Authors: Tea Obreht
The waiter says to me: “Well, sir. Tonight we have the sole, the eel, the cuttlefish, and the John Dory. May I recommend the John Dory? It was freshly caught this morning.”
There are not very many of them, not very many fish—perhaps five or six, but they are neatly arranged, with the two eels curled around the edges of the display. The John Dory is lying on its side like a spiked flat of paper, the spot on its tail staring up like an eye. Of all the fish on the cart, it is the only one that actually looks like a fish, and also the only one not giving off a vaguely dead smell. Now, I love John Dory, but tonight I find myself wanting lobster, and I ask about it, about the lobster. The old waiter bows to me, and apologizes, says that they have just run out.
I tell him I will need a moment to think, and he leaves me with the menu and disappears. I am pretty disappointed about that lobster, I can tell you, as I sit there looking at the dishes they have to go with the fish. They have, of course, what you would expect: they have potatoes several ways, salad with garlic, four or five different sauces to go with the fish, but all the time I am thinking about the lobster, about how they have just run out. And then I think:
my God, it would be awful if this man, this gloating man who is here reading a book, has just had the last lobster, the lobster that should have come to me when I am not here to gloat
.
And just at that moment, as I am thinking this, the old waiter reappears and bows over the man’s table.
“And now, sir,” I hear the waiter say to the man. “Have you had a chance to consider? Is there anything I can offer you to drink?”
“Yes, please,” says the man. “Water.”
I put my menu down and I look at him. He has lowered the book so that he can speak to the waiter, and I recognize him immediately. The waiter goes to get him the water, and Gavran Gailé does not raise his book back up; instead, he looks out over the river, and then around the balcony, and finally his gaze settles on me, and it is the same gaze of the man from inside the coffin—the same eyes, the same face, unchanged and whole, as it must have been in the drunk tank that night at the Church of the Virgin of the Waters, when I did not have the opportunity to see it.
The deathless man is smiling at me, and I say to him: “It’s you.”
He calls me doctor, and then he gets up and dusts off his coat and comes over to shake my hand. I stand up and hold my napkin, and while we are shaking hands in silence like this, it comes to me why he is here, but I cannot tell myself that I am surprised to see him. No, I realize, I am not surprised at all. His being here can mean only one thing, and, like the rest of us, he knows what is going to happen. He has come to collect, the deathless man.
“What a wonder,” he is saying to me. “What a remarkable, remarkable wonder.”
“How long have you been in town?” I say.
“Several days now,” he tells me.
I am tired, and all business, and I tell him: “Without doubt, you have been buying people a great deal of coffee.”
He does not smile at this, but he does not reproach me either. He does not confirm, he does not deny. He is just there. It occurs to me that he never looks tired, he never looks worn. I tell him I insist he join me for dinner, and he does, gladly. He goes to get his book and his cup, and the waiter brings us another place setting for him.
“Do you gentlemen know what you would like?” the waiter asks.
“Not yet,” my friend says to him. “But we will take
narghile.
”
I wait until the old man has left to get us the pipes, and then I say: “The best meal of my life, I ate here.” The deathless man nods at me in appreciation. “During my honeymoon,” I say. “You have never met my wife. We stayed here for our honeymoon, my wife and I, and we had lobster. Two years after the first time you and I met in that little village—do you remember it?”
“I remember,” he says.
“I was very young,” I say. “It was a beautiful honeymoon. For a week, I ate nothing but lobster. I could eat it still.”
“Then you should.”
“They haven’t any tonight.”
“That’s a shame.”
“You did not happen to get the last one?” I say.
“As you see,” he tells me, “I have not eaten.”
We sit in silence for a while, and he does not ask me what I am doing here. This is when it occurs to me that perhaps he knows something I don’t—that perhaps it is not someone else he is here to see, but, instead, that he has come to see me, that he is here for me in particular, and that thought fills me up. And I tell you, it is one thing not to believe, but quite another to entertain a possibility, and I don’t know if it’s the shelling or the evening or the Old Bridge on the water, but that is what I am doing as I sit there, hanging on to that napkin on my knees—I am entertaining the possibility.
