by Téa Obreht
By the time I was thirteen, the ritual of the tigers had become an annoyance. Our way home from the zoo was continually marked by encounters with people I knew: friends, kids my own age, who had long since stopped sharing the company of their elders. I would see them sitting in cafés, smoking on the curb at the Parliament threshold. And they would see me, and remember seeing me, remember enough to laugh mildly about it at school. Their mocking wasn’t unkind, just easy; but it reminded me that I was the prisoner of a rite I no longer felt necessary. I didn’t know at the time that the rite wasn’t solely for my benefit.
Almost immediately after the war began, the Administration closed the zoo. This was ostensibly to prevent anything that might approximate the Zobov incident: a college student in the capital of our soon-to-be southern neighbor had firebombed a zoo concession stand, killing six people. This was part of the Administration’s security plan, a preemptive defense of the city and its citizens—a defense that relied heavily on the cultivation of panic and a deliberate overestimation of enemy resources. They closed the zoo, the bus system, the newly named National Library.
Besides interrupting a childhood ritual I was more than ready to put aside, the closing of the zoo was hardly a cause for alarm. Deep down, we all knew, as the Administration did, that the war was being fought almost seven hundred miles away and that a siege of the City was nearly impossible—we had already caught the enemy off guard. We knew that an air strike would never happen because our own paramilitary had taken out the airplane factory and airstrip at Marhan almost six months ago, but the Administration still implemented a curfew and a mandatory lights-out at 10 p.m., just in case. They issued bulletins warning that anyone anywhere could be an informant for the enemy, that it was important to consider the names of your friends and neighbors before you met them at your usual coffeehouse again, and that, in the event of betrayal, you yourself would be held responsible for what you did not report.
On one hand, life went on. Six or seven kids from my class disappeared almost immediately—without warning, without goodbyes, the way refugees tend to do—but I still trudged to school every morning with a packed lunch. While tanks heading for the border drove down the Boulevard, I sat at the window and practiced sums. Because the war was new and distant, because it was about something my family didn’t want me to trouble myself with and I didn’t particularly care about, there were still art lessons and coffee dates with Zóra, birthday celebrations and shopping trips. My grandfather still taught his seminar and did his hospital rounds and went to the local market every morning, and he still soap-washed apples before peeling them. He also stood in the bread line for six hours at a time, but I wouldn’t know this until later. My mother still carried her projector slides to teach art history at the University, my grandma still tuned in to classic movie hour to watch Clark Gable smirk at Vivien Leigh.
The distance of the fighting created the illusion of normalcy, but the new rules resulted in an attitude shift that did not suit the Administration’s plans. They were going for structure, control, for panic that produced submission—what they got instead was social looseness and lunacy. To spite the curfew, teenagers parked on the Boulevard, sometimes ten cars deep, and sat drinking on their hoods all night. People would close their shops for lunch and go to the pub and not return until three days later. You’d be on your way to the dentist and see him sitting on someone’s stoop in his undershirt, wine bottle in hand, and then you’d either join him or turn around and go home. It was innocent enough at first—before the looting started some years later, before the paramilitary rose to power—the kind of celebration that happens when people, without acknowledging it, stand together on the brink of disaster.
The kids of my generation were still a few years away from facing the inflation that would send us to the bakery with our parents’ money piled up in wheelbarrows, or force us to trade shirts in the hallways at school. Those first sixteen months of wartime held almost no reality, and this made them incredible, irresistible, because the fact that something terrible was happening elsewhere, and at the same time to us, gave us room to get away with anarchy. Never mind that, three hundred miles away, girls sitting in bomb shelters were getting their periods at the age of seven. In the City, we weren’t just affected by the war; we were entitled to our affectation. When your parents said, get your ass to school, it was all right to say, there’s a war on, and go down to the riverbank instead. When they caught you sneaking into the house at three in the morning, your hair reeking of smoke, the fact that there was a war on prevented them from staving your head in. When they heard from neighbors that your friends had been spotted doing a hundred and twenty on the Boulevard with you hanging none too elegantly out the sunroof, they couldn’t argue with there’s a war on, we might all die anyway. They felt responsible, and we took advantage of their guilt because we didn’t know any better.
