The tiger’s wife: a novel / Téa Obreht.

THE FORTY DAYS OF THE SOUL BEGIN ON THE MORNING after death. That first night, before its forty days begin, the soul lies still against sweated-on pillows and watches the living fold the hands and close the eyes, choke the room with smoke and silence to keep the new soul from the doors and the windows and the cracks in the floor so that it does not run out of the house like a river. The living know that, at daybreak, the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of its past—the schools and dormitories of its youth, army barracks and tenements, houses razed to the ground and rebuilt, places that recall love and guilt, difficulties and unbridled happiness, optimism and ecstasy, memories of grace meaningless to anyone else—and sometimes this journey will carry it so far for so long that it will forget to come back. For this reason, the living bring their own rituals to a standstill: to welcome the newly loosed spirit, the living will not clean, will not wash or tidy, will not remove the soul’s belongings for forty days, hoping that sentiment and longing will bring it home again, encourage it to return with a message, with a sign, or with forgiveness.

If it is properly enticed, the soul will return as the days go by, to rummage through drawers, peer inside cupboards, seek the tactile comfort of its living identity by reassessing the dish rack and the doorbell and the telephone, reminding itself of functionality, all the time touching things that produce sound and make its presence known to the inhabitants of the house.

Speaking quietly into the phone, my grandma reminded me of this after she told me of my grandfather’s death. For her, the forty days were fact and common sense, knowledge left over from burying two parents and an older sister, assorted cousins and strangers from her hometown, a formula she had recited to comfort my grandfather whenever he lost a patient in whom he was particularly invested—a superstition, according to him, but something in which he had indulged her with less and less protest as old age had hardened her beliefs.

My grandma was shocked, angry because we had been robbed of my grandfather’s forty days, reduced now to thirty-seven or thirty-eight by the circumstances of his death. He had died alone, on a trip away from home; she hadn’t known that he was already dead when she ironed his clothes the day before, or washed the dishes that morning, and she couldn’t account for the spiritual consequences of her ignorance. He had died in a clinic in an obscure town called Zdrevkov on the other side of the border; no one my grandma had spoken to knew where Zdrevkov was, and when she asked me, I told her the truth: I had no idea what he had been doing there.

“You’re lying,” she said.

“Bako, I’m not.”

“He told us he was on his way to meet you.”

“That can’t be right,” I said.

He had lied to her, I realized, and lied to me. He had taken advantage of my own cross-country trip to slip away—a week ago, she was saying, by bus, right after I had set out myself—and had gone off for some reason unknown to either of us. It had taken the Zdrevkov clinic staff three whole days to track my grandma down after he died, to tell her and my mother that he was dead, arrange to send his body. It had arrived at the City morgue that morning, but by then, I was already four hundred miles from home, standing in the public bathroom at the last service station before the border, the pay phone against my ear, my pant legs rolled up, sandals in hand, bare feet slipping on the green tiles under the broken sink.

Somebody had fastened a bent hose onto the faucet, and it hung, nozzle down, from the boiler pipes, coughing thin streams of water onto the floor. It must have been going for hours: water was everywhere, flooding the tile grooves and pooling around the rims of the squat toilets, dripping over the doorstep and into the dried-up garden behind the shack. None of this fazed the bathroom attendant, a middle-aged woman with an orange scarf tied around her hair, whom I had found dozing in a corner chair and dismissed from the room with a handful of bills, afraid of what those seven missed beeper pages from my grandma meant before I even picked up the receiver.

I was furious with her for not having told me that my grandfather had left home. He had told her and my mother that he was worried about my goodwill mission, about the inoculations at the Brejevina orphanage, and that he was coming down to help. But I couldn’t berate my grandma without giving myself away, because she would have told me if she had known about his illness, which my grandfather and I had hidden from her. So I let her talk, and said nothing about how I had been with him at the Military Academy of Medicine three months before when he had found out, or how the oncologist, a lifelong colleague of my grandfather’s, had shown him the scans and my grandfather had put his hat down on his knee and said, “Fuck. You go looking for a gnat and you find a donkey.”

I put two more coins into the slot, and the phone whirred. Sparrows were diving from the brick ledges of the bathroom walls, dropping into the puddles at my feet, shivering water over their backs. The sun outside had baked the early afternoon into stillness, and the hot, wet air stood in the room with me, shining in the doorway that led out to the road, where the cars at border control were packed in a tight line along the glazed tarmac. I could see our car, left side dented from a recent run-in with a tractor, and Zóra sitting in the driver’s seat, door propped open, one long leg dragging along the ground, glances darting back toward the bathroom more and more often as she drew closer to the customs booth.

“They called last night,” my grandma was saying, her voice louder. “And I thought, they’ve made a mistake. I didn’t want to call you until we were sure, to worry you in case it wasn’t him. But your mother went down to the morgue this morning.” She was quiet, and then: “I don’t understand, I don’t understand any of it.”

“I don’t either, Bako,” I said.

“He was going to meet you.”

“I didn’t know about it.”

Then the tone of her voice changed. She was suspicious, my grandma, of why I wasn’t crying, why I wasn’t hysterical. For the first ten minutes of our conversation, she had probably allowed herself to believe that my calm was the result of my being in a foreign hospital, on assignment, surrounded, perhaps, by colleagues. She would have challenged me a lot sooner if she had known that I was hiding in the border-stop bathroom so that Zóra wouldn’t overhear.

She said, “Haven’t you got anything to say?”

“I just don’t know, Bako. Why would he lie about coming to see me?”

“You haven’t asked if it was an accident,” she said. “Why haven’t you asked that? Why haven’t you asked how he died?”

“I didn’t even know he had left home,” I said. “I didn’t know any of this was going on.”

“You’re not crying,” she said.

“Neither are you.”

“Your mother is heartbroken,” she said to me. “He must have known. They said he was very ill—so he must have known, he must have told someone. Was it you?”

“If he had known, he wouldn’t have gone anywhere,” I said, with what I hoped was conviction. “He would have known better.” There were white towels stacked neatly on a metal shelf above the mirror, and I wiped my face and neck with one, and then another, and the skin of my face and neck left gray smears on towel after towel until I had used up five. There was no laundry basket to put them in, so I left them in the sink. “Where is this place where they found him?” I said. “How far did he go?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “They didn’t tell us. Somewhere on the other side.”

“Maybe it was a specialty clinic,” I said.

“He was on his way to see you.”

“Did he leave a letter?”

He hadn’t. My mother and grandma, I realized, had both probably seen his departure as part of his unwillingness to retire, like his relationship with a new housebound patient outside the City—a patient we had made up as a cover for his visits to the oncologist friend from the weekly doctors’ luncheon, a man who gave injections of some formulas that were supposed to help with the pain. Colorful formulas, my grandfather said when he came home, as if he knew the whole time that the formulas were just water laced with food coloring, as if it didn’t matter anymore. He had, at first, more or less retained his healthy cast, which made hiding his illness easier; but after seeing him come out of these sessions just once, I had threatened to tell my mother, and he said: “Don’t you dare.” And that was that.

My grandma was asking me: “Are you already in Brejevina?”

“We’re at the border,” I said. “We just came over on the ferry.”

Outside, the line of cars was beginning to move again. I saw Zóra put her cigarette out on the ground, pull her leg back in and slam the door. A flurry of people who had assembled on the gravel shoulder to stretch and smoke, to check their tires and fill water bottles at the fountain, to look impatiently down the line, or dispose of pastries and sandwiches they had been attempting to smuggle, or urinate against the side of the bathroom, scrambled to get back to their vehicles.

My grandma was silent for a few moments. I could hear the line clicking, and then she said: “Your mother wants to have the funeral in the next few days. Couldn’t Zóra go on to Brejevina by herself?”

If I had told Zóra about it, she would have made me go home immediately. She would have given me the car, taken the vaccine coolers, and hitchhiked across the border to make the University’s good-faith delivery to the orphanage at Brejevina up the coast. But I said: “We’re almost there, Bako, and a lot of kids are waiting on these shots.”

She didn’t ask me again. My grandma just gave me the date of the funeral, the time, the place, even though I already knew where it would be, up on Strmina, the hill overlooking the City, where Mother Vera, my great-great-grandmother, was buried. After she hung up, I ran the faucet with my elbow and filled the water bottles I had brought as my pretext for getting out of the car. On the gravel outside, I rinsed off my feet before putting my shoes back on; Zóra left the engine running and jumped out to take her turn while I climbed into the driver’s seat, pulled it forward to compensate for my height, and made sure our licenses and medication import documents were lined up in the correct order on the dashboard. Two cars in front of us, a customs official, green shirt clinging to his chest, was opening the hatchback of an elderly couple’s car, leaning carefully into it, unzipping suitcases with a gloved hand.

When Zóra got back, I didn’t tell her anything about my grandfather. It had already been a bleak year for us both. I had made the mistake of walking out with the nurses during the strike in January; rewarded for my efforts with an indefinite suspension from the Vojvodja clinic, I had been housebound for months—a blessing, in a way, because it meant I was around for my grandfather when the diagnosis came in. He was glad of it at first, but never passed up the opportunity to call me a gullible jackass for getting suspended. And then, as his illness wore on, he began spending less and less time at home, and suggested I do the same; he didn’t want me hanging around, looking morose, scaring the hell out of him when he woke up without his glasses on to find me hovering over his bed in the middle of the night. My behavior, he said, was tipping my grandma off about his illness, making her suspicious of our silences and exchanges, and of the fact that my grandfather and I were busier than ever now that we were respectively retired and suspended. He wanted me to think about my specialization, too, about what I would do with myself once the suspension was lifted—he was not surprised that Srdjan, a professor of biochemical engineering with whom I had, according to my grandfather, “been tangling,” had failed to put in a good word for me with the suspension committee. At my grandfather’s suggestion, I had gone back to volunteering with the University’s United Clinics program, something I hadn’t done since the end of the war.

Zóra was using this volunteering mission as an excuse to get away from a blowup at the Military Academy of Medicine. Four years after getting her medical degree, she was still at the trauma center, hoping that exposure to a variety of surgical procedures would help her decide on a specialization. Unfortunately, she had spent the bulk of that time under a trauma director known throughout the City as Ironglove—a name he had earned during his days as chief of obstetrics, when he had failed to remove the silver bracelets he kept stacked on his wrist during pelvic examinations. Zóra was a woman of principle, an open atheist. At the age of thirteen, a priest had told her that animals had no souls, and she had said, “Well then, fuck you, Pops,” and walked out of church; four years of butting heads with Ironglove had culminated in an incident that Zóra, under the direction of the state prosecutor, was prohibited from discussing. Zóra’s silence on the subject extended even to me, but the scraps I had heard around hospital hallways centered around a railway worker, an accident, and a digital amputation during which Ironglove, who may or may not have been inebriated, had said something like: “Don’t worry, sir—it’s a lot easier to watch the second finger come off if you’re biting down on the first.”

Naturally, a lawsuit was in the works, and Zóra had been summoned back to testify against Ironglove. Despite his reputation, he was still well connected in the medical community, and now Zóra was torn between sticking it to a man she had despised for years, and risking a career and reputation she was just beginning to build for herself; for the first time no one—not me, not her father, not her latest boyfriend—could point her in the right direction. After setting out, we had spent a week at the United Clinics headquarters for our briefing and training, and all this time she had met both my curiosity and the state prosecutor’s incessant phone calls with the same determined silence. Then yesterday, against all odds, she had admitted to wanting my grandfather’s advice as soon as we got back to the City. She hadn’t seen him around the hospital for the past month, hadn’t seen his graying face, the way his skin was starting to loosen around his bones.

We watched the customs officer confiscate two jars of beach pebbles from the elderly couple, and wave the next car through; when he got to us, he spent twenty minutes looking over our passports and identity cards, our letters of certification from the University. He opened the medicine coolers and lined them up on the tarmac while Zóra towered over him, arms crossed, and then said, “You realize, of course, that the fact that it’s in a cooler means it’s temperature-sensitive—or don’t they teach you about refrigeration at the village schoolhouse?” knowing that everything was in order, knowing that, realistically, he couldn’t touch us. This challenge, however, prompted him to search the car for weapons, stowaways, shellfish, and uncertified pets for a further thirty minutes.

Twelve years ago, before the war, the people of Brejevina had been our people. The border had been a joke, an occasional formality, and you used to drive or fly or walk across as you pleased, by woodland, by water, by open plain. You used to offer the customs officials sandwiches or jars of pickled peppers as you went through. Nobody asked you your name—although, as it turned out, everyone had apparently been anxious about it all along, about how your name started and ended. Our assignment in Brejevina was intended to rebuild something. Our University wanted to collaborate with the local government in getting several orphanages on their feet, and to begin attracting young people from across the border back to the City. That was the long-term diplomatic objective of our journey—but in layman’s terms Zóra and I were there to sanitize children orphaned by our own soldiers, to examine them for pneumonia and tuberculosis and lice, to inoculate them against measles, mumps, rubella, and other assorted diseases to which they had been subjected during the war and the years of destitution that followed it. Our contact in Brejevina, a Franciscan monk named Fra Antun, had been enthusiastic and hospitable, paging us to make sure our journey was unencumbered, and to assure us that his parents, conveniently enough, were looking forward to hosting us. His voice was always cheerful, especially for a man who had spent the last three years fighting to fund the establishment and construction of the first official orphanage on the coast, and who was, in the meantime, housing sixty orphaned children at a monastery intended to accommodate twenty monks.

Zóra and I were joining up for this charitable trip before our lives took us apart for the first time in the twenty-some-odd years we had known each other. We would wear our white doctors’ coats even off duty in order to appear simultaneously trustworthy and disconcerting. We were formidable with our four supplies coolers loaded with vials of MMR-II and IPV, with boxes of candy we were bringing to stave off the crying and screaming we felt certain would ensue once the inoculation got going. We had an old map, which we kept in the car years after it had become completely inaccurate. We had used the map on every road trip we had ever taken, and it showed in the marker scribbling all over it: the crossed-out areas we were supposed to avoid on our way to some medical conference or other, the stick man holding crudely drawn skis on a mountain resort we had loved that was no longer a part of our country.

I couldn’t find Zdrevkov, the place where my grandfather died, on that map. I couldn’t find Brejevina either, but I had known in advance that it was missing, so we had drawn it in. It was a small seaside village forty kilometers east of the new border. We drove through red-roofed villages that clung to the lip of the sea, past churches and horse pastures, past steep plains bright with purple bellflowers, past sunlit waterfalls that thrust out of the sheer rock-face above the road. Every so often we entered woodland, high pine forests dotted with olives and cypresses, the sea flashing like a knife where the forest fell away down the slope. Parts of the road were well paved, but there were places where it ripped up into ruts and stretches of gravel that hadn’t been fixed in years.

