The Tiger's Wife

WHEN LUKA AND JOVO RETURNED FROM THE MOUNTAIN, carrying with them the gun of the fallen blacksmith—about whose fate they lied through their teeth, and whose final moments they played up to such an extent that stories of the blacksmith’s skill and fortitude were being told in surrounding towns long after the war had ended—my grandfather was relieved to discover that the hunt had not been successful. In the long afternoon and night while the hunters were away, he had contemplated his encounter with the tiger in the smokehouse. Why had the girl been there? Had she been there the whole time? What had she been doing?

He knew for certain that her purpose had not been to harm the tiger, that she had smiled knowingly at him when it became obvious that the tiger had escaped. My grandfather considered what he would say to the girl when he saw her next, how he could ask her, knowing she could not reply, about what she had seen, what the tiger was like. They were sharing the tiger now.

My grandfather felt certain that he would see her at the service to honor the blacksmith. Sunday afternoon, and he stood in the stifled back of the church, with its hanging white tapestries, and scanned the frost-reddened faces of the congregation, but he did not see her. He did not see her outside afterward, either, or later that week at the Wednesday market.

What my grandfather didn’t know was that, in addition to the gun, Luka had brought something else back from the mountain: the pork shoulder the tiger had been eating when the hunters had come upon him in the glade. My grandfather did not know that, after Luka had entered his quiet house at the edge of the pasture on the afternoon of his return, and slowly placed the blacksmith’s gun by the door, he had swung that pork shoulder into the face of the deaf-mute girl, who was already kneeling in the corner with her arms across her belly. My grandfather didn’t know that Luka, after he had dislocated the deaf-mute’s shoulder, had dragged her into the kitchen by her hair, and pressed her hands into the stove.

My grandfather did not know any of these things, but the other villagers knew, without having to talk about it, that Luka was a batterer. People had noticed well enough when she went missing for days, when new rungs appeared in her nose, when that unmoving blood-spot welled in her eye and did not dissipate, to guess what was happening in Luka’s house.

It would be easy for me to simplify the situation. It might even be justifiable to say, “Luka was a batterer, and so he deserved what was coming to him”—but because I am trying to understand now what my grandfather did not know then, it’s a lot more important to be able to say, “Luka was a batterer, and here is why.”

Luka, like almost everyone in the village, had been born in Galina, in the family house he would occupy until his death. From the start to the end of his days, he knew the ax, the butcher’s block, the wet smell of autumnal slaughter. Even during the hopeful decade he spent away from home, the sound of a sheep’s bell in the market square produced in him a paralyzing rush too complicated to be mere nostalgia.

Luka was the sixth son of a seventh son, born just shy of being blessed, and this almost-luck sat at his shoulders all his life. His father, Korčul, was an enormous, bearded man with big teeth, the only person in the house, it seemed, who ever laughed, and never at the right thing. In his youth, Korčul had spent some fifteen years in “the Army”—when asked about it, he always said “the Army,” because he did not care to advertise that he had, in fact, volunteered with several, and had not been particularly selective regarding the alliance or aim of the side on which he was fighting, as long as he could see Turkish pennants flying above the distant, advancing line. Over the years, he had amassed an impressive collection of Ottoman war artifacts, and Sunday mornings found him at the tavern on the upper slopes of the village, coffee in one hand, rakija in the other, trading stories with other veterans, always eager to exhibit some bullet or spearhead or dagger fragment and tell the story of how he had earned it in battle. Long before Luka was born, word had spread that Korčul’s trove included items far older than anyone could remember—helmets, arrowheads, links of chain mail—and that the butcher spent his spare time expanding his collection by robbing graves, digging in old battlegrounds for the clothes and weapons of men centuries dead. This, by all standards, was unforgivable, a curse-inviting sin. This was why, they would later say, none of Korčul’s children survived to have children of their own.

It was also why the villagers—assessing the goings-on of the butcher’s household from a distance—could not reconcile the pairing of Korčul and Luka’s mother, Lidia. She was a round woman with patient eyes and a quiet manner, a polite and even-handed daughter of Sarobor, a merchant’s child, reduced from the nomadic luxuries of her youth by the failure of her father’s business. Her love for children was boundless, but always greatest for her youngest child—a position Luka occupied for only three years, and from which he was demoted following the birth of the family’s first and only daughter. There were five boys before him, the oldest ten years his senior, and while he watched them file, one by one, into the rituals of manhood prescribed by Korčul’s own upbringing, Luka found himself clinging to the foundations of his mother’s life, the stories of her girlhood travels, her insistence on education, on the importance of history, the sanctity of the written word.

So Luka grew up with the feeling of a world that was larger than the one he knew. As he became more and more aware of himself, it began to occur to him that his father—that feared, well-respected, but illiterate man—knew nothing of that greater world, and had done nothing to arrange for the futures of his children in the context of it. During the time he spent with his father, learning, with his brothers, the life of a butcher, he understood that his father’s knowledge extended to cuts of meat and types of blades, the warning signs that an animal was ill, the smell of meat gone bad, the right technique for skinning. For all his prosperity, Luka found Korčul’s ignorance ugly, his disinterest in a larger life, apart from battle trophies, profane, and came to abhor Korčul’s tendency to overlook cleaning his apron, or to eat bread with blood-rusted nail beds. While his brothers were pretending to bash one another over the head with makeshift cudgels, Luka busied himself reading history and literature.

For all his resistance, however, Luka could not avoid the rites that came with family. By the age of ten, he was butchering sheep, and when he turned fourteen, his father, following a tradition of many generations, gave him a knife for cutting bread and locked him into the barn with a young bull whose nose had been filled with pepper. Like his brothers before him, Luka was expected to subdue the bull and kill it with a single knife-thrust to the skull. Luka had spent most of his life dreading this ritual—the violence, the pointlessness of it—but he found himself hoping that, despite his unfortunately wiry frame and thin hands, he might have some unexpected success, some miraculous burst of strength that would enable him to just get it over with. But the bull came tearing out of the back of the stable and smeared Luka across the dirt in front of the butcher and his five other sons, and twenty or thirty villagers who had come to watch the show. Someone who witnessed the event told me that it was like watching a tank crumple a lamppost. (I have since surmised that this rich analogy could not have come about until at least a decade after the actual event, when the witness would have had occasion to see his first tank.) Luka had the bull by the top of the skull, his armpits braced against the boss of the horns. The bull—sensing, perhaps, that victory was imminent—dropped to its knees on top of Luka’s torso, pressed the boy into the ground and plowed the dirt with him, crashing into crates and troughs and hay bales until a physician who had come all the way from Gorchevo climbed into the barn and lodged an ax in the dome of the bull’s back. Luka had a concussion and three broken ribs. A few days later, his father also broke Luka’s left arm in a fit of rage.

After that, Luka bought an old gusla off a gypsy peddler, and went into the fields to shepherd for a few of the local families who needed hired hands. A lot of this is probably tainted by hindsight, but people say that he was too easy in his manner. His voice was too soft, his mind too eased by quiet evenings playing his new gusla. He was too eager to strip naked and bathe with other young men in the mountain lake above the pasture—although no one will ever accuse the other young men of his generation of being too eager to bathe with him. This may be because the young men of Luka’s generation are the fathers of the men telling these stories.

