He closed his eyes, as though trying to remember every detail of the tiger.
“To tell the truth, the biggest problem with the tiger is the odor—it’s overpowering. It gets into your pores, right down the roots of your hair. That’s why I always wear my cologne. It was a present from one of the ladies. Not sure which one. Anyway, it cost plenty.” At this point, he moved closer until his chest was almost touching my face. “Nice, isn’t it?” he said. He had apparently acquired expensive tastes from living among the wealthy, though the experience had made him no richer himself.
“But the old ladies are really more interested in all different kinds of torture,” he went on without opening his eyes. “They go all over the world, buying anything that could be used to inflict pain, and my job is to take care of all the things they bring home.”
“That’s a pretty strange job,” I said.
“At first I thought it was torture enough being left alone with the tiger, but I have to admit that some of the devices they bring back are pretty interesting: a hatchet for breaking ankles, a stretcher to rip open your mouth, a knife for flaying human skin.”
He described these “devices” one after the other, and I found it difficult to picture what they looked like. Some of them, though, reminded me of that brace of his.
* * *
The image of my uncle that remains clearest in memory for me is of his back as he is leaving our house. No one ever knew where he was going, and no one asked. He left with little more than a “See you later.”
When he returned, he was carrying nothing. He never had a suitcase, and I wondered what he did for clean underwear and the like. Perhaps he kept these things tucked away somewhere in his pockets—like the gifts he brought me.
“I’ve had a wonderful time,” he would tell us when he was ready to go again, and he apparently meant it. And then he might tell me how important it was to study hard. “Even if something seems pointless at the time, you mustn’t take it lightly. You’ll see how useful it is later on. Nothing you study will ever turn out to be useless. That’s the way the world is.”
He would pick me up and rub his cheek against mine. Sometimes I would struggle to escape and muss his carefully combed hair in the process, but he never seemed to mind. Then he would bow and thank my parents, smoothing his hair with his hand.
“When will you be back?” I would ask. It still amazes me that I could have been so blunt as a child—but I truly wanted to know.
“I wonder…” He was incapable of making promises of any sort.
His last visit was after the old ladies had died and the house was turned into a museum of torture, for which he was to serve as curator. I was by then too old for our little games.
That time, too, a hired car came to take him to the station—spotless, black and impressive. He tripped on the front stairs, and when I went to help him he thanked me in a raspy voice. I caught a whiff of his favorite cologne.
It shocked me to realize that he suddenly seemed old—so frail that the slightest push would have sent him tumbling. The body I had felt when I’d gone searching for my hidden presents had been sturdier; and though I had always thought of him as tall, he was now much shorter than me.
I realized I had no idea how old he was—I suppose I’d thought that something as mundane as age could never apply to him.
“Give my regards to the tiger,” I said, leaning in the car window. He nodded, but it was unclear whether he had heard me. “My regards to the tiger,” I said again. He had no other family in the world, as far as I knew.
He waved with his usual theatrical flair, like a king bidding farewell to courtiers. When the car finally pulled away from the curb, I could see him through the rear window, thin and frail and growing smaller in the distance.
“Well then,” said my father, turning to go back into the house. My mother followed him, nodding and muttering. I stayed behind to watch until the car was out of sight. He never turned around.
* * *
The funeral was over quickly. Only a few people had attended, and no one cried. They just took their turns lighting incense in front of the family altar, looking a bit lost. Not lost in grief; they seemed to be lost in thought, wondering perhaps what they were doing in such a place.
“They said he wasn’t murdered but he died of asphyxiation,” I heard someone whisper. “It seems odd.”
“He was terribly weak,” said another voice. “A wardrobe fell and trapped him underneath.”
“I bet someone pushed it over. He had plenty of enemies.”
“They said he was nothing but skin and bones, he would have starved to death anyway.”
His troubles had started when one of his neighbors told the police that he was bringing underage girls into the Museum of Torture and doing indecent things to them. In fact he had been involved with an eighteen-year-old woman, a beautician, who had moved into the museum. But she never filed a complaint against him and the whole thing had eventually blown over.
