“That can’t be true.”
“Well, you believe it or don’t. But I’m telling you, whatever happened to that Luka was no accident. And that baby—that’s no accident, neither.”
“That’s no baby. She’s eating—Luka’s been starving her for years, and now she’s free to eat.”
“Haven’t you seen her? Haven’t you seen her coming into town, so slow, those robes of hers coming up bigger and bigger in the front? That girl’s got a belly out to here, are you blind?”
“There’s no belly.”
“Oh, there’s a belly—and I’ll tell you something else. That belly ain’t Luka’s.”
It never occurred to my grandfather to accept what the others were thinking—that the baby belonged to the tiger. To my grandfather, the baby was incidental. He had no need to guess, as I have guessed, that it was a result of some drunken stupor of Luka’s, or rape by some unnamed villager, and that the baby had been there before the tiger had come to Galina.
However, there was no way to deny that the tiger’s wife was changing. And whatever the source of that transformation, whatever was said about it, my grandfather realized that the only true witness to it was the tiger. The tiger saw the girl as she had seen him: without judgment, fear, foolishness, and somehow the two of them understood each other without exchanging a single sound. My grandfather had inadvertently stumbled onto that understanding that night at the smokehouse, and now he wanted so much to be a part of it. On the simplest possible level, his longing was just about the tiger. He was a boy from a small village in the grip of a terrible winter, and he wanted, wanted, wanted to see the tiger. But there was more to it than that. Sitting at the hearth in Mother Vera’s house, my grandfather drew the shape of the tiger in the ashes, and thought about seeing and knowing— about how everyone knew, without having seen, that Luka was dead, and that the tiger was a devil, and that the girl was carrying the tiger’s baby. He wondered why it didn’t occur to anyone to know other things—to know, as he knew, that the tiger meant them no harm, and that what went on in that house had nothing to do with Luka, or the village, or the baby: nightfall, hours of silence, and then, quiet as a river, the tiger coming down from the hills, dragging with him that sour, heavy smell, snow dewing on his ears and back. And then, for hours by the fireside, comfort and warmth—the girl leaning against his side and combing the burs and tree sap out of the tiger’s fur while the big cat lay, broad-backed and rumbling, red tongue peeling the cold out of his paws.
My grandfather knew this, but he wanted to see it for himself. Now that Luka was gone, there was no reason for him to stay away. So when he saw the tiger’s wife one day as she was walking home from the grocer’s, her arms heavy with tins of jam and dried fruit, he found himself brave enough to grin up at her and pat his own stomach in a pleased and understanding kind of way. He wasn’t sure if he did this in approval of her choice of jams, or because he wanted to let her know he didn’t care about the baby. She had been smiling from the moment she spotted him across the square, and when he stopped to acknowledge her—the first person to do so for what must have been weeks—she piled four of her jam tins into the crook of his arm, and the two of them walked slowly together down the road and through the pasture, past the empty smokehouse and the gate, which was breaking in the winter cold.
At church, the women who made the candles were gossiping together: “She’ll have a time with that baby and only a tiger for a husband. I tell you, it makes my skin crawl. They ought to run her out. She’ll be feeding our children to the tiger next.”
“She’s harmless.”
“Harmless! You ask poor Luka if she’s harmless. He’d tell you how harmless she is—if he could.”
“Well, I’m sure she’d have a thing or two to say about Luka, if
“That’s what I heard. I heard she carved him up, right in his own smokehouse, and then in comes the tiger for dinner, and she feeds him strips of her dead husband like it’s feast day.”
“Good.”
“Well, can’t you see why she did it? She didn’t do it for herself. She did it to protect that baby, didn’t she?”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s the tiger’s baby growing in her. Imagine what would have happened when it came out—that Luka, being the way he is, seeing the tiger’s baby come out of his wife. He’d just kill her, wouldn’t he? Or worse.”
“What do you mean, worse?”
“Well, he’d do like a wolf.”
“Like a wolf how?”
“Don’t you know? A wolf’ll kill another wolf’s pups when he comes up in a pack. Sometimes he’ll even kill the bitch what carries them. Don’t you know anything?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, that’s why she killed him, isn’t it? So he wouldn’t go mad like a wolf and kill her devil-baby when it come out.”
“That makes a lot of sense to me. Her killing him to make room for the tiger. Even so, that Luka was a bastard ten times over. What do you think that baby will look like?”
“I don’t know, I’m sure, and I don’t want to know. I hope they run her out. All my life, I’ve never laid eyes on a devil—fifty years, and I never seen one. I don’t intend to start now. I hope she knows well enough to keep that child in the house, and not bring it out here for my children to look at.”
“I’ll say one thing. I’ll say this: I’m not Vera. I’ll not have my children running around with the devil’s brood.”
Mother Vera had already caught him coming back from the butcher’s house: she had been standing on the porch steps when he came back in the twilight that first time, waiting for him, and as he stole back across the field he saw her and hung his head, expecting a reproach. To his surprise, she did nothing, only looked him over and pulled him into the house. After she got wind of what they were saying about her, she herself packed up a basket of food, pies and jams and pickles, a few cloths and a sprig of rosemary, and she sent my grandfather to take it to the tiger’s wife that same afternoon, in full view of the entire village, while she stood in the doorway and shouted for him to hurry up. My grandfather grinned obligingly at passersby as he braced the basket against his hip, pushing his feet through the snow. Halfway across the field, he heard Mother Vera’s voice behind him say: “What are you looking at, you fools?”
All month, my grandfather carried food and blankets to the tiger’s