All this aside, Luka became renowned for sitting under the summer trees and composing love songs. I have heard, from more than one source, that Luka was unnaturally good at this, even though he never seemed to be in love himself, and even though his musical talent never quite caught up to his prowess as a lyricist. Though there are those who say that any man who heard Luka play the gusla, even in wordless melody, was immediately moved to tears. One spring—and this, like so much of what is said about someone in admiration, is probably a lie—a wolf came to hunt in the pasture, and Luka, instead of throwing rocks or calling for his father’s dog, subdued it with music.

When I think of Luka in his youth, I sometimes picture a thin, pale boy with large eyes and lips, the kind of boy you might see sitting with his feet bare and his arms around a lamb in a pastoral painting. It is easy to see him this way when you hear the villagers talk about his songs, about the gravity and maturity of his music. In this early image, he is a beloved son of Galina. Maybe it is easier for them to remember him as this mild boy instead of the enraged youth he must have been, the adolescent consumed with the smallness of his life, and then, later on, the man in the red apron who beat a deaf-mute bride.

This much is certain: Luka was angry enough, determined enough, good enough to leave Galina at sixteen and make his way to the river port of Sarobor in the hope of becoming a guslar.

At that time, the Sarobor guslars were a group of young men from all over the neighboring provinces, who had found one another through some small miracle, and who would converge nightly on the banks of the Grava to sing folk songs. Luka had first heard about them from his mother, who had described them as artists, philosophers, lovers of music, and for years Luka had been convincing himself to join them. Without a word of objection from his father—who had hardly uttered a word of any sort to him since the incident with the bull—Luka crossed three hundred miles on foot to reach them. He had a vision of men with serious faces sitting around a pier with their feet in the bright water below, singing about love and famine and the long, sad passage of their fathers’ fathers, who knew a lot, but not enough to cheat Death, that black-hearted villain who treats all men equally. It was, Luka believed, the only kind of life for him, the life that would certainly lead him farther, perhaps even to the City itself.

In his first week in Sarobor, while renting a thin-ceilinged room above a whorehouse on the eastern side of town, Luka learned that there was a strictly observed hierarchy to all musical proceedings on the river. The musicians did not assemble, as he had supposed, in a convivial atmosphere to share and trade songs; nor were they proper guslars. Instead of solitary men playing the one-stringed fiddle he had come to know and love, he found two considerably sized warring factions—one that favored the brass sound that had come out of the West, and one that retained the frantic string arrangements that harkened back to Ottoman times. Each group, often twenty strong, would assemble nightly on opposite sides of the river and begin to play; then, as the evening progressed, and revelers, drunk with perfume and the moist heat of the river, began to fill the street, each band would take a little bit of the bridge. Slowly, song by song, dance by dance, the musicians would advance along the wide cobbled arch, each band’s progress depending solely upon the size of its audience, the grace of those who had been moved to dance, the enthusiasm of the passersby who stopped to join in the chorus. The songs were not, as Luka had hoped, serious meditations on the fickle nature of love and the difficulties of life under the sultan; instead, they were drinking songs, songs of indulgent levity; songs like “There Goes Our Last Child,” and “Now That the Storm Has Passed (Should We Rebuild the Village?).”

As to the musicians themselves, they were more complicated than Luka had originally expected, a little more ragtag, disorganized, a little more disheveled and drunk than he had imagined. They were wanderers, mostly, and had a fast turnover rate because every six months or so someone would fall in love and get married, one would die of syphilis or tuberculosis, and at least one would be arrested for some minor offense and hanged in the town square as an example to the others.

As Luka became better acquainted with them—crowding in with the string section, night after night, his gusla silent in his hands except for the two or three times he picked up a few bars of some song—he came to know the regulars, the men who had lingered on the bridge for years. There was a fellow who played the goblet drum, a Turk with pomade-glossed hair who was known for being a sensation among rich young ladies. There was also a straw-haired kid whose name no one could ever get right, and whose tongue had been cut out as a result of some mysterious transgression, but who kept good time with a tambourine. On accordion: Grickalica Brki?, whose teeth, whenever a buxom woman stopped to hear his playing, would begin to chatter uncontrollably, and thus made for interesting accompaniment. The fiddler was a man known only as “the Monk.” Some say this was because he had left the Benedictine order because God’s calling for him was in music, not in silence. In reality, however, this nickname was derived from the Monk’s highly unusual haircut: the man was thirty, but bald from forehead to ears, eyebrows included, the result of a disastrous drunken night when he had suggested that, because the fire would not hold in the hearth, someone go up and pour oil down the chimney while he himself lit the wood below.

None of them knew much about history or art. None of them had much ambition for moving on to better things. None of them cared much for the traditional gusla, or its use in epic poetry; but they thought it added an interesting sound to their amateur-crowded group. Luka played on with them for months, at the Monk’s elbow, until they came to understand that he wasn’t going anywhere; until he was a welcome and unequivocal constant among those core players; a drinking companion, a confidant, a recognized wordsmith. People would go on to recite his songs in their homes, hum them in the marketplace, and throw coins into his hat so they could hear them again.

And all the while, carrying on like this, Luka did not give up his devotion to the gusla, or his desire to move on to a position that would afford him more distinguished notoriety. After a certain point, he was forced to admit to himself that the people of Sarobor were beginning to tire of the sad songs that were his passion, but he did not abandon the belief that demand for those songs would exist elsewhere. Lazy afternoons, when the other musicians slept in tavern basements, in the shade of porch screens or in the pale arms of women whose names they did not know, Luka made a project of seeking out real guslars. They were thin-boned old men who had long since stopped playing, and who sent him away from their doors again and again. But he kept coming back, and eventually they relented. After a few glasses of rakija, pulled back to some earlier time by the sound of the river and the sight of the merchants’ ships arriving along the green curve of the bank, the old men would reach for Luka’s gusla and begin to play.

He immersed himself in the movement of their hands, the soft thump of their feet, the throbbing wail of their voices winding through tales remembered or invented. The more time he spent in their company, the more certain he was that this was how he wanted to live and die; the more they praised his growing skill, the more he was able to stand himself, tolerate what he saw as the wretchedness of his roots, accept the disparity between the love he voiced in his songs and the lack of desire he felt for women, from the veiled girls who smiled at him on the bridge to the whores who tried to push themselves over his knees while he sat at the tavern in the company of the other musicians.

There was never enough money to move on, so he stayed in Sarobor; first for one year, then two, then three, playing at weddings, composing serenades, fighting for room on the bridge.

