Tea Obreht - The Tiger's Wife

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.