The Tiger's Wife

WHILE THE VILLAGERS OF GALINA ARE RELUCTANT TO TALK about the tiger and his wife, they will never hesitate to tell you stories of one of the lateral participants in their story.

Ask someone from Galina about Dariša the Bear, and the conversation will begin with a story that isn’t true: Dariša was raised by bears—or, he ate only bears. In some versions, he had spent twenty years hunting a great black bruin that had eluded other hunters from time out of mind, even Vuk Sivić, who had killed the fabled wolf of Kolovac. In the end, the advocates of that narrative say, the bear grew so weary of Dariša’s pursuit that it came to his camp in the night and lay down to die, and Dariša talked to it while it was dying like this in the snow, until its spirit passed into him at first light. My personal favorite, however, was the story that Dariša’s tremendous success as a hunter was derived from his ability to actually turn into a bear—that he did not kill, as men killed, with gun or poison or knife, but with tooth and claw, with the savage tearing of flesh, great ursine teeth locked into the throat of his opponent, making a sound as loud as the breaking of a mountain.

All these variations come down to one truth, however: Dariša was the greatest bear hunter in the old kingdom. That, at least, is fact. There is evidence of it. There are pictures of Dariša before the incident with the tiger’s wife—pictures in which Dariša, light-eyed and stone-faced, stands over the piled hides of bears, almost invariably in the company of some spindly-legged member of the aristocracy whose cheerful grin is intended to conceal knees still shaking from the hunt. In these pictures, Dariša is guileless and unsmiling, as charismatic as a lump of coal, and it’s hard to understand how he managed to generate such a loyal following among the villagers of Galina. The bears in these pictures tell a different story, too, one of death in excess—but then, no one ever looks to them for answers.

Dariša came to Galina once a year, right after the Christmas feasts, to indulge in village hospitality and to sell furs in anticipation of the hardening winter. His entrance was expected but sudden: people never saw him arrive, only awoke to the pleasant realization that he was already there, his horse tethered, oxen unhitched from their cart, fare spread out on a faded blue carpet. Dariša was short and bearded, and, in passing, might have been taken for a beggar; but, like his quiet manner and his tendency to indulge the morbid curiosity of children, he seemed to bring with him a wilder, more admirable world. He brought news and warmth, too, and occasionally stories of the wilderness and the animals that peopled it, and the villagers of Galina associated his arrival with good luck and seasonal stability.

Until that particular winter, my grandfather had looked forward to the yearly visit of Dariša the Bear with as much enthusiasm as anyone else in the village; but, distracted by the tiger and his wife, my grandfather had forgotten all about him. The other villagers, however, had not; instead, the inevitability of his appearance had loomed on and on in their collective consciousness, something that they avoided mentioning, lest their reliance on its surety prevent his arrival. So, when they emerged from their houses one late January morning and saw him there, brown and dirty and as welcome as a promise, their hearts rose.

My grandfather, who would otherwise have been first in line to walk up and down the faded blue carpet and stare at the open-jawed heads of bears, eyes glass, or stone, or altogether missing, looked through the window and realized, with dread, what was going to happen. Across the square, the tiger’s wife was probably looking out at Dariša, too, but she did not know the gravity of the commotion that was animating the village. She did not guess, as my grandfather must have guessed, that the priest rushing toward Dariša with open arms was not just saying hello, but also: “Praise God you’ve come safely through—you must rid us of this devil in his fiery pajamas.”

All along, my grandfather had hoped for a miracle, but expected disaster. He was nine, but he had known, since the encounter in the smokehouse, that he and the tiger and the tiger’s wife were caught on one side of a failing fight. He did not understand the opponents; he did not want to. Mother Vera’s unexpected assistance had been a sign of hope, but he didn’t know what the hope was toward. And with the hunter’s coming, my grandfather realized immediately that the odds were now heavily weighted against the tiger. Dariša the Bear, who, for so long, had represented something admirable and untouchable, became a betrayer, a murderer, a killer of tigers, a knife-wielding, snare-setting instrument of death that would be directed at something sacred, and my grandfather had no doubt that, given enough time, Dariša would succeed.

Unlike most hunters, Dariša the Bear did not live for the moment of death, but for what came afterward. He indulged the occupation he was known for so that he could earn the occupation that gave him pleasure: the preparation of the pelts. For Dariša, it was the skinning, the scraping, the smell of the curing oils, the ability to frame the memory of the hunt by re-creating wilderness in his own house. That is the truth about Dariša: the man was a taxidermist at heart.

To understand this, you have to go back to his childhood, to things no one in the village had heard about, to a prominent neighborhood of the City, a redbrick house on a lamp-lit thoroughfare overlooking the king’s manicured parks; to Dariša’s father, who was a renowned Austrian engineer, twice widowed, and who spent the better part of his life abroad; to Dariša’s sister, Magdalena, whose lifelong illness prevented them from following their father when he left, for years at a time, to oversee the construction of museums and palaces in Egypt, and kept them confined to each other’s company, and to the landscape of their father’s letters.

Magdalena was epileptic, and therefore restricted to small distances and small pleasures. Unable to attend school, she made as much progress as she could with a tutor, and taught herself painting. Dariša, seven years her junior, doted on her, adored everything she adored, and had grown up with the notion that her welfare was his obligation, his responsibility. Standing in the hallway of their house, watching the footman carry his father’s valises out to the waiting carriage, Dariša would cling to the lapels of the engineer’s coat, and his father would say: “You’re a very small boy, but I am going to make you a gentleman. Do you know how a small boy becomes a gentleman?”