About ten years into his life as a guslar, he met the woman who would destroy his life. She was the daughter of the prosperous Turkish silk merchant, Hassan Effendi, a boisterous, clever, and charming girl named Amana, who was already somewhat of a legend in the town, having vowed, at the age of ten, to remain a virgin forever, and to spend her life studying music and poetry, and painting canvases (which supposedly weren’t particularly good, but were nevertheless valued on principle). A great deal was known about her life, mostly because Hassan Effendi was a notorious bellyacher, and on his daily visit to the teahouse would divulge—and probably embellish—the details of whatever new obstinacy Amana had adopted. As a result, she was often the subject of broader market gossip, renowned for her arrogance, wit, and charm; for the many delicacies to which she was prone; for the determination and inventiveness with which she threatened suicide every other week, whenever her father suggested a new suitor; for sneaking, unveiled, out of her father’s house to join in the revelries on the bridge in a practiced routine obvious to everyone but Hassan Effendi.

Luka had seen her here and there, from a distance—recognized her as the bright-eyed girl with the braid and the disarming smile—but he would never have exchanged words with her if she had not grown curious about his instrument. One evening, after the band had rounded out a lively rendition of “Is That Your Blood?” Luka looked up from his gusla to see her standing over him, one hand on her hip, the other holding a gold coin over the old hat at his feet.

“What do they call that, boy?” she said loudly, though she already knew, and touched the bottom of his fiddle with a sandaled foot.

“This is a gusla,” he said, and found himself grinning.

“Poor little fiddle,” said Amana, in a voice that made the people who had gotten up to give him money stop and hover behind her. “It has only one string.”

Luka said: “They might offer me a bigger fiddle tomorrow, but still I would not give up my one string.”

“Why? What can it do?”

For a moment, Luka felt his face burn. Then he said: “Fifty strings sing one song, but this single string knows a thousand stories.”

Then Amana dropped the coin into his hat, and without moving from his side she said: “Well, play me one, guslar.”

Luka took up his bow and obliged, and for the ten minutes he played alone, silence fell over the bridge. I’m told he played “The Hangman’s Daughter,” but Luka himself could never remember what he played; for years afterward, he would recall only the way the string sent a grating pulse through his chest, the strange sound of his own voice, the outline of Amana’s unmoving hand on her hip.

People began to talk: Luka and Amana sitting on the bridge together at daybreak, Luka and Amana at the tavern with their heads bent close over a piece of paper.

That they loved each other was certain. The nature of that love, however, was not as simple as people supposed. Luka had found someone who admired his music, and wanted to hear every song he could play; someone who knew about poetry and the art of conversation, about finer things he had long since given up on trying to address with the other musicians. Amana found the intellectual weight behind Luka’s aspirations attractive, the idea of the journey he had already made—and the journey he hoped to make still—incredible. The problem was, however, that she had long since decided she wanted nothing to do with men; and he did not make the effort to convince her otherwise, because he had long since realized he wanted nothing to do with women. Amana was determined to die a virgin; Luka had come to terms, by then, with what it meant to find himself aroused by the sight of the town youths diving into the river on summer days. Taking the final step would mean summoning failure to himself in a world that had already thrown too much against him; one hopes, however, that despite what would happen later with the tiger’s wife, that Luka did find some happiness during the days and nights of which he never spoke.

For a year, his friendship with Amana grew on song and philosophical debate, on stories and pointless arguments about poetry and history. Balmy evenings found them on the bridge together, standing apart from the old bands: Luka singing with the fiddle against his belly, and, sitting behind him on a broken-backed chair, Amana with her chin on his shoulder, lending her voice to his songs, deepening them. On their own, neither was a spectacular singer; but together their voices blended into a low and surprising sadness, a twang that pulled even the most optimistic crowds away from the foot-stomping revelry of the traditional bridge bands.

Luka, with Amana’s help, was well on his way to the life he had designed for himself so many years ago. He had begun to make up his own songs—sometimes even spontaneously, right there on the bridge—and he had begun to form a following among the younger guslars. He still lacked the means, however, to move to the City; and, even if he had been better funded, he was reluctant to leave Amana behind, and he could not ask for her hand without having something to offer in return. Around this time, there appeared in Sarobor a soft-spoken, bearded scholar named Vuk, who, according to the town gossips, had been traveling from town to town for almost ten years, listening to songs and stories and writing them down.

“He is a thief of music,” said those on the bridge who refused to speak to him. “If he comes to you, you send him to hell.”

The scholar cornered Luka in the tavern one night and explained to him about the School of Music that had recently been founded in the City. In an effort to gain more popularity and support, the School had begun a collaborative program with the government: any traditional musician from a municipality outside the City would be awarded a small fee for any song he consented to submit for a recording. Luka, the scholar informed him, was the man he wanted to sing for Sarobor; Luka and that charming young lady of his, even though it was not traditional for women to participate in gusla playing.

Luka had seen his first radio earlier that spring; this, combined with his encounter in the tavern, was enough to make him dream. He couldn’t see how he would get them there, himself and Amana—how a journey like that could be justified at all. The solution came one week later, in the form of a letter from Luka’s younger sister. She was writing on the pretense of informing him of her recent marriage to a man whose father owned a car factory in Berlin. Her actual goal, however, was to break the news of their mother’s death to him gently, and to negotiate his conditional return to Galina at the behest of his father, who had found himself alone and helpless. She wrote to him with news of his only remaining brother, the firstborn: he had died of pneumonia the previous winter. Two of the four who had gone into the army had died long ago, in the service of the kaiser; the second-youngest had just been killed in a fight over a woman outside a tavern two towns over. No one knew the whereabouts of the fifth brother, but some people said that he had fallen in love with a gypsy, and had gone to France with her many years ago. His father, she said, was on the brink of death. And now, despite the unfortunate incident with the bull, despite what may or may not have been said about Luka over the years, it was up to him to carry on the family name and business. With a woman, his sister made sure to write, of fine character, who will bear you many children.

Luka, who had for so long resisted his past, suddenly found himself contemplating a strategic return to Galina. His father was old, grief-stricken. He knew that there would be no love between them upon his return; but he also knew that his father could not live long, and after that, the inheritance that would have otherwise been split between six brothers would fall to Luka alone. If he sacrificed two years now—spent them perfecting his songs in Galina while he waited for the old man to die—he could make his future with the earnings of the man who had made him wretched, use Korčul’s own fortune. The closeness of that possibility, the reality of it, made it fragile.

For a few days, he hardly spoke to anyone. Then, just after nightfall, he climbed the lattice up to Amana’s room and asked for her hand.

“Well, I knew you were mad,” she said, sitting up in bed. “But I didn’t realize you were a fool.”

Then he explained it all to her, explained about his father and his fortune, and about the radio in the City, waiting for their songs—songs they would sing together, because he could not see himself pursuing this without her. And when he was finished, he said: “Amana, we’ve been good friends all these years.” He had been kneeling by her bed. He pushed himself up and sat down on the covers beside her. “Your father will charge you, one way or another, to marry somebody someday—wouldn’t you rather it be me than some stranger who will force himself on you? I promise not to touch you, and to love you as I love you now until the day I die. No other man who comes into this room asking for you will ever make that promise knowing with certainty that it will be kept.”

It was the first time he had voiced anything close to a confession of himself, and even though she had known for a long time, Amana put a hand out and touched his face.

