by Téa Obreht
What my grandfather didn’t know was that, in addition to the gun, Luka had brought something else back from the mountain: the pork shoulder the tiger had been eating when the hunters had come upon him in the glade. My grandfather did not know that, after Luka had entered his quiet house at the edge of the pasture on the afternoon of his return, and slowly placed the blacksmith’s gun by the door, he had swung that pork shoulder into the face of the deaf-mute girl, who was already kneeling in the corner with her arms across her belly. My grandfather didn’t know that Luka, after he had dislocated the deaf-mute’s shoulder, had dragged her into the kitchen by her hair, and pressed her hands into the stove.
My grandfather did not know any of these things, but the other villagers knew, without having to talk about it, that Luka was a batterer. People had noticed well enough when she went missing for days, when new rungs appeared in her nose, when that unmoving blood-spot welled in her eye and did not dissipate, to guess what was happening in Luka’s house.
It would be easy for me to simplify the situation. It might even be justifiable to say, “Luka was a batterer, and so he deserved what was coming to him”—but because I am trying to understand now what my grandfather did not know then, it’s a lot more important to be able to say, “Luka was a batterer, and here is why.”
Luka, like almost everyone in the village, had been born in Galina, in the family house he would occupy until his death. From the start to the end of his days, he knew the ax, the butcher’s block, the wet smell of autumnal slaughter. Even during the hopeful decade he spent away from home, the sound of a sheep’s bell in the market square produced in him a paralyzing rush too complicated to be mere nostalgia.
Luka was the sixth son of a seventh son, born just shy of being blessed, and this almost-luck sat at his shoulders all his life. His father, Korčul, was an enormous, bearded man with big teeth, the only person in the house, it seemed, who ever laughed, and never at the right thing. In his youth, Korčul had spent some fifteen years in “the Army”—when asked about it, he always said “the Army,” because he did not care to advertise that he had, in fact, volunteered with several, and had not been particularly selective regarding the alliance or aim of the side on which he was fighting, as long as he could see Turkish pennants flying above the distant, advancing line. Over the years, he had amassed an impressive collection of Ottoman war artifacts, and Sunday mornings found him at the tavern on the upper slopes of the village, coffee in one hand, rakija in the other, trading stories with other veterans, always eager to exhibit some bullet or spearhead or dagger fragment and tell the story of how he had earned it in battle. Long before Luka was born, word had spread that Korčul’s trove included items far older than anyone could remember—helmets, arrowheads, links of chain mail—and that the butcher spent his spare time expanding his collection by robbing graves, digging in old battlegrounds for the clothes and weapons of men centuries dead. This, by all standards, was unforgivable, a curse-inviting sin. This was why, they would later say, none of Korčul’s children survived to have children of their own.
It was also why the villagers—assessing the goings-on of the butcher’s household from a distance—could not reconcile the pairing of Korčul and Luka’s mother, Lidia. She was a round woman with patient eyes and a quiet manner, a polite and even-handed daughter of Sarobor, a merchant’s child, reduced from the nomadic luxuries of her youth by the failure of her father’s business. Her love for children was boundless, but always greatest for her youngest child—a position Luka occupied for only three years, and from which he was demoted following the birth of the family’s first and only daughter. There were five boys before him, the oldest ten years his senior, and while he watched them file, one by one, into the rituals of manhood prescribed by Korčul’s own upbringing, Luka found himself clinging to the foundations of his mother’s life, the stories of her girlhood travels, her insistence on education, on the importance of history, the sanctity of the written word.
So Luka grew up with the feeling of a world that was larger than the one he knew. As he became more and more aware of himself, it began to occur to him that his father—that feared, well-respected, but illiterate man—knew nothing of that greater world, and had done nothing to arrange for the futures of his children in the context of it. During the time he spent with his father, learning, with his brothers, the life of a butcher, he understood that his father’s knowledge extended to cuts of meat and types of blades, the warning signs that an animal was ill, the smell of meat gone bad, the right technique for skinning. For all his prosperity, Luka found Korčul’s ignorance ugly, his disinterest in a larger life, apart from battle trophies, profane, and came to abhor Korčul’s tendency to overlook cleaning his apron, or to eat bread with blood-rusted nail beds. While his brothers were pretending to bash one another over the head with makeshift cudgels, Luka busied himself reading history and literature.