“How?” Dariša would say, even though he already knew the answer.

“With a task,” his father said. “With taking responsibility for others. Shall I give you a task?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Help me think of one. What do you think most needs doing while I am away? While you are the only gentleman in the house?”

“Magdalena needs to be looked after.”

“And will you look after her for me?”

During the months that followed he busied himself with doing what he could for her, establishing order on a miniature but ferocious level. They had a housekeeper who prepared the meals and cleaned the house—but it was Dariša who carried the breakfast tray up to his sister’s room, Dariša who helped her pick the ribbons out for her hair, Dariša who fetched her frocks and stockings and then stood guard outside her door while she got dressed, so he could be there to hear her if she felt dizzy and called for him. Dariša laced her shoes, posted her letters, carried her things, held her hand when they took walks in the park; he sat in on her piano lessons, scowling like a fish, interfering if the teacher grew too stern; he arranged baskets of fruit and glasses of wine and wedges of cheese for her so she could paint still lifes; he kept an endless circulation of books and travel journals on her nightstand so they could read together at bedtime. For her part, Magdalena indulged him. He was a great help to her, and she realized very quickly that by looking after her he was learning to look after himself. His efforts invariably earned him the first line in Magdalena’s letters: Dearest papa, you should see how our Dariša takes care of me.

He was eight years old when he first witnessed one of her attacks. He had crept into her room to tell her about a bad dream. He found her twisted up in the covers, her body taut with spasms, her neck and shoulders drenched with sweat and something white and sticky. Looking at her, he suddenly felt ambushed, stifled by the soundless arrival of something else that had eased into the room with him when he opened the door. He left her there. Without putting on his coat, without putting on his shoes, he left the house and ran down the street in his nightshirt, his bare feet slapping on the wet pavement, all the way to the doctor’s house halfway across town. All around him, he felt only absence, as wide and heavy as a ship. The absence of people on the street, the absence of his father, the absence of certainty that Magdalena would be alive when he got home. He cried only a little, and afterward, in the doctor’s carriage, he didn’t cry at all.

“Let’s not tell Papa about any of this, all right?” Magdalena said two days later, when he was still refusing to leave her bedside. “You were such a brave little man, my brave, brave little gentleman—but let’s not tell him, let’s not make him worry.”

After that, Dariša learned to fear the night—not because he found the darkness itself terrifying, or because he was afraid of being carried off by something supernatural and ugly, but because he realized suddenly the extent of his own helplessness. Death, winged and quiet, was already in the house with him. It hovered in the spaces between people and things, between his bed and the lamp, between his room and Magdalena’s—always there, drifting between rooms, especially when his mind was temporarily elsewhere, especially when he was asleep. He decided that his dealings with Death had to be preemptive. He developed a habit of sleeping for two hours, while it was still light out, and then waking to wander the house, to creep into Magdalena’s room, his breath withering in front of him, and to stand with his hand on her stomach, as if she were a baby, waiting for the movement of her ribs. Sometimes he would sit in the room with her all night, but most often he would leave her door open and go through the rest of the house, room by room, looking for Death, trying to flush him from his hiding places. He looked in the hall cupboards and the china cabinets, the armoires where boxes of old newspapers and diagrams were kept. He looked in his father’s room, always empty, in the wardrobe where his father kept his old military uniform, under the beds, behind bathroom doors. Back and forth he went through the house, latching and unlatching windows with useless determination, expecting, at any moment, to look inside the oven and find Death squatting in it—a man, just a man, a patient-looking winged man with the unmoving eyes of a thief.

Dariša planned to say: “I’ve found you, now get out.” He had planned no course of action in the event of Death’s refusal.

Dariša had been doing this for several months when the Winter Palace of Emin Pasha opened its doors. For years, the fate of the pasha’s winter residence had been a subject of some debate among the City’s officials. As a relic of the City’s Ottoman history, it had been unused for years. Unable to use it for himself, unwilling to rid the City of it entirely, the magistrate from Vienna called it a museum, and turned it over that year to the enjoyment of royal subjects who were already patrons of the arts, people who were regulars at places like the National Opera, the Royal Library, the King’s Gardens.

WONDER AND MAJESTY, said a red-and-gold placard on every lamppost in Dariša’s neighborhood. A DAZZLING LOOK INTO THE HEATHEN WORLD.

The upper floor of the palace was a cigar club for gentlemen, with a card room and bar and library, and an equestrian museum with mounted horses from the pasha’s cavalry, chargers with gilded bridles and the jangling processional saddles of the empire, creaking carriages with polished wheels, rows and rows of pennants bearing the empire’s crescent and star. Downstairs, there was a courtyard garden with arbors of jasmine and palm, a cushioned arcade for outdoor reading, and a pond where a rare white frog was said to live in a skull that had been wedged under the lily pads by some assassin seeking to conceal the identity of his now-headless victim. There were portraiture halls with ornate hangings and brass lamps, court tapestries depicting feasts and battles, a small library annex where the young ladies could read, and a tearoom where the pasha’s china and cookbooks and coffee cups were on display.