They began to plan their marriage. Amana agreed to confine herself to the house and avoid jeopardizing their situation; and for two months Luka made himself presentable every night and appeared at her house and ate and drank with Hassan Effendi, and the two of them smoked narghile and played music until the sun came up. Hassan Effendi, who deduced rather quickly that an offer of marriage would soon be at hand, resigned himself to the idea of having an enterprising butcher for a son-in-law rather than an obstinate virgin for a daughter, and with patience let Luka woo him for as long as necessary to secure a socially appropriate proposal.

If Luka had been a slightly better judge of character—if he had realized that Hassan Effendi was sold at a month and a half, and asked for Amana’s hand almost immediately—this story might have turned out quite differently. Instead, while the two of them were playing at social graces, strumming away on Hassan Effendi’s balcony and listening to each other’s opinions, they left Amana entirely out of the proceedings, left her to her own devices, left her to wait. And while she was waiting, contemplating her future as Luka’s wife, anticipating their eventual move to the City, it began to occur to her that the life of virginal solitude she had so publicly laid claim to on so many occasions had been secured. It was done. She no longer had to fear, as she had feared all her days, the presence of a domineering, oafish husband, the ordeal of the wedding night, the drudgery of marriage, the gruesome prospect of childbirth. A single decision, and those possibilities had vanished. Her life lay before her without them, and at first she was glad. But then she began to think about what a long life it was, and how the way she pictured herself lay in the presence of those fears, in the conflict they provided; it occurred to her that the struggle had not been nearly as great as the struggle for which she had steeled herself, and that, above all, with it had gone that other possibility, the unnamed one: the possibility of changing her mind. It suddenly seemed to her that her whole life had come and gone.

Two weeks before the wedding, Amana fell into bed with a fever. News concerning the severity of her illness spread around town. People said that her curtains could not be opened, that she clutched at her bedclothes, sweating and raving, that the mere act of nodding her head caused her excruciating pain.

Luka was not a friend, not a family member, not yet even an official fiancé. He listened for news of her welfare in the market and on the bridge, and this was how he found out that physician after physician came and went from Hassan Effendi’s house, and that his girl was still no better. From Hassan Effendi, he was able to extract only hopeful news—she’s very well, it is a minor autumnal cough, she will get better soon enough—but on street corners he heard that the situation had become desperate, and that Khasim Aga, the herbalist, had written to a physician who lived across the kingdom, and who was known as something of a miracle worker.

No one in town saw the miracle worker arrive; no one would have been able to recognize him in the street. It was well known that for three days and three nights, the miracle worker stood over Amana’s bed, holding her wrist, wiping her brow. It was also soon evident that this miracle worker, with one or two earnest glances, and hands that unsteadily ran the cold sponge down her neck, obliterated all of Amana’s notions of virginity and scholastic isolation, all her lifelong plans, her devotion to music and to Luka. As soon as she had begun to recover, she was sneaking out of her bedroom to meet with the physician who had saved her, just as she had snuck out to play with the guslars—except now, she was sneaking around abandoned mills and barn lofts with dots of perfume on her wrists and navel.

Relieved at the news that she had recovered, still not permitted to visit her sickbed, Luka did not suspect a thing. He did not know that when Hassan Effendi told Amana he had consented for her to be wed to Luka, she kissed her father’s hands and then went up to her bedroom to hang herself with the curtains. Luka did not know that the story might have ended there had the tiger’s wife not come in at the right moment, and found her sister sprawled out on the bed, weeping with frustration at not being able to get the curtain thin enough to wrap around her neck for the jump. He would never know that it was the tiger’s wife who held Amana’s head on her knees until she came up with a better plan; that the tiger’s wife carried Amana’s letter of desperation to the physician the following morning. The tiger’s wife was the lookout when Amana climbed down the lattice the following night; she was there, in Amana’s bedroom, to give their mother Amana’s letter of farewell the morning of the wedding.

Hassan Effendi, standing over the two remaining women in his life, found himself saying words he never would have imagined Amana putting him in a position to say: “God damn her, the whore has disgraced me.” And right then and there, with his wife weeping profusely over his decision, he took the opportunity to rid himself of the child he thought he would be saddled with forever by dressing the deaf-mute girl in her sister’s wedding clothes and putting her in Amana’s place.

And so Luka, who spent the wedding in a contemplative daze, imagining his future with Amana in the City, did not know that all his plans for his father’s fortune, all the songs he was hoping to sing, all the many freedoms he saw opening up before him, were being dashed to hell even as he was taking his vows.

He did not realize Hassan Effendi’s deceit until he lifted the veil in the ceremonial gesture of seeing his wife for the first time and found himself looking, with almost profane stupidity, into the face of a stranger. Afterward, while the men were toasting the bridegroom, all Hassan Effendi had to say was, “Even so, she’s yours, as prescribed by custom. She is the sister of your betrothed, and I’ve the right to demand that you take her. You will disgrace yourself to refuse her now.” And so Luka found himself married to a deaf-mute child of thirteen, who looked at him with big, fearful eyes, and smiled absently every so often in his direction at the feast while her mother was crying and kissing her forehead.

That night, he looked at her in her terrified nakedness, and made her face away from him while he took off his clothes, expectation hanging between them. The following day, he took her back to Galina in the wagon, a child bride for the butcher’s son. No laughter, no friendship, no hope for the future. The ride lasted five days, and on the second day he realized that, though he had probably heard it at one time or another, he had forgotten her name.

“What do they call you?” he said to her. When she did not respond, he took her hand and shook it a little. “Your name—what is your name?” But she only smiled.

To make matters worse, the house—which Luka remembered as a place teeming with loud bodies, running feet, crying children, two frying pans on the stove at all times—was silent. Luka’s father, worn by old age into a crooked-backed cripple, sat alone by a low fire. Without greeting, he looked at the new bride as she stepped over the threshold and said to his only remaining son, “Couldn’t you do any better than some bitch of Mohammed?” Luka did not have the strength to tell his father, with relish, that he had meant better, that somehow he would remedy everything once Korčul was gone.

With this distant hope growing in him again, Luka resigned himself to his temporary life. Even without Amana, he would find a plan for the gusla, for his songs, for the School of Music. In the meantime, he had only the deaf-mute girl, an old incontinent man, the ceaseless death screams of the sheep in the smokehouse, and his own rage at the unfairness of it all.

What surprised him most was how quickly he came to tolerate his wife. She had big eyes and a quiet gait, and sometimes when he looked at her he saw Amana, even called her Amana once or twice. She needed some guidance—he had to show her how to warm the stove, where the cistern was, had to take her into the village several times to show her how to do the marketing—but he realized that once she knew how something was done, she took it over herself completely, developed her own routine for doing it. She was everywhere: helping in the smokehouse, washing his clothes, changing his father’s soiled trousers. Without complaining, without uttering a syllable, she carried water from the well and walked the old man down the porch stairs every day for a breath of fresh air. Sometimes it was even pleasant to come home in the evenings, and have someone to smile at him.

