The Tiger's Wife

ON THE WAY BACK FROM ZDREVKOV, I STOPPED AT KOLAC for the children’s candy, intercepted the cashier of the gas station convenience store just as she was closing up for the evening. I had no bills left, and I grappled with her for twenty minutes, finally persuading her by paying double the amount in our currency to cover the cost of her having to go to the money exchange in the morning. She helped me load two boxes of local chocolate into the car and then drove away in a little run-down hatchback that roared out a line of smoke as she pulled onto the road.

There was a pay phone by the deserted gas pump, and I used my last four coins to call my grandma. The blue bag was in my backpack, folded in half. The mortuary cold of it had stunned me, and I hadn’t touched it since Zdrevkov.

My grandma had been making funeral arrangements all day, and when she asked me if I was ready to come home, I told her about Zdrevkov, about going to the veterans’ clinic, about how hospitable and consoling they had been. She listened to me in silence, and I realized the news of this journey was as incomprehensible for her as the idea of my grandfather’s death had been to me, all of it just words on a bad line. The fact that Zdrevkov had been within driving distance seemed to comfort her, reaffirm in some way that he had been coming to see me after all. She could forgive a misunderstanding, but not an outright lie. Driving off the peninsula, I had been thinking about the deathless man, how my grandfather could have heard about the boys who had stepped on the land mine. The veterans’ village, stragglers clinging to life after the dead had gone away. I didn’t mention any of this to her.

“Were they disappointed?” she said. “Were they hoping no one would come by to collect his things?” She had been envisioning a despicable scenario in which I walked into the hospital to find my grandfather’s belongings had been distributed among the staff, his hat on the head of an assistant janitor, his watch on the receptionist’s wrist.

“They’re very busy there,” I said. “They apologized for the mix-up.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her what kind of place it was, that we had been lucky to have them find us at all, lucky he hadn’t ended up on that sea-facing slope behind the clinic. “Would you like me to tell you what’s in the bag?”

There was a long silence. The phone clicked. My grandma finally said, “You opened it?”

“Not yet.”

“And don’t,” she told me. “Don’t you dare. How can you even think it?” She started in about the forty days again, about unwittingly interrupting the progress of the soul. How the bag was a blessing, an untouched blessing, and what the hell was I thinking? She was shouting by the time she said: “What else do I have left to pay my respects with, Natalia? When I didn’t know he was sick? And you didn’t say anything when you knew?”

The phone beeped twice, and then the line went dead. My pager rang almost immediately, and it continued to ring while I drove back to Brejevina, but I had no money left, and the afternoon was fading into evening. She gave up eventually, my grandma, and I drove with all four windows down, the draft keeping me awake.

By the time I got back to the monastery, the gate was closed. I could see the low sun mirrored in the clerestory windows from the road, but the garden was empty. All along the boardwalk, the shops were dark and shuttered, the postcard stands and trays of snorkeling gear crammed behind iron screens. Some hundred yards later, I came to the corner canal, and here Brejevina’s townspeople and tourists were standing in animated, sunburned throngs, smoking, leaning against cars, making their way slowly between the eucalyptus trees to the vineyard fence. I rolled the car into the ditch and left it there, went up the slope with my backpack in my arms, the bag still inside. There was a hot stillness over the sea, and it had crawled onto the land and stilled everything, even the vineyard. From the gate, I could see the diggers, deeper among the vines than they had been that morning. Duré was there with his pot-handle ears, standing like a scarecrow, back bent, hips thrown out. The heavyset man from that morning was there, too, drinking a can of cola, his neck reddened by the sun. The boys from that morning were sitting against a dirt-filled wheelbarrow among the vines; there was no sign of the young woman, or the little girl.

Fra Antun saw me from the vineyard gate, opened it without a word. I apologized, told him about the traffic and the candy, but I’m sure he could tell I was lying. He was sweating under his cassock, his glasses fogged up and his hair curling in thin wisps away from his neck.

From the hill, I could see the sun cutting an unhurried line through the water, the ferry returning from the islands, and the shaded back of Barba Ivan’s place. People were ranged along the vineyard fence all the way down into the overgrowth behind the house. Nada stood on the downstairs balcony, smoking with about six or seven other women, widows hunched like birds in their black dresses and a few middle-aged housewives in fish-splashed towels who had just come up from the beach. Nada had set food out on a long rectangular table under the olive tree, and every few minutes she would lower a tray down to the people crowding the fence.

Zóra stood by an oil-drum fire behind the diggers, frowning at something on the bottom of her shoe. When she straightened up and saw me, she gave me a look formerly reserved for Ironglove and the records administrator who worked at the University registrar’s office. Armed with disinfectants, several liters of water, and some knowledge of what was to come, she was there to salvage the community’s faith in us by forestalling a medical disaster. She did not want my help.