“I’ll bet he was torturing her,” my father said.
“Why do you say that?” I asked, a bit shocked.
“The place was full of that stuff. What else could they do with it?”
But almost immediately after that affair was over, the police arrested him for embezzling from the old ladies’ estate. He had apparently gone through quite a bit of their money in the few years since their deaths, and so, for a second time in his life, my uncle found himself in jail.
Worse still, they closed the museum while he was away and he lost his home.
He had asked me repeatedly to come visit him while he worked there, but I never managed to make the trip. I’m not sure why; I didn’t dislike museums in principle and I wasn’t trying to distance myself from him. I suppose I was preoccupied with my studies and extracurricular activities, and in the end I missed my chance.
He sent me a card every Christmas with a photograph of himself posing in front of the museum displays. Bow tie, starched shirt, his chest puffed out. He was usually pointing at one of his treasures, smiling happily; he seemed to be assuring the viewer that the device was a genuine instrument of torture.
* * *
I saw him for the last time in February, after he had been let out on parole. The clouds were low and the wind had been blowing hard all day. I had wandered for a long time, hands in my pockets, head bent in the wind, searching for his apartment. What I found at last was practically a ruin: a long, squat building with two lines of unadorned windows. No flower boxes, not even laundry hung out to dry. The walls were stained, the gutters pulled loose in places, the banisters crooked. It was perfectly silent except for the mewing of a cat hiding in the weeds near the door.
I checked the mailboxes to be sure I hadn’t made a mistake. My uncle’s name was written in magic marker on the box for number 201—though the characters were shaky and smeared by the rain. Peering in the box, I saw nothing but darkness, not a postcard or even an advertising flyer.
I opened the door to the apartment. “Uncle!” I called. “Uncle! It’s me!” From somewhere inside, I heard the sound of labored breathing. I took off my shoes and slid open the inner door, but then I froze, unable to find a place to set my foot. The entire apartment was filled with a mound of garbage—though “garbage” wasn’t exactly the right word for it. These were objects that had once been useful but were no longer so. A mountain of random things, with no discernible connection between them.
“Oh, you’ve come.” His voice sounded weak, muffled as it was by the mound of clutter. “Well, don’t stand there all day. Come and let me look at you.”
“I’d like to, but I’m not sure how,” I said.
“Not to worry,” he said. “Just come past the refrigerator, by the radio, slip behind the chest, and you’re there.” Following his instructions, I made my way cautiously into the apartment.
Worn-out socks, barbecue utensils, a set of encyclopedias, pieces of a clarinet, cans of cat food, pots without handles, dried-up bars of soap, a microscope, a marionette, a stuffed weasel … The sheer variety of items made me dizzy. Tightly packed in a giant mass, they filled the entire room, covering the windows and piled nearly to the ceiling. But somehow I managed to find him inside of it all.
“It’s true, you’re really here,” he said. “But come closer. My eyes are bad and I want to get a look at you.” He was stretched out in a tiny space near the middle of the room, all but buried in his things. His trembling hand reached toward me. I took it and held it to my cheek.
“I remember that face,” he said. “And those soft hands. You haven’t changed a bit.” He, however, was nearly unrecognizable. He had grown terribly thin, his collarbone and shoulders jutting out sharply. I held tight to his hand.
“Thanks for the Christmas cards,” I said.
“I don’t send them to anyone else anymore.”
I hesitated a moment, but then I decided to push back the things near his head and I knelt beside him.
“How are you getting along?” I said. I wanted to talk to him about the disaster in his apartment, but I didn’t know how to broach the topic.
“I can’t complain. Though the cold makes my neuralgia act up.”
He was wrapped in a thin blanket, more a towel really, and so filthy that its original color was impossible to guess. There was no sign of a heater anywhere—but I had the feeling that this mass of objects gave off a warmth of its own.
“You haven’t come to see us,” I said.
“I know, there’s always something…”
“Are you eating?” I asked. “You have to keep up your strength.”
“All of a sudden you’re grown and worrying about me, instead of the other way around. Seems like yesterday you were just a little boy.”