Could Luka have left her there, in Galina, with the old man, once he had recovered from the initial shock of what had happened to him? Could he have taken some of his father’s money from the coffer hidden under the baseboards of the house, left for the City on his own, found someone to take Amana’s place? Almost certainly. After the first few times he followed the deaf-mute girl into town to disperse the children who would assemble behind her to make faces and shout the obscenities they had picked up from their parents at her retreating back, he realized that he had worsened matters by bringing her here, that people were beginning to talk. Look at that girl, people were saying, look at the deaf-mute he’s brought home—where did he get her? What is he trying to hide? Their attention drove him to panic, made him more determined to flee than ever; but, in doing so, it also deepened his predicament, pointed out to him the many ways he would have to uncouple his life in order to abandon it again.

Then there was the afternoon he came home to find her with Korčul in the attic: his father, in a gesture masquerading as affection, had brought out his box of war relics, and Luka came upstairs to find the deaf-mute girl sitting cross-legged with the box across her knees while the old man knelt behind her, one hand already on her breast.

“She’s a child!” Luka kept screaming after he had thrown Korčul against the wall. “She’s a child, she’s a child!”

“She’s a child!” Korčul screamed back, grinning wildly. Then he said: “If you don’t start producing sons, I will.”

He could not leave her there, he realized, because, Mohammedan or not, child bride or not, Korčul was going to rape her, if he hadn’t already—force her down while Luka was out of the house—and she would be powerless to stop him.

And so Luka stayed, and the longer he stayed the farther that burning dream seemed; the more insults Korčul flung at him, the more questions people entering the butcher’s shop asked him about his wife, the more he came to see her as the reason he was still there. In those moments, his wife’s silence terrified him. It terrified him because he knew, and knew absolutely, that she could see every thought that passed through his head. She was like an animal, he thought, as silent and begrudging as an owl. And what made it considerably worse was that, despite his belief that it was his right to think whatever he wanted—he had, after all, been cheated, and what did she want from him, this girl, when he had been unfairly crippled by fate?—he found himself wanting to explain it to her, wanting to tell her that none of it was her fault, not the silence, not the marriage, not Korčul’s advances. He wanted to explain, too, that none of it was his fault, either, but he was having a difficult enough time convincing himself.

The day things finally broke, it was high summer, incredibly hot, and Luka hadn’t been able to get away from the heat. She was scrubbing the laundry in a corner of the kitchen, and his father was snoring wetly in one of the many empty bedrooms. Luka had come in to rest for the afternoon, to wait out the worst of the day before heading back to the shop. Plums had ripened in the orchard, and he had brought three inside, was slicing them on the empty table when he turned the radio on; and then, just like that, he recognized the Monk’s nasal twang, an octave higher than it should have been, cutting through the melody of one of Luka’s own songs like some kind of terrible joke. His body seemed to fall away from him.

It was “The Enchantress,” a song he had written with and about Amana, reduced from its slow tempo, intended for the gusla, to a frenzied ode about debauchery. He half expected to wake up moments later and find that he had passed out drunk the night before—but he didn’t, he just sat and sat there on the kitchen chair while the song moved through the verses, and then it was over, and the radio had moved on to something else. His songs had moved on without him, too, moved on to the School of Music.

He looked up to see the girl standing over him, his wet shirt slung across her shoulder like skin.

“Listen,” he said to her, and touched his ear and then the radio. He ran his fingers over the top of the mahogany box. She stood there, smiling at him. In that moment, he was still himself. Then she made a gesture, something like a half shrug, and she leaned forward, took one of the plum slices from under his knife, put it under her tongue, and turned away to go outside. He was up before he knew what he was doing, pushing the table onto her, pinning her facedown under the full weight of it. The sound her body made when she struck the floor stayed in him, and he stood over her and kicked her ribs and head until blood came out of her ears.

Everything about that first time surprised him. His own inexplicable rage, the dull thud of his boot against her body, her soundless, gaping mouth and closed eyes. He realized that he had gone on hitting her far longer than he had intended, because he had been expecting her to cry out in fear or pain. He realized afterward, while he was helping her up, that his curiosity about whether she could even produce sound had just been fulfilled, and, now that it had, there was even more rage than ever: rage at himself, rage at her for looking so surprised and forlorn and subdued when he brought the water in to wash the blood off her face.

He told himself that it would never happen again. But, of course, it did. Something had opened in him, and he could not close it again. It happened the night of his father’s funeral, when it was just Luka and the girl and the house, silence everywhere. He thought, after me, there will be no children, no one left, and rolled on top of her. He would try, he told himself, to fuck her—he would try. But it had been months since he had managed it, and, feeling her under him, small and tense, as still as death, he couldn’t. He couldn’t even hurt her that way. Hitting her didn’t help, either—but it made him feel like he was doing something, interrupting her judgment at the very least. The injustice of it, that judgment he knew was there but couldn’t force out. He couldn’t force her to voice it, and he couldn’t force her to put it away.

Eventually, it was just the fear in her eyes when he walked in, just the way her shoulders shrank back when she was scrubbing the floor and felt his footsteps through the floorboards. The fact that she could see him that way, a side of himself that surprised him. Sometimes he would throw things at her: fruit, plates, a pot of boiling water that hit her at the waist and soaked through her clothes while she panted and her eyes rolled in terror. Once he held her against the wall with his body and slammed his forehead into her face until her blood seeped into his eyes.

People in Galina now, they give a thousand explanations for Luka’s marriage to the tiger’s wife. She was the bastard child of a notorious gambler, some say, who was forced on Luka as payment for a tremendous debt, a shameful secret that followed him back from those years he spent in Turkey. According to others, he purchased her from a thief in Istanbul, a man who sold girls at the souk, where she had stood quietly among the spice sacks and pyramids of fruit until Luka found her.

Whatever Luka’s reason, there is general agreement that the girl’s presence in his life was intended to hide something, because a deaf-mute could not reveal the truth about the assorted vices he was presumed to have during his ten-year absence: his gambling, his whoring, his predilection for men. And perhaps, in some part, that is true; perhaps he had allowed himself to think he had found someone to put between himself and the village, someone whose appearance, if not her disability, would discourage people from making contact while he secluded himself and planned a return to his dream that would never be fulfilled—she would remind them too much of the last war, their fathers’ fears, stories they’d heard of sons lost to the sultan. Never mind, the villagers thought, that he had found a wife who could never demand anything of him, never reproach him for being drunk, never beg for money.

But, in keeping her, Luka had also stumbled into an unwelcome complication. He had underestimated the power of her strangeness, the village’s potential for a fascination with her, and now people were talking more than ever. The secrecy she had been intended to afford him had turned his life into a public spectacle. He could hear them chattering now, gossiping, speculating and flat-out lying about where she’d come from and how he had found her, asking each other about the bruises on her arms, about why Luka and his wife were rarely seen in public together, why she’d yet to bear him a child—every possible answer leading only to further questions, further humiliations. It was worse than the first winter of their marriage, when he had brought her with him to church on Christmas, and the entire congregation had whispered afterward, What does he mean by bringing her here? Worse even than the following Christmas, when he had not, and they said, What does he mean by leaving her at home?

