by Téa Obreht
“She’s harmless.”
“Harmless! You ask poor Luka if she’s harmless. He’d tell you how harmless she is—if he could.”
“Well, I’m sure she’d have a thing or two to say about Luka, if she could. Mother of God, I’m glad she’s killed him, if that’s what she’s done. The broken bones he laid on that girl. I hope she fed him to that tiger, nice and slow. Feet first.”
“That’s what I heard. I heard she carved him up, right in his own smokehouse, and then in comes the tiger for dinner, and she feeds him strips of her dead husband like it’s feast day.”
“Good.”
“Well, can’t you see why she did it? She didn’t do it for herself. She did it to protect that baby, didn’t she?”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s the tiger’s baby growing in her. Imagine what would have happened when it came out—that Luka, being the way he is, seeing the tiger’s baby come out of his wife. He’d just kill her, wouldn’t he? Or worse.”
“What do you mean, worse?”
“Well, he’d do like a wolf.”
“Like a wolf how?”
“Don’t you know? A wolf’ll kill another wolf’s pups when he comes up in a pack. Sometimes he’ll even kill the bitch what carries them. Don’t you know anything?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, that’s why she killed him, isn’t it? So he wouldn’t go mad like a wolf and kill her devil-baby when it come out.”
“That makes a lot of sense to me. Her killing him to make room for the tiger. Even so, that Luka was a bastard ten times over. What do you think that baby will look like?”
“I don’t know, I’m sure, and I don’t want to know. I hope they run her out. All my life, I’ve never laid eyes on a devil—fifty years, and I never seen one. I don’t intend to start now. I hope she knows well enough to keep that child in the house, and not bring it out here for my children to look at.”
“I’ll say one thing. I’ll say this: I’m not Vera. I’ll not have my children running around with the devil’s brood.”
Mother Vera had already caught him coming back from the butcher’s house: she had been standing on the porch steps when he came back in the twilight that first time, waiting for him, and as he stole back across the field he saw her and hung his head, expecting a reproach. To his surprise, she did nothing, only looked him over and pulled him into the house. After she got wind of what they were saying about her, she herself packed up a basket of food, pies and jams and pickles, a few cloths and a sprig of rosemary, and she sent my grandfather to take it to the tiger’s wife that same afternoon, in full view of the entire village, while she stood in the doorway and shouted for him to hurry up. My grandfather grinned obligingly at passersby as he braced the basket against his hip, pushing his feet through the snow. Halfway across the field, he heard Mother Vera’s voice behind him say: “What are you looking at, you fools?”
All month, my grandfather carried food and blankets to the tiger’s wife. The winter sat, still and insensate, on the ridges of Galina, and while it clung like this to the world, my grandfather brought her water and firewood, measured the girl’s forehead for a new bonnet Mother Vera was knitting, a task the old woman was performing publicly, defiantly, on the porch so the village could see her, wrapped in six or seven blankets, her hands blue with cold. She would never cross the pasture to greet the tiger’s wife; but every so often, she would give the half-finished bonnet, a snarl of yellow and black yarn, to my grandfather, and he would carry it as gently as you would carry a bird’s nest, cross the road with it and climb the porch stairs and, holding the needles aside, tuck the shining hair of the tiger’s wife under it, and look across to his own house for Mother Vera’s motion of approval.
Because my grandfather was not permitted to linger at the girl’s house after dark, there was still no sign of the tiger. But he hadn’t given up hope. Most afternoons, he would put blankets on the floor by the hearth in the girl’s house, and help her sit down, and then he would take out The Jungle Book. It had taken him a few days to determine that she did not know how to read; at first, he had sat beside her with the book open on his knees, believing that the two of them were reading together in silence. But then he noticed that she would flip impatiently through to the pictures, and he understood. So he began to draw the story of Mowgli and Shere Khan for her instead, mangled, disproportionate figures in the hearth ashes: tiger, panther, bear. He drew Mother Wolf, the suckling cubs, and then the jackal Tabaqui—or, at least, how he envisioned Tabaqui, because Kipling had not drawn him at all, and my grandfather drew something that looked like a squirrel, a strange, big-eared squirrel that hovered watchfully around the den and prey of Shere Khan. He drew the wolf pack and Council Rock, showed her in layers of ash how Baloo taught the man-cub the Law of the Jungle. He drew a frog to explain what Mowgli’s name meant, and the frog he drew looked stupid, but obliging.
