony, and he is peering inside the cup, and I am leaning forward, and his face is like stone.
“Look here,” he says suddenly. “Why did you come into Sarobor? You are with the other side.”
“I beg you not to say that,” I tell him. “I am begging you not to say that aloud again. Do you want that old man to hear?” Gavo is still holding my cup in his hand, and I say: “I am not with the other side. I have no side. I am all sides.”
“Not by name,” he says.
“My wife was born here,” I tell him, and I am tapping the table with my finger. “My daughter, too. We lived here until my daughter was six.”
“But you seem to know what is going to happen tomorrow. I ask, why did you come? You were not summoned. You did not come here to retrieve anything of value. You came to have dinner—why?”
“That is of value to me,” I say. “And apparently to that poor old man, whom you will not even give a chance to be with his family.”
“He will be with his family tonight, Doctor, when he goes home,” the deathless man says, and he is still patient. I cannot believe how patient he is. “Why should I tell him that tomorrow he is going to die? So that, on his last night with his family, he will mourn himself?”
“Why did you bother warning the others, then?”
“What others?”
“The others—the man who drowned you, and the man with the cough at the Virgin of the Waters. Why do you not warn him? Those other men were dying, really dying. This man could save himself, he could leave.”
“So could you,” he says.
“I am going to.”
“Are you?” he says.
“I am,” I say. “Give me that cup, you smiling bastard—there is nothing in it for me.”
But he will not give me the cup, and he says to me: “You did not answer, Doctor, when I asked you why you had come to Sarobor.”
I drin
k a lot of wine very quickly, and then I say: “Because I have loved it all my life. My finest memories are here—my wife, my child. This, all this, is going to hell tomorrow.”
“By coming here, you realize you risk going with it. They could fire off a missile right now and hit this building.”
“Is that going to happen?” I say. I am too angry now to be concerned.
“It may and it may not,” he says.
“So you are not warning me either?”
“No, Doctor—I am talking about something,” he says patiently. “I am not talking about illness, about a long slow descent into something. I am talking about suddenness. I am trying to explain. I am not warning that man because his life will end in suddenness. He does not need to know this, because it is through the not-knowing that he will not suffer.”
“Suddenness?” I say.
“Suddenness,” he says to me. “His life, as he is living it—well, and with love, with friends—and then suddenness. Believe me, Doctor, if your life ends in suddenness you will be glad it did, and if it does not you will wish it had. You will want suddenness, Doctor.”
“Not me,” I say. “I do not do things, as you say, suddenly. I prepare, I think, I explain.”
“Yes,” he says. “And those things you can do reasonably well for everything—but not this.” And he is pointing into the cup, and I think, yes, he is here for me, too. “Suddenness,” he says. “You do not prepare, you do not explain, you do not apologize. Suddenly, you go. And with you, you take all contemplation, all consideration of your own departure. All the suffering that would have come from knowing comes after you are gone, and you are not a part of it.” He is looking at me, and I am looking at him, and the waiter comes with the check. The waiter must think something very terrible and private is going on, because he leaves very quickly.
“Why are you crying, Doctor?” the deathless man says.
I wipe my eyes and tell him I hadn’t realized I was.
“There is going to be a lot of suddenness, Doctor, over the next few years,” says Gavran Gailé. “They are going to be long, long years—you can have no doubt about that. But those years will pass, eventually they will end. So you must tell me why you came to Sarobor, Doctor, where you take a risk every minute you sit here, even though you know that one day this war will end?”
“This war never ends,” I say. “It was there when I was a child and it will be here for my children’s children. I came to Sarobor because I want to see it again before it dies, because I do not want it to go from me, like you say, in suddenness.” I have been bunching up the tablecloth and I smooth it out. The deathless man puts crisp, clean bills that will be worth nothing in the morning onto the plate with the check. Then I say: “Tell me, Gavran Gailé—does the cup say that I will be joining you, tonight, in suddenness?”
He shrugs, and he is smiling at me. There is nothing angry, nothing mean in his smile. There never is. “What would you like me to say, Doctor?”
“No.”
“Then break your cup,” he says to me, “and go.”
Months later, for weeks and weeks after the bombing ended, Zbogom the tiger continued to eat his own legs. He was docile, tame, to the keepers, but savage on himself, and they would sit in the cage with him, stroking the big square block of his head while he gnawed on the stumps of his legs. The wounds were infected, swollen, and black.
In the end, without announcing it in the newspaper, they shot that legless tiger there, on the stone slab of his cage. The man who raised him—the man who nursed him, weighed him, gave him baths, the man who carried him around the zoo in a knapsack, the man whose hands appeared in every picture ever taken of the tiger as a cub—pulled the trigger. They say the tiger’s mate killed and ate one of her cubs the following spring. To the tigress, the season meant red light and heat, a sound that rises and falls like a scream; so the keepers took the remaining cubs away from her, raised them in their own houses, with their own pets and children. Houses without electricity, with no running water for weeks on end. Houses with tigers.
THE MAN WHO DISCOVERED THE DEATH OF DARIŠA THE Bear is still living in Galina today. His name is Marko Parović, and he is seventy-seven years old, a great-grandfather. His grandchildren have recently purchased a new lawn mower for him, and he operates this monstrosity by himself, a tiny, hatted, brown-armed man who still somehow manages to aim the orange machine in a straight line across his lawn. He does not talk about Dariša the Bear at night, and he will not talk about him at all without enlisting encouragement from several glasses of rakija.
