The Tiger's Wife

the two of us stood and watched her go, her shoulders striped with shadows from the vine awning that led out to the street.

Zora appeared at my elbow with an empty box. “We can’t go on,” she said, holding it out to me, “without candy.”

It was lunchtime, so we seized the opportunity to regroup, devise a new strategy for maintaining order. Zora had turned her pager off, but the prosecutor had called her six times since that morning, so she went to the monastery office to return the calls while I stayed behind to sort out the paperwork. Sleepy, band-aided stragglers were milling around the courtyard in the dense heat of the afternoon; I tried to herd them out of the sun, and by the time I got back to the examining room, Fra Antun was already there, sorting the children’s papers in alphabetical order.

He was eyeing my blood pressure pump, and I laughed and told him his was sure to be high, considering he was working with sixty children. He rolled up the sleeve of his cassock and patted the inside of his arm, and I shrugged and pointed to the chair. He sat down, and I pushed the cuff over his fist. He had a thin, young-looking face. Later on, I would find out from Nada that he had been the kind of boy who caught bumblebees in jars and then harnessed them carefully with film from cassette tapes, so that it was not uncommon to see him walking down the main road with dozens of them rising around him like tiny, insane balloons while the film flashed wildly in the sun.

“I hear you caused a stir up in the vineyard this morning,” he said.

I was about to admit to being too confrontational in my conversation with Dure—in my defense, I had listened to the little girl cough all night. But Fra Antun was talking, instead, about the entrance I had made. “You scared the hell out of them,” he said. I was tightening the cuff over his forearm, and I didn’t know what to make of his saying hell. He was smiling. “Imagine: you’re digging for a body. You’ve been digging all day and all night. In the hours before dawn, on the verge of finding what you’ve been looking for, you are surprised by the sudden appearance of a woman wearing what looks like a white shroud.”

“I fell into a hole,” I said, putting my eartips in and sliding the chestpiece onto his skin.

“That’s how it’s being told around town,” he said. “What would you think, in their place?”

“I’d think: why am I making my children dig for a body I put here myself?”

He looked at me like he couldn’t decide whether or not to trust me with what he had to say. I was standing over him, inflating the cuff, and he was sitting with his cassock folded down between his knees. I released the air valve and watched the dial and listened to the whumping sound of his blood.

“We have one here, you know.”

I didn’t know.

“A haunt,” he said. “They call it a mora. A spirit.”

“We’ll have to do this again,” I said, and started over.

“Everyone’s shocked about this business with the body, but they forget we’ve had the mora a hundred years. We put coins and presents on the graves of our dead because the mora takes them. Word around town is that your diggers’ crone knows about our mora, and that’s why she’s having them sanctify the body here.”

“How would she know?”

“That’s just what they’re saying,” Fra Antun said. “I don’t pretend it makes any sense to me.”

It made no sense to me, either; Dure and his family were from near the City, and we had no shortage of our own moras and spirits, rarely glimpsed beings that willowed about, demanding graveside offerings that inevitably ended up in the hands of churchyard caretakers or passing gypsies.

“So what happens tonight?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Dure says the village woman told him to ‘wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.’ ” This charge, which Dure had repeated in confidence to Barba Ivan, had nevertheless spread through town, so that only a week later, it had become a sinister chant regurgitated by the boys who hung out at the arcade, whispered by women at the grocery store, invoked by drunkards who passed the vineyard on their way home.

“Even your parrot knows it,” I said. “You realize, of course, that no body buried twelve years out here is actually going to have a heart in it.”

“That’s none of my business,” Fra Antun said with a defeated smile. “They’ve asked me to supervise, and so I will, but unless the devil himself jumps out of the vineyard tonight, what happens to the body is no concern of mine.”

“I’m surprised you condone it,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like a Catholic process.”

“It isn’t—it’s not really an Orthodox one, either, but I’m sure you know that.” He was smiling. “They have to settle for me in case something goes wrong,” he said. “The other monks wouldn’t even consider it.”

“And your mother—does she know you’ll be officiating?”

“She knows.” His grin was laced with guilt. “One of the advantages of being a monk is not having to get permission from your mother to carry out holy work.”

“I hear she’s not happy about the vineyard.”

“No, it’s difficult for her. First there’s a body in the vineyard and now people from your side—excuse me, Doctor, but they are from your side—digging the whole place up.” He pushed his glasses up his nose and looked at me. “She’d rather not have me near the vineyard when they’re digging. It’s not just about the body, or the vines being disturbed—all kinds of accidents happen in the field here.” I gave up on the blood pressure cuff and listened to him. “Mines,” he said, “there are still land mines, even around here, up the mountain where the old village used to be. Most of them have been cleared, but the ones that haven’t get found when somebody steps on them. A shepherd or farmer, or somebody’s child, cuts through an unpaved area. Then there’s a rush to keep it quiet.” He watched me roll up the cuff and cord. “Even just last week, those boys in Zdrevkov.”

I misheard him at first, or the name didn’t register because he was pronouncing it differently than my grandma did. Perhaps I didn’t make the connection because it was the last thing I expected him to say, the last place I