By the time my grandfather climbed out of bed and went to the doorway, a great crowd was already assembling in the square, and the women, their heads wrapped in flower-stippled handkerchiefs, were already shrieking it out:
“Darisa is dead. God has abandoned us.”
My grandfather stood at Mother Vera’s side, watching the crowd grow bigger and bigger at the bottom of the stairs. He could see Jovo, the greengrocer, and Mr. Neven, who repaired plows; he could see the priest in his stained black cassock, and the spinster sisters from two doors down, who had come out with their slippers on. Half a dozen other people with their backs turned to him. The first wave of panic at Marko Parovic’s news had hit, and now my grandfather watched the disbelieving faces of the men and women he had known all his life: the baker, rigid and red-faced with his dough-numbed fingers; the shaking shoulders of the baker’s daughter, who was gasping and twisting her hair in her fists like a mourner at a burial. Standing slightly apart was the apothecary, quiet with his coat thrown over his shoulders, looking down at the formless, blood-soaked pelt, all that was left of Darisa the Bear, which lay at their feet as if Darisa had never been alive at all.
The apothecary stooped down and picked up one end of the pelt. Half-lifted, it looked like a wet, hairy wing.
“Poor man,” my grandfather heard a woman say.
“It is too much.”
“We must honor him. We must have a funeral.”
“Look, God—what shall we bury?”
“Here,” my grandfather heard the apothecary say, “here, are you quite sure there was no trace of him?”
“Sir,” Marko Parovic said, spreading his hands. “Only the trails in the snow where the battle was fought.”
A mutter of horror and admiration passed through the crowd, and people began crossing themselves. The villagers’ collective disappointment in Darisa, their rage at his abandonment, the fact that they had been denigrating his name and what he stood for little more than two hours ago—all of this had fallen by the wayside with the news of his death.
One of the village hounds chose that moment to investigate the outspread pelt and raise a leg against it; there was a cry of outrage as six or seven hands reached for the pelt and somebody’s boot kicked the dog out of the way, and Vladisa, whose nerves had never recovered from his encounter with the tiger, went down in a dead faint.
“By God, let us take it into church,” the priest said. And while a handful of aghast villagers carried the pelt off in the direction of the church, the apothecary propped Vladisa against the porch steps, and for the first time looked at my grandfather in the doorway.
“Get water,” the apothecary said, and my grandfather ran to the kitchen basin and obliged. He was aware, when he came back, of being carefully studied, of the eyes of the village women on him like shadows. But my grandfather looked only at the apothecary, who smelled of soap and warmth, and who smiled at him as he handed down the water basin.
And then there was a flurry of female voices.
“So, it’s you, is it?” the baker’s daughter shouted at him, embattled. My grandfather backed up the porch steps and stared down at her. “Don’t you go back in, you just stay out here and show your face. Just look. Look at what’s happened.” Mother Vera came out to stand behind my grandfather, and the baker’s daughter said, “Aren’t you ashamed? At what cost have you befriended the devil’s bitch, made her welcome here? Aren’t you ashamed?”
“You mind your own business,” Mother Vera said.
The baker’s daughter said: “It’s everybody’s business now.”
My grandfather said nothing. With daylight and a few hours’ sleep separating him from it, the journey of last night seemed a thousand years ago. His mind could not frame it properly. He suspected—even as the baker’s daughter was blaming him for his involvement—that no one actually knew its true level. But there was still a chance that someone would come forward and say they had seen him sneak out of the village the previous night; or, worse still, that they had witnessed his return with the girl, seen him sinking into the snow under the weight of her exertions; or that they had found his tracks before the midnight snowfall had covered them up.
Lying on his cot, his feet cold and his legs twitching, trying to still the nervous jerking of his limbs, certain that the force with which his heart was shuddering through his hair and skin must be audible to Mother Vera, my grandfather had allowed himself to believe that they had gotten away with something. But now, it was impossible not to think of Darisa—and even though my grandfather was too young to completely understand what had happened to the Bear, some feeling of responsibility must have clung to him all his life. As it was, nine years old and terrified, all he could do was stand in the doorway and watch the panic that was shaking the village loose of any sense it had left.
“It has gone too far,” the woodcutter said. “She’ll dispatch us one by one.”
“We must leave, all of us.”
“We must drive the bitch out,” Jovo said, “and stay.”
In the movements of the men my grandfather saw a new sense of purpose. They had not coordinated themselves yet, but they were on the verge of some decision, and my grandfather felt the inevitability of disaster run by him like a river against whose current he was completely helpless.
He was certain of only one thing: she needed him now more than ever. He had realized it last night, when they stopped in a glade a little way down the mountain, and he had stood over the tiger’s wife while she knelt in the snow, watching the breath smoke out of her mouth in long, thin trails, and he had been unable to let go of her hand. He had the sense that whatever made her a grown-up, kept her calm and unafraid, kept her belly as round as the moon, had given way to the terrors of night, and had left her alone, and left him alone with her. It was as if they had lost the tiger, as if the tiger had abandoned them, and it was just the two of them, my grandfather and the tiger’s wife.
He had helped her up the stairs of her house last night and he had told her, even though she couldn’t hear him, that he would come back in the morning. He would come back with warm tea and water, with porridge for her breakfast, and he would keep her company. Would take care of her. But now, he realized, this was impossible. To leave his house and walk through the square with all of them watching him, to cross the pasture and go into her house, would set something off, a decline without end. He could not do it; he had no authority, no way to brace
