Tea Obreht - The Tiger's Wife

He barely remembered Luka as a child, but he was wary of the butcher’s son as soon as he’d returned: Luka, who’d seen the world; Luka, who was a brute without being a fool, an inexcusable combination; Luka, who had, despite the distrust between them, appeared ashen-faced at the shop door late one night two autumns ago, eyes bloodshot, voice cracking. “You’d better come—I think she’s dead.”

There in Luka’s house he had at last seen proof of what he had suspected for months: the girl was in the corner, twisted up under a broken table that had been driven against the wall. He couldn’t imagine how the table had ended up there, how she had fallen under it. He couldn’t bring himself to drag her out. Her neck looked loose, broken, and if she was still alive he could kill her by moving her. So he dragged the table across the room while Luka sat on the kitchen floor, sobbing into his fists. The girl’s face was unrecognizable, gelled with blood, her hair matted down and the scalp bleeding into the floor. Her nose was broken—he was certain of that without touching her. He put his hands on the floor, brought his face close, knelt like this for a long time before he finally found her breath, caught in a thick, blood-clotted bubble of spit that stretched out between her lips.

He assessed the damage: kneecap shattered; the scalp studded with shards of some kind of crockery; left hand mangled, twisted back toward the arm, a spear of bone stretching the skin just above her wrist. At first, he thought three of her front teeth were gone—but then he put his fingers in her mouth and found them, slammed back into the ridges of her palate. He used a spoon to brace them, brought them forward again with a wet crack that he would feel in the tips of his fingers. They would never set properly, but at least she wouldn’t lose them. He sponged the blood from her face, bandaged her head, splinted up what he could and immobilized the rest, tied the jaw shut with dressings, chinned her up like a corpse, and that was how she looked, lying on a cot in the front room, four days going by before she opened her good eye. The apothecary had been going to Luka’s house twice daily to ice her face and ribs and smooth balm into the cuts on her head, all the while convinced that she would slip away between visits, and he was stunned when she looked at him.

The last time he stopped by to look in on her, the apothecary said to Luka: “If this happens again, I will run you out.”

He had meant it, too; and, back then, he’d had enough heft in the village to manage it. But then came the epidemic that claimed the children of the village—Mirica of the oleander leaves, my grandfather’s friend Dušan—and the long, terrifying fight in which he had seen them slip out of his grasp one by one. After that, the line at his door had dwindled; patients came around twice, three times, to make sure they were on the path to recovery, to question the herbs he had prescribed to them. His power—which had, until that moment, elevated him even above the priest, that last-resort mediator for the next world—was suddenly poised on the edge of a knife. He was, and always had been, an outsider, and when his dependability failed, he had felt his hold on the village slipping. He had resolved that he would defend the girl; but, on the heels of his defeat, that promise, made largely to himself, had fallen behind his efforts to regain the villagers’ trust, reestablish their faith in and submission to him. It was becoming apparent to him that these efforts, too, had failed.

The men of the village had started a small bonfire in the square, and the fire was sending black sheets of smoke down the street. Some of the men had gone across the pasture and into the foothills to search for Dariša’s camp, to find his wagon and belongings, which they half-expected to have vanished, just like Dariša himself. A few of the men had paused by the butcher’s house and gone no farther; Jovo had found courage enough to run up and peer through the window, but had seen nothing.

My grandfather stood with his wet boots on the porch of the apothecary’s shop, watching the icicles above the door twist into drops that rapped a quiet rhythm on the railings and the trees. When the apothecary opened the door, my grandfather just said “Please.” And then he said it over and over again, until the apothecary pulled him inside and knelt down beside him with a warm glass of water and made him drink it very, very slowly.

Then the apothecary brushed the hair out of my grandfather’s eyes, and said: “What has happened?”

_____

The steps of her house were powdered with snow, and the apothecary went up and stood on the porch. In his hand he carried the bottle in which he mixed the drink for expectant mothers, a drink he had often made of chalk and sugar and water. He tapped on the door with his fingers, lightly at first, so that the sound would not carry across the pasture; when she did not answer, he banged harder until he remembered that she was deaf, and then he stood there, feeling stupid. Then he tried the door, and it gave. He paused, for a moment, remembering the gun, the blacksmith’s gun, which had not surfaced in the village since Luka had brought it back down, wondering if the girl still had it, and how he might announce himself. He pushed the door open and looked around, and then he opened it farther and stepped into the doorway.

The tiger’s wife was sitting on the floor by the fireplace, drawing something in the hearth with her finger. The fire was bright on her face, and her hair had settled around her eyes so that he couldn’t see her properly, and she did not look up when he went in and shut the door behind him. She was sitting wrapped in her Turkish silks, purples and golds and reds draped around her shoulders like water, and her legs, which were folded under the bulge of her stomach, were bare and thin. What struck him most was the sparseness of the room; there was a table, a few pots and bowls over the tabletop. There was no trace of the gun.

She had not seen him yet, and he did not want to surprise her, but there was nothing he could do about that now. He took a step forward, and then another, and then she turned abruptly and saw him, and he held up his hands to show her that he was harmless and unarmed.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. Then he bowed a little and touched his fingers to his lips and forehead. It had been almost forty years since he had made the gesture.

She got up in one swift motion, rolled to her feet, and the cloth slid down her shoulders when she did it, and she stood there, her face tight and furious, and the apothecary continued to hold his half bow and didn’t move. She was very small, the tiger’s wife, with thin shoulders and a long thin neck, which a river of sweat had caked with salt. Her belly was enormous and tight and round, unbalancing in the way it overpowered her frame and pulled her hips forward.

“The baby,” he said, pointing at her. He grabbed his stomach under his coat and shook it a little, and then held up the bottle. “For the baby.”

But she had placed him, he could see that—remembered him, remembered his house, remembered that he had given her back to Luka—and the look coming over her now was one of intense revulsion. Her whole body was shaking.

The apothecary tried to explain. He shook the bottle again, smiling, holding it high so she could see it. The water was cloudy inside.

“For the baby,” he said again, and pointed again at her belly. He made a cradling gesture with his arms, pointed to himself. But her face did not change until he took a step toward her.

He expected something to shift between them, then. In such a short time, she had successfully frightened the villagers into reverential awe. He envied her that, admired it despite himself. He wondered if she could see it. She had done it without effort or intention; and even now, he suspected she didn’t know she had done it at all.