Magdalena seized the opportunity to take her little brother there right away. She was sixteen, aware of the full extent of her illness, and increasingly tortured by the fact that she had never been anywhere, and that she was to blame for Dariša’s isolation (about which he did not complain) and Dariša’s endless nighttime patrolling (which he would not give up). She had read in the newspaper that the palace contained something called the Pasha’s Hall of Mirrors, and she took him there because she wanted Dariša to know something of the world outside their thoroughfare and their park and the four walls of their house.

To enter the Pasha’s Hall of Mirrors, you had to cross the garden and go down a small staircase to a landing that looked like the threshold of a tomb. A rearing dragon was carved on the tympanum, and a gypsy with a lion cub sat on a small box and threatened to curse your way if you did not pay for guidance. This was mostly for the benefit of children, because both the gypsy and the lion cub were on the payroll of the museum. You would put a grosh in the gypsy’s hat, and she would say “Beware of yourself” and then shove you inside and slam the door. Wary of Magdalena’s condition, the family’s doctor had advised her against going inside, so Dariša went alone.

The first part of the labyrinth was innocent enough, a row of joke mirrors that blew you up and cut you in half and made your head look like a zeppelin, but past that you would suddenly have the notion of standing upside down and back to front. The ceiling and floor were done in gold tile and carved palm crowns, and the mirrors stood so that every step you took was into an alcove with nine, ten, twenty thousand of yourself. You would inch along slowly, the tiles on the floor shifting and changing shape, the angles of the mirrors slanting in and out of reality while your hands touched glass, and glass, and more glass, and then, finally, open space where you least expected it. Coming around invisible corners, you would occasionally encounter a painted oasis, or a mounted peacock in what appeared to be the distance, but was, in reality, somewhere behind you. Then the marionette of an Indian snake charmer, with a wooden cobra rearing out of a basket. Making his way through the labyrinth, Dariša felt that his heart might stop at any moment, felt that, even though he was seeing himself everywhere as he advanced, he did not know which one of him was real, and his movement was crippled by indecision and fear of becoming lost, of never finding his way out of the fog, and despite Magdalena’s best intentions, he began to feel the same emptiness that found him in the darkness of his room at home. Every few feet, his face would hit the mirror and leave a chalky stain on the glass. He was crying by the time he reached the pasha’s oasis, a curtained atrium with six or seven live peacocks milling around a green fountain, and beyond it, the door to the trophy room.

The trophy room was a long, narrow corridor with blue wallpaper. A tasseled Turkish carpet unrolled down the length of the hall, and the south wall was studded with the shining mounted skulls of antelope and wild sheep, the broad horns of buffalo and moose; picture-boxes of pinned beetles and butterflies; carved perches from which the wide dead eyes of hawks and owls stared down; the tusks of an elephant, crossed like sabers next to a case containing the spiraled single horn of a narwhal; a large swan, spread-winged and silent, kiting on string; and, at the end of the hall, the mounted body of a hermaphroditic goat, with several photographs of the living animal preserving moments of its life in the pasha’s menagerie to prove that its existence had been real, and not fabricated after death.

The opposite wall was illuminated with lamps that tilted upward from the floor into enormous glass cases where the wild things of the world were posed in agitated silence. One case for every corner of the earth, every place the pasha or his sons had hunted. Yellow grass and the staircase crowns of flat-topped trees painted in the background of a case that held a lion and his cub, an ostrich, a purple warthog, and a small gazelle cowering in a flush of thorns. Dark woods with canvas waterfalls, the mouth of a cave, and a bear standing rigid, paws folded, eyes up, ears forward; behind the bear, a white hare with red eyes and a pheasant in flight pinned to the wall. A pastel river, thick with the foreheads of drinking zebra, kudu, oryx, horns slanting up, ears turned here and there to catch the silence. An evening tableau: bent bamboo forest, green as summer, and a tiger, washed with fire, standing in the thicket with its face pulled up in a snarl, eyes fixed forward through the glass.

Young boys are fascinated with animals, but for Dariša the hysterical dream of the golden labyrinth, coupled with the silent sanctuary of the trophy room, amounted to a much simpler notion: absence, solitude, and then, at the end of it all, Death in thousands of forms, standing in that hall with frankness and clarity—Death had size and color and shape, texture and grace. There was something concrete to it. In that room, Death had come and gone, swept by, and left behind a mirage of life—it was possible, he realized, to find life in Death.

Dariša did not necessarily understand the feeling that came over him. He knew only that for a long time he had feared absence, and now here was presence. But he realized that it had something to do with preservation of spirit, with the maintenance of an image you most loved or feared or respected, and afterward he came to the Hall of Mirrors often, by himself, and walked up and down the trophy room, admiring the wax nostrils and fixed postures, the roll of the tendons and muscles, and the veins in the faces of stags and rams.

Dariša began his apprenticeship with Mr. Bogdan Dankov of Dankov and Sloki? long before Magdalena died. He began it because of a chance encounter with Mr. Bogdan at the palace when the old master had come to repair a mounted fox that needed re-bristling. Mr. Bogdan mounted the most respectable heads in town and, in Dariša’s twelve-year-old eyes, was an artist of the highest caliber. His clients were dukes and generals, people who lived and hunted in the kinds of places Dariša’s father wrote about in his letters, and, more and more often, Dariša found himself at the Bogdan workshop on the south side of town, waiting for the morning deliveries, waiting for the servants of great men to bring in the skins and the skulls, the horns and the heads. Of course, it wasn’t all pleasant—the capes arriving, smelling of something faint and funny, the way the dead skins lay there in a matted heap. But the preparation was worth the reward of watching Mr. Bogdan draw up the sketches for the mannequin, and then, as weeks went by, raise the wooden frame, sculpt the plaster and the wax, carve out the muscles and the lines where the tissues held together under the skin, select the eyes, stretch the skin over and sew it up around the body until it stood, full again, knees and ears and tail and all. Then came the painting of the rough spots, the glazing of the nose, the smoothing of the antlers.

