The Tiger's Wife

THE MAN WHO DISCOVERED THE DEATH OF DARIŠA THE Bear is still living in Galina today. His name is Marko Parović, and he is seventy-seven years old, a great-grandfather. His grandchildren have recently purchased a new lawn mower for him, and he operates this monstrosity by himself, a tiny, hatted, brown-armed man who still somehow manages to aim the orange machine in a straight line across his lawn. He does not talk about Dariša the Bear at night, and he will not talk about him at all without enlisting encouragement from several glasses of rakija.

When he does talk, this is the story he tells:

An hour before first light, Dariša the Bear awoke from his interrupted journey in the bloodied snow. When he sat up and looked about himself, he saw the tiger was eating his heart. There among the black trees of Galina, the yellow-eyed devil sat with his teeth deep in the wet wedge of Dariša’s heart. Terrified at first, Dariša felt his ribs and found them empty, and he drew on his only remaining strength, the strength of bears whose hearts he had stilled over the years. His human heart gone, Dariša fell to all fours, and his back rose like a mountain, his eyes full of darkness. His teeth fell like glass from his jaws and in their place grew the yellow tusks of the bear. He reared high over the tiger, black-backed in the moonlight, and the whole forest shook with his roar.

To this day, on such and such a night, you can still hear the ringing of their battle when the wind blows east through the treetops of Galina. Dariša the Bear threw his great, ursine weight into the tiger’s side, and the yellow-eyed devil sank his claws into Dariša’s shoulders, and the two of them rolled through the snow, jaws locked, leveling trees and laying bare the rocks of the ground.

In the morning, nothing of the terrible battle remained but the empty skin of Dariša the Bear, and a blood-smeared field that will not flower to this day.

Some hours after daybreak—he had felt certain he would not be able to sleep at all, but somehow, at first light, he had found himself submitting to his own exhaustion, to the terrible cold, to the relief of having brought the tiger’s wife safely home—my grandfather awoke to a world that already knew Dariša the Bear was dead. Marko Parović, checking his quail traps at the foot of the mountain, had stumbled upon the red-clotted skin, and he had come running into the village, dragging it behind him, calling for God.

By the time my grandfather climbed out of bed and went to the doorway, a great crowd was already assembling in the square, and the women, their heads wrapped in flower-stippled handkerchiefs, were already shrieking it out:

“Dariša is dead. God has abandoned us.”

My grandfather stood at Mother Vera’s side, watching the crowd grow bigger and bigger at the bottom of the stairs. He could see Jovo, the greengrocer, and Mr. Neven, who repaired plows; he could see the priest in his stained black cassock, and the spinster sisters from two doors down, who had come out with their slippers on. Half a dozen other people with their backs turned to him. The first wave of panic at Marko Parović’s news had hit, and now my grandfather watched the disbelieving faces of the men and women he had known all his life: the baker, rigid and red-faced with his dough-numbed fingers; the shaking shoulders of the baker’s daughter, who was gasping and twisting her hair in her fists like a mourner at a burial. Standing slightly apart was the apothecary, quiet with his coat thrown over his shoulders, looking down at the formless, blood-soaked pelt, all that was left of Dariša the Bear, which lay at their feet as if Dariša had never been alive at all.

The apothecary stooped down and picked up one end of the pelt. Half-lifted, it looked like a wet, hairy wing.

“Poor man,” my grandfather heard a woman say.

“It is too much.”

“We must honor him. We must have a funeral.”

“Look, God—what shall we bury?”

“Here,” my grandfather heard the apothecary say, “here, are you quite sure there was no trace of him?”

“Sir,” Marko Parović said, spreading his hands. “Only the trails in the snow where the battle was fought.”

A mutter of horror and admiration passed through the crowd, and people began crossing themselves. The villagers’ collective disappointment in Dariša, their rage at his abandonment, the fact that they had been denigrating his name and what he stood for little more than two hours ago—all of this had fallen by the wayside with the news of his death.

One of the village hounds chose that moment to investigate the outspread pelt and raise a leg against it; there was a cry of outrage as six or seven hands reached for the pelt and somebody’s boot kicked the dog out of the way, and Vladiša, whose nerves had never recovered from his encounter with the tiger, went down in a dead faint.

“By God, let us take it into church,” the priest said. And while a handful of aghast villagers carried the pelt off in the direction of the church, the apothecary propped Vladiša against the porch steps, and for the first time looked at my grandfather in the doorway.

