Authors: Tea Obreht
My own notoriety was equally unsatisfying as far as Mića the Cleaver was concerned. I was making a little money helping out twice a week in the biology lab. Three weeks in, I was asked to help a laboratory assistant prepare brain samples for a study. Unfortunately, the brains belonged to a bagful of baby mice. Convincing myself that my sympathy for animals did not extend to small mammals, and taking into consideration the striking eyes of the laboratory assistant, I asked him how we would dispose of the mice. The assistant then explained there were two ways to go about it: seal them up in a box and wait for them to suffocate, or lop off their heads with nail clippers. The latter method he demonstrated rather than described. Zóra didn’t witness the incident herself, but she had already heard several colorful renditions of it two days later, with which she was able to regale me while we sat at the orthodonist’s office, waiting for them to cap the tooth I’d broken biting the floor.
We ended the term in December, ashamed of our respective debacles and fully expecting them to influence our inevitable encounter with Mića in the fall. But then came preparations for spring anatomy, and the long-awaited search for skull replicas. You’d think that, after the war, they would have had enough real skulls to go around; but they were bullet-riddled skulls, or skulls that needed to be buried so they could wait underground to be dug up, washed, buried again by their loved ones.
Skulls were nearly impossible to come by. The trade embargoes hadn’t lifted, and the channels through which the University had acquired medical supplies—questionable to begin with—were considerably more difficult to access now. People from previous years were selling ridiculously overpriced fourth- or fifth-hand skulls, advertising their availability by word of mouth. We were desperate. In the end, a friend of a friend told us about a man called Avgustin, who specialized in producing plastic replicas of human parts, which he sold to dentists, orthopedists, and cosmetic surgeons—on the black market, of course.
We lied to our parents, drove four hours down a snow-packed highway, past army trucks that were inching, bumper to bumper, in the opposite lane; we smiled through two customs lines, at six reluctant officials, so we could meet Avgustin at his office in a Romanian border town, which had windows overlooking the docks and the ice-banked waters of the Grava River. He was a short man with a bald head and square cheeks, and he offered us lunch, which we refused. We stood close together while he told us about the skulls he had for us. They were apparently both replicas of the head of some magician from the 1940s, a man called the Magnificent Fedrizzi. It was a specimen, he said, he had acquired with great difficulty. That was probably a version of the truth, although he didn’t mention the part about the obligatory haggling with the gravekeeper, whom he had probably bribed to dig up the Magnificent Fedrizzi after enough time had elapsed for there to be nothing left but bones. In life, this Magnificent Fedrizzi had apparently performed dazzling feats of magic on a Venetian stage—until 1942, when a German audience member, whose woman the Magnificent Fedrizzi had evidently been sharing for some time, put an end to them rather abruptly.
“The skull of Don Juan,” Avgustin said, winking at Zóra. We didn’t know why he was telling us this until he finally brought out the replicas, swathed in bubble wrap. The skulls looked like cousins at best, and it immediately became apparent that the German who killed the Magnificent Fedrizzi liked to settle his fights the old-fashioned way—with a wine bottle or nightstick, or perhaps a lamp or rifle butt.
“Couldn’t you have at least plastered over the fractures?” Zóra said, pointing to the slightly dented left side of the cranium, the burst of grooves in the plastic.
Apart from the fractures, the skulls were white and matter-of-fact and clinical, and the jaw opened and closed without squeaking, which was, ultimately, all we were looking for. We managed to get Avgustin to knock the price down by 10 percent, and, as we left, he warned us repeatedly against taking the skulls out of their boxes and packaging—labeled
SHOES
. But in the inbound customs line later on we thought better of this; they were searching people’s trunks, and we had two suspicious-looking boxes with black market goods in ours. I put my Magnificent Fedrizzi in my backpack, and Zóra hid hers in the First Aid compartment under the back seat. It didn’t end well, but least it ended at our customs booth, and not the Romanian one—the officials searched the car, and then proceeded to hold us up at gunpoint, confiscate my backpack, and take the Magnificent Fedrizzi away.
