Authors: Tea Obreht
To make matters worse, in addition to the dying who are there to pray, people are taking the ferry in from the mainland to rejoice, to feast and drink in honor of the Virgin. At night, the priests are always finding six or seven drunks on the church grounds, and they are putting these drunks in a little annex in the crypt so they can sober up overnight. They have no other place to put the drunks—they lock them in so they do not go wandering, but you can imagine what happens when these drunks wake up in the dead of night to find themselves in a lightless stone room. All the time, the drunks are making noise. All night long, you can hear them hooting and sobbing in there, and the dying, who are crowded around the columns and sleeping in the baptismal font, can hear them through the crypt walls, and to them it must sound like the dead are calling them home.
You are going to see what it is like, someday soon, being in a room full of the dying. They’re always waiting, and in their sleep they are waiting most of all. When you’re around them, you’re waiting too, measuring all the time their breaths, their sighs.
On the night I’m telling you about, it is more quiet than usual in the little drunk cell next door. I have given the nurses a night off to have a weekend dinner on the mainland by themselves, and I am not expecting them until morning. It is impossible to sleep, but it is not so bad, being by myself like that. No one is on watch with me, reminding me about the dying. I’ve got a small lamp, and every so often I go walking up and down the rows of sleepers, leaning over them, looking into their faces. Sometimes, a person runs a fever or begins to vomit, and I give them medicine and stand by them with the light. The light they find more comforting than the medicine. There is a man there who is coughing a great deal, and I am not optimistic about him, or about how much help I will be when the time comes, but whenever the light is near him, he coughs a little less.
I am walking like this, back and forth, when I hear someone say: “Water.”
It’s very dark, and I can’t tell where the voice is coming from, so I say, quietly, “Who’s speaking? Who wants water?”
For a long time there is no reply, and then I hear it again, someone very quietly saying: “Water, please.”
I lift up my lamp, and all I see around me are the backs and faces of blanket-covered sleepers. No one is lifting a hand to call to me, there are no open eyes looking at me, asking for water.
“Hello?” I say.
“Yes—here,” says the voice. “I beg your pardon, but—water.”
The voice is very faint, and it’s almost as though it is being held up very high in the air, above my head, so that no one else can hear it. I am raising my lamp and turning around and around, looking for the owner of the voice, and then the voice, with so much patience, says to me: “Doctor, over here. Water, please.” And then I understand that the voice is coming from the little cell where the drunks are kept. I think at first,
some boozer has woken up and gotten out somehow, and now he is going to make trouble for me
. But then the door is shut tight, and I pull on it and it doesn’t open, and the voice says, “Here I am—Doctor, down here” and I search the wall with my hand and I find a space between the stones near the floor, a place where the stones have been taken out or chipped away, a very small opening, and I hold up my light but on the other side I see only darkness. I put my face near the hole, and I say: “Are you there?”
The voice says: “Yes, Doctor.” The owner of the voice is sitting by the hole and talking out at me, asking for water. I don’t know how I am going to give him the water through the small opening, but I intend to try. Before I can tell him this, however, the voice says: “This is a wonderful surprise, Doctor.”
“I’m sorry?” I say.
“How nice it is to see you again,” the voice says agreeably, and waits. I am seriously confounded, and I try to put a face to this voice. I say to myself:
who do I know back home who would make a pilgrimage to this island in the middle of nowhere just to end up in the drunk tank?
I think maybe it is some idiot boyfriend of your mother’s, in which case I am going to leave him there without any water, but there is something about this business of asking for the water, the way he is asking for the water, that makes me think the voice belongs to someone from long ago. The voice is patient with my silence for a while, and then it says: “You must remember me.” But still I don’t. “It’s been fifteen years, Doctor, but you must remember the coffee grounds. The ankle weights and the lake?” And then I realize it is him—it is the deathless man—and my silence continues because I do not know what to say. He must think I am not saying anything because I do not remember, so he keeps reminding me: “You must remember me, Doctor—from inside the coffin.”
