The Tiger's Wife Read online

  “I heard something in the smokehouse,” my grandfather was telling everyone. “I thought one of the animals had escaped. But it was the tiger.”

  Nearby, Luka stood looking out through the smokehouse door, holding on to the arm of the deaf-mute, whose skin had gone white around his grip. She was looking at my grandfather and smiling.

  He appealed to the deaf-mute. “You came out because you heard him, too, didn’t you?”

  “The bitch is deaf, she didn’t hear anything,” Luka told him, before he led her across the field into the house and closed the door.

  _____

  There was only one gun in the village, and, for many years, it had been kept in the family home of the blacksmith. It was an old Ottoman musket and it had a long, sharp muzzle, like a pike, and a silver-mantled barrel with a miniature Turkish cavalry carved riding forward over the saddle below the sight. A faded, woolly tassel hung from an embroidered cord over the musket butt, which was a deep, oily mahogany, and rough along the side, where the name of the Turk who had first carried it had been thoughtfully scraped off.

  The musket had made its way to the village through a series of exchanges that differed almost every time someone told the story, and went back nearly two centuries. It had supposedly first seen battle at Lastica, before disappearing in the mule-pack of a defecting Janissary from the sultan’s personal bodyguard, a soldier-turned-peddler who carried it with him for many decades while he roamed the mountains, selling silks and cook pots and exotic oils. The musket was eventually stolen from the Janissary peddler by a Magyar highwayman, and, later still, dragged out from under the Magyar’s body by the mounted brigade that shot him down outside the house of his mistress, whose blouse, wet with the highwayman’s blood, was still unbuttoned when she begged the brigadiers to leave her the gun as they took her lover’s corpse away. The highwayman’s mistress mounted the gun above the counter in her tavern. She dressed in mourning, and developed a habit of cleaning the gun as though it were in use. Many years later, an old woman of sixty, she gave it to the boy who carried milk up the stairs for her, so it would protect him when he rode against the bey’s citadel in an ill-fated uprising that was swiftly crushed. The boy’s head ended up on a pike on the citadel wall, and the gun ended up in the possession of the bey, who hung it in a minor trophy room of his winter palace, between the heads of two leopards with crooked eyes. It stayed there for almost sixty years, through the reigns of three beys, hanging opposite a stuffed lynx—and then, as time passed, a sultan’s last battle outfit, the carriage of a Russian queen, a silver tea-set honoring one alliance or another, and eventually a state car belonging to a wealthy Turk who, shortly before his execution, had forfeited all his possessions to the citadel.

  When the citadel fell, shortly after the turn of the century, the gun was taken away by a looter from Kovač, who carried it with him while he went from town to town, selling coffee. In the end, switching hands in some skirmish between peasants and Turkish militia, the musket went home with one of the survivors, a youth from the village, the grandfather of the blacksmith. That was 1901. Since then, the gun had hung on the wall above the blacksmith’s hearth. It had been fired only once, in the direction of a sheep rapist, and never by the blacksmith himself. Now, my grandfather learned, the old gun would be used to kill the tiger.

  The blacksmith was allegedly very brave about the business of the gun, and did not reveal—although perhaps he should have—that he did not know how to use it. He had a vague sense of what he was supposed to do with the powder, the bullets, the greased paper wadding, the ramrod. He felt an obligation to the village, and to the memory of his grandfather, whom he had never known, but who had once shod the sultan’s horse. On the eve of the hunt, the blacksmith sat by the fire and watched his wife take the gun down and wipe the barrel in clean, even strokes, slowly and with loving patience. She polished the hood, beat the dust out of the tassel, and then wiped the inside with greased felt.

  My grandfather watched them prepare for the hunt the following morning, in the gray hours before dawn. He did not know what to make of his encounter in the smokehouse, but his throat was tight when the blacksmith emerged from his house with the honored gun under his arm. With the blacksmith were two other men: Luka and Jovo. They had dogs with them, too—a short, fat hound with floppy ears, and an old red sheepdog who had lost one eye under a carriage wheel.