Out among the vines, Duré was bending over something with a damp cloth, wiping it down slowly from end to end, making a visible effort not to move it around too much. It was a suitcase of some kind, an old-fashioned valise, patent leather cracked, handles frayed gray. This, I realized, was why Duré had been confident that the body would eventually make an appearance, why he had been willing to overlook the reality of dogs and floods: he had safeguarded the cousin—whom I had previously imagined to be the occupant of a shallow grave—by stuffing him into a suitcase. Duré was wiping the sides down slowly, with great care, enormous relief at having recovered the case evident in his face. Twelve years of accounting for his inability to return the body, his negligence in leaving a family member behind, loyalty suspect, always defending himself from the conclusions they must have been drawing when he explained himself—had he abandoned a dying man? Killed him and disposed of the body? And the illness itself, how his thoughts must have turned straight to the body when his wife and children began falling ill, one by one; how he must have circled around his own guilt, hinted at it while he searched for cures from the village crone, until the old woman finally caught on and told him what he wanted to hear, pointed to his recklessness and irresponsibility with the body, absolved him by confirming that the burden was his.

The evening began with a blessing. This had been scrawled on a piece of neon-green paper in handwriting that was presumably illegible; Duré read it aloud, slowly, stumbling over the words, over the name of the Father and of the Son, and over some invocation that mystified him so thoroughly he was forced to summon help from some of the other diggers. While they tried in vain to decipher their guidelines, I imagined the old woman who had sent them here, alone in a small, cold house high above Duré’s village, as milky-eyed and supple-limbed as a toad, devoting every ounce of strength to composing this blessing she knew by heart, but had never written down. Her notes urged the diggers to wail, but their hesitation made their efforts seem halfhearted. Shawled and bent, the old woman would have given the process dignity, produced a sound long and hollow and endless, a sound that would have dispersed the audience along the vineyard fence. Instead, the discordant howl of the diggers roused the onlookers into a steady chorus of “wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind” that started first among the most inebriated of the men, but pretty soon spread up and down the line.

Undaunted, the heavyset man turned away from the fire and shouted “Motherfuck you!” to everyone.

“Stop fucking around,” Duré said to him, and lost his place on the page. “That’s not part of this,” he said, turning to Fra Antun, “should I start over?”

“I really don’t know,” the monk said.

Fra Antun had incense, and he was swinging it back and forth helplessly over the valise while Duré read on, and the diggers coughed and crossed themselves. There was still no sign of the little girl.

The heat of the day, compounded by my early morning in the vineyard, had caught up to me. I felt I’d waited years for the body to be found, though I’d only heard about it that morning—somehow being in Zdrevkov had changed everything, and I didn’t know what I was waiting for anymore. My backpack was on my knees, my grandfather’s belongings folded up inside. I wondered what they would look like without him: his watch, his wallet, his hat reduced by his absence to objects you could find at a flea market, in somebody’s attic.

The opening of the valise was preceded by a baptism with holy water from one of the diggers’ herbed bottles. Fra Antun sprinkled it himself, and then Duré tried the zipper—not surprisingly, after more than a decade underground, the zipper did not budge. In the end, they agreed to cut the suitcase open, and someone ran for a kitchen knife from the house, which Nada handed over from the balcony. The diggers were deliberating over where to make the incision. Total silence from the spectators for Duré’s backswing and then the knife went in. A strained creak, followed almost immediately by the stench of decay. The body groaned. The sound, straining like a violin, stretched between the fire and the fence. Someone behind me called for God. Arms swung into action; up and down the fence, people were crossing themselves.

Zóra, meanwhile, had been standing by all this time, watching the proceedings, her whole body tensed up like piano wire. I would later find out that, before things got under way, she had asked Duré if he really expected to find a heart in the valise, and he’d said: “What do you think I am, some sort of idiot?” to which Zóra—by no small miracle—did not reply. But now that groans from the valise had shaken the entire town into paroxysmal supplication, she couldn’t restrain herself any longer. “That’s just the gases depressurizing,” she said, loudly and to no one in particular.

But the diggers were undeterred. More chanting and wailing, Fra Antun refusing to touch the herbed bottle, renouncing their holy water but still swinging that incense patiently over the suitcase, the pot catching the light of the falling sun. Zóra waited for another opportunity to offer her opinion, but minutes went by and none came. She drew back to my side of the vineyard, came up the slope dusting her hands against her coat, and stood over me. I pushed myself across the rock ledge to make room for her.

“I have a message for you,” she said. She handed me her coat, and then took off her sweater. She laid the sweater out on the ground beside me and sat down on it, took her coat back across her knees. “Your grandma says: you open the bag, you’d better not bother coming home.” Zóra said this without looking at me. Her throat was beaded with sweat from standing too close to the fire. “She was emphatic on that point.”