To practice, Dariša set up a small workshop of his own in his father’s cellar. It was a permanent and unassailable solution to the problem of his inability to sleep, which had never gone away. Still the gendarme of the house, he would read until Magdalena and the housekeeper were asleep, and then go down to his workshop, take the skins out of the icebox, and begin the process of restoring the dead. He must have reasoned, in some way, that if Death were already in the house, it would be attracted to his activity, interested in the magic of reversal, puzzled, perhaps, by how the unformed skin was made to rise over new shoulders, new flanks, new neck. If he kept Death there, kept it riveted and preoccupied, thought about it while it shared the cellar with him, it would not wander the house. He practiced first on vermin he picked out of the trash, cats that had met their ends under carriage wheels, and then on squirrels he trapped with a clumsy box-and-bait apparatus he set up in the back garden. After Magdalena’s kingfisher died, he showed the mounted bird to Mr. Bogdan and won the right to take small commissions home with him: fox, badger, pine marten. Whatever satisfaction he gained from the finished product, he did not admit, either to himself or to the quiet, empty room.

He continued this way for years, even after the attack that killed Magdalena, which, predictably, happened one sunny afternoon in March at the park, when he let go of her hand to lace up his shoes, and she seized and fell and hit her head, and after a long time in the hospital, slipped away without waking up or ever saying a word to him again. Afterward, other things collapsed in small piles around him—the kingdom went first, and the wars that united it into a new one bankrupted his father, who hanged himself from one of the many bridges that spanned the Nile, far away, in Egypt. Alone, penniless, without task, Dariša moved into Mr. Bogdan’s basement and continued his apprenticeship in the business of death. At least, he told himself, this is something I know how to do, and he went to the Hall of Mirrors more and more often to perfect the technique of his craft, until at last he was permitted to touch up one of the pasha’s great boars, which was much later mounted in the office of the Marshall, although Dariša would never know about it. He had plans, then, to open up a business of his own, or to take over from Mr. Bogdan when the old master retired. But then came the Great War, and years of poverty, and any business he might have made of it dried up in the coffers and pockets of the rich who fled or died or went broke, assumed other identities, adopted other kingdoms.

At twenty, having buried Mr. Bogdan and faithfully distributed almost all the old man’s money among his many legitimate and illegitimate children so that he could keep the basement for himself, Dariša was scrounging for work. He found himself running errands for a tavern owner he detested, a sallow-faced, tubercular old gypsy whose name was Karan, and who insisted on paying him in old currency. The tavern was a one-room shack, so there was never enough sitting room inside, and the patrons would instead spill out into the square, where Karan had steadily been carving out space with boxes and moving crates, overturned butter churns and broken pickling barrels, anything found or unused that might serve as a tabletop.

Contributing to the tavern’s popularity—particularly in the eyes of children—was Lola, Karan’s dancing bear and the love of his life. She was an old, soft-muzzled, doe-eyed thing who had spent countless years traveling the world with her master, performing on street corners and in circuses, in theatrical productions and palace galas, and once—as evidenced by Karan’s only framed photograph, proudly on display above the spit—for the late archduke himself. She was so old she no longer needed a tether, and was content to spend her waning years in the shade of the oak outside the tavern, letting the neighborhood children clamber all over her and peer inside her nostrils. On the rare occasion she did get up to dance, she lumbered through it with unforced grace that still showed some traces of her former glory.

Dariša had never seen a living bear before, and when he wasn’t scrubbing dishes or butchering the morning’s shipment of meat, he was outside with Lola. Old age had worn away her sight and sense of smell, and it was often all she could do to raise herself to her feet and move from one shaded area to another; but her range of expressions still betrayed the wild animal in her. There was, of course, the almost canine sideways tilt of the eyes when she wanted something she was not supposed to have (a prime cut of meat, for example, or a drink of rakija, in which she was occasionally permitted to indulge), or the way her muzzle melted into contentment at the sound of Karan’s voice; but there was also the sudden upward pull of the facial muscles when she managed to hear a dog in the distance, and the darkened, drawn, focused look that came over her at feeding time.

When Lola finally died that winter, Karan was beside himself with grief. He closed the tavern down, and kept her wrapped in an enormous blanket in the dining room for four days before he finally let Dariša take her away. In Mr. Bogdan’s basement, Dariša worked slowly, a little each day, his hands trying to remember the movement of the knife and the needle as smoothly as possible while his mind stayed fixed on Lola in the golden labyrinth. When he brought her back to Karan, almost a month later, the gypsy was speechless. Dariša had positioned her standing, her body half-turned and her ears alert, somewhere between dancing and rearing for a better look at her prey; her paws were outspread, her fur combed and clean, her eyes wide and fixed on something in the distance. Dariša had found the ground between her docile nature and her long-lost, feral dignity; Karan immediately gave him a raise, and put Lola on the slope beneath her tree and laid her silver-tasseled dancing muzzle under one enormous hind paw.

