The Tiger's Wife

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. “Dure, 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, Dure, do you see her?”

“It’s all right,” Dure 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. Dure 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 Dure.

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,” Dure 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 Dure. “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 Dure: “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.

Dure 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,” Dure 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.”