Authors: Tea Obreht
The first part of the labyrinth was innocent enough, a row of joke mirrors that blew you up and cut you in half and made your head look like a zeppelin, but past that you would suddenly have the notion of standing upside down and back to front. The ceiling and floor were done in gold tile and carved palm crowns, and the mirrors stood so that every step you took was into an alcove with nine, ten, twenty thousand of yourself. You would inch along slowly, the tiles on the floor shifting and changing shape, the angles of the mirrors slanting in and out of reality while your hands touched glass, and glass, and more glass, and then, finally, open space where you least expected it. Coming around invisible corners, you would occasionally encounter a painted oasis, or a mounted peacock in what appeared to be the distance, but was, in reality, somewhere behind you. Then the marionette of an Indian snake charmer, with a wooden cobra rearing out of a basket. Making his way through the labyrinth, Dariša felt that his heart might stop at any moment, felt that, even though he was seeing himself everywhere as he advanced, he did not know which one of him was real, and his movement was crippled by indecision and fear of becoming lost, of never finding his way out of the fog, and despite Magdalena’s best intentions, he began to feel the same emptiness that found him in the darkness of his room at home. Every few feet, his face would hit the mirror and leave a chalky stain on the glass. He was crying by the time he reached the pasha’s oasis, a curtained atrium with six or seven live peacocks milling around a green fountain, and beyond it, the door to the trophy room.
The trophy room was a long, narrow corridor with blue wallpaper. A tasseled Turkish carpet unrolled down the length of the hall, and the south wall was studded with the shining mounted skulls of antelope and wild sheep, the broad horns of buffalo and moose; picture-boxes of pinned beetles and butterflies; carved perches from which the wide dead eyes of hawks and owls stared down; the tusks of an elephant, crossed like sabers next to a case containing the spiraled single horn of a narwhal; a large swan, spread-winged and silent, kiting on string; and, at the end of the hall, the mounted body of a hermaphroditic goat, with several photographs of the living animal preserving moments of its life in the pasha’s menagerie to prove that its existence had been real, and not fabricated after death.
The opposite wall was illuminated with lamps that tilted upward from the floor into enormous glass cases where the wild things of the world were posed in agitated silence. One case for every corner of the earth, every place the pasha or his sons had hunted. Yellow grass and the staircase crowns of flat-topped trees painted in the background of a case that held a lion and his cub, an ostrich, a purple warthog, and a small gazelle cowering in a flush of thorns. Dark woods with canvas waterfalls, the mouth of a cave, and a bear standing rigid, paws folded, eyes up, ears forward; behind the bear, a white hare with red eyes and a pheasant in flight pinned to the wall. A pastel river, thick with the foreheads of drinking zebra, kudu, oryx, horns slanting up, ears turned here and there to catch the silence. An evening tableau: bent bamboo forest, green as summer, and a tiger, washed with fire, standing in the thicket with its face pulled up in a snarl, eyes fixed forward through the glass.
Young boys are fascinated with animals, but for Dariša the hysterical dream of the golden labyrinth, coupled with the silent sanctuary of the trophy room, amounted to a much simpler notion: absence, solitude, and then, at the end of it all, Death in thousands of forms, standing in that hall with frankness and clarity—Death had size and color and shape, texture and grace. There was something concrete to it. In that room, Death had come and gone, swept by, and left behind a mirage of life—it was possible, he realized, to find life in Death.
Dariša did not necessarily understand the feeling that came over him. He knew only that for a long time he had feared absence, and now here was presence. But he realized that it had something to do with preservation of spirit, with the maintenance of an image you most loved or feared or respected, and afterward he came to the Hall of Mirrors often, by himself, and walked up and down the trophy room, admiring the wax nostrils and fixed postures, the roll of the tendons and muscles, and the veins in the faces of stags and rams.
