The Tiger's Wife

different stories, too.

No one will ever tell you that four or five days went by before anyone began to suspect a thing. People didn’t like Luka—they didn’t visit his house, and his docility while he stood there, his glasses around his neck in the yawning white space of the butcher’s shop with his hands on the meat, made them universally uncomfortable. The truth is that, even after the baker’s daughter went to buy meat and found the shutters of the butcher’s shop closed and the lights out, it took several days before anyone else tried again, before they began to realize that this winter they would have to do without.

There is the very real possibility that people assumed Luka had gone away—that he was out trapping rabbits for the midwinter feasts, or that he had given up on the village and decided to brave the snowed-in pass and make for the City while the German occupation there was still new. The truth is, the whole situation did not strike anyone as particularly unusual until the deaf-mute girl appeared in town, perhaps two weeks later, with a fresh, bright face, and a smile that suggested something new about her.

My grandfather had spent the morning carrying firewood from the timber pile, and was pounding the snow from the bottoms of his shoes on the doorstep when he saw her coming down the road, wrapped in Luka’s fur coat. It was a cloudless winter afternoon, and villagers were leaning against their doorways. At first, only a few of them saw her, but by the time she reached the square the whole village was peering through doors and windows, watching her as she made her way into the fabric shop. They could see her through the window, hovering there indulgently, pointing to the Turkish silks that hung from the walls and running her hands over them lovingly when the shopkeeper spread them out on the counter for her. A few minutes later, my grandfather saw her cross the square with a parcel of silks under her arm, followed by a small procession of village women, who, while keeping their distance, were still too intrigued to maintain the illusion of nonchalance.

Who came up with that name for her? I can’t say—I have never been able to find out. Until the moment of Luka’s disappearance, she was known as “the deaf-mute girl,” or “the Mohammedan.” Then suddenly, for reasons uncertain to the villagers, Luka was no longer a factor in how they perceived the girl. And even after that first time, even after she wrapped her head in Turkish silk and admired herself in front of the mirror in the fabric shop, when it was clearer than ever that Luka was not coming back, that she had no more fear of him, she still did not become “Luka’s widow.” They called her “the tiger’s wife”—and the name stuck. Her presence in town, smiling, bruiseless, suddenly suggested an exciting and irrevocable possibility for what had happened to Luka, a possibility the people of Galina would cling to even seventy years later.

If things had turned out differently, if that winter’s disasters had fallen in some alternate order—if the baker had not sat up in bed some night and seen, or thought he had seen, the ghost of his mother-in-law standing in the doorway, and buckled under the weight of his own superstitions; if the pies of the cobbler’s aunt had risen properly, putting her in a good mood—the rumors that spread about the tiger’s wife might have been different. Conversation might have been more practical, more generous, and the tiger’s wife might have immediately been regarded as a vila, as something sacred to the entire village. Even without their admission, she was already a protective entity, sanctified by her position between them and the red devil on the hill. But because that winter was the longest anyone could remember, and filled with a thousand small discomforts, a thousand senseless quarrels, a thousand personal shames, the tiger’s wife shouldered the blame for the villagers’ misfortunes.

So their talk about her was constant, careless, and unburdening, and my grandfather, with The Jungle Book in his pocket, listened. They were talking about her in every village corner, on every village doorstep, and he could hear them as he came and went from Mother Vera’s house. Truths, half-truths, utter delusions drifted like shadows into conversations he was not intended to overhear.

“I seen her today,” the Brketi? widow would say, chins shaking, slung like thin necklaces, while my grandfather stood at the counter of the greengrocer’s, waiting for pickling salts.

“The tiger’s wife?”

“I seen her coming down from that house again, alone as you please.”

“She’s driven him away, hasn’t she? Luka’s never coming back.”

“Driven him away! Imagine that. A man like Luka being driven away by a deaf-mute child. Our Luka? I seen Luka eat a ram’s head raw.”

“What then?”

“Well, that’s plain, isn’t it? That tiger’s got him. That tiger’s got him, and now she’s all alone, nobody bothering her, no one but the tiger.”

“I can’t say I’m all that sorry. Not all that sorry, not for Luka.”

“Well, I am. Don’t anyone deserve to be done that way.”

“What way?”

“Well, isn’t it obvious? Isn’t it plain? She’s made a pact with that tiger, hasn’t she? She probably done Luka herself, probably cut off his head in the night, left the body out for the tiger to eat.”

“That little thing? She’s barely bigger than a child.”

“I’m telling you, that’s what happened. That devil give her the strength to do it, and now she’s his wife.”

My grandfather listened without believing everything—with caution, with guarded curiosity, with a premonition that something inferior was going on in those conversations, something that did not include the horizon of his own imagination. He understood that some part of the tiger was, of course, Shere Khan. He understood that, if Shere Khan was a butcher, this tiger had some butcher in him, too. But he had always felt some compassion for Shere Khan to begin with, and this tiger—neither lame nor vengeful—did not come into the village to kill men or cattle. The thing he had met in the smokehouse was massive, slow, hot-breathing—but, to him, it had been a merciful thing, and what had passed between my grandfather and the tiger’s wife had been a shared understanding of something the villagers did not seem to feel. So because they did not know, as he knew, that the tiger was concrete, lonely, different, he did not trust what they said about the tiger’s wife. He did not trust them when they whispered that she had been responsible for Luka’s death, or when they called the tiger devil. And he did not trust them when, a few weeks after her appearance in the fabric shop, they began to talk about how she was changing. Her body, they said, was changing. She was growing bigger, the tiger’s wife, and more frightening, and my grandfather listened in the shops and in the square when they said it was because she was swelling with strength, or anger, and when they decided, that no, it wasn’t her spirit, just her belly, her belly was growing, and they all knew what that meant.

“You don’t think it was an accident do you?” the beautiful Svetlana would say to her friends at the village well. “She saw, that girl, what was coming. And Luka, he never was too clever. Still, that’s what comes to you when you marry one of them Mohammedans from God knows where. Like a gypsy, that girl. Probably strung him up with his own meat hooks, left him there for the tiger.”