by Téa Obreht
He said this to a short man who had materialized out of a corner row down the slope. “I thought you found something,” the man said. He was switch-thin. His ears were remarkable—sticking away from his face in silhouette like pot handles—and the sweat on his face was breaking through a fine layer of pale dust that had caked solid in the creases around his eyes and mouth.
“But, Duré, do you see her?”
“It’s all right,” Duré said, clapping the fat man’s shoulder. “It’s all right.” And to me, he said, “What the hell are you doing?” I had no answer. “Don’t you know better than to come creeping up here in the middle of the night? What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m a doctor,” I said, feeling stupid.
He squinted at my white coat—splattered now with dust and something I hoped was mud—and then he shook his head. “Jesus.”
“I’m sorry,” I said to the heavyset man, and he leveled some incomprehensible, regional epithet at me, almost certainly not an acceptance of my apology. Then he picked up his flask and waddled off into the rows, muttering to himself and coughing that same cough I had heard from the house. The men who had been standing around began to disperse, returning to their places among the vines. Duré dusted his hands off on the gray jumpsuit he was wearing, then lit a cigarette. He didn’t seem particularly interested in why I was there, or why I wasn’t leaving, and eventually he turned around and headed back down the slope. I followed him between the rows until he found his shovel, and stood behind him as he swung it into the hard dirt under the vines.
My hands had broken my fall, and I realized they were scraped up, sticky with blood, dirt pushed in under the skin.
“Got any water?” I said to Duré.
He didn’t, but he had rakija. He watched me tip a capful of it onto my palms. “That’s homemade,” he told me. It smelled like apricots, and stung.
“I’m a doctor,” I said.
“You keep saying that,” Duré said, taking back his flask. “I’m a mechanic. Dubi over there is a welder. My uncle shovels shit for a living.” He unscrewed the cap and tilted the flask back.
“I’m staying at Barba Ivan’s,” I said. “I want to talk to you about the little girl.”
“What about her?”
“Is she your daughter?”
“That’s what my wife says.” He took a final drag of the cigarette that had been cindering away between his lips, dropped it into the mound of dirt that was slowly piling higher by his sneakers.
“What’s her name?”
“What’s that got to do with you?” He tucked the rakija flask back into the pocket of his gray jumpsuit and swung the shovel off his shoulder and into the ground.
“That little girl is very sick,” I said.
“Really?” said Duré. “Think it takes you to tell me that—why d’you think I’m out here, for exercise?”
I put my hands in my pockets and watched sunlight sliding up the tips of the hills in the distance. Nada had been right about the other children—two young boys who couldn’t have been more than nine, digging with the rest of the men, their faces white, eyelids dark and swollen. They were passing a cigarette between them. I thought to myself, my grandfather would twist their ears off—and in that first moment afterward, when I realized that I would not be telling him, I stood there with the dry earth flying and the cicadas scraping their melancholy drone on the cypress slope.
I asked Duré: “How old are those kids over there?”
“They’re my kids,” he said to me, without missing a beat.
“They’re smoking,” I said. One of the kids had a long, thick clot of green coming out of one nostril, and as he dug he occasionally licked it away. “Are they sick, too?” I said.
Duré lanced the shovel, spade down, into the dirt and straightened up to look at me. “That’s not your business,” he said.
“This isn’t an ordinary cold. It sounds serious—the little girl could have whooping cough, bronchitis. She could end up with pneumonia.”
“She won’t.”
“Has she seen a doctor?”
“She doesn’t need one.”
“What about the boys—they don’t need one either?”
“They’ll be fine,” Duré said.
“I’ve heard you’ve got them out here in the afternoons, in the heat. Do you know what that does if someone’s got a fever?”
“You’ve heard, have you?” he said. He was shaking his head, his chuckles weighed down by the way he was leaning forward. “We do what we have to, Doctor,” he said. “Don’t concern yourself with it.”
“I’m sure you need all the hands you can get for the working season,” I said, trying to sound understanding. “But you must be able to spare the boys.”
