The Tiger's Wife

by Téa Obreht

  “No—the place,” I said. “You said something about boys there?”

  “Zdrevkov,” he said. He took off his glasses and wiped them on the front of his cassock. “It’s even more backwater than this, but there’s a clinic there,” he told me, blinking up, eyes unfocused. “They’ve been keeping this kind of thing quiet for years. This happened last week. Two teenagers coming home late from town at Rajkovac. Mine got them coming through their own lettuce patch.” He thought my silence was surprise, or fear, or hesitation to ask about the boys’ well-being. “Twelve years since the war, it was in their family’s lettuces the whole time.” He got up and dusted off his cassock. “That’s why the digging’s bad news.”

  “How close is it?” I said.

  “Zdrevkov? It’s on the peninsula,” he said. “Maybe an hour’s drive.”

  I said I was getting more candy, and Zóra believed me, believed me, too, when I said I would be back in an hour or less. She had wanted to come along, but I convinced her we’d look unreliable if we both left, insisted on going alone, insisted it would be faster this way, ignored her when she asked me why I needed the car, why I didn’t just walk to the convenience store in town.

  North of Brejevina, the road was well paved, stark and new because the scrubland had not grown back up to it, the cliffs rising white and pocked with thorn trees. A wind-flattened thunderhead stood clear of the sea, its gray insides stretching out under the shining anvil. Past the villages of Kolac and Glog, where the seaward slope was topped with new hotels, pink and columned, windows flung wide and the laundry hanging still on the balcony lines. Then came the signs for the peninsula turnoff, twelve kilometers, then seven, and then the peninsula itself, cutting the bay like a ship’s prow between the shore and outer islands, wave-lashed cliffs and pineland. Fra Antun had predicted it wouldn’t take more than an hour to reach the village, but the closeness of the peninsula stunned me.

  My grandfather, it seemed, had been coming to see me after all; but while Zóra and I had gone the long way, sidetracked by having to check into the United Clinics headquarters before crossing the border, he had come straight down by bus, and somewhere around Zdrevkov he had been unable to come farther. Or he had heard, somehow, about the two boys, and stopped to help.

  All this time I had been disconnected from the reality of his death by distance, by my inability to understand it—I hadn’t allowed myself to picture the clinic where he had died, or the living person who would have his belongings, but that was all drawing in around me now.

  The final six kilometers to Zdrevkov were unmarked, a dirt trail that wound left through a scattering of carob trees and climbed into the cypresses, which fell away suddenly in places where the slopes dropped away to the water. In the lagoon where the peninsula met the land, the sun had blanched the water bottle-green. The air-conditioning was giving out, and the steady striping of the light between the trees was making me dizzy. The crest of the next hill brought me out of the forest and into a downward-sloping stretch of road, where the abandoned almond orchards were overgrown with lantana bushes. I could see the light-furrowed afternoon swells in the distance, and, straight ahead, the flat roofs of the village.

  Even at this distance, I could see why Zdrevkov was so obscure: it was a shantytown, a cluster of plywood-and-metal shacks that had sprung up around a single street. Some of the shacks were windowless, or propped up with makeshift brick ovens. Household junk spilled out of the doorways and into the yellowed grass: iron cots, stained mattresses, a rusted tub, a vending machine lying on its side. There was an unattended fruit stand with a pyramid of melons, and, a few doors later, a middle-aged man sleeping in a rolling chair outside his tin-roofed house. He had his legs up on a stack of bricks, and as I drove past I realized his right leg was missing, a glaring purple stump just below the knee.

  The clinic was a gray, two-story house that stood on the edge of town, easy to find because it was the only brick building in sight. Years ago, it had probably been a serious structure with clean walls, a paved courtyard lined with enormous flower urns that were now empty. Since then, the rain gutters had stained red-brown rivers into the walls.

