“By coming here, you realize you risk going with it. They could fire off a missile right now and hit this building.”
“Is that going to happen?” I say. I am too angry now to be concerned.
“It may and it may not,” he says.
“So you are not warning me either?”
“No, Doctor—I am talking about something,” he says patiently. “I am not talking about illness, about a long slow descent into something. I am talking about suddenness. I am trying to explain. I am not warning that man because his life will end in suddenness. He does not need to know this, because it is through the not-knowing that he will not suffer.”
“Suddenness?” I say.
“Suddenness,” he says to me. “His life, as he is living it—well, and with love, with friends—and then suddenness. Believe me, Doctor, if your life ends in suddenness you will be glad it did, and if it does not you will wish it had. You will want suddenness, Doctor.”
“Not me,” I say. “I do not do things, as you say, suddenly. I prepare, I think, I explain.”
“Yes,” he says. “And those things you can do reasonably well for everything—but not this.” And he is pointing into the cup, and I think,
“Why are you crying, Doctor?” the deathless man says.
I wipe my eyes and tell him I hadn’t realized I was.
“There is going to be a lot of suddenness, Doctor, over the next few years,” says Gavran Gaile. “They are going to be long, long years—you can have no doubt about that. But those years will pass, eventually they will end. So you must tell me why you came to Sarobor, Doctor, where you take a risk every minute you sit here, even though you know that one day this war will end?”
“This war never ends,” I say. “It was there when I was a child and it will be here for my children’s children. I came to Sarobor because I want to see it again before it dies, because I do not want it to go from me, like you say, in suddenness.” I have been bunching up the tablecloth and I smooth it out. The deathless man puts crisp, clean bills that will be worth nothing in the morning onto the plate with the check. Then I say: “Tell me, Gavran Gaile— does the cup say that I will be joining you, tonight, in suddenness?”
He shrugs, and he is smiling at me. There is nothing angry, nothing mean in his smile. There never is. “What would you like me to say, Doctor?”
“No.”
“Then break your cup,” he says to me, “and go.”
Months later, for weeks and weeks after the bombing ended, Zbogom the tiger continued to eat his own legs. He was docile, tame, to the keepers, but savage on himself, and they would sit in the cage with him, stroking the big square block of his head while he gnawed on the stumps of his legs. The wounds were infected, swollen, and black.
In the end, without announcing it in the newspaper, they shot that legless tiger there, on the stone slab of his cage. The man who raised him—the man who nursed him, weighed him, gave him baths, the man who carried him around the zoo in a knapsack, the man whose hands appeared in every picture ever taken of the tiger as a cub— pulled the trigger. They say the tiger’s mate killed and ate one of her cubs the following spring. To the tigress, the season meant red light and heat, a sound that rises and falls like a scream; so the keepers took the remaining cubs away from her, raised them in their own houses, with their own pets and children. Houses without electricity, with no running water for weeks on end. Houses with tigers.
THE MAN WHO DISCOVERED THE DEATH OF DARISA THE Bear is still living in Galina today. His name is Marko Parovic, and he is seventy-seven years old, a great-grandfather. His grandchildren have recently purchased a new lawn mower for him, and he operates this monstrosity by himself, a tiny, hatted, brown-armed man who still somehow manages to aim the orange machine in a straight line across his lawn. He does not talk about Darisa the Bear at night, and he will not talk about him at all without enlisting encouragement from several glasses of
When he does talk, this is the story he tells:
An hour before first light, Darisa the Bear awoke from his interrupted journey in the bloodied snow. When he sat up and looked about himself, he saw the tiger was eating his heart. There among the black trees of Galina, the yellow-eyed devil sat with his teeth deep in the wet wedge of Darisa’s heart. Terrified at first, Darisa felt his ribs and found them empty, and he drew on his only remaining strength, the strength of bears whose hearts he had stilled over the years. His human heart gone, Darisa fell to all fours, and his back rose like a mountain, his eyes full of darkness. His teeth fell like glass from his jaws and in their place grew the yellow tusks of the bear. He reared high over the tiger, black-backed in the moonlight, and the whole forest shook with his roar.
To this day, on such and such a night, you can still hear the ringing of their battle when the wind blows east through the treetops of Galina. Darisa the Bear threw his great, ursine weight into the tiger’s side, and the yellow- eyed devil sank his claws into Darisa’s shoulders, and the two of them rolled through the snow, jaws locked, leveling trees and laying bare the rocks of the ground.
In the morning, nothing of the terrible battle remained but the empty skin of Darisa the Bear, and a blood- smeared field that will not flower to this day.
Some hours after daybreak—he had felt certain he would not be able to sleep at all, but somehow, at first light, he had found himself submitting to his own exhaustion, to the terrible cold, to the relief of having brought the tiger’s wife safely home—my grandfather awoke to a world that already knew Darisa the Bear was dead. Marko Parovic, checking his quail traps at the foot of the mountain, had stumbled upon the red-clotted skin, and he had come running into the village, dragging it behind him, calling for God.
