Authors: Tea Obreht
“Of course not,” my grandfather said. Only later would I understand what it meant to him to add: “Even if she wanted to be, I should think that would be difficult to manage, considering it’s been razed to the ground.”
“It is my job to ask,” the hat said with a gracious smile. He was clearly trying to backtrack now, to ingratiate himself, and he waved a hand around the room. “You are a man of considerable assets, and if your wife has brothers or sisters still in Sarobor—”
“Get out,” my grandfather said. The hat blinked at him stupidly. My neck had stiffened up, and drops of cold water from the towel were running down the outside of my leg.
“Doctor—” the hat began, but my grandfather cut him off.
“Get the hell out.” He had put his hands behind his back and was rocking forward on his heels now. His shoulders had slumped down and forward, his whole face sunk in a grimace. “Out of my house,” he said. “Out.”
The hat closed his notebook and put it away. Then he picked up the briefcase and rested it on the edge of the coffee table. “There’s no need for this misunderstanding.”
“Did you hear me?” my grandfather said. Then, without warning, he leaned forward in one motion and grabbed the handle of the briefcase and pulled. The hat did not let go, and he stumbled forward still hanging on, and the coffee table went end over end, the vase and all the old newspapers and magazines on it showering onto the floor, along with the contents of the briefcase, which had flown open. The hat knelt down, red-faced—
God damn it, look at all this, there’s no need for this, sir
—trying to put all his papers back in the briefcase, and suddenly my grandfather, like something out of a cartoon, was kicking all those fallen newspapers and letters and magazines and coupons, kicking his feet into the pile and heaving up clouds of paper. He looked ridiculous, long-legged and awkward in his suit, swinging his arms around insanely and saying, without the slightest rise in his voice, “Get out, get out, get out, get the hell out.” By the time the hat had finished stuffing his belongings back into the briefcase, my grandfather was already holding the door open.
Three months later, the Administration came down especially hard on established doctors. Apparently, my grandfather was not the only one with ties to the old system, to the provinces, to families there. Doctors above the age of fifty, suspected of having loyalist feelings toward the unified state, were suspended from practice, and were informed, in writing, that their University seminars would be closely monitored.
Despite the insistent pull of his instinct to protect us, my grandfather still suffered from that national characteristic of our people that is often mistaken for stupidity but is more like self-righteous indignation. He called a locksmith whom he had once treated for gallstones, and had him install the most complex front-door deadbolt system I had ever seen. It made the inner plane of the door look like something out of a clock, and you needed three separate keys to get in from the outside. The sound of the gears moving would have woken the dead. Although the termination of his practice did not entirely preclude him from teaching at the University, my grandfather tendered his resignation. Then he telephoned the patients he was now forbidden to see—asthma sufferers and victims of rheumatoid arthritis; insomniacs, teachers who had recently given up smoking, construction workers whose backs were on the mend; paraplegics and hypochondriacs; a tubercular horse breeder; a celebrated thespian who was also a recovering alcoholic—and arranged a schedule of house calls that seemed, at least to me, endless.
I sat in the armchair beside his desk while he made the phone calls, rolling my eyes. I couldn’t figure out whether his decision was the result of his commitment to his patients, or some remote glimmer of the same adolescent stubbornness I recognized in myself, in Zóra, in the kids on the docks. The possibility that it might be the latter terrified me, but I did not have the courage to challenge him on that front, to ask him if it was possible that he could risk everything on something that in us seemed like towering defiance, but in him amounted to inexcusable stupidity. Instead—in what must have been the most I’d said to him in months—I leveled one disastrous scenario after another at him, all of which left him completely unfazed: What if one of your patients is indiscreet? What if someone follows you on a house call? What if the pharmacy starts asking questions about why you yourself are filling out all these prescriptions for ailments you clearly don’t have? What if someone in your care dies, has a stroke, hemorrhages, suffers an aneurysm—what if you’re blamed for that death because your patient didn’t go to the hospital? What if you end up in prison, charged with murder? What will happen to us?