Zóra had begun wearing a new perfume two months ago, and I hadn’t been able to get used to the smell of it yet—but, sitting there with the smoke in her hair and the day coming out of her skin, the smell of alcohol and soap and cigarettes, her mother’s detergent in the starchy smell of her coat, the iron in her earrings tinged by sweat, she came back to me completely. Everything I had expected her to say she let fall between us, and I couldn’t remember the answers I had been preparing.

Duré had moistened a clean rag with water from the herbed bottle and was taking the cousin out of the suitcase, bone by bone, rubbing the long yellowed blades of the legs gently with the cloth, laying them down on a clean sheet on the ground. The other diggers hovered over him, smoking, their backs to the fence. They had closed off the ritual, speaking quietly, with smaller gestures, either following the directions of their village crone or owing to the animated reaction of the onlookers—who, having guessed that the liveliest portion of the proceedings had come and gone, were beginning to lose interest anyway.

“What would you do?” I said.

“That depends,” said Zóra. “What would your grandfather say?”

“He’d tell me to humor my grandma, not to open the bag.” After a while, I said: “And he’d tell you to testify.”

“We’ll never get back by Saturday,” Zóra told me. “But you know that.” She took my hand and held it on her knee, and didn’t say anything.

The wet rag was passing from hand to hand, and they were squeezing the water out of it onto the bones, the cracked dome of the skull, wiping down the empty sockets and the crooked lines between the teeth. The spinal column was materializing on the sheet, the vertebral discs like toys. So many hands in the suitcase it was hard to tell who was removing what, but someone was meticulous and organized, sorting the pieces out on the sheet, joints here, fingers there, even though the whole thing would be folded up into itself later. Then they were breaking the thighbones, sawing through them with a cleaver so that the body could not walk in death to bring sickness to the living, and Duré was rolling up the rag, winding it tight over his fist and calling it the heart—and I felt stupid for not considering this possibility, the metaphorical heart, and for doubting the old crone, wherever she was.

Silence while Duré moistened the rag again, three splashes of water for the newly baptized heart, the clenched wad of it tight and heavy in his fist. The heavyset man brought out a small brass pot, and Duré lowered the rag into it carefully, poured oil on it and set it on fire, and for a long time the little brass pot stood on the ground with the family leaning forward to look at it, and all I could think about while we were waiting for it to end was the deathless man and his coffee cup.

They were adding water to the brass pot, which was smoking now, putting it over the oil-drum coals, and Duré baptized the fire and the bones with what was left of the water and then tossed the bottle aside. All along the fence, the onlookers were beginning to dissipate, buckling under the weight of their expectations. A couple of boys were kicking a soccer ball along the vineyard fence.

Then the water was boiling, and Duré took the pot off the fire, and the men began passing it around quietly, without emotion, steadfast drinkers all, trying not to spill the ash-water. Some of the men removed their hats as they did this; some didn’t bother to put out their cigarettes. Fra Antun carried his incense over to us and stood there, watching the slow progression of the brass pot, and the faces of the men who had already had their share of the heart.

“Where’s the little girl?” I asked him.

“Inside,” said Fra Antun, “sleeping. They had her out here with a fever this afternoon, my mother threatened to call the police if they tried to bring her back out again.”

It was getting dark now. The sun had dipped below the side of the peninsula, and the sky in the west was draining quickly into the water. While we watched, one of the boys from the burial party put on his hat and went by us quickly. Zóra was already holding out an offering of water and disinfectant, but he pushed past her and went through the gate at the end of the vineyard. And with him, it was over, the tight secrecy of the circle around the valise had unraveled. One of the men wiped his mouth and laughed about something.

“What now?” Zóra said.

“Now comes the vigil,” Fra Antun told her.

“Where’s that kid going?” she said.

“To get someone from outside the family to bury the ashes on the hill.”

“Why doesn’t he do it himself?”

“Family member,” Fra Antun said. “He can’t.”

“What about you?”

“Well, I won’t.” Peering down at us from the underside of his glasses, he looked like an enormous dragonfly. “He’ll have a hard time getting anyone to go up to the crossroads after a body’s come up.”

“The crossroads?”

“For our mora,” said Fra Antun with a smile. “The spirit who comes to gather the dead.”

I was saying, “I’ll do it,” before my mind had fully come around what he might mean.

“Don’t be stupid,” Zóra said, looking at me. Fra Antun was biting his nails, letting the two of us sort it out ourselves.

I said: “Tell Duré and the family I’ll go to the crossroads on their behalf if they send the mother and the kids down to the clinic in the morning.”