by Téa Obreht
“Listen,” he said to her, and touched his ear and then the radio. He ran his fingers over the top of the mahogany box. She stood there, smiling at him. In that moment, he was still himself. Then she made a gesture, something like a half shrug, and she leaned forward, took one of the plum slices from under his knife, put it under her tongue, and turned away to go outside. He was up before he knew what he was doing, pushing the table onto her, pinning her facedown under the full weight of it. The sound her body made when she struck the floor stayed in him, and he stood over her and kicked her ribs and head until blood came out of her ears.
Everything about that first time surprised him. His own inexplicable rage, the dull thud of his boot against her body, her soundless, gaping mouth and closed eyes. He realized that he had gone on hitting her far longer than he had intended, because he had been expecting her to cry out in fear or pain. He realized afterward, while he was helping her up, that his curiosity about whether she could even produce sound had just been fulfilled, and, now that it had, there was even more rage than ever: rage at himself, rage at her for looking so surprised and forlorn and subdued when he brought the water in to wash the blood off her face.
He told himself that it would never happen again. But, of course, it did. Something had opened in him, and he could not close it again. It happened the night of his father’s funeral, when it was just Luka and the girl and the house, silence everywhere. He thought, after me, there will be no children, no one left, and rolled on top of her. He would try, he told himself, to fuck her—he would try. But it had been months since he had managed it, and, feeling her under him, small and tense, as still as death, he couldn’t. He couldn’t even hurt her that way. Hitting her didn’t help, either—but it made him feel like he was doing something, interrupting her judgment at the very least. The injustice of it, that judgment he knew was there but couldn’t force out. He couldn’t force her to voice it, and he couldn’t force her to put it away.
Eventually, it was just the fear in her eyes when he walked in, just the way her shoulders shrank back when she was scrubbing the floor and felt his footsteps through the floorboards. The fact that she could see him that way, a side of himself that surprised him. Sometimes he would throw things at her: fruit, plates, a pot of boiling water that hit her at the waist and soaked through her clothes while she panted and her eyes rolled in terror. Once he held her against the wall with his body and slammed his forehead into her face until her blood seeped into his eyes.
People in Galina now, they give a thousand explanations for Luka’s marriage to the tiger’s wife. She was the bastard child of a notorious gambler, some say, who was forced on Luka as payment for a tremendous debt, a shameful secret that followed him back from those years he spent in Turkey. According to others, he purchased her from a thief in Istanbul, a man who sold girls at the souk, where she had stood quietly among the spice sacks and pyramids of fruit until Luka found her.
Whatever Luka’s reason, there is general agreement that the girl’s presence in his life was intended to hide something, because a deaf-mute could not reveal the truth about the assorted vices he was presumed to have during his ten-year absence: his gambling, his whoring, his predilection for men. And perhaps, in some part, that is true; perhaps he had allowed himself to think he had found someone to put between himself and the village, someone whose appearance, if not her disability, would discourage people from making contact while he secluded himself and planned a return to his dream that would never be fulfilled—she would remind them too much of the last war, their fathers’ fears, stories they’d heard of sons lost to the sultan. Never mind, the villagers thought, that he had found a wife who could never demand anything of him, never reproach him for being drunk, never beg for money.
But, in keeping her, Luka had also stumbled into an unwelcome complication. He had underestimated the power of her strangeness, the village’s potential for a fascination with her, and now people were talking more than ever. The secrecy she had been intended to afford him had turned his life into a public spectacle. He could hear them chattering now, gossiping, speculating and flat-out lying about where she’d come from and how he had found her, asking each other about the bruises on her arms, about why Luka and his wife were rarely seen in public together, why she’d yet to bear him a child—every possible answer leading only to further questions, further humiliations. It was worse than the first winter of their marriage, when he had brought her with him to church on Christmas, and the entire congregation had whispered afterward, What does he mean by bringing her here? Worse even than the following Christmas, when he had not, and they said, What does he mean by leaving her at home?
And now they were talking about the smokehouse. In the two days since the tiger was spotted in the village, there were whispers everywhere. What had she been doing, they were asking in doorways, in the smokehouse with that tiger? And what did it mean, they wanted to know, that Luka couldn’t keep her in his bed?
For weeks, he had suspected that the smokehouse was missing meat, but he had second-guessed his own judgment, refusing to believe that she had the audacity to steal from him. And then he had seen the tiger, and the sight of that pork in the big cat’s jaws had stunned him—that little gypsy, he had thought, that Mohammedan bitch, sneaking out and giving his meat to the devil. She was making him look like an idiot.
The night he returned from the hunt, he took her outside and tied her up in the smokehouse. He told himself that he wanted only to punish her, but, while he was eating his supper and getting ready for bed, he understood that some part of him was hoping that the tiger would come for her, that it would come in the night and rip her apart, and in the morning Luka would awake to find nothing.
