Authors: Tea Obreht
The little boy who had drawn the dog with green udders stood, without a word, on the scale and opened his mouth obediently for the tongue depressor, tilted his head for the ear thermometer, drew deep breaths when we asked him to. He did not want to know how a stethoscope worked. Zóra, always great with children despite her insistence she would never have any herself, failed to impress him with her analogy of lice as warriors, fortified and equipped for siege, while she rifled through his hair with gloved hands, finding nothing. Ivo watched with mild interest as I sawed off an ampoule tip and filled the syringe, swabbed down his arm with alcohol. When I put the needle in, he watched the thin depression on his skin deepen without flinching, and when I did his other arm he didn’t look at it at all, just sat in the green plastic chair with his hands on his lap and stared at me. We had special-ordered children’s band-aids with pictures of dolphins and a counterfeit Spider-Man in a yellow suit, and when I asked him which one he wanted he shrugged, and I gave him two for each arm, and would have given him more. I had the horrified feeling then that all the kids would be like this, oblivious to pain, unmoved in practice by the things that kids at home reacted against on principle. When the next kid kicked me in the shin, I was relieved.
The wails of children in distress are monstrously contagious: the moment one child strikes up, six more follow it, and the acoustics of the monastery halls amplified this phenomenon so that the whole place was ringing with howls of dread and indignation before we even laid hands on the second child. We had presaged what they were capable of doling out, a life-or-death struggle, an eagerness to bite. The monks, who stood by in terror for the first half hour, eventually came to our aid, pinning down legs and arms, threatening punishment, promising sweets. Beguiled by the prospect of more candy, some of the kids came and went without a fight. But in distributing most of the candy beforehand, we had made a serious tactical mistake: our only leverage in the situation had been that candy, and we watched it disappear, piece by piece, bar by bar, with an upwelling of despair, realizing that any minute now we would be down to just one or two.
At two o’clock, the young woman from the house appeared. I looked up and there she was, hovering in the doorway, and I didn’t know how long she had been standing there. She had covered her shoulders and head with a shawl to come into church, and the little girl was braced against her hip, asleep on her shoulder. When I motioned for her to enter she turned around and went back into the courtyard. By the time I got the next kid squared away and went to follow her, Fra Antun had cut her off at the door. I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear what she was saying. They had found the body.
She was holding a yellowed envelope out to Fra Antun, tilting it toward him, and he had his hands up, refusing to touch it. “Afterwards,” he was saying. “Afterwards.” I waited for him to notice me in the doorway, and then I pointed to the child in the young woman’s arms. He smiled and turned the young woman to face me, took her elbow, gestured for her to follow me indoors. But she was shaking her head, backing away from him to leave, and the two of us stood and watched her go, her shoulders striped with shadows from the vine awning that led out to the street.
Zóra appeared at my elbow with an empty box. “We can’t go on,” she said, holding it out to me, “without candy.”
It was lunchtime, so we seized the opportunity to regroup, devise a new strategy for maintaining order. Zóra had turned her pager off, but the prosecutor had called her six times since that morning, so she went to the monastery office to return the calls while I stayed behind to sort out the paperwork. Sleepy, band-aided stragglers were milling around the courtyard in the dense heat of the afternoon; I tried to herd them out of the sun, and by the time I got back to the examining room, Fra Antun was already there, sorting the children’s papers in alphabetical order.
He was eyeing my blood pressure pump, and I laughed and told him his was sure to be high, considering he was working with sixty children. He rolled up the sleeve of his cassock and patted the inside of his arm, and I shrugged and pointed to the chair. He sat down, and I pushed the cuff over his fist. He had a thin, young-looking face. Later on, I would find out from Nada that he had been the kind of boy who caught bumblebees in jars and then harnessed them carefully with film from cassette tapes, so that it was not uncommon to see him walking down the main road with dozens of them rising around him like tiny, insane balloons while the film flashed wildly in the sun.
“I hear you caused a stir up in the vineyard this morning,” he said.