  It was Christmas Eve, and the entire village had turned out to watch the hunters depart. People stood in a long line by the side of the road, their hands held out to touch the gun for luck as it went by on the blacksmith’s arm. My grandfather stood guiltily beside Mother Vera with his sleeves drawn up over his hands, and when his turn came, he touched the barrel with the tip of one sleeve-covered finger, and only for a moment.

  That afternoon, as he waited for the hunters to return, my grandfather drew in the hearth dust with that same finger and hated the men on the hill. He hated Luka already, for the pigs’ feet and the way he called his wife “bitch,” but now he hated those other men, and the dogs too, because he believed, fully and wholeheartedly, that the tiger would have spared him even if he had come in just a moment earlier or later, even if he had come in to find the tiger’s eyes burning at him from the other side of the barn. He could already see the men coming back, the tiger slung upside down on a pole between them; or else, just the tiger’s head, in one of their carry sacks, and he hated them.

  He would probably not have hated them if he had known what is easy to guess: that the blacksmith was terrified. Climbing up Galina, knee-deep in snow, the gun, for all its honored past, a deadweight against his ribs, the blacksmith was convinced that this was the end for him. Like everyone in the village, he had faith in the rituals of superstition. He gave money to beggars before traveling, put pennies in the shrines of the Virgin at crossroads, spat on his children when they were born. But, unlike his fellow villagers, he was renowned for having a deficit. He had been born in a lean year, without a ducat under his pillow. To make matters worse, an estranged aunt had once allegedly lifted him from his crib and praised heaven for what a beautiful baby, what a gorgeous, fat, blessed, rosy child he was—forever sealing his destiny to be impoverished, crippled, struck down and taken by the devil at some unexpected time, in some terrifying way.

  Of course, it hadn’t happened yet. But he could not imagine anything more terrifying than a tiger. And there he was—thirty-nine years old, happily married and with five children—on his way to meet the devil. All his efforts, all his many precautions and prayers, the countless coins he had thrown to gypsies and circus folk and legless soldiers, all the times he had crossed himself while traveling on a lonely road at night, had been counteracted by the simple fact that the gun, like the misfortune, was his birthright, and that, regardless of his qualifications, he was the one intended to carry it against the tiger.

  Like his companions, the blacksmith did not know what to expect. He would have been just as surprised to discover that the tiger was a small but cunning cat with very big feet as he would have to find Satan—whether horned and cloven-hoofed or robed in black—riding the tiger around a massive steaming caldera in the forest. He hoped, of course, that they would not meet the tiger at all. He hoped to find himself at home that night, eating goat stew, and preparing to make love to his wife.

  The day was intermittently gray and bright. Along the ridges, where the mountains sloped in and out of the pine-filled valleys, they could hear the echoing crack of the red deer stags in rut. A freezing rain had fallen during the night, and the trees, twisting under the weight of their ice-laden branches, had transformed the forest into a snarl of crystal. The dogs plodded along, running to and fro, sniffing at trees and pissing wherever they could, seemingly unaware of their purpose on the trip. Luka was bracing himself up the mountain, using his pitchfork as a staff, and talking, too loudly for the blacksmith’s taste, about his plans to raise the price of meat when the Germans came through in the spring. Jovo was eating che
ese, throwing slices of it to the dogs, and calling Luka a filthy collaborator.

  On the ridge midway up the mountain, the dogs grew excited. They snuffled impatiently through the snow, whimpering. There were yellow patches melted into the snow, an occasional pile of scat here and there, and, most important, a clot of brownish fur clinging to a bramble by the frozen stream. Most assuredly, Jovo told the blacksmith, the tiger had crossed here. They followed. They crossed the sheet of ice and went uphill, following the dense pines through a rocky pass where the sun had melted the snow, and then reaching a small crevasse that they had to help each other across with the dogs, whining, tied to their packs. The blacksmith thought about suggesting they turn back. He couldn’t understand Jovo’s calmness, or Luka’s tight-jawed determination.

  It was late afternoon when they came across the tiger in a clearing by a frozen pond, bright and real, carved from sunlight. The dogs saw him first, sensed him, perhaps, because he lay partially obscured in the shadow of a tree, and the blacksmith felt, as he saw him get up to meet the dogs with his ears flat and his teeth bared, that he would have passed the tiger by. He felt his organs clench as the first of the dogs, the bravely stupid, half-blind shepherd, reached the tiger and went end over end when the big cat lashed at him, and then pinned him with all its enormous weight.

