The Tiger's Wife

“You and I are not understanding one another,” he says. He has said this to me before, and he is always so patient when he says it. “The dead are celebrated. The dead are loved. They give something to the living. Once you put something into the ground, Doctor, you always know where to find it.”

I want to say to him, the living are celebrated too, and loved. But this has gone on long enough, and he seems to think so, too.

“Now, Doctor,” says the deathless man, with the voice of someone who is getting up from a meal. “I must ask you to let me out.”

“I can’t,” I say.

“You must. I need water.”

“It’s impossible,” I say. “If I had the keys to let you out, don’t you think I would have given you water by now?” But I am wondering it a little myself, wondering whether or not I would let him out if I had the keys. I’m not saying what I really think, which is that I am glad he cannot come out, glad he can’t take the book from me, even though I still do not believe that I lost my bet. Even though I believe he would take it unfairly if he took it now. Then I say, “I wonder, assuming I believe you—which I don’t—how could I be responsible for letting out the man who is here to gather my patients for the grave?”

The deathless man laughs at this. “Whether I am in here or out there, they are going to die,” he says. “I do not direct the passage—I just make it easier. Remember, Doctor: the man with the cough, the man with liver cancer, and the man who appears to have indigestion.”

It is like we are playing Battleship with the dying. I tell him this, hoping that he will laugh a little, but all he says to me is, “Remember for next time, Doctor, that you still owe me a pledge.”

I sit for a long time by that door, and then I am convinced he has fallen asleep. I get up and I continue my walking, but Natalia—I am telling you this honestly—that night they go, one by one: the man with the cough, the man with the liver cancer, and the man who appears to have indigestion. They go in that order too, but by the time we have lost the last one, the monks have returned and are helping me, performing the rites, closing the eyes and crossing the arms, and the dying all around are in distress, in fear, feeling themselves all over and asking me, it’s not me yet, is it, Doctor?

By the time I go back to see the deathless man, the monks have already opened the cell and let the drunks out to the morning, and he is long gone.

WHEN LUKA AND JOVO RETURNED FROM THE MOUNTAIN, carrying with them the gun of the fallen blacksmith—about whose fate they lied through their teeth, and whose final moments they played up to such an extent that stories of the blacksmith’s skill and fortitude were being told in surrounding towns long after the war had ended—my grandfather was relieved to discover that the hunt had not been successful. In the long afternoon and night while the hunters were away, he had contemplated his encounter with the tiger in the smokehouse. Why had the girl been there? Had she been there the whole time? What had she been doing?

He knew for certain that her purpose had not been to harm the tiger, that she had smiled knowingly at him when it became obvious that the tiger had escaped. My grandfather considered what he would say to the girl when he saw her next, how he could ask her, knowing she could not reply, about what she had seen, what the tiger was like. They were sharing the tiger now.

My grandfather felt certain that he would see her at the service to honor the blacksmith. Sunday afternoon, and he stood in the stifled back of the church, with its hanging white tapestries, and scanned the frost-reddened faces of the congregation, but he did not see her. He did not see her outside afterward, either, or later that week at the Wednesday market.

What my grandfather didn’t know was that, in addition to the gun, Luka had brought something else back from the mountain: the pork shoulder the tiger had been eating when the hunters had come upon him in the glade. My grandfather did not know that, after Luka had entered his quiet house at the edge of the pasture on the afternoon of his return, and slowly placed the blacksmith’s gun by the door, he had swung that pork shoulder into the face of the deaf-mute girl, who was already kneeling in the corner with her arms across her belly. My grandfather didn’t know that Luka, after he had dislocated the deaf-mute’s shoulder, had dragged her into the kitchen by her hair, and pressed her hands into the stove.

My grandfather did not know any of these things, but the other villagers knew, without having to talk about it, that Luka was a batterer. People had noticed well enough when she went missing for days, when new rungs appeared in her nose, when that unmoving blood-spot welled in her eye and did not dissipate, to guess what was happening in Luka’s house.

It would be easy for me to simplify the situation. It might even be justifiable to say, “Luka was a batterer, and so he deserved what was coming to him”—but because I am trying to understand now what my grandfather did not know then, it’s a lot more important to be able to say, “Luka was a batterer, and here is why.”

Luka, like almost everyone in the village, had been born in Galina, in the family house he would occupy until his death. From the start to the end of his days, he knew the ax, the butcher’s block, the wet smell of autumnal slaughter. Even during the hopeful decade he spent away from home, the sound of a sheep’s bell in the market square produced in him a paralyzing rush too complicated to be mere nostalgia.

Luka was the sixth son of a seventh son, born just shy of being blessed, and this almost-luck sat at his shoulders all his life. His father, Korcul, was an enormous, bearded man with big teeth, the only person in the house, it seemed, who ever laughed, and never at the right thing. In his youth, Korcul had spent some fifteen years in “the Army”—when asked about it, he always said “the Army,” because he did not care to advertise that he had, in fact, volunteered with several, and had not been particularly selective regarding the alliance or aim of the side on which he was fighting, as long as he could see Turkish pennants flying above the distant, advancing line. Over the years, he had amassed an impressive collection of Ottoman war artifacts, and Sunday mornings found him at the tavern on the upper slopes of the village, coffee in one hand, rakija in the other, trading stories with other veterans, always eager to exhibit some bullet or spearhead or dagger fragment and tell the story of how he had earned it in battle. Long before Luka was born, word had spread that Korcul’s trove included items far older than anyone could remember—helmets, arrowheads, links of chain mail—and that the butcher spent his spare time expanding his collection by robbing graves, digging in old battlegrounds for the clothes and weapons of men centuries dead. This, by all standards, was unforgivable, a curse-inviting sin. This was why, they would later say, none of Korcul’s children survived to have children of their own.

It was also why the villagers—assessing the goings-on of the butcher’s household from a distance—could not reconcile the pairing of Korcul and Luka’s mother, Lidia. She was a round woman with patient eyes and a quiet manner, a polite and even-handed daughter of Sarobor, a merchant’s child, reduced from the nomadic luxuries of her youth by the failure of her father’s business. Her love for children was boundless, but always greatest for her