For all its efforts to go on as before, the school system could not prevent the war, however distant, from sliding in: we saw it in the absence of classmates, in the absence of books, in the absence of pig fetuses (which Zóra and I, even then, had eagerly been looking forward to rummaging through). We were supposed to be inducing chemical reactions and doing basic dissection, but we had no chemicals, and our pig fetuses were being held hostage in a lab somewhere across the ever-shifting border. Instead, we made endless circuits with wires and miniature light-bulbs. We left old-money coins out in the rain to rust and then boiled water and salt and baking soda to clean them. We had a few diagrams of dissected frogs, which we were forced to commit to memory. Inexplicably, we also had a cross section of a horse’s foot, preserved in formaldehyde in a rectangular vase, which we sketched and re-sketched until it might be assumed that any one of us could perform crude surgery on a horse with hoof problems. Mostly, from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, we read the textbook aloud.
To make things worse, the conflict had necessitated a rather biased shift of upperclassmen to upper floors; in other words, the older you were, the farther you were from the school basement bomb shelter. So the year we turned fourteen, Zóra and I ended up in a classroom on the concrete roof overlooking the river, a square turret with enormous windows that normally housed the kindergarteners. Everything about that particular rearrangement of space indicated that it had been made quickly: the walls of the classroom were papered with watercolors of princesses, and the windowsill was lined with Styrofoam cups full of earth, from which, we were told, beans would eventually grow. Some even did. There had been family-tree drawings too, but someone had had the presence of mind to take them down, and had left a bare patch of wall under the blackboard. We sat there, drawing that horse’s hoof, saying things like, there’s a war on, at least if they bomb us we’ll go before the little ones do, very nonchalant about it. The turret window of that room afforded us a 360-degree view of the City, from the big hill to the north to the citadel across the river, behind which the woods rose and fell in a green line. You could see smokestacks in the distance, belching streams as thick as tar, and the brick outline of the old neighborhoods. You could see the dome of the basilica on University Hill, the square cross bright and enormous on top. You could see the iron bridges—still standing in our city, all but gone up and down the two rivers, rubble in the water. You could see the rafts on the riverbank, abandoned and rusted over, and then, upriver at the confluence, Carton City, where the gypsies lived, with its wet paper walls, the black smoke of its dungfires.
Our teacher that year was a small woman who went by the name M. Dobravka. She had nervous hands, and glasses that slid down so often that she had developed a habit of hitching them up by flexing her nose. We would later learn that M. Dobravka had once been a political artist, and that, after we graduated, she moved somewhere else to avoid persecution. Some years later, she encouraged a group of high school students in the production of an antiadministration poster that landed them in jail and caused her to disappear one night on the walk from her apartment to
the newspaper kiosk at the corner of her street. Back then, completely unaware of her determination, unfamiliar with the frustration she felt at not having the tools to teach us her own subject, let alone one with which she was unfamiliar, we thought she was hilarious. Then she brought us a gift.
It was a freak March heat wave, hot as summer, and we had come to school and taken our shoes and socks and sweaters off. The turret was like a greenhouse. We had the door open but we were still moist with perspiration and a tender kind of frenzy that comes from unexpected weather. M. Dobravka came in late and out of breath. She had a large, foil-wrapped parcel under one arm, which she opened to reveal two enormous pairs of lungs, pink, wet, soft as satin. A violation of the meat ration. Contraband. We didn’t ask her where she had gotten them.
“Spread some newspapers out on the tables outside,” she said, and her glasses dropped immediately. Ten minutes later, faces dripping with sweat, we hovered over her while she tried to butterfly one pair of lungs with a kitchen knife she had brought along with her. The lung strained against the knife, bulging out on either side of the blade like a rubber ball. The meat was already beginning to smell, and we were swatting the flies away.