For all his resistance, however, Luka could not avoid the rites that came with family. By the age of ten, he was butchering sheep, and when he turned fourteen, his father, following a tradition of many generations, gave him a knife for cutting bread and locked him into the barn with a young bull whose nose had been filled with pepper. Like his brothers before him, Luka was expected to subdue the bull and kill it with a single knife-thrust to the skull. Luka had spent most of his life dreading this ritual—the violence, the pointlessness of it—but he found himself hoping that, despite his unfortunately wiry frame and thin hands, he might have some unexpected success, some miraculous burst of strength that would enable him to just get it over with. But the bull came tearing out of the back of the stable and smeared Luka across the dirt in front of the butcher and his five other sons, and twenty or thirty villagers who had come to watch the show. Someone who witnessed the event told me that it was like watching a tank crumple a lamppost. (I have since surmised that this rich analogy could not have come about until at least a decade after the actual event, when the witness would have had occasion to see his first tank.) Luka had the bull by the top of the skull, his armpits braced against the boss of the horns. The bull—sensing, perhaps, that victory was imminent—dropped to its knees on top of Luka’s torso, pressed the boy into the ground and plowed the dirt with him, crashing into crates and troughs and hay bales until a physician who had come all the way from Gorchevo climbed into the barn and lodged an ax in the dome of the bull’s back. Luka had a concussion and three broken ribs. A few days later, his father also broke Luka’s left arm in a fit of rage.
After that, Luka bought an old gusla off a gypsy peddler, and went into the fields to shepherd for a few of the local families who needed hired hands. A lot of this is probably tainted by hindsight, but people say that he was too easy in his manner. His voice was too soft, his mind too eased by quiet evenings playing his new gusla. He was too eager to strip naked and bathe with other young men in the mountain lake above the pasture—although no one will ever accuse the other young men of his generation of being too eager to bathe with him. This may be because the young men of Luka’s generation are the fathers of the men telling these stories.
All this aside, Luka became renowned for sitting under the summer trees and composing love songs. I have heard, from more than one source, that Luka was unnaturally good at this, even though he never seemed to be in love himself, and even though his musical talent never quite caught up to his prowess as a lyricist. Though there are those who say that any man who heard Luka play the gusla, even in wordless melody, was immediately moved to tears. One spring—and this, like so much of what is said about someone in admiration, is probably a lie—a wolf came to hunt in the pasture, and Luka, instead of throwing rocks or calling for his father’s dog, subdued it with music.
When I think of Luka in his youth, I sometimes picture a thin, pale boy with large eyes and lips, the kind of boy you might see sitting with his feet bare and his arms around a lamb in a pastoral painting. It is easy to see him this way when you hear the villagers talk about
his songs, about the gravity and maturity of his music. In this early image, he is a beloved son of Galina. Maybe it is easier for them to remember him as this mild boy instead of the enraged youth he must have been, the adolescent consumed with the smallness of his life, and then, later on, the man in the red apron who beat a deaf-mute bride.
This much is certain: Luka was angry enough, determined enough, good enough to leave Galina at sixteen and make his way to the river port of Sarobor in the hope of becoming a guslar.
At that time, the Sarobor guslars were a group of young men from all over the neighboring provinces, who had found one another through some small miracle, and who would converge nightly on the banks of the Grava to sing folk songs. Luka had first heard about them from his mother, who had described them as artists, philosophers, lovers of music, and for years Luka had been convincing himself to join them. Without a word of objection from his father—who had hardly uttered a word of any sort to him since the incident with the bull—Luka crossed three hundred miles on foot to reach them. He had a vision of men with serious faces sitting around a pier with their feet in the bright water below, singing about love and famine and the long, sad passage of their fathers’ fathers, who knew a lot, but not enough to cheat Death, that black-hearted villain who treats all men equally. It was, Luka believed, the only kind of life for him, the life that would certainly lead him farther, perhaps even to the City itself.
