The Tiger's Wife

by Téa Obreht

  “With a young man, maybe?”

  He shook his head.

  “They would have been arguing,” I said.

  “This is a veterans’ slum, what do you think people do all day?”

  In the freezer below us, something shifted with a hollow clang.

  “Look,” said the barman. “Place was crawling with people I didn’t know—nurses, assistants, two doctors, people who brought those kids in from the fields. I haven’t seen it so full since the war ended. Had the whole village in the bar that afternoon. I only know the old man collapsed. I barely remember him, let alone who he was with.” He went on, “And I wouldn’t go door-to-door round here, Doctor. On the chance that someone might have seen him. Not with that accent.”

  I lifted my backpack onto my shoulder. “You better sign for this,” he added, looking around for a piece of paper. There were no forms, so he turned over a receipt for saline solution and handed me a pen, watched me sign, Natalia Stefanović, which I did slowly, hoping he would make the connection. But his eyes told me he had already done this on his own.

  EVERY SUNDAY AFTERNOON, EVEN WHEN THE WAR WAS AT its worst, the City’s greatest doctors would convene on the patio of Banević’s restaurant in Old Town to smoke and drink and reminisce, to trade stories of astonishing patients and impossible cases, to praise one another’s diagnoses and resourcefulness over a three-o’clock lunch reservation that had stood firm for almost sixty years.

  The doctors were professors and nephrologists, cardiologists and University chairs, oncologists and orthopedic surgeons, a rotating parade of retirees whose accomplishments, though sometimes several decades old, still carried considerable weight in the medical community. They knew each other’s stories by heart, but over walnut rakija and warm bread, red peppers with garlic and platefuls of grilled meat, they reminded each other of difficult times, pleasurable to revisit now that their legacy was secure in a timeline that by the grace of the spoken word only grew more and more incredible.

  My grandfather was always among them. They were men alongside whom he had struggled up the tortuous rungs of the School of Medicine in his youth; and, though he was always humble about his work, I guess he, too, needed to remind himself of who he was and had once been. He had not founded a cancer clinic or won a national research prize; but, a great doctor in his own right, he was known for turning out flawless diagnosticians and surgeons during his time at the University, for advocating the medical rights of poverty-stricken villagers, and above all, for the privilege of having saved the Marshall’s life—which, for better or worse, was an honor he shared only with certain surgeons in Zurich.

  Because my grandfather was far more comfortable with extolling my accomplishments than his own, my knowledge of the incident was vague until I got to medical school. I knew about the Marshall’s handwritten letter of thanks, sitting in the top drawer of my grandfather’s desk; I knew, also, about the bottle of the Marshall’s finest quince rakija, made from fruit harvested in the Marshall’s own orchards, sitting unopened in the back of my grandfather’s liquor cabinet for as long as I could remember.

  The person who finally filled me in on the details was a starstruck assistant in first-semester pathology, who related it all sixth- or seventh- or eighth-hand. Apparently, one summer more than thirty years ago, my grandparents were hosting a wedding party for the head of the oncology department of the Military Academy of Medicine at our family lake house in Borovo.

  “Verimovo,” I corrected him.

  “Right,” the assistant said.

  Still, there was a wedding. It was evening, the party in full swing, when an innkeeper from the nearby village came running down the drive in desperation. It’s a strange scene to picture: doctors and their wives dancing to the alcohol-impaired efforts of the village trumpet players; interns and laboratory assistants drunkenly lip-locked in the woods behind the house; inebriated dermatologists hanging over the porch rails; the University’s entire medical department swarming our old lake house and garden; and my grandfather, a frowning and irritated sentry, extracting the chief of rheumatology from where he had fallen into the rosebushes. The innkeeper coming up the road, waving his arms, saying, we need the doctor, where is the doctor?—in God’s name, give us the doctor, the man is dying! My grandfather, miraculously the only sober doctor on hand, shrugging into his coat and heading into the village to veto the stupefied local herbalist, who, as the only qualified person in town, had misdiagnosed the condition as food poisoning, and administered raw mint as a remedy.

