The Tiger's Wife (5 page)

“Maybe we should refrigerate them,” somebody said.

But M. Dobravka was a woman possessed. She was determined to make something of the risk she’d taken, to show us how the lungs worked, to open them up like cloth and point out the alveoli, the collapsed air sacs, the thick white cartilage of the bronchial tubes. She sawed away at a corner of the lung, and, as she went on, her range of motion got bigger and bigger, until we all stepped back and watched her tearing into the side of the lung, her glasses going up and down, up and down as she pressed with one arm and pumped away with the other like she was working a cistern.

Then the lung slipped out of her hands and slid across the aluminum foil and over the edge of the table, onto the ground. It lay there, heavy and definite. M. Dobravka looked down at it for a few moments, while the flies immediately found it and began to walk gingerly along the tracheal opening. Then she bent down, picked it up, and dropped it back on the newspaper.

“You,” she said to me, because I happened to be standing next to her. “Get a straw out of the coffee cabinet and come back here and inflate this lung. Come on, hurry up.”

After that, M. Dobravka was a figure of reverence, particularly for me. Those lungs—the way she’d smuggled them in for us, the way she’d stood over us while we took turns blowing into them, one by one—cemented my interest in becoming a doctor.

M. Dobrovka had also touched upon our relationship to contraband, an obsession that was already beginning to seize the whole City. For her, it was school supplies. For us, it was the same guiding principle, but a different material concern. Suddenly, because we couldn’t have them, because they were expensive and difficult to obtain, we wanted things we had never thought of wanting, things that would give us bragging rights: fake designer handbags, Chinese jewelry, American cigarettes, Italian perfume. Zóra started wearing her mother’s lipstick, and then began looking for ways to buy some herself. Six months into the war, she developed a taste for French cigarettes, and refused to smoke anything else. All of fifteen, she would sit at the table in our coffeehouse on the Square of the Revolution and raise her eyebrow at boys who had probably gone to considerable lengths to impress her with local varieties. At a party I don’t remember attending, she took up with Branko, who was twenty-one and reputed to be a gunrunner. I didn’t approve, but there was a war on. Besides, he later turned out to be a punk whose mightiest offense was stealing radios.

Most weekends, Zóra and I would go down to the bottom of Old Town and park at the dock. This was the University hangout, the epicenter of contraband activity, and the boys, gangly and bird-shouldered, sat along the railing with their tables and boxes lined up, videos and sunglasses and T-shirts on display. Zóra, wearing her shortest skirt, pursued by colorful catcalls, would make her way down to where Branko had his stand and sit cross-legged while he played accordion and drank beer and, as the evening deepened, took breaks from peddling his wares to feel her up behind the dumpster. In the meantime, I stayed in the car with the windows rolled down, legs crossed through the passenger window, the bass line of Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” humming in my lower back.

This was how Ori found me—Ori, who sold fake designer labels he swore he could seamlessly attach to your clothing, luggage, haberdashery. He was seventeen, skinny and shy-grinning, another guy whose wartime reputation made him considerably more appealing than he otherwise might have been, but he had the temerity to stick his head into the car and ask, regarding my music selection, “You like this stuff? You want more?”

Ori had struck upon my only vice, which I had barely managed to keep in check. The Administration had shut down all but two radio stations, and insisted on repeat airings of folk songs that were outdated even by my grandma’s standards. By the second year of war, I was sick of love songs that used trees and barrels as metaphors. Without knowing I was missing them, I wanted Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and Johnny Cash. The first time Ori got me out of the car, he led me across the dock to where his three-legged mutt was guarding an overturned crate, and showed me his stash, alphabetized, the lyrics mistranslated and handwritten on notepaper that had been carefully folded and stuffed into the tape boxes. By some miracle, he had a Walkman, which almost made him worth dating in and of itself, and we sat on the floor behind his table, one earbud each, and he took me through his collection and put his hand on my thigh.

