The Tiger's Wife

by Téa Obreht

  The men of the village had started a small bonfire in the square, and the fire was sending black sheets of smoke down the street. Some of the men had gone across the pasture and into the foothills to search for Dariša’s camp, to find his wagon and belongings, which they half-expected to have vanished, just like Dariša himself. A few of the men had paused by the butcher’s house and gone no farther; Jovo had found courage enough to run up and peer through the window, but had seen nothing.

  My grandfather stood with his wet boots on the porch of the apothecary’s shop, watching the icicles above the door twist into drops that rapped a quiet rhythm on the railings and the trees. When the apothecary opened the door, my grandfather just said “Please.” And then he said it over and over again, until the apothecary pulled him inside and knelt down beside him with a warm glass of water and made him drink it very, very slowly.

  Then the apothecary brushed the hair out of my grandfather’s eyes, and said: “What has happened?”

  _____

  The steps of her house were powdered with snow, and the apothecary went up and stood on the porch. In his hand he carried the bottle in which he mixed the drink for expectant mothers, a drink he had often made of chalk and sugar and water. He tapped on the door with his fingers, lightly at first, so that the sound would not carry across the pasture; when she did not answer, he banged harder until he remembered that she was deaf, and then he stood there, feeling stupid. Then he tried the door, and it gave. He paused, for a moment, remembering the gun, the blacksmith’s gun, which had not surfaced in the village since Luka had brought it back down, wondering if the girl still had it, and how he might announce himself. He pushed the door open and looked around, and then he opened it farther and stepped into the doorway.

  The tiger’s wife was sitting on the floor by the fireplace, drawing something in the hearth with her finger. The fire was bright on her face, and her hair had settled around her eyes so that he couldn’t see her properly, and she did not look up when he went in and shut the door behind him. She was sitting wrapped in her Turkish silks, purples and golds and reds draped around her shoulders like water, and her legs, which were folded under the bulge of her stomach, were bare and thin. What struck him most was the sparseness of the room; there was a table, a few pots and bowls over the tabletop. There was no trace of the gun.

  She had not seen him yet, and he did not want to surprise her, but there was nothing he could do about that now. He took a step forward, and then another, and then she turned abruptly and saw him, and he held up his hands to show her that he was harmless and unarmed.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said. Then he bowed a little and touched his fingers to his lips and forehead. It had been almost forty years since he had made the gesture.

  She got up in one swift motion, rolled to her feet, and the cloth slid down her shoulders when she did it, and she stood there, her face tight and furious, and the apothecary continued to hold his half bow and didn’t move. She was very small, the tiger’s wife, with thin shoulders and a long thin neck, which a river of sweat had caked with salt. Her belly was enormous and tight and round, unbalancing in the way it overpowered her frame and pulled her hips forward.

  “The baby,” he said, pointing at her. He grabbed his stomach under his coat and shook it a little, and then held up the bottle. “For the baby.”

  But she had placed him, he could see that—remembered him, remembered his house, remembered that he had given her back to Luka—and the look coming over her now was one of intense revulsion. Her whole body was shaking.

  The apothecary tried to explain. He shook the bottle again, smiling, holding it high so she could see it. The water was cloudy inside.

  “For the baby,” he said again, and pointed again at her belly. He made a cradling gesture with his arms, pointed to himself. But her face did not change until he took a step toward her.

  He expected something to shift between them, then. In such a short time, she had successfully frightened the villagers into reverential awe. He envied her that, admired it despite himself. He wondered if she could see it. She had done it without effort or intention; and even now, he suspected she didn’t know she had done it at all.

  The tiger’s wife must have seen the hesitation in his face, because at that moment, her upper lip lifted and her teeth flashed out, and she hissed at him with the ridge of her nose folded up against her eyes. The sound—the only sound he ever heard her make, when she had made no sound over broken bones and bruises that spread like continents over her body—went through him like a rifle report and left him there, left him paralyzed. She was naked, furious, and he knew suddenly that she had learned to make that sound mimicking a face that wasn’t human. He left with the bottle, without turning his back to her, reaching behind him to feel for the door, and when he opened it he couldn’t even feel the cold air coming in. The heat of the house stayed with him like a mark as he walked back.

  A little way down the pasture, where the creek had begun to come back in black flashes through the ice, the apothecary could see Jovo waiting for him. “Go back to your house,” the apothecary said.

  “She in there?” Jovo said, moving forward a little.

  The apothecary stopped, turned. “Go home,” he said, and waited until Jovo vanished.

  My grandfather had been waiting with the ibis for the apothecary’s return.

  “Is she well?” my grandfather said.

  The apothecary looked at my grandfather wordlessly for a long moment. Before he had gone out—after my grandfather had told him everything, after the apothecary had promised to help her—my grandfather had watched him light the lamp at his counter and bring jars and spoons and an empty glass down from the shelf. My grandfather had stood with his nose running and watched the big, round hands of the apothecary working the mortar and pestle. Wiping out the inside of the glass. Bringing out the golden scales. Measuring the powders. He had watched the apothecary pour the warm water into a bottle and put in the sugar and chalk powder and mint leaves. He had watched the white clouding of the glass as the apothecary capped the glass with his palm, shook it, then wiped it down with a cloth. Rinsed his hands.

