The Tiger's Wife (28 page)

Silence while Duré moistened the rag again, three splashes of water for the newly baptized heart, the clenched wad of it tight and heavy in his fist. The heavyset man brought out a small brass pot, and Duré lowered the rag into it carefully, poured oil on it and set it on fire, and for a long time the little brass pot stood on the ground with the family leaning forward to look at it, and all I could think about while we were waiting for it to end was the deathless man and his coffee cup.

They were adding water to the brass pot, which was smoking now, putting it over the oil-drum coals, and Duré baptized the fire and the bones with what was left of the water and then tossed the bottle aside. All along the fence, the onlookers were beginning to dissipate, buckling under the weight of their expectations. A couple of boys were kicking a soccer ball along the vineyard fence.

Then the water was boiling, and Duré took the pot off the fire, and the men began passing it around quietly, without emotion, steadfast drinkers all, trying not to spill the ash-water. Some of the men removed their hats as they did this; some didn’t bother to put out their cigarettes. Fra Antun carried his incense over to us and stood there, watching the slow progression of the brass pot, and the faces of the men who had already had their share of the heart.

“Where’s the little girl?” I asked him.

“Inside,” said Fra Antun, “sleeping. They had her out here with a fever this afternoon, my mother threatened to call the police if they tried to bring her back out again.”

It was getting dark now. The sun had dipped below the side of the peninsula, and the sky in the west was draining quickly into the water. While we watched, one of the boys from the burial party put on his hat and went by us quickly. Zóra was already holding out an offering of water and disinfectant, but he pushed past her and went through the gate at the end of the vineyard. And with him, it was over, the tight secrecy of the circle around the valise had unraveled. One of the men wiped his mouth and laughed about something.

“What now?” Zóra said.

“Now comes the vigil,” Fra Antun told her.

“Where’s that kid going?” she said.

“To get someone from outside the family to bury the ashes on the hill.”

“Why doesn’t he do it himself?”

“Family member,” Fra Antun said. “He can’t.”

“What about you?”

“Well, I won’t.” Peering down at us from the underside of his glasses, he looked like an enormous dragonfly. “He’ll have a hard time getting anyone to go up to the crossroads after a body’s come up.”

“The crossroads?”

“For our
mora,
” said Fra Antun with a smile. “The spirit who comes to gather the dead.”

I was saying, “I’ll do it,” before my mind had fully come around what he might mean.

“Don’t be stupid,” Zóra said, looking at me. Fra Antun was biting his nails, letting the two of us sort it out ourselves.

I said: “Tell Duré and the family I’ll go to the crossroads on their behalf if they send the mother and the kids down to the clinic in the morning.”

WHILE THE VILLAGERS OF GALINA ARE RELUCTANT TO TALK
about the tiger and his wife, they will never hesitate to tell you stories of one of the lateral participants in their story.

Ask someone from Galina about Dariša the Bear, and the conversation will begin with a story that isn’t true: Dariša was raised by bears—or, he ate only bears. In some versions, he had spent twenty years hunting a great black bruin that had eluded other hunters from time out of mind, even Vuk Sivić, who had killed the fabled wolf of Kolovac. In the end, the advocates of that narrative say, the bear grew so weary of Dariša’s pursuit that it came to his camp in the night and lay down to die, and Dariša talked to it while it was dying like this in the snow, until its spirit passed into him at first light. My personal favorite, however, was the story that Dariša’s tremendous success as a hunter was derived from his ability to actually turn into a bear—that he did not kill, as men killed, with gun or poison or knife, but with tooth and claw, with the savage tearing of flesh, great ursine teeth locked into the throat of his opponent, making a sound as loud as the breaking of a mountain.

All these variations come down to one truth, however: Dariša was the greatest bear hunter in the old kingdom. That, at least, is fact. There is evidence of it. There are pictures of Dariša before the incident with the tiger’s wife—pictures in which Dariša, light-eyed and stone-faced, stands over the piled hides of bears, almost invariably in the company of some spindly-legged member of the aristocracy whose cheerful grin is intended to conceal knees still shaking from the hunt. In these pictures, Dariša is guileless and unsmiling, as charismatic as a lump of coal, and it’s hard to understand how he managed to generate such a loyal following among the villagers of Galina. The bears in these pictures tell a different story, too, one of death in excess—but then, no one ever looks to them for answers.

Dariša came to Galina once a year, right after the Christmas feasts, to indulge in village hospitality and to sell furs in anticipation of the hardening winter. His entrance was expected but sudden: people never saw him arrive, only awoke to the pleasant realization that he was already there, his horse tethered, oxen unhitched from their cart, fare spread out on a faded blue carpet. Dariša was short and bearded, and, in passing, might have been taken for a beggar; but, like his quiet manner and his tendency to indulge the morbid curiosity of children, he seemed to bring with him a wilder, more admirable world. He brought news and warmth, too, and occasionally stories of the wilderness and the animals that peopled it, and the villagers of Galina associated his arrival with good luck and seasonal stability.

