The Tiger's Wife

got stuck, briefly, among the icy rocks, and then began to slope upward sharply through the thickets at the lip of the forest.

The tracks were heavy with hesitation here, and they made twisted, uneven holes in the places where her coat and hair had snagged, forcing her to swivel to free herself, or where the trees had come up quickly and into her eyes. My grandfather kept his head low and reached for the boughs of saplings, pulling himself up, exhausted already, but urging himself on and on. Snow, piled thick in the high silence of the pines, slapped down on him as he went. His hands were raw, and he was choking on his own fear, on his inability to move faster, on the urgency of his own disbelief. Perhaps the house would stay dark forever. Perhaps she had gone away for good. He fell, once, twice, and each time he went down into the snow, suddenly much deeper than it seemed, and when he came up, his nostrils were full, and he had to wipe the sting out of his eyes.

He did not know how much farther he had to go. Perhaps the tiger’s wife had left hours before. Perhaps she had already met the tiger, somewhere far ahead in the woods, and the two of them had gone ahead, into the winter, leaving him behind. And what if the stories were not as false and ridiculous as he had previously thought— what if, by the same magic that made him a man, the tiger had changed the girl into a tiger as well? What if my grandfather stumbled onto the two of them, and she did not remember him? As my grandfather went, arm over arm, his heart making sour little shudders against his ribs, he kept listening for a sound, the sound of the tiger, the sound of anything but his own feet and lungs. He was pulling himself up, up, up where the roots of the trees made a curve over what looked like the lip of a hill. Then he was standing in a clearing, and he saw them.

There, where the trees sloped briefly down onto a cradle in the side of the mountain, the tiger’s wife, still herself, still human, shoulders draped with hair, was kneeling with an armful of meat. The tiger was nowhere in sight, but there was someone else in the clearing, fifteen or twenty feet behind her, and my grandfather’s relief at finding the girl was overwhelmed now by the realization that this unexpected figure—changing before his eyes from man to shadow and back again—was Darisa the Bear, enormous and upright, advancing through the snow with a gun on his arm.

My grandfather wanted to shout a warning, but he stumbled forward instead, breathless, his arms high to pull himself out of the snow. The tiger’s wife heard nothing. She was kneeling quietly in the glade, digging. And then Darisa the Bear was on her. My grandfather saw him grab the tiger’s wife and pull her to her feet, and already she was thrashing like an animal in a head-snare; Darisa had her by the shoulder, and her body was arching forward, away from him, her free arm jerking over her head to claw at his face and his hair, and all the while she was making a hoarse, rasping sound, like a cough, and my grandfather could hear her teeth clacking together, hard.

She was enormous and clumsy, and then Darisa stumbled forward and pushed her into the snow, and she fell and disappeared, and my grandfather couldn’t see her in the darkness, but he was still running. Then Darisa was getting to his knees, and my grandfather put his hands out and shouted—one long, endless howl of fear and hatred and despair—and launched himself onto Darisa’s shoulders, and bit his ear.

Darisa did not react as quickly as you might expect, probably because, for a moment, he may have thought the tiger was on him. Then he must have realized that something small and human was gnawing on his ear, and he reached around, and my grandfather hung on and on, until Darisa finally caught hold of my grandfather’s coat and peeled him off with one arm, off and onto the ground. My grandfather lay stunned. Above him, the trees were steep and sharp and lost in the darkness, and the sounds around his head vanished in the snow. Then the furious face of Darisa the Bear, neck dark with blood, and weight coming down on my grandfather’s chest—Darisa’s knee or elbow—and then, before he even knew it was happening, my grandfather’s hand was closing on something cold and hard it contacted in the snow and raising it straight up against Darisa’s nose. There was a crack, and a sudden burst of blood, and then Darisa fell forward over my grandfather and lay still.

My grandfather did not get up. He lay there, the coarse hairs of Darisa’s coat in his mouth, and he listened to the dull thud of a heartbeat, unsure whether it was his own or Darisa’s. And then the blood-brown, sticky hands of the tiger’s wife rolled the man over, and pulled my grandfather to his feet. She was ashen, the skin beneath her eyes tight and gray with fear, and she was turning his face this way and that, uselessly bundling him deeper into his coat.

And then my grandfather was running again. The tiger’s wife was running beside him, gripping his hand like she might fall. She was breathing hard and fast, small sounds that lodged in her throat. My grandfather hoped she might call to the tiger somehow, but he didn’t know how, and he didn’t know whether he was supposed to be holding her hand or the other way around. He knew, with certainty, that he could run faster, but the tiger’s wife had her other arm across her belly, so he kept pace with her, her bundled-up body and her bare feet, and he held her fingers tight.

“NO,” DURE SAID TO FRA ANTUN, “NO, I DON’T WANT HER, get me somebody else.”

But the crowd along the fence had thinned out, the campground lighting up, restaurants along the boardwalk reopening, and the kid who had gone looking for a volunteer had not come back. Dure tried to wait him out, but night was falling, and after a few minutes without better prospects he was forced to consult his green paper for any rules that might explicitly prohibit me from taking the rag heart up to the crossroads.

“For God’s sake,” he said at last, his face falling. “Have you at least got a patron saint in your family?”

“Where’s that written?” I said, trying to get a look at the paper.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Dure. “Who’s your patron saint?”

“Lazarus,” I said, uncertain, trying to picture the icon hanging from the handle of my grandma’s sewing drawer. This seemed sufficient for Dure, and he gave in.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll send the boys around tomorrow.”

“Send them all tonight,” Zora said. “And the little girl.”

Even before he handed me the jar I had admitted to myself that my desire to bury the heart on behalf of his family had nothing to do with good faith, or good medicine, or any kind of spiritual generosity. It had to do with the mora, that man who came out of the darkness to dig up jars, and who was probably just someone from the village playing a practical joke—but who was, nevertheless, gathering souls at a crossroads sixty kilometers from where my grandfather had died, a ferry ride from the island of the Virgin of the Waters, three hours from Sarobor, and there was no way around these things, not after I had been thinking about them all afternoon, not with my grandfather’s belongings in my backpack. I was prepared, of course, for a prankster. I was prepared for an awkward exchange, an encounter in which I caught three teenagers digging up the jar to steal coins from the hole, putting their cigarettes out in the well-loved ashes of the heart. It was also possible—more than possible, in fact, probable, really, the likeliest of all possibilities—that no one would appear, and that I would wait at the crossroads all night, watching the wind come through the slanted green plot of the neighboring vineyard. Or that, in my exhaustion, I would fall asleep or begin to hallucinate. Or it would be the deathless man, tall and wearing his coat, coming down through the fields of long grass above the town—smiling, always smiling—and then I would sit,