The Tiger's Wife (15 page)

No one would ever guess that the gun had misfired. No one would ever guess that Luka and Jovo, from the branches of the tree they had scrambled up, had watched the tiger reel back in surprise, and look around, puzzled. No one would ever guess, not even after the blacksmith’s clothed bones were found in disarray, many years later, that the two of them waited in that tree until the tiger pulled the blacksmith’s legs off and dragged them away, waited until nightfall to climb down and retrieve the gun from what was left of the blacksmith. No one would guess that they did not even bury the unlucky blacksmith, whose brain was eventually picked over by crows, and to whose carcass the tiger would return again and again, until he had learned something about the taste of man, about the freshness of human meat, which was different now, in snow, than it had been in the heat of summer.

BIS WAS SNORING ASTHMATICALLY ON THE DOORSTEP OF
the upper patio, and he started at the sound of my footsteps and bellowed like a moose until I reached him. I pushed past him with my knee, and then he followed me to the upper porch, where I sat at the top of the staircase above the main road. Bis hung around for a moment or two, pushing his wet face into the crook of my arm, sneezing with excitement at the notion of sharing the early morning hours with someone; and then he decided that I was unanimated and useless, and he ran down and over the road and dropped past the palms onto the beach. Moments later, I could hear him splashing around. It wasn’t dawn yet, and there was a fine pink sheen to the air, as translucent as a fish. The lights of Zvoćana were still bright on the water across the bay.

The shadows were pulling back from the water, gathering at the foot of the road, when Barba Ivan came down the stairs. He came down slowly, putting both feet on each stair. He took one look at me—scuffed-up pant legs and dirt-smeared coat and bloodied palms—and said, “I see you’ve been up to the vineyard.”

That I had made this effort on my own seemed to compel him to confide in me. He asked if I wanted to come fishing, and I said no, but I got up and followed him down to his boat anyway. It was a little blue skiff, paint peeling off the sides, green and yellow barnacles clinging to the bottom like something earned. Rubber boots on his feet, two large crates and an empty bucket in his arms, the Barba told me he had some lobster cages near the shore, a small net for dogfish a little farther out, and then the big net, right in the middle of the bay, that Fra Antun helped him with when he wasn’t supervising the orphanage. He held his arm out as he explained this to me, cutting the horizon into evenly distanced rectangles with a flat hand.

Then he told me about the diggers. They had shown up on his doorstep last week, two carloads of them, all their pots and pans and, in his words, peddling bric-a-brac, and at first he’d thought they were gypsies. He hadn’t known how ill they were then; only Duré had come inside, and he had stood in Barba Ivan’s kitchen and told them there was a body in the vineyard, a body Duré had put there, the body of a distant cousin whom he had carried down from the mountains during the war and had to leave behind. The cousin had been stuffed into the ground somewhere up on that plot during the months the house had been abandoned. Now the whole family was sick, and no one had been able to help them until some hag from back in their village told them it was the body making them sick, the body calling out for last rites, a proper resting place. They were going to find him at any cost; earlier this year, they’d lost an aunt to the illness, and they were paying to dig.

“Nada doesn’t care for it,” he told me, untying the boat. “But then, of course, what it comes down to is: they’ve got children. And do we or do we not want a body in the vineyard?”

He had been watching them for the last week, growing more and more uneasy. “You’ve seen the pouches,” he said, pointing to his neck. “They’ve got—I don’t know—grass and dead things in them to keep away the illness.”

They had brought so many bottles that Barba Ivan suspected they had a trade on the side; rare kinds of
rakija
, perhaps some family concoction. But the young woman had told him about the bottles, full of water from a holy spring—back on Duré’s and my side of the border—and herbs and grasses for health.

“But they haven’t found him yet?” I said.

“Oh, he’s long gone,” Barba Ivan said with a broad smile. “I keep telling them—long gone. It’s hard, shallow earth. He’s not where he’s supposed to be—floods have flushed him out, dogs have dragged him off. Who knows?”