“Of course,” I say, because I am astounded enough already, and I do not want him to say anything more about the weights and the lake. It is a despicable dream to me, an unthinkable risk some other doctor, some young fool, took long ago, and I cannot put my mind to it just like that. “It is Gavran Gailé.”
“Oh, I’m so glad,” he says. “So very glad you remember me, Doctor.”
“Well,” I say. “This is remarkable.” It is the strangest thing, coming face-to-face with this man, Gavran Gailé, in the dark, without being able to see if he is real. You must realize—to know that a man has not died after going into a lake for most of the night is one thing. You do not explain it to yourself because you know you will never come across this kind of thing again, you will never meet another man who also doubles as a lungfish. You do not explain it to yourself, and, as I have said before, you certainly do not explain it to other people, and then it becomes the sort of thing that slips away from your own grasp of the truth, until you have very nearly forgotten about it.
So the deathless man wants water, but none of my bottles or ladles will fit through the hole, and we sit there, the deathless man and I, in silence, and he is very thirsty, you understand, but never irritable. He does not complain. He asks me what I am doing here, and I tell him I am here for the dying, and he says, what a coincidence, he is too.
And I am thinking to let this go, to not address it at all, when he says: “Is he dead yet?”
“Who?” I say.
“The man with the cough, the one who is going to die.”
“No one has died tonight, thank you, and I’m confident no one will.”
“You are mistaken, Doctor,” he says with enthusiasm. “Three will go tonight. The man with the cough, the man with the cancer of the liver, and the man who appears to have indigestion.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say, but something about all of this makes me weary, so I get up and walk around anyway, with my lamp up, looking at the sleepers, and among them I do not see anything strange. I come back and I say to the deathless man: “That’s enough. I’ve nothing to say to you tonight. I have no interest in taking medical cues from a drunk man.”
“Oh, no, Doctor,” he says, and he sounds deeply apologetic. “I am not drunk. I haven’t been drunk in forty years. They put me in here because I was unruly this morning, and wouldn’t leave.” I do not ask him what he was doing to be unruly, but I am hovering, and I do not go, so he tells me: “I have been selling coffee, you see, and today I told that man with the cough that he was going to die.”
Suddenly, I realize I’ve seen him—I’ve been seeing him without knowing it, because for the last three or four days there has been a coffee seller at the Waters dressed in the traditional Turkish style, selling coffee to the masses by the waterfalls. I have never looked at him closely, and now it seems to me that, yes, perhaps it is possible that he had the face of the deathless man, but then that face must have changed over the years, and so I do not know.
I cannot believe it
, I say to myself,
I cannot believe that anyone would disguise himself as a coffee seller to play a terrible practical joke
.
“You mustn’t do that,” I say to him. “The people who come here are very sick. You mustn’t frighten them like that, they are here to pray.”
“And yet, you are here, so you must not believe entirely in the fact that they will get what they are praying for.”
“But I still let them pray.” I am very angry. “You must not do this again. They are very sick, they need peace.”
“But that is what I do,” the deathless man says. “That is my work: to give peace.”
“Who are you, really?” I say. “What are you doing here?”
“I am here for my penance.”
“You’re here for the Virgin?”
“No, on behalf of my uncle.”
“Your uncle. Always there is something with your uncle. Haven’t you paid enough penance to your damned uncle?”
“I have been in his debt almost forty years.”
This again
, I think. And to him I say: “It must be incredible, this debt you’re paying.”
The deathless man gets very quiet, and after a few moments, he says: “That reminds me, Doctor. You’ve a debt of your own.”
The way he says this, the whole room lies still. I have led him straight to the memory of our wager on the bridge so many years ago, but I also feel that he has tricked me, that perhaps he is the one who has been leading
me
to it. I am certain he knows I have not forgotten. Just in case I have, he is helpful, and reminds me: “The book, Doctor. You pledged the book.”
“I know what I pledged,” I say.
“Of course,” he says, and I can hear he has not doubted me.