  Now the apothecary had come back with that same bottle still full, and he said to my grandfather: “She doesn’t know me.” He held the bottle out. “So, here, you must run and give her this yourself. She needs it.”

  “Everyone will see me,” my grandfather said.

  “Everyone has gone.”

  So it was my grandfather who crossed the square, carrying the clouded glass, looking over his shoulder at the empty square; my grandfather who went into the butcher’s house, smiling; my grandfather who held the hand of the tiger’s wife when she propped the glass against her lips, my grandfather who wiped her chin.

  It didn’t take very long after that.

  There is a huge tree just outside my grandfather’s village on the bank of the stream that leads down from the Galinica River. In winter, the red boughs arch up from the trunk, bare as hip bones, curving like hands clasped in prayer. The tree stands near the fence where the braided cornfields begin, and Marko Parović tells me the people of Galina avoid it at all costs; its branches, he says, cast a net in which souls are caught as they rise to heaven, and the ravens that roost there pick the souls out of the bark like worms.

  It was here that Marko Parović witnessed the death of the apothecary of Galina, more than sixty years ago. Marko takes me down to the edge of the village to show me, to tap the trunk with his cane, stand back and point to the tree so that I will understand: picture the hangman, a green-eyed youth from a village to the south, recruited by the invading troops moving through the lowlands, and asked—not forced—to carry out the executions as they went from town to town. They dispatched headmen, the instigators of rebellion and resistance, or just men with a loyal following—the kind of following the apothecary had once again, now that everyone knew, without having to talk about it, that he had saved them from her, that he had been th
e cause of her death.

  The apothecary—“such an ugly man,” Marko says to me, drawing his hand across his face, “ugly, but great”—stood on the cornfield fence with the noose around his neck, wondering why they hadn’t shot him instead, and still hoping they would. Of the sixty men who had come to the village, Marko tells me, the Germans numbered twelve, and these twelve did not come to the hanging. They were in the tavern, drinking, putting their cigarettes out in the patches of soil laid bare by the melt that had brought them there. The men who stood by the tree that afternoon were men whose language Marko Parović understood, and whose hatred the apothecary understood even more, and they had brought the entire village out to see the apothecary writhe on the rope like a gutted animal, the first of many pointless examples.

  Marko does not remember seeing my grandfather among the spectators at the hanging, though he was probably there, wide-eyed and hopeless, the victim of a betrayal he had already put together, barely speaking at all since the morning after his last visit, when they had found her dead on her own porch. That day, he wailed for hours, and when he looked for help, for absolution, the face he saw was kind but firm. Mother Vera said, “Now it is done, so leave it to God.” After the war, she swore to him, and it kept him going. After the war, they would leave the village, go elsewhere, start anew. The summer Mother Vera died, my grandfather was already a doctor, already the man he would become.

  But Marko does remember the intense stillness of the apothecary before the recruit kicked his legs off the fence, the apothecary’s eyes steady and resigned, all the fight pulled out of him by something no one present completely understood, but everyone would later relegate to responsibility, to the grace of self-sacrifice.

  “They didn’t even bury him in the graveyard,” Marko says, bracing himself against his cane, waving his free hand toward the church. “We had to put him there ourselves, after the war.”

  “Where is the girl buried?” it suddenly occurs to me to ask him.

  “What girl?” he says.

  “The girl,” I say. “The tiger’s wife.”

  “What has that got to do with anything?” he says.

  HALFWAY UP THE HILL, THE FIGURE STOPPED TO REST, and I stopped too, in the cover of a low, wind-strangled tree that was leaning over the road, the smell of the lavender and sage straining my nostrils. He was standing in the middle of the road, swaying on his feet as he looked around, and I had the distinct feeling that he was looking back at me, that he knew I was there, and was trying to decide what to do with me. I had not planned out what I intended to do if he turned and came to confront me, and for the first time I regretted the white coat I was still wearing, and the backpack rustling against my shoulders. I stood still while the man turned from one side to the other, a slow, ponderous kind of dance, shifting from one foot to the next, shoulders hunched forward, ribs twisted up in the shadows, so that I found myself thinking mora, and laughing at myself in my head.

  Then the moon came out, and threw the whole plane of the hill into sharp relief, the shadows of the trees and the humped rocks along the side of the road, and I saw that the man was moving again. Slowly, slowly, rolling on, he went up the hill. I waited for him to disappear around a bend, and then I set off after him. For a long time, now, I had felt a sense of being tipped back, the steep thrust of the mountain tilting forward over me the closer I got to it, and now, as I came around the bend in the road, the path turned right, and became what felt and sounded like a shallow, almost empty riverbed, which led away from town across the flat, wind-washed side of the hill. Below me lay the iridescent outline of the beach, lit up with ice cream signs and restaurant terraces, harbor lights smeared in the water, the square of darkness around the monastery where Fra Antun’s garden stood empty.