If you go to Galina now, people will tell you different things about Luka’s disappearance. In one version of the story, the village woodcutter, waking from a dream in which his wife has forgotten to put the pie in the oven and served it to him raw, looks through the window and sees Luka wandering down the road in his nightgown, a white scarf tying his chin to the rest of his head so that the mouth will not fall open in death, his red butcher’s apron slung over one shoulder. In that version, Luka’s face is as loose as a puppet’s, and there is a bright light in his eyes, the light of a journey beginning. The woodcutter stands with the window curtains flung open, his legs stiff with fear and lack of sleep, and he watches the butcher’s slow advance through the snowdrifts that are running across the dead man’s bare feet.
Others will tell you about the baker’s eldest daughter, who, getting up early to warm the ovens, opens the window to let the winter air in to cool her and sees a grounded hawk sitting like something ancient on the fallen snow of her garden. The hawk’s shoulders are dark with blood, and when it hears her open the window it turns and looks at her with yellow eyes. She asks the hawk, “Is all well with you, brother—or not?” and the hawk replies, “Not,” and vanishes.
Whatever the details, the consensus is that there was an immediate awareness of Luka’s death, and an immediate acknowledgment that the tiger’s wife was responsible—but many of the people telling you the story couldn’t have been alive when it happened, and then it becomes clear that they have all been telling each other different stories, too.
No one will ever tell you that four or five days went by before anyone began to suspect a thing. People didn’t like Luka—they didn’t visit his house, and his docility while he stood there, his glasses around his neck in the yawning white space of the butcher’s shop with his hands on the meat, made them universally uncomfortable. The truth is that, even after the baker’s daughter went to buy meat and found the shutters of the butcher’s shop closed and the lights out, it took several days before anyone else tried again, before they began to realize that this winter they would have to do without.
There is the very real possibility that people assumed Luka had gone away—that he was out trapping rabbits for the midwinter feasts, or that he had given up on the village and deci
ded to brave the snowed-in pass and make for the City while the German occupation there was still new. The truth is, the whole situation did not strike anyone as particularly unusual until the deaf-mute girl appeared in town, perhaps two weeks later, with a fresh, bright face, and a smile that suggested something new about her.
My grandfather had spent the morning carrying firewood from the timber pile, and was pounding the snow from the bottoms of his shoes on the doorstep when he saw her coming down the road, wrapped in Luka’s fur coat. It was a cloudless winter afternoon, and villagers were leaning against their doorways. At first, only a few of them saw her, but by the time she reached the square the whole village was peering through doors and windows, watching her as she made her way into the fabric shop. They could see her through the window, hovering there indulgently, pointing to the Turkish silks that hung from the walls and running her hands over them lovingly when the shopkeeper spread them out on the counter for her. A few minutes later, my grandfather saw her cross the square with a parcel of silks under her arm, followed by a small procession of village women, who, while keeping their distance, were still too intrigued to maintain the illusion of nonchalance.
Who came up with that name for her? I can’t say—I have never been able to find out. Until the moment of Luka’s disappearance, she was known as “the deaf-mute girl,” or “the Mohammedan.” Then suddenly, for reasons uncertain to the villagers, Luka was no longer a factor in how they perceived the girl. And even after that first time, even after she wrapped her head in Turkish silk and admired herself in front of the mirror in the fabric shop, when it was clearer than ever that Luka was not coming back, that she had no more fear of him, she still did not become “Luka’s widow.” They called her “the tiger’s wife”—and the name stuck. Her presence in town, smiling, bruiseless, suddenly suggested an exciting and irrevocable possibility for what had happened to Luka, a possibility the people of Galina would cling to even seventy years later.
If things had turned out differently, if that winter’s disasters had fallen in some alternate order—if the baker had not sat up in bed some night and seen, or thought he had seen, the ghost of his mother-in-law standing in the doorway, and buckled under the weight of his own superstitions; if the pies of the cobbler’s aunt had risen properly, putting her in a good mood—the rumors that spread about the tiger’s wife might have been different. Conversation might have been more practical, more generous, and the tiger’s wife might have immediately been regarded as a vila, as something sacred to the entire village. Even without their admission, she was already a protective entity, sanctified by her position between them and the red devil on the hill. But because that winter was the longest anyone could remember, and filled with a thousand small discomforts, a thousand senseless quarrels, a thousand personal shames, the tiger’s wife shouldered the blame for the villagers’ misfortunes.
So their talk about her was constant, careless, and unburdening, and my grandfather, with The Jungle Book in his pocket, listened. They were talking about her in every village corner, on every village doorstep, and he could hear them as he came and went from Mother Vera’s house. Truths, half-truths, utter delusions drifted like shadows into conversations he was not intended to overhear.
“I seen her today,” the Brketi? widow would say, chins shaking, slung like thin necklaces, while my grandfather stood at the counter of the greengrocer’s, waiting for pickling salts.
“The tiger’s wife?”
“I seen her coming down from that house again, alone as you please.”
“She’s driven him away, hasn’t she? Luka’s never coming back.”
“Driven him away! Imagine that. A man like Luka being driven away by a deaf-mute child. Our Luka? I seen Luka eat a ram’s head raw.”
“What then?”
“Well, that’s plain, isn’t it? That tiger’s got him. That tiger’s got him, and now she’s all alone, nobody bothering her, no one but the tiger.”
“I can’t say I’m all that sorry. Not all that sorry, not for Luka.”