Dariša began his apprenticeship with Mr. Bogdan Dankov of Dankov and Sloki? long before Magdalena died. He began it because of a chance encounter with Mr. Bogdan at the palace when the old master had come to repair a mounted fox that needed re-bristling. Mr. Bogdan mounted the most respectable heads in town and, in Dariša’s twelve-year-old eyes, was an artist of the highest caliber. His clients were dukes and generals, people who lived and hunted in the kinds of places Dariša’s father wrote about in his letters, and, more and more often, Dariša found himself at the Bogdan workshop on the south side of town, waiting for the morning deliveries, waiting for the servants of great men to bring in the skins and the skulls, the horns and the heads. Of course, it wasn’t all pleasant—the capes arriving, smelling of something faint and funny, the way the dead skins lay there in a matted heap. But the preparation was worth the reward of watching Mr. Bogdan draw up the sketches for the mannequin, and then, as weeks went by, raise the wooden frame, sculpt the plaster and the wax, carve out the muscles and the lines where the tissues held together under the skin, select the eyes, stretch the skin over and sew it up around the body until it stood, full again, knees and ears and tail and all. Then came the painting of the rough spots, the glazing of the nose, the smoothing of the antlers.
To practice, Dariša set up a small workshop of his own in his father’s cellar. It was a permanent and unassailable solution to the problem of his inability to sleep, which had never gone away. Still the gendarme of the house, he would read until Magdalena and the housekeeper were asleep, and then go down to his workshop, take the skins out of the icebox, and begin the process of restoring the dead. He must have reasoned, in some way, that if Death were already in the house, it would be attracted to his activity, interested in the magic of reversal, puzzled, perhaps, by how the unformed skin was made to rise over new shoulders, new flanks, new neck. If he kept Death there, kept it riveted and preoccupied, thought about it while it shared the cellar with him, it would not wander the house. He practiced first on vermin he picked out of the trash, cats that had met their ends under carriage wheels, and then on squirrels he trapped with a clumsy box-and-bait apparatus he set up in the back garden. After Magdalena’s kingfisher died, he showed the mounted bird to Mr. Bogdan and won the right to take small commissions home with him: fox, badger, pine marten. Whatever satisfaction he gained from the finished product, he did not admit, either to himself or to the quiet, empty room.
He continued this way for years, even after the attack that killed Magdalena, which, predictably, happened one sunny afternoon in March at the park, when he let go of her hand to lace up his shoes, and she seized and fell and hit her head, and after a long time in the hospital, slipped away without waking up or ever saying a word to him again. Afterward, other things collapsed in small piles around him—the kingdom went first, and the wars that united it into a new one bankrupted his father, who hanged himself from one of the many bridges that spanned the Nile, far away, in Egypt. Alone, penniless, without task, Dariša moved into Mr. Bogdan’s basement and continued his apprenticeship in the business of death.
At least
, he told himself,
this is something I know how to do
, and he went to the Hall of Mirrors more and more often to perfect the technique of his craft, until at last he was permitted to touch up one of the pasha’s great boars, which was much later mounted in the office of the Marshall, although Dariša would never know about it. He had plans, then, to open up a business of his own, or to take over from Mr. Bogdan when the old master retired. But then came the Great War, and years of poverty, and any business he might have made of it dried up in the coffers and pockets of the rich who fled or died or went broke, assumed other identities, adopted other kingdoms.
At twenty, having buried Mr. Bogdan and faithfully distributed almost all the old man’s money among his many legitimate and illegitimate children so that he could keep the basement for himself, Dariša was scrounging for work. He found himself running errands for a tavern owner he detested, a sallow-faced, tubercular old gypsy whose name was Karan, and who insisted on paying him in old currency. The tavern was a one-room shack, so there was never enough sitting room inside, and the patrons would instead spill out into the square, where Karan had steadily been carving out space with boxes and moving crates, overturned butter churns and broken pickling barrels, anything found or unused that might serve as a tabletop.
Contributing to the tavern’s popularity—particularly in the eyes of children—was Lola, Karan’s dancing bear and the love of his life. She was an old, soft-muzzled, doe-eyed thing who had spent countless years traveling the world with her master, performing on street corners and in circuses, in theatrical productions and palace galas, and once—as evidenced by Karan’s only framed photograph, proudly on display above the spit—for the late archduke himself. She was so old she no longer needed a tether, and was content to spend her waning years in the shade of the oak outside the tavern, letting the neighborhood children clamber all over her and peer inside her nostrils. On the rare occasion she did get up to dance, she lumbered through it with unforced grace that still showed some traces of her former glory.
