Authors: Tea Obreht
All day long, he walked up and down the length of the ridge, letting the smells drift up to him, puzzled by the feeling that they weren’t entirely new. He had not forgotten his time at the citadel, but his memory was heavily veiled by his final days there and the days afterward, his arduous trek, burrs and splinters and glass stinging his paws, the dense, watery taste of the bloated dead. By now, he had only an indistinct sense, in another layer of his mind, that, long, long ago, someone had thrown him fresh meat twice a day and sprayed him with water when the heat grew too unbearable. The smells from below meant something related to that, and they made him restless and agitated as he wandered the woods, instinctively sprinting after every rabbit and squirrel he saw. The smells were pleasant and distinct, entirely separate from one another: the thick, woolly smell of sheep and goats; the smell of fire, tar, wax; the interesting reek of the outhouses; paper, iron, the individual smells of people; the savory smells of stew and goulash, the grease of baking pies. The smells also made him more and more aware of his hunger, his lack of success as a hunter, of the length of time since his last meal, the calf that had blundered into him that bitter afternoon when he’d seen the man turn and run. The taste of the calf had been familiar; the shape of the man had been familiar.
That night, he had come halfway down the mountain. Stopped at a precipice where the tree line curved around the bottom of a frozen waterfall, and looked and looked at the burning windows and snow-topped roofs below him in the valley.
And some nights later, there was a new smell. He had sensed it here and there in the past—the momentary aroma of salt and wood smoke, rich with blood. The smell fell into his stomach, made him long for the calf, reduced him to rolling onto his back, head pressed into the snow, and calling for it until the birds shuddered free of their nests. The smell came up to him almost every night, in darkness, and he stood there in the newly fallen snow, with the trees arching in low around him, breathing it in and out. One night, half a mile from his clearing, he watched a lone stag—whose imminent death the tiger had been waiting on, had sensed days before it happened—buckle under the weight of starvation and old age and the bitter cold. The tiger watched him kneel and fold over, watched the stag’s one remaining antler snap off. Later, as he ripped the belly open, even the spreading warmth of the stag’s entrails couldn’t drown out the smell from the village.
One night, he went down to the valley and stood at the pasture fence. Across the field, the silent houses, past the barn and the empty pigpen, past the house with its snow-packed porch, stood the smokehouse. There was the smell, almost close enough. The tiger rubbed his chin up and down the fence posts. He did not return for two days, but when he did he found the meat. Someone had been there in his absence. One of the fence planks had been ripped down, and the meat lay under it, dry and tough, but full of the smell that frenzied him. He dug it up and carried it back to the woods, where he gnawed on it for a long time.
Two nights later, he had to venture closer to find the next piece; it was waiting for him under a broken barrel that had been left out in the field, just yards from the smokehouse door. A cautious return some nights later to the same place, a bigger piece. Then two pieces, then three, and, eventually, a whole shoulder right at the threshold of the smokehouse.
The following night, the tiger came up the smokehouse ramp and put his shoulders in the doorway, which was thrown wide open for the first time. He could hear the sheep bleating in the stable, some distance away, terrified by his presence; the dogs, fenced up, barking furiously. The tiger sniffed the air: there was the smell of the meat, but also the thick, overwhelming smell of the person inside, the person whose scent he had found on and around the meat before, and whom he could see now, sitting in the back of the smokehouse, a piece of meat in her hands.
Galina, meanwhile, had gone nervously about its business. The end of the year was marked with heavy snowstorms, knee-deep drifts that moved like sand in and out of doorways. There was a quiet, clotted feeling in the air, the electricity of fear. Snow had buried the mountain passes, and, with them, any news of the war. Somewhere nearby, high above them in the dense pine forests of Galina ridge, something large and red and unknown was stalking up and down and biding its time. They found evidence of it once—the woodcutter, reluctantly braving the undergrowth at the bottom of the mountain, had come across the head of a stag, fur matted and eyes gone white, the spinal column, like a braid of bone, rolling out gray along the ground—and this, with Vladiša’s encounter, sufficiently persuaded them against leaving the village.
