The Tiger's Wife

The voice says: “Yes, Doctor.” The owner of the voice is sitting by the hole and talking out at me, asking for water. I don’t know how I am going to give him the water through the small opening, but I intend to try. Before I can tell him this, however, the voice says: “This is a wonderful surprise, Doctor.”

“I’m sorry?” I say.

“How nice it is to see you again,” the voice says agreeably, and waits. I am seriously confounded, and I try to put a face to this voice. I say to myself: who do I know back home who would make a pilgrimage to this island in the middle of nowhere just to end up in the drunk tank? I think maybe it is some idiot boyfriend of your mother’s, in which case I am going to leave him there without any water, but there is something about this business of asking for the water, the way he is asking for the water, that makes me think the voice belongs to someone from long ago. The voice is patient with my silence for a while, and then it says: “You must remember me.” But still I don’t. “It’s been fifteen years, Doctor, but you must remember the coffee grounds. The ankle weights and the lake?” And then I realize it is him—it is the deathless man—and my silence continues because I do not know what to say. He must think I am not saying anything because I do not remember, so he keeps reminding me: “You must remember me, Doctor—from inside the coffin.”

“Of course,” I say, because I am astounded enough already, and I do not want him to say anything more about the weights and the lake. It is a despicable dream to me, an unthinkable risk some other doctor, some young fool, took long ago, and I cannot put my mind to it just like that. “It is Gavran Gaile.”

“Oh, I’m so glad,” he says. “So very glad you remember me, Doctor.”

“Well,” I say. “This is remarkable.” It is the strangest thing, coming face-to-face with this man, Gavran Gaile, in the dark, without being able to see if he is real. You must realize—to know that a man has not died after going into a lake for most of the night is one thing. You do not explain it to yourself because you know you will never come across this kind of thing again, you will never meet another man who also doubles as a lungfish. You do not explain it to yourself, and, as I have said before, you certainly do not explain it to other people, and then it becomes the sort of thing that slips away from your own grasp of the truth, until you have very nearly forgotten about it.

So the deathless man wants water, but none of my bottles or ladles will fit through the hole, and we sit there, the deathless man and I, in silence, and he is very thirsty, you understand, but never irritable. He does not complain. He asks me what I am doing here, and I tell him I am here for the dying, and he says, what a coincidence, he is too.

And I am thinking to let this go, to not address it at all, when he says: “Is he dead yet?”

“Who?” I say.

“The man with the cough, the one who is going to die.”

“No one has died tonight, thank you, and I’m confident no one will.”

“You are mistaken, Doctor,” he says with enthusiasm. “Three will go tonight. The man with the cough, the man with the cancer of the liver, and the man who appears to have indigestion.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say, but something about all of this makes me weary, so I get up and walk around anyway, with my lamp up, looking at the sleepers, and among them I do not see anything strange. I come back and I say to the deathless man: “That’s enough. I’ve nothing to say to you tonight. I have no interest in taking medical cues from a drunk man.”

“Oh, no, Doctor,” he says, and he sounds deeply apologetic. “I am not drunk. I haven’t been drunk in forty years. They put me in here because I was unruly this morning, and wouldn’t leave.” I do not ask him what he was doing to be unruly, but I am hovering, and I do not go, so he tells me: “I have been selling coffee, you see, and today I told that man with the cough that he was going to die.”

Suddenly, I realize I’ve seen him—I’ve been seeing him without knowing it, because for the last three or four days there has been a coffee seller at the Waters dressed in the traditional Turkish style, selling coffee to the masses by the waterfalls. I have never looked at him closely, and now it seems to me that, yes, perhaps it is possible that he had the face of the deathless man, but then that face must have changed over the years, and so I do not know. I cannot believe it, I say to myself, I cannot believe that anyone would disguise himself as a coffee seller to play a terrible practical joke.

“You mustn’t do that,” I say to him. “The people who come here are very sick. You mustn’t frighten them like that, they are here to pray.”

“And yet, you are here, so you must not believe entirely in the fact that they will get what they are praying for.”

“But I still let them pray.” I am very angry. “You must not do this again. They are very sick, they need peace.”

“But that is what I do,” the deathless man says. “That is my work: to give peace.”

“Who are you, really?” I say. “What are you doing here?”

“I am here for my penance.”

“You’re here for the Virgin?”

“No, on behalf of my uncle.”

“Your uncle. Always there is something with your uncle. Haven’t you paid enough penance to your damned uncle?”

“I have been in his debt almost forty years.”

This again, I think. And to him I say: “It must be incredible, this debt you’re paying.”

The deathless man gets very quiet, and after a few moments, he says: “That reminds me, Doctor. You’ve a debt of your own.”

The way he says this, the whole room lies still. I have led him straight to the memory of our wager on the bridge so many years ago, but I also feel that he has tricked me, that perhaps he is the one who has been leading me to it. I am certain he knows I have not forgotten. Just in case I have, he is helpful, and reminds me: “The book, Doctor. You pledged the book.”

“I know what I pledged,” I say.