“Work has nothing to do with it,” Duré said.
“Send them down to see us,” I said, pressing on, ignoring him. “We’re from the University—we’ve got medicines for the new orphanage of Sveti Paškal. There’ll be a free clinic.”
“My children aren’t orphans.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s all right, it’s free medicine.”
“That’s all right, she says—what’s the matter with you?” he said again. “You think I want my kids around orphans?”
“Well, you’ll put them to work when they’re sick,” I said loudly. Someone in the vineyard let out a low whistle, and it was followed by an explosion of laughter from the men.
Duré was unfazed. All that time, he hadn’t stopped digging for a moment. I could see the gaunt outline of his shoulder blades rising and falling through the gray jumpsuit. By now, this same conversation with my grandfather would probably have come to blows.
“I’ll take good care of them,” I said.
“This is family business,” Duré told me. “They’re being cared for.”
I was suddenly incredibly angry. I fought the urge to ask Duré how he would feel about a visit from my friend, the sergeant, back at United Clinics headquarters—how would Duré feel about getting a talking-to from a man who weighed a hundred and fifty kilos and had just spent six weeks supervising the demolition of a third-rate hospital that didn’t have running water? But then I felt it might be counterproductive, so I just stood by while Duré lit another cigarette and continued to scrape away. Every so often, he would lean in to examine the dirt carefully, run his fingers through it, and the straightening up—not the cigarette, not the rakija—was the effort that forced the wet cough out of him at last.
I said: “How far do you think you’re going to get with that rakija wrap, and whatever other insane cures you’re trying—smothering them with blankets and putting potato peelings in their socks?” He had stopped listening. “They need medicine. So does your wife. And I wouldn’t be surprised if you did, too.”
There was a shout from the other side of the vineyard. One of the men had found something, and there was a commotion to get to it as quickly as possible. Duré made his way over, probably thinking that leaving me behind would ensure my immediate departure; it didn’t. I followed him along the row and then around the corner, to where a slim young man was kneeling over a deep pit in the ground. The men clustered around it. A little way behind them, I stood on tiptoe to see.
Duré leaned down and sifted through the dirt with his free hand. The vineyard had filled with pale light, and the earth was white and moist. He straightened up with something on the palm of his hand—a finger-length shard of something sharp and yellow. Bone, I realized. He turned it over in his fist, looked down into the dirt again.
“What do you say, Doctor?” Duré said, turning around and holding it out to me. I didn’t know what he was asking, and I stared stupidly at it.
“Didn’t think so,” he said, and dropped it into the dirt. “Some animal,” he said to the digger who had found it.
One of the boys was standing at my elbow, leaning over the handle of his shovel. He was a scrawny, sandy-haired kid with a wide face, and he was making that wet gl
azed noise of throat ache between yawns, sucking his tongue back to scrape it along the dry surface of his throat. Just hearing it made my eyes water. When he turned to go, I clapped a hand onto his temples.
“He’s got a fever,” I said to Duré, who was heading back down to his little patch at the bottom of the vineyard.
But it was already dawn, and the yellow haze of light had crossed the summit of Mount Brejevina and was coming down the other side toward us, toward the house, our upstairs window behind the oleander bush, and the sea, flat and shining beyond the roof. I felt I’d been awake for days. I couldn’t keep up with Duré on the uneven ground, so I was shouting down to him: “He’s sick and underage, you’re breaking the law.”
“I’m in my country.”
It was a vehement lie. He had a drawl from just east of the City. “You’re not,” I said.
“Neither are you, Doctor.”
“Still, even out here there are organizations that wouldn’t think twice—”
But Duré had heard enough. He came back up toward me so fast we nearly collided, his neck cabled with tendons. I had the higher ground, but he had the shovel, and his eyes were bloodshot. “You think you’re the first coat to tell me something like that?” He was very quiet saying this. I could smell the sting of the apricots on his breath. “I haven’t heard this before, about how you’re bringing someone in to interfere, take my kids away? You go ahead, see how long it takes.”
“He’s been out here all night—send him home.”