  The patient, of course, was the Marshall himself. He had been taken ill en route to a conference in Vrgovac after overindulging in date shells and garlic broth. Caught without his personal physician, he had been rushed to the nearest medical facility—a two-room shack—with an entourage of thirty men, all armed to the teeth. The innkeeper was terrified: the date shells had been prepared at his establishment. By the time my grandfather reached the clinic, the patient was halfway to looking like a corpse already, and my grandfather knew instinctively that neither food poisoning, nor any of its cognates, was the issue.

  My grandfather took one look at the patient—whose green face was ostensibly unrecognizable. “You stupid son of a bitch,” he said to no one in particular (though everyone present was said to have immediately wet his pants). “Why didn’t you just shoot him in the head, you would have freed up the bed faster.” Fifteen minutes later, the patient was lying half-conscious on an operating table, his midsection unzipped, while my grandfather pulled feet and feet of infected intestine out of the Marshall’s body in great red loops over his shoulder, and several bystanders—the innkeeper, assorted security personnel, probably a nurse or two, all terrified into competency by my grandfather’s rage—stood in an assembly line of blood-spattered coats and goggles, patting away at the man’s entrails, trying to clean off the appendix pus.

  I remember the assistant looking at me expectantly when he finished the story, waiting for me to return the favor, to tell him something about my grandfather that could surpass what he had just told me.

  After the University’s admission lists were posted, and Zóra and I had confirmed, several times over, that we had both made the stipended top 500 cutoff, my grandfather asked me why I had decided to become a doctor. He had already bragged about it at the doctors’ luncheon, told a number of his patients about it, and I didn’t know what he wanted me to say, so I said, “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

  This was true—I had been inspired largely by guilt that was manifesting itself among members of my generation as a desire to help the people we kept hearing about on the news, people whose suffering we had used to explain our struggles, frame our debates, and justify our small rebellions.

  For years, we had fought to show nonchalance in the face of war, and now that it was suddenly over, over without having touched us in the City, indignation was surfacing. Everything was a cause, a dignified labor. We fought through biology and organic chemistry and clinical pathology; fought to adopt the University’s rituals, from the pre-exam binges to the gypsy woman who took advantage of superstitious exam-takers in the courtyard, threatening them with bad luck if they didn’t give her money. We fought, above all, to show that we deserved to be there, to defeat emerging newspaper projections that declared the City’s postwar generation destined for failure. We were seventeen, furious at everything because we didn’t know what else to do with the fact that the war was over. Years of fighting, and, before that, a lifetime on the cusp of it. Conflict we didn’t necessarily understand—conflict we had raged over, regurgitated opinions on, seized as the reason for why we couldn’t go anywhere, do anything, be anyone—had been at the center of everything. It had forced us to make choices based on circumstances that were now no longer a part of our daily lives, and we kept it close, a heavy birthright for which we were only too eager to pay.

  For a while, I thought I wanted to help women—rape victims, women who were giving birth in basements whil
e their husbands were walking through minefields, women who had been beaten, disfigured, maimed in the war, usually by men from their own side. It was impossible to accept, however, that those particular women would no longer need my help by the time I was qualified to give it. At seventeen, things like that make you self-righteous. You don’t know anything about the aftershocks of war. Slightly younger, we had been unable to ration our enthusiasm for living under the yoke of war; now, we couldn’t regulate our inability to part with it. Major decisions trended toward the assumption that the war and its immediate effects would always be around. Aspiring to orthopedic surgery was considered under-achieving—you wanted, instead, to be an orthopedic surgeon specializing in amputation recovery. Plastic surgery was unthinkable—unless you wanted to deal with facial reconstruction.

  One late afternoon, a week before midsemester exams, my grandfather asked me if I had given any thought to my own specialization, as if it were just around the corner. I had an answer for him: “Pediatric surgery.”

