The Tiger's Wife

by Téa Obreht

  He had the jar, and he turned away from the shrine. He did not start down the road to Brejevina then, but instead began a slow ascent up the mountain. I waited until I could see the outline of him on the first roll below the tree line, and then I followed.

  A FEW YEARS BEFORE MY GRANDFATHER DIED, BOMBS WERE falling on the City. It was the final collapse, years after it had first begun, and it had finally reached us. Bombs were falling, and they were falling on government buildings and banks, on the houses of war criminals—but also on libraries, on buses, on bridges that spanned the two rivers. It came as a surprise, the bombing, especially because the way it started was so mundane. There was an announcement, and then, an hour later, the scream of the air raid siren. All of it was going on outside, somehow, even when the sound of the bombs hitting started coming in through the open windows, and even when you went outside, you could tell yourself it was some kind of crazy construction accident, that the car, flung seventy-five feet into the façade of a brick building, was just some kind of terrible joke.

  Bombs were falling, and the entire City shut down. For the first three days, people did not know how to react—there was hysteria, mostly, and people evacuated or tried to evacuate, but bombs were falling up and down the two rivers, and there was nowhere to go to avoid them. Those who stayed in the City were convinced that it wouldn’t last more than a week, that it was ineffective and expensive, and that they would just give up and go away, and there was nothing to do but stick it out. On the fourth day of the bombing, compelled by the irresistible need for certain kinds of freedoms despite the circumstances—or, perhaps, because of them—people started going to coffeehouses again, sitting on the porches, often staying out to drink and smoke even after the sirens sounded. There was an attitude of outdoor safety—if you were outside, people reasoned, you were a much smaller, moving target, while if you sat in your building, you were just waiting for them to miss what they were actually aiming for and hit you instead. The coffeehouses stayed open all night, their lights darkened, the television hissing in a back room, people sitting quietly with their beers and iced teas, watching the useless red waterfalls of light from the antiaircraft guns on the hill.

  While it was happening, my grandfather didn’t read about it, and didn’t talk about it, not even to my mother who, for the first three days of bombing, became the kind of person who yelled at the television and didn’t turn the set off even when she went to bed—as if keeping it on would somehow isolate her from the thunder outside, as if our city’s presence on the screen could somehow contain what was happening, make it reasonable and distant and insignificant.

  I was twenty-two, interning at the Military Academy of Medicine. To me, the persistence of my grandfather’s rituals meant that he was unchanged, running on discipline and continuance and stoicism. I didn’t notice, and didn’t realize, that the rituals themselves were changing, that there was a difference between the rituals of comfort and the preventive rituals that come at the end of life. He still went out as though he had a full roster of house calls to make, but his lifelong patients were beginning to die, to fold slowly to the maladies of old age, even with him there. His daily exercises continued, but they were the perfunctory exercises of an old man: facing the living room window in the pale morning light, his sweatpants loose and hitched up above his socks, his hands clasped behind his back in a matter-of-fact way while he rose to the balls of his feet and fell back onto his heels, rhythmically, with a thump that reverberated through the whole apartment. He did this daily, and without deviation, even with the sirens grinding a howl on the next block.

  For twenty years, we had watched the four-o’clock showing of ’Allo ’Allo! together. Now, there were afternoon naps. He slept sitting up, with his head bent. His feet stuck straight out in front of him, and his body was propped up entirely on the heels of his clogs. His hands were folded across his stomach, which was usually growling, because in addition to everything else, he was now frowning, without precedent, over the things my grandma cooked for us, over burek and paprikash and stuffed peppers, things I remembered him eating with relish in the past, meals he would sigh delightedly over during otherwise silent dinners. It happened while I wasn’t looking, but Grandma was preparing separate meals for him now, because she couldn’t bear to subject the rest of us to the punishment of eating boiled greens twice a day and poached meat for dinner, which was all he ate, strictly and uncomplaining.

  His trips to the zoo had become a thing of the past long before the bombing forced the City to close its gates. There was a lot of speculation about this closure—people, not just my grandfather, were furious, felt it was a sign of giving up, accused the City of using the bombing as an excuse to slaughter the animals to save on resources. Indignant, the authorities set up a weekly newspaper column that ran current pictures of the animals and reported on their well-being, on the birth of their cubs, on plans for zoo renovation when the raids were over.

  My grandfather began to cut out newspaper clippings about the zoo. I would come home in the early mornings, after my shift at the hospital, to find him taking breakfast by himself, removing the back section of the newspaper and looking through it angrily. There was disaster, he would tell me, at the zoo.

  “This business is very bad for us,” he said, tilting his head up to look through his bifocals, his tray of seeds and nuts half-finished, his water glass tinted with the orange of fiber supplements.

  The story in the newspaper focused on the tiger, and only on the tiger, because, despite everything, there was still some hope for him. It said nothing about how the lioness aborted and the wolves turned and ate their cubs, one by one, while the cubs howled in agony and tried to run. It said nothing about the owls, splitting open their unhatched eggs and pulling the runny red yolk, bird-formed and nearly ready, out of the center; or about the prized Arctic fox, who disemboweled his mate and rolled around in her remains until his heart stopped under the lancing lights of the evening raids.

