I was trying to remember—as though I needed that kind of thought at the time—the particulars of those stories about mountain spirits, the ones that lived in fields and woodlands and existed for the sole pleasure of misleading idiot travelers. My grandma had once told me about some man from Sarobor who had gone up into the hills after his sheep and found himself eating with a house full of the dead, to which he had found his way by following a little girl with a white bonnet who turned out not to be a little girl at all, but something malicious and impossible to forget, something that changed him, preoccupied him until his own death.
Ahead of me, the streambed dipped down into a steep incline and beat a wavering trail into the valley below. There were a few final houses clustered around that bend in the road before the wilderness grew up again in clumps, and among them, coming down the trail sideways so I wouldn’t slip, I saw a very small stone house with a raised threshold and a low, low green door, the only door that still hung in its frame in the entire empty village, and between the door and the ground I could see light.
On any other night, I would have turned and gone back the way I had come. But on any other night, I wouldn’t have come at all. The man I was following, I said to myself, had gone into this house, unless he was already standing directly behind me, unless he had been watching me since I had come into the village. That thought alone was enough to make me climb the cracked stone staircase. It took me a little longer to open the door, but in the end I did open it, and I did go inside.
You’re Gavran Gailé, I was going to say. And then whatever happened next would happen.
“Hello, Doctor.”
“It’s you.”
“Of course. Come in, Doctor. Come in. What are you doing here? Come—shut the door. Take a seat, Doctor. This is a very bad business. You could have been hurt, gotten lost. I didn’t realize you were following me.”
“I saw you in the vineyard.”
“Well, now, I didn’t notice. I didn’t realize—I would have stopped and made you turn around. Come to the fire. Come sit, I’ll make room.”
“That’s all right, I’ll stand.”
“You must be tired. Please, sit down—here, sit just here. I’ll move these aside. I’ve meant to get the place ordered, but there’s never time. It’s always so late. Come sit down. Don’t mind the flowers, just push them all this way, and sit down.”
“I don’t want to intrude.”
“You can move the flowers closer, Doctor, closer to the fire. The fire dries them faster.”
“I’m sorry.”
“The faster they dry, the less they smell. As you see, I do not throw them away. Are you cold, Doctor?”
“I should go back.”
“That is out of the question. You must wait. We must finish here.”
“I’ve made a mistake.”
“But it is all right now, and will be. You are here, and safe. We’ll walk back together. Come—put these coins in the barrel for me.”
“My God. How much is this?”
“There was more, before.”
“I don’t even recognize some of this currency.”
“Some of it is from before the war. Some of it is even older.”
“What’s this?”
“That’s Roman bronze—the hills are full of coins like that. It may not mean much to you, but it’s still payment for the dead.”
“What will you do with it all?”
“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 Zóra, 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.”
&nbs
p; 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.
The few doctors who might have chuckled over the book my grandfather always carried in his pocket would probably guess that it had been lost, or stolen at Zdrevkov, misplaced somewhere on a dying man’s journey. But the book is gone—not lost, not stolen, gone—and to me this means that my grandfather did not die as he had once told me men die—in fear—but in hope, like a child: knowing he would meet the deathless man again, certain he would pay his debt. Knowing, above all, that I would come looking, and find what he had left for me, all that remained of The Jungle Book in the pocket of his doctor’s coat, that folded-up, yellowed page torn from the back of the book, with a bristle of thick, coarse hairs clenched inside. Galina, says my grandfather’s handwriting, above and below a child’s drawing of the tiger, who is curved like the blade of a scimitar across the page. Galina, it says, and that is how I know how to find him again, in Galina, in the story he hadn’t told me but perhaps wished he had.
_____
Eventually, I will know enough to tell myself the story of my grandfather’s childhood. But I will not explain what happened between the tiger and his wife. I think it’s probably possible to explain it. It would be simple enough to reason away the tiger’s attachment: he was only half-wild, and in his partial tameness he missed, without being able to articulate it, the companionship and predictability of life at the citadel. However expertly he learned to fend for himself, his life as a tiger had been tainted since birth—maybe that great, deadly Shere Khan light my grandfather believed in had already been extinguished. He had been dulled at the edges by circumstances, and it was simply easier for him to succumb to being hand-fed. It’s possible to reduce the tiger’s attachment to some predictable accident of nature, to make him as mysterious as a bear rummaging through a pile of overturned trash cans—but that is not my grandfather’s tiger; that is not the tiger on whose account my grandfather carried The Jungle Book in his pocket every day for the rest of his life, the tiger my grandfather kept at his side during the war, and the long years he and Mother Vera struggled in the City, and during his studies; the tiger who was with him when he met my grandma, and taught at the University, and met the deathless man; the tiger he carried with him to Zdrevkov.