We would joke, later on, about how he was probably much happier there, in the Grava River Valley, working with the customs officials. But calling home from the customs station, dreading what I would say to my grandfather—whom I hoped to convince to get on the train and rescue us—it was not funny at all.
“Bako,” I said, when my grandma picked up. “Put Grandpa on.”
“What’s the matter?” she said sharply.
“Nothing, just put him on.”
“He’s not here. What’s happened to you?”
“When is he coming home?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s at the zoo.”
Zóra and I sat in the interrogation room at the customs station for six hours until he came to sort out our mess, and that entire time, for some reason, I couldn’t work the image of my grandfather sitting at the zoo by himself out of my head. I could see him, a bald man with enormous glasses, sitting on the green bench in front of the tiger pit with
The Jungle Book
closed on one knee. Leaning forward a little in his coat, both feet on the pavement, hands clasped. Smiling at the parents of children going by. In his pocket, the empty, balled-up plastic bag from which he had fed the pony and the hippopotamus. I felt ashamed for thinking of him. It hadn’t occurred to me that the zoo would have reopened, or that my grandfather might have resumed going despite my no longer having the time to keep him company. I told myself to ask him about it, but in the end I never found the right moment. Or I was too embarrassed to do anything that might be perceived as questioning the ritual comforts of an old man.
My grandfather cut a different figure, of course, when he stormed into the customs station with his emeritus badge from the University hanging around his neck, white coat on, hat in hand, and demanded the return of his granddaughter and her friend—“the one who smokes.”
“That skull was a medical necessity,” my grandfather said to the customs official holding us prisoner. “But this will never happen again.”
“The import restrictions are on the other side of the border, Doctor, I couldn’t give a shit if they were bringing in six dead bodies and a liquor cabinet,” the customs official said. “But my son does have a birthday coming up.”
My grandfather paid him off, advised him to invest the money toward his son’s moral upbringing, and then motioned us to the back seat of Zóra’s car and drove us home in silence. That silence, which was the only thing worse than his rage, his disappointment, his worry, was intended to give me ample time to brace myself for what he would have to say to me when we got home. I was too old for punishment. What I had coming was a carefully versed speech intended to make you feel as ashamed as possible of your own incompetence, stupidity, and lack of respect for things that were above you. But I couldn’t get beyond the zoo—he had been at the zoo, all alone, and something about that devastated me.
An hour into the drive, Zóra leaned forward and took our remaining, hidden skull out of the First Aid compartment and put it on the seat between us with a smile that was intended to comfort me. My grandfather was looking in the rearview mirror.
“Who the hell is that?” he said.
“The Magnificent Fedrizzi,” Zóra said flatly, and afterward we shared the skull and the story and, eventually, the smile from Mića.
The war had altered everything. Once separate, the pieces that made up our old country no longer carried the same characteristics that had formerly represented their respective parts of the whole. previously shared things—landmarks, writers, scientists, histories—had to be doled out according to their new owners. That Nobel Prize–winner was no longer ours, but theirs; we named our airport after our crazy inventor, who was no longer a communal figure. And all the while we told ourselves that everything would eventually return to normal.
In my grandfather’s life, the rituals that followed the war were rituals of renegotiation. All his life, he had been part of the whole—not just part of it, but made up of it. He had been born here, educated there. His name spoke of one place, his accent of another. None of this had mattered before the war; but as time went on, and the Military Academy did not officially invite him back to practice medicine, it became clear that a return to professional normalcy would not be possible, and he would be tending to his under-the-table patients until the day he chose to retire. With this knowledge came an overwhelming desire to revisit lost places, to reestablish unmaintained rituals. The zoo was one of these.