“Maybe we should refrigerate them,” somebody said.
But M. Dobravka was a woman possessed. She was determined to make something of the risk she’d taken, to show us how the lungs worked, to open them up like cloth and point out the alveoli, the collapsed air sacs, the thick white cartilage of the bronchial tubes. She sawed away at a corner of the lung, and, as she went on, her range of motion got bigger and bigger, until we all stepped back and watched her tearing into the side of the lung, her glasses going up and down, up and down as she pressed with one arm and pumped away with the other like she was working a cistern.
Then the lung slipped out of her hands and slid across the aluminum foil and over the edge of the table, onto the ground. It lay there, heavy and definite. M. Dobravka looked down at it for a few moments, while the flies immediately found it and began to walk gingerly along the tracheal opening. Then she bent down, picked it up, and dropped it back on the newspaper.
“You,” she said to me, because I happened to be standing next to her. “Get a straw out of the coffee cabinet and come back here and inflate this lung. Come on, hurry up.”
After that, M. Dobravka was a figure of reverence, particularly for me. Those lungs—the way she’d smuggled them in for us, the way she’d stood over us while we took turns blowing into them, one by one—cemented my interest in becoming a doctor.
M. Dobrovka had also touched upon our relationship to contraband, an obsession that was already beginning to seize the whole City. For her, it was school supplies. For us, it was the same guiding principle, but a different material concern. Suddenly, because we couldn’t have them, because they were expensive and difficult to obtain, we wanted things we had never thought of wanting, things that would give us bragging rights: fake designer handbags, Chinese jewelry, American cigarettes, Italian perfume. Zóra started wearing her mother’s lipstick, and then began looking for ways to buy some herself. Six months into the war, she developed a taste for French cigarettes, and refused to smoke anything else. All of fifteen, she would sit at the table in our coffeehouse on the Square of the Revolution and raise her eyebrow at boys who had probably gone to considerable lengths to impress her with local varieties. At a party I don’t remember attending, she took up with Branko, who was twenty-one and reputed to be a gunrunner. I didn’t approve, but there was a war on. Besides, he later turned out to be a punk whose mightiest offense was stealing radios.
Most weekends, Zóra and I would go down to the bottom of Old Town and park at the dock. This was the University hangout, the epicenter of contraband activity, and the boys, gangly and bird-shouldered, sat along the railing with their tables and boxes lined up, videos and sunglasses and T-shirts on display. Zóra, wearing her shortest skirt, pursued by colorful catcalls, would make her way down to where Branko had his stand and sit cross-legged while he played accordion and drank beer and, as the evening deepened, took breaks from peddling his wares to feel her up behind the dumpster. In the meantime, I stayed in the car with the windows rolled down, legs crossed through the passenger window, the bass line of Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” humming in my lower back.
This was how Ori found me—Ori, who sold fake designer labels he swore he could seamlessly attach to your clothing, luggage, haberdashery. He was seventeen, skinny and shy-grinning, another guy whose wartime reputation made him considerably more appealing than he otherwise might have been, but he had the temerity to stick his head into the car and ask, regarding my music selection, “You like this stuff? You want more?”
Ori had struck upon my only vice, which I had barely managed to keep in check. The Administration had shut down all but two radio stations, and insisted on repeat airings of folk songs that were outdated even by my grandma’s standards. By the second year of war, I was sick of love songs that used trees and barrels as metaphors. Without knowing I was missing them, I wanted Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and Johnny Cash. The first time Ori got me out of the car, he led me across the dock to where his three-legged mutt was guarding an overturned crate, and showed me his stash, alphabetized, the lyrics mistranslated and handwritten on notepaper that had been carefully folded and stuffed into the tape boxes. By some miracle, he had a Walkman, which almost made him worth dating in and of itself, and we sat on the floor behind his table, one earbud each, and he took me through his collection and put his hand on my thigh.
When, after a few weeks of saving up, I tried to buy Graceland, he said, “There’s a war on, your money’s no good,” and kissed me. I remember being surprised at his mouth, at the difference between the dry outer part of his mouth and the wet inner part, and thinking about this while he was kissing me, and afterward, too.