The car was pitching up and down through the ruts on the shoulder, and I could hear the glass vials in the cooler shivering. Thirty kilometers out of Brejevina, we started to see more signs for pensions and restaurants, tourist places that were slowly beginning to rely on the offshore islands for business again. We started seeing fruit and specialty food stands, signs for homemade pepper cookies and grape-leaf rakija, local honey, sour cherry and fig preserves. I had three missed pages from my grandmother, but Zóra had the mobile, and there was no way to call my grandma back with Zóra in the car. We pulled over at the next rest-stop with a pay phone, a roadside barbecue stand with a blue awning and an outhouse in the adjacent field.

There was a truck parked on the other side of the stand, and a long line of soldiers crowding at the barbecue counter. The men were in camouflage. They fanned themselves with their hats and waved when I got out of the car and headed for the phone booth. Some local gypsy kids, handing out pamphlets for a new nightclub in Brac, laughed at me through the glass. Then they ran to the side of the car to bum cigarettes from Zóra.

From the booth, I could see the army truck, with its dusty, folded tarp, and the grill of Boro’s Beefs, where a large man, probably Boro himself, was flipping burger patties and veal shoulders and sausages with the flat part of an enormous knife. Behind the stand, a little way across the field, there was a funny-looking brown cow tied to a post in the ground—I suddenly got the feeling that Boro would routinely use that knife for the cow, and the butchering, and the flipping of the burgers, and the cutting of bread, which made me feel a little sorry for the soldier standing by the condiment counter, spooning diced onions all over his sandwich.

I hadn’t noticed my headache while I had been driving, but now it hit me when my grandma picked up after the sixth ring, and her voice was followed by the sharp sound of her hearing aid lancing through the phone line and into the base of my skull. There were soft beeps as she turned it down. I could hear my mother’s voice in the background, quiet but determined, talking with some other consoler who had come to pay a call.

My grandma was hysterical. “His things are gone.”

I told her to calm down, asked her to explain.

“His things!” she said. “Your grandfather’s things, they’re—your mother went down to the morgue, and they had his suit and coat and shoes, but his things, Natalia—they’re all gone, they’re not there with him.”

“What things?”

“Look, God—‘what things’!” I heard her slap her hands together. “Do you hear me? I’m telling you his things are gone—those bastards at the clinic, they stole them, they stole his hat and umbrella, his wallet. Think—can you believe it? To steal things from a dead man.”

I could believe it, having heard things about it at our own hospital. It happened, usually to the unclaimed dead, and often with very little reprimand. But I said, “Sometimes there’s a mix-up. It can’t have been a very big clinic, Bako. There might be a delay. Maybe they forgot to send them.”

“His watch, Natalia.”

“Please, Bako.” I thought of his coat pocket, and of The Jungle Book, and wanted to ask if it, too, was missing; but as far as I knew, my grandma had not cried yet, and I was terrified of saying something that would make her cry. I must have thought of the deathless man at this moment; but the thought was so far away I wouldn’t find it again until later.

“His watch.”

“Do you have the number of the clinic?” I said. “Have you called them?”

“I’m calling and calling,” she said. “There’s no answer. Nobody’s there. They’ve taken his things. God, Natalia, his glasses—they’re gone.”

His glasses, I thought—the way he would clean them, put almost the whole lens in his mouth to blow on it before wiping it clean with the little silk cloth he kept in his pocket—and a cold stiffness crept into my ribs and stayed there.

“What kind of place is this, where he died?” my grandma was saying. Her voice, hoarse from shouting, was beginning to break.

“I don’t know, Bako,” I said. “I wish I had known he had gone.”

“None of it would be like this—but you have to lie, the pair of you, always whispering about something. He’s lying, you’re lying.” I heard my mother try to take the phone from her, and my grandma said, “No.” I was watching Zóra get out of the car. She straightened up slowly and locked the car door, leaving the cooler on the floor of the passenger side. The gypsy kids were leaning against the back bumper, passing a cigarette back and forth. “You’re sure he didn’t leave a note?” My grandma asked me what kind of note, and I said, “Anything. Any kind of message.”

“I’m telling you, I don’t know,” she said.

“What did he say when he left?”

“That he was coming to you.”

It was my turn to be suspicious, to calculate who had known what, and how much of it no one had known at all. He had been counting on the pattern into which we had fallen as a family over the years, the tendency to lie about each other’s physical condition and whereabouts to spare one another’s feelings and fears; like the time my mother had broken her leg falling off the lake-house garage at Verimovo, and we had told my grandparents that we were delaying our trip home because the house had flooded; or the time my grandmother had had open-heart surgery at a clinic in Strekovac while my mother and I, blissfully oblivious, vacationed in Venice, and my grandfather, lying into a telephone line that was too scrambled to be anything but our own, insisted that he had taken my grandma on an impromptu spa trip to Luzern.

“Let me have the phone number of that clinic in Zdrevkov,” I said.

“Why?” my grandma said, still suspicious.

“Just let me have it.” I had a wrinkled receipt in my coat pocket, and I propped it against the glass. The only pencil I had was worn to a stub; my grandfather’s influence, the habit of using the same pencil until it couldn’t fit between his fingers anymore. I wrote the number down.

Zóra was waving at me and pointing in the direction of Boro and his beefs, and the crowd at the counter, and I shook my head at her and looked on in desperation as she crossed the mud ruts on the shoulder and got in line behind a blue-eyed soldier who couldn’t have been more than nineteen. I saw him look her up and down less than discreetly, and then Zóra said something I couldn’t hear. The roar of laughter that erupted from the soldiers around the blue-eyed kid was audible even in the phone booth, however, and the kid’s ears went red. Zóra gave me a satisfied look, and then continued to stand there with her arms across her chest, eyeing the chalkboard menu above a drawing of a cow wearing a purple hat, which looked a lot like the cow tied up out back.

“Where are you girls now?” my grandma said.

“We’ll be in Brejevina by nightfall,” I said. “We’ll do the shots and come straight home. I promise I’ll try to be home by the day after tomorrow.” She didn’t say anything. “I’ll call the clinic in Zdrevkov,” I said, “and if it’s on the way home I’ll go by and get his things, Bako.”

“I still don’t know,” she finally said, “how none of us knew.” She was waiting for me to admit that I had known. “You’re lying to me,” she said.

“I don’t know anything, Bako.”

She wanted me to say that I had seen the symptoms but ignored them, or that I had spoken to him about it, anything to comfort her in her fear that, despite being with us, he had been totally alone with the knowledge of his own death.

“Then swear to me,” she said. “Swear to me on my life that you didn’t know.”

It was my turn to be silent. She listened for my oath, but when it didn’t come, she said: “It must be hot out there. Are you girls drinking plenty of water?”

“We’re fine.”

A pause. “If you eat meat, make sure it’s not pink in the middle.”

I told her I loved her, and she hung up without a word. I held the dead receiver against my head for a few more minutes, and then I called the clinic in Zdrevkov. You could always tell the backwater places because it would take forever to connect, and when it did, the sound was distant and muffled.

I let the line ring to silence twice, and then tried once more before hanging up and getting in line with Zóra, who had already locked horns with Boro trying to order what our city joints called a “strengthened burger,” with extra onions. Boro told her that this was Brejevina, and that she could have a double burger if she wanted, but he had never heard of a strengthened burger, and what the hell was that? The stand was cluttered with coolers of raw meat and cast-iron soup pots brimming with something brown and oily. Behind the counter, Boro was terse, and he wanted exact change, probably to stick it to us for that strengthened burger. Zóra held her sandwich in one hand and mine in the other while I went through her coat pockets for her wallet.

“You heard of a place called Zdrevkov?” I asked Boro, leaning over the counter with the pink and blue notes in my hand. “You know where it is?”

He didn’t.

At seven-thirty, the sun banking low into a distant cover of blue clouds, we came within sight of Brejevina and turned off the highway to follow the town road to the sea. The town was smaller than I had expected, with a palm-lined boardwalk that ran tight between the shore and the shops and restaurants that spilled out into our path, coffeehouse chairs and postcard stands in the middle of the road, kids on bicycles hitting the back of the car with open hands. It was too early for the tourist season to be in full swing, but, with the windows down, I could hear Polish and Italian as we rolled slowly past the convenience store and the post office, the monastery square where we would be setting up the free clinic for the orphanage.

Fra Antun had told us where to find his parents’ house. The place was tucked away in a white oleander grove at the farthest edge of town. It was a modest beachfront house with blue shuttered windows and a roof of faded shingles, sitting on top of a natural escarpment in the slope of the mountain, maybe fifty yards from the sea. There was a big olive tree with what looked like a tire swing out front. There was a henhouse that had apparently collapsed at least once in the last few years, and been haphazardly reassembled and propped up against the low stone wall that ran along the southern edge of the property. A couple of chickens were milling around the door, and a rooster was sitting in one of the downstairs window boxes. The place looked leftover, but not defeated. There was something determined about the way the blue paint clung to the shutters and the door and the broken crate full of lavender that was leaning against the side of the house. Fra Antun’s father, Barba Ivan, was a local fisherman. The moment we reached the top of the stairs that led up from the road, he was already hurrying through the garden. He wore brown suspenders and sandals, and a bright red vest that must have cost his wife a fortune at the yarn cart. At his side was a white dog with a square black head—it was a pointer, but its big-eyed, excited expression made it look about as useful as a panda.

Barba Ivan was saying, “Hey there, doctors! Welcome, welcome!” as he came toward us, and he tried to take all of our belongings at once. After some persuasion, we got him to settle for Zóra’s suitcase, which he rolled up the cobbled pathway between the scrub and the roses. Barba Ivan’s wife, Nada, was waiting at the door, smoking. She had thin white hair and green-river veins that ran down her neck and bare arms. She kissed our faces matter-of-factly, and then apologized for the state of the garden before putting out her cigarette and herding us inside.

Inside, the house was quiet and warm, bright despite the evening. The corridor where we left our shoes opened out into a small living room with blue-cushioned chairs, and a sofa and armchair that had obviously been upholstered long ago. Someone in the house was a painter: an easel, with an unfinished canvas of what looked like a hound, had been set up by the window, and paint-splattered newspapers were crowded around it on the floor. Framed watercolors were spaced carefully along the walls, and it took me a moment to realize that they were all of the same hound, that beautifully stupid black-headed dog from outside. The windows were all open, and with the outdoor heat came the electric evening song of the cicadas. Still apologizing for the mess, Nada led us through to the kitchen, while Barba Ivan took this opportunity to seize all our luggage—Zóra’s suitcase, my duffel, our backpacks—and dart up the stairs at the end of the hall. Nada jostled us into the kitchen and showed us where the plates and glasses were kept, told us where the bread box was, opened the fridge and pointed out the milk and the juice and the pears and the bacon, and told us to have as much of everything as we wanted whenever we wanted, even the cola.

A red and yellow parrot sat in a tin cage between the kitchen window and another lopsided watercolor of the black-headed dog. The parrot had been looking suspiciously at Zóra since we had entered the kitchen, and he took that moment to screech out: “O! My God! Behold the wonderment!”—an outburst we at first took as a strikingly lecherous reaction to Zóra’s bare arms and collarbones. But Nada apologized profusely and dropped a dishrag over the parrot’s cage.

“He likes to recite poetry,” Nada said, and then we both realized that the parrot had been trying to begin the prologue of an old epic poem. “I’ve tried to get him to say things like ‘good morning’ and ‘I like bread and butter.’ ”

She showed us upstairs. Zóra and I would be sharing a room with two cots that had been made up with blue paisley quilts. There was a polished wooden dresser with a few broken drawers, and a small bathroom with an old-fashioned tub and a chain-pull toilet we were warned might or might not flush, depending on the time of day. More sketches of the dog under a fig tree, another of him sleeping on the downstairs sofa. Our window looked out over the back of the property, the orange and lemon trees shivering behind it, and, above that, a sloping plain at the foot of the mountain, lined with rows of low, wind-ruffled vines. Men were digging among the vines; we could hear the distant crunch of their shovels, the sound of their voices as they shouted to one another.

“Our vineyard,” Nada said. “Don’t mind them,” she said about the diggers, and closed one of the shutters.

By the time we brought the coolers and the boxes in from the car and stacked them in a corner of our room, dinner was ready. Nada had fried up sardines and two squid, and grilled a few fish that were about the size of a man’s hand, and there was nothing to do but accept her hospitality and cluster around the square table in the kitchen while Barba Ivan poured us two mugs of homemade red wine, and the parrot, still under the cover of the dishrag, burbled to himself and occasionally shrieked out “O! Hear you thunder? Is that the earth a-shaking?” and, every so often, in answer to his own question, “No! ’Tis not thunder! Nor the earth a-shaking!”

Nada served us black bread, chopped green peppers, boiled potatoes with chard and garlic. She had made a massive effort, arranged everything carefully on blue china that was chipped, but lovingly wiped down after probably spending years in a basement, hidden from looters. The cool evening air came in off the sea from the lower balcony; there were sardines piled high and caked with salt, two charred bass shining with olive oil—“From our own olives,” Barba Ivan said, tipping the bottle so that I could smell the lip. I could picture him sitting earlier that day in a small dinghy somewhere out in the rolling waters of the bay, the thin net pulling at his hands, the effort it would take for him to pick the fish out of the net with those big-jointed brown hands.

Barba Ivan and Nada did not ask us about our drive, about our work, or about our families. Instead, in order to avoid any potential political or religious tangents, the conversation turned to crops. The spring had been terrible: torrential rains, streams overflowing, floods that had flushed out the soil up and down the coast and destroyed lettuces and onions. Tomatoes had been late coming in, and you couldn’t find spinach anywhere—I remembered my grandfather coming back from the market with dandelion leaves that a farmer had passed off as spinach, my grandma buttering the paper-thin dough for zaljanica and then pulling the coarse-leafed mass he had brought home out of the grocery bag and shouting, “What the hell is this?” It was the first time I had thought about my grandfather in several hours, and the suddenness of it pushed me into silence. I sat and listened, half-hearing, as Barba Ivan insisted that the summer, contrary to his expectations, had been incredible: the oranges and lemons plentiful, strawberries everywhere, the figs fat and ripe. Zóra was saying, for us, too, even though I’d never seen her eat a fig in her life.