Dariša had never seen a living bear before, and when he wasn’t scrubbing dishes or butchering the morning’s shipment of meat, he was outside with Lola. Old age had worn away her sight and sense of smell, and it was often all she could do to raise herself to her feet and move from one shaded area to another; but her range of expressions still betrayed the wild animal in her. There was, of course, the almost canine sideways tilt of the eyes when she wanted something she was not supposed to have (a prime cut of meat, for example, or a drink of
rakija
, in which she was occasionally permitted to indulge), or the way her muzzle melted into contentment at the sound of Karan’s voice; but there was also the sudden upward pull of the facial muscles when she managed to hear a dog in the distance, and the darkened, drawn, focused look that came over her at feeding time.
When Lola finally died that winter, Karan was beside himself with grief. He closed the tavern down, and kept her wrapped in an enormous blanket in the dining room for four days before he finally let Dariša take her away. In Mr. Bogdan’s basement, Dariša worked slowly, a little each day, his hands trying to remember the movement of the knife and the needle as smoothly as possible while his mind stayed fixed on Lola in the golden labyrinth. When he brought her back to Karan, almost a month later, the gypsy was speechless. Dariša had positioned her standing, her body half-turned and her ears alert, somewhere between dancing and rearing for a better look at her prey; her paws were outspread, her fur combed and clean, her eyes wide and fixed on something in the distance. Dariša had found the ground between her docile nature and her long-lost, feral dignity; Karan immediately gave him a raise, and put Lola on the slope beneath her tree and laid her silver-tasseled dancing muzzle under one enormous hind paw.
Lola stood outside the tavern this way for months, and when the spring brought trappers back from the mountains after the season’s hunt, they marveled at her authenticity, and demanded to meet the man who had done her such remarkable justice. The trappers were hard-faced, ugly men, ugly in every way, but they got less ugly the more they drank, and they drank a lot that night, buying round after round for Dariša. There was no more money to be made in taxidermy in the City, they told him; but there were forests the whole world over, forests belonging to kings and counts, even forests belonging to no one, and these forests were stocked with bear and wolf and lynx, whose hides were now worth a great deal to City men trying to distinguish themselves in social circles to which they had no birthright. In this world, the trappers told Dariša, the aristocracy had fallen from their frivolous pursuits, and a man could no longer rely on them to bring him work. Instead, he must go out and find the beasts himself, hunt them on his own time and with his own skill. If a rich idiot should happen to tag along, he was an added blessing; but rich idiots were harder and harder to come by, unreliable even when they expressed interest, and a man could not spend a lifetime waiting for them.
Dariša mopped floors for the rest of the spring and summer, but when autumn came he followed the trappers into the mountains. The hunt, he had convinced himself, was just a new avenue of the death business, and one way or another it would accommodate a return to independence and to the work he loved. He himself would bring home the hides that would revive Mr. Bogdan’s workshop; he would kill the bears whose pelts doctors and politicians would buy on market stands, the bears whose unseen deaths retired generals would embellish in fireside stories.
That first year, following one trapper and then another, Dariša became a hunter. They say he fell to hunting as if he had been born for it; but perhaps it was the possibility of having a purpose again that fueled him to adopt his new life with such ferocious energy and dedication. He learned to set up camp and mend weapons; to build a blind and sit motionless in it for hours; to read his quarry’s track in the dark and in the rain. He learned, by heart, the movement of deer herds across the mountains so that he could anticipate the bears who came to pick off the stragglers. He learned to hunt in late autumn, when the bears, slow-gaited and fattened, were fiercest in their last months of foraging before winter sleep. What the other trappers could teach him, he absorbed voraciously; what they could not, he figured out for himself. He hunted with traps and guns, with snares and poisoned meat, grew accustomed to the loud and stinking way bears died, and the way their skin came away from the body if you cut it right, heavy, blood-filled, but as accommodating as a dress pattern. He learned to love solitude, unbroken except for an occasional encounter with other trappers, or the unexpected hospitality of some godforsaken farm where the men always seemed to be gone, and the women always happy to see him. He learned that seven months of hunting could earn him the pleasure of three months of work in Mr. Bogdan’s basement, shut away from the world, rebuilding the skins he had brought with him.