When, after a few weeks of saving up, I tried to buy
Graceland
, he said, “There’s a war on, your money’s no good,” and kissed me. I remember being surprised at his mouth, at the difference between the dry outer part of his mouth and the wet inner part, and thinking about this while he was kissing me, and afterward, too.

We went on kissing for three more months, during which my musical holdings must have tripled, and then Ori, like many boys around that age, disappeared. I had borrowed his Walkman and showed up three nights running to our café so I could return it to him—eventually someone told me he was gone, and they didn’t know if he had enlisted or fled the draft. I kept the Walkman, slept with it, which must have been some expression of missing him, but the reality of his being gone wouldn’t sink in until other things went missing.

The years I spent immersing myself in the mild lawlessness of the war my grandfather spent believing it would end soon, pretending that nothing had changed. I now know that the loss of the tigers was a considerable blow to him, but I wonder whether his optimism didn’t have as much to do with my behavior, with his refusal to accept that, for a while at least, he had lost me. We saw very little of each other, and while we did not talk about those years afterward, I know that his other rituals went on uninterrupted, unaltered. Breakfast over a newspaper, followed by Turkish coffee brewed by my grandma; personal correspondence, always in alphabetical order, as dictated by his address book. A walk to the market for fresh fruit—or, as the war went on, whatever he could get, as long as he came back with something. On Mondays and Wednesdays, an afternoon lecture at the University. Lunch, followed by an afternoon nap. Some light exercise; a snack at the kitchen table, almost always sunflower seeds. Then a few hours in the living room with my mother and grandma, sometimes talking, sometimes just sitting together. Dinner, and then an hour of reading. Bed.

We interacted, but always without commiserating, always without acknowledging that things were different. Like the time he forced me to stay home for the family Christmas party, and I drank Cognac all night because I knew he would not reprimand me in front of the guests. Or the time I came home at four—eyeliner smeared and hair a mess following a prolonged encounter with Ori behind a broken vending machine—to find my grandfather on the curb outside our building, on his way back from an emergency house call, politely trying to fend off the advances of a leggy blonde I soon realized was a prostitute.

“You see, there is my granddaughter,” I heard him say as I approached, his voice the voice of a drowning man. Relief tightened the skin around his temples, a reaction I never would have hoped for considering the circumstances of my return. I stepped onto the curb beside him, and he grabbed my arm. “Here she is,” he said cheerfully. “You see, here she is.”

“Beat it,” I said to the hooker, acutely aware of the fact that my bra was hanging on for dear life, down to one solitary clasp that might give at any moment and render the whole situation even more uncomfortable.

My grandfather gave the prostitute fifty dinars, and I stood behind him while he unlocked the downstairs door, watching her go down the street on cane-thin legs, one heel slightly shorter than the other.

“What did you give her that money for?” I asked him as we went upstairs.

“You shouldn’t be rude like that to anyone,” he said. “We didn’t raise you that way.” Without stopping to look at me when we got to the door: “For shame.”

This had been the general state of affairs for years. My grandfather and I, without acknowledging it, were at a stalemate. His reductions had dropped my allowance to a new low, and I had taken to locking my door and smoking cigarettes in my room, under the covers.

I was thus occupied one spring afternoon when the doorbell rang. A few moments later, it rang again, and then again. I think I probably shouted for someone to get the door, and when no one did, I put my cigarette out on the outer sill of my bedroom window and did it myself.

I remember the shape of the narrow-brimmed black hat that obscured most of the peephole, and I did not see the man’s face, but I was anxious to get back to my room and irritated that no one else in the house had answered.

When I opened the door, the man said that he was there to see the doctor. He had a thin voice, and a doughy face that looked like it had been forcibly stuffed up into his hat, which was probably why he had not removed it in greeting in the first place. I thought I’d seen him before, that he was a hospital official, maybe, and I showed him in and left him in the hall. My mother was on campus, preparing for class; my grandparents sharing a late lunch in the kitchen. My grandfather was eating with one hand, and with the other he held my grandma’s wrist across the table. She was smiling about something, and the moment I came in she pointed at the pot of stuffed peppers on the stove.