“Get water,” the apothecary said, and my grandfather ran to the kitchen basin and obliged. He was aware, when he came back, of being carefully studied, of the eyes of the village women on him like shadows. But my grandfather looked only at the apothecary, who smelled of soap and warmth, and who smiled at him as he handed down the water basin.

And then there was a flurry of female voices.

“So, it’s you, is it?” the baker’s daughter shouted at him, embattled. My grandfather backed up the porch steps and stared down at her. “Don’t you go back in, you just stay out here and show your face. Just look. Look at what’s happened.” Mother Vera came out to stand behind my grandfather, and the baker’s daughter said, “Aren’t you ashamed? At what cost have you befriended the devil’s bitch, made her welcome here? Aren’t you ashamed?”

“You mind your own business,” Mother Vera said.

The baker’s daughter said: “It’s everybody’s business now.”

My grandfather said nothing. With daylight and a few hours’ sleep separating him from it, the journey of last night seemed a thousand years ago. His mind could not frame it properly. He suspected—even as the baker’s daughter was blaming him for his involvement—that no one actually knew its true level. But there was still a chance that someone would come forward and say they had seen him sneak out of the village the previous night; or, worse still, that they had witnessed his return with the girl, seen him sinking into the snow under the weight of her exertions; or that they had found his tracks before the midnight snowfall had covered them up.

Lying on his cot, his feet cold and his legs twitching, trying to still the nervous jerking of his limbs, certain that the force with which his heart was shuddering through his hair and skin must be audible to Mother Vera, my grandfather had allowed himself to believe that they had gotten away with something. But now, it was impossible not to think of Dariša—and even though my grandfather was too young to completely understand what had happened to the Bear, some feeling of responsibility must have clung to him all his life. As it was, nine years old and terrified, all he could do was stand in the doorway and watch the panic that was shaking the village loose of any sense it had left.

“It has gone too far,” the woodcutter said. “She’ll dispatch us one by one.”

“We must leave, all of us.”

“We must drive the bitch out,” Jovo said, “and stay.”

In the movements of the men my grandfather saw a new sense of purpose. They had not coordinated themselves yet, but they were on the verge of some decision, and my grandfather felt the inevitability of disaster run by him like a river against whose current he was completely helpless.

He was certain of only one thing: she needed him now more than ever. He had realized it last night, when they stopped in a glade a little way down the mountain, and he had stood over the tiger’s wife while she knelt in the snow, watching the breath smoke out of her mouth in long, thin trails, and he had been unable to let go of her hand. He had the sense that whatever made her a grown-up, kept her calm and unafraid, kept her belly as round as the moon, had given way to the terrors of night, and had left her alone, and left him alone with her. It was as if they had lost the tiger, as if the tiger had abandoned them, and it was just the two of them, my grandfather and the tiger’s wife.

He had helped her up the stairs of her house last night and he had told her, even though she couldn’t hear him, that he would come back in the morning. He would come back with warm tea and water, with porridge for her breakfast, and he would keep her company. Would take care of her. But now, he realized, this was impossible. To leave his house and walk through the square with all of them watching him, to cross the pasture and go into her house, would set something off, a decline without end. He could not do it; he had no authority, no way to brace himself against the shock outside, against the anger of the grown-ups, who were, after all, grown-ups. And she, the tiger’s wife, was entirely alone. This thought, above all others, strangled him.

He wanted to explain it to Mother Vera as she forced him back into the house. He wanted to tell her about the previous night, how cold and terrified the girl had been. But he couldn’t find a way to explain himself. It occurred to him, then, that she had allowed him to sleep in: she had neglected to wake him at dawn for his chores, or at eight for his breakfast; she had neglected to wake him when Marko Parović had stumbled out of the pasture and past the butcher’s house with the bloodied hide in his hands and struck up a cry. She had let him sleep because she had sensed that he needed it. There was nothing more he could tell her. She already knew. And, for whatever reason, she had cut herself away from it, and her eyes told him that, as far as she was concerned, she no longer had a place in the battle.

Hopeless, my grandfather stood at the window and looked on. There was a thin, mud-tinged ring of slush where last night’s snow pile was beginning to melt; the village dogs, dirty and matted, were milling around; the fence posts and wide-flung doors of the village houses stood wet and cold, and beyond them the little butcher’s house on the edge of the pasture, with its smoking chimney, which seemed impossibly far now. When the apothecary helped Vladiša to his feet and set off for his shop, my grandfather ran outside and went after him.