We had scraped most of the flesh off our respective fishes, unwisely downed our mugs of red wine, tried to help the parrot with verses he had apparently committed to memory better than we ever could, when the child appeared. She was so small I suspect that none of us would have noticed her if she hadn’t come in coughing—a thick, loud, productive cough that ripped through her on the balcony, and then there she was, tiny and round-bellied, standing in the doorway in mismatched shoes, her head a mass of tight brownish curls.

The child couldn’t have been more than five or six, and she held on to the door frame, one hand tucked into the pocket of the yellow summer dress she was wearing. She was a little dusty, her eyes a little tired, and her entrance had caused a lull in the conversation, so that when her second cough came we were all already looking at her. Then she put a finger in her ear.

“Hello,” I said, “and who are you?”

“God knows,” Nada said, and stood up to clear the plates. “She’s one of theirs—those people up in the vineyard.” I hadn’t realized, until that moment, that they were staying here, too. To the little girl, Nada said, “Where’s your mother?” leaning forward, speaking very loudly. When the child said nothing, Nada told her, “Come in for a cookie.”

Barba Ivan leaned back in his chair and reached into the cupboard behind him. He emerged with a tin of pepper cookies, lifted the lid and held it out to the child. She didn’t move. Nada returned from the sink and tried to ply her with a glass of lemonade, but the child wouldn’t come in: a violet pouch had been tied around her neck with frayed ribbon, and this she was swinging with her free hand from one shoulder to the other, occasionally hitting herself in the chin, and sucking back the green streams of snot that were inching out of her nose. Outside, we could hear people returning from the vineyard, dust-hoarsed voices and the clink of shovels and spades dropping to the ground, feet on the downstairs patio. They were setting up to have their dinner outside, at the table under the big olive tree, and Nada said, “We’d better finish up here,” and started collecting our utensils. Zóra tried to stand and help, but Nada nudged her back into her seat. The commotion outside had roused the interest of Bis, the dog who charged out with his ridiculous, ear-swinging lope, nosed the child in the doorway with mild interest, and then got distracted by something in the garden.

Barba Ivan was still holding out the cookie box when a thin young woman swept by the door and swung the child into her arms. Nada went to the door and looked outside. When she turned around, she said, “They shouldn’t be here.”

“Sweets aren’t much good for children,” Barba Ivan said to Zóra, confidentially. “Bad habits before dinner, rots their teeth and such. But what else are we supposed to do? We can’t eat all this ourselves.”

“It was ridiculous to let them stay,” Nada said, stacking the dirty plates on the edge of the table.

Barba Ivan was holding the cookie box out to me. “There was a time when I could eat a whole nut cake, by myself, just sitting around in the afternoon. But my doctor says, careful! I’m getting old, he says, I have to be careful.”

“I said this would happen—didn’t I?” Nada said, scraping the smeared leftovers of the potatoes and chard onto a plate, and lowering the plate to the floor. “Two or three days—it’s been a week. Wandering in and out all hours of the night, coughing on my sheets.”

“They’ve got all kinds of rules now,” Barba Ivan was saying. “Don’t eat butter, don’t drink beer. This much fruit a day.” He held his hands apart, indicating a small barrel. “Eat your vegetables.”

“Each one sicker than the next.” This Nada said loudly, leaning toward the door. “Those children should be in school, or at the hospital, or with people who can afford to put them in school or in the hospital.”

“I tell him, listen. I eat my vegetables. Don’t tell me about vegetables: you buy them at the market, I grow them at my house.” Barba Ivan opened his hands and counted off tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, green onions, leeks. “I’m a man who knows vegetables—but also I’ve eaten bread every day of my life. My father, too, and he had red wine with every meal. Do you know what my doctor says?” I shook my head, fixing a smile.

Nada said: “I told you, and I told Antun, I don’t want them here—and now the doctors have come, and they’re still here, doing God knows what up there, overturning the whole damn vineyard. It’s indecent.”

“He says it’ll help me live longer. Look, God—why would I want that?”

“Tell me it’s not dangerous,” Nada said, touching Zóra’s shoulder. “Tell me, Doctor. Ten of them in two rooms—five to a bed, and all of them sick as dogs, every single one.”

“Why would I want to live longer if I have to eat—rice, and this—what do they call it? Prunes.”

“Not that I am suggesting everyone from up your way sleeps like that. Sleeps five a bed—I’m not saying that at all, Doctor.”

“The hell with your prunes.”

“Have you ever heard of such a thing?” Nada asked us both, wiping her hands on her apron. “Have you?”

“No,” said Zóra obligingly.

“It’s not right,” she said again. “And with those pouches stinking to high heaven. Whoever heard of such a thing—we Catholics don’t have it; the Muslims don’t have it.”

“But still, these people have it, and it’s not our business,” Barba Ivan said, suddenly serious, turning in his chair to look at her. “They’re staying here—it’s not my concern.”

“It’s my house,” Nada said. “My vineyard.”

“The real difficulty is the children,” Barba Ivan said to me, serious now. “They’re very ill. Getting worse.” He closed the cookie tin and put it back on the shelf. “I’m told they haven’t been to a doctor—I don’t know, of course.” He made a face, tapped a fist to his neck. “The bags certainly aren’t helping, and they’re foul.”

“Foul,” said Nada.

They might have continued like this if one of the diggers, a brown-haired, sunburned boy of about thirteen, hadn’t come in to ask for milk. He was shy about asking, and his presence took all the air out of Nada’s indignation, so that she didn’t go back to it even after he left.

After dinner, Barba Ivan took out his accordion to play us some old census songs he had learned from his grandfather. We cut him off at the pass by asking him when he’d last had a physical and offering to get one started for him, doing his auscultation and taking his temperature and blood pressure before bed.

Later on, upstairs, there were more pressing matters: the toilet didn’t flush, and the water in the sink was cold. Their boiler wasn’t working. Not one to be disadvantaged out of a shower, Zóra chanced it. Standing at the window, while Zóra yelped under the running water, I could no longer see the vineyard, but I could hear the clink of shovels starting up again, the high sound of voices that sounded like children. The cicadas were trilling from the oleander bush under the window, and swallows were swinging in high arcs just outside the range of the house lights. A speckled gray moth cowered in an outside corner of the mosquito net. Zóra came out of the bathroom and announced, with some triumph, that the purpose of the rusted pliers in the bathtub was to lift up the pin that turned the shower on. She put her wet hair in a ponytail and came to stand by the window. “Are they digging all night?” she said.

I had no idea. “They must be workers,” I said. “The Barba must be keeping them here past the season for some kind of charity.”

The state prosecutor had paged her twice while she was in the shower.

“You should call them back,” I said.

She was having an evening smoke, holding an ashtray in her free hand and stirring the ashes with the bright tip of her cigarette. “As far as I’m concerned, I have nothing to say until I talk to your grandfather,” Zóra said. She smiled at me, carefully blew the smoke out of the window, waved it out of my face with her hand.

She was on the cusp of asking me what was wrong, so I said, “We’ll get them to come down to the clinic tomorrow,” and climbed into bed. Zóra finished her cigarette, but continued to hover, peering out the window. Then she checked the bedroom door.

“Do you suppose they lock up downstairs?”

“Probably not,” I said. “Doors are probably wide open, and blowing a breeze of paramilitary rapists.”

She turned out the light reluctantly, and for a long time there was silence. She was awake and staring at me, and I was waiting for her to drift off so I wouldn’t have to think of something to say.

Downstairs, muffled by the towel covering his cage, the parrot said: “Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.”

EVERYTHING NECESSARY TO UNDERSTAND MY GRANDFATHER lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life—of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.

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?”

He said this to a short man who had materialized out of a corner row down the slope. “I thought you found something,” the man said. He was switch-thin. His ears were remarkable—sticking away from his face in silhouette like pot handles—and the sweat on his face was breaking through a fine layer of pale dust that had caked solid in the creases around his eyes and mouth.

“But, Duré, do you see her?”

“It’s all right,” Duré said, clapping the fat man’s shoulder. “It’s all right.” And to me, he said, “What the hell are you doing?” I had no answer. “Don’t you know better than to come creeping up here in the middle of the night? What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m a doctor,” I said, feeling stupid.

He squinted at my white coat—splattered now with dust and something I hoped was mud—and then he shook his head. “Jesus.”

“I’m sorry,” I said to the heavyset man, and he leveled some incomprehensible, regional epithet at me, almost certainly not an acceptance of my apology. Then he picked up his flask and waddled off into the rows, muttering to himself and coughing that same cough I had heard from the house. The men who had been standing around began to disperse, returning to their places among the vines. Duré dusted his hands off on the gray jumpsuit he was wearing, then lit a cigarette. He didn’t seem particularly interested in why I was there, or why I wasn’t leaving, and eventually he turned around and headed back down the slope. I followed him between the rows until he found his shovel, and stood behind him as he swung it into the hard dirt under the vines.

My hands had broken my fall, and I realized they were scraped up, sticky with blood, dirt pushed in under the skin.

“Got any water?” I said to Duré.

He didn’t, but he had rakija. He watched me tip a capful of it onto my palms. “That’s homemade,” he told me. It smelled like apricots, and stung.

“I’m a doctor,” I said.

“You keep saying that,” Duré said, taking back his flask. “I’m a mechanic. Dubi over there is a welder. My uncle shovels shit for a living.” He unscrewed the cap and tilted the flask back.

“I’m staying at Barba Ivan’s,” I said. “I want to talk to you about the little girl.”

“What about her?”

“Is she your daughter?”

“That’s what my wife says.” He took a final drag of the cigarette that had been cindering away between his lips, dropped it into the mound of dirt that was slowly piling higher by his sneakers.

“What’s her name?”

“What’s that got to do with you?” He tucked the rakija flask back into the pocket of his gray jumpsuit and swung the shovel off his shoulder and into the ground.

“That little girl is very sick,” I said.

“Really?” said Duré. “Think it takes you to tell me that—why d’you think I’m out here, for exercise?”

I put my hands in my pockets and watched sunlight sliding up the tips of the hills in the distance. Nada had been right about the other children—two young boys who couldn’t have been more than nine, digging with the rest of the men, their faces white, eyelids dark and swollen. They were passing a cigarette between them. I thought to myself, my grandfather would twist their ears off—and in that first moment afterward, when I realized that I would not be telling him, I stood there with the dry earth flying and the cicadas scraping their melancholy drone on the cypress slope.

I asked Duré: “How old are those kids over there?”

“They’re my kids,” he said to me, without missing a beat.

“They’re smoking,” I said. One of the kids had a long, thick clot of green coming out of one nostril, and as he dug he occasionally licked it away. “Are they sick, too?” I said.

Duré lanced the shovel, spade down, into the dirt and straightened up to look at me. “That’s not your business,” he said.

“This isn’t an ordinary cold. It sounds serious—the little girl could have whooping cough, bronchitis. She could end up with pneumonia.”

“She won’t.”

“Has she seen a doctor?”

“She doesn’t need one.”

“What about the boys—they don’t need one either?”

“They’ll be fine,” Duré said.

“I’ve heard you’ve got them out here in the afternoons, in the heat. Do you know what that does if someone’s got a fever?”

“You’ve heard, have you?” he said. He was shaking his head, his chuckles weighed down by the way he was leaning forward. “We do what we have to, Doctor,” he said. “Don’t concern yourself with it.”

“I’m sure you need all the hands you can get for the working season,” I said, trying to sound understanding. “But you must be able to spare the boys.”

“Work has nothing to do with it,” Duré said.

“Send them down to see us,” I said, pressing on, ignoring him. “We’re from the University—we’ve got medicines for the new orphanage of Sveti Paškal. There’ll be a free clinic.”

“My children aren’t orphans.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s all right, it’s free medicine.”

“That’s all right, she says—what’s the matter with you?” he said again. “You think I want my kids around orphans?”

“Well, you’ll put them to work when they’re sick,” I said loudly. Someone in the vineyard let out a low whistle, and it was followed by an explosion of laughter from the men.

Duré was unfazed. All that time, he hadn’t stopped digging for a moment. I could see the gaunt outline of his shoulder blades rising and falling through the gray jumpsuit. By now, this same conversation with my grandfather would probably have come to blows.

“I’ll take good care of them,” I said.

“This is family business,” Duré told me. “They’re being cared for.”

I was suddenly incredibly angry. I fought the urge to ask Duré how he would feel about a visit from my friend, the sergeant, back at United Clinics headquarters—how would Duré feel about getting a talking-to from a man who weighed a hundred and fifty kilos and had just spent six weeks supervising the demolition of a third-rate hospital that didn’t have running water? But then I felt it might be counterproductive, so I just stood by while Duré lit another cigarette and continued to scrape away. Every so often, he would lean in to examine the dirt carefully, run his fingers through it, and the straightening up—not the cigarette, not the rakija—was the effort that forced the wet cough out of him at last.

I said: “How far do you think you’re going to get with that rakija wrap, and whatever other insane cures you’re trying—smothering them with blankets and putting potato peelings in their socks?” He had stopped listening. “They need medicine. So does your wife. And I wouldn’t be surprised if you did, too.”

There was a shout from the other side of the vineyard. One of the men had found something, and there was a commotion to get to it as quickly as possible. Duré made his way over, probably thinking that leaving me behind would ensure my immediate departure; it didn’t. I followed him along the row and then around the corner, to where a slim young man was kneeling over a deep pit in the ground. The men clustered around it. A little way behind them, I stood on tiptoe to see.

Duré leaned down and sifted through the dirt with his free hand. The vineyard had filled with pale light, and the earth was white and moist. He straightened up with something on the palm of his hand—a finger-length shard of something sharp and yellow. Bone, I realized. He turned it over in his fist, looked down into the dirt again.

“What do you say, Doctor?” Duré said, turning around and holding it out to me. I didn’t know what he was asking, and I stared stupidly at it.

“Didn’t think so,” he said, and dropped it into the dirt. “Some animal,” he said to the digger who had found it.

One of the boys was standing at my elbow, leaning over the handle of his shovel. He was a scrawny, sandy-haired kid with a wide face, and he was making that wet glazed noise of throat ache between yawns, sucking his tongue back to scrape it along the dry surface of his throat. Just hearing it made my eyes water. When he turned to go, I clapped a hand onto his temples.

“He’s got a fever,” I said to Duré, who was heading back down to his little patch at the bottom of the vineyard.

But it was already dawn, and the yellow haze of light had crossed the summit of Mount Brejevina and was coming down the other side toward us, toward the house, our upstairs window behind the oleander bush, and the sea, flat and shining beyond the roof. I felt I’d been awake for days. I couldn’t keep up with Duré on the uneven ground, so I was shouting down to him: “He’s sick and underage, you’re breaking the law.”

