its surety prevent his arrival. So, when they emerged from their houses one late January morning and saw him there, brown and dirty and as welcome as a promise, their hearts rose.
My grandfather, who would otherwise have been first in line to walk up and down the faded blue carpet and stare at the open-jawed heads of bears, eyes glass, or stone, or altogether missing, looked through the window and realized, with dread, what was going to happen. Across the square, the tiger’s wife was probably looking out at Darisa, too, but she did not know the gravity of the commotion that was animating the village. She did not guess, as my grandfather must have guessed, that the priest rushing toward Darisa with open arms was not just saying hello, but also: “Praise God you’ve come safely through—you must rid us of this devil in his fiery pajamas.”
All along, my grandfather had hoped for a miracle, but expected disaster. He was nine, but he had known, since the encounter in the smokehouse, that he and the tiger and the tiger’s wife were caught on one side of a failing fight. He did not understand the opponents; he did not want to. Mother Vera’s unexpected assistance had been a sign of hope, but he didn’t know what the hope was toward. And with the hunter’s coming, my grandfather realized immediately that the odds were now heavily weighted against the tiger. Darisa the Bear, who, for so long, had represented something admirable and untouchable, became a betrayer, a murderer, a killer of tigers, a knife- wielding, snare-setting instrument of death that would be directed at something sacred, and my grandfather had no doubt that, given enough time, Darisa would succeed.
Unlike most hunters, Darisa the Bear did not live for the moment of death, but for what came afterward. He indulged the occupation he was known for so that he could earn the occupation that gave him pleasure: the preparation of the pelts. For Darisa, it was the skinning, the scraping, the smell of the curing oils, the ability to frame the memory of the hunt by re-creating wilderness in his own house. That is the truth about Darisa: the man was a taxidermist at heart.
To understand this, you have to go back to his childhood, to things no one in the village had heard about, to a prominent neighborhood of the City, a redbrick house on a lamp-lit thoroughfare overlooking the king’s manicured parks; to Darisa’s father, who was a renowned Austrian engineer, twice widowed, and who spent the better part of his life abroad; to Darisa’s sister, Magdalena, whose lifelong illness prevented them from following their father when he left, for years at a time, to oversee the construction of museums and palaces in Egypt, and kept them confined to each other’s company, and to the landscape of their father’s letters.
Magdalena was epileptic, and therefore restricted to small distances and small pleasures. Unable to attend school, she made as much progress as she could with a tutor, and taught herself painting. Darisa, seven years her junior, doted on her, adored everything she adored, and had grown up with the notion that her welfare was his obligation, his responsibility. Standing in the hallway of their house, watching the footman carry his father’s valises out to the waiting carriage, Darisa would cling to the lapels of the engineer’s coat, and his father would say: “You’re a very small boy, but I am going to make you a gentleman. Do you know how a small boy becomes a gentleman?”
“How?” Darisa would say, even though he already knew the answer.
“With a task,” his father said. “With taking responsibility for others. Shall I give you a task?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Help me think of one. What do you think most needs doing while I am away? While you are the only gentleman in the house?”
“Magdalena needs to be looked after.”
“And will you look after her for me?”
During the months that followed he busied himself with doing what he could for her, establishing order on a miniature but ferocious level. They had a housekeeper who prepared the meals and cleaned the house—but it was Darisa who carried the breakfast tray up to his sister’s room, Darisa who helped her pick the ribbons out for her hair, Darisa who fetched her frocks and stockings and then stood guard outside her door while she got dressed, so he could be there to hear her if she felt dizzy and called for him. Darisa laced her shoes, posted her letters, carried her things, held her hand when they took walks in the park; he sat in on her piano lessons, scowling like a fish, interfering if the teacher grew too stern; he arranged baskets of fruit and glasses of wine and wedges of cheese for her so she could paint still lifes; he kept an endless circulation of books and travel journals on her nightstand so they could read together at bedtime. For her part, Magdalena indulged him. He was a great help to her, and she realized very quickly that by looking after her he was learning to look after himself. His efforts invariably earned him the first line in Magdalena’s letters:
He was eight years old when he first witnessed one of her attacks. He had crept into her room to tell her about a bad dream. He found her twisted up in the covers, her body taut with spasms, her neck and shoulders drenched with sweat and something white and sticky. Looking at her, he suddenly felt ambushed, stifled by the soundless arrival of something else that had eased into the room with him when he opened the door. He left her there. Without putting on his coat, without putting on his shoes, he left the house and ran down the street in his nightshirt, his bare feet slapping on the wet pavement, all the way to the doctor’s house halfway across town. All around him, he felt only absence, as wide and heavy as a ship. The absence of people on the street, the absence of his father, the absence of certainty that Magdalena would be alive when he got home. He cried only a little, and afterward, in the doctor’s carriage, he didn’t cry at all.
“Let’s not tell Papa about any of this, all right?” Magdalena said two days later, when he was still refusing to leave her bedside. “You were such a brave little man, my brave, brave little gentleman—but let’s not tell him, let’s not make him worry.”
After that, Darisa learned to fear the night—not because he found the darkness itself terrifying, or because he was afraid of being carried off by something supernatural and ugly, but because he realized suddenly the extent of his own helplessness. Death, winged and quiet, was already in the house with him. It hovered in the spaces between people and things, between his bed and the lamp, between his room and Magdalena’s—always there, drifting between rooms, especially when his mind was temporarily elsewhere, especially when he was asleep. He decided that his dealings with Death had to be preemptive. He developed a habit of sleeping for two hours, while it was still light out, and then waking to wander the house, to creep into Magdalena’s room, his breath withering in front of him, and to stand with his hand on her stomach, as if she were a baby, waiting for the movement of her ribs. Sometimes he would sit in the room with her all night, but most often he would leave her door open and go through the rest of the house, room by room, looking for Death, trying to flush him from his hiding places. He looked in the hall cupboards and the china cabinets, the armoires where boxes of old newspapers and diagrams were kept. He looked in his father’s room, always empty, in the wardrobe where his father kept his old military uniform, under the beds, behind bathroom doors. Back and forth he went through the house, latching and unlatching windows with useless determination, expecting, at any moment, to look inside the oven and find Death squatting in it—a man, just a man, a patient-looking winged man with the unmoving eyes of a thief.
Darisa planned to say: “I’ve found you, now get out.” He had planned no course of action in the event of Death’s refusal.
Darisa had been doing this for several months when the Winter Palace of Emin Pasha opened its doors. For years, the fate of the pasha’s winter residence had been a subject of some debate among the City’s officials. As a
