silent.
“Oh yes,” she said flatly, and she didn’t say what I thought she might—nothing about my grandfather being a nice man, nothing about how it was a shame that he had died.
“I’m here for his clothes and personal belongings.”
“Those are usually sent back with the body,” she said, without interest.
“They didn’t arrive,” I said. There was a hum of distant noise behind the nurse, music playing, blips from a pinball machine. She sounded like she had a cold, and every few seconds she would sniffle thinly into the receiver. The way she did this made me think that she was the kind of girl who might be very much at home sitting in a bar not unlike this one.
“I really don’t know anything about it,” she said. “I wasn’t on duty back then. You’ll want to talk to Dejana.” I heard her light a cigarette and take a drag. Her mouth sounded dry. “But Dejana’s in Turkey now.”
“Turkey.”
“On holiday.”
Then I lied: “The family needs his things for burial.”
“I don’t come out there until Sunday.”
“The funeral is Saturday. I drove here from the City.”
She sounded unimpressed. “I got no one to drive me out until Sunday. And I can’t give you the coroner’s notes without the doctor.”
I told her I didn’t need the notes, I knew what they’d say. I needed his watch and his wedding band, the glasses he’d worn all my life. The four men around the barrel top were looking at me, but I didn’t mind now. “I don’t know if you’re familiar with the situation, but this man was dying for a long time, and then he left his family to do it away from home. They’re devastated. They want his things back.”
“Dying makes people do strange things—I’m sure you told the family about that. You know how they sometimes go off, like animals do when they’re going to die.”
“I need his things,” I said.
She was drinking something; I heard the ice in her glass clink against her teeth. She said: “Give me Bojan.” The barman called her “angel” again. She was still talking when he went to the refrigerator, opened it and rummaged around, still talking when he went outside. I hung back in the doorway and watched him cross the street and climb the clinic stairs.
“Well?” he said to me from the top of the stairs, the phone still against his ear. By the time I crossed the street, the door had been propped open, the lights still off. Inside, the air was stale and close, the floor sheeted with pale dust that had settled on the waiting room chairs and the top of the reception counter. There were trails in the dust where people had passed by, and they disappeared under a green curtain that had been drawn across the room.
“In here,” the barman said. He drew the curtain aside, walking slowly from one end of the room to the other, pulling it behind him as he went. The curtain opened out to a whitewashed infirmary, paint-chipped iron cots lined up against the walls, sheets empty and smooth, drawn tight under the mattresses. The room was unfinished, the rear wall missing, and in its place, from ceiling to floor, an enormous, opaque tarp that the afternoon light pasted with a dull yellow sheen. Outside, the wind picked up and the hem of the tarp lifted, crackling.
“Wait here,” the barman said. He unlocked a second door at the other end of the room, and I listened to him going down the stairs until I couldn’t hear him anymore.
The fan above me wasn’t working, and a dead fly was suspended on the lip of one of the blades. I crossed the room to lift the tarp, my shoes ringing on the tile even when I tried to preserve the silence by dragging my feet. Already, it seemed like the barman had been gone a long time, and I was trying to remember what I had been doing the day he died, and how I’d ended up here, in the room where my grandfather had died, which looked nothing like how I’d pictured it, nothing like the yellowed rooms in the oncology ward back home, trying to remember how he’d sounded when I spoke to him last, his hands holding my suitcase out to me, a memory which was probably not our last goodbye, but some other goodbye before it, something my brain substituted for the real thing.
There was something familiar about the room and the village, a crowded feeling of sadness that crawled into my gut, but not for the first time, like a note of music I could recognize but not name. I don’t know how long I stood there before I thought of the deathless man. When I did, I knew immediately that it was the deathless man, and not me, my grandfather had come looking for. And I wondered how much of our hiding his illness had been intended to afford my grandfather the secrecy he would need to go looking for him. The heat overwhelmed me, and I sat down on the end of one of the cots.
The barman reappeared with a pale blue plastic bag under his right arm. I watched him lock the stairwell door and come over to me. Goose bumps paled the flesh of his arm.
“This it?” he asked me. The bag was folded, stapled closed.
“I don’t know.” I stood up.
He turned the bag over and looked at the label. “Stefanovi??”
I reached for the bag, but it was so cold it fell out of my hands. Bad arm dangling, the barman stooped to pick it up, and when he held it out to me, I opened my backpack for him and he folded it inside.
He watched me zip up the backpack. “All I know is, he collapsed,” the barman finally said.
“Where?”
“Outside the bar. A couple of nights after they brought those kids in. Before they died.”
“Were the nurses here? Did they take long to help him?”
The barman shook his head. “Not long,” he said. “Not long. They thought maybe he was drunk, at first. But I told them no. I told them he only ordered water.”