One could also say that the girl was young, and foolish, and for a time, incredibly, incredibly lucky. That it was her great fortune, despite the odds against her, to encounter a tiger who was not all tiger, to see him face-to-face when she saw him first, to somehow carry the same scent as an old keeper of his, to awaken some lost memory. But that, too, would be oversimplifying it.
Maybe it’s enough to say he enjoyed the sensation of her hand between his eyes. She liked the way his flank smelled when she curled up against it to sleep.
_____
In the end, I cannot tell you who or what she was. I cannot even say for certain what happened to Luka, though I tend to side with those in Galina who say that he awoke, after leaving the girl tied in the smokehouse for the tiger, to find her kneeling at the foot of his bed, her wrists skinned raw, holding the blacksmith’s gun against his mouth.
If the situation had been different—if the people of Galina had been more aware of their own ephemeral isolation, more conscious that it was only a matter of time before war tightened around them—their regard for the tiger and his wife might have been more cursory. Isn’t it strange, they might have said, here is a kind of love story, and then moved on to some other point of gossip. But they attached their anxious grief to the girl so they could avoid looking past her to what was coming. After her death, their time with her became the unifying memory that carried them into the spring, through the arrival of the Germans with their trucks, and later their railroad, which the villagers were made to build; and finally the train, the rattle and cough of the tracks that pulled them awake at night (every time they thought don’t stop here, don’t stop), and even further than that.
When you ask the people of Galina today: “Why don’t you let your children out after dark?” their answers are vague and uncomfortable. They say, what’s the point of being out after dark? You can’t see anything—there is nothing but trouble. Why would we let them hang around at the corners, smoking cigarettes, playing dice, when there’s work to do in the morning? But the truth is, whether they think about him or not, the tiger is always there, in their movements, in their speech, in the preventive gestures that have become a part of their everyday lives. He is there when the red deer scatter down the mountainside, and the whole valley smells of fear; he is there when they find the carcasses of the stags split open and devoured, red ribs standing clear of the skins, and they refuse to talk to one another about it. They are aware, all the time, that the tiger has never been found, that he has never been killed. Men don’t go to cut timber alone; there is a strong stipulation against virgins crossing the pasture on a full-moon night, even though no one is really sure of the consequences.
The tiger has died up there, they reason to themselves, starving on its own loneliness, on walking the ridge, on waiting for her. He has shriveled, rumpled up like skin, lain down somewhere, watching the crows wait on him to die. Still, most summers, young boys take the sheep up to the ridge, hoping the sound of their bells might lure the tiger out of hiding. When they get to a clearing, someplace that looks like it might be what they’re looking for, they cover their ears with the palms of their hands and call for him, trying to make a noise that sounds more like an animal than a human voice, but the sound that comes out of them sounds like itself, and nothing else.
There is, however, and always has been, a place on Galina where the trees are thin, a wide space where the saplings have twisted away and light falls broken and dappled on the snow. There is a cave here, a large flat slab of stone where the sun is always cast. My grandfather’s tiger lives there, in a glade where the winter does not go away. He is the hunter of stag and boar, a fighter of bears, a great source of confusion for the lynx, a rapt admirer of the colors of birds. He has forgotten the citadel, the nights of fire, his long and difficult journey to the mountain. Everything lies dead in his memory, except for the tiger’s wife,
for whom, on certain nights, he goes calling, making that tight note that falls and falls. The sound is lonely, and low, and no one hears it anymore.
I am forever indebted to:
my parents, Maja and Jovan, whose faith is boundless and unfaltering; my baby brother, Alex, the best illustrator ever; my grandmother, Zahida, who is a rock.
Dr. Maša Kovacević—my traveling companion, diapers to dentures—whose tolerance of late-night phone calls was indispensable to the completion of this book, and whose wit and wisdom have reconnected me to my roots.
Alexi Zentner, who is a force of nature in every life he touches. We’ve traveled so far, we two.
Parini Shroff, for giving me the birthday present that set me back on the right path again, and whose love keeps lifting me higher.
my teachers: Patty Seyburn, whose faith kept me going; Alison Lurie, for her kindness; Stephanie Vaughn and Michael Koch, for their generosity; J. Robert Lennon, for his enthusiasm.
Ernesto Quiñonez, for insisting that it was “not a question of if, but when,” and for seizures of laughter, and for Cosmos.
my agent, Seth Fishman, for taking a chance on me, and for having all the answers, and for being my friend.
my editor, Noah Eaker, whose voice has been the guiding light for the past two years, and who puts up with my belief that just five more minutes will make a difference; Arzu Tahsin, who is amazing; Susan Kamil and Jynne Martin, for making me feel at home at Random House.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Deborah Treisman, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, and C. Michael Curtis, whose support and kindness continue to overwhelm me; Judy Barringer and everyone at the Constance Salton-stall Foundation for the Arts.