the living, and Dure was rolling up the rag, winding it tight over his fist and calling it the heart—and I felt stupid for not considering this possibility, the metaphorical heart, and for doubting the old crone, wherever she was.
Silence while Dure moistened the rag again, three splashes of water for the newly baptized heart, the clenched wad of it tight and heavy in his fist. The heavyset man brought out a small brass pot, and Dure lowered the rag into it carefully, poured oil on it and set it on fire, and for a long time the little brass pot stood on the ground with the family leaning forward to look at it, and all I could think about while we were waiting for it to end was the deathless man and his coffee cup.
They were adding water to the brass pot, which was smoking now, putting it over the oil-drum coals, and Dure baptized the fire and the bones with what was left of the water and then tossed the bottle aside. All along the fence, the onlookers were beginning to dissipate, buckling under the weight of their expectations. A couple of boys were kicking a soccer ball along the vineyard fence.
Then the water was boiling, and Dure took the pot off the fire, and the men began passing it around quietly, without emotion, steadfast drinkers all, trying not to spill the ash-water. Some of the men removed their hats as they did this; some didn’t bother to put out their cigarettes. Fra Antun carried his incense over to us and stood there, watching the slow progression of the brass pot, and the faces of the men who had already had their share of the heart.
“Where’s the little girl?” I asked him.
“Inside,” said Fra Antun, “sleeping. They had her out here with a fever this afternoon, my mother threatened to call the police if they tried to bring her back out again.”
It was getting dark now. The sun had dipped below the side of the peninsula, and the sky in the west was draining quickly into the water. While we watched, one of the boys from the burial party put on his hat and went by us quickly. Zora was already holding out an offering of water and disinfectant, but he pushed past her and went through the gate at the end of the vineyard. And with him, it was over, the tight secrecy of the circle around the valise had unraveled. One of the men wiped his mouth and laughed about something.
“What now?” Zora said.
“Now comes the vigil,” Fra Antun told her.
“Where’s that kid going?” she said.
“To get someone from outside the family to bury the ashes on the hill.”
“Why doesn’t he do it himself?”
“Family member,” Fra Antun said. “He can’t.”
“What about you?”
“Well, I won’t.” Peering down at us from the underside of his glasses, he looked like an enormous dragonfly. “He’ll have a hard time getting anyone to go up to the crossroads after a body’s come up.”
“The crossroads?”
“For our
I was saying, “I’ll do it,” before my mind had fully come around what he might mean.
“Don’t be stupid,” Zora said, looking at me. Fra Antun was biting his nails, letting the two of us sort it out ourselves.
I said: “Tell Dure and the family I’ll go to the crossroads on their behalf if they send the mother and the kids down to the clinic in the morning.”
WHILE THE VILLAGERS OF GALINA ARE RELUCTANT TO TALK about the tiger and his wife, they will never hesitate to tell you stories of one of the lateral participants in their story.
Ask someone from Galina about Darisa the Bear, and the conversation will begin with a story that isn’t true: Darisa was raised by bears—or, he ate only bears. In some versions, he had spent twenty years hunting a great black bruin that had eluded other hunters from time out of mind, even Vuk Sivic, who had killed the fabled wolf of Kolovac. In the end, the advocates of that narrative say, the bear grew so weary of Darisa’s pursuit that it came to his camp in the night and lay down to die, and Darisa talked to it while it was dying like this in the snow, until its spirit passed into him at first light. My personal favorite, however, was the story that Darisa’s tremendous success as a hunter was derived from his ability to actually turn into a bear—that he did not kill, as men killed, with gun or poison or knife, but with tooth and claw, with the savage tearing of flesh, great ursine teeth locked into the throat of his opponent, making a sound as loud as the breaking of a mountain.
All these variations come down to one truth, however: Darisa was the greatest bear hunter in the old kingdom. That, at least, is fact. There is evidence of it. There are pictures of Darisa before the incident with the tiger’s wife —pictures in which Darisa, light-eyed and stone-faced, stands over the piled hides of bears, almost invariably in the company of some spindly-legged member of the aristocracy whose cheerful grin is intended to conceal knees still shaking from the hunt. In these pictures, Darisa is guileless and unsmiling, as charismatic as a lump of coal, and it’s hard to understand how he managed to generate such a loyal following among the villagers of Galina. The bears in these pictures tell a different story, too, one of death in excess—but then, no one ever looks to them for answers.
Darisa came to Galina once a year, right after the Christmas feasts, to indulge in village hospitality and to sell furs in anticipation of the hardening winter. His entrance was expected but sudden: people never saw him arrive, only awoke to the pleasant realization that he was already there, his horse tethered, oxen unhitched from their cart, fare spread out on a faded blue carpet. Darisa was short and bearded, and, in passing, might have been taken for a beggar; but, like his quiet manner and his tendency to indulge the morbid curiosity of children, he seemed to bring with him a wilder, more admirable world. He brought news and warmth, too, and occasionally stories of the wilderness and the animals that peopled it, and the villagers of Galina associated his arrival with good luck and seasonal stability.
Until that particular winter, my grandfather had looked forward to the yearly visit of Darisa the Bear with as much enthusiasm as anyone else in the village; but, distracted by the tiger and his wife, my grandfather had forgotten all about him. The other villagers, however, had not; instead, the inevitability of his appearance had loomed on and on in their collective consciousness, something that they avoided mentioning, lest their reliance on