We went on kissing for three more months, during which my musical holdings must have tripled, and then Ori, like many boys around that age, disappeared. I had borrowed his Walkman and showed up three nights running to our café so I could return it to him—eventually someone told me he was gone, and they didn’t know if he had enlisted or fled the draft. I kept the Walkman, slept with it, which must have been some expression of missing him, but the reality of his being gone wouldn’t sink in until other things went missing.
The years I spent immersing myself in the mild lawlessness of the war my grandfather spent believing it would end soon, pretending that nothing had changed. I now know that the loss of the tigers was a considerable blow to him, but I wonder whether his optimism didn’t have as much to do with my behavior, with his refusal to accept that, for a while at least, he had lost me. We saw very little of each other, and while we did not talk about those years afterward, I know that his other rituals went on uninterrupted, unaltered. Breakfast over a newspaper, followed by Turkish coffee brewed by my grandma; personal correspondence, always in alphabetical order, as dictated by his address book. A walk to the market for fresh fruit—or, as the war went on, whatever he could get, as long as he came back with something. On Mondays and Wednesdays, an afternoon lecture at the University. Lunch, followed by an afternoon nap. Some light exercise; a snack at the kitchen table, almost always sunflower seeds. Then a few hours in the living room with my mother and grandma, sometimes talking, sometimes just sitting together. Dinner, and then an hour of reading. Bed.
We interacted, but always without commiserating, always without acknowledging that things were different. Like the time he forced me to stay home for the family Christmas party, and I drank Cognac all night because I knew he would not reprimand me in front of the guests. Or the time I came home at four—eyeliner smeared and hair a mess following a prolonged encounter with Ori behind a broken vending machine—to find my grandfather on the curb outside our building, on his way back from an emergency house call, politely trying to fend off the advances of a leggy blonde I soon realized was a prostitute.
“You see, there is my gra
nddaughter,” I heard him say as I approached, his voice the voice of a drowning man. Relief tightened the skin around his temples, a reaction I never would have hoped for considering the circumstances of my return. I stepped onto the curb beside him, and he grabbed my arm. “Here she is,” he said cheerfully. “You see, here she is.”
“Beat it,” I said to the hooker, acutely aware of the fact that my bra was hanging on for dear life, down to one solitary clasp that might give at any moment and render the whole situation even more uncomfortable.
My grandfather gave the prostitute fifty dinars, and I stood behind him while he unlocked the downstairs door, watching her go down the street on cane-thin legs, one heel slightly shorter than the other.
“What did you give her that money for?” I asked him as we went upstairs.
“You shouldn’t be rude like that to anyone,” he said. “We didn’t raise you that way.” Without stopping to look at me when we got to the door: “For shame.”
This had been the general state of affairs for years. My grandfather and I, without acknowledging it, were at a stalemate. His reductions had dropped my allowance to a new low, and I had taken to locking my door and smoking cigarettes in my room, under the covers.
I was thus occupied one spring afternoon when the doorbell rang. A few moments later, it rang again, and then again. I think I probably shouted for someone to get the door, and when no one did, I put my cigarette out on the outer sill of my bedroom window and did it myself.
I remember the shape of the narrow-brimmed black hat that obscured most of the peephole, and I did not see the man’s face, but I was anxious to get back to my room and irritated that no one else in the house had answered.
When I opened the door, the man said that he was there to see the doctor. He had a thin voice, and a doughy face that looked like it had been forcibly stuffed up into his hat, which was probably why he had not removed it in greeting in the first place. I thought I’d seen him before, that he was a hospital official, maybe, and I showed him in and left him in the hall. My mother was on campus, preparing for class; my grandparents sharing a late lunch in the kitchen. My grandfather was eating with one hand, and with the other he held my grandma’s wrist across the table. She was smiling about something, and the moment I came in she pointed at the pot of stuffed peppers on the stove.