In his first week in Sarobor, while renting a thin-ceilinged room above a whorehouse on the eastern side of town, Luka learned that there was a strictly observed hierarchy to all musical proceedings on the river. The musicians did not assemble, as he had supposed, in a convivial atmosphere to share and trade songs; nor were they proper guslars. Instead of solitary men playing the one-stringed fiddle he had come to know and love, he found two considerably sized warring factions—one that favored the brass sound that had come out of the West, and one that retained the frantic string arrangements that harkened back to Ottoman times. Each group, often twenty strong, would assemble nightly on opposite sides of the river and begin to play; then, as the evening progressed, and revelers, drunk with perfume and the moist heat of the river, began to fill the street, each band would take a little bit of the bridge. Slowly, song by song, dance by dance, the musicians would advance along the wide cobbled arch, each band’s progress depending solely upon the size of its audience, the grace of those who had been moved to dance, the enthusiasm of the passersby who stopped to join in the chorus. The songs were not, as Luka had hoped, serious meditations on the fickle nature of love and the difficulties of life under the sultan; instead, they were drinking songs, songs of indulgent levity; songs like “There Goes Our Last Child,” and “Now That the Storm Has Passed (Should We Rebuild the Village?).”
As to the musicians themselves, they were more complicated than Luka had originally expected, a little more ragtag, disorganized, a little more disheveled and drunk than he had imagined. They were wanderers, mostly, and had a fast turnover rate because every six months or so someone would fall in love and get married, one would die of syphilis or tuberculosis, and at least one would be arrested for some minor offense and hanged in the town square as an example to the others.
As Luka became better acquainted with them—crowding in with the string section, night after night, his gusla silent in his hands except for the two or three times he picked up a few bars of some song—he came to know the regulars, the men who had lingered on the bridge for years. There was a fellow who played the goblet drum, a Turk with pomade-glossed hair who was known for being a sensation among rich young ladies. There was also a straw-haired kid whose name no one could ever get right, and whose tongue had been cut out as a result of some mysterious transgression, but who kept good time with a tambourine. On accordion: Grickalica Brki?, whose teeth, whenever a buxom woman stopped to hear his playing, would begin to chatter uncontrollably, and thus made for interesting accompaniment. The fiddler was a man known only as “the Monk.” Some say this was because he had left the Benedictine order because God’s calling for him was in music, not in silence. In reality, however, this nickname was derived from the Monk’s highly unusual haircut: the man was thirty, but bald from forehead to ears, eyebrows included, the result of a disastrous drunken night when he had suggested that, because the fire would not hold in the hearth, someone go up and pour oil down the chimney while he himself lit the wood below.
None of them knew much about history or art. None of them had much ambition for moving on to better things. None of them cared much for the traditional gusla, or its use in epic poetry; but they thought it added an interesting sound to their amateur-crowded group. Luka played on with them for months, at the Monk’s elbow, until they came to understand that he wasn’t going anywhere; until he was a welcome and unequivocal constant among those core players; a drinking companion, a confidant, a recognized wordsmith. People would go on to recite his songs in their homes, hum them in the marketplace, and throw coins into his hat so they could hear them again.
And all the while, carrying on like this, Luka did not give up his devotion to the gusla, or his desire to move on to a position that would afford him more distinguished notoriety. After a certain point, he was forced to admit to himself that the people of Sarobor were beginning to tire of the sad songs that were his passion, but he did not abandon the belief that demand for those songs would exist elsewhere. Lazy afternoons, when the other musicians slept in tavern basements, in the shade of porch screens or in the pale arms of women whose names they did not know, Luka made a project of seeking out real guslars. They were thin-boned old men who had long since stopped playing, and who sent him away from their doors again and again. But he kept coming back, and eventually they relented. After a few glasses of rakija, pulled back to some earlier time by the sound of the river and the sight of the merchants’ ships arriving along the green curve of the bank, the old men would reach for Luka’s gusla and begin to play.