It was winter, and their livestock were already slaughtered, or stabled until spring. The season had provided them with an excuse for staying safely indoors, which they already knew how to do, and the tiger, they hoped, would not last the winter. On the other hand, there was the possibility that the tiger—how had it gotten there in the first place, they wondered, if it belonged so far away, in jungles, in fields of elephant grass?—would realize it might not last, and come down into the village to hunt them just the same. So they lit fires in their homes, hoping to discourage it from leaving the ridge. The ground was frozen solid, they had already postponed all funerals until the thaw—only three people died that winter anyway, so they were fortunate, very fortunate—and they packed the undertaker’s basement with ice blocks and took the added precaution of stuffing the windows with cloth from the inside, to prevent any smell of the corpses from getting out.
For a while, there was no trace of the tiger. They almost managed to convince themselves that it had all been a joke, that Vladiša had seen a personal ghost of some kind, or perhaps had some kind of seizure up there in the mountains; that the stag had been dispatched by a bear or wolf. But the village dogs—sheepdogs and boarhounds, thick-coated hunting dogs with yellow eyes who belonged to everybody and nobody at once—knew for certain that he was up there, and reminded the village. The dogs could smell him, the big-cat stink of him, and it drove them crazy. They were restless, and bayed at him and pulled at their tethers. They filled the night with a hollow sound, and the villagers, swaddled in their nightshirts and woolen socks, shook in their beds and slept fitfully.
But my grandfather still walked to the village well every morning, and laid out quail traps every night. It was his responsibility to ensure that he and Mother Vera had something to eat—and, besides, he was hoping, all the time hoping, for a glimpse of the tiger. He carried his brown volume with the picture of Shere Khan everywhere he went; and, while he never went far that particular winter, it must have been tangible, the excitement of a nine-year-old boy, because it brought him to the attention of the deaf-mute girl.
She was a girl of about sixteen, who lived on the edge of town in the butcher’s house and helped with the shop. My grandfather, probably not the most observant boy, had seen her occasionally, on market days and festival days, but he never noticed her with any particular interest until, that winter, some days before the Christmas celebration in January, she shyly blocked his path as he was heading to the baker’s in the early morning and took his book out of the top breast pocket of his coat, where he had kept it since the tiger had come.
My grandfather would remember the girl all his life. He would remember her dark hair and large eyes, interested, expressive eyes, and he would remember the cleft in her chin when she smiled as she opened the book to the dog-eared page with Shere Khan. My grandfather had his gray woolen cap down around his ears, and in the muted hush of his own head, he heard himself say: “That’s what the tiger looks like.” And he pointed to the mountain above the smoking chimneys of the village.
The girl did not say anything, but she studied the picture carefully. She had only one glove, and the cold had turned the fingers of her bare hand an odd shade of purple. Her nose was slightly runny, and this made my grandfather wipe his own nose with the back of his coat sleeve, as discreetly as possible. The girl still hadn’t said anything, and it occurred to him that she might be embarrassed because she couldn’t read—so he launched into an explanation of Shere Khan, and his complicated relationship with Mowgli, and how my grandfather himself found it strange that in one chapter Mowgli skinned the tiger and draped the tiger-skin over Council Rock, but later on Shere Khan was whole again. He talked very quickly, gulping down pockets of cold air, and the girl, who still didn’t say a thing, looked at him patiently and then, after a few minutes, handed the book back to him and went on her way.
In particular, my grandfather remembered his own embarrassment, when, after talking at her about tigers and asking her questions to which she did not reply, he went home confused and asked Mother Vera about her. He remembered how bright his own ears felt when she cuffed him and said: “Don’t bother her, that’s Luka’s wife. That girl’s a deaf-mute, and Mohammedan besides—you stay away from her.”
Luka was the town butcher, who owned the pasture and smokehouse on the edge of town. He was a tall man with curly brown hair and thick, red hands, and he wore an apron that was almost perpetually soaked in blood. Something about that apron made the townspeople uncomfortable. They were, in one capacity or another, all butchers themselves, and they didn’t understand why, if he had to make his money cutting up meat and selling it at Gorchevo, he didn’t at least change to conduct his business transactions, didn’t do his best to smell like something other than the sour insides of cows and sheep. In the nine years of his life at the time, my grandfather had met Luka only once, but the encounter was clear in his memory. Two years before, during a brief but cold winter storm, Mother Vera had sent my grandfather out to the butcher’s shop to buy a leg of lamb because the cold had tightened her hands with pain. The front room of the butcher’s house was filled with the smell of meat, and my grandfather had stood and looked around at the smoked hams and sausages hanging from the rafters, soup bones and square bacon slabs in the cold vitrine, the skinned red lamb with its sharp little teeth lying on the block while Luka, his glasses hanging around his neck, cleaved the bone of the leg away. My grandfather was leaning in to look at jars full of something brined and white and lumpy behind the counter when the butcher smiled at him and said: “Pigs’ feet. Delicious. They’re a lot like children’s feet, actually.”