And now they were talking about the smokehouse. In the two days since the tiger was spotted in the village, there were whispers everywhere. What had she been doing, they were asking in doorways, in the smokehouse with that tiger? And what did it mean, they wanted to know, that Luka couldn’t keep her in his bed?

For weeks, he had suspected that the smokehouse was missing meat, but he had second-guessed his own judgment, refusing to believe that she had the audacity to steal from him. And then he had seen the tiger, and the sight of that pork in the big cat’s jaws had stunned him—that little gypsy, he had thought, that Mohammedan bitch, sneaking out and giving his meat to the devil. She was making him look like an idiot.

The night he returned from the hunt, he took her outside and tied her up in the smokehouse. He told himself that he wanted only to punish her, but, while he was eating his supper and getting ready for bed, he understood that some part of him was hoping that the tiger would come for her, that it would come in the night and rip her apart, and in the morning Luka would awake to find nothing.

If you go to Galina now, people will tell you different things about Luka’s disappearance. In one version of the story, the village woodcutter, waking from a dream in which his wife has forgotten to put the pie in the oven and served it to him raw, looks through the window and sees Luka wandering down the road in his nightgown, a white scarf tying his chin to the rest of his head so that the mouth will not fall open in death, his red butcher’s apron slung over one shoulder. In that version, Luka’s face is as loose as a puppet’s, and there is a bright light in his eyes, the light of a journey beginning. The woodcutter stands with the window curtains flung open, his legs stiff with fear and lack of sleep, and he watches the butcher’s slow advance through the snowdrifts that are running across the dead man’s bare feet.

Others will tell you about the baker’s eldest daughter, who, getting up early to warm the ovens, opens the window to let the winter air in to cool her and sees a grounded hawk sitting like something ancient on the fallen snow of her garden. The hawk’s shoulders are dark with blood, and when it hears her open the window it turns and looks at her with yellow eyes. She asks the hawk, “Is all well with you, brother—or not?” and the hawk replies, “Not,” and vanishes.

Whatever the details, the consensus is that there was an immediate awareness of Luka’s death, and an immediate acknowledgment that the tiger’s wife was responsible—but many of the people telling you the story couldn’t have been alive when it happened, and then it becomes clear that they have all been telling each other different stories, too.

No one will ever tell you that four or five days went by before anyone began to suspect a thing. People didn’t like Luka—they didn’t visit his house, and his docility while he stood there, his glasses around his neck in the yawning white space of the butcher’s shop with his hands on the meat, made them universally uncomfortable. The truth is that, even after the baker’s daughter went to buy meat and found the shutters of the butcher’s shop closed and the lights out, it took several days before anyone else tried again, before they began to realize that this winter they would have to do without.

There is the very real possibility that people assumed Luka had gone away—that he was out trapping rabbits for the midwinter feasts, or that he had given up on the village and decided to brave the snowed-in pass and make for the City while the German occupation there was still new. The truth is, the whole situation did not strike anyone as particularly unusual until the deaf-mute girl appeared in town, perhaps two weeks later, with a fresh, bright face, and a smile that suggested something new about her.

My grandfather had spent the morning carrying firewood from the timber pile, and was pounding the snow from the bottoms of his shoes on the doorstep when he saw her coming down the road, wrapped in Luka’s fur coat. It was a cloudless winter afternoon, and villagers were leaning against their doorways. At first, only a few of them saw her, but by the time she reached the square the whole village was peering through doors and windows, watching her as she made her way into the fabric shop. They could see her through the window, hovering there indulgently, pointing to the Turkish silks that hung from the walls and running her hands over them lovingly when the shopkeeper spread them out on the counter for her. A few minutes later, my grandfather saw her cross the square with a parcel of silks under her arm, followed by a small procession of village women, who, while keeping their distance, were still too intrigued to maintain the illusion of nonchalance.

Who came up with that name for her? I can’t say—I have never been able to find out. Until the moment of Luka’s disappearance, she was known as “the deaf-mute girl,” or “the Mohammedan.” Then suddenly, for reasons uncertain to the villagers, Luka was no longer a factor in how they perceived the girl. And even after that first time, even after she wrapped her head in Turkish silk and admired herself in front of the mirror in the fabric shop, when it was clearer than ever that Luka was not coming back, that she had no more fear of him, she still did not become “Luka’s widow.” They called her “the tiger’s wife”—and the name stuck. Her presence in town, smiling, bruiseless, suddenly suggested an exciting and irrevocable possibility for what had happened to Luka, a possibility the people of Galina would cling to even seventy years later.

If things had turned out differently, if that winter’s disasters had fallen in some alternate order—if the baker had not sat up in bed some night and seen, or thought he had seen, the ghost of his mother-in-law standing in the doorway, and buckled under the weight of his own superstitions; if the pies of the cobbler’s aunt had risen properly, putting her in a good mood—the rumors that spread about the tiger’s wife might have been different. Conversation might have been more practical, more generous, and the tiger’s wife might have immediately been regarded as a vila, as something sacred to the entire village. Even without their admission, she was already a protective entity, sanctified by her position between them and the red devil on the hill. But because that winter was the longest anyone could remember, and filled with a thousand small discomforts, a thousand senseless quarrels, a thousand personal shames, the tiger’s wife shouldered the blame for the villagers’ misfortunes.

So their talk about her was constant, careless, and unburdening, and my grandfather, with The Jungle Book in his pocket, listened. They were talking about her in every village corner, on every village doorstep, and he could hear them as he came and went from Mother Vera’s house. Truths, half-truths, utter delusions drifted like shadows into conversations he was not intended to overhear.

“I seen her today,” the Brketi? widow would say, chins shaking, slung like thin necklaces, while my grandfather stood at the counter of the greengrocer’s, waiting for pickling salts.

“The tiger’s wife?”

“I seen her coming down from that house again, alone as you please.”

“She’s driven him away, hasn’t she? Luka’s never coming back.”

“Driven him away! Imagine that. A man like Luka being driven away by a deaf-mute child. Our Luka? I seen Luka eat a ram’s head raw.”

“What then?”

“Well, that’s plain, isn’t it? That tiger’s got him. That tiger’s got him, and now she’s all alone, nobody bothering her, no one but the tiger.”

“I can’t say I’m all that sorry. Not all that sorry, not for Luka.”

“Well, I am. Don’t anyone deserve to be done that way.”

“What way?”

“Well, isn’t it obvious? Isn’t it plain? She’s made a pact with that tiger, hasn’t she? She probably done Luka herself, probably cut off his head in the night, left the body out for the tiger to eat.”

“That little thing? She’s barely bigger than a child.”

“I’m telling you, that’s what happened. That devil give her the strength to do it, and now she’s his wife.”