When people talk about the apothecary of Galina, they rarely mention his appearance. As I find out from Marko Parović, there is a reason for this. “Dignified,” he says of the apothecary, drawing his hand across his face, “but very ugly.”

The implication is that, despite whatever unfortunate configuration of his features—or, perhaps, because of it—the apothecary looked trustworthy, at ease with himself, someone to whom people would turn for counsel.

It is less easy to imagine him in one of his many lives before Galina, as a ten-year-old boy, the first time he appears in the stories of other people, when he was found wandering the charred ruins of the monastery of Sveti Petar by a hajduk band, twelve men mounted on scruffy nags who had arrived too late to interrupt a raid by an Ottoman battalion. The monks of Sveti Petar had been accused of hiding a rebel who had killed the nephew of the captain of the battalion in a tavern brawl several weeks earlier—and the captain had personally undertaken the task of avenging both his nephew’s death and the more important, slanderous casting of the young man as a drunk. Four days of siege, and then indiscriminate slaughter; for the hajduks, who had spent the morning extracting the dead from the fragile cinders of the chapel, the sight of the apothecary crawling out from under an overturned wagon by the south wall was redemption from God’s own hand. Here was a child that had been spared for them; they did not know who he was, could not guess he had been an orphan at the monastery, would never know about his fear, his hatred, his blind recklessness when he had lost patience praying and charged out to face the Turkish cavalry alone. A saber had promptly caught him in the ribs, and he lay there, gasping for air in the smoke-stained dawn while the captain, Mehmet Aga, bent over him and demanded his name, so that he would know who he was about to impale on the stake. He did not tell the hajduks—and no one in Galina would ever find out—that it was not the Aga’s admiration for the boy’s courage that won him his life, but that name: “Kasim,” the apothecary said, using, for the last time, the name under which he had been abandoned at the monastery door, “Kasim Suleimanović,” and the Aga, turned to improbable mercy by the hand of his own God, left him there to seep out into the ashen earth. Saved by his name once, the boy did not expect it to save him again. When the hajduks asked him for it while they bandaged him, he said he couldn’t remember.

Then the hajduks gave him a new name—Nenad, the unhoped-for one—but to the apothecary, the new name meant nothing: changed once, he would change it again and again. Yet his old name, and what it had meant, would follow him, unshed, for the rest of his life.

Kasim Suleimanović would follow him during his years with the hajduks, with whom he lived and pillaged with considerable reluctance until he turned eighteen. The name brought uncertainty, the awareness of a certain kind of betrayal whose consequences he would always anticipate. Like a vulture, the name sat at his shoulders, keeping him apart so that he was able to see the flaws that made the hajduks ridiculous: they were determined to give back to the poor, but in their unbridled generosity failed to keep any funds for themselves, which often left them scraping for resources and severely undermined their valiant marauding; they craved victory, but defeat was more honorable, more character-forming, more pleasant to reflect on; their pursuits demanded discretion, but they would break into songs that lauded their own exploits at the first hint of tavern adoration. The apothecary, while he was among them—while he prepared their meals and sharpened their swords, cared for their wounded—did not voice his reservations, could not confess that he thought their endeavors celebrated their own certainty to fail, and were therefore senseless and stupid and unsafe. In every collective tendency of the hajduks, he recognized a willful attempt to forestall security.

The name followed him, too, when the hajduk camp fell to a band of Magyar bounty hunters. It was with him when he dragged his only surviving compatriot, Blind Orlo, out of the debris of their camp and into the woods; it was with him while he tended to Orlo, bound his fractured skull, set the bullet-grazed fibula until an infection swelled Orlo’s right leg to twice its size, thundered through his bloodstream for weeks. It was a bitter winter, and the apothecary kept the old man outdoors as much as he dared, applying salves, keeping the leg cold, terrified he would wake up one morning to find that it had gone black during the night.

Following Blind Orlo’s recovery, the apothecary could have broken away, found some other life. But he was duty-bound to his blind companion, and so he stayed; and this, perhaps, was only an excuse for his fear of a world in which his standing was uncertain. Protected, for the first half of his life, by monks, and guarded by hajduks these past ten years, he did not know how to give up the certainty of unquestioning brotherhood. Without it, he would be powerless.

