Tea Obreht - The Tiger's Wife

“The hell with your prunes.”

“Have you ever heard of such a thing?” Nada asked us both, wiping her hands on her apron. “Have you?”

“No,” said Zóra obligingly.

“It’s not right,” she said again. “And with those pouches stinking to high heaven. Whoever heard of such a thing—we Catholics don’t have it; the Muslims don’t have it.”

“But still, these people have it, and it’s not our business,” Barba Ivan said, suddenly serious, turning in his chair to look at her. “They’re staying here—it’s not my concern.”

“It’s my house,” Nada said. “My vineyard.”

“The real difficulty is the children,” Barba Ivan said to me, serious now. “They’re very ill. Getting worse.” He closed the cookie tin and put it back on the shelf. “I’m told they haven’t been to a doctor—I don’t know, of course.” He made a face, tapped a fist to his neck. “The bags certainly aren’t helping, and they’re foul.”

“Foul,” said Nada.

They might have continued like this if one of the diggers, a brown-haired, sunburned boy of about thirteen, hadn’t come in to ask for milk. He was shy about asking, and his presence took all the air out of Nada’s indignation, so that she didn’t go back to it even after he left.

After dinner, Barba Ivan took out his accordion to play us some old census songs he had learned from his grandfather. We cut him off at the pass by asking him when he’d last had a physical and offering to get one started for him, doing his auscultation and taking his temperature and blood pressure before bed.

Later on, upstairs, there were more pressing matters: the toilet didn’t flush, and the water in the sink was cold. Their boiler wasn’t working. Not one to be disadvantaged out of a shower, Zóra chanced it. Standing at the window, while Zóra yelped under the running water, I could no longer see the vineyard, but I could hear the clink of shovels starting up again, the high sound of voices that sounded like children. The cicadas were trilling from the oleander bush under the window, and swallows were swinging in high arcs just outside the range of the house lights. A speckled gray moth cowered in an outside corner of the mosquito net. Zóra came out of the bathroom and announced, with some triumph, that the purpose of the rusted pliers in the bathtub was to lift up the pin that turned the shower on. She put her wet hair in a ponytail and came to stand by the window. “Are they digging all night?” she said.

I had no idea. “They must be workers,” I said. “The Barba must be keeping them here past the season for some kind of charity.”

The state prosecutor had paged her twice while she was in the shower.

“You should call them back,” I said.

She was having an evening smoke, holding an ashtray in her free hand and stirring the ashes with the bright tip of her cigarette. “As far as I’m concerned, I have nothing to say until I talk to your grandfather,” Zóra said. She smiled at me, carefully blew the smoke out of the window, waved it out of my face with her hand.

She was on the cusp of asking me what was wrong, so I said, “We’ll get them to come down to the clinic tomorrow,” and climbed into bed. Zóra finished her cigarette, but continued to hover, peering out the window. Then she checked the bedroom door.

“Do you suppose they lock up downstairs?”

“Probably not,” I said. “Doors are probably wide open, and blowing a breeze of paramilitary rapists.”

She turned out the light reluctantly, and for a long time there was silence. She was awake and staring at me, and I was waiting for her to drift off so I wouldn’t have to think of something to say.

Downstairs, muffled by the towel covering his cage, the parrot said: “Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.”

EVERYTHING NECESSARY TO UNDERSTAND MY GRANDFATHER lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life—of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.

The war started quietly, its beginning subdued by the decade we had spent on the precipice, waiting for it to come. Kids at school would say “any day now” without knowing what they were talking about, repeating what they had been hearing for years at home. First came the election and then the riots, the assassination of a minister, the massacre at the delta, and then came Sarobor—and after Sarobor, it was like something loosening, a release.

Before the war, every week since I was four, my grandfather and I would take that walk to the citadel to see the tigers. It was always just the two of us. We would start at the bottom and come up the back of Strmina Hill, walking the old carriage trail through the shallow valley of the park on the west side of town, crossing the dozens of small clear streams that drizzled through the undergrowth where, as a little girl, I had spent countless hours, stick in hand, dragging the wet leaves of autumn off the mossy rocks in my useless pursuit of tadpoles. My grandfather, his shoulders bent, arms swinging— rowing , Grandma would call from the balcony as she watched us leave, you’re rowing again, Doctor —loped with long strides, the bag with our farm-stand offerings in his hand. He would wear his vest and slacks, his collared shirt with its long white sleeves, his polished hospital shoes, even for summertime uphill treks. Hurrying after him in worn-out sneakers, a foot and a half shorter than he was, my job was only to keep up. After we had crossed the railroad and passed the place where, at age seven, I had taken a dive off my bicycle and bawled through half an hour of treatment via rakija -soaked cloth to my ripped-up knees, the trail would begin to slope sharply upward.

When he saw me fall behind, my grandfather would stop, wipe his brow, and say: “What’s this, what’s this? I’m just an old man—come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?”

And then I would speed up and pant all the way up the hill while he complained, with maddening relish, about how hoarse I sounded, about how he wouldn’t bring me with him anymore if I insisted on sounding like a weasel in a potato sack, if I was going to ruin his nice time outdoors. From the top of Strmina, the trail descended through a long, flower-speckled meadow across which you could see east over the ruptured Roman wall, stones spilled by long-silent cannon fire, and over the cobbled boulevard of Old Town with its dusty sun-smeared windows, its pale orange roofs, grill smoke drifting through the bright awnings of the coffeehouses and souvenir shops. Pigeons, clustered thick enough to be visible from the hill, shuffled like cowled women up and down the street that curved to the docks where the rivers were smashing into each other all day and all night at the head of the peninsula. And then the view would end as we reached the citadel courtyard and paid at the zoo entrance—always the only people in line on a weekday while the entire City indulged in its afternoon lunch break, always bypassing the green-mouthed camels and the hippo enclosure with its painted egrets, always heading straight for where the tigers were patrolling tirelessly up and down the old grate.

By the time I was thirteen, the ritual of the tigers had become an annoyance. Our way home from the zoo was continually marked by encounters with people I knew: friends, kids my own age, who had long since stopped sharing the company of their elders. I would see them sitting in cafés, smoking on the curb at the Parliament threshold. And they would see me, and remember seeing me, remember enough to laugh mildly about it at school. Their mocking wasn’t unkind, just easy; but it reminded me that I was the prisoner of a rite I no longer felt necessary. I didn’t know at the time that the rite wasn’t solely for my benefit.