My grandfather listened without believing everything—with caution, with guarded curiosity, with a premonition that something inferior was going on in those conversations, something that did not include the horizon of his own imagination. He understood that some part of the tiger was, of course, Shere Khan. He understood that, if Shere Khan was a butcher, this tiger had some butcher in him, too. But he had always felt some compassion for Shere Khan to begin with, and this tiger—neither lame nor vengeful—did not come into the village to kill men or cattle. The thing he had met in the smokehouse was massive, slow, hot-breathing—but, to him, it had been a merciful thing, and what had passed between my grandfather and the tiger’s wife had been a shared understanding of something the villagers did not seem to feel. So because they did not know, as he knew, that the tiger was concrete, lonely, different, he did not trust what they said about the tiger’s wife. He did not trust them when they whispered that she had been responsible for Luka’s death, or when they called the tiger devil. And he did not trust them when, a few weeks after her appearance in the fabric shop, they began to talk about how she was changing. Her body, they said, was changing. She was growing bigger, the tiger’s wife, and more frightening, and my grandfather listened in the shops and in the square when they said it was because she was swelling with strength, or anger, and when they decided, that no, it wasn’t her spirit, just her belly, her belly was growing, and they all knew what that meant.

“You don’t think it was an accident do you?” the beautiful Svetlana would say to her friends at the village well. “She saw, that girl, what was coming. And Luka, he never was too clever. Still, that’s what comes to you when you marry one of them Mohammedans from God knows where. Like a gypsy, that girl. Probably strung him up with his own meat hooks, left him there for the tiger.”

“That can’t be true.”

“Well, you believe it or don’t. But I’m telling you, whatever happened to that Luka was no accident. And that baby—that’s no accident, neither.”

“That’s no baby. She’s eating—Luka’s been starving her for years, and now she’s free to eat.”

“Haven’t you seen her? Haven’t you seen her coming into town, so slow, those robes of hers coming up bigger and bigger in the front? That girl’s got a belly out to here, are you blind?”

“There’s no belly.”

“Oh, there’s a belly—and I’ll tell you something else. That belly ain’t Luka’s.”

It never occurred to my grandfather to accept what the others were thinking—that the baby belonged to the tiger. To my grandfather, the baby was incidental. He had no need to guess, as I have guessed, that it was a result of some drunken stupor of Luka’s, or rape by some unnamed villager, and that the baby had been there before the tiger had come to Galina.

However, there was no way to deny that the tiger’s wife was changing. And whatever the source of that transformation, whatever was said about it, my grandfather realized that the only true witness to it was the tiger. The tiger saw the girl as she had seen him: without judgment, fear, foolishness, and somehow the two of them understood each other without exchanging a single sound. My grandfather had inadvertently stumbled onto that understanding that night at the smokehouse, and now he wanted so much to be a part of it. On the simplest possible level, his longing was just about the tiger. He was a boy from a small village in the grip of a terrible winter, and he wanted, wanted, wanted to see the tiger. But there was more to it than that. Sitting at the hearth in Mother Vera’s house, my grandfather drew the shape of the tiger in the ashes, and thought about seeing and knowing—about how everyone knew, without having seen, that Luka was dead, and that the tiger was a devil, and that the girl was carrying the tiger’s baby. He wondered why it didn’t occur to anyone to know other things—to know, as he knew, that the tiger meant them no harm, and that what went on in that house had nothing to do with Luka, or the village, or the baby: nightfall, hours of silence, and then, quiet as a river, the tiger coming down from the hills, dragging with him that sour, heavy smell, snow dewing on his ears and back. And then, for hours by the fireside, comfort and warmth—the girl leaning against his side and combing the burs and tree sap out of the tiger’s fur while the big cat lay, broad-backed and rumbling, red tongue peeling the cold out of his paws.

My grandfather knew this, but he wanted to see it for himself. Now that Luka was gone, there was no reason for him to stay away. So when he saw the tiger’s wife one day as she was walking home from the grocer’s, her arms heavy with tins of jam and dried fruit, he found himself brave enough to grin up at her and pat his own stomach in a pleased and understanding kind of way. He wasn’t sure if he did this in approval of her choice of jams, or because he wanted to let her know he didn’t care about the baby. She had been smiling from the moment she spotted him across the square, and when he stopped to acknowledge her—the first person to do so for what must have been weeks—she piled four of her jam tins into the crook of his arm, and the two of them walked slowly together down the road and through the pasture, past the empty smokehouse and the gate, which was breaking in the winter cold.

At church, the women who made the candles were gossiping together: “She’ll have a time with that baby and only a tiger for a husband. I tell you, it makes my skin crawl. They ought to run her out. She’ll be feeding our children to the tiger next.”

“She’s harmless.”

“Harmless! You ask poor Luka if she’s harmless. He’d tell you how harmless she is—if he could.”

“Well, I’m sure she’d have a thing or two to say about Luka, if she could. Mother of God, I’m glad she’s killed him, if that’s what she’s done. The broken bones he laid on that girl. I hope she fed him to that tiger, nice and slow. Feet first.”

“That’s what I heard. I heard she carved him up, right in his own smokehouse, and then in comes the tiger for dinner, and she feeds him strips of her dead husband like it’s feast day.”

“Good.”

“Well, can’t you see why she did it? She didn’t do it for herself. She did it to protect that baby, didn’t she?”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s the tiger’s baby growing in her. Imagine what would have happened when it came out—that Luka, being the way he is, seeing the tiger’s baby come out of his wife. He’d just kill her, wouldn’t he? Or worse.”

“What do you mean, worse?”

“Well, he’d do like a wolf.”

“Like a wolf how?”

“Don’t you know? A wolf’ll kill another wolf’s pups when he comes up in a pack. Sometimes he’ll even kill the bitch what carries them. Don’t you know anything?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, that’s why she killed him, isn’t it? So he wouldn’t go mad like a wolf and kill her devil-baby when it come out.”

“That makes a lot of sense to me. Her killing him to make room for the tiger. Even so, that Luka was a bastard ten times over. What do you think that baby will look like?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure, and I don’t want to know. I hope they run her out. All my life, I’ve never laid eyes on a devil—fifty years, and I never seen one. I don’t intend to start now. I hope she knows well enough to keep that child in the house, and not bring it out here for my children to look at.”

“I’ll say one thing. I’ll say this: I’m not Vera. I’ll not have my children running around with the devil’s brood.”

Mother Vera had already caught him coming back from the butcher’s house: she had been standing on the porch steps when he came back in the twilight that first time, waiting for him, and as he stole back across the field he saw her and hung his head, expecting a reproach. To his surprise, she did nothing, only looked him over and pulled him into the house. After she got wind of what they were saying about her, she herself packed up a basket of food, pies and jams and pickles, a few cloths and a sprig of rosemary, and she sent my grandfather to take it to the tiger’s wife that same afternoon, in full view of the entire village, while she stood in the doorway and shouted for him to hurry up. My grandfather grinned obligingly at passersby as he braced the basket against his hip, pushing his feet through the snow. Halfway across the field, he heard Mother Vera’s voice behind him say: “What are you looking at, you fools?”

