Authors: Tea Obreht
The name followed him, too, when the hajduk camp fell to a band of Magyar bounty hunters. It was with him when he dragged his only surviving compatriot, Blind Orlo, out of the debris of their camp and into the woods; it was with him while he tended to Orlo, bound his fractured skull, set the bullet-grazed fibula until an infection swelled Orlo’s right leg to twice its size, thundered through his bloodstream for weeks. It was a bitter winter, and the apothecary kept the old man outdoors as much as he dared, applying salves, keeping the leg cold, terrified he would wake up one morning to find that it had gone black during the night.
Following Blind Orlo’s recovery, the apothecary could have broken away, found some other life. But he was duty-bound to his blind companion, and so he stayed; and this, perhaps, was only an excuse for his fear of a world in which his standing was uncertain. Protected, for the first half of his life, by monks, and guarded by hajduks these past ten years, he did not know how to give up the certainty of unquestioning brotherhood. Without it, he would be powerless.
At Blind Orlo’s side, the apothecary acquired the foundations of deceit he would come to abhor. For years, he followed Blind Orlo from village to village, preying on the superstitions of the simple and easily led. They played the same trick in each town: the blind soothsayer and his companion with the unfortunate face. Officially, Blind Orlo read tea leaves, bones, dice, innards, the movement of swallows, and his condition lent credibility to his claims. But all the intuition his lies required was relayed to him in unspoken signals by the apothecary, who learned to read the desires and fears of his followers in the lines of their mouths and eyes, foreheads, the minute movements of their hands, vocal inconsistencies, gestures of which they themselves were unaware. Then Blind Orlo told them what they wanted to hear.
“Your crop will prosper,” he would say to the farmer with callused palms.
“A handsome boy from the next village is in your thoughts,” he would say to the virgin who stared at him across the pink entrails of the dove she had brought. “Do not worry, you are also in his.”
Serving as Blind Orlo’s eyes, the apothecary learned to read white lies, to distinguish furtive glances between secret lovers that would precipitate future weddings, to harness old family hatreds dredged up in fireside conversations that allowed him to foresee conflicts, fights, sometimes even murders. He learned, too, that when confounded by the extremes of life—whether good or bad—people would turn first to superstition to find meaning, to stitch together unconnected events in order to understand what was happening. He learned that, no matter how grave the secret, how imperative absolute silence, someone would always feel the urge to confess, and an unleashed secret was a terrible force.
While the apothecary was learning this way about deceit, he stumbled, quite accidentally, onto his own medical prowess. It started slowly at first, with services that supplemented the soothsaying profession: herbs for migraines, fertility incantations, brews for impotence. But pretty soon he was splinting bones and feeling spleens, putting his fingers against the swollen lymph nodes of influenza sufferers. Once, without prior training, he excised a deeply embedded bullet from the shoulder of a town constable. It was a gift, they said wherever he went; they had never seen such a calm, authoritative, compassionate young man. It was a gift to them all, but it was a gift to the apothecary as well: as healer he was the giver of answers, the vanquisher of fear, the restorer of order and stability. Blind Orlo, with his lies and manipulations, had power, yes; but real power, he came to understand, lay in the definite and the concrete, in predictions backed by evidence, in the continued life of a man you claimed you could save, and the death of a man you pronounced was certain to die.
Of course, neither the apothecary nor Blind Orlo could account for the unpredictability of their ventures, the unreliability of people, omitted details that made an enormous difference in situations that were impossible to read. It was probably not their first grave mistake; but it was the only one for which they were still around, and they paid dearly. In the town of Spašen, they counseled a well-to-do merchant, who was considering expanding his business, to take on an ambitious young protégé about whom the merchant had entertained serious doubts.
“Give the boy a position,” Blind Orlo had said. “Youth reinvigorates the soul.”