He immersed himself in the movement of their hands, the soft thump of their feet, the throbbing wail of their voices winding through tales remembered or invented. The more time he spent in their company, the more certain he was that this was how he wanted to live and die; the more they praised his growing skill, the more he was able to stand himself, tolerate what he saw as the wretchedness of his roots, accept the disparity between the love he voiced in his songs and the lack of desire he felt for women, from the veiled girls who smiled at him on the bridge to the whores who tried to push themselves over his knees while he sat at the tavern in the company of the other musicians.
There was never enough money to move on, so he stayed in Sarobor; first for one year, then two, then three, playing at weddings, composing serenades, fighting for room on the bridge.
About ten years into his life as a guslar, he met the woman who would destroy his life. She was the daughter of the prosperous Turkish silk merchant, Hassan Effendi, a boisterous, clever, and charming girl named Amana, who was already somewhat of a legend in the town, having vowed, at the age of ten, to remain a virgin forever, and to spend her life studying music and poetry, and painting canvases (which supposedly weren’t particularly good, but were nevertheless valued on principle). A great deal was known about her life, mostly because Hassan Effendi was a notorious bellyacher, and on his daily visit to the teahouse would divulge—and probably embellish—the details of whatever new obstinacy Amana had adopted. As a result, she was often the subject of broader market gossip, renowned for her arrogance, wit, and charm; for the many delicacies to which she was prone; for the determination and inventiveness with which she threatened suicide every other week, whenever her father suggested a new suitor; for sneaking, unveiled, out of her father’s house to join in the revelries on the bridge in a practiced routine obvious to everyone but Hassan Effendi.
Luka had seen her here and there, from a distance—recognized her as the bright-eyed girl with the braid and the disarming smile—but he would never have exchanged wor
ds with her if she had not grown curious about his instrument. One evening, after the band had rounded out a lively rendition of “Is That Your Blood?” Luka looked up from his gusla to see her standing over him, one hand on her hip, the other holding a gold coin over the old hat at his feet.
“What do they call that, boy?” she said loudly, though she already knew, and touched the bottom of his fiddle with a sandaled foot.
“This is a gusla,” he said, and found himself grinning.
“Poor little fiddle,” said Amana, in a voice that made the people who had gotten up to give him money stop and hover behind her. “It has only one string.”
Luka said: “They might offer me a bigger fiddle tomorrow, but still I would not give up my one string.”
“Why? What can it do?”
For a moment, Luka felt his face burn. Then he said: “Fifty strings sing one song, but this single string knows a thousand stories.”
Then Amana dropped the coin into his hat, and without moving from his side she said: “Well, play me one, guslar.”
Luka took up his bow and obliged, and for the ten minutes he played alone, silence fell over the bridge. I’m told he played “The Hangman’s Daughter,” but Luka himself could never remember what he played; for years afterward, he would recall only the way the string sent a grating pulse through his chest, the strange sound of his own voice, the outline of Amana’s unmoving hand on her hip.
People began to talk: Luka and Amana sitting on the bridge together at daybreak, Luka and Amana at the tavern with their heads bent close over a piece of paper.
That they loved each other was certain. The nature of that love, however, was not as simple as people supposed. Luka had found someone who admired his music, and wanted to hear every song he could play; someone who knew about poetry and the art of conversation, about finer things he had long since given up on trying to address with the other musicians. Amana found the intellectual weight behind Luka’s aspirations attractive, the idea of the journey he had already made—and the journey he hoped to make still—incredible. The problem was, however, that she had long since decided she wanted nothing to do with men; and he did not make the effort to convince her otherwise, because he had long since realized he wanted nothing to do with women. Amana was determined to die a virgin; Luka had come to terms, by then, with what it meant to find himself aroused by the sight of the town youths diving into the river on summer days. Taking the final step would mean summoning failure to himself in a world that had already thrown too much against him; one hopes, however, that despite what would happen later with the tiger’s wife, that Luka did find some happiness during the days and nights of which he never spoke.