The Tiger's Wife

there, kept it riveted and preoccupied, thought about it while it shared the cellar with him, it would not wander the house. He practiced first on vermin he picked out of the trash, cats that had met their ends under carriage wheels, and then on squirrels he trapped with a clumsy box-and-bait apparatus he set up in the back garden. After Magdalena’s kingfisher died, he showed the mounted bird to Mr. Bogdan and won the right to take small commissions home with him: fox, badger, pine marten. Whatever satisfaction he gained from the finished product, he did not admit, either to himself or to the quiet, empty room.

He continued this way for years, even after the attack that killed Magdalena, which, predictably, happened one sunny afternoon in March at the park, when he let go of her hand to lace up his shoes, and she seized and fell and hit her head, and after a long time in the hospital, slipped away without waking up or ever saying a word to him again. Afterward, other things collapsed in small piles around him—the kingdom went first, and the wars that united it into a new one bankrupted his father, who hanged himself from one of the many bridges that spanned the Nile, far away, in Egypt. Alone, penniless, without task, Darisa moved into Mr. Bogdan’s basement and continued his apprenticeship in the business of death. At least, he told himself, this is something I know how to do, and he went to the Hall of Mirrors more and more often to perfect the technique of his craft, until at last he was permitted to touch up one of the pasha’s great boars, which was much later mounted in the office of the Marshall, although Darisa would never know about it. He had plans, then, to open up a business of his own, or to take over from Mr. Bogdan when the old master retired. But then came the Great War, and years of poverty, and any business he might have made of it dried up in the coffers and pockets of the rich who fled or died or went broke, assumed other identities, adopted other kingdoms.

At twenty, having buried Mr. Bogdan and faithfully distributed almost all the old man’s money among his many legitimate and illegitimate children so that he could keep the basement for himself, Darisa was scrounging for work. He found himself running errands for a tavern owner he detested, a sallow-faced, tubercular old gypsy whose name was Karan, and who insisted on paying him in old currency. The tavern was a one-room shack, so there was never enough sitting room inside, and the patrons would instead spill out into the square, where Karan had steadily been carving out space with boxes and moving crates, overturned butter churns and broken pickling barrels, anything found or unused that might serve as a tabletop.

Contributing to the tavern’s popularity—particularly in the eyes of children—was Lola, Karan’s dancing bear and the love of his life. She was an old, soft-muzzled, doe-eyed thing who had spent countless years traveling the world with her master, performing on street corners and in circuses, in theatrical productions and palace galas, and once—as evidenced by Karan’s only framed photograph, proudly on display above the spit—for the late archduke himself. She was so old she no longer needed a tether, and was content to spend her waning years in the shade of the oak outside the tavern, letting the neighborhood children clamber all over her and peer inside her nostrils. On the rare occasion she did get up to dance, she lumbered through it with unforced grace that still showed some traces of her former glory.

Darisa had never seen a living bear before, and when he wasn’t scrubbing dishes or butchering the morning’s shipment of meat, he was outside with Lola. Old age had worn away her sight and sense of smell, and it was often all she could do to raise herself to her feet and move from one shaded area to another; but her range of expressions still betrayed the wild animal in her. There was, of course, the almost canine sideways tilt of the eyes when she wanted something she was not supposed to have (a prime cut of meat, for example, or a drink of rakija, in which she was occasionally permitted to indulge), or the way her muzzle melted into contentment at the sound of Karan’s voice; but there was also the sudden upward pull of the facial muscles when she managed to hear a dog in the distance, and the darkened, drawn, focused look that came over her at feeding time.

When Lola finally died that winter, Karan was beside himself with grief. He closed the tavern down, and kept her wrapped in an enormous blanket in the dining room for four days before he finally let Darisa take her away. In Mr. Bogdan’s basement, Darisa worked slowly, a little each day, his hands trying to remember the movement of the knife and the needle as smoothly as possible while his mind stayed fixed on Lola in the golden labyrinth. When he brought her back to Karan, almost a month later, the gypsy was speechless. Darisa had positioned her standing, her body half-turned and her ears alert, somewhere between dancing and rearing for a better look at her prey; her paws were outspread, her fur combed and clean, her eyes wide and fixed on something in the distance. Darisa had found the ground between her docile nature and her long-lost, feral dignity; Karan immediately gave him a raise, and put Lola on the slope beneath her tree and laid her silver-tasseled dancing muzzle under one enormous hind paw.

Lola stood outside the tavern this way for months, and when the spring brought trappers back from the mountains after the season’s hunt, they marveled at her authenticity, and demanded to meet the man who had done her such remarkable justice. The trappers were hard-faced, ugly men, ugly in every way, but they got less ugly the more they drank, and they drank a lot that night, buying round after round for Darisa. There was no more money to be made in taxidermy in the City, they told him; but there were forests the whole world over, forests belonging to kings and counts, even forests belonging to no one, and these forests were stocked with bear and wolf and lynx, whose hides were now worth a great deal to City men trying to distinguish themselves in social circles to which they had no birthright. In this world, the trappers told Darisa, the aristocracy had fallen from their frivolous pursuits, and a man could no longer rely on them to bring him work. Instead, he must go out and find the beasts himself, hunt them on his own time and with his own skill. If a rich idiot should happen to tag along, he was an added blessing; but rich idiots were harder and harder to come by, unreliable even when they expressed interest, and a man could not spend a lifetime waiting for them.

Darisa mopped floors for the rest of the spring and summer, but when autumn came he followed the trappers into the mountains. The hunt, he had convinced himself, was just a new avenue of the death business, and one way or another it would accommodate a return to independence and to the work he loved. He himself would bring home the hides that would revive Mr. Bogdan’s workshop; he would kill the bears whose pelts doctors and politicians would buy on market stands, the bears whose unseen deaths retired generals would embellish in fireside stories.

That first year, following one trapper and then another, Darisa became a hunter. They say he fell to hunting as if he had been born for it; but perhaps it was the possibility of having a purpose again that fueled him to adopt his new life with such ferocious energy and dedication. He learned to set up camp and mend weapons; to build a blind and sit motionless in it for hours; to read his quarry’s track in the dark and in the rain. He learned, by heart, the movement of deer herds across the mountains so that he could anticipate the bears who came to pick off the stragglers. He learned to hunt in late autumn, when the bears, slow-gaited and fattened, were fiercest in their last months of foraging before winter sleep. What the other trappers could teach him, he absorbed voraciously; what they could not, he figured out for himself. He hunted with traps and guns, with snares and poisoned meat, grew accustomed to the loud and stinking way bears died, and the way their skin came away from the body if you cut it right, heavy, blood-filled, but as accommodating as a dress pattern. He learned to love solitude, unbroken except for an occasional encounter with other trappers, or the unexpected hospitality of some godforsaken farm where the men always seemed to be gone, and the women always happy to see him. He learned that seven months of hunting could earn him the pleasure of three months of work in Mr. Bogdan’s basement, shut away from the world, rebuilding the skins he had brought with him.

He learned, also, to tolerate and understand the necessity of taking on rich idiots—a trickle of young men trying to cling to the noble birthrights of their fathers and grandfathers. By his third year of hunting, these youths would follow him through the brush, as sure-footed as fawns, their alarm wild and loud and completely unpredictable. They were the kind of men who came oversupplied and underprepared, whose teeth would chatter and arms go dead at the crucial moment. Every so often, one of them would inexplicably rise to the occasion and deliver the