The Tiger's Wife (35 page)

“Are you going to die tomorrow, too?” I say. “Is that why you’re here?” It is a foolish question, and I realize this as soon as I have asked it.

“Of course not,” he tells me. His fingers are drumming on his belly like a little boy’s fingers. “Are you?” he says.

I do not laugh, even though I think he is joking. “Even after all this—after this city is razed to the ground, which is what is going to happen tomorrow, without question—you don’t believe he will give you permission to die?” I say.

“Of course he won’t.” Gavo wipes his mouth with his napkin, and raises his hand for the waiter. The waiter comes and gathers the plates, and before he even asks, the deathless man is saying: “And now we’ll have some coffee.”

And now I am thinking, this is serious. He takes up the
narghile
pipe again and begins to smoke it, and every few puffs he offers me a try, and I refuse. His tobacco smells like wood and bitter roses. The smoke unfurls and goes into the fog that is hanging low, smearing the lights above the bridge. The waiter comes back with our coffee. He begins to set the table, to put down the coffee cups, but the deathless man says, “No, we will share from this one,” and he pulls out his little white cup with the gold trim.

I make one last attempt, and, while the waiter is in earshot, I say: “I suppose, now, that you will be asking the gentleman to share our coffee?” I say this rudely, so the waiter will leave and not drink from the cup.

But the deathless man says, “No, no, the two of us, we had coffee this afternoon—didn’t we?” And the old waiter smiles and bows his bald head and I am very sad, suddenly, I am stricken with sadness for the old man. “No, my friend, this coffee is for you and me,” says the deathless man. When the waiter leaves, Gavo pours the hot coffee into the cup, and hands it to me, and sits back and waits for it to be cold enough. This takes a long time, but eventually I drink down my cup, and my friend is smiling at me.

“Well now,” he says, and takes it from me. It is dark on the balcony, and he is peering inside the cup, and I am leaning forward, and his face is like stone.

“Look here,” he says suddenly. “Why did you come into Sarobor? You are with the other side.”

“I beg you not to say that,” I tell him. “I am begging you not to say that aloud again. Do you want that old man to hear?” Gavo is still holding my cup in his hand, and I say: “I am not with the other side. I have no side. I am all sides.”

“Not by name,” he says.

“My wife was born here,” I tell him, and I am tapping the table with my finger. “My daughter, too. We lived here until my daughter was six.”

“But you seem to know what is going to happen tomorrow. I ask, why did you come? You were not summoned. You did not come here to retrieve anything of value. You came to have dinner—why?”

“That
is
of value to me,” I say. “And apparently to that poor old man, whom you will not even give a chance to be with his family.”

“He will be with his family tonight, Doctor, when he goes home,” the deathless man says, and he is still patient. I cannot believe how patient he is. “Why should I tell him that tomorrow he is going to die? So that, on his last night with his family, he will mourn himself?”

“Why did you bother warning the others, then?”

“What others?”

“The others—the man who drowned you, and the man with the cough at the Virgin of the Waters. Why do you not warn him? Those other men were dying, really dying. This man could save himself, he could leave.”

“So could you,” he says.

“I am going to.”

“Are you?” he says.

“I am,” I say. “Give me that cup, you smiling bastard—there is nothing in it for me.”

But he will not give me the cup, and he says to me: “You did not answer, Doctor, when I asked you why you had come to Sarobor.”

I drink a lot of wine very quickly, and then I say: “Because I have loved it all my life. My finest memories are here—my wife, my child. This, all this, is going to hell tomorrow.”

“By coming here, you realize you risk going with it. They could fire off a missile right now and hit this building.”

“Is that going to happen?” I say. I am too angry now to be concerned.

“It may and it may not,” he says.

“So you are not warning me either?”

“No, Doctor—I am talking about something,” he says patiently. “I am not talking about illness, about a long slow descent into something. I am talking about suddenness. I am trying to explain. I am not warning that man because his life will end in suddenness. He does not need to know this, because it is through the not-knowing that he will not suffer.”

“Suddenness?” I say.

“Suddenness,” he says to me. “His life, as he is living it—well, and with love, with friends—and then suddenness. Believe me, Doctor, if your life ends in suddenness you will be glad it did, and if it does not you will wish it had. You will want suddenness, Doctor.”

“Not me,” I say. “I do not do things, as you say, suddenly. I prepare, I think, I explain.”

“Yes,” he says. “And those things you can do reasonably well for everything—but not this.” And he is pointing into the cup, and I think,
yes, he is here for me, too
. “Suddenness,” he says. “You do not prepare, you do not explain, you do not apologize. Suddenly, you go. And with you, you take all contemplation, all consideration of your own departure. All the suffering that would have come from knowing comes after you are gone, and you are not a part of it.” He is looking at me, and I am looking at him, and the waiter comes with the check. The waiter must think something very terrible and private is going on, because he leaves very quickly.

“Why are you crying, Doctor?” the deathless man says.

I wipe my eyes and tell him I hadn’t realized I was.

“There is going to be a lot of suddenness, Doctor, over the next few years,” says Gavran Gailé. “They are going to be long, long years—you can have no doubt about that. But those years will pass, eventually they will end. So you must tell me why you came to Sarobor, Doctor, where you take a risk every minute you sit here, even though you know that one day this war will end?”

“This war never ends,” I say. “It was there when I was a child and it will be here for my children’s children. I came to Sarobor because I want to see it again before it dies, because I do not want it to go from me, like you say, in suddenness.” I have been bunching up the tablecloth and I smooth it out. The deathless man puts crisp, clean bills that will be worth nothing in the morning onto the plate with the check. Then I say: “Tell me, Gavran Gailé—does the cup say that I will be joining you, tonight, in suddenness?”

He shrugs, and he is smiling at me. There is nothing angry, nothing mean in his smile. There never is. “What would you like me to say, Doctor?”

“No.”

“Then break your cup,” he says to me, “and go.”

Months later, for weeks and weeks after the bombing ended, Zbogom the tiger continued to eat his own legs. He was docile, tame, to the keepers, but savage on himself, and they would sit in the cage with him, stroking the big square block of his head while he gnawed on the stumps of his legs. The wounds were infected, swollen, and black.

In the end, without announcing it in the newspaper, they shot that legless tiger there, on the stone slab of his cage. The man who raised him—the man who nursed him, weighed him, gave him baths, the man who carried him around the zoo in a knapsack, the man whose hands appeared in every picture ever taken of the tiger as a cub—pulled the trigger. They say the tiger’s mate killed and ate one of her cubs the following spring. To the tigress, the season meant red light and heat, a sound that rises and falls like a scream; so the keepers took the remaining cubs away from her, raised them in their own houses, with their own pets and children. Houses without electricity, with no running water for weeks on end. Houses with tigers.

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.