The Tiger's Wife

“Whyever not?”

“My uncle has forbidden it.”

“Your uncle. Who is your uncle?”

“I am not disposed to say. Especially because I feel you will be laughing at me. Now”—dusting himself off again—“it is getting late, and no doubt some of your villagers will be hovering outside to see what progress you are making. Please let me up, and I will be on my way.”

“Do not get up.”

“Please do not pull my coat.”

“I forbid it. Your brains, right now, are plugged up in your head by two bullets, and if one of them dislodges, everything in there is going to come running out like pudding. I would be insane to let you up.”

“I would be insane to stay here,” he says to me in an exasperated voice. “Any minute now your Hungarian is going to go outside and call in the others, and then there will be business with garlic and stakes and things. And even though I cannot die, I have to tell you that I do not enjoy having a tent peg put in my ribs. I’ve had it before, and I do not want it again.”

“If I can promise the villagers will not be involved—if I can promise you real doctors, and a clean hospital bed, no stakes, no shouting, will you be still and let me do my work?”

He laughs at me, and I tell him I want to take him to the field hospital, some twelve kilometers away, to make sure he is properly cared for. I tell him I will send Dominic on foot to get some people to come out with the car, and that we will carry Gavo out in the coffin, and make him comfortable on the drive. I even humor him, I tell him that, if he is not going to die, he can at least get out of this church in some acceptable way, some safe way that will ensure he will not be shot at again. I tell him this because I think, on some level, that he is afraid of the man who shot him, and all the while he is looking at me with great sympathy—this great sympathy, as if this is so pleasant for him, he is so moved by my gesture, by the fact that I care so much for his plugged-up brains. He says all right, he will stay until the medics come, and I give Dominic instructions, I tell him to walk back to the field hospital and have them bring the car out with a stretcher and one of the other field surgeons. Dominic is very nervous at the idea of my staying in the church with a vampire, and I can see that he is not at all looking forward to the prospect of walking twelve kilometers in the dark, especially after what he has seen, but he agrees to do it. He will set off immediately and, on his way, he will give the nearest sentry orders to quarantine the nearest bridge so that sick people from the village cannot leave, and no one traveling in this direction can cross to stop at the village. Gavo shakes Dominic’s hand, and Dominic gives him a feeble smile, and off he goes.

Now I am alone with Gavo, and I light some of the lamps in the church, and the pigeons in the rafters are cooing and fluttering here and there above us in the darkness. I roll up my coat and I put it down like a pillow in the coffin, and then I take out my bandages and I start to bandage Gavo’s head so that the bullets will not fall out. He sits very patiently and gives me that cowlike look, and for the first time, I wonder if somehow he is going to make me feel safe and pleasant enough to fall asleep, and then I will find myself starting awake with him standing over me, growling like an animal, his eyes bulging like a rabid dog’s. You know I don’t believe in these things, Natalia, but at that moment, I find myself feeling sorry for poor Dominic, who does.

I ask Gavo about his drowning.

“Who is the man who held you underwater?” I say.

“It doesn’t matter,” Gavo says. “It doesn’t matter at all.”

“I think it may,” I tell him. “I think he may have been the man who shot you.”

“Does it matter?” Gavo says. “He hasn’t killed me.”

“Not yet,” I say.

He looks at me patiently. I am passing the bandage over one of his eyes, and now he looks like a mummy, like a mummy from one of those movies. “Not at all,” he says.

I do not want to go back to this business of deathlessness, so I say to him: “Why did he try to drown you?”

And like a shot, he answers: “Because I told him that he was going to die.”

Now I am thinking, my God, I’m bandaging up a murderer, he came here to kill someone and they tried to drown him and they shot him in the head in self-defense, and that is what this whole thing has been about. Dominic has left only a half hour ago, and I have all night to be alone with this man. Who knows what might happen? I tell myself, if he starts toward me, I’ll hit him in the back of the head and turn over his coffin and I’ll run like hell.

“Did you come to kill him?” I say.

“Of course not,” Gavo says. “He was dying of tuberculosis—you’ve heard what they’re saying around the village, I’m sure. I only came to tell him, to help him, to be here when it happened. Come now, Doctor—blood on pillows, a terrible cough. What was your diagnosis even before you came here?”

I am very surprised by this. “Are you a doctor?”

“I was once, yes.”

“And now? Are you a priest?”

“Not exactly a priest, no,” he says. “But I have made it my work to make myself available to the dying and the dead.”

“Your work?”

“For my uncle,” he says. “In repayment to my uncle.”

“Is your uncle a priest?” I say.

Gavo laughs, and he says: “No, but he makes much work for priests.” I finish bandaging him up, and he still won’t tell me who his uncle is. I am beginning to suspect he may be some political radical, one of those men who have been instigating the skirmishes in the north. If that is true, I would rather not know who his uncle is.