Tea Obreht - The Tiger's Wife

My grandfather did not get up. He lay there, the coarse hairs of Dariša’s coat in his mouth, and he listened to the dull thud of a heartbeat, unsure whether it was his own or Dariša’s. And then the blood-brown, sticky hands of the tiger’s wife rolled the man over, and pulled my grandfather to his feet. She was ashen, the skin beneath her eyes tight and gray with fear, and she was turning his face this way and that, uselessly bundling him deeper into his coat.

And then my grandfather was running again. The tiger’s wife was running beside him, gripping his hand like she might fall. She was breathing hard and fast, small sounds that lodged in her throat. My grandfather hoped she might call to the tiger somehow, but he didn’t know how, and he didn’t know whether he was supposed to be holding her hand or the other way around. He knew, with certainty, that he could run faster, but the tiger’s wife had her other arm across her belly, so he kept pace with her, her bundled-up body and her bare feet, and he held her fingers tight.

“NO,” DURÉ SAID TO FRA ANTUN, “NO, I DON’T WANT HER, get me somebody else.”

But the crowd along the fence had thinned out, the campground lighting up, restaurants along the boardwalk reopening, and the kid who had gone looking for a volunteer had not come back. Duré tried to wait him out, but night was falling, and after a few minutes without better prospects he was forced to consult his green paper for any rules that might explicitly prohibit me from taking the rag heart up to the crossroads.

“For God’s sake,” he said at last, his face falling. “Have you at least got a patron saint in your family?”

“Where’s that written?” I said, trying to get a look at the paper.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Duré. “Who’s your patron saint?”

“Lazarus,” I said, uncertain, trying to picture the icon hanging from the handle of my grandma’s sewing drawer. This seemed sufficient for Duré, and he gave in.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll send the boys around tomorrow.”

“Send them all tonight,” Zóra said. “And the little girl.”

Even before he handed me the jar I had admitted to myself that my desire to bury the heart on behalf of his family had nothing to do with good faith, or good medicine, or any kind of spiritual generosity. It had to do with the mora , that man who came out of the darkness to dig up jars, and who was probably just someone from the village playing a practical joke—but who was, nevertheless, gathering souls at a crossroads sixty kilometers from where my grandfather had died, a ferry ride from the island of the Virgin of the Waters, three hours from Sarobor, and there was no way around these things, not after I had been thinking about them all afternoon, not with my grandfather’s belongings in my backpack. I was prepared, of course, for a prankster. I was prepared for an awkward exchange, an encounter in which I caught three teenagers digging up the jar to steal coins from the hole, putting their cigarettes out in the well-loved ashes of the heart. It was also possible—more than possible, in fact, probable, really, the likeliest of all possibilities—that no one would appear, and that I would wait at the crossroads all night, watching the wind come through the slanted green plot of the neighboring vineyard. Or that, in my exhaustion, I would fall asleep or begin to hallucinate. Or it would be the deathless man, tall and wearing his coat, coming down through the fields of long grass above the town—smiling, always smiling—and then I would sit, without breathing, in some bush or under some tree while he dug up the jar, probably whistling to himself, and when he had it in his hand, I would come out and ask him about my grandfather.

The sun had set, bringing the sky low and spreading thin clouds into corners of the horizon where the light was still standing. The tide had risen suddenly, gray and heavy and massive on the shore below. Fra Antun volunteered to show me the way to the crossroads, and we took a road up from the vineyard into the open space between the town and the mountain, and were walking south along the ridge, through a field of bristles and purple and red flowers scattered in tight clusters, out of which grasshoppers, black and singing, fell like arrows as we passed. Fra Antun was walking a few steps ahead, in silence, probably considering how he would broach the subject of my disappearance earlier that afternoon. I followed with a garden spade in my pocket and the little clay jar in my hands, terrified that I was going to drop it, or that it was going to tilt and spill ash-water over me. I had the backpack thrown over one shoulder, and as it swung back and forth, I could hear the muted crackle of the blue bag from Zdrevkov. We passed a young boy bringing six gray-faced sheep down from the mountain—we heard them before we saw them, and long after they had gone, we could hear the steady clang of the ram’s bell.

“It’s very kind of you to do this,” Fra Antun said suddenly, looking back at me, and I shook my head.

“At least they’ll come for medicine now,” I said, and I thought of Zóra down in the graveyard, waiting patiently to start wiping people’s mouths and handing out water.

“I’m sure your time could be better spent,” he said, and for a moment I thought he was reproaching me, but then he turned and smiled back at me, and I smiled back and kept walking.

“You’re looking after sixty children, Father,” I said eventually. “I’m just burying a jar.” Fra Antun was holding up the hem of his cassock, and I could see sandals and frayed jeans underneath. “There are a lot of paintings of your dog in town,” I said. “At the monastery, at your mother’s house.”

“Bis isn’t mine,” he said, “Bis is Arlo’s dog—my brother, Arlo.”

“Did your brother do the paintings at Nada’s house?”

“Some of them,” he said. “But then a lot of people took to it after the war.”

“The children seem really attached to him,” I said, and it all seemed to make sense to me. “Does Arlo bring the dog around for them to play with?”

“My brother is dead,” he said shortly. We had come up to a slight rise in the road, and here the path through the grass veered off and up the hill, but Fra Antun pressed on into the field, where the sticky, switch-thin blades were sawing against each other. I was still going after him, and trying to think of something to say to that, something besides I’m sorry , when he stopped abruptly and turned. “For my mother, it’s been very hard.” I nodded, and Fra Antun scratched the back of his neck with his hand. “Arlo was fifteen the year before the war started, and he made friends with some boys who were staying with us on vacation. One day they all went camping up at Bogomoljka, just five or six kids, for a night or two. A few nights went by—he was fifteen you know, we thought maybe he was acting up, acting out. This was a few months before the war. We didn’t look for him. He’d been gone a week. My father went down to throw the trash out in the dumpster in our drive, and there he was.”

I said: “I’m sorry,” and regretted it immediately, because it just fell out of my mouth and continued to fall, and did nothing.

“Anyway,” he said, without hearing me, “that whole week he was gone, Bis sat next to the dumpster and didn’t move, and we all thought he was waiting by the road for Arlo to come back. Except we had it wrong—he was waiting for us to find Arlo.” Fra Antun took off his glasses and wiped them on his cassock. “So—we found out a few years later that those kids he had gone camping with were serving with the paramilitary on the border. And now, people paint Bis.”