“I’m in my country.”

It was a vehement lie. He had a drawl from just east of the City. “You’re not,” I said.

“Neither are you, Doctor.”

“Still, even out here there are organizations that wouldn’t think twice—”

But Duré had heard enough. He came back up toward me so fast we nearly collided, his neck cabled with tendons. I had the higher ground, but he had the shovel, and his eyes were bloodshot. “You think you’re the first coat to tell me something like that?” He was very quiet saying this. I could smell the sting of the apricots on his breath. “I haven’t heard this before, about how you’re bringing someone in to interfere, take my kids away? You go ahead, see how long it takes.”

“He’s been out here all night—send him home.”

The kid in question had been listening the whole time, standing on the bouldered ground above us, thin shoulders slumped forward. Duré rested the shovel against his thigh and took a pair of work gloves out of his pocket, pulled them over calloused, dark-nailed fingers. “Marko,” Duré said loudly. “Doctor advises you to go home.” He did not look at the boy. “It’s up to you.”

The kid hesitated for a moment, looking up and down the vineyard. Then he went back to digging without a word.

Duré watched him with a smile I couldn’t categorize. Then he turned to me. “I’ve no more time to waste with you. I got a body somewhere under here that needs to come up so my kids can get better.” He turned, dragging the shovel. “That sound acceptable, Doctor—my kids getting better?”

I watched the thin lines of his hair, slicked back across the bare parts of his head, as he descended, trying to find his footing on the gravel. “I don’t understand,” I said.

“We’ve got a cousin in this vineyard, Doctor.” He spread his arms and gestured to the vines, from one side of the plot to the other. “Buried twelve years. During the war.” He was perfectly serious. “Doesn’t like it here, and he’s making us sick. When we find him we’ll be on our way.”

I was too tired, I thought, and I felt myself beginning to laugh. He had run out of things to say and had resorted to this to get rid of me. But the digging was shallow, patternless—they hadn’t been planting anything, I realized. They hadn’t been weeding, either, or smashing the skulls of field mice. I was trying to be funny when I said: “Have you checked the bridge foundations?”

Duré looked at me for a moment, serious and unblinking. Then he said: “Sure, it’s the first place we looked.”

HAVING SIFTED THROUGH EVERYTHING I NOW KNOW about the tiger’s wife, I can tell you that this much is fact: in 1941, in late spring, without declaration or warning, German bombs started falling on the city and did not stop for three days.

The tiger did not know that they were bombs. He did not know anything beyond the hiss and screech of the fighters passing overhead, missiles falling, the sound of bears bellowing in another part of the fortress, the sudden silence of birds. There was smoke and terrible warmth, a gray sun rising and falling in what seemed like a matter of minutes, and the tiger, frenzied, dry-tongued, ran back and forth across the span of the rusted bars, lowing like an ox. He was alone and hungry, and that hunger, coupled with the thunderous noise of bombardment, had burned in him a kind of awareness of his own death, an imminent and innate knowledge he could neither dismiss nor succumb to. He did not know what to do with it. His water had dried up, and he rolled and rolled in the stone bed of his trough, in the uneaten bones lying in a corner of the cage, making that long sad sound that tigers make.

After two days of pacing, his legs gave out, and he was reduced to a contraction of limbs lying in his own waste. He had lost the ability to move, to produce sound, to react in any way. When a stray bomb hit the south wall of the citadel—sending up a choking cloud of smoke and ash and shattering bits of rubble into the skin of his head and flank, bits that would gnaw at his flesh for weeks until he got used to the grainy ache of them when he rolled onto his side or scratched himself against trees—his heart should have stopped. The iridescent air and the feeling of his fur folding back like paper in the heat, and then the long hours during which he crouched at the back of his pen, watching the ruptured flank of the citadel wall. All of these things should have killed him. But something, some flickering of the blood, forced him to his feet and through the gap in the wall. The strength of that drive. (He was not the only one: years later they would write about wolves running down the street, a polar bear standing in the river. They would write about how flights of parrots were seen for weeks above the city, how a prominent engineer and his family lived an entire month off a zebra carcass.)

The tiger’s route through the city that night took him north to the waterfront behind the citadel, where the remains of the merchants’ port and Jewish quarter spread in flattened piles of brick down the bank and into the waters of the Danube. The river was lit by fires, and those who had gone into it were washing back against the bank where the tiger stood. He considered the possibility of swimming across, and under optimal circumstances he might have attempted it, but the smell rising off the bodies turned the tiger around, sent him back past the citadel hill and into the ruined city.

People must have seen him, but in the wake of bombardment he was anything but a tiger to them: a joke, an insanity, a religious hallucination. He drifted, enormous and silent, down the alleys of Old Town, past the smashed-in doors of coffeehouses and bakeries, past motorcars flung through shopwindows. He went down the tramway, up and over fallen trolleys in his path, beneath lines of electric cable that ran through the city and now hung broken and black as jungle creeper.

By the time he reached Knez Petrova, looters were already swarming the Boulevard. Men were walking by him, past him, alongside him, men with fur coats and bags of flour, with sacks of sugar and ceiling fixtures, with faucets, tables, chair legs, upholstery ripped from the walls of ancient Turkish houses that had fallen in the raid. He ignored them all.

Some hours before sunrise, the tiger found himself in the abandoned market at Kalinia, two blocks up from where my grandfather and my grandma would buy their first apartment fifteen years later. Here, the scent of death that clung to the wind drifting in from the north separated from the pools of rich stench that ran between the cobbles of the market square. He walked with his head down, savoring the spectrum of unrecognizable aromas—splattered tomatoes and spinach that stuck to the grooves in the road, broken eggs, bits of fish, the clotted fat leavings on the sides of the butchers’ stands, the thick smell smeared around the cheese counter. His thirst insane, the tiger lapped up pools from the leaky fountain where the flower women filled their buckets, and then put his nose into the face of a sleeping child who had been left, wrapped in blankets, under the pancake stand.

Finally, up through the sleepless neighborhoods of the lower city, with the sound of the second river in his ears, the tiger began to climb the trail into the king’s forest. I like to think that he went along our old carriage trail. I like to imagine his big-cat paw prints in the gravel, his exhausted, square-shouldered walk along my childhood paths, years before I was even born—but in reality, the way through the undergrowth was faster, the moss easier on paws he had shredded on city rubble. The cooling feel of the trees bending down to him as he pushed up the hill, until at last he reached the top, the burning city far behind him.

The tiger spent the rest of the night in the graveyard and left the city at dawn. He did not go by unobserved. He was seen first by the grave digger, a man who was almost blind, and who did not trust his eyes to tell him that a tiger, braced on its hind legs, was rummaging through the churchyard garbage heap, mouthing thistles in the early morning sunlight. He was seen next by a small girl, riding in the back of her family’s wagon, who noticed him between the trees and thought he was a dream. He was noticed, too, by the city’s tank commander, who would go on to shoot himself three days later, and who mentioned the tiger in his last letter to his betrothed—I have never seen so strange a thing as a tiger in a wheat field, he wrote, even though, today, I pulled a woman’s black breasts and stomach out of the pond at the Convent of Sveta Maria. The last person to see the tiger was a farmer on a small plot of land two miles south of the city, who was burying his son in the garden, and who threw rocks when the tiger got too close.

The tiger had no destination, only the constant tug of self-preservation in the pit of his stomach, some vague, inborn sense of what he was looking for, which carried him onward. For days, then weeks, there were long, parched fields and stretches of marshland clogged with the dead. Bodies lay in piles by the roadside and hung like pods, split open and drying, from the branches of trees. The tiger waited below for them to fall, then scavenged them until he got mange, lost two teeth, and moved on. He followed the river upstream, through the flooded bowl of the foothills swollen with April rain, sleeping in empty riverboats while the sun, pale in the blue mist of the river, grew dimmer. He skirted human habitations, small farms where the sound of cattle drew him out of the bracken; but the openness of the sky and the prospect of human noise terrified him, and he did not stay long.

At some bend in the river, he came across an abandoned church, half a bell tower overgrown with ivy, crowded with the hushed shuffling of pigeons. It kept the rain off him for a few weeks, but there was no food for him there, all the corpses in the churchyard having decomposed long ago, nothing for him but the eggs of waterbirds and the occasional beached catfish, and eventually he moved on. By early autumn, he had spent four months in the swamps, gnawing on decaying carcasses that drifted by, snatching frogs and salamanders along the creek bed. He had become a host for leeches, and dozens of them stood like eyes in the fur of his legs and sides.

One morning, in the grip of an early frost, he came across a boar. Brown and bloated, the hog was distracted with acorns, and for the first time in his life, the tiger gave chase. It was loud and poorly calculated. He came on with his head up and his breath blaring like a foghorn, and the hog, without even turning to look at its pursuer, disappeared into the autumn brush.

The tiger did not succeed, but it was something, at least. He had been born in a box of hay in a gypsy circus, and had spent his life feeding on fat white columns of spine in the citadel cage. For the first time, the impulse that made him flex his claws in sleep, the compulsion that led him to drag his meat to the corner of the cage he occupied alone, was articulated into something other than frustration. Necessity drew him slowly out of his domesticated clumsiness. It strengthened and reinforced the building blocks of his nature, honed his languid, feline reflexes; and the long-lost Siberian instinct pulled him north, into the cold.

BIS WAS SNORING ASTHMATICALLY ON THE DOORSTEP OF the upper patio, and he started at the sound of my footsteps and bellowed like a moose until I reached him. I pushed past him with my knee, and then he followed me to the upper porch, where I sat at the top of the staircase above the main road. Bis hung around for a moment or two, pushing his wet face into the crook of my arm, sneezing with excitement at the notion of sharing the early morning hours with someone; and then he decided that I was unanimated and useless, and he ran down and over the road and dropped past the palms onto the beach. Moments later, I could hear him splashing around. It wasn’t dawn yet, and there was a fine pink sheen to the air, as translucent as a fish. The lights of Zvoćana were still bright on the water across the bay.

The shadows were pulling back from the water, gathering at the foot of the road, when Barba Ivan came down the stairs. He came down slowly, putting both feet on each stair. He took one look at me—scuffed-up pant legs and dirt-smeared coat and bloodied palms—and said, “I see you’ve been up to the vineyard.”

That I had made this effort on my own seemed to compel him to confide in me. He asked if I wanted to come fishing, and I said no, but I got up and followed him down to his boat anyway. It was a little blue skiff, paint peeling off the sides, green and yellow barnacles clinging to the bottom like something earned. Rubber boots on his feet, two large crates and an empty bucket in his arms, the Barba told me he had some lobster cages near the shore, a small net for dogfish a little farther out, and then the big net, right in the middle of the bay, that Fra Antun helped him with when he wasn’t supervising the orphanage. He held his arm out as he explained this to me, cutting the horizon into evenly distanced rectangles with a flat hand.

Then he told me about the diggers. They had shown up on his doorstep last week, two carloads of them, all their pots and pans and, in his words, peddling bric-a-brac, and at first he’d thought they were gypsies. He hadn’t known how ill they were then; only Duré had come inside, and he had stood in Barba Ivan’s kitchen and told them there was a body in the vineyard, a body Duré had put there, the body of a distant cousin whom he had carried down from the mountains during the war and had to leave behind. The cousin had been stuffed into the ground somewhere up on that plot during the months the house had been abandoned. Now the whole family was sick, and no one had been able to help them until some hag from back in their village told them it was the body making them sick, the body calling out for last rites, a proper resting place. They were going to find him at any cost; earlier this year, they’d lost an aunt to the illness, and they were paying to dig.

“Nada doesn’t care for it,” he told me, untying the boat. “But then, of course, what it comes down to is: they’ve got children. And do we or do we not want a body in the vineyard?”

He had been watching them for the last week, growing more and more uneasy. “You’ve seen the pouches,” he said, pointing to his neck. “They’ve got—I don’t know—grass and dead things in them to keep away the illness.”

They had brought so many bottles that Barba Ivan suspected they had a trade on the side; rare kinds of rakija, perhaps some family concoction. But the young woman had told him about the bottles, full of water from a holy spring—back on Duré’s and my side of the border—and herbs and grasses for health.

“But they haven’t found him yet?” I said.

“Oh, he’s long gone,” Barba Ivan said with a broad smile. “I keep telling them—long gone. It’s hard, shallow earth. He’s not where he’s supposed to be—floods have flushed him out, dogs have dragged him off. Who knows?”

The Barba put his crates in the boat and I helped him push it out, even though he waved me off. Bis was already in the boat, wagging his tail so hard his hips and whole rear end were swinging manically from left to right. Then Barba Ivan climbed into the boat and, eighty years old if he was a day, rowed himself out to the motorboat he kept moored to the breakwater, switched vessels, lifted Bis out of the skiff and into the motorboat, and then, with the dog standing on the wet prow like a masthead, the two of them set off down the coast, cutting the still morning water. Every hundred yards or so, Bis would launch backward out of the boat, his jowls flapping into an insane grin of canine pleasure, and disappear under the waves; Barba Ivan would kill the motor and drift until the dog caught up, or turn the boat around and go back for him.

EVERY SUNDAY AFTERNOON, EVEN WHEN THE WAR WAS AT its worst, the City’s greatest doctors would convene on the patio of Banević’s restaurant in Old Town to smoke and drink and reminisce, to trade stories of astonishing patients and impossible cases, to praise one another’s diagnoses and resourcefulness over a three-o’clock lunch reservation that had stood firm for almost sixty years.

The doctors were professors and nephrologists, cardiologists and University chairs, oncologists and orthopedic surgeons, a rotating parade of retirees whose accomplishments, though sometimes several decades old, still carried considerable weight in the medical community. They knew each other’s stories by heart, but over walnut rakija and warm bread, red peppers with garlic and platefuls of grilled meat, they reminded each other of difficult times, pleasurable to revisit now that their legacy was secure in a timeline that by the grace of the spoken word only grew more and more incredible.

My grandfather was always among them. They were men alongside whom he had struggled up the tortuous rungs of the School of Medicine in his youth; and, though he was always humble about his work, I guess he, too, needed to remind himself of who he was and had once been. He had not founded a cancer clinic or won a national research prize; but, a great doctor in his own right, he was known for turning out flawless diagnosticians and surgeons during his time at the University, for advocating the medical rights of poverty-stricken villagers, and above all, for the privilege of having saved the Marshall’s life—which, for better or worse, was an honor he shared only with certain surgeons in Zurich.

