The Tiger's Wife

People who talk about my grandfather’s death now talk about the boys from Zdrevkov, the land mine that ripped into their legs and shredded their bodies. At the doctors’ luncheon, I’m told, aging men pay their respects, admire how my grandfather, gaunt and gray-skinned, undeterred by an illness he hid like shame, abandoned everything and traveled four hundred miles to save the boys’ lives. As I’ve pointed out to Zóra, whenever she calls me from the Neurology Institute in Zurich in a panic at all hours of the night—more and more often now that her son has reached that age where he understands objects best by hiding them up his nose—the fact that the boys themselves did not survive does not figure in the telling.

The doctors’ knowledge does not extend to my grandfather’s bag of belongings, or how I brought it home to my grandma two days after the funeral, or how it sat on the hall table for thirty days, as if part of my grandfather were still living with us, sitting quietly on the hallway table, all but demanding sunflower seeds. Leaving room for whatever miscalculations we’d made about his death, on the fortieth day my grandma opened the hospital bag—before taking his silk pajamas out from under the pillow beside her head, before putting away his clogs. When I came home from the hospital that night, I saw her as a widow for the first time, my grandfather’s widow, sitting quietly in his green armchair with his belongings arranged in a cookie tin on her lap.

I sat on a footstool beside her and watched her go through them. My mother was already there. For a long time, no one said anything, and there were only my grandma’s hands with their smooth knuckles and big rings, and then my grandma said, “Let’s have some coffee,” and my mother got up to brew it, leaving my grandma room to disagree with her, to correct her technique, point out the obvious: “Don’t put that pot there—use the board, for God’s sake.”

Of course I never told anyone about the firelit room in the abandoned village, the broken table and barrel brimming with coins, the carpet of dead flowers, rows of jars and bottles—clay and porcelain, glass and stone, wax-lipped lids and corks and caps broken or missing—empty offerings, cobwebs clinging to the lips of the bottles and the lids of the jars. The fire putting round shadows between their sides and edges, and all the jars and the bottles singing, and the paintings of Bis stacked like papyrus scrolls against the wall, and me, promising not to tell and demanding an equal promise in return, kneeling to open the bag in secret, absolved by a room which, for the rest of the world, did not exist.

In the bag I found his wallet and his hat, his gloves. I found his doctor’s coat, folded neatly in half. But I did not find The Jungle Book, for which I searched, mourned in that hot little room above Brejevina. It took me a long time to accept that it was gone, gone entirely, gone from his coat and from our house, gone from the drawers in his office and the shelves in our living room.

When I think of my grandfather’s last meeting with the deathless man, I picture the two of them in casual conversation, sitting together on the porch of that bar in Zdrevkov, The Jungle Book, the terms of the wager, closed on the tabletop between them. My grandfather is in his best suit, and the deathless man has taken him out, not for a cup of coffee, but for a beer, a long laugh before they take their journey to the crossroads together. For once in the long history of their acquaintance, they are not alone, and they go by unnoticed, two men you could pass on the street without a second glance. They have the comfortable demeanor of old friends, of two people between whom a lifetime has passed. For the deathless man, it is more than one lifetime, but you would never know it from looking at him. According to my grandfather’s descriptions, he is a young man at ninety-five, and he will still be a young man long after my grandfather’s forty days, and probably long after mine.

The few doctors who might have chuckled over the book my grandfather always carried in his pocket would probably guess that it had been lost, or stolen at Zdrevkov, misplaced somewhere on a dying man’s journey. But the book is gone—not lost, not stolen, gone—and to me this means that my grandfather did not die as he had once told me men die—in fear—but in hope, like a child: knowing he would meet the deathless man again, certain he would pay his debt. Knowing, above all, that I would come looking, and find what he had left for me, all that remained of The Jungle Book in the pocket of his doctor’s coat, that folded-up, yellowed page torn from the back of the book, with a bristle of thick, coarse hairs clenched inside. Galina, says my grandfather’s handwriting, above and below a child’s drawing of the tiger, who is curved like the blade of a scimitar across the page. Galina, it says, and that is how I know how to find him again, in Galina, in the story he hadn’t told me but perhaps wished he had.