“Why do I have to be the adult?” I would ask Zóra while we sat at our usual table, waiting for Branko to start baying into the microphone. “Why do I have to point out when he does something insane?”
“I know,” Zóra would say, smacking her lips in the direction of her compact. “Really.”
My grandfather must have noticed that he was seeing considerably more of me than he had over the past two years. He must have noticed that I, and not my grandma, was brewing coffee at daybreak; that our breakfast debates over the latest news did not stop with my waving a hand and muttering,
what do you expect, there’s a war on
, but spilled down the stairs and onto the street when I went with him to do the marketing; that I protested when my grandma tried to make the beds, or chop too-hard vegetables, or watch television instead of taking a nap. He must have realized that I was doing my homework in the kitchen every evening when he left to make house calls, and that I was up doing the crossword puzzle when he returned. He must have noticed it all, but he never said anything of my new rituals, and he never invited me to share in any of his. This was, perhaps, a kind of punishment, and back then I thought it was for allowing myself to slip, or for letting the hat into our apartment. Now I realize that it was punishment for giving up so easily on the tigers.
In the end, though, I must have earned something back, because he told me about the deathless man.
It was the summer I turned sixteen. Some patient—I didn’t know who—had been battling pneumonia, and my grandfather’s visits to him had increased from once to three times a week. I had dozed off struggling through a crossword puzzle, fully intending to wait up for him, and I came around some hours later to find my grandfather standing in the doorway, flicking the table lamp on and off. When he saw me sit up, he stopped, and for a few moments I sat in total darkness.
“Natalia,” I heard him say, and I realized he was motioning for me to get off the sofa. I could see him now. He was still wearing his hat and raincoat, and exhaustion turned my relief at seeing him into impatience.
“What?” I said, all hunched and groggy. “What?”
He motioned toward the door, and then he said, “Quietly. Come on.” He had my raincoat over his arm, my sneakers in his right hand. Evidently, there was no time to change. “What’s going on?” I said, forcing my foot into an already laced sneaker. “What’s the matter?”
“You’ll see,” he said, holding the coat out for me. “Hurry up, come on.”
I thought:
that’s it, it’s finally happened—he’s killed somebody
.
The elevator would have made too much noise, so we took the stairs. Outside the rain had stopped, but water was still running in the gutters, coming down the street from the market and carrying with it the smell of cabbage and dead flowers. The café across the street had closed early, the patio chained off, wet chairs stacked on the tabletops. An enormous white cat was sitting under the pharmacy awning, blinking at us with distaste as we passed under the lamppost at the end of the block. By this time, I had given up on my coat buttons.
“Where are we going?” I said. “What’s happened?”
But my grandfather didn’t answer. He just kept moving down the street, so fast I came after him almost at a run. I thought,
if I start crying, he’ll make me go back
, and stayed on his heels. Past the baker, the bank, the out-of-business toy shop where I had bought stickers for my never-completed Ewoks album; past the stand that sold fried dough, the sugared smell of it wedged permanently in the air; past the stationery shop, the newsstand on the next corner. Three blocks down, I realized how quiet it was. We had passed two cafés, both closed, and a late-night grill that was normally packed, but was occupied tonight by only one waiter, who sat spinning coins across an eight-person table.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked my grandfather.
I wondered what my mother would do if she woke up to find us both gone. We were nearing the end of our street where it opened out onto the Boulevard, and I assumed the silence of our walk would be shattered by the bustle along the tramway. But when we got there, nothing, not even a single passing car. All the way from one end of the Boulevard to the other, every window was dark, and a hazy yellow moon was climbing along the curve of the old basilica on the hill. As it rose, it seemed to be gathering the silence up around it like a net. Not a sound: no police sirens, no rats in the dumpsters that lined the street. Not even my grandfather’s shoes as he stopped, looked up and down the street, and then turned left to follow the Boulevard east across the Square of the Konjanik.
“It’s not far now,” he said, and I caught up with him long enough to see the side of his face. He was smiling.