The kid in question had been listening the whole time, standing on the bouldered ground above us, thin shoulders slumped forward. Duré rested the shovel against his thigh and took a pair of work gloves out of his pocket, pulled them over calloused, dark-nailed fingers. “Marko,” Duré said loudly. “Doctor advises you to go home.” He did not look at the boy. “It’s up to you.”
The kid hesitated for a moment, looking up and down the vineyard. Then he went back to digging without a word.
Duré watched him with a smile I couldn’t categorize. Then he turned to me. “I’ve no more time to waste with you. I got a body somewhere under here that needs to come up so my kids can get better.” He turned, dragging the shovel. “That sound acceptable, Doctor—my kids getting better?”
I watched the thin lines of his hair, slicked back across the bare parts of his head, as he descended, trying to find his footing on the gravel. “I don’t understand,” I said.
“We’ve got a cousin in this vineyard, Doctor.” He spread his arms and gestured to the vines, from one side of the plot to the other. “Buried twelve years. During the war.” He was perfectly serious. “Doesn’t like it here, and he’s making us sick. When we find him we’ll be on our way.”
I was too tired, I thought, and I felt myself beginning to laugh. He had run out of things to say and had resorted to this to get rid of me. But the digging was shallow, patternless—they hadn’t been planting anything, I realized. They hadn’t been weeding, either, or smashing the skulls of field mice. I was trying to be funny when I said: “Have you checked the bridge foundations?”
Duré looked at me for a moment, serious and unblinking. Then he said: “Sure, it’s the first place we looked.”
HAVING SIFTED THROUGH EVERYTHING I NOW KNOW about the tiger’s wife, I can tell you that this much is fact: in 1941, in late spring, without declaration or warning, German bombs started falling on the city and did not stop for three days.
The tiger did not know that they were bombs. He did not know anything beyond the hiss and screech of the fighters passing overhead, missiles falling, the sound of bears bellowing in another part of the fortress, the sudden silence of birds. There was smoke and terrible warmth, a gray sun rising and falling in what seemed like a matter of minutes, and the tiger, frenzied, dry-tongued, ran back and forth across the span of the rusted bars, lowing like an ox. He was alone and hungry, and that hunger, coupled with the thunderous noise of bombardment, had burned in him a kind of awareness of his own death, an imminent and innate knowledge he could neither dismiss nor succumb to. He did not know what to do with it. His water had dried up, and he rolled and rolled in the stone bed of his trough, in the uneaten bones lying in a corner of the cage, making that long sad sound that tigers make.
After two days of pacing, his legs gave out, and he was reduced to a contraction of limbs lying in his own waste. He had lost the ability to move, to produce sound, to react in any way. When a stray bomb hit the south wall of the citadel—sending up a choking cloud of smoke and ash and shattering bits of rubble into the skin of his head and flank, bits that would gnaw at his flesh for weeks until he got used to the grainy ache of them when he rolled onto his side or scratched himself against trees—his heart should have stopped. The iridescent air and the feeling of his fur folding back like paper in the heat, and then the long hours during which he crouched at the back of his pen, watching the ruptured flank of the citadel wall. All of these things should have killed him. But something, some flickering of the blood, forced him to his feet and through the gap in the wall. The strength of that drive. (He was not the only one: years later they would write about wolves running down the street, a polar bear standing in the river. They would write about how flights of parrots were seen for weeks above the city, how a prominent engineer and his family lived an entire month off a zebra carcass.)
The tiger’s route through the city that night took him north to the waterfront behind the citadel, where the remains of the merchants’ port and Jewish quarter spread in flattened piles of brick down the bank and into the waters of the Danube. The river was lit by fires, and those who had gone into it were washing back against the bank where the tiger stood. He considered the possibility of swimming across, and under optimal circumstances he might have attempted it, but the smell rising off the bodies turned the tiger around, sent him back past the citadel hill and into the ruined city.
