Authors: Tea Obreht
“Who is your uncle?” I say.
“I don’t think you really want to know,” he says.
“Well, I’m asking.”
“There is no point in telling you,” Gavo says. “I confided in you as a fellow man of medicine, but I can see you will not believe me, and this conversation cannot go anywhere if some part of it is not taken in good faith.”
I am honest. I say to him: “I am interested in who your uncle is because you believe it explains your being unable to die.”
“It does.”
“Well?”
“If you do not believe I cannot die—even though a man held me underwater for ten minutes and then shot me in the back of the head twice—I do not see you believing who my uncle is. I do not see it.” I can hear him shuffling around in the coffin, his shoulders moving, his boots on the bottom of the coffin.
“Please hold still,” I say.
“I would like some coffee,” he says.
I laugh in his face, and I tell him is he crazy?—I am not going to give him coffee in his condition.
“If we have coffee, I can prove to you that I cannot die,” he says.
“How?”
“You will see,” he says, “if you make the coffee.” I see him sit up, and he leans out of the coffin and looks inside my traveling bag, and he takes out the coffee box and the paraffin burner. I tell him to lie down, for God’s sake, but he only says: “Go on, make us some coffee, Doctor, and I’ll show you.”
I have nothing else to do, so I make coffee. I make coffee with holy water, the smell of the paraffin burning inside the church. He watches me do this while he sits, cross-legged, on the velvet cushions of his coffin, and I find that I’ve given up insisting he lie down. I stir the coffee with a tongue depressor, and the brown grit spreads through the water in a thick cloud, and he watches it, still smiling.
When the coffee is done, he insists we both drink from the little white cup with the gold rim. He says this is how he will prove what he means about being deathless, and by this time I am intrigued, so I let him reach out of the coffin and pour me a cup. He tells me to hold it in my hands and not to blow on it, to sit with it until it becomes cool enough to drink in one swallow. While I’m holding the cup, I’m telling myself that I am crazy.
I am sitting
, I tell myself,
in a church, drinking coffee with a man who has two bullets lodged in his head
.
“Now drink it,” he says, and I do. It is still too hot, and it burns my tongue, and I cough when I’ve finished it. But he’s already taking the cup from my hands and peering inside. He tips it my way so I can see. The bottom is clotted with grit. Then I realize what’s going on.
“You’re reading my coffee grit?” I say. I am dumbfounded. This is what gypsies do, or magicians at the circus.
“No, no,” he says. “Sure enough, grit is involved. In this grit, I can see your death.”
“You must be joking,” I say.
“No, I can see it,” he says. “It is there. The fact that you have grit, in and of itself, is a certain thing.”
“Of course it’s certain,” I say. “It’s coffee. Everybody has grit. Grit is certain.”
“So is death,” he says. Then he holds up his hand, and he pours himself a cup. He holds it in his hands, and I am too angry at myself to speak, too angry that I allowed him to persuade me to make coffee just to be mocked like this. After a few minutes, he drinks his coffee, and a thin little stream of it runs down his neck, and I am thinking about the bullets quivering in his skull and praying they don’t dislodge—or, now, maybe I am praying that they do.
Gavo holds out the cup to me, and the cup is empty. I can see the white bottom, and the inside of the cup is as dry as if he had just wiped it with a towel.
“Satisfied?” he says, looking at me like he’s just done something wonderful.
“I’m sorry?” I say.
“I have no grit,” he says.
“This is a joke,” I tell him.
“Certainly not,” he says. “Look.” And he runs his finger across the bottom of the cup.
“That you have no grit in your coffee cup proves to me that you are deathless?”
“It certainly should,” he says. He says it like he has just solved a mathematical equation, like I am being difficult about something that is fact.
“It’s a party trick.”
“No. It’s not a trick. The cup is special, that is true, but it is not a joke cup—it was given to me by my uncle.”
“To hell with your uncle,” I shout. “You lie down and shut up until the medics get here.”
“I’m not going to the hospital, Doctor,” he says, flatly. “My name is Gavran Gailé, and I am a deathless man.”
I shake my head and I turn off the paraffin burner, and put away the coffee box. I want to take his cup away, but I don’t want to provoke him. He never stops smiling.
“How can I prove to you that I am telling the truth?” I think I hear resignation in his voice, and I realize he is tired, he has tired of me.