  I was sitting cross-legged at the dining room table, my secondhand cellular biology textbook lying on a kitchen towel to spare our white lace tablecloth. My grandfather was eating sunflower seeds directly from the small tin tray he usually toasted them on. Like all of his rituals, this was a process. He would remove the tray from the toaster oven and set it down on two cork coasters, and lay out a napkin for the disposal of shells. He would sift through the seeds before he started eating them; no one, not even my grandma, knew why he did this, what he was looking for. While he was sifting, he would wrinkle his nose to raise his glasses, which were enormous and square, to a position through which he could comfortably focus. It gave him the appearance of a diamond expert, and also made him look slightly suspicious.

  “You’ll be leaving God out of it, then,” he said.

  “What does that mean?” I said. I couldn’t remember when he had last mentioned God.

  But he was back to the business of sifting through the seeds. Every so often, he would pick one out and chew on it, mostly with his front teeth; he would invariably end up eating them all, rendering the sifting exercise pointless. It took him a long time to ask, “Been around children much?”

  He wasn’t looking at me, so he didn’t see me shrug. After a while, I shrugged again, tapped my book with a pencil. Eventually, I asked: “Why?”

  He sat up, pushed his chair away from the table and rubbed his knees. “When men die, they die in fear,” he said. “They take everything they need from you, and as a doctor it is your job to give it, to comfort them, to hold their hand. But children die how they have been living—in hope. They don’t know what’s happening, so they expect nothing, they don’t ask you to hold their hand—but you end up needing them to hold yours. With children, you’re on your own. Do you understand?”

  Of everything we fought for that year, we fought hardest for notoriety, for the specific word-of-mouth reputation needed to earn respect, recognition, and above all the favor of an obese technical assistant named Mića the Cleaver, the man who prepared cadavers, and who, like an unmet husband or your passport representative at City Hall, was a figure we were expected to factor into our plans long before we ever actually laid eyes on him.

  It was a daunting but critical endeavor. Mića’s attention had to be attracted well in advance. His gruff admiration was the prize for having attached some impressive anecdote, some reputable deed, to your name. Earning this attention before second-year anatomy was crucial. The point was to elicit some spark of awareness in his tar-clotted voice during the first roll call in the laboratory basement, so that when he read your name, he would raise an eyebrow at you and say, Bogdanovic—aren’t you the one who smoked pot in your room during the Kobilac retreat, and then put a towel on your head when the firemen came, and tried to say the vapor from your shower had set off the alarm? You would nod, and, by the grace of God, Mića the Cleaver would smile, and then you were ensured a corpse every week, even in weeks of shortage, which were coming now that the war was over.

  Without a weekly cadaver, a corpse to practice on, you were predictably fucked for the remainder of your career in medical school. It was a special privilege to be in those well-scrubbed rooms with the prepared cadavers that looked like damp schnitzel. You wanted to get a head start on your colleagues by entering that mental space where you were used to a dead body, where you could look at a corpse without cringing or throwing up or collapsing. In order to succeed, you needed to move beyond the notion of respect for an autopsy victim, to resist the urge to pass out if the assistant referred to the corpse by its living name. You had to be the kind of person who could rise above the coping mechanism of painting the corpse’s eyelashes with green mascara. For this, you needed a weekly corpse. You needed Mića the Cleaver’s acknowledgment. You needed it so you could take that first step toward nonchalance in the face of death.

  “What the hell do you have to be worried about?” Zóra said to me when some older male colleagues, in an effort to ingratiate themselves to us, revealed that we would be dedicating our first year to this effort. “Haven’t you inherited that anecdote about the Marshall’s guts?”