Because my grandfather was far more comfortable with extolling my accomplishments than his own, my knowledge of the incident was vague until I got to medical school. I knew about the Marshall’s handwritten letter of thanks, sitting in the top drawer of my grandfather’s desk; I knew, also, about the bottle of the Marshall’s finest quince rakija, made from fruit harvested in the Marshall’s own orchards, sitting unopened in the back of my grandfather’s liquor cabinet for as long as I could remember.

The person who finally filled me in on the details was a starstruck assistant in first-semester pathology, who related it all sixth- or seventh- or eighth-hand. Apparently, one summer more than thirty years ago, my grandparents were hosting a wedding party for the head of the oncology department of the Military Academy of Medicine at our family lake house in Borovo.

“Verimovo,” I corrected him.

“Right,” the assistant said.

Still, there was a wedding. It was evening, the party in full swing, when an innkeeper from the nearby village came running down the drive in desperation. It’s a strange scene to picture: doctors and their wives dancing to the alcohol-impaired efforts of the village trumpet players; interns and laboratory assistants drunkenly lip-locked in the woods behind the house; inebriated dermatologists hanging over the porch rails; the University’s entire medical department swarming our old lake house and garden; and my grandfather, a frowning and irritated sentry, extracting the chief of rheumatology from where he had fallen into the rosebushes. The innkeeper coming up the road, waving his arms, saying, we need the doctor, where is the doctor?—in God’s name, give us the doctor, the man is dying! My grandfather, miraculously the only sober doctor on hand, shrugging into his coat and heading into the village to veto the stupefied local herbalist, who, as the only qualified person in town, had misdiagnosed the condition as food poisoning, and administered raw mint as a remedy.

The patient, of course, was the Marshall himself. He had been taken ill en route to a conference in Vrgovac after overindulging in date shells and garlic broth. Caught without his personal physician, he had been rushed to the nearest medical facility—a two-room shack—with an entourage of thirty men, all armed to the teeth. The innkeeper was terrified: the date shells had been prepared at his establishment. By the time my grandfather reached the clinic, the patient was halfway to looking like a corpse already, and my grandfather knew instinctively that neither food poisoning, nor any of its cognates, was the issue.

My grandfather took one look at the patient—whose green face was ostensibly unrecognizable. “You stupid son of a bitch,” he said to no one in particular (though everyone present was said to have immediately wet his pants). “Why didn’t you just shoot him in the head, you would have freed up the bed faster.” Fifteen minutes later, the patient was lying half-conscious on an operating table, his midsection unzipped, while my grandfather pulled feet and feet of infected intestine out of the Marshall’s body in great red loops over his shoulder, and several bystanders—the innkeeper, assorted security personnel, probably a nurse or two, all terrified into competency by my grandfather’s rage—stood in an assembly line of blood-spattered coats and goggles, patting away at the man’s entrails, trying to clean off the appendix pus.

I remember the assistant looking at me expectantly when he finished the story, waiting for me to return the favor, to tell him something about my grandfather that could surpass what he had just told me.

WHEN LUKA AND JOVO RETURNED FROM THE MOUNTAIN, carrying with them the gun of the fallen blacksmith—about whose fate they lied through their teeth, and whose final moments they played up to such an extent that stories of the blacksmith’s skill and fortitude were being told in surrounding towns long after the war had ended—my grandfather was relieved to discover that the hunt had not been successful. In the long afternoon and night while the hunters were away, he had contemplated his encounter with the tiger in the smokehouse. Why had the girl been there? Had she been there the whole time? What had she been doing?

He knew for certain that her purpose had not been to harm the tiger, that she had smiled knowingly at him when it became obvious that the tiger had escaped. My grandfather considered what he would say to the girl when he saw her next, how he could ask her, knowing she could not reply, about what she had seen, what the tiger was like. They were sharing the tiger now.

My grandfather felt certain that he would see her at the service to honor the blacksmith. Sunday afternoon, and he stood in the stifled back of the church, with its hanging white tapestries, and scanned the frost-reddened faces of the congregation, but he did not see her. He did not see her outside afterward, either, or later that week at the Wednesday market.

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.”

ON THE WAY BACK FROM ZDREVKOV, I STOPPED AT KOLAC for the children’s candy, intercepted the cashier of the gas station convenience store just as she was closing up for the evening. I had no bills left, and I grappled with her for twenty minutes, finally persuading her by paying double the amount in our currency to cover the cost of her having to go to the money exchange in the morning. She helped me load two boxes of local chocolate into the car and then drove away in a little run-down hatchback that roared out a line of smoke as she pulled onto the road.

There was a pay phone by the deserted gas pump, and I used my last four coins to call my grandma. The blue bag was in my backpack, folded in half. The mortuary cold of it had stunned me, and I hadn’t touched it since Zdrevkov.

My grandma had been making funeral arrangements all day, and when she asked me if I was ready to come home, I told her about Zdrevkov, about going to the veterans’ clinic, about how hospitable and consoling they had been. She listened to me in silence, and I realized the news of this journey was as incomprehensible for her as the idea of my grandfather’s death had been to me, all of it just words on a bad line. The fact that Zdrevkov had been within driving distance seemed to comfort her, reaffirm in some way that he had been coming to see me after all. She could forgive a misunderstanding, but not an outright lie. Driving off the peninsula, I had been thinking about the deathless man, how my grandfather could have heard about the boys who had stepped on the land mine. The veterans’ village, stragglers clinging to life after the dead had gone away. I didn’t mention any of this to her.

“Were they disappointed?” she said. “Were they hoping no one would come by to collect his things?” She had been envisioning a despicable scenario in which I walked into the hospital to find my grandfather’s belongings had been distributed among the staff, his hat on the head of an assistant janitor, his watch on the receptionist’s wrist.

“They’re very busy there,” I said. “They apologized for the mix-up.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her what kind of place it was, that we had been lucky to have them find us at all, lucky he hadn’t ended up on that sea-facing slope behind the clinic. “Would you like me to tell you what’s in the bag?”

There was a long silence. The phone clicked. My grandma finally said, “You opened it?”

“Not yet.”

“And don’t,” she told me. “Don’t you dare. How can you even think it?” She started in about the forty days again, about unwittingly interrupting the progress of the soul. How the bag was a blessing, an untouched blessing, and what the hell was I thinking? She was shouting by the time she said: “What else do I have left to pay my respects with, Natalia? When I didn’t know he was sick? And you didn’t say anything when you knew?”

The phone beeped twice, and then the line went dead. My pager rang almost immediately, and it continued to ring while I drove back to Brejevina, but I had no money left, and the afternoon was fading into evening. She gave up eventually, my grandma, and I drove with all four windows down, the draft keeping me awake.

By the time I got back to the monastery, the gate was closed. I could see the low sun mirrored in the clerestory windows from the road, but the garden was empty. All along the boardwalk, the shops were dark and shuttered, the postcard stands and trays of snorkeling gear crammed behind iron screens. Some hundred yards later, I came to the corner canal, and here Brejevina’s townspeople and tourists were standing in animated, sunburned throngs, smoking, leaning against cars, making their way slowly between the eucalyptus trees to the vineyard fence. I rolled the car into the ditch and left it there, went up the slope with my backpack in my arms, the bag still inside. There was a hot stillness over the sea, and it had crawled onto the land and stilled everything, even the vineyard. From the gate, I could see the diggers, deeper among the vines than they had been that morning. Duré was there with his pot-handle ears, standing like a scarecrow, back bent, hips thrown out. The heavyset man from that morning was there, too, drinking a can of cola, his neck reddened by the sun. The boys from that morning were sitting against a dirt-filled wheelbarrow among the vines; there was no sign of the young woman, or the little girl.

Fra Antun saw me from the vineyard gate, opened it without a word. I apologized, told him about the traffic and the candy, but I’m sure he could tell I was lying. He was sweating under his cassock, his glasses fogged up and his hair curling in thin wisps away from his neck.

From the hill, I could see the sun cutting an unhurried line through the water, the ferry returning from the islands, and the shaded back of Barba Ivan’s place. People were ranged along the vineyard fence all the way down into the overgrowth behind the house. Nada stood on the downstairs balcony, smoking with about six or seven other women, widows hunched like birds in their black dresses and a few middle-aged housewives in fish-splashed towels who had just come up from the beach. Nada had set food out on a long rectangular table under the olive tree, and every few minutes she would lower a tray down to the people crowding the fence.

Zóra stood by an oil-drum fire behind the diggers, frowning at something on the bottom of her shoe. When she straightened up and saw me, she gave me a look formerly reserved for Ironglove and the records administrator who worked at the University registrar’s office. Armed with disinfectants, several liters of water, and some knowledge of what was to come, she was there to salvage the community’s faith in us by forestalling a medical disaster. She did not want my help.

Out among the vines, Duré was bending over something with a damp cloth, wiping it down slowly from end to end, making a visible effort not to move it around too much. It was a suitcase of some kind, an old-fashioned valise, patent leather cracked, handles frayed gray. This, I realized, was why Duré had been confident that the body would eventually make an appearance, why he had been willing to overlook the reality of dogs and floods: he had safeguarded the cousin—whom I had previously imagined to be the occupant of a shallow grave—by stuffing him into a suitcase. Duré was wiping the sides down slowly, with great care, enormous relief at having recovered the case evident in his face. Twelve years of accounting for his inability to return the body, his negligence in leaving a family member behind, loyalty suspect, always defending himself from the conclusions they must have been drawing when he explained himself—had he abandoned a dying man? Killed him and disposed of the body? And the illness itself, how his thoughts must have turned straight to the body when his wife and children began falling ill, one by one; how he must have circled around his own guilt, hinted at it while he searched for cures from the village crone, until the old woman finally caught on and told him what he wanted to hear, pointed to his recklessness and irresponsibility with the body, absolved him by confirming that the burden was his.

The evening began with a blessing. This had been scrawled on a piece of neon-green paper in handwriting that was presumably illegible; Duré read it aloud, slowly, stumbling over the words, over the name of the Father and of the Son, and over some invocation that mystified him so thoroughly he was forced to summon help from some of the other diggers. While they tried in vain to decipher their guidelines, I imagined the old woman who had sent them here, alone in a small, cold house high above Duré’s village, as milky-eyed and supple-limbed as a toad, devoting every ounce of strength to composing this blessing she knew by heart, but had never written down. Her notes urged the diggers to wail, but their hesitation made their efforts seem halfhearted. Shawled and bent, the old woman would have given the process dignity, produced a sound long and hollow and endless, a sound that would have dispersed the audience along the vineyard fence. Instead, the discordant howl of the diggers roused the onlookers into a steady chorus of “wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind” that started first among the most inebriated of the men, but pretty soon spread up and down the line.

Undaunted, the heavyset man turned away from the fire and shouted “Motherfuck you!” to everyone.

“Stop fucking around,” Duré said to him, and lost his place on the page. “That’s not part of this,” he said, turning to Fra Antun, “should I start over?”

“I really don’t know,” the monk said.

Fra Antun had incense, and he was swinging it back and forth helplessly over the valise while Duré read on, and the diggers coughed and crossed themselves. There was still no sign of the little girl.

The heat of the day, compounded by my early morning in the vineyard, had caught up to me. I felt I’d waited years for the body to be found, though I’d only heard about it that morning—somehow being in Zdrevkov had changed everything, and I didn’t know what I was waiting for anymore. My backpack was on my knees, my grandfather’s belongings folded up inside. I wondered what they would look like without him: his watch, his wallet, his hat reduced by his absence to objects you could find at a flea market, in somebody’s attic.

The opening of the valise was preceded by a baptism with holy water from one of the diggers’ herbed bottles. Fra Antun sprinkled it himself, and then Duré tried the zipper—not surprisingly, after more than a decade underground, the zipper did not budge. In the end, they agreed to cut the suitcase open, and someone ran for a kitchen knife from the house, which Nada handed over from the balcony. The diggers were deliberating over where to make the incision. Total silence from the spectators for Duré’s backswing and then the knife went in. A strained creak, followed almost immediately by the stench of decay. The body groaned. The sound, straining like a violin, stretched between the fire and the fence. Someone behind me called for God. Arms swung into action; up and down the fence, people were crossing themselves.

Zóra, meanwhile, had been standing by all this time, watching the proceedings, her whole body tensed up like piano wire. I would later find out that, before things got under way, she had asked Duré if he really expected to find a heart in the valise, and he’d said: “What do you think I am, some sort of idiot?” to which Zóra—by no small miracle—did not reply. But now that groans from the valise had shaken the entire town into paroxysmal supplication, she couldn’t restrain herself any longer. “That’s just the gases depressurizing,” she said, loudly and to no one in particular.

But the diggers were undeterred. More chanting and wailing, Fra Antun refusing to touch the herbed bottle, renouncing their holy water but still swinging that incense patiently over the suitcase, the pot catching the light of the falling sun. Zóra waited for another opportunity to offer her opinion, but minutes went by and none came. She drew back to my side of the vineyard, came up the slope dusting her hands against her coat, and stood over me. I pushed myself across the rock ledge to make room for her.

“I have a message for you,” she said. She handed me her coat, and then took off her sweater. She laid the sweater out on the ground beside me and sat down on it, took her coat back across her knees. “Your grandma says: you open the bag, you’d better not bother coming home.” Zóra said this without looking at me. Her throat was beaded with sweat from standing too close to the fire. “She was emphatic on that point.”

Zóra had begun wearing a new perfume two months ago, and I hadn’t been able to get used to the smell of it yet—but, sitting there with the smoke in her hair and the day coming out of her skin, the smell of alcohol and soap and cigarettes, her mother’s detergent in the starchy smell of her coat, the iron in her earrings tinged by sweat, she came back to me completely. Everything I had expected her to say she let fall between us, and I couldn’t remember the answers I had been preparing.

Duré had moistened a clean rag with water from the herbed bottle and was taking the cousin out of the suitcase, bone by bone, rubbing the long yellowed blades of the legs gently with the cloth, laying them down on a clean sheet on the ground. The other diggers hovered over him, smoking, their backs to the fence. They had closed off the ritual, speaking quietly, with smaller gestures, either following the directions of their village crone or owing to the animated reaction of the onlookers—who, having guessed that the liveliest portion of the proceedings had come and gone, were beginning to lose interest anyway.

“What would you do?” I said.

“That depends,” said Zóra. “What would your grandfather say?”

“He’d tell me to humor my grandma, not to open the bag.” After a while, I said: “And he’d tell you to testify.”

“We’ll never get back by Saturday,” Zóra told me. “But you know that.” She took my hand and held it on her knee, and didn’t say anything.