“And have you been very busy?” I ask him.
“Not particularly,” he says to me, and he wants to say more, but at this moment the old waiter comes shuffling back with the
narghile
, which he sets up for us, cleaning the pipe lips, setting up the tobacco and
tumbak
in the bowl. When he finishes, there is a sweet roasting smell coming from the pipe, honey-and-rose smell, and he is taking out a pencil and piece of paper to write down our order.
“What do you say to the perch?” the deathless man asks me.
“I am a great lover of John Dory,” I say. “In the absence of lobster.”
“Shall we have the John Dory?”
“Let’s have the John Dory.”
“We’ll have the John Dory,” the deathless man says to the old waiter, looking up at him and smiling. The waiter bows from the waist, like we’ve made a very good choice. Which we have, we’ve really made a very good choice. It is probably the last John Dory the hotel will ever sell.
“Can I entice the sirs with some
mezze
?” the old waiter says. “We have an excellent
ajvar
with garlic, and also an octopus salad. We have wonderful
sarma
, and cheese with olives.”
“I feel some indulgence is needed,” the deathless man says. “Some indulgence is needed tonight. We’ll have it all. And, to go with the fish, the boiled potatoes with chard.”
“Very good, sir,” the waiter says while he is writing it all down with a stubby pencil.
“And, naturally, the parsley sauce.”
“Naturally, sir,” says the waiter.
He refills our wine glasses and leaves, and I am sitting there looking at the calm, smiling face of the deathless man, and asking myself why, in particular, indulgence is needed tonight. The deathless man takes the pipe of the
narghile
and begins to puff on it slowly, and big thick clouds of smoke are rising out of his nostrils and mouth and he looks very content, sitting there, with the blasts rocking the valley at Marhan.
I must be looking pretty stupefied at all this, because he asks me: “Is something wrong?” I shake my head, and he smiles. “Do not worry about the price, Doctor. This is my treat. It is important—so important—to indulge in these pleasurable things.”
My God
, I say to myself,
and now it has come to this. My last meal, and with a deathless man, at that
.
“My best meal,” he says out of nowhere, as if we are still on that subject, “was at the Big Boar, about sixty years ago.” I do not know why this happens now, but I do not find myself saying,
how? How could you have had a meal like this, when your face says you are thirty, and even that is generous
. He says: “The Big Boar was a wonderful tavern in the king’s hunting park, and you would shoot the game yourself and then the chef would prepare it in his special way. The woman I told you about—the woman who died—she and I went there when we first fled. When we fled from here.”
“I didn’t realize she was from Sarobor,” I say.
“Everybody’s from somewhere, Doctor. She used to play the gusla there—” he says, pointing down to the Old Bridge, “just over there.”
The pepper and the octopus salad and the
sarma
arrive, and the waiter arranges the plates, and the deathless man digs right in. It all smells so wonderful, and he is spooning those cabbage leaves and that red pepper onto his plate, and all those oils are running into each other, and the pink-purple octopus tentacles are shining with oil, and I put some on my plate and I eat, too, but I eat slowly, because who knows, maybe it’s poisoned, maybe the old waiter is working with a vengeance, maybe that is why the deathless man is here. But it is too difficult not to eat with the lights going off in Marhan, and now Gavran Gailé will not stop talking about the meal we are eating. Every time the waiter comes close, Gavo is talking loudly about how wonderful the flavors are, how fresh the oil—and it is true, the food is wonderful, but I am feeling that he is rubbing it in, this business of it being my last meal, and I am thinking,
My God, what I have done, coming here?
The waiter brings the John Dory and it is glorious. The fish is dark and crisp on the outside, and it has been grilled whole. He cuts it up slowly with the fish knife, and the flesh goes soft and feathery under the knife, and he serves it to us on our plates and then ladles out the potatoes with the chard. The potatoes are bright yellow and steaming, and the chard is thick and green and clinging to the potatoes, and the deathless man is eating and eating and talking about how glorious the meal is—which is true, really, it is a glorious meal, and even though you can hear the shelling in Marhan, it is all right with the meal on the balcony and the river and the Old Bridge.