At Blind Orlo’s side, the apothecary acquired the foundations of deceit he would come to abhor. For years, he followed Blind Orlo from village to village, preying on the superstitions of the simple and easily led. They played the same trick in each town: the blind soothsayer and his companion with the unfortunate face. Officially, Blind Orlo read tea leaves, bones, dice, innards, the movement of swallows, and his condition lent credibility to his claims. But all the intuition his lies required was relayed to him in unspoken signals by the apothecary, who learned to read the desires and fears of his followers in the lines of their mouths and eyes, foreheads, the minute movements of their hands, vocal inconsistencies, gestures of which they themselves were unaware. Then Blind Orlo told them what they wanted to hear.

“Your crop will prosper,” he would say to the farmer with callused palms.

“A handsome boy from the next village is in your thoughts,” he would say to the virgin who stared at him across the pink entrails of the dove she had brought. “Do not worry, you are also in his.”

Serving as Blind Orlo’s eyes, the apothecary learned to read white lies, to distinguish furtive glances between secret lovers that would precipitate future weddings, to harness old family hatreds dredged up in fireside conversations that allowed him to foresee conflicts, fights, sometimes even murders. He learned, too, that when confounded by the extremes of life—whether good or bad—people would turn first to superstition to find meaning, to stitch together unconnected events in order to understand what was happening. He learned that, no matter how grave the secret, how imperative absolute silence, someone would always feel the urge to confess, and an unleashed secret was a terrible force.

While the apothecary was learning this way about deceit, he stumbled, quite accidentally, onto his own medical prowess. It started slowly at first, with services that supplemented the soothsaying profession: herbs for migraines, fertility incantations, brews for impotence. But pretty soon he was splinting bones and feeling spleens, putting his fingers against the swollen lymph nodes of influenza sufferers. Once, without prior training, he excised a deeply embedded bullet from the shoulder of a town constable. It was a gift, they said wherever he went; they had never seen such a calm, authoritative, compassionate young man. It was a gift to them all, but it was a gift to the apothecary as well: as healer he was the giver of answers, the vanquisher of fear, the restorer of order and stability. Blind Orlo, with his lies and manipulations, had power, yes; but real power, he came to understand, lay in the definite and the concrete, in predictions backed by evidence, in the continued life of a man you claimed you could save, and the death of a man you pronounced was certain to die.

Of course, neither the apothecary nor Blind Orlo could account for the unpredictability of their ventures, the unreliability of people, omitted details that made an enormous difference in situations that were impossible to read. It was probably not their first grave mistake; but it was the only one for which they were still around, and they paid dearly. In the town of Spašen, they counseled a well-to-do merchant, who was considering expanding his business, to take on an ambitious young protégé about whom the merchant had entertained serious doubts.

“Give the boy a position,” Blind Orlo had said. “Youth reinvigorates the soul.”

Of course, neither he nor the apothecary could have guessed that the soul the young man was reinvigorating belonged, in fact, to the merchant’s wife; or that the merchant would return home one night to find that the lady of the house had absconded with both the youthful protégé and the jar of money the merchant had kept hidden in the baptismal font of his family chapel. The merchant then drank for three days and three nights, on tab, without stopping, and, thus lubricated, shot Blind Orlo one evening as he and the apothecary were returning from supper at the miller’s house.

The apothecary, who barely escaped with his life, would learn several weeks later that the jilted husband was a man of considerable determination: he had placed a modest but compelling bounty, and a charge of fraudulence, on the apothecary’s head, making it necessary for him to move on. The apothecary mourned for his fallen compatriot, the last link to his first life; but by that time, the apothecary was certain of what he wanted, what he longed for: stability, lawfulness, belonging. And he found them, some years later, in a remote corner of the Northern Mountains, in a tiny village through which he had been passing when a mother of four had fallen ill, and he had stopped to care for her, and never left.

