The Tiger's Wife

“Water? Was he alone?”

The barman wiped the sweat that had congealed on his temples in a grainy film. “I couldn’t say. Think so.”

“A tall man,” I said. “With glasses, and a hat and coat. You don’t remember him sitting with anyone at all?”

“No.”

“With a young man, maybe?”

He shook his head.

“They would have been arguing,” I said.

“This is a veterans’ slum, what do you think people do all day?”

In the freezer below us, something shifted with a hollow clang.

“Look,” said the barman. “Place was crawling with people I didn’t know—nurses, assistants, two doctors, people who brought those kids in from the fields. I haven’t seen it so full since the war ended. Had the whole village in the bar that afternoon. I only know the old man collapsed. I barely remember him, let alone who he was with.” He went on, “And I wouldn’t go door-to-door round here, Doctor. On the chance that someone might have seen him. Not with that accent.”

I lifted my backpack onto my shoulder. “You better sign for this,” he added, looking around for a piece of paper. There were no forms, so he turned over a receipt for saline solution and handed me a pen, watched me sign, Natalia Stefanovic, which I did slowly, hoping he would make the connection. But his eyes told me he had already done this on his own.

EVERY SUNDAY AFTERNOON, EVEN WHEN THE WAR WAS AT its worst, the City’s greatest doctors would convene on the patio of Banevic’s restaurant in Old Town to smoke and drink and reminisce, to trade stories of astonishing patients and impossible cases, to praise one another’s diagnoses and resourcefulness over a three-o’clock lunch reservation that had stood firm for almost sixty years.

The doctors were professors and nephrologists, cardiologists and University chairs, oncologists and orthopedic surgeons, a rotating parade of retirees whose accomplishments, though sometimes several decades old, still carried considerable weight in the medical community. They knew each other’s stories by heart, but over walnut rakija and warm bread, red peppers with garlic and platefuls of grilled meat, they reminded each other of difficult times, pleasurable to revisit now that their legacy was secure in a timeline that by the grace of the spoken word only grew more and more incredible.

My grandfather was always among them. They were men alongside whom he had struggled up the tortuous rungs of the School of Medicine in his youth; and, though he was always humble about his work, I guess he, too, needed to remind himself of who he was and had once been. He had not founded a cancer clinic or won a national research prize; but, a great doctor in his own right, he was known for turning out flawless diagnosticians and surgeons during his time at the University, for advocating the medical rights of poverty-stricken villagers, and above all, for the privilege of having saved the Marshall’s life—which, for better or worse, was an honor he shared only with certain surgeons in Zurich.

Because my grandfather was far more comfortable with extolling my accomplishments than his own, my knowledge of the incident was vague until I got to medical school. I knew about the Marshall’s handwritten letter of thanks, sitting in the top drawer of my grandfather’s desk; I knew, also, about the bottle of the Marshall’s finest quince rakija, made from fruit harvested in the Marshall’s own orchards, sitting unopened in the back of my grandfather’s liquor cabinet for as long as I could remember.

The person who finally filled me in on the details was a starstruck assistant in first-semester pathology, who related it all sixth- or seventh- or eighth-hand. Apparently, one summer more than thirty years ago, my grandparents were hosting a wedding party for the head of the oncology department of the Military Academy of Medicine at our family lake house in Borovo.

“Verimovo,” I corrected him.

“Right,” the assistant said.

Still, there was a wedding. It was evening, the party in full swing, when an innkeeper from the nearby village came running down the drive in desperation. It’s a strange scene to picture: doctors and their wives dancing to the alcohol-impaired efforts of the village trumpet players; interns and laboratory assistants drunkenly lip-locked in the woods behind the house; inebriated dermatologists hanging over the porch rails; the University’s entire medical department swarming our old lake house and garden; and my grandfather, a frowning and irritated sentry, extracting the chief of rheumatology from where he had fallen into the rosebushes. The innkeeper coming up the road, waving his arms, saying, we need the doctor, where is the doctor?—in God’s name, give us the doctor, the man is dying! My grandfather, miraculously the only sober doctor on hand, shrugging into his coat and heading into the village to veto the stupefied local herbalist, who, as the only qualified person in town, had misdiagnosed the condition as food poisoning, and administered raw mint as a remedy.

The patient, of course, was the Marshall himself. He had been taken ill en route to a conference in Vrgovac after overindulging in date shells and garlic broth. Caught without his personal physician, he had been rushed to the nearest medical facility—a two-room shack—with an entourage of thirty men, all armed to the teeth. The innkeeper was terrified: the date shells had been prepared at his establishment. By the time my grandfather reached the clinic, the patient was halfway to looking like a corpse already, and my grandfather knew instinctively that neither food poisoning, nor any of its cognates, was the issue.

My grandfather took one look at the patient—whose green face was ostensibly unrecognizable. “You stupid son of a bitch,” he said to no one in particular (though everyone present was said to have immediately wet his pants). “Why didn’t you just shoot him in the head, you would have freed up the bed faster.” Fifteen minutes later, the patient was lying half-conscious on an operating table, his midsection unzipped, while my grandfather pulled feet and feet of infected intestine out of the Marshall’s body in great red loops over his shoulder, and several bystanders—the innkeeper, assorted security personnel, probably a nurse or two, all terrified into competency by my grandfather’s rage—stood in an assembly line of blood-spattered coats and goggles, patting away at the man’s entrails, trying to clean off the appendix pus.

I remember the assistant looking at me expectantly when he finished the story, waiting for me to return the favor, to tell him something about my grandfather that could surpass what he had just told me.

After the University’s admission lists were posted, and Zora and I had confirmed, several times over, that we