Lola stood outside the tavern this way for months, and when the spring brought trappers back from the mountains after the season’s hunt, they marveled at her authenticity, and demanded to meet the man who had done her such remarkable justice. The trappers were hard-faced, ugly men, ugly in every way, but they got less ugly the more they drank, and they drank a lot that night, buying round after round for Dariša. There was no more money to be made in taxidermy in the City, they told him; but there were forests the whole world over, forests belonging to kings and counts, even forests belonging to no one, and these forests were stocked with bear and wolf and lynx, whose hides were now worth a great deal to City men trying to distinguish themselves in social circles to which they had no birthright. In this world, the trappers told Dariša, the aristocracy had fallen from their frivolous pursuits, and a man could no longer rely on them to bring him work. Instead, he must go out and find the beasts himself, hunt them on his own time and with his own skill. If a rich idiot should happen to tag along, he was an added blessing; but rich idiots were harder and harder to come by, unreliable even when they expressed interest, and a man could not spend a lifetime waiting for them.

Dariša mopped floors for the rest of the spring and summer, but when autumn came he followed the trappers into the mountains. The hunt, he had convinced himself, was just a new avenue of the death business, and one way or another it would accommodate a return to independence and to the work he loved. He himself would bring home the hides that would revive Mr. Bogdan’s workshop; he would kill the bears whose pelts doctors and politicians would buy on market stands, the bears whose unseen deaths retired generals would embellish in fireside stories.

That first year, following one trapper and then another, Dariša became a hunter. They say he fell to hunting as if he had been born for it; but perhaps it was the possibility of having a purpose again that fueled him to adopt his new life with such ferocious energy and dedication. He learned to set up camp and mend weapons; to build a blind and sit motionless in it for hours; to read his quarry’s track in the dark and in the rain. He learned, by heart, the movement of deer herds across the mountains so that he could anticipate the bears who came to pick off the stragglers. He learned to hunt in late autumn, when the bears, slow-gaited and fattened, were fiercest in their last months of foraging before winter sleep. What the other trappers could teach him, he absorbed voraciously; what they could not, he figured out for himself. He hunted with traps and guns, with snares and poisoned meat, grew accustomed to the loud and stinking way bears died, and the way their skin came away from the body if you cut it right, heavy, blood-filled, but as accommodating as a dress pattern. He learned to love solitude, unbroken except for an occasional encounter with other trappers, or the unexpected hospitality of some godforsaken farm where the men always seemed to be gone, and the women always happy to see him. He learned that seven months of hunting could earn him the pleasure of three months of work in Mr. Bogdan’s basement, shut away from the world, rebuilding the skins he had brought with him.

He learned, also, to tolerate and understand the necessity of taking on rich idiots—a trickle of young men trying to cling to the noble birthrights of their fathers and grandfathers. By his third year of hunting, these youths would follow him through the brush, as sure-footed as fawns, their alarm wild and loud and completely unpredictable. They were the kind of men who came oversupplied and underprepared, whose teeth would chatter and arms go dead at the crucial moment. Every so often, one of them would inexplicably rise to the occasion and deliver the thunderclap blow at the correct moment and precise angle; these rare boys, few and far between, could never recover completely from the shock of their first kill, and their faces, in hunting photographs and for weeks afterward, would register smiles of stupefaction and little else.

But more and more, as times grew harder, Dariša found himself hunting specific bears, problem bears. Stories of his prowess had spread, and messengers would scour the woods to find him: a black bruin had made off with somebody’s child in Zlatica; an unseen devil-bear was coming down to a farm in Drveno, slaughtering horses in the field. A red sow the size of a house had lost her cubs to a male bear in Jesenica, and was jealously guarding the cornfield in which they had died, attacking the farmers during harvest; an old gray boar had made a lair for himself in a barn in Preliv, and was hibernating in there.

One by one, he found them all; and when the killing was done, he took their hides with him to the next village. The villagers would welcome him and take him in, feed and clothe him, buy the pelts he did not keep for himself; and then, when the time came for him to help them, too, they would line up in awe along the village streets and watch him leave the village for the forest beyond. Whether or not Dariša took the precaution of burying his weapons somewhere in the forest is irrelevant. Suffice it to say that he made an impressive sight, all five foot seven of him, disappearing into the forest unarmed, with the great bear pelt rolling over his shoulders.

Dariša the Bear. Behind him, knowledge of the golden labyrinth, and somewhere ahead of him, advancement toward it. And in the meantime, nothing but bears.

_____

And now, a tiger. It is said, of course, that Dariša interfered on Galina’s behalf as soon as he heard of the villagers’ misfortune; the truth, however, is that Dariša had little interest in hunting a tiger in the bitter winter. He was already in his late forties by then, reluctant to tangle with the unfamiliar; and, besides, he knew the war was coming closer, sensed it in the stories he had heard along the road. He was not compelled to stay in this part of the mountains with the troops moving quickly through the foothills, ready to come up at the first hint of spring. And though his refusal to the priest was firm, it was the apothecary who finally convinced him to stay, the apothecary who appealed to Dariša’s sense of compassion—not through righteousness or desperation or even the novelty of the quarry.