“Not far to where?” I said, out of breath, angry. “Where are you taking me?” I drew myself up and stopped. “I’m not going any further until you tell me what the hell this is.”
He turned to look at me, indignant. “Lower your voice, you fool, before you set something off,” he hissed. “Can’t you feel it?” Suddenly his arms went over his head in a wide arc. “Isn’t it lovely? No one in the world awake but us.” And off he went again. I stood still for a few moments, watching him go, a tall, thin, noiseless shadow. Then the realization of it rushed over me: he didn’t need me with him, he wanted me there. Without realizing it, I had been invited back.
We passed the empty windows of shops that had gone out of business; lightless buildings where roosting pigeons hunched along the fire escapes; a beggar sleeping so soundly that I would have thought him dead if I hadn’t realized that the moment had closed around us, stilling everything.
When I finally caught up with my grandfather, I said: “Look, I don’t know what we’re doing, but I’d like to be in on it.”
Then suddenly he stopped in the darkness ahead of me and my chin cracked his elbow. The force of the collision knocked me back, but then he reached for me and held my shoulder while I steadied myself. My jaw clicked when I put my hand against it.
My grandfather stood on the curb, pointing into the distance of the empty street. “There,” he said, “look.” His hand was shaking with excitement.
“I don’t see anything,” I told him.
“Yes you do,” he said. “You do, Natalia. Look.”
I peered out into the street, where the long blades of the rails lay slick and shining. There was a tree on the other curb, a lamppost with a dying bulb, an eviscerated dumpster lying on its side in the road. I was opening my mouth to say
what
? And then I saw it.
Half a block from where we were standing, an enormous shadow was moving along the street, going very slowly up the Boulevard of the Revolution. At first I thought it was a bus, but its shape was too organic, too lumpy, and it was going far too slowly for that, making almost no noise. It was swaying, too, swaying up the street with an even momentum, a ballasted rolling motion that was drawing it away from us like a tide, and every time it rocked forward something about it made a soft dragging sound on the rails. As we watched, the thing sucked in air and then let out a deep groan.
“God,” I said. “That’s an elephant.”
My grandfather said nothing, but when I looked up at him he was smiling. His glasses had fogged up during the walk, but he wasn’t taking them off to wipe them.
“Come on,” he said, and took my hand. We moved fast along the sidewalk until we drew parallel, and then passed it, stopped a hundred meters down so we could watch it coming toward us.
From there, the elephant—the sound and smell of it; the ears folded back against the domed, bouldered head with big-lidded eyes; the arched roll of the spine, falling away into the hips; dry folds of skin shaking around the shoulders and knees as it shifted its weight—seemed to take up the whole street. It dragged its curled trunk like a fist along the ground. Several feet in front of it, holding a bag of something that must have been enormously tempting, a short young man was walking slowly backward, drawing it forward with whispers.
“I saw them up at the train station as I was coming home,” my grandfather said. “He must be bringing it to the zoo.”
The young man had seen us, and as he inched back along the tramway he nodded and smiled, pulled down on his cap. Every so often, he would take something out of the bag and hold it out to the elephant, and the elephant would lift its trunk from the ground, grip the offering, and loll it back between the yellow sabers of its tusks.
Later on, we would read about how some soldiers had found him near death at the site of an abandoned circus; about how, despite everything, despite closure and bankruptcy, the zoo director had said bring him in, bring him in and eventually the kids will see him. For months the newspapers would run a picture of him, standing stark-ribbed in his new pen at the zoo, an advert of times to come, a pledge of the zoo’s future, the undeniable end of the war.
My grandfather and I stopped at the bus station, and the elephant passed, slow, graceful, enchanted by the food in the young man’s hand. The moon threw a tangle of light into the long, soft hairs sticking up out of his trunk and under his chin. The mouth was open, and the tongue lay in it like a wet arm.
“No one will ever believe this,” I said.
My grandfather said: “What?”
“None of my friends will ever believe it.”
My grandfather looked at me like he’d never seen me before, like he couldn’t believe I was his. Even in our estrangement, he had never quite looked at me that way, and afterward he never did again.