“But I do not concede that you won the bet,” I say, angry at his entitlement, angry at myself. I open my coat and feel for the book, which I find is still there.
“I did win it, Doctor.”
“The bet was for proof, Gavran, and you proved nothing,” I say. “Everything you did could have been a trick.”
“You know that’s not true, Doctor,” he says. “You said you were a betting man. The terms were fair.”
“It was a late night,” I say, “and I hardly remember it. There could have been a thousand ways for you to stay underwater for so long.”
“Now that’s not true either,” he says, sounding, for the first time, disconcerted. “You are welcome to shoot me,” he says. “But I am walled up.”
And you’ll damn well stay that way, you lunatic
. I am thinking we must have someone from the asylum on standby before we let him out of the drunk tank in the morning. We must have someone here to help him, so that he does not go wandering like this, scaring people to death. They will end up calling him a devil—they will say the devil has come to the Waters—and there will be a panic. I find myself wanting to shame him, to ask him to put the back of his head against the wall so I can feel for bullet holes from the last time we met—but I do not do this. Some part of me feels shame, too, for I have not forgotten the bet, and the confidence with which he is offering to let me shoot him—and not for the first time—makes me doubt myself. Besides, it is late, and there is nothing to do but talk to him.
“All right,” I say.
“All right what?” the deathless man says.
“Let’s say you’re telling the truth.”
“Really, let’s.”
“Explain to me how it’s possible. You cannot prove it, so at least explain. Let’s say—you are deathless. How does that kind of thing come to happen? Are you born with it? You’re born and your priest says
—well, here is a deathless man
. How does it happen?”
“It’s not some gift, that I should be born with it. It’s punishment.”
“I doubt most people would say that.”
“You’d be surprised,” he says.
“None of the people in this room would say it.”
“They would in the condition they are in. Deathless does not mean un-ailing.”
“So—how does it happen?”
“Well,” he says slowly. “Let’s begin with my uncle.”
“Praise God—the uncle. Tell me about your uncle.”
“Let’s suppose my uncle is Death.” He says this like he is saying
my uncle is Zeljko, my uncle is Vladimir
. He lets it hang between us for a while, and then, when he doesn’t hear me say anything, he says: “Are we supposing?”
“All right,” I say eventually. “All right. Let’s suppose your uncle is Death. How is this possible?”
“He is the brother of my father.” He says this naturally.
Cain is the brother of Abel; Romulus is the brother of Remus; Sleep is the brother of Death; Death is the brother of my father
.
“But how?”
“That’s not important,” the deathless man says. “The important thing is that we are supposing.”
“We are, so we’ll keep supposing. Being the nephew of Death, I assume you are then born deathless?”
“Not at all.”
“It does not make much sense to me.”
“Even so, that’s how it is. I am hardly the first nephew of Death, and those before me have not been deathless.”
“All right.”
“Now. Let’s suppose my having this uncle entitles me to certain rights. Let’s say that when I turn sixteen, my uncle says to me, ‘Now you are a man, and I will give you a great gift.’ ”
“I understood it was a punishment.”
“It is. The gift he is talking about is not deathlessness. That comes later. He says to me, ‘Anything you want.’ And I think very hard. I think for three days and three nights, and then I go to my uncle and I say: ‘I should like to be a great physician.’ ”
This doesn’t seem very plausible to me, asking Death to make you a doctor. I tell him so. “Your business would be putting him out of his,” I say.
“That does not matter to my uncle,” the deathless man says. “Because in the end, even if I heal every man who comes my way, the last word in all the world falls to him. He says to me, ‘Very well. I will give you this gift—you will be a great physician, and this you will do by being able to tell immediately whether or not a man is going to die.’ ”
“That would make you the first,” I say. “Physician, I mean, who can reasonably predict whether or not he is going to lose a patient. Truly, after you, there have been no others.” I am smug about saying this.
“We’ll not get anywhere with you interrupting to make smart remarks,” the deathless man says. “You’ve asked me to tell you about myself, and now you are laughing at me.”