“You can’t.”
“What would satisfy you?”
“Your cooperation—please.”
“This is getting ridiculous.” I am so stunned at his audacity in saying this that I have nothing to say to him. He looks like a lamb, sitting there in that coffin with big lamb eyes. “Let me up, and I promise to prove to you that I cannot die.”
“There is no such thing as a deathless body. This will end in complete disaster. You’re going to die, you stubborn bastard, and I am going to go to prison over you.”
“Anything you want,” he says. “Shoot me, stab me if you like. Set me on fire. I will even put money on it. We can even bet the old-fashioned way—I can name my terms after I win.”
I tell him I will not bet.
“You are not a betting man?” he says.
“On the contrary—I do not waste my time with bets I am sure to win.”
“Now I see that you are angry, Doctor,” he says. “Wouldn’t you like to crack me in the head with one of those planks?”
“Lie down,” I say.
“Too violent,” Gavran Gailé is saying. “All right, something else.” He is still sitting up in the coffin, looking about the room. “What about the lake?” he finally says. “Why not throw me into the lake with weights tied to my feet?”
Now, Natalia, you know I anger easily. You know I’ve no patience for fools. And I am so angry about the cup and the cheap trick with the coffee—that I allowed myself to be duped into making him coffee, and from my field rations, too—that I do not care, I am ready to let him do whatever he wants, to hang himself. It’s dark, it’s late, I have been on the road for hours. I am alone with this man who is telling me to hit him with planks, and now he is telling me to throw him into the lake. I have not agreed, but I have not disagreed, and perhaps there’s something hallucinatory about it—I don’t know. He sees that I am not telling him to lie down. Suddenly, he is getting out of the coffin, and he says to me, “That is excellent, afterwards you will be glad.” I tell him I have no doubt of this.
There’s a lake right beside the church, and we hunt around for something heavy enough. I find two enormous cinder blocks under the altar, and I make him carry them down the stairs. Secretly, I am hoping he will faint, but this does not happen. He rearranges the bandage around his head while I unwind the bicycle chain from the coffin where the villagers put Gavo. He helps me gather my belongings, smiling, smiling. I go outside first, and find that Aran Dari?, probably at Dominic’s instructions, is long gone. It is very late, and the village is completely dark. I am certain they are watching us through the windows, but I don’t care. I tell him to come out, and then the two of us walk through the mud and the moss, and onto the little jetty that goes out over the pond, where the village children probably fish. Gavo seems very excited by all this. I get him to put his feet in the gaps in the cinder blocks, and then I wrap the chain around his ankles and through the cinder blocks, tight and complicated, until you can’t even see that he has feet at the ends of his legs.
I am beginning to feel guilty while this is going on, and afraid. I have not been thinking of myself as a doctor, but as a man of science simply proving that an idiot is an idiot.
Still
, I say to myself,
I do not want this idiot’s blood on my hands
.
“There,” I say, when I am done. He lifts his feet, just slightly, first one, then the other, like a child trying out roller skates.
“Well done, Doctor,” he says.
“We must take some precaution,” I say. Gavo looks annoyed. “It would be irresponsible of me to let you go into that lake without some precaution.” I am looking around for some way to hold him to shore, and there is a length of rope tied up around a post on the jetty, and I take this rope and tie the free end of it around his waist. He watches me do this with great interest.
“I want your word,” I say, “that you will pull on the rope when you begin to drown.”
“I will not be drowning, Doctor,” he says. “But because you have been so kind to me, I will give you my word. I will pledge something on it.” He takes a few moments to think about this, tugging at the rope around his waist to make sure the knot is tight. Then he says: “I pledge my coffee cup that I will not die tonight, Doctor.” And he takes it out of his breast pocket and holds it up to me between his fingers, like an egg.
“I don’t want your damned cup.”
“Even so. I pledge it. What will you pledge, Doctor?”
“Why should I pledge?” I ask him. “I am not going into the lake.”
“Just the same, I should like you to pledge something. I would like you to pledge something against my death, so that, when we meet next, we needn’t go through this again.”
It is all ridiculous, but I look around for something to pledge. He will be pulling on that rope, I tell myself, and soon. I ask him if I can pledge the paraffin burner, and he laughs at me and says, “You mock me by pledging that. Come, Doctor. You must pledge something of value to you.”
