Tea Obreht - The Tiger's Wife

Almost immediately after the war began, the Administration closed the zoo. This was ostensibly to prevent anything that might approximate the Zobov incident: a college student in the capital of our soon-to-be southern neighbor had firebombed a zoo concession stand, killing six people. This was part of the Administration’s security plan, a preemptive defense of the city and its citizens—a defense that relied heavily on the cultivation of panic and a deliberate overestimation of enemy resources. They closed the zoo, the bus system, the newly named National Library.

Besides interrupting a childhood ritual I was more than ready to put aside, the closing of the zoo was hardly a cause for alarm. Deep down, we all knew, as the Administration did, that the war was being fought almost seven hundred miles away and that a siege of the City was nearly impossible—we had already caught the enemy off guard. We knew that an air strike would never happen because our own paramilitary had taken out the airplane factory and airstrip at Marhan almost six months ago, but the Administration still implemented a curfew and a mandatory lights-out at 10 p.m., just in case. They issued bulletins warning that anyone anywhere could be an informant for the enemy, that it was important to consider the names of your friends and neighbors before you met them at your usual coffeehouse again, and that, in the event of betrayal, you yourself would be held responsible for what you did not report.

On one hand, life went on. Six or seven kids from my class disappeared almost immediately—without warning, without goodbyes, the way refugees tend to do—but I still trudged to school every morning with a packed lunch. While tanks heading for the border drove down the Boulevard, I sat at the window and practiced sums. Because the war was new and distant, because it was about something my family didn’t want me to trouble myself with and I didn’t particularly care about, there were still art lessons and coffee dates with Zóra, birthday celebrations and shopping trips. My grandfather still taught his seminar and did his hospital rounds and went to the local market every morning, and he still soap-washed apples before peeling them. He also stood in the bread line for six hours at a time, but I wouldn’t know this until later. My mother still carried her projector slides to teach art history at the University, my grandma still tuned in to classic movie hour to watch Clark Gable smirk at Vivien Leigh.

The distance of the fighting created the illusion of normalcy, but the new rules resulted in an attitude shift that did not suit the Administration’s plans. They were going for structure, control, for panic that produced submission—what they got instead was social looseness and lunacy. To spite the curfew, teenagers parked on the Boulevard, sometimes ten cars deep, and sat drinking on their hoods all night. People would close their shops for lunch and go to the pub and not return until three days later. You’d be on your way to the dentist and see him sitting on someone’s stoop in his undershirt, wine bottle in hand, and then you’d either join him or turn around and go home. It was innocent enough at first—before the looting started some years later, before the paramilitary rose to power—the kind of celebration that happens when people, without acknowledging it, stand together on the brink of disaster.

The kids of my generation were still a few years away from facing the inflation that would send us to the bakery with our parents’ money piled up in wheelbarrows, or force us to trade shirts in the hallways at school. Those first sixteen months of wartime held almost no reality, and this made them incredible, irresistible, because the fact that something terrible was happening elsewhere, and at the same time to us , gave us room to get away with anarchy. Never mind that, three hundred miles away, girls sitting in bomb shelters were getting their periods at the age of seven. In the City, we weren’t just affected by the war; we were entitled to our affectation. When your parents said, get your ass to school , it was all right to say, there’s a war on , and go down to the riverbank instead. When they caught you sneaking into the house at three in the morning, your hair reeking of smoke, the fact that there was a war on prevented them from staving your head in. When they heard from neighbors that your friends had been spotted doing a hundred and twenty on the Boulevard with you hanging none too elegantly out the sunroof, they couldn’t argue with there’s a war on, we might all die anyway . They felt responsible, and we took advantage of their guilt because we didn’t know any better.

For all its efforts to go on as before, the school system could not prevent the war, however distant, from sliding in: we saw it in the absence of classmates, in the absence of books, in the absence of pig fetuses (which Zóra and I, even then, had eagerly been looking forward to rummaging through). We were supposed to be inducing chemical reactions and doing basic dissection, but we had no chemicals, and our pig fetuses were being held hostage in a lab somewhere across the ever-shifting border. Instead, we made endless circuits with wires and miniature light-bulbs. We left old-money coins out in the rain to rust and then boiled water and salt and baking soda to clean them. We had a few diagrams of dissected frogs, which we were forced to commit to memory. Inexplicably, we also had a cross section of a horse’s foot, preserved in formaldehyde in a rectangular vase, which we sketched and re-sketched until it might be assumed that any one of us could perform crude surgery on a horse with hoof problems. Mostly, from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, we read the textbook aloud.

To make things worse, the conflict had necessitated a rather biased shift of upperclassmen to upper floors; in other words, the older you were, the farther you were from the school basement bomb shelter. So the year we turned fourteen, Zóra and I ended up in a classroom on the concrete roof overlooking the river, a square turret with enormous windows that normally housed the kindergarteners. Everything about that particular rearrangement of space indicated that it had been made quickly: the walls of the classroom were papered with watercolors of princesses, and the windowsill was lined with Styrofoam cups full of earth, from which, we were told, beans would eventually grow. Some even did. There had been family-tree drawings too, but someone had had the presence of mind to take them down, and had left a bare patch of wall under the blackboard. We sat there, drawing that horse’s hoof, saying things like, there’s a war on, at least if they bomb us we’ll go before the little ones do , very nonchalant about it. The turret window of that room afforded us a 360-degree view of the City, from the big hill to the north to the citadel across the river, behind which the woods rose and fell in a green line. You could see smokestacks in the distance, belching streams as thick as tar, and the brick outline of the old neighborhoods. You could see the dome of the basilica on University Hill, the square cross bright and enormous on top. You could see the iron bridges—still standing in our city, all but gone up and down the two rivers, rubble in the water. You could see the rafts on the riverbank, abandoned and rusted over, and then, upriver at the confluence, Carton City, where the gypsies lived, with its wet paper walls, the black smoke of its dungfires.

Our teacher that year was a small woman who went by the name M. Dobravka. She had nervous hands, and glasses that slid down so often that she had developed a habit of hitching them up by flexing her nose. We would later learn that M. Dobravka had once been a political artist, and that, after we graduated, she moved somewhere else to avoid persecution. Some years later, she encouraged a group of high school students in the production of an antiadministration poster that landed them in jail and caused her to disappear one night on the walk from her apartment to the newspaper kiosk at the corner of her street. Back then, completely unaware of her determination, unfamiliar with the frustration she felt at not having the tools to teach us her own subject, let alone one with which she was unfamiliar, we thought she was hilarious. Then she brought us a gift.