without breathing, in some bush or under some tree while he dug up the jar, probably whistling to himself, and when he had it in his hand, I would come out and ask him about my grandfather.
The sun had set, bringing the sky low and spreading thin clouds into corners of the horizon where the light was still standing. The tide had risen suddenly, gray and heavy and massive on the shore below. Fra Antun volunteered to show me the way to the crossroads, and we took a road up from the vineyard into the open space between the town and the mountain, and were walking south along the ridge, through a field of bristles and purple and red flowers scattered in tight clusters, out of which grasshoppers, black and singing, fell like arrows as we passed. Fra Antun was walking a few steps ahead, in silence, probably considering how he would broach the subject of my disappearance earlier that afternoon. I followed with a garden spade in my pocket and the little clay jar in my hands, terrified that I was going to drop it, or that it was going to tilt and spill ash-water over me. I had the backpack thrown over one shoulder, and as it swung back and forth, I could hear the muted crackle of the blue bag from Zdrevkov. We passed a young boy bringing six gray-faced sheep down from the mountain—we heard them before we saw them, and long after they had gone, we could hear the steady clang of the ram’s bell.
“It’s very kind of you to do this,” Fra Antun said suddenly, looking back at me, and I shook my head.
“At least they’ll come for medicine now,” I said, and I thought of Zora down in the graveyard, waiting patiently to start wiping people’s mouths and handing out water.
“I’m sure your time could be better spent,” he said, and for a moment I thought he was reproaching me, but then he turned and smiled back at me, and I smiled back and kept walking.
“You’re looking after sixty children, Father,” I said eventually. “I’m just burying a jar.” Fra Antun was holding up the hem of his cassock, and I could see sandals and frayed jeans underneath. “There are a lot of paintings of your dog in town,” I said. “At the monastery, at your mother’s house.”
“Bis isn’t mine,” he said, “Bis is Arlo’s dog—my brother, Arlo.”
“Did your brother do the paintings at Nada’s house?”
“Some of them,” he said. “But then a lot of people took to it after the war.”
“The children seem really attached to him,” I said, and it all seemed to make sense to me. “Does Arlo bring the dog around for them to play with?”
“My brother is dead,” he said shortly. We had come up to a slight rise in the road, and here the path through the grass veered off and up the hill, but Fra Antun pressed on into the field, where the sticky, switch-thin blades were sawing against each other. I was still going after him, and trying to think of something to say to that, something besides
I said: “I’m sorry,” and regretted it immediately, because it just fell out of my mouth and continued to fall, and did nothing.
“Anyway,” he said, without hearing me, “that whole week he was gone, Bis sat next to the dumpster and didn’t move, and we all thought he was waiting by the road for Arlo to come back. Except we had it wrong—he was waiting for us to find Arlo.” Fra Antun took off his glasses and wiped them on his cassock. “So—we found out a few years later that those kids he had gone camping with were serving with the paramilitary on the border. And now, people paint Bis.”
He had his hands inside the sleeves of his cassock, and then he said again that it had been very hard for his mother, and I wanted to say I knew, but I didn’t know. He could have said
When we got to the crossroads, Fra Antun showed me the shrine of the Virgin. It was on a shelf that had been carved into the seaward side of a boulder that stood in the grass where the two roads met. The Virgin, a wooden icon with dark edges where water had damaged the wood, stood propped up on the stone shelf, and flowers, dry as paper, lay piled in neat, dark bunches around the base of the stone. Several feet away, the grass was bright with beer cans and cigarette butts, which Fra Antun began picking up with his hands while I knelt down and got out my spade and thrust the point of it into the dirt. The ground was hard, packed tight, and eventually I settled on scraping it away instead of trying to spoon it out. Every so often, I looked over my shoulder at Fra Antun, who was piling the cans and bottles and leftover wrappers into the apron he had made out of the front of his cassock. When he was done, he lit the candle on the shrine, and I put the jar into the hole I had made, and then dropped three coins in with it. I mounded the earth, like he told me to, packed it tight over the top of the jar, and then straightened up, dusted off my hands. I asked him if it would be difficult to get back to town in the dark, in case I had to before morning.
He looked at me with surprise. “You’re not thinking of staying?”
“I said I would.”
“No one ever stays,” said Fra Antun, and he sounded serious. “There are foxes out here, Doctor, that carry rabies—and obviously people who come to drink. I can’t let you stay.”
“I’ll be all right,” I said.
Fra Antun tried again. “Men, Doctor, who get drunk around here.” He looked like he was contemplating how he was going to force me to come with him. “I absolutely insist,” he said.
“I was in Zdrevkov earlier today,” I said. It was supposed to make him feel better about my decision to stay, but he took off his glasses and touched his wrist to each eye, very slowly.
“Doctor,” he said again.
“I’ll stay here,” I said. And then I said: “Part of the goodwill service.” It wasn’t entirely a lie, and he couldn’t argue with it. And I couldn’t tell him the truth.
He looked around, and then he said: “I must ask you to stand in the vineyard, then, and you must promise not