The wet rag was passing from hand to hand, and they were squeezing the water out of it onto the bones, the cracked dome of the skull, wiping down the empty sockets and the crooked lines between the teeth. The spinal column was materializing on the sheet, the vertebral discs like toys. So many hands in the suitcase it was hard to tell who was removing what, but someone was meticulous and organized, sorting the pieces out on the sheet, joints here, fingers there, even though the whole thing would be folded up into itself later. Then they were breaking the thighbones, sawing through them with a cleaver so that the body could not walk in death to bring sickness to the living, and Duré was rolling up the rag, winding it tight over his fist and calling it the heart—and I felt stupid for not considering this possibility, the metaphorical heart, and for doubting the old crone, wherever she was.

Silence while Duré moistened the rag again, three splashes of water for the newly baptized heart, the clenched wad of it tight and heavy in his fist. The heavyset man brought out a small brass pot, and Duré lowered the rag into it carefully, poured oil on it and set it on fire, and for a long time the little brass pot stood on the ground with the family leaning forward to look at it, and all I could think about while we were waiting for it to end was the deathless man and his coffee cup.

They were adding water to the brass pot, which was smoking now, putting it over the oil-drum coals, and Duré baptized the fire and the bones with what was left of the water and then tossed the bottle aside. All along the fence, the onlookers were beginning to dissipate, buckling under the weight of their expectations. A couple of boys were kicking a soccer ball along the vineyard fence.

Then the water was boiling, and Duré took the pot off the fire, and the men began passing it around quietly, without emotion, steadfast drinkers all, trying not to spill the ash-water. Some of the men removed their hats as they did this; some didn’t bother to put out their cigarettes. Fra Antun carried his incense over to us and stood there, watching the slow progression of the brass pot, and the faces of the men who had already had their share of the heart.

“Where’s the little girl?” I asked him.

“Inside,” said Fra Antun, “sleeping. They had her out here with a fever this afternoon, my mother threatened to call the police if they tried to bring her back out again.”

It was getting dark now. The sun had dipped below the side of the peninsula, and the sky in the west was draining quickly into the water. While we watched, one of the boys from the burial party put on his hat and went by us quickly. Zóra was already holding out an offering of water and disinfectant, but he pushed past her and went through the gate at the end of the vineyard. And with him, it was over, the tight secrecy of the circle around the valise had unraveled. One of the men wiped his mouth and laughed about something.

“What now?” Zóra said.

“Now comes the vigil,” Fra Antun told her.

“Where’s that kid going?” she said.

“To get someone from outside the family to bury the ashes on the hill.”

“Why doesn’t he do it himself?”

“Family member,” Fra Antun said. “He can’t.”

“What about you?”

“Well, I won’t.” Peering down at us from the underside of his glasses, he looked like an enormous dragonfly. “He’ll have a hard time getting anyone to go up to the crossroads after a body’s come up.”

“The crossroads?”

“For our mora,” said Fra Antun with a smile. “The spirit who comes to gather the dead.”

I was saying, “I’ll do it,” before my mind had fully come around what he might mean.

“Don’t be stupid,” Zóra said, looking at me. Fra Antun was biting his nails, letting the two of us sort it out ourselves.

I said: “Tell Duré and the family I’ll go to the crossroads on their behalf if they send the mother and the kids down to the clinic in the morning.”

WHILE THE VILLAGERS OF GALINA ARE RELUCTANT TO TALK about the tiger and his wife, they will never hesitate to tell you stories of one of the lateral participants in their story.

Ask someone from Galina about Dariša the Bear, and the conversation will begin with a story that isn’t true: Dariša was raised by bears—or, he ate only bears. In some versions, he had spent twenty years hunting a great black bruin that had eluded other hunters from time out of mind, even Vuk Sivić, who had killed the fabled wolf of Kolovac. In the end, the advocates of that narrative say, the bear grew so weary of Dariša’s pursuit that it came to his camp in the night and lay down to die, and Dariša talked to it while it was dying like this in the snow, until its spirit passed into him at first light. My personal favorite, however, was the story that Dariša’s tremendous success as a hunter was derived from his ability to actually turn into a bear—that he did not kill, as men killed, with gun or poison or knife, but with tooth and claw, with the savage tearing of flesh, great ursine teeth locked into the throat of his opponent, making a sound as loud as the breaking of a mountain.

All these variations come down to one truth, however: Dariša was the greatest bear hunter in the old kingdom. That, at least, is fact. There is evidence of it. There are pictures of Dariša before the incident with the tiger’s wife—pictures in which Dariša, light-eyed and stone-faced, stands over the piled hides of bears, almost invariably in the company of some spindly-legged member of the aristocracy whose cheerful grin is intended to conceal knees still shaking from the hunt. In these pictures, Dariša is guileless and unsmiling, as charismatic as a lump of coal, and it’s hard to understand how he managed to generate such a loyal following among the villagers of Galina. The bears in these pictures tell a different story, too, one of death in excess—but then, no one ever looks to them for answers.

Dariša came to Galina once a year, right after the Christmas feasts, to indulge in village hospitality and to sell furs in anticipation of the hardening winter. His entrance was expected but sudden: people never saw him arrive, only awoke to the pleasant realization that he was already there, his horse tethered, oxen unhitched from their cart, fare spread out on a faded blue carpet. Dariša was short and bearded, and, in passing, might have been taken for a beggar; but, like his quiet manner and his tendency to indulge the morbid curiosity of children, he seemed to bring with him a wilder, more admirable world. He brought news and warmth, too, and occasionally stories of the wilderness and the animals that peopled it, and the villagers of Galina associated his arrival with good luck and seasonal stability.

Until that particular winter, my grandfather had looked forward to the yearly visit of Dariša the Bear with as much enthusiasm as anyone else in the village; but, distracted by the tiger and his wife, my grandfather had forgotten all about him. The other villagers, however, had not; instead, the inevitability of his appearance had loomed on and on in their collective consciousness, something that they avoided mentioning, lest their reliance on its surety prevent his arrival. So, when they emerged from their houses one late January morning and saw him there, brown and dirty and as welcome as a promise, their hearts rose.

My grandfather, who would otherwise have been first in line to walk up and down the faded blue carpet and stare at the open-jawed heads of bears, eyes glass, or stone, or altogether missing, looked through the window and realized, with dread, what was going to happen. Across the square, the tiger’s wife was probably looking out at Dariša, too, but she did not know the gravity of the commotion that was animating the village. She did not guess, as my grandfather must have guessed, that the priest rushing toward Dariša with open arms was not just saying hello, but also: “Praise God you’ve come safely through—you must rid us of this devil in his fiery pajamas.”

All along, my grandfather had hoped for a miracle, but expected disaster. He was nine, but he had known, since the encounter in the smokehouse, that he and the tiger and the tiger’s wife were caught on one side of a failing fight. He did not understand the opponents; he did not want to. Mother Vera’s unexpected assistance had been a sign of hope, but he didn’t know what the hope was toward. And with the hunter’s coming, my grandfather realized immediately that the odds were now heavily weighted against the tiger. Dariša the Bear, who, for so long, had represented something admirable and untouchable, became a betrayer, a murderer, a killer of tigers, a knife-wielding, snare-setting instrument of death that would be directed at something sacred, and my grandfather had no doubt that, given enough time, Dariša would succeed.

“NO,” DURÉ SAID TO FRA ANTUN, “NO, I DON’T WANT HER, get me somebody else.”

But the crowd along the fence had thinned out, the campground lighting up, restaurants along the boardwalk reopening, and the kid who had gone looking for a volunteer had not come back. Duré tried to wait him out, but night was falling, and after a few minutes without better prospects he was forced to consult his green paper for any rules that might explicitly prohibit me from taking the rag heart up to the crossroads.

“For God’s sake,” he said at last, his face falling. “Have you at least got a patron saint in your family?”

“Where’s that written?” I said, trying to get a look at the paper.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Duré. “Who’s your patron saint?”

“Lazarus,” I said, uncertain, trying to picture the icon hanging from the handle of my grandma’s sewing drawer. This seemed sufficient for Duré, and he gave in.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll send the boys around tomorrow.”

“Send them all tonight,” Zóra said. “And the little girl.”

Even before he handed me the jar I had admitted to myself that my desire to bury the heart on behalf of his family had nothing to do with good faith, or good medicine, or any kind of spiritual generosity. It had to do with the mora, that man who came out of the darkness to dig up jars, and who was probably just someone from the village playing a practical joke—but who was, nevertheless, gathering souls at a crossroads sixty kilometers from where my grandfather had died, a ferry ride from the island of the Virgin of the Waters, three hours from Sarobor, and there was no way around these things, not after I had been thinking about them all afternoon, not with my grandfather’s belongings in my backpack. I was prepared, of course, for a prankster. I was prepared for an awkward exchange, an encounter in which I caught three teenagers digging up the jar to steal coins from the hole, putting their cigarettes out in the well-loved ashes of the heart. It was also possible—more than possible, in fact, probable, really, the likeliest of all possibilities—that no one would appear, and that I would wait at the crossroads all night, watching the wind come through the slanted green plot of the neighboring vineyard. Or that, in my exhaustion, I would fall asleep or begin to hallucinate. Or it would be the deathless man, tall and wearing his coat, coming down through the fields of long grass above the town—smiling, always smiling—and then I would sit, without breathing, in some bush or under some tree while he dug up the jar, probably whistling to himself, and when he had it in his hand, I would come out and ask him about my grandfather.

The sun had set, bringing the sky low and spreading thin clouds into corners of the horizon where the light was still standing. The tide had risen suddenly, gray and heavy and massive on the shore below. Fra Antun volunteered to show me the way to the crossroads, and we took a road up from the vineyard into the open space between the town and the mountain, and were walking south along the ridge, through a field of bristles and purple and red flowers scattered in tight clusters, out of which grasshoppers, black and singing, fell like arrows as we passed. Fra Antun was walking a few steps ahead, in silence, probably considering how he would broach the subject of my disappearance earlier that afternoon. I followed with a garden spade in my pocket and the little clay jar in my hands, terrified that I was going to drop it, or that it was going to tilt and spill ash-water over me. I had the backpack thrown over one shoulder, and as it swung back and forth, I could hear the muted crackle of the blue bag from Zdrevkov. We passed a young boy bringing six gray-faced sheep down from the mountain—we heard them before we saw them, and long after they had gone, we could hear the steady clang of the ram’s bell.

“It’s very kind of you to do this,” Fra Antun said suddenly, looking back at me, and I shook my head.

“At least they’ll come for medicine now,” I said, and I thought of Zóra down in the graveyard, waiting patiently to start wiping people’s mouths and handing out water.

“I’m sure your time could be better spent,” he said, and for a moment I thought he was reproaching me, but then he turned and smiled back at me, and I smiled back and kept walking.

“You’re looking after sixty children, Father,” I said eventually. “I’m just burying a jar.” Fra Antun was holding up the hem of his cassock, and I could see sandals and frayed jeans underneath. “There are a lot of paintings of your dog in town,” I said. “At the monastery, at your mother’s house.”

“Bis isn’t mine,” he said, “Bis is Arlo’s dog—my brother, Arlo.”

“Did your brother do the paintings at Nada’s house?”

“Some of them,” he said. “But then a lot of people took to it after the war.”

“The children seem really attached to him,” I said, and it all seemed to make sense to me. “Does Arlo bring the dog around for them to play with?”

“My brother is dead,” he said shortly. We had come up to a slight rise in the road, and here the path through the grass veered off and up the hill, but Fra Antun pressed on into the field, where the sticky, switch-thin blades were sawing against each other. I was still going after him, and trying to think of something to say to that, something besides I’m sorry, when he stopped abruptly and turned. “For my mother, it’s been very hard.” I nodded, and Fra Antun scratched the back of his neck with his hand. “Arlo was fifteen the year before the war started, and he made friends with some boys who were staying with us on vacation. One day they all went camping up at Bogomoljka, just five or six kids, for a night or two. A few nights went by—he was fifteen you know, we thought maybe he was acting up, acting out. This was a few months before the war. We didn’t look for him. He’d been gone a week. My father went down to throw the trash out in the dumpster in our drive, and there he was.”

I said: “I’m sorry,” and regretted it immediately, because it just fell out of my mouth and continued to fall, and did nothing.

“Anyway,” he said, without hearing me, “that whole week he was gone, Bis sat next to the dumpster and didn’t move, and we all thought he was waiting by the road for Arlo to come back. Except we had it wrong—he was waiting for us to find Arlo.” Fra Antun took off his glasses and wiped them on his cassock. “So—we found out a few years later that those kids he had gone camping with were serving with the paramilitary on the border. And now, people paint Bis.”

He had his hands inside the sleeves of his cassock, and then he said again that it had been very hard for his mother, and I wanted to say I knew, but I didn’t know. He could have said your paramilitary, but he didn’t. I kept waiting for him to say it, but he didn’t, and then I let him not say anything, and I didn’t say anything, either, and then he told me, “It’s not much further now.” We kept walking, side by side, over the rise and then down a slight dip in the field, where a low evening fog was pinning itself to the side of the mountain. Below us, at the bottom of the incline, lay a dirt track that led straight up and onto the steepest part of the slope, where the scrub grew close and dark, and, going across it, another track that led out of the field and into the spider-leafed plot of the vineyard.

When we got to the crossroads, Fra Antun showed me the shrine of the Virgin. It was on a shelf that had been carved into the seaward side of a boulder that stood in the grass where the two roads met. The Virgin, a wooden icon with dark edges where water had damaged the wood, stood propped up on the stone shelf, and flowers, dry as paper, lay piled in neat, dark bunches around the base of the stone. Several feet away, the grass was bright with beer cans and cigarette butts, which Fra Antun began picking up with his hands while I knelt down and got out my spade and thrust the point of it into the dirt. The ground was hard, packed tight, and eventually I settled on scraping it away instead of trying to spoon it out. Every so often, I looked over my shoulder at Fra Antun, who was piling the cans and bottles and leftover wrappers into the apron he had made out of the front of his cassock. When he was done, he lit the candle on the shrine, and I put the jar into the hole I had made, and then dropped three coins in with it. I mounded the earth, like he told me to, packed it tight over the top of the jar, and then straightened up, dusted off my hands. I asked him if it would be difficult to get back to town in the dark, in case I had to before morning.

He looked at me with surprise. “You’re not thinking of staying?”

“I said I would.”

“No one ever stays,” said Fra Antun, and he sounded serious. “There are foxes out here, Doctor, that carry rabies—and obviously people who come to drink. I can’t let you stay.”