  The lot was empty, the clinic curtains drawn. I got out of the car. The stone stairway was littered with leaves and cigarette butts, and it led to a second-story door on which a square green cross had been painted above a plaque that read VETERANS’ CENTER. I knocked with my knuckles, and then with my fist. Nobody answered, and, even with my ear against the door, I heard nothing inside. I tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge, and then I went out along the catwalk and peered around the corner of the clinic. The window facing the valley was shuttered.

  The street below dead-ended in a flattened patch of pale grass, bordered on either side by netless goal frames. A slide and some tire swings had been set up on the lip of a wheat field that caught the afternoon light and held it in a shivering glare. Beyond that lay the graveyard, white crosses turned out toward the sea. The wind had subsided, and the road was deserted except for a single mottled goat, tethered to the fence post of what looked like an enormous metal box opposite the clinic. If the BEER sign braced against an oil drum under the awning was to be believed, this was the bar.

  I crossed the street and looked inside. The ceiling was very low, the place lit only by the open door and an enormous jukebox, whose sound was drowned out by the humming of a yellow refrigerator that looked like it had been salvaged from a radioactive dump. Four men were on high stools around a single barrel in the corner, drinking beer. It was just the four of them, but they made the room look crowded. One of them straightened up when I came in, a tall man with an ashen, leathery face and thinning gray hair. He didn’t ask if he could help me, or invite me to seat myself, but I didn’t go away, so he didn’t sit back down.

  I finally said: “Is the clinic closed?” This forced him to come around the barrel and toward me. A prosthetic arm dangled weightlessly from his elbow on metal joints.

  “You a reporter?” he said.

  “A doctor,” I said.

  “If you’re here about those kids, they’re dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  The barman looked at the others in surprise. “Makes no difference to me, they always die when they get hoisted around here.”

  “I’m not interested in that.” I waited for some further acknowledgment, but when none came, I said: “Is anyone on duty?”

  I’d said enough for him to realize that I wasn’t from around there, which he confirmed now with a glance to the others. One of them, a huge, salt-and-pepper man, had an eye patch and a burn-stippled face; the other two seemed whole, but the blond man had an eye that looked away. The way they were staring at me made me wonder how fast I could get to the car and how much power I could get out of the engine if someone here really decided that I wasn’t leaving.

  “No one’s been by in two days,” the barman said, putting his good hand in his pocket.

  “Could somebody let me in?”

  He picked up his beer bottle and downed what was left, put it back on the barrel top. “What do you need?”

  “Someone from the clinic.” The jukebox had gone quiet, shifting tracks, and the refrigerator kept pitching in with a fierce hum. “I drove all the way from Brejevina,” I told him. And then, to present myself in the best possible light, I said: “From the orphanage.”

  The barman took a phone out of his pocket and dialed. He had a cell phone, all the way out here. I didn’t; I had a pager and maybe two or three bills of the right currency. I stood by and listened while he left a message saying only, “We got someone out here for you,” and then hung up. “They’ll call us back,” he said to me. “Have a seat.”

  I climbed onto a stool behind a two-top on the opposite end of the bar, and ordered a cola, which overwhelmed the room with a hiss when the barman opened it. I paid. He got four more beers and returned to the barrel where the others were waiting. I drank my cola, buttoned up in my white coat, trying to
hide my reluctance to put my mouth to the lip of the bottle, trying not to think about the phone call, which could have been to a nurse, but could also have been to anybody, or to no one at all. We got someone out here for you—one way or another, he’d called reinforcements. Nobody knew where I was; Fra Antun had pointed the place out on the map, but I hadn’t told him I was coming, especially not like this, in the middle of the day when I was supposed to be inoculating his kids.

  “You from the other side?” the eye patch said to me.

  “I’m just a doctor,” I said, too quickly, putting my hands on my knees.

  “I didn’t say you weren’t, did I? What else are you supposed to be?”

  “Shut up,” the barman said.

  “I didn’t say she wasn’t,” the eye patch said. He pushed his stool away and got up, pulling his shirt down with one hand. He made his way over to the jukebox, the sound of his shoes on the floor filling up the air. As he pushed buttons along the console, the albums flipped with a crunching sound that seemed to indicate something in the machine was broken.

