Tea Obreht - The Tiger's Wife

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?”