carry alone. She’s sending food. I seen the boy packing up that basket when he’s dropped it once or twice, and always there’s bread inside, and soup, too.”
“Imagine that, feeding that girl, when the rest of us have no meat. Feeding the tiger’s wife when there’s been no meat. When that girl’s been saving it all for the tiger.”
My grandfather told the tiger’s wife about the Bandar-log and about Kotick, the white seal—but whenever he reached the end of Shere Khan’s story, he could not bring himself to tell her its real conclusion. He found himself often in the gully of the ravine, with Rama and the water buffaloes stampeding at Mowgli’s command, smudged shadows in the ash, but somehow he could never reveal the way the man-cub claimed the tiger’s life. He could not make himself draw Shere Khan lying in the dust, or Shere Khan’s skin on Council Rock, clewed up, as dead as a sail. Instead, every day it was something different. Sometimes Rama stumbled and gave up, or there was a fight between Shere Khan and the buffaloes, for which he would draw his finger through the ashen figures, sending up powdery clouds, chaos, until he found some way to bring Shere Khan out of the fray alive. Sometimes it never even came to Rama—sometimes Mowgli frightened the lame tiger off with fire, or the wolf pack ambushed and drove him away. Every so often, their fights ended in a stalemate, and they came down to the Water Truce together and Bagheera grew jealous at this false, tentative peace.
Who knows if the tiger’s wife understood my grandfather’s story, or why he was doing her this courtesy. It is easy enough to guess that, after the first few times he changed the story, she realized that he was hiding some deeper tragedy from her. Perhaps her gratitude for the tiger was matched by this new gratitude, the gratitude for help and human companionship, for this persistent and animated man-cub who drew stories in the hearth. Whatever the reason, a few days before the arrival of Darisa the Bear, my grandfather earned from her a little paper bag tied with string, hardly big enough to be a button bag. When he opened it in the darkness of his own house later that night, his fingers felt emptiness, emptiness, and then short, coarse, rusty hairs that scraped that distant, living smell of the smokehouse into his fingers.
ON THE WAY BACK FROM ZDREVKOV, I STOPPED AT KOLAC for the children’s candy, intercepted the cashier of the gas station convenience store just as she was closing up for the evening. I had no bills left, and I grappled with her for twenty minutes, finally persuading her by paying double the amount in our currency to cover the cost of her having to go to the money exchange in the morning. She helped me load two boxes of local chocolate into the car and then drove away in a little run-down hatchback that roared out a line of smoke as she pulled onto the road.
There was a pay phone by the deserted gas pump, and I used my last four coins to call my grandma. The blue bag was in my backpack, folded in half. The mortuary cold of it had stunned me, and I hadn’t touched it since Zdrevkov.
My grandma had been making funeral arrangements all day, and when she asked me if I was ready to come home, I told her about Zdrevkov, about going to the veterans’ clinic, about how hospitable and consoling they had been. She listened to me in silence, and I realized the news of this journey was as incomprehensible for her as the idea of my grandfather’s death had been to me, all of it just words on a bad line. The fact that Zdrevkov had been within driving distance seemed to comfort her, reaffirm in some way that he had been coming to see me after all. She could forgive a misunderstanding, but not an outright lie. Driving off the peninsula, I had been thinking about the deathless man, how my grandfather could have heard about the boys who had stepped on the land mine. The veterans’ village, stragglers clinging to life after the dead had gone away. I didn’t mention any of this to her.
“Were they disappointed?” she said. “Were they hoping no one would come by to collect his things?” She had been envisioning a despicable scenario in which I walked into the hospital to find my grandfather’s belongings had been distributed among the staff, his hat on the head of an assistant janitor, his watch on the receptionist’s wrist.
“They’re very busy there,” I said. “They apologized for the mix-up.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her what kind of place it was, that we had been lucky to have them find us at all, lucky he hadn’t ended up on that sea-facing slope behind the clinic. “Would you like me to tell you what’s in the bag?”
There was a long silence. The phone clicked. My grandma finally said, “You opened it?”
“Not yet.”
“And don’t,” she told me. “Don’t you dare. How can you even think it?” She started in about the forty days again, about unwittingly interrupting the progress of the soul. How the bag was a blessing, an untouched blessing, and what the hell was I thinking? She was shouting by the time she said: “What else do I have left to pay my respects with, Natalia? When I didn’t know he was sick? And you didn’t say anything when you knew?”
The phone beeped twice, and then the line went dead. My pager rang almost immediately, and it continued to ring while I drove back to Brejevina, but I had no money left, and the afternoon was fading into evening. She gave up eventually, my grandma, and I drove with all four windows down, the draft keeping me awake.
By the time I got back to the monastery, the gate was closed. I could see the low sun mirrored in the clerestory windows from the road, but the garden was empty. All along the boardwalk, the shops were dark and shuttered, the postcard stands and trays of snorkeling gear crammed behind iron screens. Some hundred yards later, I came to the corner canal, and here Brejevina’s townspeople and tourists were standing in animated, sunburned throngs, smoking, leaning against cars, making their way slowly between the eucalyptus trees to the vineyard fence. I rolled the car into the ditch and left it there, went up the slope with my backpack in my arms, the bag still inside. There was a hot stillness over the sea, and it had crawled onto the land and stilled everything, even the vineyard. From the gate, I could see the diggers, deeper among the vines than they had been that morning. Dure was there with his pot-handle ears, standing like a scarecrow, back bent, hips thrown out. The heavyset man from that morning was there, too, drinking a can of cola, his neck reddened by the sun. The boys from that morning were sitting against a dirt-filled wheelbarrow among the vines; there was no sign of the young woman, or the little girl.
Fra Antun saw me from the vineyard gate, opened it without a word. I apologized, told him about the traffic and the candy, but I’m sure he could tell I was lying. He was sweating under his cassock, his glasses fogged up and his hair curling in thin wisps away from his neck.
From the hill, I could see the sun cutting an unhurried line through the water, the ferry returning from the islands, and the shaded back of Barba Ivan’s place. People were ranged along the vineyard fence all the way down into the overgrowth behind the house. Nada stood on the downstairs balcony, smoking with about six or seven other women, widows hunched like birds in their black dresses and a few middle-aged housewives in fish-splashed towels who had just come up from the beach. Nada had set food out on a long rectangular table under the olive tree, and every few minutes she would lower a tray down to the people crowding the fence.
Zora stood by an oil-drum fire behind the diggers, frowning at something on the bottom of her shoe. When she straightened up and saw me, she gave me a look formerly reserved for Ironglove and the records administrator who worked at the University registrar’s office. Armed with disinfectants, several liters of water, and some knowledge of what was to come, she was there to salvage the community’s faith in us by forestalling a medical disaster. She did not want my help.