He always began and ended with a drawing of Shere Khan, because even his feeble, flat-nosed cat with the stripes that looked like scars made her smile, and every so often the tiger’s wife would reach out and fix his drawing, and my grandfather felt that he was getting closer.
My grandfather sat on a bench by the door of the apothecary’s shop, waiting for Mother Vera’s hand ointment. Two women, the wives of men he didn’t know, stood at the counter, watching the apothecary prepare herbs, and saying: “The priest says if the devil-child come into this town, we’re all done for.”
“Don’t make much difference, having a devil-child, if the devil’s already here.”
“What do you mean?”
“That tiger. I seen him crossing the pasture by moonlight, big as a horse. Wild eyes in that tiger’s head, I’m telling you. Human eyes. Froze me right down to my feet.”
“What were you doing out so late?”
“That doesn’t matter. Point is, that tiger come all the way up to the door of Luka’s house, and then he get up and take off his skin. Leaves it out on the step and goes in to see his pregnant wife.”
“Imagine that.”
“Don’t have to, I seen it.”
“Sure you did. Me, I keep wondering about that baby.”
Then my grandfather said: “I think she’s lovely.”
The women turned to look at him. They had cold-reddened faces and chapped lips, and my grandfather shuffled where he sat on the bench, and said, “The girl. I think she’s lovely.”
Without raising his eyes from his mortar and pestle, the apothecary said: “Nothing is as lovely as a woman with child.”
The two women stood in silence after that, their backs turned toward my grandfather, whose ears were burning. They paid for their herbs in silence, took their time putting on their gloves, and when they were gone, the apothecary’s shop was filled with an unwelcome emptiness that my grandfather had not expected. The ibis in the cage by the counter stood with one leg tucked under the blood-washed skirt of its feathers.
The apothecary was taking balms down from the shelves that lined the back of the shop, unscrewing the lids of tins and jars, mixing white cream in a bowl. Quietly, he said: “Everyone is afraid of Shere Khan.”
“But I haven’t seen Shere Khan in the village—have you?” my grandfather said. The apothecary looked my grandfather over, and then went back to mixing the white cream with a twisted wooden spoon. Then my grandfather said: “Are you afraid?”
“Not of Shere Khan,” said the apothecary.
Crossing the square one morning with a basket of bread for the tiger’s wife, my grandfather heard: “There he goes again.”
“Who?”
“That little boy—Vera’s grandson. There he goes again with a basket for that wretched girl. Look how cowed he looks—he’s shaking in his boots. It’s wrong to send a child into the house of the devil.”
“What I don’t understand is—how can our apothecary just sit by and watch that child go back and forth and back and forth and never say a word? Never say
, look you, old woman, keep your child from the devil’s door.”
“That man doesn’t know, that apothecary. He’s not from around here. He doesn’t know to say.”
“It’s his place, though. It’s his place to say. If he doesn’t, who will?”
“I tell you, I’ll have a thing or two to say about what’s what when that child gets eaten.”
“I think you’re wrong about that. That girl wouldn’t harm him.”
“Probably not the way Vera’s carrying on. Do you know this is the third basket she’s sent over this week? What’s she sending?”
“By the grace of God, holy water.”
“Why’s she sending baskets?”
“Maybe she’s feeling sorry.”
“What for? Who feels sorry for a girl carrying the devil’s child?”
“I don’t know. That Vera used to be a midwife. I suppose she feels like she has to help, like that girl shouldn’t carry alone. She’s sending food. I seen the boy packing up that basket when he’s dropped it once or twice, and always there’s bread inside, and soup, too.”
“Imagine that, feeding that girl, when the rest of us have no meat. Feeding the tiger’s wife when there’s been no meat. When that girl’s been saving it all for the tiger.”