Another was the lake house at Verimovo, across the border now, where we had spent every summer until I turned eleven. It was a beautiful old stone house at the edge of one of the big valley lakes, just off the main highway that connected Sarobor and Kormilo. A few steps down the cobbled path and you would be in the water, the clear, blue-green waters of Lake Verimovo, fed by the Amovarka. None of us had been to the house in almost seven years, and there was silent acknowledgment in the family that the house was probably no longer standing, or that it had been looted, or that the second you came through the door you would be hoisted by a mine that some careless soldier, probably from your own side, had left behind. There was also acknowledgment, however, that the house had to be seen, the damage assessed, a decision made. My mother and grandma wanted to see if our neighbor Slavko had turned on us, if he’d given up on the house, reneged on his promise to keep it safe until after the war. For my grandfather, however, the urgency sprang from a need to resurrect a past pleasure into the sphere of the everyday, as if nothing had happened.
“Wouldn’t it be something if the vine was still up on the garage balcony?” he said in the fourteenth month of the cease-fire, three days after the grand reopening of the southbound railroad. He was packing for the train ride to Verimovo: his small blue suitcase with the built-in combination lock was open on the bed, and he was folding several pairs of gray cotton shorts and white undershirts into it. I was sitting at the foot of the bed, and had come in to tell him not to be ridiculous, to just sell the house. But he was smiling the way he smiled when we used to go to see the tigers, and I suddenly felt overwhelmed by my own lack of optimism—who was I to tell him what was appropriate and inappropriate? Who was I to hold him back when he wanted so much for things to go his way? So instead, I offered to go with him. To my surprise, he accepted. When I think about it now, I realize how willful he was, as though, by bringing me along, he was ensuring it was safe enough to bring me along.
As with everything we did together, there was a plan. We were going to evaluate the damage. Assuming it was still standing, we were going to open up the house, air out the rooms, see what furniture had been stolen or broken, restock the pantry. We were going to bring down summers and summers of swallows’ nests that had caked up the balcony walls, trim the bright green vines that slithered along the awning above the garage, pick whatever figs and oranges were ripe, all in preparation for my grandma, who had agreed to join us the following week. Depending on what we found, we were also going to get the new dog accustomed to lakeside life.
He was a very small, but very fat, white dog my grandma had been tricked into buying at the Sunday market in the City. She had fallen victim to circumstance because he had been the last one left in the puppy box, and the farmer, squatting in the summer heat since dawn with a box of wormy, smelly farm puppies, all throwing up and peeing on one another, had finally held the dog up in desperation and said, “I expect I am going to have to eat you,” just as my grandmother walked by. My grandma paid the man far too much money and came home with the dog cupped in her hat, and the farmer presumably went to buy some crispy pig and never thought about it again.
The dog went unnamed for a long time. He liked to be held, and he sat on my knees wrapped in a pink towel while our train sped through the parched mid-country, following the river past wheat fields and clapboard towns perched at the water’s edge, and then, as we got closer to the lakes, through soaring blue mountains tangled with scrubs and sprouting clumps of lavender. We had the compartment, meant for six, all to ourselves, because my grandfather wanted to avoid any other passengers catching sight of our passports at border control. The windows were down, and the smell of that pine scrubland came in sharp and strong.
My grandfather sat beside me, drifting in and out of consciousness. Every so often, he would wake up with a start, and then take his right hand off his belly and pet the dog, who couldn’t sleep, and was peering anxiously through the window. My grandfather would pet the dog, and, in a voice that made him sound like some kind of children’s program puppet, he would say: “You’re a dog! You’re a dog! Where are you? You’re a dog!” and the dog’s tongue would drop out of its mouth and it would start keening.
After a few hours of this, I said, “Jesus, Grandpa, I get it, he’s a dog,” not knowing that, just a few years later, I would be reminding every dog I met on the street that it was a dog, and asking it where it was.
The house was a five-minute walk from the train station, and we took this walk slowly, both of us stiff-limbed and silent. The afternoon was dry, and my shirt was sinking into my skin before we even reached the drive. And then it was there—the drive, the house, the garage drowning in vines. There was rust on the fence, and I suddenly remembered how easily things rusted at the lake house, and how, long ago, my grandfather would repaint the fence every year, patient, meticulous, standing with a sort of pleasurable grace in his clogs, with his socks on, his bony knees very white with sun protection.