The Barba put his crates in the boat and I helped him push it out, even though he waved me off. Bis was already in the boat, wagging his tail so hard his hips and whole rear end were swinging manically from left to right. Then Barba Ivan climbed into the boat and, eighty years old if he was a day, rowed himself out to the motorboat he kept moored to the breakwater, switched vessels, lifted Bis out of the skiff and into the motorboat, and then, with the dog standing on the wet prow like a masthead, the two of them set off down the coast, cutting the still morning water. Every hundred yards or so, Bis would launch backward out of the boat, his jowls flapping into an insane grin of canine pleasure, and disappear under the waves; Barba Ivan would kill the motor and drift until the dog caught up, or turn the boat around and go back for him.

Zóra had begun her morning with a call to the prosecutor’s assistant, whom she’d succeeded in calling a cow within the first two minutes of conversation. I tried to cheer her up by telling her about the diggers on our way to the monastery, about the illness and the dead cousin, whose bones were perhaps somewhere up in the vineyard, and whom the diggers, as I understood it, would be repotting as soon as he was discovered.

Zóra gave me a look from behind her sunglasses, and said nothing. She was pulling one of two dollies Nada had provided to accommodate us in our effort of delivering the vaccines to the monastery orphanage. We had stood in the doorway of the garden shed while Nada pushed boxes and crates aside to find them—two rusted carts with wheels barely clinging to the axles, leaning against the back wall behind a broken washing machine and some paper-wrapped canvases that we assumed were, undoubtedly, more dog portraits.

Zóra and I walked through town slowly, pulling the dollies behind us, past the little souvenir shops that were just opening up, past a farm stand where a thin, burnt-brown man was spearing handwritten price tags into crates of melons, tomatoes, bright green peppers, and limes. Shirtless men were already tearing down a stone wall at the bottom of an empty, sloping field full of dead yellow grasses and dark scrubs that were growing up here and there, throwing pockets of shade down the hill and onto the road. At the ferry pier, we ran into a small procession of children, presumably from the orphanage, heading our way, clinging to a frayed red rope that was slung between the waists of two supervisors, women who were both talking at the same time, telling the children to stay out of the street and not lick each other.

When we reached the monastery, we forced our crooked-wheeled dollies over the stairs at the gate, through an arbor of vines that clung like spiders to the lattice above. Fra Antun, we were told by the young woman who worked at the tourism counter in the courtyard, was in the garden. We left the dollies with her and went to find him. The garden was through a low stone tunnel, facing the sea, and was surrounded by a wall braced with cypresses and lavender. There was a goldfish pond with yawning papyrus fronds that leaned out over the water, shading a mossy rock that someone had crowned with a grinning turtle ashtray. Evidence of children lay everywhere: abandoned buckets, blue-and-green sand trucks, plastic trains crowding end-to-end in the middle of the path, a headless doll with only one shoe, a butterfly net. At the back of the garden, there was a clear space where herbs and tomato vines and heads of lettuce were growing in tight, sprouting rows, and this was where we found Fra Antun. He was dressed in a cassock, cutting herbs with a pair of scissors, and when he straightened up he had glasses and a ponytail and two overlapping front teeth, and he smiled at us in a comfortable way and asked us if we had met Tamsin, the turtle, yet. He laughed, and we laughed with him. When he bent down to gather up his things, Zóra mouthed a soundless whistle and crossed herself.

He helped us bring the dollies into the inner courtyard of the monastery, past the chapel doors, now closed, and the staircase that led up to the campanile where the big brass bell was swinging hard, sending bursts of sound up the mountain. The children had been set up away from the cloisters, in what Fra Antun called the “museum.” It was a long, white corridor with a clerestory of little square windows that ran parallel to the inner sanctum of the church. Empty sleeping bags were rolled up neatly along both sides of the hall. Fra Antun explained that, once the new orphanage was built and the children had been moved there, this corridor would house historic displays from the old library and pieces by regional artists.

“Local art,” he said with a proud wink, and showed us a patch of wall where more portraits of Bis were lined up. These drawings were in crayon, and the dog stood, stick-legged, three-eyed, bipedal, toadlike, misshapen in every possible way, on napkins and sheets of newspaper and toilet paper that had been lovingly arranged by someone considerably taller than the artists responsible for the work itself. At the end of the corridor, there was a cannonball wedged into the wall, the plaster and paint spidering around it.