Of course, neither he nor the apothecary could have guessed that the soul the young man was reinvigorating belonged, in fact, to the merchant’s wife; or that the merchant would return home one night to find that the lady of the house had absconded with both the youthful protégé and the jar of money the merchant had kept hidden in the baptismal font of his family chapel. The merchant then drank for three days and three nights, on tab, without stopping, and, thus lubricated, shot Blind Orlo one evening as he and the apothecary were returning from supper at the miller’s house.
The apothecary, who barely escaped with his life, would learn several weeks later that the jilted husband was a man of considerable determination: he had placed a modest but compelling bounty, and a charge of fraudulence, on the apothecary’s head, making it necessary for him to move on. The apothecary mourned for his fallen compatriot, the last link to his first life; but by that time, the apothecary was certain of what he wanted, what he longed for: stability, lawfulness, belonging. And he found them, some years later, in a remote corner of the Northern Mountains, in a tiny village through which he had been passing when a mother of four had fallen ill, and he had stopped to care for her, and never left.
Marko Parović was not yet born when the apothecary began, slowly but surely, to set up shop in Galina—but he tells the story of the apothecary’s arrival as though he himself witnessed it: the wagon with its unnamed trinkets, the dozens and dozens of crated jars slowly carried in through the door of the abandoned cobbler’s shop, the counter built with the help of young men from the village, the gasp that went up at the arrival of the caged ibis. How, for years, the children of the village reveled in attempting to teach the ibis to talk; and how the apothecary, out of sheer delight, never attempted to correct them. How his only fee, for many years, was a log for his fire; how a single log from your stockpile earned you the privilege of sitting in one of his varnished wooden chairs, of revealing to him the secrets of what ailed you, your headaches and nightmares, the discomforts of certain foods and the difficulties of lovemaking, and how the apothecary, as if he had all the time in the world, would listen and nod and take notes, open your mouth and peer into your eyes, feel the bones of your spine, recommend this dried grass and that.
Unaware as he is of the apothecary’s past, Marko Parović can tell me nothing of what the apothecary must have felt during those blissful years, when he finally earned the trust of the village, the security of their faith, the power that came from enchanting them with his ability to mend their small pains and arrest the advance of death. How it must have relieved him, after a lifetime of violence, to find himself being asked to preside over trivial land disputes and trade squabbles in a village with only one gun. And of course Marko Parović can tell me nothing of how the apothecary must have felt at the first appearance of Luka’s deaf-mute bride, a Mohammedan like him, or how the villagers’ treatment of her must have reinforced his need to keep himself a secret, to keep them mesmerized and unsuspecting, however ashamed he must have been for neglecting to intervene on her behalf.
He barely remembered Luka as a child, but he was wary of the butcher’s son as soon as he’d returned: Luka, who’d seen the world; Luka, who was a brute without being a fool, an inexcusable combination; Luka, who had, despite the distrust between them, appeared ashen-faced at the shop door late one night two autumns ago, eyes bloodshot, voice cracking. “You’d better come—I think she’s dead.”
There in Luka’s house he had at last seen proof of what he had suspected for months: the girl was in the corner, twisted up under a broken table that had been driven against the wall. He couldn’t imagine how the table had ended up there, how she had fallen under it. He couldn’t bring himself to drag her out. Her neck looked loose, broken, and if she was still alive he could kill her by moving her. So he dragged the table across the room while Luka sat on the kitchen floor, sobbing into his fists. The girl’s face was unrecognizable, gelled with blood, her hair matted down and the scalp bleeding into the floor. Her nose was broken—he was certain of that without touching her. He put his hands on the floor, brought his face close, knelt like this for a long time before he finally found her breath, caught in a thick, blood-clotted bubble of spit that stretched out between her lips.
He assessed the damage: kneecap shattered; the scalp studded with shards of some kind of crockery; left hand mangled, twisted back toward the arm, a spear of bone stretching the skin just above her wrist. At first, he thought three of her front teeth were gone—but then he put his fingers in her mouth and found them, slammed back into the ridges of her palate. He used a spoon to brace them, brought them forward again with a wet crack that he would feel in the tips of his fingers. They would never set properly, but at least she wouldn’t lose them. He sponged the blood from her face, bandaged her head, splinted up what he could and immobilized the rest, tied the jaw shut with dressings, chinned her up like a corpse, and that was how she looked, lying on a cot in the front room, four days going by before she opened her good eye. The apothecary had been going to Luka’s house twice daily to ice her face and ribs and smooth balm into the cuts on her head, all the while convinced that she would slip away between visits, and he was stunned when she looked at him.
