by Téa Obreht
“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.
THE FIRST NIGHT AT BARBA IVAN AND NADA’S PLACE, I slept for three hours, and after that my dreams filled up with the music of the cicadas and I woke up stifled by the heat. My bed faced the window that looked out over the vineyards behind the house, and through it I could see an orange half-moon falling down the spine of the hillside. Zóra, facedown and prostrate, had kicked off the covers, legs hanging off the end of the bed; her breath was caught in a tight whistle somewhere between her arms and hair and the pillows. Downstairs, the little girl was coughing again, and her coughs were sticky and unfinished; she was trying to sleep through them. Somewhere among layers of noise was the sea, dragging foam up the beach on the other side of the house.
Months later, long after the forty days were over, when I had already begun to piece things together, I would still go to sleep hoping that he would find his way into my dreams and tell me something important. I was always disappointed, of course, because even when I did dream of him, he would inevitably be sitting in an armchair we didn’t own, in a room I didn’t recognize, and he would say things like, Bring me the newspaper, I’m hungry, and I would know, even in my sleep, that it didn’t mean a fucking thing. But that night, I hadn’t learned to think of him as dead yet, hadn’t processed news that seemed too distant to belong to me, not even when I tried to bring it closer by thinking of his absence from our house.
I thought about our pantry. It was an enormous cupboard built into the kitchen wall opposite the sink, ceiling-to-floor egg-shell doors, the plastic bags from Zlatan’s bakery swinging from the door handles as you opened it. I could see my grandma’s big flour tin, white and blue, with a little cheerful baker in a chef’s hat smiling from the front of it. The bottom shelf with its plastic bags and cereals, the salt tin, mixing bowls, the orange and brown coffee bags from the store down the street. And then, higher up on the center shelf, four glass bowls in a neat line across the middle of the cupboard. Almonds, sunflower seeds, walnuts, and cut-up squares of bittersweet baking chocolate. My grandfather’s snack regimen, always ready ahead of time. There for thirty-five more days.
The diggers were back in the vineyard again; I couldn’t see them in the darkness, but they were there, long shadows moving in the faint beam of a single flashlight that seemed to shift constantly, except for a few minutes here and there when whoever held it put it down to continue digging, and the light shone into the vines until they tightened and drowned it out. Every so often, one of the diggers would cough; and while I was watching the vineyard, the little girl kept coughing, too.
Around four in the morning, I got dressed and went downstairs. Bis was nowhere to be seen, but his likeness, face slightly twisted by an unsteady hand, peered down at me from a sketch above the umbrella pot by the back door. There was an antique telephone on the living room desk, a rotary dial with a heavy brass-and-bone receiver, the numbers in the wheel worn away to nothing. I took the crumpled receipt with the Zdrevkov clinic number out of my pocket and dialed. At first, I got a busy signal, and it raised my hopes; I could picture the night-duty receptionist, blue eye shadow oiling the creases of her eyes, blond hair disheveled, keeping herself awake with a tantalizingly forbidden call to an overseas boyfriend. But when I called again, it rang and rang, this time without even going dead until I replaced the receiver. Afterward, I sat on the couch while gray light crawled into the spaces between the shutters.
When the coughing started again, it sounded wet and close. It occurred to me that the little girl had wandered out of her room, but she wasn’t in the kitchen or the laundry, or in any of the other rooms on the main landing, rooms that smelled of fresh paint and were full of shrouded furniture. I held on to the banister so that I wouldn’t trip in the dark on the way down, feeling my way along the wall. Downstairs, the air was cool. Two doors in the narrow corridor, both open to rooms that were empty except for beds and a jumble of belongings: piles of blankets on the floor, iron pots stacked in the corner, countless cigarette butts lying in ashtrays. There were bottles by the bed, rakija and beer bottles; a few bottles of some herb liquor, long-necked bottles full of clear liquid stuffed with lashed bunches of dead grass. The men were gone, and so were the boys Nada had talked about. But the young woman and the little girl were sitting in an armchair by the window in the second room. The woman was asleep, her head tipped back against the cushion. She had a lavender pouch, too, and held the little girl propped up against her chest, wrapped in a thin sheet that clung like wet paper to the child’s shoulders and knees. The child was awake, and staring.