Marko Parović was not yet born when the apothecary began, slowly but surely, to set up shop in Galina—but he tells the story of the apothecary’s arrival as though he himself witnessed it: the wagon with its unnamed trinkets, the dozens and dozens of crated jars slowly carried in through the door of the abandoned cobbler’s shop, the counter built with the help of young men from the village, the gasp that went up at the arrival of the caged ibis. How, for years, the children of the village reveled in attempting to teach the ibis to talk; and how the apothecary, out of sheer delight, never attempted to correct them. How his only fee, for many years, was a log for his fire; how a single log from your stockpile earned you the privilege of sitting in one of his varnished wooden chairs, of revealing to him the secrets of what ailed you, your headaches and nightmares, the discomforts of certain foods and the difficulties of lovemaking, and how the apothecary, as if he had all the time in the world, would listen and nod and take notes, open your mouth and peer into your eyes, feel the bones of your spine, recommend this dried grass and that.

Unaware as he is of the apothecary’s past, Marko Parović can tell me nothing of what the apothecary must have felt during those blissful years, when he finally earned the trust of the village, the security of their faith, the power that came from enchanting them with his ability to mend their small pains and arrest the advance of death. How it must have relieved him, after a lifetime of violence, to find himself being asked to preside over trivial land disputes and trade squabbles in a village with only one gun. And of course Marko Parović can tell me nothing of how the apothecary must have felt at the first appearance of Luka’s deaf-mute bride, a Mohammedan like him, or how the villagers’ treatment of her must have reinforced his need to keep himself a secret, to keep them mesmerized and unsuspecting, however ashamed he must have been for neglecting to intervene on her behalf.

He barely remembered Luka as a child, but he was wary of the butcher’s son as soon as he’d returned: Luka, who’d seen the world; Luka, who was a brute without being a fool, an inexcusable combination; Luka, who had, despite the distrust between them, appeared ashen-faced at the shop door late one night two autumns ago, eyes bloodshot, voice cracking. “You’d better come—I think she’s dead.”

There in Luka’s house he had at last seen proof of what he had suspected for months: the girl was in the corner, twisted up under a broken table that had been driven against the wall. He couldn’t imagine how the table had ended up there, how she had fallen under it. He couldn’t bring himself to drag her out. Her neck looked loose, broken, and if she was still alive he could kill her by moving her. So he dragged the table across the room while Luka sat on the kitchen floor, sobbing into his fists. The girl’s face was unrecognizable, gelled with blood, her hair matted down and the scalp bleeding into the floor. Her nose was broken—he was certain of that without touching her. He put his hands on the floor, brought his face close, knelt like this for a long time before he finally found her breath, caught in a thick, blood-clotted bubble of spit that stretched out between her lips.

He assessed the damage: kneecap shattered; the scalp studded with shards of some kind of crockery; left hand mangled, twisted back toward the arm, a spear of bone stretching the skin just above her wrist. At first, he thought three of her front teeth were gone—but then he put his fingers in her mouth and found them, slammed back into the ridges of her palate. He used a spoon to brace them, brought them forward again with a wet crack that he would feel in the tips of his fingers. They would never set properly, but at least she wouldn’t lose them. He sponged the blood from her face, bandaged her head, splinted up what he could and immobilized the rest, tied the jaw shut with dressings, chinned her up like a corpse, and that was how she looked, lying on a cot in the front room, four days going by before she opened her good eye. The apothecary had been going to Luka’s house twice daily to ice her face and ribs and smooth balm into the cuts on her head, all the while convinced that she would slip away between visits, and he was stunned when she looked at him.

The last time he stopped by to look in on her, the apothecary said to Luka: “If this happens again, I will run you out.”

He had meant it, too; and, back then, he’d had enough heft in the village to manage it. But then came the epidemic that claimed the children of the village—Mirica of the oleander leaves, my grandfather’s friend Dušan—and the long, terrifying fight in which he had seen them slip out of his grasp one by one. After that, the line at his door had dwindled; patients came around twice, three times, to make sure they were on the path to recovery, to question the herbs he had prescribed to them. His power—which had, until that moment, elevated him even above the priest, that last-resort mediator for the next world—was suddenly poised on the edge of a knife. He was, and always had been, an outsider, and when his dependability failed, he had felt his hold on the village slipping. He had resolved that he would defend the girl; but, on the heels of his defeat, that promise, made largely to himself, had fallen behind his efforts to regain the villagers’ trust, reestablish their faith in and submission to him. It was becoming apparent to him that these efforts, too, had failed.

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

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

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

_____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is she well?” my grandfather said.

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

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

“Everyone will see me,” my grandfather said.

“Everyone has gone.”

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

It didn’t take very long after that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What girl?” he says.

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

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