My grandfather couldn’t remember whether he had seen the girl when he had gone to the butcher’s shop; perhaps she hadn’t been married to Luka then. And he would not see her again until the day before Christmas Eve, when the pain in Mother Vera’s hands was so agonizing that she groaned in her sleep, and, overwhelmed by his own inability to help her, he went out to bring back water for her bath.
My grandfather wore his wool coat and hat, and carried the empty bucket to the well. Like so much of the village, the well had been erected during Ottoman times. It is still there today, but has been empty for many decades. That night, its pointed roof was dusted with snow, and snow-laden gusts of wind snaked all around it as my grandfather made his way across the village square. He was keenly aware of the moonless cold, the faint fires in the windows he passed, the desolate sound of his own feet shuffling along.
He had just put the bucket down and grabbed the rope when he looked up and saw a thin light at the edge of the pasture. My grandfather stood with the rope frozen in his hands, and tried to see through the darkness. He could see the butcher’s house, with the fire dying inside, which meant that Luka was probably fast asleep, but the light was not that; nor was it the barn where the butcher kept his livestock. It was the smokehouse: the door was open, and there was light inside.
My grandfather did not go there looking for trouble; it merely occurred to him that some traveler or gypsy had found shelter for the night and that Luka might be angry, or they might come across the tiger. It was the latter thought that drove him to pick up his bucket and press on to the smokehouse, partly because he wanted to warn the intruder about the tiger, partly because he was filled with a frantic, inexplicable jealousy at the thought of some drifter seeing his tiger first. Carefully, he crossed the empty fold, and picked his way through the pasture.
The chimney was going, and the smell of smoked meat hung in the air. He thought, for a moment, about whether he could get Luka to smoke the Christmas quail he hoped to find in the trap tomorrow. Then he crept up to the ramp, put his hands on it and hoisted himself up. He picked up the bucket. He stood in the doorway and looked in.
There was a lot less light than he had initially supposed. He could hardly see inside, where the hollowed-out hogs and cattle hung in rows, to the little front room in the corner, where the butcher’s block stood. The smell was wonderful, and he suddenly felt hungry, but then there was a different smell he hadn’t noticed before, a thick, dark musk, and just as he realized this the light went out. In the sudden darkness, he heard a low, heavy sound, like breath all around him, a single deep rumble that strung his veins together and trembled in his lungs. The sound spread around his skull for a moment, making room for itself. Then he dove into the little butchering room and crawled under a tarp in the corner and sat in a shuddering heap with the bucket still in his hands.
It seemed to my grandfather that the sound was still in the air, as sure and constant as his own crazy heartbeat, which could drown out everything except the sound. The smell was there too, everywhere, lingering—the smell of wild things, fox or badger, but bigger, so much more of it, like nothing he could place but something he could identify in so many other things. He thought of the plate in his book, in bed, at home, which seemed infinitely far now, not just twenty seconds of solid running past the houses of people he knew.
Something in the darkness moved, and the butcher’s hooks, hanging in rows along the rafters, clinked against one another, and my grandfather knew that it was the tiger. The tiger was walking. He could not make out the individual footfalls, the great velvet paws landing, one in front of the other; just the overall sound of it, a soft, traveling thump. He tried to quiet his own breathing, but found that he couldn’t. He was panting under the tarp and the tarp kept drawing in around him, rustling insanely, pointing him out. He could feel the tiger just beside him, through the wooden planks, the big, red heart clenching and unclenching under the ribs, the weight of it groaning through the floor. My grandfather’s chest was jolting, and he could already picture the tiger bearing down on him, but he thought of
The Jungle Book
—the way Mowgli had taunted Shere Khan at Council Rock, torch in hand, grabbing the Lame Tiger under the chin to subdue him—and he put his hand out through the tarp and touched the coarse hairs passing by him.