The Tiger's Wife

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was trying to remember—as though I needed that kind of thought at the time—the particulars of those stories about mountain spirits, the ones that lived in fields and woodlands and existed for the sole pleasure of misleading idiot travelers. My grandma had once told me about some man from Sarobor who had gone up into the hills after his sheep and found himself eating with a house full of the dead, to which he had found his way by following a little girl with a white bonnet who turned out not to be a little girl at all, but something malicious and impossible to forget, something that changed him, preoccupied him until his own death.

Ahead of me, the streambed dipped down into a steep incline and beat a wavering trail into the valley below. There were a few final houses clustered around that bend in the road before the wilderness grew up again in clumps, and among them, coming down the trail sideways so I wouldn’t slip, I saw a very small stone house with a raised threshold and a low, low green door, the only door that still hung in its frame in the entire empty village, and between the door and the ground I could see light.

On any other night, I would have turned and gone back the way I had come. But on any other night, I wouldn’t have come at all. The man I was following, I said to myself, had gone into this house, unless he was already standing directly behind me, unless he had been watching me since I had come into the village. That thought alone was enough to make me climb the cracked stone staircase. It took me a little longer to open the door, but in the end I did open it, and I did go inside.

You’re Gavran Gailé, I was going to say. And then whatever happened next would happen.

“Hello, Doctor.”

“It’s you.”

“Of course. Come in, Doctor. Come in. What are you doing here? Come—shut the door. Take a seat, Doctor. This is a very bad business. You could have been hurt, gotten lost. I didn’t realize you were following me.”

“I saw you in the vineyard.”

“Well, now, I didn’t notice. I didn’t realize—I would have stopped and made you turn around. Come to the fire. Come sit, I’ll make room.”

“That’s all right, I’ll stand.”

“You must be tired. Please, sit down—here, sit just here. I’ll move these aside. I’ve meant to get the place ordered, but there’s never time. It’s always so late. Come sit down. Don’t mind the flowers, just push them all this way, and sit down.”

“I don’t want to intrude.”

“You can move the flowers closer, Doctor, closer to the fire. The fire dries them faster.”

“I’m sorry.”

“The faster they dry, the less they smell. As you see, I do not throw them away. Are you cold, Doctor?”

“I should go back.”

“That is out of the question. You must wait. We must finish here.”

“I’ve made a mistake.”

“But it is all right now, and will be. You are here, and safe. We’ll walk back together. Come—put these coins in the barrel for me.”

“My God. How much is this?”

“There was more, before.”

“I don’t even recognize some of this currency.”

“Some of it is from before the war. Some of it is even older.”

“What’s this?”

“That’s Roman bronze—the hills are full of coins like that. It may not mean much to you, but it’s still payment for the dead.”

“What will you do with it all?”

“Give it away. It’s a bad business, giving the money of the dead to the living. But it’s shameful to leave it sitting here when it could do some good.”

“You may have to expand.”

“Your feet are on the drawings, Doctor—let me move them.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I must find somewhere else to put them, somewhere away from the hearth. It wouldn’t do for them to catch. Some are quite old. This one—see—the man who left this painting is himself dead now. I have been bringing coins from his grave here since last year.”

“You’re the mora.”

“Not always. There’s been a mora over a hundred years. Then the war came and they believed nothing. My wife believed nothing, she couldn’t believe after what happened to my son. She would come home from his grave and say, the drawings people are putting there get wet and the colors run everywhere, and the flowers get old and dirty and they smell, and all for what? For me to feel better? There is a hole in the ground and my son is buried in it. Water, Doctor.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The water, behind you. Please. For my hands. One night, I clear the grave and bring the flowers and drawings here. No one comes here. Most of the mines are gone, but they say it is still dangerous. I cannot throw away the things from my son’s grave—maybe even I believe. When my wife comes home the next night, it is as if someone has breathed a secret to her. She asks me if I’ve seen the grave—it is clear and clean, and she stands beside it and feels our son at peace. Human hands, she says, haven’t cleared the grave. It’s the mora. She knows this in her bones. Then she goes back and puts coins out, and what can I do? Besides bring them here.”

“But this isn’t all from one grave.”

“No. Pretty soon people are putting coins on the graves of all their loved ones. Leaving more flowers. Clothes, sometimes food. They keep the dead safe and well fed, they comfort themselves. Sometimes I climb up here with bagfuls, and the walk is hard. Sacred earth, they say. Leave something for your dead here and it will reach them. The mora will take it.”

“And no one knows?”

“Someone always knows, Doctor. But I would be happy if it were only you, if only you are the one who knows.”

“No one from the village? Not your son?”

“If there are people who know, they are always the ones who do not say what they know, so it is difficult to tell them from the ones who merely think they know. Someone must know by now. Not that it’s me, perhaps—but they must know. And still they keep setting things down. So I keep bringing them here. You’ll not tell my wife, Doctor? You won’t, will you?”

But he had no need to ask. I had been taught long ago that there are some stories you keep to yourself.