My grandfather told the tiger’s wife about the Bandar-log and about Kotick, the white seal—but whenever he reached the end of Shere Khan’s story, he could not bring himself to tell her its real conclusion. He found himself often in the gully of the ravine, with Rama and the water buffaloes stampeding at Mowgli’s command, smudged shadows in the ash, but somehow he could never reveal the way the man-cub claimed the tiger’s life. He could not make himself draw Shere Khan lying in the dust, or Shere Khan’s skin on Council Rock, clewed up, as dead as a sail. Instead, every day it was something different. Sometimes Rama stumbled and gave up, or there was a fight between Shere Khan and the buffaloes, for which he would draw his finger through the ashen figures, sending up powdery clouds, chaos, until he found some way to bring Shere Khan out of the fray alive. Sometimes it never even came to Rama—sometimes Mowgli frightened the lame tiger off with fire, or the wolf pack ambushed and drove him away. Every so often, their fights ended in a stalemate, and they came down to the Water Truce together and Bagheera grew jealous at this false, tentative peace.
Who knows if the tiger’s wife understood my grandfather’s story, or why he was doing her this courtesy. It is easy enough to guess that, after the first few times he changed the story, she realized that he was hiding some deeper tragedy from her. Perhaps her gratitude for the tiger was matched by this new gratitude, the gratitude for help and human companionship, for this persistent and animated man-cub who drew stories in the hearth. Whatever the reason, a few days before the arrival of Dariša the Bear, my grandfather earned from her a little paper bag tied with string, hardly big enough to be a button bag. When he opened it in the darkness of his own house later that night, his fingers felt emptiness, emptiness, and then short, coarse, rusty hairs that scraped that distant, living smell of the smokehouse into his fingers.
ON THE WAY BACK FROM ZDREVKOV, I STOPPED AT KOLAC for the children’s candy, intercepted the cashier of the gas station convenience store just as she was closing up for the evening. I had no bills left, and I grappled with her for twenty minutes, finally persuading her by paying double the amount in our currency to cover the cost of her having to go to the money exchange in the morning. She helped me load two boxes of local chocolate into the car and then drove away in a little run-down hatchback that roared out a line of smoke as she pulled onto the road.
There was a pay phone by the deserted gas pump, and I used my last four coins to call my grandma. The blue bag was in my backpack, folded in half. The mortuary cold of it had stunned me, and I hadn’t touched it since Zdrevkov.
My grandma had been making funeral arrangements all day, and when she asked me if I was ready to come home, I told her about Zdrevkov, about going to the veterans’ clinic, about how hospitable and consoling they had been. She listened to me in silence, and I realized the news of this journey was as incomprehensible for her as the idea of my grandfather’s death had been to me, all of it just words on a bad line. The fact that Zdrevkov had been within driving distance seemed to comfort her, reaffirm in some way that he had been coming to see me after all. She could forgive a misunderstanding, but not an outright lie. Driving off the peninsula, I had been thinking about the deathless man, how my grandfather could have heard about the boys who had stepped on the land mine. The veterans’ village, stragglers clinging to life after the dead had gone away. I didn’t mention any of this to her.
“Were they disappointed?” she said. “Were they hoping no one would come by to collect his things?” She had been envisioning a despicable scenario in which I walked into the hospital to find my grandfather’s belongings had been distributed among the staff, his hat on the head of an assistant janitor, his watch on the receptionist’s wrist.
“They’re very busy there,” I said. “They apologized for the mix-up.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her what kind of place it was, that we had been lucky to have them find us at all, lucky he hadn’t ended up on that sea-facing slope behind the clinic. “Would you like me to tell you what’s in the bag?”
There was a long silence. The phone clicked. My grandma finally said, “You opened it?”
“Not yet.”
“And don’t,” she told me. “Don’t you dare. How can you even think it?” She started in about the forty days again, about unwittingly interrupting the progress of the soul. How the bag was a blessing, an untouched blessing, and what the hell was I thinking? She was shouting by the time she said: “What else do I have left to pay my respects with, Natalia? When I didn’t know he was sick? And you didn’t say anything when you knew?”
The phone beeped twice, and then the line went dead. My pager rang almost immediately, and it continued to ring while I drove back to Brejevina, but I had no money left, and the afternoon was fading into evening. She gave up eventually, my grandma, and I drove with all four windows down, the draft keeping me awake.
