crossed it. From the arch, I could see houses, the outlines of abandoned houses rising on both sides of the dried-up riverbed, blocked here and there by the thick, rustling crowns of trees that were very different from the trees in the wood I had just come through. It occurred to me that this must be the old village that Fra Antun had mentioned, the one people had abandoned in favor of living closer to the sea after the Second World War. The first house I reached was on my left, and it stood apart from the others. It had a rounded facade with what looked like a small slit of a window on the now-unroofed upper level, glassless windows that had been smashed in, the grass from the field reaching up, high enough to touch the three or four shutters that were still hinged to their frames. The man I had followed here could have gone inside the house, could have been looking at me through the darkness of the empty windows. I couldn’t see inside at all, and I passed by this first house slowly, looking over my shoulder as I went. Part of the wall around the house was broken, and there was a paved area inside that led off somewhere into what looked like a garden. The deathless man could be there, too, I thought, but if he was, I didn’t want to find him.
The next house was on my right, shaded by one of the big trees, and I realized that it had once been a two- story inn. A wide stone staircase zigzagged across the front of the building, and empty flower boxes now hung from the staircase railing. The long balcony on the second floor had once supported a lattice with vines, but now it was just a couple of uneven rusted rods that stuck straight up, before fading into the partly collapsed roof.
The rest of the houses were clustered together along the streambed, yawning with shadows, and I walked sideways, first facing one bank and then the other, past crumbling archways and stacks of broken shutters, past piles of pallets, deserted courtyards scattered with buckets and gardening tools that lay heavy with disuse and rust with the grasses growing up around them. I passed what looked like the open veranda of a restaurant nestled between the corners of two buildings; there were a few tables and chairs scattered around the stone floor, and, to my surprise, a single plastic chair, on which an enormous cat was asleep, silent and unmoving, fur gray in the moonlight.
I was trying to remember—as though I needed that kind of thought at the time—the particulars of those stories about mountain spirits, the ones that lived in fields and woodlands and existed for the sole pleasure of misleading idiot travelers. My grandma had once told me about some man from Sarobor who had gone up into the hills after his sheep and found himself eating with a house full of the dead, to which he had found his way by following a little girl with a white bonnet who turned out not to be a little girl at all, but something malicious and impossible to forget, something that changed him, preoccupied him until his own death.
Ahead of me, the streambed dipped down into a steep incline and beat a wavering trail into the valley below. There were a few final houses clustered around that bend in the road before the wilderness grew up again in clumps, and among them, coming down the trail sideways so I wouldn’t slip, I saw a very small stone house with a raised threshold and a low, low green door, the only door that still hung in its frame in the entire empty village, and between the door and the ground I could see light.
On any other night, I would have turned and gone back the way I had come. But on any other night, I wouldn’t have come at all. The man I was following, I said to myself, had gone into this house, unless he was already standing directly behind me, unless he had been watching me since I had come into the village. That thought alone was enough to make me climb the cracked stone staircase. It took me a little longer to open the door, but in the end I did open it, and I did go inside.
“Hello, Doctor.”
“It’s you.”
“Of course. Come in, Doctor. Come in. What are you doing here? Come—shut the door. Take a seat, Doctor. This is a very bad business. You could have been hurt, gotten lost. I didn’t realize you were following me.”
“I saw you in the vineyard.”
“Well, now, I didn’t notice. I didn’t realize—I would have stopped and made you turn around. Come to the fire. Come sit, I’ll make room.”
“That’s all right, I’ll stand.”
“You must be tired. Please, sit down—here, sit just here. I’ll move these aside. I’ve meant to get the place ordered, but there’s never time. It’s always so late. Come sit down. Don’t mind the flowers, just push them all this way, and sit down.”
“I don’t want to intrude.”
“You can move the flowers closer, Doctor, closer to the fire. The fire dries them faster.”
“I’m sorry.”
“The faster they dry, the less they smell. As you see, I do not throw them away. Are you cold, Doctor?”
“I should go back.”
“That is out of the question. You must wait. We must finish here.”
“I’ve made a mistake.”
“But it is all right now, and will be. You are here, and safe. We’ll walk back together. Come—put these coins in the barrel for me.”
“My God. How much is this?”
“There was more, before.”
“I don’t even recognize some of this currency.”
“Some of it is from before the war. Some of it is even older.”
“What’s this?”
“That’s Roman bronze—the hills are full of coins like that. It may not mean much to you, but it’s still payment for the dead.”
“What will you do with it all?”