Until that particular winter, my grandfather had looked forward to the yearly visit of Dariša the Bear with as much enthusiasm as anyone else in the village; but, distracted by the tiger and his wife, my grandfather had forgotten all about him. The other villagers, however, had not; instead, the inevitability of his appearance had loomed on and on in their collective consciousness, something that they avoided mentioning, lest their reliance on its surety prevent his arrival. So, when they emerged from their houses one late January morning and saw him there, brown and dirty and as welcome as a promise, their hearts rose.

My grandfather, who would otherwise have been first in line to walk up and down the faded blue carpet and stare at the open-jawed heads of bears, eyes glass, or stone, or altogether missing, looked through the window and realized, with dread, what was going to happen. Across the square, the tiger’s wife was probably looking out at Dariša, too, but she did not know the gravity of the commotion that was animating the village. She did not guess, as my grandfather must have guessed, that the priest rushing toward Dariša with open arms was not just saying hello, but also: “Praise God you’ve come safely through—you must rid us of this devil in his fiery pajamas.”

All along, my grandfather had hoped for a miracle, but expected disaster. He was nine, but he had known, since the encounter in the smokehouse, that he and the tiger and the tiger’s wife were caught on one side of a failing fight. He did not understand the opponents; he did not want to. Mother Vera’s unexpected assistance had been a sign of hope, but he didn’t know what the hope was toward. And with the hunter’s coming, my grandfather realized immediately that the odds were now heavily weighted against the tiger. Dariša the Bear, who, for so long, had represented something admirable and untouchable, became a betrayer, a murderer, a killer of tigers, a knife-wielding, snare-setting instrument of death that would be directed at something sacred, and my grandfather had no doubt that, given enough time, Dariša would succeed.

Unlike most hunters, Dariša the Bear did not live for the moment of death, but for what came afterward. He indulged the occupation he was known for so that he could earn the occupation that gave him pleasure: the preparation of the pelts. For Dariša, it was the skinning, the scraping, the smell of the curing oils, the ability to frame the memory of the hunt by re-creating wilderness in his own house. That is the truth about Dariša: the man was a taxidermist at heart.

To understand this, you have to go back to his childhood, to things no one in the village had heard about, to a prominent neighborhood of the City, a redbrick house on a lamp-lit thoroughfare overlooking the king’s manicured parks; to Dariša’s father, who was a renowned Austrian engineer, twice widowed, and who spent the better part of his life abroad; to Dariša’s sister, Magdalena, whose lifelong illness prevented them from following their father when he left, for years at a time, to oversee the construction of museums and palaces in Egypt, and kept them confined to each other’s company, and to the landscape of their father’s letters.

Magdalena was epileptic, and therefore restricted to small distances and small pleasures. Unable to attend school, she made as much progress as she could with a tutor, and taught herself painting. Dariša, seven years her junior, doted on her, adored everything she adored, and had grown up with the notion that her welfare was his obligation, his responsibility. Standing in the hallway of their house, watching the footman carry his father’s valises out to the waiting carriage, Dariša would cling to the lapels of the engineer’s coat, and his father would say: “You’re a very small boy, but I am going to make you a gentleman. Do you know how a small boy becomes a gentleman?”

“How?” Dariša would say, even though he already knew the answer.

“With a task,” his father said. “With taking responsibility for others. Shall I give you a task?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Help me think of one. What do you think most needs doing while I am away? While you are the only gentleman in the house?”

“Magdalena needs to be looked after.”

“And will you look after her for me?”

During the months that followed he busied himself with doing what he could for her, establishing order on a miniature but ferocious level. They had a housekeeper who prepared the meals and cleaned the house—but it was Dariša who carried the breakfast tray up to his sister’s room, Dariša who helped her pick the ribbons out for her hair, Dariša who fetched her frocks and stockings and then stood guard outside her door while she got dressed, so he could be there to hear her if she felt dizzy and called for him. Dariša laced her shoes, posted her letters, carried her things, held her hand when they took walks in the park; he sat in on her piano lessons, scowling like a fish, interfering if the teacher grew too stern; he arranged baskets of fruit and glasses of wine and wedges of cheese for her so she could paint still lifes; he kept an endless circulation of books and travel journals on her nightstand so they could read together at bedtime. For her part, Magdalena indulged him. He was a great help to her, and she realized very quickly that by looking after her he was learning to look after himself. His efforts invariably earned him the first line in Magdalena’s letters:
Dearest papa, you should see how our Dariša takes care of me
.