It was well known that Dariša, during his stays in the village, was content to sit in the square, sharpening his knives and eavesdropping on the breathless, well-side conversations of women; or to tease them in the marketplace, where they stood cross-armed behind their stands, eyes alert and unwavering. Dariša’s affection for women extended to an intolerance of the things that harmed or humiliated them: loud men, loutish behavior, unwanted advances. Whether or not this stemmed from his days of responsibility toward Magdalena, I also cannot say; but he was notorious wherever he traveled for dislocating the shoulders of aggressive drunks, or pulling the ears of neighborhood boys who stood about whistling at young women coming back from pasture.

So at daybreak, the apothecary took him to the edge of the forest on the pretense of showing him the tiger’s tracks.

“At least come see what we’ve got on our hands,” he said, “and tell me what you think of it.”

The two of them knelt over the previous night’s paw prints, and Dariša marveled at the size of them, the strong and unhesitating track that wound up the mountain and into the trees. Dariša climbed into the bracken to look for urine, and traces of the tiger’s fur snagged on the low-hanging thickets, and when he came back, they followed the tiger’s trail back to the village, to the pasture and over the fence. It led them, of course, to the butcher’s house, and the tiger’s wife came to the doorway and watched them pass by. She was already obviously pregnant, but something—perhaps the pregnancy itself, or Luka’s absence, or something else entirely—had made her come into grace.

Dariša took off his hat when he saw her, and kept it folded in his hands while the tiger’s wife studied him with flat eyes. The apothecary took Dariša’s arm. “That tiger seems to have taken a liking to her,” he said, “which worries me. She lives alone.” He did not call her “the tiger’s wife,” and he did not mention the liking she herself had seemed to have taken to the tiger.

“Isn’t that the butcher’s wife?” Dariša asked.

“His widow,” the apothecary told him. “Recently widowed.”

Nothing about the story indicates that Dariša had any other reaction to the girl; but because he agreed, later that afternoon, to stay awhile and see what could be done about the tiger, people say he was a little in love with her. He was a little in love with her while he walked the woods at the bottom of the mountain, reading signs of the tiger in the snow, and a little in love with her as he opened the jaws of bear traps along the fence where the tiger would come through. He was a little in love with her that second morning, when he went out to check the traps and found them closed empty, shut over nothing, slammed down over dead air; a little in love with her when he made an announcement to the whole village that he could work only with everyone’s cooperation, and that none of the children must go near the traps again, because this time they might not be so lucky, might lose an arm or leg to the iron jaws. With gossip blazing through the village—what was this new sorcery? how could the traps have closed on their own with nothing to set them off?—no one dared tell Dariša what they really thought: she had done it herself, the tiger’s wife. Their fears, to them, seemed smaller with Dariša there, shameful to bring up to him, so the girl’s magic was allowed to lie over the pasture, the village, probably the entire mountain; nothing could undo it.

Later that afternoon, Mother Vera pulled my grandfather’s ear and demanded: “Did you do it, boy? Did you go to the traps last night?”

“I did not,” he said sharply.

And he hadn’t. He had, however, explained Dariša’s efforts to the tiger’s wife in the ash of the hearth, and spent a sleepless night, praying that the tiger would not blunder into the traps, going to the window to look out over the empty streets in the moonlight. Mother Vera’s insistence that he stay out of it did not prevent him from taking advantage of Dariša’s tolerance of children, tailing the Bear as he went about his work; it did not prevent my grandfather from sitting innocently on a nearby tree stump while Dariša prepared bait carcasses, asking a thousand questions about the hunt; it did not prevent him from following Dariša out to the pasture—and then, as the days went on, to the edge of the woods, to the lowest bank of the forest—and puzzling over the sight of the empty traps.

When the tracks disappeared from the pasture altogether, the apothecary knew that the tiger’s wife was responsible in some capacity for Dariša’s lack of success. With this in mind, he did his best to steer the Bear away from revealing too many of his plans to my grandfather.

“Of course, he doesn’t want you to kill it,” he said to the Bear one evening.

“I’ll let him keep one of the teeth when it is done,” Dariša said, smiling. “That always helps.”

The tiger, it seemed, had disappeared from the village. This forced Dariša to hunt deeper in the woods; and after that came things that are difficult to explain. His snares, they say, were always full of crows—crows already dead, their wings stiff against their sides, and the bait untouched. Dariša’s traps were spread out and well hidden, and she found them all, found them night after night, filling them with dead birds. How could she—small as she was, carrying the added weight of her belly—make that nightly journey, covering her own tracks, covering the tiger’s? How could she bury each poisoned carcass Dariša left out—not rabbits or squirrels, but deer, sheep, boar—so that no trace of it could be found in the morning? When Dariša, growing frustrated, set a pit-trap over a frozen streambed, how could she break the trap herself and leave, in place of the twigs and ropes, a worn blanket thrust down over the tip of the spear? How could she do all this and come back to the village unbruised, unharmed, her eyes full of innocence, and watch the villagers pretend not to know it was her?

I cannot explain any of it—but the baker’s daughter thought she could. Unable to restrain herself, she stopped Dariša one evening in the street, and held on to his arms as she told him all about the blacksmith, about Luka and the baby.

“People have seen it,” she said, her eyes full of tears. “The tiger is her husband. He comes into her house each night and takes off his skin. That apothecary—he knows, but he will not tell you this. He’s not from here.”