  Instead, they said that the tiger had begun to eat his own legs, first one and then the other, systematically, flesh to bone. They had a picture of the tiger, Zbogom—the aging son of one of my childhood tigers—sprawled out on the stone floor of his cage, his legs, stiff as boards, tied up behind him like hams. You could see the thick black marks where the flesh of his ankles had been soaked in iodine, and the newspaper said that nothing could abate that particular compulsion—they had tried tranquilizers, chains, bandages dipped in quinine. They had modified a dog funnel and taped it to his neck, but he had eaten the funnel during one of the night raids, and afterward he had eaten two of his own toes.

  Two days after the tiger article ran, bombers hit the bridge over the South River and, within two hours of its collapse, they hit the abandoned car factory beside the zoo and Sonja, our adopted African elephant—beloved zoo mascot, small-eyed matriarch of the citadel herd, lover of peanuts and of small children—fell dead on the spot.

  For weeks, the City had been trying to process the suddenness of the war, the actuality of its arrival, and we had treated it as something unusual and temporary; but, after that particular raid, something changed, and all the indignation and self-righteousness that had seeped over from the end of the last war was now put to good use. Every night afterward, people marched for miles to stand shoulder to shoulder at the citadel gate. Others, meanwhile, stood packed in inebriated rows on the stone arches of our remaining bridges. You had to be drunk for the bridge guard, because the chances you would be hit were higher, and after that the chances got higher still that you would die, because standing on either end would not spare you from a fall into the water if the middle was hit.

  Zóra, braver than anyone I knew, spread out her defensive agenda—she spent her nights with thousands of people by the stone knees of the dead Marshall’s horse on the east bank of Korčuna, wearing a toucan hat in solidarity with the people guarding the zoo. She can tell stories about the bombing of the First National bank, how she watched a missile
hit the old brick building across the river, the vacuum of sound as the blue light went down, straight down, through the top of the building and then blasted out the windows and the doors and the wooden shutters, the bronze name on the building, the plaques commemorating the dead—all of this followed by the realization, once the smoke cleared, that despite everything, the building didn’t fall, but stood there, like a jawless skull, while people cheered and kissed and, as the newspapers would later point out, started a baby boom.

  During the war, I had begged my grandfather to give up on his nightly house calls, on the rituals that made him feel productive; now, against his wishes—which he expressed with a more colorful vocabulary than even I had allowed myself at fourteen—I was holding vigil at the zoo on my nights off. The crowd there was different, older. People would begin to arrive around seven o’clock, in time for the last round of the popcorn cart, and then we would stand in small groups on the sidewalk that ran around the citadel wall, wearing the regalia of our beast of choice. The lion-woman was there, wearing a yellow mop as a wig. One man had tied wire hangers around his head and put white socks on them as ears and come to stand for Nikodemus, our giant Welsh rabbit. A few people came as the wolf pack, wearing toilet rolls as snouts, and there was a woman who had been to the zoo only once, as a child, and had come dressed the way she remembered her first and only giraffe: yellow and with stumpy horns. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d forgotten the blotches. I came for the tiger, of course, but the best I could do was paint a Davy Crockett–style cap from my old dress-up box in the basement with orange and black stripes, and stand there with the monstrous fake raccoon tail hanging over my back. The fox was a man dressed in a red suit, bow tie, and glasses. The zoo had never had a panda, but we had six or seven pandas guarding the citadel gate, loofah tails sticking out of their pants. The hippo wore a purple sweater, with a pillow tucked underneath.

  People were also writing on the zoo wall with chalk and spray paint, and, a few weeks in, they began arriving with placards that favored an attitude of friendly reportage over the standard FUCK YOUs that were being held aloft up and down the bridges. A gray-clad man with a pink towel over his head appeared one evening at the zoo gates holding up a sign that said: AIM HERE, I AM AN ELEPHANT. There was also a famous guy from lower Dranje, where the water tower had been hit, who originally posed as a duck, but then showed up on the sidewalk the day after the cotton factory bombing with the announcement: I NOW HAVE NO CLEAN UNDERWEAR. After that, the newspapers were flooded with overhead shots of his poster, the red lettering, his frayed gray gloves clutching the cardboard. He appeared again, in a week or two, bearing the message: NO UNDERWEAR AT ALL. Someone else held up a sign that read: ME NEITHER.

  Zóra and I swapped stories over our shifts at the clinic, where we bandaged heads and arms and legs, helped make room for the wounded, assisted in the maternity ward, supervised the distribution of sedatives. From the office window on the third floor of Sveti Jarmo hospital, you could see the trucks coming in from the bomb sites, the tarps laid out on the stone courtyard, laden with parts of the dead. They were not like the parts we saw in anatomy, fresh, connected to their related tissues, or to the function that gave them meaning. Instead, they made no sense, lying there red and clotted, charred at the sides, in piles to which you could only guess they belonged—legs, arms, heads. They had been picked out of ditches, trees, the rubble of buildings where they had been blown by the force of the bombs, with the purpose of identifying the dead, but you could barely distinguish what they were, much less try to assign them to the bodies, faces, persons of loved ones.

