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 Zvocana 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 Dure had come inside, and he had stood in Barba Ivan’s kitchen and told them there was a body in the vineyard, a body Dure 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
“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.
Zora had begun her morning with a call to the prosecutor’s assistant, whom she’d succeeded in calling a cow within the first two minutes of conversation. I tried to cheer her up by telling her about the diggers on our way to the monastery, about the illness and the dead cousin, whose bones were perhaps somewhere up in the vineyard, and whom the diggers, as I understood it, would be repotting as soon as he was discovered.
Zora gave me a look from behind her sunglasses, and said nothing. She was pulling one of two dollies Nada had provided to accommodate us in our effort of delivering the vaccines to the monastery orphanage. We had stood in the doorway of the garden shed while Nada pushed boxes and crates aside to find them—two rusted carts with wheels barely clinging to the axles, leaning against the back wall behind a broken washing machine and some paper-wrapped canvases that we assumed were, undoubtedly, more dog portraits.
Zora and I walked through town slowly, pulling the dollies behind us, past the little souvenir shops that were just opening up, past a farm stand where a thin, burnt-brown man was spearing handwritten price tags into crates of melons, tomatoes, bright green peppers, and limes. Shirtless men were already tearing down a stone wall at the bottom of an empty, sloping field full of dead yellow grasses and dark scrubs that were growing up here and there, throwing pockets of shade down the hill and onto the road. At the ferry pier, we ran into a small procession of children, presumably from the orphanage, heading our way, clinging to a frayed red rope that was slung between the waists of two supervisors, women who were both talking at the same time, telling the children to stay out of the street and not lick each other.
When we reached the monastery, we forced our crooked-wheeled dollies over the stairs at the gate, through an arbor of vines that clung like spiders to the lattice above. Fra Antun, we were told by the young woman who worked at the tourism counter in the courtyard, was in the garden. We left the dollies with her and went to find him. The garden was through a low stone tunnel, facing the sea, and was surrounded by a wall braced with cypresses and lavender. There was a goldfish pond with yawning papyrus fronds that leaned out over the water, shading a mossy rock that someone had crowned with a grinning turtle ashtray. Evidence of children lay everywhere: abandoned buckets, blue-and-green sand trucks, plastic trains crowding end-to-end in the middle of the path, a headless doll with only one shoe, a butterfly net. At the back of the garden, there was a clear space where herbs and tomato vines and heads of lettuce were growing in tight, sprouting rows, and this was where we found Fra Antun. He was dressed in a cassock, cutting herbs with a pair of scissors, and when he straightened up he had glasses and a ponytail and two overlapping front teeth, and he smiled at us in a comfortable way and asked us if we had met Tamsin, the turtle, yet. He laughed, and we laughed with him. When he bent down to gather up his things, Zora mouthed a soundless whistle and crossed herself.
He helped us bring the dollies into the inner courtyard of the monastery, past the chapel doors, now closed, and the staircase that led up to the campanile where the big brass bell was swinging hard, sending bursts of sound up the mountain. The children had been set up away from the cloisters, in what Fra Antun called the “museum.” It was a long, white corridor with a clerestory of little square windows that ran parallel to the inner sanctum of the church. Empty sleeping bags were rolled up neatly along both sides of the hall. Fra Antun explained that, once the new orphanage was built and the children had been moved there, this corridor would house historic displays from the old library and pieces by regional artists.
“Local art,” he said with a proud wink, and showed us a patch of wall where more portraits of Bis were lined up. These drawings were in crayon, and the dog stood, stick-legged, three-eyed, bipedal, toadlike, misshapen in every possible way, on napkins and sheets of newspaper and toilet paper that had been lovingly arranged by