Because I have to know, at a certain point I say: “Are you here to tell me that I am going to die?”
He looks up at me with surprise. “I beg your pardon?” he says.
“This meal,” I say. “Indulgence. If you are here to let me indulge in my last meal, I would like to know this. I would like to call my wife, my daughter, my grandchild.”
“I take it, since you ask that question without provocation, that you have accepted what I am—does that mean you are ready to pay your debt to me, Doctor?”
“Certainly not,” I say.
“Still more proof?”
“We’ve not even had coffee yet.”
Gavran Gailé picks up a corner of his napkin and he dabs his mouth with it.
“May I see it?”
“What?”
“Your pledge, Doctor. The book. Let me see it.”
“No,” I say, and I am worried.
“Come now, Doctor. I am only asking to see it.”
“I do not ask to see your cup,” I say. But he is not giving up, not taking up his fork and knife, just sitting there. And after a while, I take out my
Jungle Book
and I hold it out to him. He wipes the tips of his fingers before he takes it from me, and then he runs his hand over the cover.
“Oh yes,” he says, as if he remembers it well, remembers the story. He opens it and flips through the pictures and the poems. I am afraid he is going to take it, but I am also afraid that it will upset him to know I don’t trust him.
“Rikki Tikki Tavi,” he says to me, handing the book back across the table. “I remember him. I liked him best.”
“How surprising,” I say, “that you should like the weasel.” He does not reproach me for saying this, even though we know I am both rude and incorrect: Rikki Tikki is, of course, a mongoose.
Gavran Gailé watches me put the book back in my pocket. He is smiling at me, and he leans forward across the table and quietly says, “I am here for him,” and he nods at the waiter. He does not say he is not here for me, and I am weary, but suddenly I feel awful for the little old waiter.
“Does he know?”
“How would he know?”
“In the past, you’ve told them.”
“Yes, and I’ve learned a thing or two, haven’t I? You’ve been there, Doctor, while I’ve been learning. If I tell him, he is going to spear me with a kebab stick and I am going to have a difficult recovery, which mustn’t happen because—as you say—I am due to be very busy.” He sits back and wipes his mouth with a napkin. “Besides, what good would it do him to know? He is happy, he is serving an enormous meal to two pleasant people on the eve of war. Let him be happy.”
“Happy?” I am dumbfounded. “He could be home—he could be with his family.”
“We are indulging ourselves, and so indulging him,” the deathless man says. “This fellow takes great pride in what he does—and he is serving a glorious and wonderful meal, a memorable one. Tonight, he will go home to his family and talk about serving the last meal of the Hotel Amovarka, and tomorrow when he is gone, those still alive will have this to talk about. They will be talking about it after the war has ended. Do you see?”
The waiter comes and clears away our plates, the big plate with the John Dory on it, the little glass bones all picked clean. He balances the plates on one arm, and still the white napkin is folded over his free arm, and I am filled up with the idea of this memorable meal, which I have not been enjoying for fear.
“May I tempt the sirs with a dessert drink?” the old waiter says. “Or dessert?”
“All of it,” I am suddenly saying. I am saying: “We will have the
tulumbe
and the baklava and
tufahije
, and also the
kadaif
, please.”
“With quince
rakija,
” the deathless man says, and when the old waiter leaves, he tells me he is glad that I am getting into the spirit of things.
We do not talk, because I am thinking of how to convince the deathless man to tell the waiter, or perhaps how to tell him myself without the deathless man noticing, and the waiter brings the dessert on an enormous silver tray and sets it down. The
tulumbe
are there, golden and soft and dripping, and the baklava sticks to my mouth, and the roasted apple with the walnuts is lovely and it melts under the fork and all these things come with the quince brandy that burns your throat between bites, and I am a little drunk, now, and watching the fire in the sky over Marhan, I am missing your grandmother’s cooking, because her pastries are better than this.
When we are finished, Gavran Gailé pushes his chair back and says: “Truly.” And he folds his hands over his belly and there is something about him that makes me sad, too.