  Jovo seized the other dog and held it in his arms. From the other side of the pond, they watched the tiger crush the thrashing red dog. There was blood on the snow already, from something the tiger had been eating, something that looked like pork shoulder, something that Luka was observing keenly while his grip on the pitchfork tightened.

  Later on, at the village, Luka and Jovo would praise the blacksmith for his strength and resolve. They would talk about how he bravely raised the gun to his shoulder. Over and over again, Luka and Jovo would tell the villagers about how the blacksmith fired, how the bullet struck the tiger between the eyes, sending up a tremendous, rusty spurt. The noise the tiger made: a sound like a tree breaking. The tiger’s invincibility: how they watched while it got to its feet and cleared the pond in a single bound and brought the blacksmith down in a cloud of hellish red. A snap like thunder—and then, nothing, just the blacksmith’s gun lying in the snow, and the dead dog across the pond.

  In reality, at that moment, the blacksmith stood stone-still, staring at the yellow thing in the bracken. The yellow thing stared back with yellow eyes. Seeing it there, crouched at the pond’s edge with the body of the red dog under it, the blacksmith suddenly felt that the whole clearing had gone very bright, that brightness was spreading slowly across the pond and toward him. Luka shouted to the blacksmith to hurry up and shoot, idiot, and Jovo, whose mouth had dropped open, had now taken off his hat and resorted to slapping himself in the face with it, while the remaining dog, shivering like bulrush in a high wind, cowered around his legs.

  After uttering a little prayer, the blacksmith did actually raise the gun to his shoulder, and did cock it, sight, and pull the trigger, and the gun did go off, with a blast that rocked the clearing and spasmed through the blacksmith’s knees. But when the smoke cleared and the noise of it had died down in his ribs, the blacksmith looked up to discover that the tiger was on its feet and moving swiftly to the frozen center of the pond, undeterred by the ice and the men and the sound of the gunshot. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Luka drop his pitchfork and break for cover. The blacksmith fell to his knees. His hand was rummaging through the clots of yarn and the buttons and crumbs that lined the bottom of his pocket, searching for the encased bullet. When he found it, he stuffed it into the muzzle with shaking hands that seemed to be darting everywhere with the sheer force of terror, and fumbled for the ramrod. The tiger was almost over the pond, bounding on muscles like springs. He heard Jovo muttering, “Fuck me,” helplessly, and the sound of Jovo’s footsteps moving away. The blacksmith had the ramrod out and he was shoving it into the muzzle, pumping and pumping and pumping furiously, his hand already on the trigger, and he was ready to fire, strangely calm with the tiger there, almost on him, its whiskers so close and surprisingly bright and rigid. At last, it was done, and he tossed the ramrod aside and peered into the barrel, just to be sure, and blew his own head off with a thunderclap.

  No one would ever guess that the gun had misfired. No one would ever guess that Luka and Jovo, from the branches of the tree they had scrambled up, had watched the tiger reel back in surprise, and look around, puzzled. No one would ever guess, not even after the blacksmith’s clothed bones were found in disarray, many years later, that the two of them waited in that tree until the tiger pulled the blacksmith’s legs off and dragged them away, waited until nightfall to climb down and retrieve the gun from what was left of the blacksmith. No one would guess that they did not even bury the unlucky blacksmith, whose brain was eventually picked over by crows, and to whose carcass the tiger would return again and again, until he had learned something about the taste of man, about the freshness of human meat, which was different now, in snow, than it had been in the heat of summer.

  BIS WAS SNORING ASTHMATICALLY ON THE DOORSTEP OF the upper patio, and he started at the sound of my footsteps and bellowed like a moose until I reached him. I pushed past him with my knee, and then he followed me to the upper porch, where I sat at the top of the staircase above the main road. Bis hung around for a moment or two, pushing his wet face into the crook of my arm, sneezing with excitement at the notion of sharing the early morning hours with someone; and then he decided that I was unanimated and useless, and he ran down and over the road and dropped past the palms onto the beach. Moments later, I could hear him splashing around. It wasn’t dawn yet, and there was a fine pink sheen to the air, as translucent as a fish. The lights of Zvoćana were still bright on the water across the bay.