  We learned very quickly that nepotism was one of the many ways you did not want to be known to Mića the Cleaver. You did not want to be the perpetrator of some medical disaster, some self-defeating spectacle or slip of the tongue that made you look like an idiot rather than a respectable person for whom a steady influx of cadavers would pave a path to miracles. You did not want to be known for the kind of insolence to your predecessors that Zóra carried around our first semester. In a cavalier bid to secure future connections, Zóra had beaten eight hundred applicants to win a much-lauded internship with the Department of Genetics. To say that the position was lowly would be an understatement; her duties included mopping the floors. Her fifth morning on the job, carrying a box of files from the storage room, she ran into a rickety old man who was shuffling down the hall toward her, and who stopped her to suggest that she should put her excellent hips in a skirt, because pants indicated that she was too forward. Zóra, towering over the old man with a file box she probably considered dropping on his head, responded with: “Don’t be so fucking provincial.” Of course, the old man was the Chair of Genetics, and she spent the rest of the semester filing paperwork in the basement while the pandemic news of her insolence spread throughout the University, abetted by a fifth-year assistant who began producing DON’T BE SO FUCKING PROVINCIAL T-shirts, which made a killing at the October fund-raiser.

  My own notoriety was equally unsatisfying as far as Mića the Cleaver was concerned. I was making a little money helping out twice a week in the biology lab. Three weeks in, I was asked to help a laboratory assistant prepare brain samples for a study. Unfortunately, the brains belonged to a bagful of baby mice. Convincing myself that my sympathy for animals did not extend to small mammals, and taking into consideration the striking eyes of the laboratory assistant, I asked him how we would dispose of the mice. The assistant then explained there were two ways to go about it: seal them up in a box and wait for them to suffocate, or lop off their heads with nail clippers. The latter method he demonstrated rather than described. Zóra didn’t witness the incident herself, but she had already heard several colorful renditions of it two days later, with which she was able to regale me while we sat at the orthodonist’s office, waiting for them to cap the tooth I’d broken biting the floor.

  We ended the term in December, ashamed of our respective debacles and fully expecting them to influence our inevitable encounter with Mića in the fall. But then came preparations for spring anatomy, and the long-awaited search for skull replicas. You’d think that, after the war, they would have had enough real skulls to go around; but they were bullet-riddled skulls, or skulls that needed to be buried so they could wait underground to be dug up, washed, buried again by their loved ones.

  Skulls were nearly impossible to come by. The trade embargoes hadn’t lifted, and the channels through which t
he University had acquired medical supplies—questionable to begin with—were considerably more difficult to access now. People from previous years were selling ridiculously overpriced fourth- or fifth-hand skulls, advertising their availability by word of mouth. We were desperate. In the end, a friend of a friend told us about a man called Avgustin, who specialized in producing plastic replicas of human parts, which he sold to dentists, orthopedists, and cosmetic surgeons—on the black market, of course.

  We lied to our parents, drove four hours down a snow-packed highway, past army trucks that were inching, bumper to bumper, in the opposite lane; we smiled through two customs lines, at six reluctant officials, so we could meet Avgustin at his office in a Romanian border town, which had windows overlooking the docks and the ice-banked waters of the Grava River. He was a short man with a bald head and square cheeks, and he offered us lunch, which we refused. We stood close together while he told us about the skulls he had for us. They were apparently both replicas of the head of some magician from the 1940s, a man called the Magnificent Fedrizzi. It was a specimen, he said, he had acquired with great difficulty. That was probably a version of the truth, although he didn’t mention the part about the obligatory haggling with the gravekeeper, whom he had probably bribed to dig up the Magnificent Fedrizzi after enough time had elapsed for there to be nothing left but bones. In life, this Magnificent Fedrizzi had apparently performed dazzling feats of magic on a Venetian stage—until 1942, when a German audience member, whose woman the Magnificent Fedrizzi had evidently been sharing for some time, put an end to them rather abruptly.

  “The skull of Don Juan,” Avgustin said, winking at Zóra. We didn’t know why he was telling us this until he finally brought out the replicas, swathed in bubble wrap. The skulls looked like cousins at best, and it immediately became apparent that the German who killed the Magnificent Fedrizzi liked to settle his fights the old-fashioned way—with a wine bottle or nightstick, or perhaps a lamp or rifle butt.