All month, my grandfather carried food and blankets to the tiger’s wife. The winter sat, still and insensate, on the ridges of Galina, and while it clung like this to the world, my grandfather brought her water and firewood, measured the girl’s forehead for a new bonnet Mother Vera was knitting, a task the old woman was performing publicly, defiantly, on the porch so the village could see her, wrapped in six or seven blankets, her hands blue with cold. She would never cross the pasture to greet the tiger’s wife; but every so often, she would give the half-finished bonnet, a snarl of yellow and black yarn, to my grandfather, and he would carry it as gently as you would carry a bird’s nest, cross the road with it and climb the porch stairs and, holding the needles aside, tuck the shining hair of the tiger’s wife under it, and look across to his own house for Mother Vera’s motion of approval.

Because my grandfather was not permitted to linger at the girl’s house after dark, there was still no sign of the tiger. But he hadn’t given up hope. Most afternoons, he would put blankets on the floor by the hearth in the girl’s house, and help her sit down, and then he would take out The Jungle Book. It had taken him a few days to determine that she did not know how to read; at first, he had sat beside her with the book open on his knees, believing that the two of them were reading together in silence. But then he noticed that she would flip impatiently through to the pictures, and he understood. So he began to draw the story of Mowgli and Shere Khan for her instead, mangled, disproportionate figures in the hearth ashes: tiger, panther, bear. He drew Mother Wolf, the suckling cubs, and then the jackal Tabaqui—or, at least, how he envisioned Tabaqui, because Kipling had not drawn him at all, and my grandfather drew something that looked like a squirrel, a strange, big-eared squirrel that hovered watchfully around the den and prey of Shere Khan. He drew the wolf pack and Council Rock, showed her in layers of ash how Baloo taught the man-cub the Law of the Jungle. He drew a frog to explain what Mowgli’s name meant, and the frog he drew looked stupid, but obliging.

He always began and ended with a drawing of Shere Khan, because even his feeble, flat-nosed cat with the stripes that looked like scars made her smile, and every so often the tiger’s wife would reach out and fix his drawing, and my grandfather felt that he was getting closer.

My grandfather sat on a bench by the door of the apothecary’s shop, waiting for Mother Vera’s hand ointment. Two women, the wives of men he didn’t know, stood at the counter, watching the apothecary prepare herbs, and saying: “The priest says if the devil-child come into this town, we’re all done for.”

“Don’t make much difference, having a devil-child, if the devil’s already here.”

“What do you mean?”

“That tiger. I seen him crossing the pasture by moonlight, big as a horse. Wild eyes in that tiger’s head, I’m telling you. Human eyes. Froze me right down to my feet.”

“What were you doing out so late?”

“That doesn’t matter. Point is, that tiger come all the way up to the door of Luka’s house, and then he get up and take off his skin. Leaves it out on the step and goes in to see his pregnant wife.”

“Imagine that.”

“Don’t have to, I seen it.”

“Sure you did. Me, I keep wondering about that baby.”

Then my grandfather said: “I think she’s lovely.”

The women turned to look at him. They had cold-reddened faces and chapped lips, and my grandfather shuffled where he sat on the bench, and said, “The girl. I think she’s lovely.”

Without raising his eyes from his mortar and pestle, the apothecary said: “Nothing is as lovely as a woman with child.”

The two women stood in silence after that, their backs turned toward my grandfather, whose ears were burning. They paid for their herbs in silence, took their time putting on their gloves, and when they were gone, the apothecary’s shop was filled with an unwelcome emptiness that my grandfather had not expected. The ibis in the cage by the counter stood with one leg tucked under the blood-washed skirt of its feathers.

The apothecary was taking balms down from the shelves that lined the back of the shop, unscrewing the lids of tins and jars, mixing white cream in a bowl. Quietly, he said: “Everyone is afraid of Shere Khan.”

“But I haven’t seen Shere Khan in the village—have you?” my grandfather said. The apothecary looked my grandfather over, and then went back to mixing the white cream with a twisted wooden spoon. Then my grandfather said: “Are you afraid?”

“Not of Shere Khan,” said the apothecary.

Crossing the square one morning with a basket of bread for the tiger’s wife, my grandfather heard: “There he goes again.”

“Who?”

“That little boy—Vera’s grandson. There he goes again with a basket for that wretched girl. Look how cowed he looks—he’s shaking in his boots. It’s wrong to send a child into the house of the devil.”

“What I don’t understand is—how can our apothecary just sit by and watch that child go back and forth and back and forth and never say a word? Never say, look you, old woman, keep your child from the devil’s door.”

“That man doesn’t know, that apothecary. He’s not from around here. He doesn’t know to say.”

“It’s his place, though. It’s his place to say. If he doesn’t, who will?”

“I tell you, I’ll have a thing or two to say about what’s what when that child gets eaten.”

“I think you’re wrong about that. That girl wouldn’t harm him.”

“Probably not the way Vera’s carrying on. Do you know this is the third basket she’s sent over this week? What’s she sending?”

“By the grace of God, holy water.”

“Why’s she sending baskets?”

“Maybe she’s feeling sorry.”

“What for? Who feels sorry for a girl carrying the devil’s child?”

“I don’t know. That Vera used to be a midwife. I suppose she feels like she has to help, like that girl shouldn’t carry alone. She’s sending food. I seen the boy packing up that basket when he’s dropped it once or twice, and always there’s bread inside, and soup, too.”

“Imagine that, feeding that girl, when the rest of us have no meat. Feeding the tiger’s wife when there’s been no meat. When that girl’s been saving it all for the tiger.”

My grandfather told the tiger’s wife about the Bandar-log and about Kotick, the white seal—but whenever he reached the end of Shere Khan’s story, he could not bring himself to tell her its real conclusion. He found himself often in the gully of the ravine, with Rama and the water buffaloes stampeding at Mowgli’s command, smudged shadows in the ash, but somehow he could never reveal the way the man-cub claimed the tiger’s life. He could not make himself draw Shere Khan lying in the dust, or Shere Khan’s skin on Council Rock, clewed up, as dead as a sail. Instead, every day it was something different. Sometimes Rama stumbled and gave up, or there was a fight between Shere Khan and the buffaloes, for which he would draw his finger through the ashen figures, sending up powdery clouds, chaos, until he found some way to bring Shere Khan out of the fray alive. Sometimes it never even came to Rama—sometimes Mowgli frightened the lame tiger off with fire, or the wolf pack ambushed and drove him away. Every so often, their fights ended in a stalemate, and they came down to the Water Truce together and Bagheera grew jealous at this false, tentative peace.

Who knows if the tiger’s wife understood my grandfather’s story, or why he was doing her this courtesy. It is easy enough to guess that, after the first few times he changed the story, she realized that he was hiding some deeper tragedy from her. Perhaps her gratitude for the tiger was matched by this new gratitude, the gratitude for help and human companionship, for this persistent and animated man-cub who drew stories in the hearth. Whatever the reason, a few days before the arrival of Dariša the Bear, my grandfather earned from her a little paper bag tied with string, hardly big enough to be a button bag. When he opened it in the darkness of his own house later that night, his fingers felt emptiness, emptiness, and then short, coarse, rusty hairs that scraped that distant, living smell of the smokehouse into his fingers.