  “You like Extra Veka?” he said to me. “You heard of her?”

  Common sense said say nothing, but I couldn’t pretend he wasn’t there, not with the three of them sitting at the barrel. “I haven’t,” I said.

  He shifted from one foot to the other, cleared his throat. “You like Bob Dylan?”

  “I like Springsteen better,” I said, and marveled at my own idiocy.

  He pushed more buttons. “Don’t have him,” he said.

  The jukebox whirred to life, an up-tempo Dylan song I didn’t recognize. The eye patch moved away from the jukebox slowly, toward the middle of the bar, bobbing a little from side to side in time to the music. As he shifted around on the balls of his feet I saw that the burn scars wrapped around his scalp, leaving a bare, glazed scallop of flesh behind his right ear. The others were watching him. The barman was half-seated behind the bar, one leg propped on the rung of his stool and the other on the floor. The blond guy was smiling.

  The eye patch turned slowly, all the way around, chugging one foot and one arm. Then he stopped and held out his hands to me.

  “No, thanks,” I said with a smile, shaking my head, pointing to my cola.

  “Come on, Doctor,” he said. I took another drink of my cola, shook my head again. “Come on, come on,” he said, smiling, gesturing for me to get up, fanning himself with his hands. “Don’t make me dance alone,” he said. He clapped his hands and then held them back out. I didn’t move. “It’s real, you know,” he said of the eye patch. “It’s not just for show.” He took one corner and flipped it up, the flesh underneath moist with the heat, puckered and white-red where it had been stitched shut.

  “Sit down, you idiot,” the barman said.

  “I was just showing her.”

  “Sit down,” he said again, and stood to take the eye patch’s elbow and lead him away from me.

  “I’ve only got one.”

  “I’m sure she’s seen worse,” the barman said, and pushed him back into his chair at the barrel. Then he got me another cola.

  I had no pager service, and Zóra had probably started calling by now, wondering, doubtless, where the fuck I’d gotten to, why I wasn’t back yet. I could picture the monastery hallway, the kids already reassembling, soup-stained shirts and sleepy, after-lunch eyes. Zóra, livid, making a mental list of things she would say to me in private, choice expletives. There had been traffic, I would say. An accident on the road. I had gotten lost. The store had been closed, and I had to wait for them to come back for the afternoon shift.

  The barman’s phone rang. He lifted it to his ear and called the person on the other end “angel.” Then he waved me over and handed it to me.

  “Doctor doesn’t come in until next week,” the young woman on the line said right away. “This an emergency?”

  “I don’t need the doctor,” I said. I told her I was interested in the discharge records for her patient who had died a few days ago, the one whose body had been returned to the City. The four men at the barrel were silent.

  “Oh yes,” she said flatly, and she didn’t say what I thought she might—nothing about my grandfather being a nice man, nothing about how it was a shame that he had died.

  “I’m here for his clothes and personal belongings.”

  “Those are usually sent back with the body,” she said, without interest.

  “They didn’t arrive,” I said. There was a hum of distant noise behind the nurse, music playing, blips from a pinball machine. She sounded like she had a cold, and every few seconds she would sniffle thinly into the receiver. The way she did this made me think that she was the kind of girl who might be very much at home sitting in a bar not unlike this one.

  “I really don’t know anything about it,” she said. “I wasn’t on duty back then. You’ll want to talk to Dejana.” I heard her light a cigarette and take a drag. Her mouth sounded dry. “But Dejana’s in Turkey now.”

  “Turkey.”

  “On holiday.”

  Then I lied: “The family needs his things for burial.”

  “I don’t come out there until Sunday.”

  “The funeral is Saturday. I drove here from the City.”

  She sounded unimpressed. “I got no one to drive me out until Sunday. And I can’t give you the coroner’s notes without the doctor.”