By the time I got back to the monastery, the gate was closed. I could see the low sun mirrored in the clerestory windows from the road, but the garden was empty. All along the boardwalk, the shops were dark and shuttered, the postcard stands and trays of snorkeling gear crammed behind iron screens. Some hundred yards later, I came to the corner canal, and here Brejevina’s townspeople and tourists were standing in animated, sunburned throngs, smoking, leaning against cars, making their way slowly between the eucalyptus trees to the vineyard fence. I rolled the car into the ditch and left it there, went up the slope with my backpack in my arms, the bag still inside. There was a hot stillness over the sea, and it had crawled onto the land and stilled everything, even the vineyard. From the gate, I could see the diggers, deeper among the vines than they had been that morning. Duré was there with his pot-handle ears, standing like a scarecrow, back bent, hips thrown out. The heavyset man from that morning was there, too, drinking a can of cola, his neck reddened by the sun. The boys from that morning were sitting against a dirt-filled wheelbarrow among the vines; there was no sign of the young woman, or the little girl.
Fra Antun saw me from the vineyard gate, opened it without a word. I apologized, told him about the traffic and the candy, but I’m sure he could tell I was lying. He was sweating under his cassock, his glasses fogged up and his hair curling in thin wisps away from his neck.
From the hill, I could see the sun cutting an unhurried line through the water, the ferry returning from the islands, and the shaded back of Barba Ivan’s place. People were ranged along the vineyard fence all the way down into the overgrowth behind the house. Nada stood on the downstairs balcony, smoking with about six or seven other women, widows hunched like birds in their black dresses and a few middle-aged housewives in fish-splashed towels who had just come up from the beach. Nada had set food out on a long rectangular
table under the olive tree, and every few minutes she would lower a tray down to the people crowding the fence.
Zóra stood by an oil-drum fire behind the diggers, frowning at something on the bottom of her shoe. When she straightened up and saw me, she gave me a look formerly reserved for Ironglove and the records administrator who worked at the University registrar’s office. Armed with disinfectants, several liters of water, and some knowledge of what was to come, she was there to salvage the community’s faith in us by forestalling a medical disaster. She did not want my help.
Out among the vines, Duré was bending over something with a damp cloth, wiping it down slowly from end to end, making a visible effort not to move it around too much. It was a suitcase of some kind, an old-fashioned valise, patent leather cracked, handles frayed gray. This, I realized, was why Duré had been confident that the body would eventually make an appearance, why he had been willing to overlook the reality of dogs and floods: he had safeguarded the cousin—whom I had previously imagined to be the occupant of a shallow grave—by stuffing him into a suitcase. Duré was wiping the sides down slowly, with great care, enormous relief at having recovered the case evident in his face. Twelve years of accounting for his inability to return the body, his negligence in leaving a family member behind, loyalty suspect, always defending himself from the conclusions they must have been drawing when he explained himself—had he abandoned a dying man? Killed him and disposed of the body? And the illness itself, how his thoughts must have turned straight to the body when his wife and children began falling ill, one by one; how he must have circled around his own guilt, hinted at it while he searched for cures from the village crone, until the old woman finally caught on and told him what he wanted to hear, pointed to his recklessness and irresponsibility with the body, absolved him by confirming that the burden was his.
The evening began with a blessing. This had been scrawled on a piece of neon-green paper in handwriting that was presumably illegible; Duré read it aloud, slowly, stumbling over the words, over the name of the Father and of the Son, and over some invocation that mystified him so thoroughly he was forced to summon help from some of the other diggers. While they tried in vain to decipher their guidelines, I imagined the old woman who had sent them here, alone in a small, cold house high above Duré’s village, as milky-eyed and supple-limbed as a toad, devoting every ounce of strength to composing this blessing she knew by heart, but had never written down. Her notes urged the diggers to wail, but their hesitation made their efforts seem halfhearted. Shawled and bent, the old woman would have given the process dignity, produced a sound long and hollow and endless, a sound that would have dispersed the audience along the vineyard fence. Instead, the discordant howl of the diggers roused the onlookers into a steady chorus of “wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind” that started first among the most inebriated of the men, but pretty soon spread up and down the line.