The Tiger's Wife

We passed the empty windows of shops that had gone out of business; lightless buildings where roosting pigeons hunched along the fire escapes; a beggar sleeping so soundly that I would have thought him dead if I hadn’t realized that the moment had closed around us, stilling everything.

When I finally caught up with my grandfather, I said: “Look, I don’t know what we’re doing, but I’d like to be in on it.”

Then suddenly he stopped in the darkness ahead of me and my chin cracked his elbow. The force of the collision knocked me back, but then he reached for me and held my shoulder while I steadied myself. My jaw clicked when I put my hand against it.

My grandfather stood on the curb, pointing into the distance of the empty street. “There,” he said, “look.” His hand was shaking with excitement.

“I don’t see anything,” I told him.

“Yes you do,” he said. “You do, Natalia. Look.”

I peered out into the street, where the long blades of the rails lay slick and shining. There was a tree on the other curb, a lamppost with a dying bulb, an eviscerated dumpster lying on its side in the road. I was opening my mouth to say what? And then I saw it.

Half a block from where we were standing, an enormous shadow was moving along the street, going very slowly up the Boulevard of the Revolution. At first I thought it was a bus, but its shape was too organic, too lumpy, and it was going far too slowly for that, making almost no noise. It was swaying, too, swaying up the street with an even momentum, a ballasted rolling motion that was drawing it away from us like a tide, and every time it rocked forward something about it made a soft dragging sound on the rails. As we watched, the thing sucked in air and then let out a deep groan.

“God,” I said. “That’s an elephant.”

My grandfather said nothing, but when I looked up at him he was smiling. His glasses had fogged up during the walk, but he wasn’t taking them off to wipe them.

“Come on,” he said, and took my hand. We moved fast along the sidewalk until we drew parallel, and then passed it, stopped a hundred meters down so we could watch it coming toward us.

From there, the elephant—the sound and smell of it; the ears folded back against the domed, bouldered head with big-lidded eyes; the arched roll of the spine, falling away into the hips; dry folds of skin shaking around the shoulders and knees as it shifted its weight—seemed to take up the whole street. It dragged its curled trunk like a fist along the ground. Several feet in front of it, holding a bag of something that must have been enormously tempting, a short young man was walking slowly backward, drawing it forward with whispers.

“I saw them up at the train station as I was coming home,” my grandfather said. “He must be bringing it to the zoo.”

The young man had seen us, and as he inched back along the tramway he nodded and smiled, pulled down on his cap. Every so often, he would take something out of the bag and hold it out to the elephant, and the elephant would lift its trunk from the ground, grip the offering, and loll it back between the yellow sabers of its tusks.

Later on, we would read about how some soldiers had found him near death at the site of an abandoned circus; about how, despite everything, despite closure and bankruptcy, the zoo director had said bring him in, bring him in and eventually the kids will see him. For months the newspapers would run a picture of him, standing stark-ribbed in his new pen at the zoo, an advert of times to come, a pledge of the zoo’s future, the undeniable end of the war.

My grandfather and I stopped at the bus station, and the elephant passed, slow, graceful, enchanted by the food in the young man’s hand. The moon threw a tangle of light into the long, soft hairs sticking up out of his trunk and under his chin. The mouth was open, and the tongue lay in it like a wet arm.

“No one will ever believe this,” I said.

My grandfather said: “What?”

“None of my friends will ever believe it.”

My grandfather looked at me like he’d never seen me before, like he couldn’t believe I was his. Even in our estrangement, he had never quite looked at me that way, and afterward he never did again.

“You must be joking,” he said. “Look around. Think for a moment. It’s the middle of the night, not a soul anywhere. In this city, at this time. Not a dog in the gutter. Empty. Except for this elephant—and you’re going to tell your idiot friends about it? Why? Do you think they’ll understand it? Do you think it will matter to them?”

He left me behind and walked on after the elephant. I stood with my hands in my pockets. I felt my voice had fallen through and through me, and I couldn’t summon it back to tell him or myself anything at all. The elephant was moving forward along the Boulevard. I followed it. A block down, my grandfather had stopped beside a broken bench, was waiting for the elephant. I caught up with him first, and the two of us stood side by side, in silence, my face burning, his breath barely audible. The young man did not look at us again.

Eventually, my grandfather said: “You must understand, this is one of those moments.”

“What moments?”

“One of those moments you keep to yourself,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Why?”

“We’re in a war,” he said. “The story of this war—dates, names, who started it, why—that belongs to everyone. Not just the people involved in it, but the people who write newspapers, politicians thousands of miles away, people who’ve never even been here or heard of it before. But something like this—this is yours. It belongs only to you. And me. Only to us.” He put his hands behind his back and ambled along slowly, kicking the polished tips of his shoes up as he walked, exaggerating his movements so they would slow him down. No thought of turning around, of going home. Down the Boulevard for as long as the elephant and his boy would tolerate us. My grandfather said: “You have to think carefully about where you tell it, and to whom. Who deserves to hear it? Your grandma? Zora? Certainly not that clown you carry on with at the docks.”

That stung. “He’s gone,” I said quietly.

“I would like to be able to say that I’m sorry,” my grandfather said.