  The shadows were pulling back from the water, gathering at the foot of the road, when Barba Ivan came down the stairs. He came down slowly, putting both feet on each stair. He took one look at me—scuffed-up pant legs and dirt-smeared coat and bloodied palms—and said, “I see you’ve been up to the vineyard.”

  That I had made this effort on my own seemed to compel him to confide in me. He asked if I wanted to come fishing, and I said no, but I got up and followed him down to his boat anyway. It was a little blue skiff, paint peeling off the sides, green and yellow barnacles clinging to the bottom like something earned. Rubber boots on his feet, two large crates and an empty bucket in his arms, the Barba told me he had some lobster cages near the shore, a small net for dogfish a little farther out, and then the big net, right in the middle of the bay, that Fra Antun helped him with when he wasn’t supervising the orphanage. He held his arm out as he explained this to me, cutting the horizon into evenly distanced rectangles with a flat hand.

  Then he told me about the diggers. They had shown up on his doorstep last week, two carloads of them, all their pots and pans and, in his words, peddling bric-a-brac, and at first he’d thought they were gypsies. He hadn’t known how ill they were then; only Duré had come inside, and he had stood in Barba Ivan’s kitchen and told them there was a body in the vineyard, a body Duré had put there, the body of a distant cousin whom he had carried down from the mountains during the war and had to leave behind. The cousin had been stuffed into the ground somewhere up on that plot during the months the house had been abandoned. Now the whole family was sick, and no one had been able to help them until some hag from back in their village told them it was the body making them sick, the body calling out for last rites, a proper resting place. They were going to find him at any cost; earlier this year, they’d lost an aunt to the illness, and they were paying to dig.

  “Nada doesn’t care for it,” he told me, untying the boat. “But then, of course, what it comes down to is: they’ve got children. And do we or do we not want a body in the vineyard?”

  He had been watching them for the last week, growing more and more uneasy. “You’ve seen the pouches,” he said, pointing to his neck. “They’ve got—I don’t
know—grass and dead things in them to keep away the illness.”

  They had brought so many bottles that Barba Ivan suspected they had a trade on the side; rare kinds of rakija, perhaps some family concoction. But the young woman had told him about the bottles, full of water from a holy spring—back on Duré’s and my side of the border—and herbs and grasses for health.

  “But they haven’t found him yet?” I said.

  “Oh, he’s long gone,” Barba Ivan said with a broad smile. “I keep telling them—long gone. It’s hard, shallow earth. He’s not where he’s supposed to be—floods have flushed him out, dogs have dragged him off. Who knows?”

  The Barba put his crates in the boat and I helped him push it out, even though he waved me off. Bis was already in the boat, wagging his tail so hard his hips and whole rear end were swinging manically from left to right. Then Barba Ivan climbed into the boat and, eighty years old if he was a day, rowed himself out to the motorboat he kept moored to the breakwater, switched vessels, lifted Bis out of the skiff and into the motorboat, and then, with the dog standing on the wet prow like a masthead, the two of them set off down the coast, cutting the still morning water. Every hundred yards or so, Bis would launch backward out of the boat, his jowls flapping into an insane grin of canine pleasure, and disappear under the waves; Barba Ivan would kill the motor and drift until the dog caught up, or turn the boat around and go back for him.

  Zóra had begun her morning with a call to the prosecutor’s assistant, whom she’d succeeded in calling a cow within the first two minutes of conversation. I tried to cheer her up by telling her about the diggers on our way to the monastery, about the illness and the dead cousin, whose bones were perhaps somewhere up in the vineyard, and whom the diggers, as I understood it, would be repotting as soon as he was discovered.

  Zóra gave me a look from behind her sunglasses, and said nothing. She was pulling one of two dollies Nada had provided to accommodate us in our effort of delivering the vaccines to the monastery orphanage. We had stood in the doorway of the garden shed while Nada pushed boxes and crates aside to find them—two rusted carts with wheels barely clinging to the axles, leaning against the back wall behind a broken washing machine and some paper-wrapped canvases that we assumed were, undoubtedly, more dog portraits.