The little girl was looking at me without fear or deference, and I found myself coming into the room, taking a few steps on the balls of my feet. At this distance, I could smell the alcohol, the thin, searing smell of walnut rakija. The sheet had been soaked in it; they were trying to bring down her fever, break it by cooling her very quickly. It was a backwater method, a precipitous gamble, and we’d seen it over and over at the urgent care clinic—new mothers who couldn’t be steered away from their own mothers’ remedies.
I reached over the woman and put the heel of my hand against the little girl’s forehead. She was warm, but it was the damp warmth of a fever that had broken. There was no way of telling when and if it would spike again or how high it had been, but the strain in her eyes had unbuckled, and she didn’t lift her head from her sleeping mother’s neck at all, just looked at me without focus or interest while I backed out of the room.
I waited for the diggers, but an hour went by and they didn’t come back. There was no movement, no sign of anyone in the house. The little girl had fallen asleep, and the parrot, who had temporarily climbed down to the cage bottom and clattered around for a while, had gone quiet. In that silence, there was only the incessant ringing of the Zdrevkov clinic line, and then I got fed up, took my white coat off the peg and went out to find the road up to the vineyard.
There was no way to get up the slope behind Barba Ivan and Nada’s house, so I walked north toward the main square where the silent spire of the monastery rose out among the roofs. Early morning, and the restaurants and shops were still shuttered, grills cold, leaving room for the heavy smell of the sea. For about a third of a mile, there were only houses: whitewashed stone beach houses with iron railings and open windows, humming neon signs that read Pension in three or four languages. I passed the arcade, a firestorm of yellow and red and blue lights under an awning laden with pine needles. The Brejevina camping ground was a moonlit flat of dry grass, fenced off with chicken wire.
A greenish stone canal ran up past the campground, and this was the route I took. Green shutters, flower boxes in the windows, here and there a garage with a tarped car and maybe some chickens huddled on the hood. There were wheelbarrows full of patching bricks or cement or manure; one or two houses had gutting stations for fish set up, and laundry lines hung from house to house, heavy with sheets and headless shirts, pegged rows of socks. A soft-muzzled, black donkey was breathing softly, tied to a tree in someone’s front yard.
At the end of the canal, I found the vineyard gate. It was unmarked, rusted over with the salt in the
air, and it opened up to a slope of cypresses and limestone ridges. The sun was coming up, whitening the sky above the mountain. I could see the diggers moving around among the vines, men straightening up here and there to stretch and yawn and light cigarettes. There were seven or eight men with shovels scattered across the slope, and they were digging in an irregular pattern, what seemed like complete disarray, under the cypresses and between the rows, as high up as the top of the vineyard where the plot became scrubland, turning over the dew-moistened earth. The clink of their shovels, which had carried all the way down the hill last night, was somehow not so loud here. Up ahead, one of the men was singing.
I was unsteady on the loose dirt of the slope, and there were mounds and shallow holes everywhere. My eyes had adjusted to the half-light, and as I stepped through the rows I came across the nearest man, heavyset and hatted, sitting on the ground a few yards away. He was turned away from me, leaning on his shovel and uncorking what looked like a flask, and I was opening my mouth to greet him when my leg dropped into one of the holes, and I went down.
When he caught sight of me trying to get myself out of the hole, his breath stuck and he staggered back, eyes wild, lips blue, chins shaking. “Mother of Christ!” he shouted, and I realized he was crossing himself, and for a moment I thought he was going to take a swing at me with his shovel. I had my hands up and was shouting that I was a doctor, I was a doctor, don’t.
He took a minute to recover, still breathing heavily. “Motherfuck you,” he said, still crossing himself. The commotion of our encounter had sent the other men running toward us, and they were emerging now from the vines, heads and shovels, an arm here and there, their faces indistinguishable. Someone stepped forward with the flashlight, and the beam lanced my eyes.
“Do you see her?” my fat victim asked one of the men. “Duré, you see her?”