I cannot say whether or not Dariša believed this; but he was a practical man, and he was aware of his own tendency to prey, through his reputation, on the superstitions of the people of Galina. It did not surprise him to learn that the villagers had hatched a theory of their own. But he realized, then, that the apothecary had taken advantage of him; that he had led Dariša to protect the girl above all the others without presenting the possibility that she did not want this protection. He had been suspicious of deliberate sabotage for some time, and he was a fool for ignoring the signs. That night, Dariša flew into a rage. “You’ve lied to me,” he shouted. “There’s far more to this than you led me to believe.”

“Why would I tell you village stories?” the apothecary demanded, holding his ground between Dariša and the ibis in the cage. “What are they besides superstitions? How could listening to this nonsense have helped you?” Nevertheless, that night Dariša sat at the window of the shop, and the apothecary, for better or for worse, was forced to keep him company. They sat in silence for hours, watching the village street and the distant square of light in the window of the butcher’s house. But for all his years as a hunter, the countless vigils he had learned to endure, Dariša found himself falling into dreams that made no sense to him—dreams in which he stood in front of the house of the tiger’s wife and watched the return of her husband. He would see the tiger, broad-shouldered, red skin glinting in the moonlight, cross the square and come down the road, the night behind him drawing in like the hem of a dress. The door of the butcher’s house would open, and then, through the window, Dariša could see the tiger rise upright and embrace the girl, and the two of them would sit down at the table together to eat—and always they were eating heads, the heads of cattle and sheep and deer, and then they ate the head of the hermaphroditic goat from the pasha’s trophy room.

The villagers were not surprised to find Dariša preparing to leave the following morning, and they stood out in the snow, silent and pale while he rolled up his carpet and piled the remaining pelts onto his cart without looking at any of them. They were not surprised, but they were angry; he had been their surest line of defense, the last reliable weapon they’d been able to offer up against the tiger, and the girl’s magic had proved too powerful even for him. They were alone now, with the tiger and his wife, alone again for good.

The tiger had been in the thickets above the ruined monastery for days, his ears straining for the faint sound of the hunter setting traps along the bottom of the hill, obvious to him now that he recognized the sound and smell of them. He had not come close enough to determine what they did. She had brought him here, walked with him patiently with her hand on the ridge between his shoulders, the meat she’d brought him hidden somewhere inside her coat. He had gone a week without the warmth of the village and the smokehouse smell of her hair, though he had found faint traces of her in the air now and then, almost always at night. Once or twice he had gone to her, had tracked her down in the blackness of the trees, but she had always led him back. And so he had lain there among the ruins of Sveti Danilo while the snow fell through the caved-in roof above the altar, and watched the birds huddled along the golden arch of the altar-piece.

He did not fear the hunter because he did not know how or why he should. He knew only that the smell that clung to this man was different—a cluttered smell, the smell of earth and heavy rot, of possessions over which death had been repeatedly smeared—and he found that it did not invite him. It did not invite him when he watched the man from his clearing from the ridge, or when he found it around his old hiding places, along paths he had walked the day before. It was not the hunter’s smell, but the scent of a badger, unsteady and warm with winter sleep, that he followed down from Sveti Danilo the day he came across the ox cart, hidden in a pine grove.

The tiger had come up from behind, upwind of the cart, and the surprising shape, the sheer size, of the cart had pulled him down onto his belly. Crouching behind it, he could see beyond the bracken to where the wheels had sunk into the snow, and to where the oxen stood, half-blind with hair, flank to flank for warmth, their breath curling out. The smell of the hunter was everywhere.

The tiger lay in the black thicket behind the wagon for a long time, waiting for something, something just out of reach of his understanding of the situation. Then the wind turned, and the oxen got his scent and they began to shift nervously, their harnesses clanking, the chains that yoked them to the wagon shuddering with silver sound. This pulled him forward a little, only a little, out of the bracken, and their side-slit eyes caught sight of him, and the wagon rumbled forward as they bolted. The tiger, finding his instincts slammed open, was up and running, a full rush of blood already in his chest as he cleared the wagon and sprang for the hindquarters of the ox on the right. He had him, for a moment—claws ripping into the hips and his teeth on the thick base of the tail—but then there was the harness and the cart and the other ox, and somewhere in the confusion something struck him in the ribs and he let go and dropped away, and was left behind, watching the cart’s wavering path until it came to rest beyond the clearing.

The hunter was nowhere in sight.

My grandfather should have been comforted by Dariša’s departure. But he awoke that night, after hours of half-dreams, with hysteria raging through his bloodstream in the dark. Sitting up in bed, he could not rid himself of the feeling that something had shifted, crawled between himself and the tiger and the tiger’s wife until the distances between them, which he had slowly and carefully been closing, had gone back to something insurmountable. The idea of the walk to her house alone exhausted him.

The sky was cloudless, and the moon made shadows on the floor by his bed. The fire was already dead, embers breathing on the hearth. He got up and slipped into his boots and his coat, and, like that, in his nightshirt, his head bare, he went outside and ran through town, the wind biting his face and fingers.

