The Tiger's Wife

family and talk about serving the last meal of the Hotel Amovarka, and tomorrow when he is gone, those still alive will have this to talk about. They will be talking about it after the war has ended. Do you see?”

The waiter comes and clears away our plates, the big plate with the John Dory on it, the little glass bones all picked clean. He balances the plates on one arm, and still the white napkin is folded over his free arm, and I am filled up with the idea of this memorable meal, which I have not been enjoying for fear.

“May I tempt the sirs with a dessert drink?” the old waiter says. “Or dessert?”

“All of it,” I am suddenly saying. I am saying: “We will have the tulumbe and the baklava and tufahije, and also the kadaif, please.”

“With quince rakija,” the deathless man says, and when the old waiter leaves, he tells me he is glad that I am getting into the spirit of things.

We do not talk, because I am thinking of how to convince the deathless man to tell the waiter, or perhaps how to tell him myself without the deathless man noticing, and the waiter brings the dessert on an enormous silver tray and sets it down. The tulumbe are there, golden and soft and dripping, and the baklava sticks to my mouth, and the roasted apple with the walnuts is lovely and it melts under the fork and all these things come with the quince brandy that burns your throat between bites, and I am a little drunk, now, and watching the fire in the sky over Marhan, I am missing your grandmother’s cooking, because her pastries are better than this.

When we are finished, Gavran Gaile pushes his chair back and says: “Truly.” And he folds his hands over his belly and there is something about him that makes me sad, too.

“Are you going to die tomorrow, too?” I say. “Is that why you’re here?” It is a foolish question, and I realize this as soon as I have asked it.

“Of course not,” he tells me. His fingers are drumming on his belly like a little boy’s fingers. “Are you?” he says.

I do not laugh, even though I think he is joking. “Even after all this—after this city is razed to the ground, which is what is going to happen tomorrow, without question—you don’t believe he will give you permission to die?” I say.

“Of course he won’t.” Gavo wipes his mouth with his napkin, and raises his hand for the waiter. The waiter comes and gathers the plates, and before he even asks, the deathless man is saying: “And now we’ll have some coffee.”

And now I am thinking, this is serious. He takes up the narghile pipe again and begins to smoke it, and every few puffs he offers me a try, and I refuse. His tobacco smells like wood and bitter roses. The smoke unfurls and goes into the fog that is hanging low, smearing the lights above the bridge. The waiter comes back with our coffee. He begins to set the table, to put down the coffee cups, but the deathless man says, “No, we will share from this one,” and he pulls out his little white cup with the gold trim.

I make one last attempt, and, while the waiter is in earshot, I say: “I suppose, now, that you will be asking the gentleman to share our coffee?” I say this rudely, so the waiter will leave and not drink from the cup.

But the deathless man says, “No, no, the two of us, we had coffee this afternoon—didn’t we?” And the old waiter smiles and bows his bald head and I am very sad, suddenly, I am stricken with sadness for the old man. “No, my friend, this coffee is for you and me,” says the deathless man. When the waiter leaves, Gavo pours the hot coffee into the cup, and hands it to me, and sits back and waits for it to be cold enough. This takes a long time, but eventually I drink down my cup, and my friend is smiling at me.

“Well now,” he says, and takes it from me. It is dark on the balcony, and he is peering inside the cup, and I am leaning forward, and his face is like stone.

“Look here,” he says suddenly. “Why did you come into Sarobor? You are with the other side.”

“I beg you not to say that,” I tell him. “I am begging you not to say that aloud again. Do you want that old man to hear?” Gavo is still holding my cup in his hand, and I say: “I am not with the other side. I have no side. I am all sides.”

“Not by name,” he says.

“My wife was born here,” I tell him, and I am tapping the table with my finger. “My daughter, too. We lived here until my daughter was six.”

“But you seem to know what is going to happen tomorrow. I ask, why did you come? You were not summoned. You did not come here to retrieve anything of value. You came to have dinner—why?”

“That is of value to me,” I say. “And apparently to that poor old man, whom you will not even give a chance to be with his family.”

“He will be with his family tonight, Doctor, when he goes home,” the deathless man says, and he is still patient. I cannot believe how patient he is. “Why should I tell him that tomorrow he is going to die? So that, on his last night with his family, he will mourn himself?”

“Why did you bother warning the others, then?”

“What others?”

“The others—the man who drowned you, and the man with the cough at the Virgin of the Waters. Why do you not warn him? Those other men were dying, really dying. This man could save himself, he could leave.”

“So could you,” he says.

“I am going to.”

“Are you?” he says.

“I am,” I say. “Give me that cup, you smiling bastard—there is nothing in it for me.”

But he will not give me the cup, and he says to me: “You did not answer, Doctor, when I asked you why you had come to Sarobor.”

I drink a lot of wine very quickly, and then I say: “Because I have loved it all my life. My finest memories are here—my wife, my child. This, all this, is going to hell tomorrow.”