The Tiger's Wife (20 page)

Our neighbor Slavko was standing on the porch, and when he saw us he stood up and began rubbing his hands on his pants. I couldn’t really remember him from my childhood at the lake, but my mother had often talked about him: they had grown up more or less together. Somewhere along the line, my mother had started wearing jeans and listening to Johnny Cash; this, according to Slavko and some of the other local boys, distinguished her as part of the “wild crowd,” and made her a target of prepubescent window peering. I could see that boy in the guilty look he was giving us now. His face was clean-shaven, scrubbed raw, and he had a mop of gray curls that lay flat against his forehead. This, combined with big feet and shoulders that dropped suddenly into a concave chest and potbelly, made him look unnervingly like an oversized penguin.

Slavko had brought us a few pies for dinner, and was rubbing his hands on his pants nervously, nonstop. I thought for a minute that my grandfather would overdo it and embrace him, but they shook hands, and then Slavko called me “Little Nadia” and rubbed my shoulder cautiously and I shot him a dry smile. He showed us the house. Soldiers had come through almost immediately when the war began, and taken some valuables: my great-grandmother’s china, a portrait of a distant aunt, some brass Turkish coffee cups and pots, the washing machine. For the most part, there had been no upkeep. Some of the doors had been taken down, and the countertops were covered with dust and plaster that had fallen from the ceiling, and yellow stuffing was coming out of my grandma’s living room set, which, we would soon discover, was also the nesting site of some very uncooperative moths. In the bathroom, the toilet was gone, and the little blue tiles that made up the floor had been reduced to a shattered mosaic.

“Goats,” Slavko said.

“I don’t understand,” said my grandfather.

“They needed to smash it up,” said Slavko, “so their goats wouldn’t slip on the tiles.”

As we followed Slavko through the house, I held on to the dog, and kept searching my grandfather’s face for signs of disappointment, discouragement, the slightest hint of giving up. But he was smiling, smiling on, and through my own frustration I started to feel that nagging sense of shame again, an acute awareness of my own inability to share in his optimism. My grandfather told Slavko that he hoped it hadn’t been a terrible inconvenience for him, keeping the house safe for us, and Slavko laughed nervously, and said, no, no of course it hadn’t, not for my grandfather, not for a great doctor like him, everyone in town remembered him.

When Slavko left, my grandfather turned to me and said: “It’s so much better than I expected.” We unpacked, and took a walk through the orchard. My grandma’s rose garden was dead, but oranges and figs sat fat in the trees, and my grandfather went along, kicking the soil here and there, sifting for something. Every so often, he came across an artifact that didn’t belong in the dirt: bolts, bullets, broken pieces of metal that could have been crowbars or frames. In the back of the property, we found our toilet, which someone had abandoned there, unable to reconcile carrying it up the steeper slope, and also the bones of a dead animal. They were small bones, broken, sharp as glass, and my grandfather picked up the skull and looked at it. It had horns—probably a goat—but my grandfather only turned it toward me very slowly, and said: “Not the Magnificent Fedrizzi.”

While my grandfather carried the toilet indoors, I climbed the stairs to the garage with a broom under my arm, and I swept dead vine leaves off the cracked stone. There were beer bottles and cigarette butts, probably a lot more recent than the war, and I found a few used condoms, which I forked with the end of my broom and heaved furtively over the wall into the neighbor’s yard. In the late afternoon, my grandfather and I ate our dinner on boxes on the garage balcony, cold pie greasing our hands. The lake was still and yellow, dotted with seagulls that had flown in from the coast. Every few minutes, we heard a speedboat, and, eventually, a couple on a pedal-boat went slowly by.