  I came home one day to find my grandfather standing in the hallway in his big-buttoned coat, wearing his hat. I came in while he was tying his sash carefully, tucking The Jungle Book back into the coat’s inside pocket. The dog was sitting on the footstool by the door, and he was talking to the dog in that voice, and the dog was already leashed, waiting.

  I kissed him, and I said: “Where are you going?”

  “We’ve been waiting,” he said, of the dog and himself. “We’re coming with you tonight.”

  It was the last time we went to the citadel together, and we walked the whole way. It was a bright, clear autumn evening, and we went down our street until we reached the Boulevard of the Revolution and then turned uptown along the cobbled road that ran beside the tramway. Trams went by, quiet and old, as empty as the street, the tracks slick with the afternoon’s rain. There was a soft, cold wind blowing up the Boulevard toward us, raising leaves and newspapers against our legs, and against the face of the dog, who was running openmouthed, in short, fat-legged strides, between us. I had put an orange bow on the dog, to honor the tiger, and I had offered my raccoon hat to my grandfather, and he had looked at me and said, “Please. Leave me some dignity.”

  It had been predicted that there would be no air raid that night, so the sidewalk at the zoo was practically empty. The lion-woman was there, leaning against a lamppost, and we exchanged hellos and then she went back to her newspaper. A guy I’d seen only once or twice was sitting on the zoo wall, turning the dials of a handheld radio. We sat down on the bus-stop bench and my grandfather put the dog, with its fat muddy feet, on his knees, and for about twenty minutes we watched the general confusion of the intersection with the broken traffic light that no one had fixed in almost a month. Then the siren across town went off, followed by another, closer siren, and two minutes later we saw the first blast to the southwest, across the river, where they were starting on the old compound of the Treasury. I remember being surprised that the dog just sat there, looking noncommittal, while the ambulance vans from Sveti Pavlo lit up and streamed out of the garage down the street. I was comforting my grandfather about the tiger, telling him about how they dealt with crippled cats and dogs in America, how sometimes they made little wheelchairs they’d harness onto the animal’s side, and then the cat or dog could live a perfectly normal life, with its haunches in a little pet wheelchair, wheeling itself around and around the house.

  “They’re self-righting,” I said.

  For a long time, my grandfather said nothing. He was taking treats out of his pocket and giving them to the dog, and the dog was scarfing them down noisily and sniffing my grandfather’s hands for more.

  All through the war, my grandfather had been living in hope. The year before the bombing, Zóra had managed to threaten and plead him into addressing the National Council of Doctors about recasting past relationships, resuming hospital collaboration across the new borders. But now, in the country’s last hour, it was clear to him, as it was to me, that the cease-fire had provided the delusion of normalcy, but never peace. When your fight has purpose—to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent—it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling—when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event—there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it.

  Our vigil at the zoo came more than a year before we found out he was ill, before the secret visits to the oncologist, our final alliance. But the body knows itself, and part of him must have already been aware of what was starting when he turned to me, and told me for the last time about the deathless man.

  My grandfather rubbed his knees and said:

  The siege of Sarobor. We’ve never talked about it. Things were bad then, but there was a chance that they would improve. There was a chance they wouldn’t go all to hell immediately. I was at a conference on the sea, and I was about to drive home when I got a call about some wounded men at Marhan.

  I get to Marhan and it’s this mass of tents and men, and some people have been shot in a skirmish a few miles up the road, and they tell me while I’m bandaging them up, while I’m w
aiting for the medical relief, that they’re there to take out the airplane factory in the Marhan valley, first with heavy artillery and then with men. After that, they say, they’re going into Sarobor. Sarobor—can you imagine? Sarobor, where your grandma was born. So, I find the general and I ask him, what the hell is this? Do you know what he says to me?

  He says: “The Muslims want access to the sea, so we’ll send them to it, downriver, one by one.”

  What can I tell you about that? What is there to say? I married your grandmother in a church, but I would still have married her if her family had asked me to be married by a hodza. What does it hurt me to say happy Eid to her, once a year—when she is perfectly happy to light a candle for my dead in the church? I was raised Orthodox; on principle, I would have had your mother christened Catholic to spare her a full dunking in that filthy water they keep in the baptismal tureens. In practice, I didn’t have her christened at all. My name, your name, her name. In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.

  I leave Marhan. But I don’t go home. You’re at home, and your mother, and your grandma, but that’s not where I go. My relief comes, and it’s this young doctor. I can’t remember his face. He comes, and I say my goodbyes and I leave, and then I go out onto the road and I walk all afternoon until I get to Sarobor. It’s fifty centigrade going into the Amovarka valley, everything is dry and pale green and very quiet, except for the shelling, which is starting now in Marhan. This is thirteen years ago, you understand, and the war is hardly even a war yet. This was when they had the big olive grove on the hills above the town. You probably can’t remember what that town was like before they started on it, before they shelled the Muslim neighborhoods and dropped that old bridge into the river like a tree, like nothing.