  The man was moving steadily up the riverbed, through the thin channel of water, toward a timbered rise that was widening fast on the hill before us, and I walked behind in the open, hoping he would not turn to look for me again, because now that we were moving sideways across the hill I couldn’t hide any longer. The wind had stopped, and, it seemed, the cicadas, too, and there was no sound except the slight cracking of the riverbed under my feet, and the chiming of my backpack clasps, and the occasional rustle of something that ran through the grass.

  Far ahead, the figure walked unevenly, pushing himself forward through the water. He made a strange silhouette from behind, leaning forward, big feet padding along quietly on the earth, the head rolling over the shoulder. There was nothing encouraging about the man, nothing that indicated it was a good idea to keep following him. I stopped once, for a few minutes, my shoes soaked through, and I watched his advance as he moved away from me, and thought hard about turning back.

  Up ahead, the man dropped suddenly, a swinging movement that brought him low, and then he straightened up again and moved on. I gave him more distance, straining to see ahead in the dark. Something was there, something that had intercepted the man’s forward momentum, and as I came closer it came out of the darkness at me slowly. It was a chain, I realized, a rusted metal chain that spanned the riverbed, slung between two trees on either bank. It was creaking a little, and as I came up to it, I saw, hanging between the two strands of the chain, the familiar red triangle: MINES. And any doubt I’d had—in my grandfather’s stories, in my own sanity, in the wild darkness of the walk—fell away, and I was certain, certain that I was following the deathless man, certain of the madness that came with meeting him, the kind of madness that could make my grandfather tie a person to a cinder block and throw him in a pond, the kind of madness that was forcing me to throw my backpack over the chain and go down on my hands and knees and crawl into a minefield and stand up and keep going.

  Then the man entered the trees, and I hung back for a little while, not knowing whether to follow him in. He could hide, I realized, behind some tree and watch me groping around in the dark, then collect me at the crossroads when I stepped on something I thought was innocuous and went up in a shower of blood. Or I could lose my way in the wood and be stuck there until morning. But I had come this far, so I went in, into the complete loss of light, the dead silence of the pines, thick-trunked, scissor-needled, ranged close together. I was breathing hard, I realized, because the slope had been steeper for some time, and the water weighed down my movements. I tried to quiet myself so that the man would not hear me behind him while we were in the wood. The riverbed wavered up through the pines, and my feet were slipping on the wet rocks and needles that lay piled in it, and the cracking pinecones that kept getting caught in the fronts of my shoes were making too much noise. I kept expecting to look up from trying to see where I was going to find that I had come up on the man suddenly, or that he had stopped and was waiting for me. I couldn’t see anything in that darkness, but I could picture him clearly, standing with his hat and the little jar, impatient, looking at me with a slanted face that had a sharp nose and big, unforgiving eyes and that persistent smile my grandfather had told me about.

  When I came out of the forest, I had lost him. The riverbed had become a dry, empty path ringed with grass, rising sharply with the hill, and I forced myself up with my hands out for balance. At the top, the ground leveled off into some kind of field, and there stood a low stone bridge that rose over the stream, and I went up the bank and crossed it. From the arch, I could see houses, the outlines of abandoned houses rising on both sides of the dried-up riverbed, blocked here and there by the thick, rustling crowns of trees that were very different from the trees in the wood I had just come through. It occurred to me that this must be the old village that Fra Antun had mentioned, the one people had abandoned in favor of living closer to the sea after the Second World War. The first house I reached was on my left, and it stood apart from the others. It had a rounded façade with what looked like a small slit of a window on the now-unroofed upper level, glassless windows that had been smashed in, the grass from the field reaching up, high enough to touch the three or four shutters that were still
hinged to their frames. The man I had followed here could have gone inside the house, could have been looking at me through the darkness of the empty windows. I couldn’t see inside at all, and I passed by this first house slowly, looking over my shoulder as I went. Part of the wall around the house was broken, and there was a paved area inside that led off somewhere into what looked like a garden. The deathless man could be there, too, I thought, but if he was, I didn’t want to find him.

  The next house was on my right, shaded by one of the big trees, and I realized that it had once been a two-story inn. A wide stone staircase zigzagged across the front of the building, and empty flower boxes now hung from the staircase railing. The long balcony on the second floor had once supported a lattice with vines, but now it was just a couple of uneven rusted rods that stuck straight up, before fading into the partly collapsed roof.

  The rest of the houses were clustered together along the streambed, yawning with shadows, and I walked sideways, first facing one bank and then the other, past crumbling archways and stacks of broken shutters, past piles of pallets, deserted courtyards scattered with buckets and gardening tools that lay heavy with disuse and rust with the grasses growing up around them. I passed what looked like the open veranda of a restaurant nestled between the corners of two buildings; there were a few tables and chairs scattered around the stone floor, and, to my surprise, a single plastic chair, on which an enormous cat was asleep, silent and unmoving, fur gray in the moonlight.