We were sitting like this—my grandfather telling me about repairs that had to be done, things that had to be bought in town, like an air conditioner for Grandma, and a small television, new blinds, of course, and maybe even new windows altogether, a more secure door, some tick medicine for the dog, seeds for reviving the rose garden—when the fire started on the hill. It was not Verimovo’s first fire by any means, and, we would later learn, it started like all the others: with a drunkard and a cigarette. We could see black smoke lifting in waves above the summit where the old mines stood, and then, an hour or so later, a bright snake of flame coming down the hill, throwing itself down and down on a path of dry grass and pinecones, following the wind along the mountain. Slavko came to watch it from the garage with us.

“If it blows east, we’re going to be picking china out of the ashes of our houses tomorrow morning,” he warned us. “You better keep an eye on it.”

For a while, my grandfather was certain that the wind off the lake would keep the fire contained on the upper slope, above the dangerous scrubland that would catch like a Christmas tree. He was so adamant in his belief—in what I, at the time, was convinced was his naïveté—that he sent me to bed, and stayed up by himself, sweeping the stairs and poking around the pantry, all the time going outside to look.

Around midnight, when it came as far as the ridge below the tree line, my grandfather got me out of bed—where the dog and I had been wrestling for space, following the fire’s progress through the window—and I stood in the hall, watching my grandfather put on his shoes. He told me to get our passports and get out of the house. He was going to help the men from town with the fire. This entailed walking through the fields where the fire had come down from the trees, beating the low flames with coats and shovels so the blaze couldn’t start on the gardens and the lawns and the rows of plum and lemon that people were growing for market—but I remember that, even though he knew he was going to spend the night in dirt and ash, he shined his shoes. I remember his hands, and the way they held the shining rag, the way he skimmed it back and forth over the toes of his shoes like he was playing a violin. The dog shuffled around, and my grandfather touched its nose with the shoe rag. Then he took me outside, to the back of the house, where the rear wall of the balcony met the slope of the orchard in the dead rose garden and the orange and fig trees, already reddening with the light from the hill.

“Take this,” he said, putting the garden hose in my hand and turning the faucet on. “And start watering. Keep the water on the house. Keep the walls and the windows wet, and whatever you do, don’t leave the door open. If it gets bad—Natalia—if it jumps the wall and starts on the house, you run for the lake.” Then he clapped my grandma’s long-lost saucepan—the old apple-red one from Italy, which had resurfaced that evening for the first time in ten years during his inspection of the pantry, and which he must have felt would afford me some kind of special protection—onto my head, and left. I remember the sound of his shoes on the gravel, the sound of the gate opening, the fact that it was the only time he left the gate open.

My mother always says that fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they’re gone, we’re left with the concept, but not the true memory—why else, she reasons, would anyone give birth more than once? I think I understand what she means when I look back on the night of the fire. Part of me knows that there was tremendous pain, that the heat of the blaze as it came down through the old village on the hill and Slavko’s farmland and our orange grove and ripped through the fig and almond trees, the pinecones sizzling like embers for what seemed like forever before they exploded, was unbearable; that to say that it was difficult to breathe is an impossible understatement; that the hair on my bare arms was already singed when the fire dropped down through the pines and rushed the brick wall. I know that I stood there with one side to the fire and the water trained on the walls and the doors and the shuttered windows, amazed at how quickly the stream of water evaporated, how it sometimes didn’t even touch the house. But what I really remember is a sort of projected image of myself, looking ridiculous, there in my red flip-flops and my bootleg
BORN TO RUN
tube top with the frayed hem, Grandma’s best saucepan on my head, handle akimbo, and that hysterical fat white dog under my arm, his heart hammering like a cricket against my wrist, and the stream of water from the hose hissing against the back of the house to keep the fire out.

I do, however, remember the woman from next door with complete clarity. At a certain moment in the night, I turned to find her watching me water the fire from the doorway of her house. I remember she was wearing a buttoned housedress with flowers on it, and her white hair had come out of her updo and was hanging limp with sweat around her face in the firelight. I had no idea how long she had been standing there, but I thought that maybe I recognized her, felt sure she was going to offer me help, and I must have smiled at her, because suddenly she said: “What are you smiling at, you sow?”

I went back to my watering.

