had become a host for leeches, and dozens of them stood like eyes in the fur of his legs and sides.
One morning, in the grip of an early frost, he came across a boar. Brown and bloated, the hog was distracted with acorns, and for the first time in his life, the tiger gave chase. It was loud and poorly calculated. He came on with his head up and his breath blaring like a foghorn, and the hog, without even turning to look at its pursuer, disappeared into the autumn brush.
The tiger did not succeed, but it was something, at least. He had been born in a box of hay in a gypsy circus, and had spent his life feeding on fat white columns of spine in the citadel cage. For the first time, the impulse that made him flex his claws in sleep, the compulsion that led him to drag his meat to the corner of the cage he occupied alone, was articulated into something other than frustration. Necessity drew him slowly out of his domesticated clumsiness. It strengthened and reinforced the building blocks of his nature, honed his languid, feline reflexes; and the long-lost Siberian instinct pulled him north, into the cold.
The village of Galina, where my grandfather grew up, does not appear on a map. My grandfather never took me there, rarely mentioned it, never expressed longing or curiosity, or a desire to return. My mother could tell me nothing about it; my grandma had never been there. When I finally sought it out, after the inoculations at Brejevina, long after my grandfather’s burial, I went by myself, without telling anyone where I was going.
To get to Galina, you must leave the City at daybreak, and travel northwest along the highway that cuts through the suburbs where entrepreneurs are building their summer homes—tall, yardless brick houses that will never be finished. Behind their gates, the doors and windows yawn empty, and thin-legged cats stretch out in dirt- piled wheelbarrows. Here and there are signs for a country mending itself: paint store posters, green hardware- stand leaflets pinned to trees, bath-and-tile business placards, banners for carpentry workshops, furniture warehouses, electricians’ offices. A quarry, cliff face split open, unmanned yellow bulldozers waiting for the day to begin; an enormous billboard advertising the world’s best grill with a picture of a heat-dented lamb turning over a spit.
The way is nothing like the drive Zora and I made to Brejevina, though here, too, there are vineyards, shining green and yellow toward the east. Old men cross the road in front of you on foot, behind flocks of newly shorn sheep, taking their time, stopping to wave the fat lambs over, or to take off their shoes and look for bits of gravel that have been bothering them for hours. The fact that you are in a hurry is of no particular interest to them; in their opinion, if you are making your journey in a hurry, you are making it poorly.
The highway narrows into a single-lane road and begins to climb—a slight incline at first, forest-rimmed pastures, bright flushes of green that open up suddenly as you come around the curves. Cars heading down the mountain toward you are small, crowded with families, and sliding into your lane. Already your radio is picking up news from across the border, but the signal is faint, and the voices are lost to static for minutes at a time.
You lose sunlight, and suddenly you are driving through a low cloud bank that is unfurling across the road in front of you. It is anchored to the pines and the rocks above you, to the sprawling pastures that open up below, dotted with ramshackle houses, with doorless inns, distant, nameless streams. You realize that you haven’t seen a car for miles. You have a map, but it is useless. The church you pass is gray and silent, its parking lot empty. At the gas station, no one can tell you where to go next, and they haven’t had a shipment of petrol in weeks.
On that empty stretch of highway, there is a single sign pointing you in the correct direction. It is easy to miss, a wooden board with the words
The path cuts steeply down through fenced wheat fields and blackberry patches, pastures where the forest has come back and thrown a spray of white flowers into the grass. Every so often you pass a huge, unattended pig, rooting in the ditch by the path. The pig will look up at you, and it will appear unimpressed.
Twenty minutes in, the road hairpins, and when you take this turn, wait for the blaze that strikes from across the valley, where the pine forest stands dense and silent: that light is the sun glancing off the last surviving window of the monastery of Sveti Danilo, the only sign that it is still there, and is considered a miracle, because you will see it from the same place any time of the day, as long as the sun is up.
Soon afterward, houses will begin to appear: first, a tin-roofed farmhouse whose loft window opens onto the road. No one lives here, and a black vine has grown out into the garden and swallowed up the upper part of the orchard. The next house surprises you as you come around the corner. There will be a white-haired man sitting on the porch, and the moment he sees your car, he will get up and move indoors with surprising speed; know that he has been listening to your tires on the gravel for the last five minutes, and wants you to see him slamming the door. His name is Marko Parovic—you’ll get to him later.
Pass the chain of small waterfalls, and then you will reach the center of the village, ten or twelve gray and red houses clustered around the bronze, one-armed statue of Sveti Danilo and the village well. Everyone will be at the tavern, sitting on the open benches of the porch; everyone will see you, but no one will look at you.
My grandfather grew up in a stone house overgrown with ivy and bright purple flowers. The house no longer exists—for twenty years, it stood empty, and then, brick by brick, the villagers took it apart to mend their stable walls, patch up attic holes, brace their doors.
My grandfather’s mother had died in childbirth, and his father died before my grandfather had even formed a memory of him. My grandfather lived, instead, with his own grandmother, the town midwife, a woman who had already raised six children, half of whom were the children of village friends and neighbors. The entire town affectionately called her Mother Vera. There is only one surviving picture of her. In it, Mother Vera is an austere, middle-aged woman standing in front of what appears to be the corner of a stone house, behind which a tree-laden orchard slopes down and away. Her hands, crossed in front of her, are the hands of a laborer; her expression seems to indicate that the photographer owes her money.
In those days, the house had only three rooms. My grandfather slept on a straw mattress in a small wooden cot by the hearth. There was a clean kitchen with tin pots and pans, strings of garlic hanging from the rafters, a neat larder stocked with pickle barrels, jars of
They say that, in medieval times, the town sprang up around the monastery of Sveti Danilo. The monastery was the project of an architect whose mapping skills and artful design were undermined by his inability to consider that the seclusion of the monks would be regularly interrupted by the movement of armies over the eastern mountains and into the river valley. The result was the gradual encroachment on the monastery’s lands by an ever-growing band of farmers, herders, and mountain people, who, though capable of withstanding long-running