“I’m at the university now.”
“What are you studying?”
“French literature,” I told him.
“Wonderful! Absolutely wonderful.” He closed his swollen eyes and squeezed my hand, apparently on the verge of tears.
“Oh, I almost forgot. I brought you a present. Can you guess where I’ve hidden it?” Not wanting to see him cry, I forced myself to sound jolly. He let out a sound that was something between a cough and a laugh, and I produced a box of chocolates from the inner pocket of my jacket. “Weren’t these always your favorites?”
“They were indeed,” he said. “Thank you. But I never thought I’d see the day when you would bring me presents.”
I balanced the box on a toaster, resting on a tricycle, and almost immediately it blended in, becoming part of the pile.
As I studied the mass more closely, I began to feel that it was not the product of random accumulation but that it actually had a coherent form all its own; and while the individual items were dirty and deteriorating, taken together they were like a strange piece of art.
Something else became apparent: many of these scraps of wood and chains and leather were, in fact, the remains of exhibits from his museum. A twisted belt with buckles nearly torn off might have been used to bind the wrists; a whip with a broken handle; a rusted weight that could have crushed bone. But they were ruined, no longer suitable for causing pain; the devices themselves almost seemed to be the victims. They looked exhausted, ready to die.
I looked down at my feet and realized I was staring at the brace. The feeling of suffocation came back to me in an instant—the sweat under the collar, the plate against my back. Then I saw that he was lying next to a knot of old braces that looked impossible to untangle.
“I remember those,” I said, and my uncle seemed to know what I meant without even turning his head.
“You do?” he said. “That was a great invention, even if it didn’t sell. I still get New Year’s cards from clients who are taller thanks to those braces. They think of me as their benefactor, and when I see them, I feel as though my life hasn’t been a complete waste.”
He closed his eyes, pulled his blanket up to his chin, and curled into a ball. When he coughed, a shudder ran down his back.
The wind blew outside, rattling the windows. A tiny creature—a mouse or a cockroach perhaps—scurried along the edge of my vision before disappearing into the instruments of torture. There was a quiet rustling and then silence again.
“Take one with you, if you like. I have plenty. Who knows, it could still help.”
“Thanks,” I said.
The kitchen was at the back of the apartment, but there was no sign that it was in use. The sink was filled with dozens of empty cologne bottles.
“Whatever happened to the tiger?” I asked.
“He died in the garden,” he said. “It was a beautiful death.”
We were quiet then for a moment. The only sound was the wind at the window. His arms reached out from under the blanket. I took his hands in mine, and it seemed to me that we were praying for the tiger.
* * *
“It’s started to snow,” he said sometime later.
“How can you tell?”
“The wind has died.”
“Do you have a heavier blanket? You need to keep warm.”
“I’m fine like this,” he said. “You’re the one who’ll catch cold. You should wear this home,” he said, plunging his hand into the mound next to him and pulling out a fur coat.
“It’s wonderful,” I said. “You should use it for a blanket. I don’t need it.”
“Don’t say that. I want you to have it. It’s the only thing I have to leave you.”
“Well then,” I said. “Thank you.”
He closed his eyes again and a look of satisfaction spread over his face. A few minutes later his breath fell into the regular rhythm of sleep.
* * *
Where had it all come from? Outside, the world lay under a blanket of white, just as my uncle had said. The air was still, and large snowflakes drifted out of the night sky. The street was empty, and the cat that had been lurking near the entrance had disappeared. I walked gingerly over the unmarked snow. When I turned to look back, the window was dark.
Thanks to the coat, I didn’t feel the cold at all. I felt as though I were being embraced by big, strong arms, and with each step I caught a whiff of my uncle’s cologne. The fur was so soft, I found myself rubbing it against my cheek.
I wasn’t sure how to get back, and the snow had covered and obscured all landmarks, so I could do nothing but walk straight ahead. The flakes that fell on the fur melted almost immediately. I turned one last time, but the building had vanished, and a trail of my footprints in the snow stretched back into the darkness.