Eventually, as they always do, people would find a way to extract humor even from that evening. They would laugh openly about it, make jokes about the barbecue up at Slavko’s place—the pigs and the chickens and the goats cindering down in their pens as the night wore on—and nobody would ever mention that they had five or six hours as the fire wound closer to get the animals out, to stop the screaming that would eventually rise over the deafening noise of the fire. Nobody ever mentions that, at the time, they were so absolutely certain of more war that it was easier for them to let the livestock burn where they stood than to save them, only to have our soldiers return and take it all from them again.

By morning, the fire had died, or spread elsewhere, but with the sun rising there was nowhere to get away from the heat. Indoors, the furniture was white with ash, and I turned on the fans and closed the shutters against the morning stillness that lay on the black slope above the house.

My grandfather got back a little after dawn, wheezing. He came in through the gate, closed it behind him and stepped inside. He didn’t embrace me, just put his hand on the top of my head and held it there for a long time. Ash had slid into the lines of his face, the crow’s-feet around his eyes, the contours of his mouth. He washed up and then sat at the small table in the kitchen, digging the soot out from under his fingernails, bouncing the dog on his knee, with
The Jungle Book
open on a handkerchief in front of him while I made eggs and toast and cut up slices of watermelon for breakfast.

Then he told me about the deathless man again.

  
Dabbing the gray corners of
The Jungle Book
with his handkerchief, my grandfather said:

In ’71, there’s this miracle in a village a little way from here, on the sea. Some kids are playing near a waterfall, this small white waterfall that feeds a deep hole at the bottom of some cliffs, and one day, while they’re playing like that, they see the Virgin in the water. The Virgin’s just standing there, her arms outspread, and the children run home and tell their parents, and suddenly they are calling the water miraculous. The children are coming to the waterfall every day to see the Virgin, and suddenly they’re renaming the local church—the Church of the Virgin of the Waters—and people are coming in from all over. They’re coming in from Spain and Italy and from Austria to see this little watering hole and sit in the church and look at the children who are sitting all day, staring into the water, and saying, “Yes, we see her—she is still there.” Pretty soon some cardinal’s coming out to bless it, and suddenly you’ve got buses coming out of nowhere, trips from hospitals and sanitariums so people can come and look at the waterfall and swim in the water and be healed. I’m talking about really sick people—I’m talking about people with cerebral palsy and faulty hearts, people with cancer. A lot of them are coming in from tuberculosis clinics. And then there’s the people who can’t even walk, people on their last breath being carried in on stretchers. There’s people who’ve been sick for years, and no one can say what’s wrong with them. And that Church of the Waters is handing out blankets, and they’re all sitting out there, the sick people, in the gardens and in the courtyard, all the way out to the sidewalk, just waiting. The sick people, in that heat with the flies around them, with their feet in the water, their faces in the water, bottling it up to take home with them. You know me, Natalia—nothing, for me, has quite the effect of a man with no legs dragging himself down a rocky slope for penance so he can sit in a swimming hole and tell himself he is getting better.

So the University asks me to get a small team together and get down there right away. There’s risk, they’re thinking—all these people, already dying, are under constant strain. They want me to set up a care center, maybe offer some free medicine. I go out there with about twelve nurses and right away we come to understand that these Waters are a thousand miles from anywhere, and the only building on that side of the mountain is the church, and everything that happens here is happening in or around the church. There’s no hospital around, no hotels—not like there will be in twenty years. The miracle is too recent, no one has had the time to profit from it. The church provides shelter for the dying, but the only place they have to put them is the crypt. There’s this door under the altar, and you go down down down the stairs into the stone cellar of the crypt, where the dead are laid like bricks into the walls, and there you see the dying on the floor, wrapped in blankets, and the stink is enough to make you want to kill yourself, because, besides the diseases, these dying are eating what the church provides for them: they are eating apples and olives the local farmers bring from the other side of the island, and they are eating bread, and the whole place has this sour, sour smell that goes into your clothes and your hair and there is no place to get away from it.