I was about to admit to being too confrontational in my conversation with Duré—in my defense, I had listened to the little girl cough all night. But Fra Antun was talking, instead, about the entrance I had made. “You scared the hell out of them,” he said. I was tightening the cuff over his forearm, and I didn’t know what to make of his saying
hell
. He was smiling. “Imagine: you’re digging for a body. You’ve been digging all day and all night. In the hours before dawn, on the verge of finding what you’ve been looking for, you are surprised by the sudden appearance of a woman wearing what looks like a white shroud.”
“I fell into a hole,” I said, putting my eartips in and sliding the chestpiece onto his skin.
“That’s how it’s being told around town,” he said. “What would you think, in their place?”
“I’d think:
why am I making my children dig for a body I put here myself?
”
He looked at me like he couldn’t decide whether or not to trust me with what he had to say. I was standing over him, inflating the cuff, and he was sitting with his cassock folded down between his knees. I released the air valve and watched the dial and listened to the whumping sound of his blood.
“We have one here, you know.”
I didn’t know.
“A haunt,” he said. “They call it a
mora
. A spirit.”
“We’ll have to do this again,” I said, and started over.
“Everyone’s shocked about this business with the body, but they forget we’ve had the
mora
a hundred years. We put coins and presents on the graves of our dead because the
mora
takes them. Word around town is that your diggers’ crone knows about our
mora
, and that’s why she’s having them sanctify the body here.”
“How would she know?”
“That’s just what they’re saying,” Fra Antun said. “I don’t pretend it makes any sense to me.”
It made no sense to me, either; Duré and his family were from near the City, and we had no shortage of our own
moras
and spirits, rarely glimpsed beings that willowed about, demanding graveside offerings that inevitably ended up in the hands of churchyard caretakers or passing gypsies.
“So what happens tonight?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Duré says the village woman told him to ‘wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.’ ” This charge, which Duré had repeated in confidence to Barba Ivan, had nevertheless spread through town, so that only a week later, it had become a sinister chant regurgitated by the boys who hung out at the arcade, whispered by women at the grocery store, invoked by drunkards who passed the vineyard on their way home.
“Even your parrot knows it,” I said. “You realize, of course, that no body buried twelve years out here is actually going to have a heart in it.”
“That’s none of my business,” Fra Antun said with a defeated smile. “They’ve asked me to supervise, and so I will, but unless the devil himself jumps out of the vineyard tonight, what happens to the body is no concern of mine.”
“I’m surprised you condone it,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like a Catholic process.”
“It isn’t—it’s not really an Orthodox one, either, but I’m sure you know that.” He was smiling. “They have to settle for me in case something goes wrong,” he said. “The other monks wouldn’t even consider it.”
“And your mother—does she know you’ll be officiating?”
“She knows.” His grin was laced with guilt. “One of the advantages of being a monk is not having to get permission from your mother to carry out holy work.”
“I hear she’s not happy about the vineyard.”
“No, it’s difficult for her. First there’s a body in the vineyard and now people from your side—excuse me, Doctor, but they
are
from your side—digging the whole place up.” He pushed his glasses up his nose and looked at me. “She’d rather not have me near the vineyard when they’re digging. It’s not just about the body, or the vines being disturbed—all kinds of accidents happen in the field here.” I gave up on the blood pressure cuff and listened to him. “Mines,” he said, “there are still land mines, even around here, up the mountain where the old village used to be. Most of them have been cleared, but the ones that haven’t get found when somebody steps on them. A shepherd or farmer, or somebody’s child, cuts through an unpaved area. Then there’s a rush to keep it quiet.” He watched me roll up the cuff and cord. “Even just last week, those boys in Zdrevkov.”
I misheard him at first, or the name didn’t register because he was pronouncing it differently than my grandma did. Perhaps I didn’t make the connection because it was the last thing I expected him to say, the last place I expected him to name, and the collision of my grandfather’s death and Fra Antun sitting in that little room with the sun glaring in past the orange tree outside was sudden and senseless until I sorted it out.
Fra Antun had already moved on, talking about the mines above the old village, about an undetonated land mine in the neighbor’s plot, by the time I said: “Where?”
“Next door,” he said, pointing through the window.
“No—the place,” I said. “You said something about boys there?”