I take out my old
Jungle Book
—you know, that old one I keep in my pocket—and I show it to him. “I will pledge this,” I say. He is looking at it with great interest, and then he leans forward with the cinder blocks on his feet and sniffs it.
“I take it this is something you would not want to lose?”
It occurs to me that I had better be clear, as we are both pledging things that mean a great deal to us, so I say: “I pledge it on the grounds that you will begin to drown.”
“Not that I will die?”
“No, because you have pledged to pull on the rope before that happens,” I tell him. “This is your chance,” I say, “to change your mind. The medics are probably already on their way.” This is a lie, Dominic is probably only halfway to the field hospital by now. But I try. Gavran Gailé smiles and smiles.
He holds out his hand, and when I go to shake his, he puts something cold and metallic in my palm. The bullets, I realize. While I’ve been arranging this trip into the lake, he has taken them out. I am looking down at them, shining with blood, matted with clumps of hair, and suddenly Gavo is stepping back toward the edge of the jetty, and he says to me: “Well, Doctor, I will be seeing you shortly.” Then he leans over and drops into the lake. I cannot remember the splash at all.
I can hear Dominic’s voice saying to me, “My God, boss. You’ve send a man with two bullet in his head into lake with stones tied his feet.” I don’t do anything, not while there are bubbles, and also not when there are no bubbles anymore. The rope straightens out a little, but then it is still.
At first, I tell myself that maybe I should have tied Gavo’s hands to his ankles—perhaps, with his hands free, he has too much accommodation to untie himself and break off a hollow reed, or push up a lily pad, and conceal a breathing mechanism from me, like something out of a Robin Hood film. Then it occurs to me that I haven’t thought this out properly, because, if he dies in that pond, he will not come up easily with those bricks tied to his feet. Then I remember that he was originally buried for having drowned, and I tell myself that this is a man who holds his breath—this is a man who plays jokes on honest people by performing a circus trick so that others will believe themselves guilty of his death, and he can walk away with some sick feeling of triumph, some feeling of having made fools of them.
“I am not going anywhere,” I say to myself, “until he either comes up or floats up.” I sit down on the bank and I hold on to the rope. I take out my pipe and I start to smoke it. I can picture the villagers sitting at their darkened windows, staring out at me in horror—me, the doctor, who let a miraculous survivor drown. Eventually five minutes pass, and then seven. Ten minutes, twelve. At fifteen I’ve really got that pipe going, and the rope is as stiff as a board. He’s not coming up, and there are no bubbles. I am thinking that I have misjudged the depth of the pond, that the rope has tightened around his waist and broken all his ribs. I am beginning to pull the rope now, but gently, every few minutes, so that, if by some miracle of God he is alive, I do not hurt him, but so that he will be reminded to pull back on it. He does not do this, however, and I am absolutely convinced, at this point, that he is dead, and I’ve been tricked into a huge mistake. His body is floating limp, I tell myself, like he’s been hanged, floating over his own feet like a balloon.
A man is not a porpoise
, is what I am thinking.
A man cannot survive a thing like this. A man does not just slow his heart down because he feels he should
.
After an hour, I have cried a little, mostly for myself, and I am out of tobacco. I have stopped tugging. I can already see my firing squad. Or maybe, I am thinking, a little cave somewhere in Greece. I am thinking about what I could change my name to. The night is going by and by, until, eventually, it is that hour before dawn, when the birds are coming awake.
This is when the most extraordinary thing happens. I hear a sound in the water, and I look up. The rope is moving through the water, rising up, wet. Light is beginning slowly in the east, and I can see the opposite bank of the lake, where the woods come all the way up to the bulrushes. And there he is, Gavran Gailé—the deathless man—climbing slowly and wetly out of the lake on the opposite side, his coat completely drenched, water grasses on his shoulders. He’s got the cinder blocks on his feet, and the rope around his waist, and it’s been hours. I am on my feet, but I am very quiet. Gavran Gailé’s hat is dripping over his ears, and he takes it off and shakes the water out of it. Then he bends down and unwinds the chains from his feet. He does this like he is taking off his shoes, and then he undoes the knot of the rope around his waist and lets it fall back into the water.