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Eventually, I will know enough to tell myself the story of my grandfather’s childhood. But I will not explain what happened between the tiger and his wife. I think it’s probably possible to explain it. It would be simple enough to reason away the tiger’s attachment: he was only half-wild, and in his partial tameness he missed, without being able to articulate it, the companionship and predictability of life at the citadel. However expertly he learned to fend for himself, his life as a tiger had been tainted since birth—maybe that great, deadly Shere Khan light my grandfather believed in had already been extinguished. He had been dulled at the edges by circumstances, and it was simply easier for him to succumb to being hand-fed. It’s possible to reduce the tiger’s attachment to some predictable accident of nature, to make him as mysterious as a bear rummaging through a pile of overturned trash cans—but that is not my grandfather’s tiger; that is not the tiger on whose account my grandfather carried The Jungle Book in his pocket every day for the rest of his life, the tiger my grandfather kept at his side during the war, and the long years he and Mother Vera struggled in the City, and during his studies; the tiger who was with him when he met my grandma, and taught at the University, and met the deathless man; the tiger he carried with him to Zdrevkov.

One could also say that the girl was young, and foolish, and for a time, incredibly, incredibly lucky. That it was her great fortune, despite the odds against her, to encounter a tiger who was not all tiger, to see him face-to-face when she saw him first, to somehow carry the same scent as an old keeper of his, to awaken some lost memory. But that, too, would be oversimplifying it.

Maybe it’s enough to say he enjoyed the sensation of her hand between his eyes. She liked the way his flank smelled when she curled up against it to sleep.

_____

In the end, I cannot tell you who or what she was. I cannot even say for certain what happened to Luka, though I tend to side with those in Galina who say that he awoke, after leaving the girl tied in the smokehouse for the tiger, to find her kneeling at the foot of his bed, her wrists skinned raw, holding the blacksmith’s gun against his mouth.

If the situation had been different—if the people of Galina had been more aware of their own ephemeral isolation, more conscious that it was only a matter of time before war tightened around them—their regard for the tiger and his wife might have been more cursory. Isn’t it strange, they might have said, here is a kind of love story, and then moved on to some other point of gossip. But they attached their anxious grief to the girl so they could avoid looking past her to what was coming. After her death, their time with her became the unifying memory that carried them into the spring, through the arrival of the Germans with their trucks, and later their railroad, which the villagers were made to build; and finally the train, the rattle and cough of the tracks that pulled them awake at night (every time they thought don’t stop here, don’t stop), and even further than that.

When you ask the people of Galina today: “Why don’t you let your children out after dark?” their answers are vague and uncomfortable. They say, what’s the point of being out after dark? You can’t see anything—there is nothing but trouble. Why would we let them hang around at the corners, smoking cigarettes, playing dice, when there’s work to do in the morning? But the truth is, whether they think about him or not, the tiger is always there, in their movements, in their speech, in the preventive gestures that have become a part of their everyday lives. He is there when the red deer scatter down the mountainside, and the whole valley smells of fear; he is there when they find the carcasses of the stags split open and devoured, red ribs standing clear of the skins, and they refuse to talk to one another about it. They are aware, all the time, that the tiger has never been found, that he has never been killed. Men don’t go to cut timber alone; there is a strong stipulation against virgins crossing the pasture on a full-moon night, even though no one is really sure of the consequences.

The tiger has died up there, they reason to themselves, starving on its own loneliness, on walking the ridge, on waiting for her. He has shriveled, rumpled up like skin, lain down somewhere, watching the crows wait on him to die. Still, most summers, young boys take the sheep up to the ridge, hoping the sound of their bells might lure the tiger out of hiding. When they get to a clearing, someplace that looks like it might be what they’re looking for, they cover their ears with the palms of their hands and call for him, trying to make a noise that sounds more like an animal than a human voice, but the sound that comes out of them sounds like itself, and nothing else.

There is, however, and always has been, a place on Galina where the trees are thin, a wide space where the saplings have twisted away and light falls broken and dappled on the snow. There is a cave here, a large flat slab of stone where the sun is always cast. My grandfather’s tiger lives there, in a glade where the winter does not go away. He is the hunter of stag and boar, a fighter of bears, a great source of confusion for the lynx, a rapt admirer of the colors of birds. He has forgotten the citadel, the nights of fire, his long and difficult journey to the mountain. Everything lies dead in his memory, except for the tiger’s wife, for whom, on certain nights, he goes calling, making that tight note that falls and falls. The sound is lonely, and low, and no one hears it anymore.