“Zdrevkov,” he said. He took off his glasses and wiped them on the front of his cassock. “It’s even more backwater than this, but there’s a clinic there,” he told me, blinking up, eyes unfocused. “They’ve been keeping this kind of thing quiet for years. This happened last week. Two teenagers coming home late from town at Rajkovac. Mine got them coming through their own lettuce patch.” He thought my silence was surprise, or fear, or hesitation to ask about the boys’ well-being. “Twelve years since the war, it was in their family’s lettuces the whole time.” He got up and dusted off his cassock. “That’s why the digging’s bad news.”
“How close is it?” I said.
“Zdrevkov? It’s on the peninsula,” he said. “Maybe an hour’s drive.”
I said I was getting more candy, and Zóra believed me, believed me, too, when I said I would be back in an hour or less. She had wanted to come along, but I convinced her we’d look unreliable if we both left, insisted on going alone, insisted it would be faster this way, ignored her when she asked me why I needed the car, why I didn’t just walk to the convenience store in town.
North of Brejevina, the road was well paved, stark and new because the scrubland had not grown back up to it, the cliffs rising white and pocked with thorn trees. A wind-flattened thunderhead stood clear of the sea, its gray insides stretching out under the shining anvil. Past the villages of Kolac and Glog, where the seaward slope was topped with new hotels, pink and columned, windows flung wide and the laundry hanging still on the balcony lines. Then came the signs for the peninsula turnoff, twelve kilometers, then seven, and then the peninsula itself, cutting the bay like a ship’s prow between the shore and outer islands, wave-lashed cliffs and pineland. Fra Antun had predicted it wouldn’t take more than an hour to reach the village, but the closeness of the peninsula stunned me.
My grandfather, it seemed, had been coming to see me after all; but while Zóra and I had gone the long way, sidetracked by having to check into the United Clinics headquarters before crossing the border, he had come straight down by bus, and somewhere around Zdrevkov he had been unable to come farther. Or he had heard, somehow, about the two boys, and stopped to help.
All this time I had been disconnected from the reality of his death by distance, by my inability to understand it—I hadn’t allowed myself to picture the clinic where he had died, or the living person who would have his belongings, but that was all drawing in around me now.
The final six kilometers to Zdrevkov were unmarked, a dirt trail that wound left through a scattering of carob trees and climbed into the cypresses, which fell away suddenly in places where the slopes dropped away to the water. In the lagoon where the peninsula met the land, the sun had blanched the water bottle-green. The air-conditioning was giving out, and the steady striping of the light between the trees was making me dizzy. The crest of the next hill brought me out of the forest and into a downward-sloping stretch of road, where the abandoned almond orchards were overgrown with lantana bushes. I could see the light-furrowed afternoon swells in the distance, and, straight ahead, the flat roofs of the village.
Even at this distance, I could see why Zdrevkov was so obscure: it was a shantytown, a cluster of plywood-and-metal shacks that had sprung up around a single street. Some of the shacks were windowless, or propped up with makeshift brick ovens. Household junk spilled out of the doorways and into the yellowed grass: iron cots, stained mattresses, a rusted tub, a vending machine lying on its side. There was an unattended fruit stand with a pyramid of melons, and, a few doors later, a middle-aged man sleeping in a rolling chair outside his tin-roofed house. He had his legs up on a stack of bricks, and as I drove past I realized his right leg was missing, a glaring purple stump just below the knee.
The clinic was a gray, two-story house that stood on the edge of town, easy to find because it was the only brick building in sight. Years ago, it had probably been a serious structure with clean walls, a paved courtyard lined with enormous flower urns that were now empty. Since then, the rain gutters had stained red-brown rivers into the walls.
The lot was empty, the clinic curtains drawn. I got out of the car. The stone stairway was littered with leaves and cigarette butts, and it led to a second-story door on which a square green cross had been painted above a plaque that read V
ETERANS’
C
ENTER
. I knocked with my knuckles, and then with my fist. Nobody answered, and, even with my ear against the door, I heard nothing inside. I tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge, and then I went out along the catwalk and peered around the corner of the clinic. The window facing the valley was shuttered.