There was no light in the village. All around him, the pasture was shining with new snow. Somewhere behind, a dog was barking, and another dog took up the call, and their voices rang to each other in the dark. The weight of the afternoon’s snowfall had freed the slanted shoulders of her roof, piled the hedges thick and uneven, and my grandfather stood at the bottom of the porch steps and stared up at the black attic turret and the black windows. The house seemed strange to him, unfamiliar, and he could not summon a memory of being indoors with the tiger’s wife. He could see that something had crossed the stairs and the porch, leaving white furrows behind. He tried to tell himself that perhaps the tiger had done this coming home; but the footprints were small, the trails short and two-footed, and they led away from the door. He thought about going up, letting himself in, waiting for her by the hearth. But the house was empty, and he would be alone.

My grandfather ran down to the end of the pasture and under the fence, following the trail, which was becoming deeper as the snow thickened out in the field. All winter, he had not come this far, and now, with the snow groaning under his boots, he ran blindly forward, his breath beating wide clouds that fanned out around him. His eyes were watering with the cold. At the edge of the field, the ground dipped down into a streambed, where he got stuck, briefly, among the icy rocks, and then began to slope upward sharply through the thickets at the lip of the forest.

The tracks were heavy with hesitation here, and they made twisted, uneven holes in the places where her coat and hair had snagged, forcing her to swivel to free herself, or where the trees had come up quickly and into her eyes. My grandfather kept his head low and reached for the boughs of saplings, pulling himself up, exhausted already, but urging himself on and on. Snow, piled thick in the high silence of the pines, slapped down on him as he went. His hands were raw, and he was choking on his own fear, on his inability to move faster, on the urgency of his own disbelief. Perhaps the house would stay dark forever. Perhaps she had gone away for good. He fell, once, twice, and each time he went down into the snow, suddenly much deeper than it seemed, and when he came up, his nostrils were full, and he had to wipe the sting out of his eyes.

He did not know how much farther he had to go. Perhaps the tiger’s wife had left hours before. Perhaps she had already met the tiger, somewhere far ahead in the woods, and the two of them had gone ahead, into the winter, leaving him behind. And what if the stories were not as false and ridiculous as he had previously thought—what if, by the same magic that made him a man, the tiger had changed the girl into a tiger as well? What if my grandfather stumbled onto the two of them, and she did not remember him? As my grandfather went, arm over arm, his heart making sour little shudders against his ribs, he kept listening for a sound, the sound of the tiger, the sound of anything but his own feet and lungs. He was pulling himself up, up, up where the roots of the trees made a curve over what looked like the lip of a hill. Then he was standing in a clearing, and he saw them.

There, where the trees sloped briefly down onto a cradle in the side of the mountain, the tiger’s wife, still herself, still human, shoulders draped with hair, was kneeling with an armful of meat. The tiger was nowhere in sight, but there was someone else in the clearing, fifteen or twenty feet behind her, and my grandfather’s relief at finding the girl was overwhelmed now by the realization that this unexpected figure—changing before his eyes from man to shadow and back again—was Dariša the Bear, enormous and upright, advancing through the snow with a gun on his arm.

My grandfather wanted to shout a warning, but he stumbled forward instead, breathless, his arms high to pull himself out of the snow. The tiger’s wife heard nothing. She was kneeling quietly in the glade, digging. And then Dariša the Bear was on her. My grandfather saw him grab the tiger’s wife and pull her to her feet, and already she was thrashing like an animal in a head-snare; Dariša had her by the shoulder, and her body was arching forward, away from him, her free arm jerking over her head to claw at his face and his hair, and all the while she was making a hoarse, rasping sound, like a cough, and my grandfather could hear her teeth clacking together, hard.

She was enormous and clumsy, and then Dariša stumbled forward and pushed her into the snow, and she fell and disappeared, and my grandfather couldn’t see her in the darkness, but he was still running. Then Dariša was getting to his knees, and my grandfather put his hands out and shouted—one long, endless howl of fear and hatred and despair—and launched himself onto Dariša’s shoulders, and bit his ear.

Dariša did not react as quickly as you might expect, probably because, for a moment, he may have thought the tiger was on him. Then he must have realized that something small and human was gnawing on his ear, and he reached around, and my grandfather hung on and on, until Dariša finally caught hold of my grandfather’s coat and peeled him off with one arm, off and onto the ground. My grandfather lay stunned. Above him, the trees were steep and sharp and lost in the darkness, and the sounds around his head vanished in the snow. Then the furious face of Dariša the Bear, neck dark with blood, and weight coming down on my grandfather’s chest—Dariša’s knee or elbow—and then, before he even knew it was happening, my grandfather’s hand was closing on something cold and hard it contacted in the snow and raising it straight up against Dariša’s nose. There was a crack, and a sudden burst of blood, and then Dariša fell forward over my grandfather and lay still.

My grandfather did not get up. He lay there, the coarse hairs of Dariša’s coat in his mouth, and he listened to the dull thud of a heartbeat, unsure whether it was his own or Dariša’s. And then the blood-brown, sticky hands of the tiger’s wife rolled the man over, and pulled my grandfather to his feet. She was ashen, the skin beneath her eyes tight and gray with fear, and she was turning his face this way and that, uselessly bundling him deeper into his coat.

And then my grandfather was running again. The tiger’s wife was running beside him, gripping his hand like she might fall. She was breathing hard and fast, small sounds that lodged in her throat. My grandfather hoped she might call to the tiger somehow, but he didn’t know how, and he didn’t know whether he was supposed to be holding her hand or the other way around. He knew, with certainty, that he could run faster, but the tiger’s wife had her other arm across her belly, so he kept pace with her, her bundled-up body and her bare feet, and he held her fingers tight.