The Tiger's Wife

“Give it away. It’s a bad business, giving the money of the dead to the living. But it’s shameful to leave it sitting here when it could do some good.”

“You may have to expand.”

“Your feet are on the drawings, Doctor—let me move them.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I must find somewhere else to put them, somewhere away from the hearth. It wouldn’t do for them to catch. Some are quite old. This one—see—the man who left this painting is himself dead now. I have been bringing coins from his grave here since last year.”

“You’re the mora.”

“Not always. There’s been a mora over a hundred years. Then the war came and they believed nothing. My wife believed nothing, she couldn’t believe after what happened to my son. She would come home from his grave and say, the drawings people are putting there get wet and the colors run everywhere, and the flowers get old and dirty and they smell, and all for what? For me to feel better? There is a hole in the ground and my son is buried in it. Water, Doctor.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The water, behind you. Please. For my hands. One night, I clear the grave and bring the flowers and drawings here. No one comes here. Most of the mines are gone, but they say it is still dangerous. I cannot throw away the things from my son’s grave—maybe even I believe. When my wife comes home the next night, it is as if someone has breathed a secret to her. She asks me if I’ve seen the grave—it is clear and clean, and she stands beside it and feels our son at peace. Human hands, she says, haven’t cleared the grave. It’s the mora. She knows this in her bones. Then she goes back and puts coins out, and what can I do? Besides bring them here.”

“But this isn’t all from one grave.”

“No. Pretty soon people are putting coins on the graves of all their loved ones. Leaving more flowers. Clothes, sometimes food. They keep the dead safe and well fed, they comfort themselves. Sometimes I climb up here with bagfuls, and the walk is hard. Sacred earth, they say. Leave something for your dead here and it will reach them. The mora will take it.”

“And no one knows?”

“Someone always knows, Doctor. But I would be happy if it were only you, if only you are the one who knows.”

“No one from the village? Not your son?”

“If there are people who know, they are always the ones who do not say what they know, so it is difficult to tell them from the ones who merely think they know. Someone must know by now. Not that it’s me, perhaps—but they must know. And still they keep setting things down. So I keep bringing them here. You’ll not tell my wife, Doctor? You won’t, will you?”

But he had no need to ask. I had been taught long ago that there are some stories you keep to yourself.

People who talk about my grandfather’s death now talk about the boys from Zdrevkov, the land mine that ripped into their legs and shredded their bodies. At the doctors’ luncheon, I’m told, aging men pay their respects, admire how my grandfather, gaunt and gray-skinned, undeterred by an illness he hid like shame, abandoned everything and traveled four hundred miles to save the boys’ lives. As I’ve pointed out to Zora, whenever she calls me from the Neurology Institute in Zurich in a panic at all hours of the night—more and more often now that her son has reached that age where he understands objects best by hiding them up his nose—the fact that the boys themselves did not survive does not figure in the telling.

The doctors’ knowledge does not extend to my grandfather’s bag of belongings, or how I brought it home to my grandma two days after the funeral, or how it sat on the hall table for thirty days, as if part of my grandfather were still living with us, sitting quietly on the hallway table, all but demanding sunflower seeds. Leaving room for whatever miscalculations we’d made about his death, on the fortieth day my grandma opened the hospital bag— before taking his silk pajamas out from under the pillow beside her head, before putting away his clogs. When I came home from the hospital that night, I saw her as a widow for the first time, my grandfather’s widow, sitting quietly in his green armchair with his belongings arranged in a cookie tin on her lap.

I sat on a footstool beside her and watched her go through them. My mother was already there. For a long time, no one said anything, and there were only my grandma’s hands with their smooth knuckles and big rings, and then my grandma said, “Let’s have some coffee,” and my mother got up to brew it, leaving my grandma room to disagree with her, to correct her technique, point out the obvious: “Don’t put that pot there—use the board, for God’s sake.”

Of course I never told anyone about the firelit room in the abandoned village, the broken table and barrel brimming with coins, the carpet of dead flowers, rows of jars and bottles—clay and porcelain, glass and stone, wax-lipped lids and corks and caps broken or missing—empty offerings, cobwebs clinging to the lips of the bottles and the lids of the jars. The fire putting round shadows between their sides and edges, and all the jars and the bottles singing, and the paintings of Bis stacked like papyrus scrolls against the wall, and me, promising not to tell and demanding an equal promise in return, kneeling to open the bag in secret, absolved by a room which, for the rest of the world, did not exist.

In the bag I found his wallet and his hat, his gloves. I found his doctor’s coat, folded neatly in half. But I did not find The Jungle Book, for which I searched, mourned in that hot little room above Brejevina. It took me a long time to accept that it was gone, gone entirely, gone from his coat and from our house, gone from the drawers in his office and the shelves in our living room.

When I think of my grandfather’s last meeting with the deathless man, I picture the two of them in casual conversation, sitting together on the porch of that bar in Zdrevkov, The Jungle Book, the terms of the wager, closed on the tabletop between them. My grandfather is in his best suit, and the deathless man has taken him out, not for a cup of coffee, but for a beer, a long laugh before they take their journey to the crossroads together. For once in the long history of their acquaintance, they are not alone, and they go by unnoticed, two men you could pass on the street without a second glance. They have the comfortable demeanor of old friends, of two people between whom a lifetime has passed. For the deathless man, it is more than one lifetime, but you would never know it from looking at him. According to my grandfather’s descriptions, he is a young man at ninety-five, and he will still be a young man long after my grandfather’s forty days, and probably long after mine.