“Well, I am. Don’t anyone deserve to be done that way.”
“What way?”
“Well, isn’t it obvious? Isn’t it plain? She’s made a pact with that tiger, hasn’t she? She probably done Luka herself, probably cut off his head in the night, left the body out for the tiger to eat.”
“That little thing? She’s barely bigger than a child.”
“I’m telling you, that’s what happened. That devil give her the strength to do it, and now she’s his wife.”
My grandfather listened without believing everything—with caution, with guarded curiosity, with a premonition that something inferior was going on in those conversations, something that did not include the horizon of his own imagination. He understood that some part of the tiger was, of course, Shere Khan. He understood that, if Shere Khan was a butcher, this tiger had some butcher in him, too. But he had always felt some compassion for Shere Khan to begin with, and this tiger—neither lame nor vengeful—did not come into the village to kill men or cattle. The thing he had met in the smokehouse was massive, slow, hot-breathing—but, to him, it had been a merciful thing, and what had passed between my grandfather and the tiger’s wife had been a shared understanding of something the villagers did not seem to feel. So because they did not know, as he knew, that the tiger was concrete, lonely, different, he did not trust what they said about the tiger’s wife. He did not trust them when they whispered that she had been responsible for Luka’s death, or when they called the tiger devil. And he did not trust them when, a few weeks after her appearance in the fabric shop, they began to talk about how she was changing. Her body, they said, was changing. She was growing bigger, the tiger’s wife, and more frightening, and my grandfather listened in the shops and in the square when they said it was because she was swelling with strength, or anger, and when they decided, that no, it wasn’t her spirit, just her belly, her belly was growing, and they all knew what that meant.
“You don’t think it was an accident do you?” the beautiful Svetlana would say to her friends at the village well. “She saw, that girl, what was coming. And Luka, he never was too clever. Still, that’s what comes to you when you marry one of them Mohammedans from God knows where. Like a gypsy, that girl. Probably strung him up with his own meat hooks, left him there for the tiger.”
“That can’t be true.”
“Well, you believe it or don’t. But I’m telling you, whatever happened to that Luka was no accident. And that baby—that’s no accident, neither.”
“That’s no baby. She’s eating—Luka’s been starving her for years, and now she’s free to eat.”
“Haven’t you seen her? Haven’t you seen her coming into town, so slow, those robes of hers coming up bigger and bigger in the front? That girl’s got a belly out to here, are you blind?”
“There’s no belly.”
“Oh, there’s a belly—and I’ll tell you something else. That belly ain’t Luka’s.”
It never occurred to my grandfather to accept what the others were thinking—that the baby belonged to the tiger. To my grandfather, the baby was incidental. He had no need to guess, as I have guessed, that it was a result of some drunken stupor of Luka’s, or rape by some unnamed villager, and that the baby had been there before the tiger had come to Galina.
However, there was no way to deny that the tiger’s wife was changing. And whatever the source of that transformation, whatever was said about it, my grandfather realized that the only true witness to it was the tiger. The tiger saw the girl as she had seen him: without judgment, fear, foolishness, and somehow the two of them understood each other without exchanging a single sound. My grandfather had inadvertently stumbled onto that understanding that night at the smokehouse, and now he wanted so much to be a part of it. On the simplest possible level, his longing was just about the tiger. He was a boy from a small village in the grip of a terrible winter, and he wanted, wanted, wanted to see the tiger. But there
was more to it than that. Sitting at the hearth in Mother Vera’s house, my grandfather drew the shape of the tiger in the ashes, and thought about seeing and knowing—about how everyone knew, without having seen, that Luka was dead, and that the tiger was a devil, and that the girl was carrying the tiger’s baby. He wondered why it didn’t occur to anyone to know other things—to know, as he knew, that the tiger meant them no harm, and that what went on in that house had nothing to do with Luka, or the village, or the baby: nightfall, hours of silence, and then, quiet as a river, the tiger coming down from the hills, dragging with him that sour, heavy smell, snow dewing on his ears and back. And then, for hours by the fireside, comfort and warmth—the girl leaning against his side and combing the burs and tree sap out of the tiger’s fur while the big cat lay, broad-backed and rumbling, red tongue peeling the cold out of his paws.
My grandfather knew this, but he wanted to see it for himself. Now that Luka was gone, there was no reason for him to stay away. So when he saw the tiger’s wife one day as she was walking home from the grocer’s, her arms heavy with tins of jam and dried fruit, he found himself brave enough to grin up at her and pat his own stomach in a pleased and understanding kind of way. He wasn’t sure if he did this in approval of her choice of jams, or because he wanted to let her know he didn’t care about the baby. She had been smiling from the moment she spotted him across the square, and when he stopped to acknowledge her—the first person to do so for what must have been weeks—she piled four of her jam tins into the crook of his arm, and the two of them walked slowly together down the road and through the pasture, past the empty smokehouse and the gate, which was breaking in the winter cold.
At church, the women who made the candles were gossiping together: “She’ll have a time with that baby and only a tiger for a husband. I tell you, it makes my skin crawl. They ought to run her out. She’ll be feeding our children to the tiger next.”