  I told her I didn’t need the notes, I knew what they’d say. I needed his watch and his wedding band, the glasses he’d worn all my life. The four men around the barrel top were looking at me, but I didn’t mind now. “I don’t know if you’re familiar with the situation, but this man was dying for a long time, and then he left his family to do it away from home. They’re devastated. They want his things back.”

  “Dying makes people do strange things—I’m sure you told the family about that. You know how they sometimes go off, like animals do when they’re going to die.”

  “I need his things,” I said.

  She was drinking something; I heard the ice in her glass clink against her teeth. She said: “Give me Bojan.” The barman called her “angel” again. She was still talking when he went to the refrigerator, opened it and rummaged around, still talking when he went outside. I hung back in the doorway and watched him cross the street and climb the clinic stairs.

  “Well?” he said to me from the top of the stairs, the phone still against his ear. By the time I crossed the street, the door had been propped open, the lights still off. Inside, the air was stale and close, the floor sheeted with pale dust that had settled on the waiting room chairs and the top of the reception counter. There were trails in the dust where people had passed by, and they disappeared under a green curtain that had been drawn across the room.

  “In here,” the barman said. He drew the curtain aside, walking slowly from one end of the room to the other, pulling it behind him as he went. The curtain opened out to a whitewashed infirmary, paint-chipped iron cots lined up against the walls, sheets empty and smooth, drawn tight under the mattresses. The room was unfinished, the rear wall missing, and in its place, from ceiling to floor, an enormous, opaque tarp that the afternoon light pasted with a dull yellow sheen. Outside, the wind picked up and the hem of the tarp lifted, crackling.

  “Wait here,” the barman said. He unlocked a second door at the other end of the room, and I listened to him going down the stairs until I couldn’t hear him anymore.

  The fan above me wasn’t working, and a dead fly was suspended on the lip of one of the blades. I crossed the room to lift the tarp, my shoes ringing on the tile even when I tried to preserve the silence by dragging my feet. Already, it seemed like the barman had been gone a long time, and I was trying to remember what I had been doing the day he died, and how I’d ended up here, in the room where my grandfather had died, which looked nothing like how I’d pictured it, nothing like the yellowed rooms in the oncology ward back home, trying to remember how he’d sounded when I spoke to him last, his hands
holding my suitcase out to me, a memory which was probably not our last goodbye, but some other goodbye before it, something my brain substituted for the real thing.

  There was something familiar about the room and the village, a crowded feeling of sadness that crawled into my gut, but not for the first time, like a note of music I could recognize but not name. I don’t know how long I stood there before I thought of the deathless man. When I did, I knew immediately that it was the deathless man, and not me, my grandfather had come looking for. And I wondered how much of our hiding his illness had been intended to afford my grandfather the secrecy he would need to go looking for him. The heat overwhelmed me, and I sat down on the end of one of the cots.

  The barman reappeared with a pale blue plastic bag under his right arm. I watched him lock the stairwell door and come over to me. Goose bumps paled the flesh of his arm.

  “This it?” he asked me. The bag was folded, stapled closed.

  “I don’t know.” I stood up.

  He turned the bag over and looked at the label. “Stefanovi??”

  I reached for the bag, but it was so cold it fell out of my hands. Bad arm dangling, the barman stooped to pick it up, and when he held it out to me, I opened my backpack for him and he folded it inside.

  He watched me zip up the backpack. “All I know is, he collapsed,” the barman finally said.

  “Where?”

  “Outside the bar. A couple of nights after they brought those kids in. Before they died.”

  “Were the nurses here? Did they take long to help him?”

  The barman shook his head. “Not long,” he said. “Not long. They thought maybe he was drunk, at first. But I told them no. I told them he only ordered water.”

  “Water? Was he alone?”

  The barman wiped the sweat that had congealed on his temples in a grainy film. “I couldn’t say. Think so.”

  “A tall man,” I said. “With glasses, and a hat and coat. You don’t remember him sitting with anyone at all?”

  “No.”