He was eight years old when he first witnessed one of her attacks. He had crept into her room to tell her about a bad dream. He found her twisted up in the covers, her body taut with spasms, her neck and shoulders drenched with sweat and something white and sticky. Looking at her, he suddenly felt ambushed, stifled by the soundless arrival of something else that had eased into the room with him when he opened the door. He left her there. Without putting on his coat, without putting on his shoes, he left the house and ran down the street in his nightshirt, his bare feet slapping on the wet pavement, all the way to the doctor’s house halfway across town. All around him, he felt only absence, as wide and heavy as a ship. The absence of people on the street, the absence of his father, the absence of certainty that Magdalena would be alive when he got home. He cried only a little, and afterward, in the doctor’s carriage, he didn’t cry at all.

“Let’s not tell Papa about any of this, all right?” Magdalena said two days later, when he was still refusing to leave her bedside. “You were such a brave little man, my brave, brave little gentleman—but let’s not tell him, let’s not make him worry.”

After that, Dariša learned to fear the night—not because he found the darkness itself terrifying, or because he was afraid of being carried off by something supernatural and ugly, but because he realized suddenly the extent of his own helplessness. Death, winged and quiet, was already in the house with him. It hovered in the spaces between people and things, between his bed and the lamp, between his room and Magdalena’s—always there, drifting between rooms, especially when his mind was temporarily elsewhere, especially when he was asleep. He decided that his dealings with Death had to be preemptive. He developed a habit of sleeping for two hours, while it was still light out, and then waking to wander the house, to creep into Magdalena’s room, his breath withering in front of him, and to stand with his hand on her stomach, as if she were a baby, waiting for the movement of her ribs. Sometimes he would sit in the room with her all night, but most often he would leave her door open and go through the rest of the house, room by room, looking for Death, trying to flush him from his hiding places. He looked in the hall cupboards and the china cabinets, the armoires where boxes of old newspapers and diagrams were kept. He looked in his father’s room, always empty, in the wardrobe where his father kept his old military uniform, under the beds, behind bathroom doors. Back and forth he went through the house, latching and unlatching windows with useless determination, expecting, at any moment, to look inside the oven and find Death squatting in it—a man, just a man, a patient-looking winged man with the unmoving eyes of a thief.

Dariša planned to say: “I’ve found you, now get out.” He had planned no course of action in the event of Death’s refusal.

Dariša had been doing this for several months when the Winter Palace of Emin Pasha opened its doors. For years, the fate of the pasha’s winter residence had been a subject of some debate among the City’s officials. As a relic of the City’s Ottoman history, it had been unused for years. Unable to use it for himself, unwilling to rid the City of it entirely, the magistrate from Vienna called it a museum, and turned it over that year to the enjoyment of royal subjects who were already patrons of the arts, people who were regulars at places like the National Opera, the Royal Library, the King’s Gardens.

WONDER AND MAJESTY
, said a red-and-gold placard on every lamppost in Dariša’s neighborhood.
A DAZZLING LOOK INTO THE HEATHEN WORLD
.

The upper floor of the palace was a cigar club for gentlemen, with a card room and bar and library, and an equestrian museum with mounted horses from the pasha’s cavalry, chargers with gilded bridles and the jangling processional saddles of the empire, creaking carriages with polished wheels, rows and rows of pennants bearing the empire’s crescent and star. Downstairs, there was a courtyard garden with arbors of jasmine and palm, a cushioned arcade for outdoor reading, and a pond where a rare white frog was said to live in a skull that had been wedged under the lily pads by some assassin seeking to conceal the identity of his now-headless victim. There were portraiture halls with ornate hangings and brass lamps, court tapestries depicting feasts and battles, a small library annex where the young ladies could read, and a tearoom where the pasha’s china and cookbooks and coffee cups were on display.

Magdalena seized the opportunity to take her little brother there right away. She was sixteen, aware of the full extent of her illness, and increasingly tortured by the fact that she had never been anywhere, and that she was to blame for Dariša’s isolation (about which he did not complain) and Dariša’s endless nighttime patrolling (which he would not give up). She had read in the newspaper that the palace contained something called the Pasha’s Hall of Mirrors, and she took him there because she wanted Dariša to know something of the world outside their thoroughfare and their park and the four walls of their house.

To enter the Pasha’s Hall of Mirrors, you had to cross the garden and go down a small staircase to a landing that looked like the threshold of a tomb. A rearing dragon was carved on the tympanum, and a gypsy with a lion cub sat on a small box and threatened to curse your way if you did not pay for guidance. This was mostly for the benefit of children, because both the gypsy and the lion cub were on the payroll of the museum. You would put a grosh in the gypsy’s hat, and she would say “Beware of yourself” and then shove you inside and slam the door. Wary of Magdalena’s condition, the family’s doctor had advised her against going inside, so Dariša went alone.