“Eat something,” she said.

“Later,” I said. “There’s a man at the door for you,” I said to my grandfather.

“Who the hell is it?” my grandfather said.

“I don’t know,” I told him.

A few more spoonfuls of stuffed pepper while my grandfather thought it over. “Well, what does he think this is? Tell him to wait. I’m eating with my wife.” My grandma handed him the bread.

I showed the hat into the living room, and he sat there for what must have been twenty minutes, looking around. So that no one could accuse me of being inhospitable, I went to get him some water, but when I came back I saw that he had taken a notebook out of his briefcase, and was squinting up at the paintings on our walls, scribbling down some sort of inventory. His eye went over my grandparents’ wedding pictures, my grandma’s old coffee set, the vintage bottles behind the glass door of the liquor cabinet.

He was writing and writing, and I realized what a serious mistake I had made letting him into the house. I was terrified, and then when he took two gulps of water and peered into the glass to see if it was clean all my fear turned into a wash of rage. I went into my room to put my Paul Simon tape in my Walkman and returned to the living room with my headset on, pretending to dust. I had the Walkman clipped to my pocket so he could see it, the angry wheels of my contraband spinning through the plastic window, and he sat there blinking at me while I ran a moist towel over the television and the coffee table and the pictures from my grandparents’ wedding. I thought I was somehow sticking it to him, but he was unfazed by all this, and continued to write in his notebook until my grandfather came out of the kitchen.

“Can I help you?” he said, and the hat got up and shook his hand.

The hat said good afternoon, and that he was there on behalf of the enlistment office. He showed my grandfather his card. I turned down the headset volume and started dusting books one by one.

“Well?” my grandfather said. He did not ask the hat to sit back down.

“I am here to confirm your birth date and your record of service in the army,” the hat said. “On behalf of the enlistment office.” My grandfather stood across the coffee table with his arms folded, looking the hat up and down. “This is standard procedure, Doctor.”

“Then proceed.”

The hat put on a pair of glasses and opened the ledger to the page on which he had been scribbling. He ran a large, white finger down the page, and without looking up, he asked my grandfather: “It is true you were born in 1932?”

My grandfather nodded once.

“Where?”

“In Galina.”

“And where is that?” I didn’t know myself.

“Some four hundred miles northwest of here, I suppose.”

“Brothers or sisters?”

“None.”

“You served in the National Army from ’47 to ’56?”

“That is correct.”

“And why did you leave?”

“To work at the University.”

The hat made a note, and looked up at my grandfather and smiled. My grandfather did not return the expression, and the hat’s grin deflated.

“Children?” the hat said.

“One daughter.”

“Where does she live?”

“Here.”

“Grandchildren?”

“One granddaughter.”

“Are there any young men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five living in the house, or who have cited this house as a residence?”

“None,” my grandfather said.

“Where is your son-in-law?”

My grandfather’s mouth moved as he ran his tongue over a tooth. “There are no other men living here.”

“And—I’m sorry, Doctor, standard procedure—your wife?”

“What about her?”

“Was she born in Galina, too?”

“Why, are you hoping to draft her?”

The hat didn’t reply. He appeared to be going down the page, counting something.

“Your wife’s full name, please, Doctor?”

“Mrs. Doctor,” my grandfather said. He said this in a way that made the hat look up from his notebook.

“Like I said, Doctor, this is standard procedure for the enlistment office.”

“I don’t believe you, and I don’t like your questions. You’re sucking around for something, and you may as well ask me directly so we can get to the point.”

“Where was your wife born?”

“In Sarobor.”

“I see,” the hat said. I had stopped dusting, and was standing there with the moist towel in my hand, looking from my grandfather to the hat. I could imagine my grandma sitting on the other side of the door, in the kitchen, listening to all this. We had heard about this kind of thing happening; I had let it into the house.

“And your wife’s family lives—?”

“My wife’s family lives in this house.”

“Is your wife in touch with anyone in Sarobor?”