People must have seen him, but in the wake of bombardment he was anything but a tiger to them: a joke, an insanity, a religious hallucination. He drifted, enormous and silent, down the alleys of Old Town, past the smashed-in doors of coffeehouses and bakeries, past motorcars flung through shopwindows. He went down the tramway, up and over fallen trolleys in his path, beneath lines of electric cable that ran through the city and now hung broken and black as jungle creeper.
By the time he reached Knez Petrova, looters were already swarming the Boulevard. Men were walking by him, past him, alongside him, men with fur coats and bags of flour, with sacks of sugar and ceiling fixtures, with faucets, tables, chair legs, upholstery ripped from the walls of ancient Turkish houses that had fallen in the raid. He ignored them all.
Some hours before sunrise, the tiger found himself in the abandoned market at Kalinia, two blocks up from where my grandfather and my grandma would buy their first apartment fifteen years later. Here, the scent of death that clung to the wind drifting in from the north separated from the pools of rich stench that ran between the cobbles of the market square. He walked with his head down, savoring the spectrum of unrecognizable aromas—splattered tomatoes and spinach that stuck to the grooves in the road, broken eggs, bits of fish, the clotted fat leavings on the sides of the butchers’ stands, the thick smell smeared around the cheese counter. His thirst insane, the tiger lapped up pools from the leaky fountain where the flower women filled their buckets, and then put his nose into the face of a sleeping child who had been left, wrapped in blankets, under the pancake stand.
Finally, up through the sleepless neighborhoods of the lower city, with the sound of the second river in his ears, the tiger began to climb the trail into the king’s forest. I like to think that he went along our old carriage trail. I like to imagine his big-cat paw prints in the gravel, his exhausted, square-shouldered walk along my childhood paths, years before I was even born—but in reality, the way through the undergrowth was faster, the moss easier on paws he had shredded on city rubble. The cooling feel of the trees bending down to him as he p
ushed up the hill, until at last he reached the top, the burning city far behind him.
The tiger spent the rest of the night in the graveyard and left the city at dawn. He did not go by unobserved. He was seen first by the grave digger, a man who was almost blind, and who did not trust his eyes to tell him that a tiger, braced on its hind legs, was rummaging through the churchyard garbage heap, mouthing thistles in the early morning sunlight. He was seen next by a small girl, riding in the back of her family’s wagon, who noticed him between the trees and thought he was a dream. He was noticed, too, by the city’s tank commander, who would go on to shoot himself three days later, and who mentioned the tiger in his last letter to his betrothed—I have never seen so strange a thing as a tiger in a wheat field, he wrote, even though, today, I pulled a woman’s black breasts and stomach out of the pond at the Convent of Sveta Maria. The last person to see the tiger was a farmer on a small plot of land two miles south of the city, who was burying his son in the garden, and who threw rocks when the tiger got too close.
The tiger had no destination, only the constant tug of self-preservation in the pit of his stomach, some vague, inborn sense of what he was looking for, which carried him onward. For days, then weeks, there were long, parched fields and stretches of marshland clogged with the dead. Bodies lay in piles by the roadside and hung like pods, split open and drying, from the branches of trees. The tiger waited below for them to fall, then scavenged them until he got mange, lost two teeth, and moved on. He followed the river upstream, through the flooded bowl of the foothills swollen with April rain, sleeping in empty riverboats while the sun, pale in the blue mist of the river, grew dimmer. He skirted human habitations, small farms where the sound of cattle drew him out of the bracken; but the openness of the sky and the prospect of human noise terrified him, and he did not stay long.
At some bend in the river, he came across an abandoned church, half a bell tower overgrown with ivy, crowded with the hushed shuffling of pigeons. It kept the rain off him for a few weeks, but there was no food for him there, all the corpses in the churchyard having decomposed long ago, nothing for him but the eggs of waterbirds and the occasional beached catfish, and eventually he moved on. By early autumn, he had spent four months in the swamps, gnawing on decaying carcasses that drifted by, snatching frogs and salamanders along the creek bed. He had become a host for leeches, and dozens of them stood like eyes in the fur of his legs and sides.
