Tea Obreht - The Tiger's Wife

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.