battles with bears, snow, dead ancestors, and Baba Roga, came to find that isolation on the eastern slopes was not preferable to the ability to run for the monastery walls at the first sign of a Turkish horde. They eventually devised a small economy of their own, balanced on the varied professions of about twenty resident families, whose lot in life was passed on from generation to generation, and whose solitude, even after the monastery fell in the First World War, was fiercely protected from all outsiders, save the occasional traveling summer market, or a daughter from across the mountain who came into the village as a new bride.
Mother Vera’s people had always been shepherds, and, being alone, she had invested so much of her own life in this profession that it seemed the natural path down which to direct my grandfather. So he was brought up with sheep, with their bleating and groaning, their thick smell and runny eyes, their stupefied spring nakedness. He was brought up, too, with their death, the spring slaughter, the way they were butchered and sold. The articulate way Mother Vera handled the knife: straightforward, precise, like everything she did, from her cooking to the way she knitted sweaters for him. The ritual rhythms of this life were built into Mother Vera’s nature, an asset she hoped would adhere to my grandfather, too: the logical and straightforward process of moving from season to season, from birth to death, without unnecessary sentiment.
Like all matriarchal disciplinarians, Mother Vera was certain of my grandfather’s eventual acceptance of order, and therefore confident in his abilities—overconfident, perhaps, because when he was six, she handed him a small, cut-to-size shepherd’s staff and sent him into the fields with a cluster of old sheep, whom she did not expect to give him very much trouble. It was an exercise, and my grandfather was delighted with his newfound responsibility. But he was so young then that later he was only able to remember fragments of what happened next: the lull of the morning fields, the springy cotton flanks of the sheep, the suddenness of the tumble down the deep hole in which he would spend the night, alone, gazing up at the puzzled sheep, and hours later, Mother Vera’s thoughtful, dawn-lit face hovering over the mouth of the hole.
This was one of the few stories my grandfather told from his childhood. Another, characteristically, was a medical anecdote. Growing up, he had a friend called Mirica who lived a few houses over, and when they were old enough not to be engaged in the business of pulling each other’s hair and calling each other names, they played house, which was the civilized thing to do. One afternoon, my grandfather, playing the part of the woodcutter husband, went down the street, talking to himself and carrying a toy ax in his hand; Mirica, meanwhile, indoctrinated as she was with the principle of what a dutiful wife should be doing, prepared for him a meal of well- water soup in oleander leaves, which she served on the stump of a tree. The problem was not the essence of the game, but the practice: my grandfather dutifully ate the oleander leaf soup and was instantaneously seized with paroxysms of vomiting.
The town apothecary arrived an hour later to induce more vomiting, and to pump my grandfather’s stomach, which is a barbaric procedure now and was considerably more barbaric back then. I have heard the apothecary described by others who knew him: enormous hands, great, imposing eyes, and above them the headlamp, and I imagine my grandfather was, from a very early age, lured into a stunned reverence of the medical profession.
Over the years, the apothecary visited more and more often. He was there to administer ipecac and to set broken bones, to pull a shattered molar when my grandfather secretly bought hard candy from a passing gypsy peddler with whom he had been forbidden to interact. When, during an intense game of us-versus-Ottomans, my grandfather shook his makeshift ax a little too enthusiastically and sent the razor-edged tin can tied to the top of it flying into the forehead of a neighborhood boy, the apothecary was there to stitch up the bone-deep cut that ran just under Dusan’s hairline. My grandfather, of course, never mentioned the winter of his own great illness, a fever that ripped through the village—despite the apothecary’s best efforts, my grandfather was the only child under the age of twelve to survive it, six buried in the snow, his entire generation, even Mirica of the oleander leaves.
I think something in those early childhood memories must have been imperishable. All his life, my grandfather would remember the sensation of standing in the warmth of the apothecary’s shop, staring into the cage of the apothecary’s great red ibis, quiet and stern. The shop represented a magnificent kind of order, the kind of pleasurable symmetry you just couldn’t get from coming home with the right number of sheep. Standing under the counter, one sock lower than the other, my grandfather would look up at the shelves and shelves of jars, the swollen-bottomed bottles of remedies, and revel in their calm, controlled promise of wellness. The little golden scales, the powders, the herbs and spices, the welcoming smell of the apothecary’s shop, were all things that signified another plane of reality. And the apothecary—tooth puller, dream interpreter, measurer of medicine, keeper of the magnificent scarlet ibis—was the reliable magician, the only kind of magician my grandfather could ever admire. Which is why, in a way, this story starts and ends with him.
Shepherding, perhaps surprisingly, is conducive to scholastics, and likely advanced my grandfather’s studies. He went alone and undisturbed for long periods of time. The fields above the Galina are green and quiet, the dwelling place of grasshoppers and butterflies, the pasture of red deer. Sixty sheep to one boy, and all the tree shade he could want. That first summer he spent in the fields, he taught himself to read.
He read the alphabet book, that staple of childhood learning, the first philosophy we are exposed to—the simplicity of language, the articulation of a letter that sounds exactly how it looks. Then he read
I’m told that the tiger was first sighted on the Galina ridge, above town, during a snowstorm at the end of December. Who knows how long he had already been there, hiding in the hollows of fallen trees; but, on that particular day, the herdsman Vladisa lost a calf in the blizzard and went up the mountain to retrieve it. In a thicket of saplings, he came across the tiger, yellow-eyed and bright as a blood moon, with the calf, already dead, hanging in its jaws. A tiger. What did that mean to a man like Vladisa? I knew
People did not believe poor Vladisa, even when they saw him running down the hill, white as a ghost, arms in the air, no calf. They did not believe him when he collapsed in the village square, breathless with exhaustion and terror, and managed to stutter out that they were done for, that the devil had come to Galina, and call the priest quick. They did not believe him because they didn’t know what to believe—what was this orange thing, back and shoulders scorched with fire? They would have been better equipped to react if he had told them he had met Baba Roga, and if, that same instant, her skull-and-bones hut on its one chicken leg had come tearing down the hillside after him.
My grandfather and Mother Vera were among those who were summoned to the square by the sound of Vladisa’s shouting. The tiger’s wife must have been there, too, but they didn’t know it at the time. My grandfather ran out of the house quickly, without his coat on, and Mother Vera came out after him with his coat in her hands and gave him a cuff across the ear as she forced him into the sleeves. Then they stood there, the two of them, while the blacksmith and the fishmonger and the man who sold buttons propped Vladisa up in the snow and gave him water.
Vladisa was saying: “The devil I tell you! The devil has come for us all!”