“That is a cannonball,” Zóra said, without feeling.

“Yes,” said Fra Antun. “From a Venetian ship.” And he pointed out in the direction of the sea.

The children were working in a windowless room that looked like an ancient kitchen. There was an enormous, empty black fireplace, and a spinning wheel in a wooden case in the corner, a shelf with turn-of-the-century irons that looked like instruments with which you could club a person to death. Stone bowls were lined up in small piles along a tiered mantelpiece. The single fold of an old fishing net hung above the door; a scruffy-looking blue plush fish was trapped in it. Fra Antun’s kids sat hunched over wooden benches in the middle of the room. There were glasses of pencils and crayons scattered over the tables, and the color rose up in a glaring mess from the pages the kids were writing on, sitting on, sneezing on, folding into paper airplanes or birds. The strange thing about it all was the silence. We stood in the doorway, and we could hear the broad sound of the bell outside in the courtyard, but in the kitchen there was only sniffling and shuffling paper, the occasional rhythm of someone scratching his head. They were white-faced and small, sturdy despite their leanness. They were working with another monk, a man named Fra Parso. He had a beard and a tonsure, and was Italian. He didn’t smile at us.

We had intended to save the candy for after the injections, to win the children’s cooperation and patience, to comfort the criers and coax the breath holders, revive the fainters and bribe the ones who would go limp and eel out of your grip and onto the floor. But the silence in that room, with the little heads bowed over the flush of paper, did something to Zóra, and she unstrapped the box from the top of the pile and set it down right there and announced: “We have candy.” And after that, the children were milling around her, still quiet, but milling, looking inside the cooler, walking away with bags of Kiki bonbons, which they probably hadn’t seen since the war, and some had probably never seen at all. Zóra sat down on the stairs leading into the room with the tables and held out the candy, and I stood back until an even-eyed little boy with thick brown hair came up and took my hand and led me inside to look at his drawing. He was a little pale, but he looked painstakingly well cared for, and his head, which he put near me when he pointed to his picture, smelled clean. I was not surprised to find that he, too, had drawn Bis; except he had given the dog apple-green udders.

“That’s a nice dog,” I told him. From the corner of my eye, I could see Zóra eyeing the leftover candy in the cooler, and then estimating how many kids were walking around with their mouths full or with wrappers in their fists, trying to work out whether she could bring them back for seconds.

“It’s Arlo’s dog,” the little boy said, without looking at me.

“Who’s Arlo?” I said.

The boy shrugged, and then wandered off to look for more candy.

I had been longing for my grandfather all day without letting myself think about it. Sitting in that hot, moist room with the dogs in all shapes and colors spread out in front of me made me remember how, for years during the war, he had collected my old things—dolls, baby clothes, books—to take to the orphanage downtown. He would take the tram there and always walk back, and when he came home I knew not to disturb him. They had lost children themselves, my grandparents: a son and a daughter, both stillborn, within a year of each other. It was another thing they never talked about, a fact I knew somehow without knowing how I’d ever heard about it, something buried so long ago, in such absolute silence, that I could go for years without remembering it. When I did, I was always stunned by the fact that they had survived it, this thing that sat between them, barricaded from everyone else, despite which they had been able to cling together, and raise my mother, and take trips, and laugh, and raise me.

I started setting up, and a little while later, her candy-distributing energy spent, Zóra joined me. With the discipline of the morning lesson shattered, the kids hovered in the doorway and watched us set up in an empty room at the end of the hall. Fra Antun and a few other monks carried plastic tables up from the cellar, and we straightened out the table legs and put down cloth, stacked our boxes of injections and sterile blood vials in the corner that didn’t get sun, set the scales, got out towels and tubs and boxes of gel for the lice station, and then Zóra had a fight with Fra Parso about the contraceptives we had brought to hand out to the older girls. When it was all finished, we gave the monks the supplies we had brought just in case, the thermometers and hot water bottles, a box of antibiotics and iodine and throat syrup and aspirin. The children were waiting for more candy, and Zóra was getting more and more agitated by what she was now seeing as our lack of preparation. There were no papers, she had realized—the monks did not have the children’s medical histories—so we were going to have to make up the records by hand as we went.