“I’ll be all right,” I said.

Fra Antun tried again. “Men, Doctor, who get drunk around here.” He looked like he was contemplating how he was going to force me to come with him. “I absolutely insist,” he said.

“I was in Zdrevkov earlier today,” I said. It was supposed to make him feel better about my decision to stay, but he took off his glasses and touched his wrist to each eye, very slowly.

“Doctor,” he said again.

“I’ll stay here,” I said. And then I said: “Part of the goodwill service.” It wasn’t entirely a lie, and he couldn’t argue with it. And I couldn’t tell him the truth.

He looked around, and then he said: “I must ask you to stand in the vineyard, then, and you must promise not to leave it till morning.”

“Why?”

“They say the vines are holy,” he said. “The blood of Christ.” He pushed his glasses up nervously, and then he took my arm, and we walked twenty feet off the road and into the first rows of the vineyard. He was tucking me in, I realized, tucking me as far back into the vines as possible. He held my hand, and he kept looking up the mountain and then down toward the water, picking his way between the vines, pulling me behind him. “It doesn’t matter, of course,” he said, once he’d picked a spot. “No one is actually going to come, Doctor. You know that, you must know that.” I nodded hard. “But it will give me peace of mind to know you’re off the road,” he said, smiling. “We’re all entitled to our superstitions.”

I watched him as he walked out between the vines. He waved to me once he got out, and I could barely see him, but I waved back, and then I stayed where I was and watched him as he went through the field slowly, without looking over his shoulder, and his failure to do this worried me now that I was alone. The cans in his cassock were rattling, and I could hear them after he had disappeared over the rise and down the road that led to the graveyard below.

It was very late, but the remaining light of the day was still falling on the sea, settling in cones behind the peaks of the offshore islands. At eleven it was late evening, a cloudless night, and the moon was surfacing above the summit of Mount Brejevina, casting before it a net of brightness that crept up and up and made new shadows on the ground. There was nowhere to sit, so I stood with the vines shuddering around me until I got tired, and then I crouched down in the dirt and watched the flickering light of the Virgin’s candle through the wooden legs of the vineyard. I put the backpack down in front of me and opened the flap so I could see the blue bag, but with the fading of the light it had gone gray like everything else.

For the first two hours, I had no visitors, and it’s possible that I fell asleep, because I don’t remember how that time passed. Then, I expect, it got late enough for the movement of nocturnal things, and an owl fared in from somewhere behind me and landed in the field, the white ruff of its feathers rearing up around the swiveling head while it listened for something I couldn’t hear. It sat with me for a long time, wide-eyed and silent, shifting from side to side, and then, when I got up to stretch my legs, it was gone. Mice were in the vineyard, the quick movement of their feet. The cicadas sang in waves, in lulls and roars of sound that drifted in from the field. Around two-thirty, I heard what I thought were footsteps, and I stood up and tried to get a look at the shrine, but it was only a donkey coming down from the mountain, brown, big-headed, disinterested. It had shy eyes, and it entered the vineyard a little way down from me, and I could hear it moving off through the leaves, making a dry snorting sound as it went. It left a warm, sweet smell behind it.

My grandfather, I realized, would have called me a lot of things for staying there. It hadn’t occurred to me that, if anyone came, they might come through the vineyard, too, and we might surprise each other, in which case I could get shot, or stabbed, or worse.

At three-fifteen, a fox ran by out of nowhere. I had confined myself to my square of vineyard, and hadn’t moved at all, and it came in with a shriek that rose up through me from the ground and rattled me completely. It sounded like a child, and I was looking around for it before I was even on my feet, but then I saw the fox, or, at least, the rings that were the fox’s eyes, and then the silver flash of the tail receding into darkness, and then I thought, the hell with this.

My feet were asleep. I waited out the pins and needles and made my way to the edge of the vineyard, and then I saw that somehow the candle on the shrine had gone out.

Someone was already there.

From where I was standing I could see the curved back of a figure hunched over the ground by the boulder. When I saw it, I backed quickly into the vineyard and continued to stare between the leaves. I didn’t know where the man had come from, I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t heard his approach.

He was digging: slowly, methodically, with both hands, throwing up small black showers of dirt, its shadow spread out like a wing across the white boulder. Then he found the jar, and I heard the sound of his hand on the coins—one, two, three. All that certainty I had felt that nothing would come, and now this. And I found myself barely able to stand, let alone come out and say, Are you the deathless man? Are you? in a voice convincing enough to deserve an answer.

He had the jar, and he turned away from the shrine. He did not start down the road to Brejevina then, but instead began a slow ascent up the mountain. I waited until I could see the outline of him on the first roll below the tree line, and then I followed.

A FEW YEARS BEFORE MY GRANDFATHER DIED, BOMBS WERE falling on the City. It was the final collapse, years after it had first begun, and it had finally reached us. Bombs were falling, and they were falling on government buildings and banks, on the houses of war criminals—but also on libraries, on buses, on bridges that spanned the two rivers. It came as a surprise, the bombing, especially because the way it started was so mundane. There was an announcement, and then, an hour later, the scream of the air raid siren. All of it was going on outside, somehow, even when the sound of the bombs hitting started coming in through the open windows, and even when you went outside, you could tell yourself it was some kind of crazy construction accident, that the car, flung seventy-five feet into the façade of a brick building, was just some kind of terrible joke.

Bombs were falling, and the entire City shut down. For the first three days, people did not know how to react—there was hysteria, mostly, and people evacuated or tried to evacuate, but bombs were falling up and down the two rivers, and there was nowhere to go to avoid them. Those who stayed in the City were convinced that it wouldn’t last more than a week, that it was ineffective and expensive, and that they would just give up and go away, and there was nothing to do but stick it out. On the fourth day of the bombing, compelled by the irresistible need for certain kinds of freedoms despite the circumstances—or, perhaps, because of them—people started going to coffeehouses again, sitting on the porches, often staying out to drink and smoke even after the sirens sounded. There was an attitude of outdoor safety—if you were outside, people reasoned, you were a much smaller, moving target, while if you sat in your building, you were just waiting for them to miss what they were actually aiming for and hit you instead. The coffeehouses stayed open all night, their lights darkened, the television hissing in a back room, people sitting quietly with their beers and iced teas, watching the useless red waterfalls of light from the antiaircraft guns on the hill.

While it was happening, my grandfather didn’t read about it, and didn’t talk about it, not even to my mother who, for the first three days of bombing, became the kind of person who yelled at the television and didn’t turn the set off even when she went to bed—as if keeping it on would somehow isolate her from the thunder outside, as if our city’s presence on the screen could somehow contain what was happening, make it reasonable and distant and insignificant.

I was twenty-two, interning at the Military Academy of Medicine. To me, the persistence of my grandfather’s rituals meant that he was unchanged, running on discipline and continuance and stoicism. I didn’t notice, and didn’t realize, that the rituals themselves were changing, that there was a difference between the rituals of comfort and the preventive rituals that come at the end of life. He still went out as though he had a full roster of house calls to make, but his lifelong patients were beginning to die, to fold slowly to the maladies of old age, even with him there. His daily exercises continued, but they were the perfunctory exercises of an old man: facing the living room window in the pale morning light, his sweatpants loose and hitched up above his socks, his hands clasped behind his back in a matter-of-fact way while he rose to the balls of his feet and fell back onto his heels, rhythmically, with a thump that reverberated through the whole apartment. He did this daily, and without deviation, even with the sirens grinding a howl on the next block.

For twenty years, we had watched the four-o’clock showing of ’Allo ’Allo! together. Now, there were afternoon naps. He slept sitting up, with his head bent. His feet stuck straight out in front of him, and his body was propped up entirely on the heels of his clogs. His hands were folded across his stomach, which was usually growling, because in addition to everything else, he was now frowning, without precedent, over the things my grandma cooked for us, over burek and paprikash and stuffed peppers, things I remembered him eating with relish in the past, meals he would sigh delightedly over during otherwise silent dinners. It happened while I wasn’t looking, but Grandma was preparing separate meals for him now, because she couldn’t bear to subject the rest of us to the punishment of eating boiled greens twice a day and poached meat for dinner, which was all he ate, strictly and uncomplaining.

His trips to the zoo had become a thing of the past long before the bombing forced the City to close its gates. There was a lot of speculation about this closure—people, not just my grandfather, were furious, felt it was a sign of giving up, accused the City of using the bombing as an excuse to slaughter the animals to save on resources. Indignant, the authorities set up a weekly newspaper column that ran current pictures of the animals and reported on their well-being, on the birth of their cubs, on plans for zoo renovation when the raids were over.

My grandfather began to cut out newspaper clippings about the zoo. I would come home in the early mornings, after my shift at the hospital, to find him taking breakfast by himself, removing the back section of the newspaper and looking through it angrily. There was disaster, he would tell me, at the zoo.

“This business is very bad for us,” he said, tilting his head up to look through his bifocals, his tray of seeds and nuts half-finished, his water glass tinted with the orange of fiber supplements.

The story in the newspaper focused on the tiger, and only on the tiger, because, despite everything, there was still some hope for him. It said nothing about how the lioness aborted and the wolves turned and ate their cubs, one by one, while the cubs howled in agony and tried to run. It said nothing about the owls, splitting open their unhatched eggs and pulling the runny red yolk, bird-formed and nearly ready, out of the center; or about the prized Arctic fox, who disemboweled his mate and rolled around in her remains until his heart stopped under the lancing lights of the evening raids.

Instead, they said that the tiger had begun to eat his own legs, first one and then the other, systematically, flesh to bone. They had a picture of the tiger, Zbogom—the aging son of one of my childhood tigers—sprawled out on the stone floor of his cage, his legs, stiff as boards, tied up behind him like hams. You could see the thick black marks where the flesh of his ankles had been soaked in iodine, and the newspaper said that nothing could abate that particular compulsion—they had tried tranquilizers, chains, bandages dipped in quinine. They had modified a dog funnel and taped it to his neck, but he had eaten the funnel during one of the night raids, and afterward he had eaten two of his own toes.

Two days after the tiger article ran, bombers hit the bridge over the South River and, within two hours of its collapse, they hit the abandoned car factory beside the zoo and Sonja, our adopted African elephant—beloved zoo mascot, small-eyed matriarch of the citadel herd, lover of peanuts and of small children—fell dead on the spot.

For weeks, the City had been trying to process the suddenness of the war, the actuality of its arrival, and we had treated it as something unusual and temporary; but, after that particular raid, something changed, and all the indignation and self-righteousness that had seeped over from the end of the last war was now put to good use. Every night afterward, people marched for miles to stand shoulder to shoulder at the citadel gate. Others, meanwhile, stood packed in inebriated rows on the stone arches of our remaining bridges. You had to be drunk for the bridge guard, because the chances you would be hit were higher, and after that the chances got higher still that you would die, because standing on either end would not spare you from a fall into the water if the middle was hit.

Zóra, braver than anyone I knew, spread out her defensive agenda—she spent her nights with thousands of people by the stone knees of the dead Marshall’s horse on the east bank of Korčuna, wearing a toucan hat in solidarity with the people guarding the zoo. She can tell stories about the bombing of the First National bank, how she watched a missile hit the old brick building across the river, the vacuum of sound as the blue light went down, straight down, through the top of the building and then blasted out the windows and the doors and the wooden shutters, the bronze name on the building, the plaques commemorating the dead—all of this followed by the realization, once the smoke cleared, that despite everything, the building didn’t fall, but stood there, like a jawless skull, while people cheered and kissed and, as the newspapers would later point out, started a baby boom.

During the war, I had begged my grandfather to give up on his nightly house calls, on the rituals that made him feel productive; now, against his wishes—which he expressed with a more colorful vocabulary than even I had allowed myself at fourteen—I was holding vigil at the zoo on my nights off. The crowd there was different, older. People would begin to arrive around seven o’clock, in time for the last round of the popcorn cart, and then we would stand in small groups on the sidewalk that ran around the citadel wall, wearing the regalia of our beast of choice. The lion-woman was there, wearing a yellow mop as a wig. One man had tied wire hangers around his head and put white socks on them as ears and come to stand for Nikodemus, our giant Welsh rabbit. A few people came as the wolf pack, wearing toilet rolls as snouts, and there was a woman who had been to the zoo only once, as a child, and had come dressed the way she remembered her first and only giraffe: yellow and with stumpy horns. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d forgotten the blotches. I came for the tiger, of course, but the best I could do was paint a Davy Crockett–style cap from my old dress-up box in the basement with orange and black stripes, and stand there with the monstrous fake raccoon tail hanging over my back. The fox was a man dressed in a red suit, bow tie, and glasses. The zoo had never had a panda, but we had six or seven pandas guarding the citadel gate, loofah tails sticking out of their pants. The hippo wore a purple sweater, with a pillow tucked underneath.

People were also writing on the zoo wall with chalk and spray paint, and, a few weeks in, they began arriving with placards that favored an attitude of friendly reportage over the standard FUCK YOUs that were being held aloft up and down the bridges. A gray-clad man with a pink towel over his head appeared one evening at the zoo gates holding up a sign that said: AIM HERE, I AM AN ELEPHANT. There was also a famous guy from lower Dranje, where the water tower had been hit, who originally posed as a duck, but then showed up on the sidewalk the day after the cotton factory bombing with the announcement: I NOW HAVE NO CLEAN UNDERWEAR. After that, the newspapers were flooded with overhead shots of his poster, the red lettering, his frayed gray gloves clutching the cardboard. He appeared again, in a week or two, bearing the message: NO UNDERWEAR AT ALL. Someone else held up a sign that read: ME NEITHER.

Zóra and I swapped stories over our shifts at the clinic, where we bandaged heads and arms and legs, helped make room for the wounded, assisted in the maternity ward, supervised the distribution of sedatives. From the office window on the third floor of Sveti Jarmo hospital, you could see the trucks coming in from the bomb sites, the tarps laid out on the stone courtyard, laden with parts of the dead. They were not like the parts we saw in anatomy, fresh, connected to their related tissues, or to the function that gave them meaning. Instead, they made no sense, lying there red and clotted, charred at the sides, in piles to which you could only guess they belonged—legs, arms, heads. They had been picked out of ditches, trees, the rubble of buildings where they had been blown by the force of the bombs, with the purpose of identifying the dead, but you could barely distinguish what they were, much less try to assign them to the bodies, faces, persons of loved ones.

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.