When he does talk, this is the story he tells:
An hour before first light, Dariša the Bear awoke from his interrupted journey in the bloodied snow. When he sat up and looked about himself, he saw the tiger was eating his heart. There among the black trees of Galina, the yellow-eyed devil sat with his teeth deep in the wet wedge of Dariša’s heart. Terrified at first, Dariša felt his ribs and found them empty, and he drew on his only remaining strength, the strength of bears whose hearts he had stilled over the years. His human heart gone, Dariša fell to all fours, and his back rose like a mountain, his eyes full of darkness. His teeth fell like glass from his jaws and in their place grew the yellow tusks of the bear. He reared high over the tiger, black-backed in the moonlight, and the whole forest shook with his roar.
To this day, on such and such a night, you can still hear the ringing of their battle when the wind blows east through the treetops of Galina. Dariša the Bear threw his great, ursine weight into the tiger’s side, and the yellow-eyed devil sank his claws into Dariša’s shoulders, and the two of them rolled through the snow, jaws locked, leveling trees and laying bare the rocks of the ground.
In the morning, nothing of the terrible battle remained but the empty skin of Dariša the Bear, and a blood-smeared field that will not flower to this day.
Some hours after daybreak—he had felt certain he would not be able to sleep at all, but somehow, at first light, he had found himself submitting to his own exhaustion, to the terrible cold, to the relief of having brought the tiger’s wife safely home—my grandfather awoke to a world that already knew Dariša the Bear was dead. Marko Parović, checking his quail traps at the foot of the mountain, had stumbled upon the red-clotted skin, and he had come running into the village, dragging it behind him, calling for God.
By the time my grandfather climbed out of bed and went to the doorway, a great crowd was already assembling in the square, and the women, their heads wrapped in flower-stippled handkerchiefs, were already shrieking it out:
“Dariša is dead. God has abandoned us.”
My grandfather stood at Mother Vera’s side, watching the crowd grow bigger and bigger at the bottom of the stairs. He could see Jovo, the greengrocer, and Mr. Neven, who repaired plows; he could see the priest in his stained black cassock, and the spinster sisters from two doors down, who had come out with their slippers on. Half a dozen other people with their backs turned to him. The first wave of panic at Marko Parović’s news had hit, and now my grandfather watched the disbelieving faces of the men and women he had known all his life: the baker, rigid and red-faced with his dough-numbed fingers; the shaking shoulders of the baker’s daughter, who was gasping and twisting her hair in her fists like a mourner at a burial. Standing slightly apart was the apothecary, quiet with his coat thrown over his shoulders, looking down at the formless, blood-soaked pelt, all that was left of Dariša the Bear, which lay at their feet as if Dariša had never been alive at all.
The apothecary stooped down and picked up one end of the pelt. Half-lifted, it looked like a wet, hairy wing.
“Poor man,” my grandfather heard a woman say.
“It is too much.”
“We must honor him. We must have a funeral.”
“Look, God—what shall we bury?”
“Here,” my grandfather heard the apothecary say, “here, are you quite sure there was no trace of him?”
“Sir,” Marko Parovi
ć said, spreading his hands. “Only the trails in the snow where the battle was fought.”
A mutter of horror and admiration passed through the crowd, and people began crossing themselves. The villagers’ collective disappointment in Dariša, their rage at his abandonment, the fact that they had been denigrating his name and what he stood for little more than two hours ago—all of this had fallen by the wayside with the news of his death.
One of the village hounds chose that moment to investigate the outspread pelt and raise a leg against it; there was a cry of outrage as six or seven hands reached for the pelt and somebody’s boot kicked the dog out of the way, and Vladiša, whose nerves had never recovered from his encounter with the tiger, went down in a dead faint.
“By God, let us take it into church,” the priest said. And while a handful of aghast villagers carried the pelt off in the direction of the church, the apothecary propped Vladiša against the porch steps, and for the first time looked at my grandfather in the doorway.
“Get water,” the apothecary said, and my grandfather ran to the kitchen basin and obliged. He was aware, when he came back, of being carefully studied, of the eyes of the village women on him like shadows. But my grandfather looked only at the apothecary, who smelled of soap and warmth, and who smiled at him as he handed down the water basin.
And then there was a flurry of female voices.
“So, it’s you, is it?” the baker’s daughter shouted at him, embattled. My grandfather backed up the porch steps and stared down at her. “Don’t you go back in, you just stay out here and show your face. Just look. Look at what’s happened.” Mother Vera came out to stand behind my grandfather, and the baker’s daughter said, “Aren’t you ashamed? At what cost have you befriended the devil’s bitch, made her welcome here? Aren’t you ashamed?”
“You mind your own business,” Mother Vera said.
The baker’s daughter said: “It’s everybody’s business now.”
My grandfather said nothing. With daylight and a few hours’ sleep separating him from it, the journey of last night seemed a thousand years ago. His mind could not frame it properly. He suspected—even as the baker’s daughter was blaming him for his involvement—that no one actually knew its true level. But there was still a chance that someone would come forward and say they had seen him sneak out of the village the previous night; or, worse still, that they had witnessed his return with the girl, seen him sinking into the snow under the weight of her exertions; or that they had found his tracks before the midnight snowfall had covered them up.