The last time he stopped by to look in on her, the apothecary said to Luka: “If this happens again, I will run you out.”
He had meant it, too; and, back then, he’d had enough heft in the village to manage it. But then came the epidemic that claimed the children of the village—Mirica of the oleander leaves, my grandfather’s friend Dušan—and the long, terrifying fight in which he had seen them slip out of his grasp one by one. After that, the line at his door had dwindled; patients came around twice, three times, to make sure they were on the path to recovery, to question the herbs he had prescribed to them. His power—which had, until that moment, elevated him even above the priest, that last-resort mediator for the next world—was suddenly poised on the edge of a knife. He was, and always had been, an outsider, and when his dependability failed, he had felt his hold on the village slipping. He had resolved that he would defend the girl; but, on the heels of his defeat, that promise, made largely to himself, had fallen behind his efforts to regain the villagers’ trust, reestablish their faith in and submission to him. It was becoming apparent to him that these efforts, too, had failed.
The men of the village had started a small bonfire in the square, and the fire was sending black sheets of smoke down the street. Some of the men had gone across the pasture and into the foothills to search for Dariša’s camp, to find his wagon and belongings, which they half-expected to have vanished, just like Dariša himself. A few of the men had paused by the butcher’s house and gone no farther; Jovo had found courage enough to run up and peer through the window, but had seen nothing.
My grandfather stood with his wet boots on the porch of the apothecary’s shop, watching the icicles above the door twist into drops that rapped a quiet rhythm on the railings and the trees. When the apothecary opened the door, my grandfather just said “Please.” And then he said it over and over again, until the apothecary pulled him inside and knelt down beside him with a warm glass of water and made him drink it very, very slowly.
Then the apothecary brushed the hair out of my grandfather’s eyes, and said: “What has happened?”
_____
The steps of her house were powdered with snow, and the apothecary went up and stood on the porch. In his hand he carried the bottle in which he mixed the drink for expectant mothers, a drink he had often made of chalk and sugar and water. He tapped on the door with his fingers, lightly at first, so that the sound would not carry across the pasture; when she did not answer, he banged harder until he remembered that she was deaf, and then he stood there, feeling stupid. Then he tried the door, and it gave. He paused, for a moment, remembering the gun, the blacksmith’s gun, which had not surfaced in the village since Luka had brought it back down, wondering if the girl still had it, and how he might announce himself. He pushed the door open and looked around, and then he opened it farther and stepped into the doorway.
The tiger’s wife was sitting on the floor by the fireplace, drawing something in the hearth with her finger. The fire was bright on her face, and her hair had settled around her eyes so that he couldn’t see her properly, and she did not look up when he went in and shut the door behind him. She was sitting wrapped in her Turkish silks, purples and golds and reds draped around her shoulders like water, and her legs, which were folded under the bulge of her stomach, were bare and thin. What struck him most was the sparseness of the room; there was a table, a few pots and bowls over the tabletop. There was no trace of the gun.
She had not seen him yet, and he did not want to surprise her, but there was nothing he could do about that now. He took a step forward, and then another, and then she turned abruptly and saw him, and he held up his hands to show her that he was harmless and unarmed.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. Then he bowed a little and touched his fingers to his lips and forehead. It had been almost forty years since he had made the gesture.
She got up in one swift motion, rolled to her feet, and the cloth slid down her shoulders when she did it, and she stood there, her face tight and furious, and the apothecary continued to hold his half bow and didn’t move. She was very small, the tiger’s wife, with thin shoulders and a long thin neck, which a river of sweat had caked with salt. Her belly was enormous and tight and round, unbalancing in the way it overpowered her frame and pulled her hips forward.