HALFWAY UP THE HILL, THE FIGURE STOPPED TO REST, and I stopped too, in the cover of a low, wind-strangled tree that was leaning over the road, the smell of the lavender and sage straining my nostrils. He was standing in the middle of the road, swaying on his feet as he looked around, and I had the distinct feeling that he was looking back at me, that he knew I was there, and was trying to decide what to do with me. I had not planned out what I intended to do if he turned and came to confront me, and for the first time I regretted the white coat I was still wearing, and the backpack rustling against my shoulders. I stood still while the man turned from one side to the other, a slow, ponderous kind of dance, shifting from one foot to the next, shoulders hunched forward, ribs twisted up in the shadows, so that I found myself thinking mora, and laughing at myself in my head.

Then the moon came out, and threw the whole plane of the hill into sharp relief, the shadows of the trees and the humped rocks along the side of the road, and I saw that the man was moving again. Slowly, slowly, rolling on, he went up the hill. I waited for him to disappear around a bend, and then I set off after him. For a long time, now, I had felt a sense of being tipped back, the steep thrust of the mountain tilting forward over me the closer I got to it, and now, as I came around the bend in the road, the path turned right, and became what felt and sounded like a shallow, almost empty riverbed, which led away from town across the flat, wind-washed side of the hill. Below me lay the iridescent outline of the beach, lit up with ice cream signs and restaurant terraces, harbor lights smeared in the water, the square of darkness around the monastery where Fra Antun’s garden stood empty.

The man was moving steadily up the riverbed, through the thin channel of water, toward a timbered rise that was widening fast on the hill before us, and I walked behind in the open, hoping he would not turn to look for me again, because now that we were moving sideways across the hill I couldn’t hide any longer. The wind had stopped, and, it seemed, the cicadas, too, and there was no sound except the slight cracking of the riverbed under my feet, and the chiming of my backpack clasps, and the occasional rustle of something that ran through the grass.

Far ahead, the figure walked unevenly, pushing himself forward through the water. He made a strange silhouette from behind, leaning forward, big feet padding along quietly on the earth, the head rolling over the shoulder. There was nothing encouraging about the man, nothing that indicated it was a good idea to keep following him. I stopped once, for a few minutes, my shoes soaked through, and I watched his advance as he moved away from me, and thought hard about turning back.

Up ahead, the man dropped suddenly, a swinging movement that brought him low, and then he straightened up again and moved on. I gave him more distance, straining to see ahead in the dark. Something was there, something that had intercepted the man’s forward momentum, and as I came closer it came out of the darkness at me slowly. It was a chain, I realized, a rusted metal chain that spanned the riverbed, slung between two trees on either bank. It was creaking a little, and as I came up to it, I saw, hanging between the two strands of the chain, the familiar red triangle: MINES. And any doubt I’d had—in my grandfather’s stories, in my own sanity, in the wild darkness of the walk—fell away, and I was certain, certain that I was following the deathless man, certain of the madness that came with meeting him, the kind of madness that could make my grandfather tie a person to a cinder block and throw him in a pond, the kind of madness that was forcing me to throw my backpack over the chain and go down on my hands and knees and crawl into a minefield and stand up and keep going.

Then the man entered the trees, and I hung back for a little while, not knowing whether to follow him in. He could hide, I realized, behind some tree and watch me groping around in the dark, then collect me at the crossroads when I stepped on something I thought was innocuous and went up in a shower of blood. Or I could lose my way in the wood and be stuck there until morning. But I had come this far, so I went in, into the complete loss of light, the dead silence of the pines, thick-trunked, scissor-needled, ranged close together. I was breathing hard, I realized, because the slope had been steeper for some time, and the water weighed down my movements. I tried to quiet myself so that the man would not hear me behind him while we were in the wood. The riverbed wavered up through the pines, and my feet were slipping on the wet rocks and needles that lay piled in it, and the cracking pinecones that kept getting caught in the fronts of my shoes were making too much noise. I kept expecting to look up from trying to see where I was going to find that I had come up on the man suddenly, or that he had stopped and was waiting for me. I couldn’t see anything in that darkness, but I could picture him clearly, standing with his hat and the little jar, impatient, looking at me with a slanted face that had a sharp nose and big, unforgiving eyes and that persistent smile my grandfather had told me about.

When I came out of the forest, I had lost him. The riverbed had become a dry, empty path ringed with grass, rising sharply with the hill, and I forced myself up with my hands out for balance. At the top, the ground leveled off into some kind of field, and there stood a low stone bridge that rose over the stream, and I went up the bank and crossed it. From the arch, I could see houses, the outlines of abandoned houses rising on both sides of the dried-up riverbed, blocked here and there by the thick, rustling crowns of trees that were very different from the trees in the wood I had just come through. It occurred to me that this must be the old village that Fra Antun had mentioned, the one people had abandoned in favor of living closer to the sea after the Second World War. The first house I reached was on my left, and it stood apart from the others. It had a rounded façade with what looked like a small slit of a window on the now-unroofed upper level, glassless windows that had been smashed in, the grass from the field reaching up, high enough to touch the three or four shutters that were still hinged to their frames. The man I had followed here could have gone inside the house, could have been looking at me through the darkness of the empty windows. I couldn’t see inside at all, and I passed by this first house slowly, looking over my shoulder as I went. Part of the wall around the house was broken, and there was a paved area inside that led off somewhere into what looked like a garden. The deathless man could be there, too, I thought, but if he was, I didn’t want to find him.

The next house was on my right, shaded by one of the big trees, and I realized that it had once been a two-story inn. A wide stone staircase zigzagged across the front of the building, and empty flower boxes now hung from the staircase railing. The long balcony on the second floor had once supported a lattice with vines, but now it was just a couple of uneven rusted rods that stuck straight up, before fading into the partly collapsed roof.

The rest of the houses were clustered together along the streambed, yawning with shadows, and I walked sideways, first facing one bank and then the other, past crumbling archways and stacks of broken shutters, past piles of pallets, deserted courtyards scattered with buckets and gardening tools that lay heavy with disuse and rust with the grasses growing up around them. I passed what looked like the open veranda of a restaurant nestled between the corners of two buildings; there were a few tables and chairs scattered around the stone floor, and, to my surprise, a single plastic chair, on which an enormous cat was asleep, silent and unmoving, fur gray in the moonlight.

I was trying to remember—as though I needed that kind of thought at the time—the particulars of those stories about mountain spirits, the ones that lived in fields and woodlands and existed for the sole pleasure of misleading idiot travelers. My grandma had once told me about some man from Sarobor who had gone up into the hills after his sheep and found himself eating with a house full of the dead, to which he had found his way by following a little girl with a white bonnet who turned out not to be a little girl at all, but something malicious and impossible to forget, something that changed him, preoccupied him until his own death.

Ahead of me, the streambed dipped down into a steep incline and beat a wavering trail into the valley below. There were a few final houses clustered around that bend in the road before the wilderness grew up again in clumps, and among them, coming down the trail sideways so I wouldn’t slip, I saw a very small stone house with a raised threshold and a low, low green door, the only door that still hung in its frame in the entire empty village, and between the door and the ground I could see light.

On any other night, I would have turned and gone back the way I had come. But on any other night, I wouldn’t have come at all. The man I was following, I said to myself, had gone into this house, unless he was already standing directly behind me, unless he had been watching me since I had come into the village. That thought alone was enough to make me climb the cracked stone staircase. It took me a little longer to open the door, but in the end I did open it, and I did go inside.

You’re Gavran Gailé, I was going to say. And then whatever happened next would happen.

“Hello, Doctor.”

“It’s you.”

“Of course. Come in, Doctor. Come in. What are you doing here? Come—shut the door. Take a seat, Doctor. This is a very bad business. You could have been hurt, gotten lost. I didn’t realize you were following me.”

“I saw you in the vineyard.”

“Well, now, I didn’t notice. I didn’t realize—I would have stopped and made you turn around. Come to the fire. Come sit, I’ll make room.”

“That’s all right, I’ll stand.”

“You must be tired. Please, sit down—here, sit just here. I’ll move these aside. I’ve meant to get the place ordered, but there’s never time. It’s always so late. Come sit down. Don’t mind the flowers, just push them all this way, and sit down.”

“I don’t want to intrude.”

“You can move the flowers closer, Doctor, closer to the fire. The fire dries them faster.”

“I’m sorry.”

“The faster they dry, the less they smell. As you see, I do not throw them away. Are you cold, Doctor?”

“I should go back.”

“That is out of the question. You must wait. We must finish here.”

“I’ve made a mistake.”

“But it is all right now, and will be. You are here, and safe. We’ll walk back together. Come—put these coins in the barrel for me.”

“My God. How much is this?”

“There was more, before.”

“I don’t even recognize some of this currency.”

“Some of it is from before the war. Some of it is even older.”

“What’s this?”

“That’s Roman bronze—the hills are full of coins like that. It may not mean much to you, but it’s still payment for the dead.”

“What will you do with it all?”

“Give it away. It’s a bad business, giving the money of the dead to the living. But it’s shameful to leave it sitting here when it could do some good.”

“You may have to expand.”

“Your feet are on the drawings, Doctor—let me move them.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I must find somewhere else to put them, somewhere away from the hearth. It wouldn’t do for them to catch. Some are quite old. This one—see—the man who left this painting is himself dead now. I have been bringing coins from his grave here since last year.”

“You’re the mora.”

“Not always. There’s been a mora over a hundred years. Then the war came and they believed nothing. My wife believed nothing, she couldn’t believe after what happened to my son. She would come home from his grave and say, the drawings people are putting there get wet and the colors run everywhere, and the flowers get old and dirty and they smell, and all for what? For me to feel better? There is a hole in the ground and my son is buried in it. Water, Doctor.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The water, behind you. Please. For my hands. One night, I clear the grave and bring the flowers and drawings here. No one comes here. Most of the mines are gone, but they say it is still dangerous. I cannot throw away the things from my son’s grave—maybe even I believe. When my wife comes home the next night, it is as if someone has breathed a secret to her. She asks me if I’ve seen the grave—it is clear and clean, and she stands beside it and feels our son at peace. Human hands, she says, haven’t cleared the grave. It’s the mora. She knows this in her bones. Then she goes back and puts coins out, and what can I do? Besides bring them here.”

“But this isn’t all from one grave.”

“No. Pretty soon people are putting coins on the graves of all their loved ones. Leaving more flowers. Clothes, sometimes food. They keep the dead safe and well fed, they comfort themselves. Sometimes I climb up here with bagfuls, and the walk is hard. Sacred earth, they say. Leave something for your dead here and it will reach them. The mora will take it.”

“And no one knows?”

“Someone always knows, Doctor. But I would be happy if it were only you, if only you are the one who knows.”

“No one from the village? Not your son?”

“If there are people who know, they are always the ones who do not say what they know, so it is difficult to tell them from the ones who merely think they know. Someone must know by now. Not that it’s me, perhaps—but they must know. And still they keep setting things down. So I keep bringing them here. You’ll not tell my wife, Doctor? You won’t, will you?”

But he had no need to ask. I had been taught long ago that there are some stories you keep to yourself.

Eventually, I will know enough to tell myself the story of my grandfather’s childhood. But I will not explain what happened between the tiger and his wife. I think it’s probably possible to explain it. It would be simple enough to reason away the tiger’s attachment: he was only half-wild, and in his partial tameness he missed, without being able to articulate it, the companionship and predictability of life at the citadel. However expertly he learned to fend for himself, his life as a tiger had been tainted since birth—maybe that great, deadly Shere Khan light my grandfather believed in had already been extinguished. He had been dulled at the edges by circumstances, and it was simply easier for him to succumb to being hand-fed. It’s possible to reduce the tiger’s attachment to some predictable accident of nature, to make him as mysterious as a bear rummaging through a pile of overturned trash cans—but that is not my grandfather’s tiger; that is not the tiger on whose account my grandfather carried The Jungle Book in his pocket every day for the rest of his life, the tiger my grandfather kept at his side during the war, and the long years he and Mother Vera struggled in the City, and during his studies; the tiger who was with him when he met my grandma, and taught at the University, and met the deathless man; the tiger he carried with him to Zdrevkov.

One could also say that the girl was young, and foolish, and for a time, incredibly, incredibly lucky. That it was her great fortune, despite the odds against her, to encounter a tiger who was not all tiger, to see him face-to-face when she saw him first, to somehow carry the same scent as an old keeper of his, to awaken some lost memory. But that, too, would be oversimplifying it.

Maybe it’s enough to say he enjoyed the sensation of her hand between his eyes. She liked the way his flank smelled when she curled up against it to sleep.

_____

I am forever indebted to:

my parents, Maja and Jovan, whose faith is boundless and unfaltering; my baby brother, Alex, the best illustrator ever; my grandmother, Zahida, who is a rock.

Dr. Maša Kovacević—my traveling companion, diapers to dentures—whose tolerance of late-night phone calls was indispensable to the completion of this book, and whose wit and wisdom have reconnected me to my roots.

Alexi Zentner, who is a force of nature in every life he touches. We’ve traveled so far, we two.

Parini Shroff, for giving me the birthday present that set me back on the right path again, and whose love keeps lifting me higher.

my teachers: Patty Seyburn, whose faith kept me going; Alison Lurie, for her kindness; Stephanie Vaughn and Michael Koch, for their generosity; J. Robert Lennon, for his enthusiasm.

Ernesto Quiñonez, for insisting that it was “not a question of if, but when,” and for seizures of laughter, and for Cosmos.

my agent, Seth Fishman, for taking a chance on me, and for having all the answers, and for being my friend.

my editor, Noah Eaker, whose voice has been the guiding light for the past two years, and who puts up with my belief that just five more minutes will make a difference; Arzu Tahsin, who is amazing; Susan Kamil and Jynne Martin, for making me feel at home at Random House.

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Deborah Treisman, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, and C. Michael Curtis, whose support and kindness continue to overwhelm me; Judy Barringer and everyone at the Constance Salton-stall Foundation for the Arts.

Tricia, who is family, for reading my work since I was ten.

friends and loved ones, from California to New York: Jared, whom I still might grow up to be someday; David, who always knows what I’m talking about, no matter how obscure the reference; Danielle, who bends reality; Colleen, for knowing what to say, every time; Christine, still the most generous person I know; Jay, who is always with me; Yael and the Incredible Zentner Family—Laurie, Zoey and Sabine—who aren’t actually a rock band, though they sound like one here.

None of this would have been possible without you.

TÉA OBREHT was born in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia in 1985 and has lived in the United States since the age of twelve. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She has been named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty and included in the National Book Foundation’s list of 5 Under 35. She lives in New York.

www.TeaObreht.com