The Tiger's Wife

wife. The winter sat, still and insensate, on the ridges of Galina, and while it clung like this to the world, my grandfather brought her water and firewood, measured the girl’s forehead for a new bonnet Mother Vera was knitting, a task the old woman was performing publicly, defiantly, on the porch so the village could see her, wrapped in six or seven blankets, her hands blue with cold. She would never cross the pasture to greet the tiger’s wife; but every so often, she would give the half-finished bonnet, a snarl of yellow and black yarn, to my grandfather, and he would carry it as gently as you would carry a bird’s nest, cross the road with it and climb the porch stairs and, holding the needles aside, tuck the shining hair of the tiger’s wife under it, and look across to his own house for Mother Vera’s motion of approval.

Because my grandfather was not permitted to linger at the girl’s house after dark, there was still no sign of the tiger. But he hadn’t given up hope. Most afternoons, he would put blankets on the floor by the hearth in the girl’s house, and help her sit down, and then he would take out The Jungle Book. It had taken him a few days to determine that she did not know how to read; at first, he had sat beside her with the book open on his knees, believing that the two of them were reading together in silence. But then he noticed that she would flip impatiently through to the pictures, and he understood. So he began to draw the story of Mowgli and Shere Khan for her instead, mangled, disproportionate figures in the hearth ashes: tiger, panther, bear. He drew Mother Wolf, the suckling cubs, and then the jackal Tabaqui—or, at least, how he envisioned Tabaqui, because Kipling had not drawn him at all, and my grandfather drew something that looked like a squirrel, a strange, big-eared squirrel that hovered watchfully around the den and prey of Shere Khan. He drew the wolf pack and Council Rock, showed her in layers of ash how Baloo taught the man-cub the Law of the Jungle. He drew a frog to explain what Mowgli’s name meant, and the frog he drew looked stupid, but obliging.

He always began and ended with a drawing of Shere Khan, because even his feeble, flat-nosed cat with the stripes that looked like scars made her smile, and every so often the tiger’s wife would reach out and fix his drawing, and my grandfather felt that he was getting closer.

My grandfather sat on a bench by the door of the apothecary’s shop, waiting for Mother Vera’s hand ointment. Two women, the wives of men he didn’t know, stood at the counter, watching the apothecary prepare herbs, and saying: “The priest says if the devil-child come into this town, we’re all done for.”

“Don’t make much difference, having a devil-child, if the devil’s already here.”

“What do you mean?”

“That tiger. I seen him crossing the pasture by moonlight, big as a horse. Wild eyes in that tiger’s head, I’m telling you. Human eyes. Froze me right down to my feet.”

“What were you doing out so late?”

“That doesn’t matter. Point is, that tiger come all the way up to the door of Luka’s house, and then he get up and take off his skin. Leaves it out on the step and goes in to see his pregnant wife.”

“Imagine that.”

“Don’t have to, I seen it.”

“Sure you did. Me, I keep wondering about that baby.”

Then my grandfather said: “I think she’s lovely.”

The women turned to look at him. They had cold-reddened faces and chapped lips, and my grandfather shuffled where he sat on the bench, and said, “The girl. I think she’s lovely.”

Without raising his eyes from his mortar and pestle, the apothecary said: “Nothing is as lovely as a woman with child.”

The two women stood in silence after that, their backs turned toward my grandfather, whose ears were burning. They paid for their herbs in silence, took their time putting on their gloves, and when they were gone, the apothecary’s shop was filled with an unwelcome emptiness that my grandfather had not expected. The ibis in the cage by the counter stood with one leg tucked under the blood-washed skirt of its feathers.

The apothecary was taking balms down from the shelves that lined the back of the shop, unscrewing the lids of tins and jars, mixing white cream in a bowl. Quietly, he said: “Everyone is afraid of Shere Khan.”

“But I haven’t seen Shere Khan in the village—have you?” my grandfather said. The apothecary looked my grandfather over, and then went back to mixing the white cream with a twisted wooden spoon. Then my grandfather said: “Are you afraid?”

“Not of Shere Khan,” said the apothecary.

Crossing the square one morning with a basket of bread for the tiger’s wife, my grandfather heard: “There he goes again.”

“Who?”

“That little boy—Vera’s grandson. There he goes again with a basket for that wretched girl. Look how cowed he looks—he’s shaking in his boots. It’s wrong to send a child into the house of the devil.”

“What I don’t understand is—how can our apothecary just sit by and watch that child go back and forth and back and forth and never say a word? Never say, look you, old woman, keep your child from the devil’s door.”

“That man doesn’t know, that apothecary. He’s not from around here. He doesn’t know to say.”

“It’s his place, though. It’s his place to say. If he doesn’t, who will?”

“I tell you, I’ll have a thing or two to say about what’s what when that child gets eaten.”

“I think you’re wrong about that. That girl wouldn’t harm him.”

“Probably not the way Vera’s carrying on. Do you know this is the third basket she’s sent over this week? What’s she sending?”

“By the grace of God, holy water.”

“Why’s she sending baskets?”

“Maybe she’s feeling sorry.”

“What for? Who feels sorry for a girl carrying the devil’s child?”

“I don’t know. That Vera used to be a midwife. I suppose she feels like she has to help, like that girl shouldn’t