through the wooden planks, the big, red heart clenching and unclenching under the ribs, the weight of it groaning through the floor. My grandfather’s chest was jolting, and he could already picture the tiger bearing down on him, but he thought of
And, just like that, the tiger was gone. My grandfather felt the big, hot, rushing heart brush past and then vanish. He broke out in a sweat, sitting there with the bucket between his knees. He heard the sound of footsteps, and moments later the deaf-mute girl was kneeling at his side in the little room with the butcher’s table, digging him out of his tarp, brushing the hair from his forehead with worry in her eyes. Her hands, sweeping over his face, carried the heavy smell of the tiger, of snow and pine trees and blood.
And then, Mother Vera’s voice, screaming in the distance: “My child! The devil has taken my child!”
My grandfather eventually learned that Mother Vera, sensing that he had been gone a long time, had stepped out, and from the stairs of their little house, had seen the tiger leave the smokehouse and take off across the field. She was still screaming when the doors of the houses around the square opened, one by one, and the men spilled out into the streets and gave chase to the edge of the pasture. Loud voices, and then light and men filling the doorway, even Luka the butcher, looking furious in his nightshirt and slippers, a cleaver in his hand. The deaf-mute girl helped my grandfather to his feet, and led him to the door. From the smokehouse ramp, he could see the dark, empty field, swimming with shadows: the villagers, the snowdrifts, the fence, but not the tiger. The tiger was already gone.
“He’s here, here he is,” my grandfather heard someone say, and suddenly Mother Vera was clutching at him with cold hands, out of breath and stuttering.
Outside, in the snow, were footprints. Big, round, springy footprints, the even, loping prints of a cat. My grandfather watched as the grocer Jovo, who had once killed a badger with his bare hands, knelt down in the snow and pressed his hand into one of them. The tracks were the size of dinner plates, and they ran—matter-of-factly and without pause—down from the woods and across the field, into the smokehouse and back.
“I heard something in the smokehouse,” my grandfather was telling everyone. “I thought one of the animals had escaped. But it was the tiger.”
Nearby, Luka stood looking out through the smokehouse door, holding on to the arm of the deaf-mute, whose skin had gone white around his grip. She was looking at my grandfather and smiling.
He appealed to the deaf-mute. “You came out because you heard him, too, didn’t you?”
“The bitch is deaf, she didn’t hear anything,” Luka told him, before he led her across the field into the house and closed the door.
_____
There was only one gun in the village, and, for many years, it had been kept in the family home of the blacksmith. It was an old Ottoman musket and it had a long, sharp muzzle, like a pike, and a silver-mantled barrel with a miniature Turkish cavalry carved riding forward over the saddle below the sight. A faded, woolly tassel hung from an embroidered cord over the musket butt, which was a deep, oily mahogany, and rough along the side, where the name of the Turk who had first carried it had been thoughtfully scraped off.
The musket had made its way to the village through a series of exchanges that differed almost every time someone told the story, and went back nearly two centuries. It had supposedly first seen battle at Lastica, before disappearing in the mule-pack of a defecting Janissary from the sultan’s personal bodyguard, a soldier-turned- peddler who carried it with him for many decades while he roamed the mountains, selling silks and cook pots and exotic oils. The musket was eventually stolen from the Janissary peddler by a Magyar highwayman, and, later still, dragged out from under the Magyar’s body by the mounted brigade that shot him down outside the house of his mistress, whose blouse, wet with the highwayman’s blood, was still unbuttoned when she begged the brigadiers to leave her the gun as they took her lover’s corpse away. The highwayman’s mistress mounted the gun above the counter in her tavern. She dressed in mourning, and developed a habit of cleaning the gun as though it were in use. Many years later, an old woman of sixty, she gave it to the boy who carried milk up the stairs for her, so it would protect him when he rode against the bey’s citadel in an ill-fated uprising that was swiftly crushed. The boy’s head ended up on a pike on the citadel wall, and the gun ended up in the possession of the bey, who hung it in a minor trophy room of his winter palace, between the heads of two leopards with crooked eyes. It stayed there for almost sixty years, through the reigns of three beys, hanging opposite a stuffed lynx—and then, as time passed, a sultan’s last battle outfit, the carriage of a Russian queen, a silver tea-set honoring one alliance or another, and eventually a state car belonging to a wealthy Turk who, shortly before his execution, had forfeited all his possessions to the citadel.
When the citadel fell, shortly after the turn of the century, the gun was taken away by a looter from Kovac, who carried it with him while he went from town to town, selling coffee. In the end, switching hands in some skirmish between peasants and Turkish militia, the musket went home with one of the survivors, a youth from the village, the grandfather of the blacksmith. That was 1901. Since then, the gun had hung on the wall above the blacksmith’s hearth. It had been fired only once, in the direction of a sheep rapist, and never by the blacksmith himself. Now, my grandfather learned, the old gun would be used to kill the tiger.
The blacksmith was allegedly very brave about the business of the gun, and did not reveal—although perhaps he should have—that he did not know how to use it. He had a vague sense of what he was supposed to do with the powder, the bullets, the greased paper wadding, the ramrod. He felt an obligation to the village, and to the memory of his grandfather, whom he had never known, but who had once shod the sultan’s horse. On the eve of the hunt, the blacksmith sat by the fire and watched his wife take the gun down and wipe the barrel in clean, even strokes, slowly and with loving patience. She polished the hood, beat the dust out of the tassel, and then wiped the inside with greased felt.
My grandfather watched them prepare for the hunt the following morning, in the gray hours before dawn. He did not know what to make of his encounter in the smokehouse, but his throat was tight when the blacksmith emerged from his house with the honored gun under his arm. With the blacksmith were two other men: Luka and Jovo. They had dogs with them, too—a short, fat hound with floppy ears, and an old red sheepdog who had lost one eye under a carriage wheel.
It was Christmas Eve, and the entire village had turned out to watch the hunters depart. People stood in a long line by the side of the road, their hands held out to touch the gun for luck as it went by on the blacksmith’s arm. My grandfather stood guiltily beside Mother Vera with his sleeves drawn up over his hands, and when his turn came, he touched the barrel with the tip of one sleeve-covered finger, and only for a moment.
That afternoon, as he waited for the hunters to return, my grandfather drew in the hearth dust with that same finger and hated the men on the hill. He hated Luka already, for the pigs’ feet and the way he called his wife “bitch,” but now he hated those other men, and the dogs too, because he believed, fully and wholeheartedly, that the tiger would have spared him even if he had come in just a moment earlier or later, even if he had come in to find the tiger’s eyes burning at him from the other side of the barn. He could already see the men coming back, the tiger slung upside down on a pole between them; or else, just the tiger’s head, in one of their carry sacks, and he hated them.
