The Tiger's Wife

“We’ll not get anywhere with you interrupting to make smart remarks,” the deathless man says. “You’ve asked me to tell you about myself, and now you are laughing at me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, because it is rare to hear him so impatient. “Please, continue.”

I hear shuffling, and he is doubtless getting into a more comfortable position for his story. “Now, my uncle gives me a cup. And he says: ‘In this cup, the lives of men come and go. Give a man coffee from this cup, and once he has had it, you will see the journeys of his life, and whether he is coming or going. If he is sick, but not dying, the paths in the coffee will be still, and constant. Then you must make him break the cup, and you must send the drinker on his way. But if he is coming to me, the paths will point away from the drinker, and then the cup must remain unbroken until he crosses my path.’ ”

“But we are all dying,” I say. “All the time.”

“I’m not,” he laughs. “But then, I am the only one for whom the cup shows nothing at all.”

“But really—don’t the paths toward your uncle Death appear in the coffee cup of every living man? Isn’t every living man a dying man as well?”

“You are determined to make me look useless, Doctor,” he says. “The paths appear in the cups of men for whom Death is fast approaching. It is as if, having stepped into a room, a man can no longer see the door through which he has come, and so cannot leave. His illness is absolute; his path, fixed.”

“But how is it that you still have the cup?” I say. “If you were meant to break it when the patient was well?”

“Ah,” he says. “I am glad you asked. Whenever a patient breaks a cup, a new one takes its place in my coat pocket.”

“Convenient,” I say, with some bile, “that you are telling me this from behind a wall, and cannot demonstrate your endless, regenerating cups.”

“A demonstration wouldn’t prove a thing to you, Doctor,” he says. “You would only say that I am a magician, another trickster. I can see us now: you, flinging cups to the floor; I, handing you new ones from my coat pocket until you can no longer think of a name bad enough to call me. Smashed crockery everywhere. Besides”—Gavran Gaile says this last part good-naturedly—“what makes you so sure you’d be lucky enough to be breaking your cup tonight?”

And though I do not believe him, Natalia, I feel cold all over. Then there is silence, and after a while he says: “By God, I should really like some water.” I tell him there is nothing I can do about that, and he says, “Never mind, never mind. So, off I go with my cup, a great physician now, able to tell a dying man from a living one, which, I can tell you, was a feat back then. First, the people who come to me are villagers, people with small ailments and terrible fears, because everything they do not understand frightens them. And some die, and some live; but what surprises them is that, sometimes when other physicians tell them they are certain to die, I tell them, against all the odds, that they will live. And they fuss and fear, they tell me, how can I live when I feel as terrible as ever? But eventually they get well, and then they thank me. And I am never wrong, of course, about this kind of thing, and pretty soon the ones who will get well do not doubt at all, and this, in and of itself, is a kind of medicine for them.”

“Certainty,” I say.

“Yes, certainty,” Gavran Gaile says. “And then, as time goes by, even the ones whose fates are sealed are calling me a miracle worker, saying, you saved my sister, you saved my father, if you cannot help me then I know I am meant to go. And, even though I am a very young man, I am well known, and suddenly craftsmen are coming to me, then artists—painters and writers and players of music—and then merchants, and after them, town magistrates and consuls, until I am seeing lords and dukes, and, once, the king himself. ‘If you cannot help me,’ he says, ‘then I know I am meant to go,’ and they bury him six days later, and he goes to his grave smiling. And I realize, even though I have not known it, that when it comes to my uncle, all their fears are the same, and all their fears are terrible.”

One of the sleepers begins to cough, and then he is silent again, breathing slowly through his mouth.

“But the greatest fear is that of uncertainty,” Gavran Gaile is saying. “They are uncertain about meeting my uncle, of course. But they are uncertain, above all, of their own inaction: have they done enough, discovered their illness soon enough, consulted the worthiest physicians, consumed the best medicines, uttered the correct prayers?”

I say, “That is why they come to this place.”

But the deathless man is not paying attention: “And all the while, out of their fear, I am becoming a great and respected man, known the whole kingdom over as a healer, and an honest physician who will not take money if the situation cannot be helped.”

“I have never heard of you,” I say.

“This was many, many years ago,” he says, undeterred. It is incredible.

“And how does this perfect profession go wrong?”

“I make a mistake, of course.”

“It wouldn’t happen to involve a woman?”

“It would—how did you guess?”

“I think I’ve heard this kind of story before.”

“Not like this, you haven’t,” he says to me cheerfully. “This time it’s true. This time, I am telling it. Yes, it is a young woman: the daughter of a wealthy silk merchant has fallen ill and the physicians are saying she is as good as dead. She has fallen ill quite suddenly, they are saying, and there is no hope. A terrible fever, a terrible ache in the neck and the back of the head.”

“What was the matter with her?” I say.

“Back then, there were fewer names for illness,” Gavran Gaile says. “Sometimes, when there was no name, you simply died of Death. She is well liked, this young woman, and about to be married. Her father, I see, has brought me there so he may resign himself, tell himself he has done all he could. The young woman, she is very ill and very frightened. But she has not given up. Though all those around her want me to tell them it is all right, it is