The Tiger's Wife (25 page)

No one in town saw the miracle worker arrive; no one would have been able to recognize him in the street. It was well known that for three days and three nights, the miracle worker stood over Amana’s bed, holding her wrist, wiping her brow. It was also soon evident that this miracle worker, with one or two earnest glances, and hands that unsteadily ran the cold sponge down her neck, obliterated all of Amana’s notions of virginity and scholastic isolation, all her lifelong plans, her devotion to music and to Luka. As soon as she had begun to recover, she was sneaking out of her bedroom to meet with the physician who had saved her, just as she had snuck out to play with the guslars—except now, she was sneaking around abandoned mills and barn lofts with dots of perfume on her wrists and navel.

Relieved at the news that she had recovered, still not permitted to visit her sickbed, Luka did not suspect a thing. He did not know that when Hassan Effendi told Amana he had consented for her to be wed to Luka, she kissed her father’s hands and then went up to her bedroom to hang herself with the curtains. Luka did not know that the story might have ended there had the tiger’s wife not come in at the right moment, and found her sister sprawled out on the bed, weeping with frustration at not being able to get the curtain thin enough to wrap around her neck for the jump. He would never know that it was the tiger’s wife who held Amana’s head on her knees until she came up with a better plan; that the tiger’s wife carried Amana’s letter of desperation to the physician the following morning. The tiger’s wife was the lookout when Amana climbed down the lattice the following night; she was there, in Amana’s bedroom, to give their mother Amana’s letter of farewell the morning of the wedding.

Hassan Effendi, standing over the two remaining women in his life, found himself saying words he never would have imagined Amana putting him in a position to say: “God damn her, the whore has disgraced me.” And right then and there, with his wife weeping profusely over his decision, he took the opportunity to rid himself of the child he thought he would be saddled with forever by dressing the deaf-mute girl in her sister’s wedding clothes and putting her in Amana’s place.

And so Luka, who spent the wedding in a contemplative daze, imagining his future with Amana in the City, did not know that all his plans for his father’s fortune, all the songs he was hoping to sing, all the many freedoms he saw opening up before him, were being dashed to hell even as he was taking his vows.

He did not realize Hassan Effendi’s deceit until he lifted the veil in the ceremonial gesture of seeing his wife for the first time and found himself looking, with almost profane stupidity, into the face of a stranger. Afterward, while the men were toasting the bridegroom, all Hassan Effendi had to say was, “Even so, she’s yours, as prescribed by custom. She is the sister of your betrothed, and I’ve the right to demand that you take her. You will disgrace yourself to refuse her now.” And so Luka found himself married to a deaf-mute child of thirteen, who looked at him with big, fearful eyes, and smiled absently every so often in his direction at the feast while her mother was crying and kissing her forehead.

That night, he looked at her in her terrified nakedness, and made her face away from him while he took off his clothes, expectation hanging between them. The following day, he took her back to Galina in the wagon, a child bride for the butcher’s son. No laughter, no friendship, no hope for the future. The ride lasted five days, and on the second day he realized that, though he had probably heard it at one time or another, he had forgotten her name.

“What do they call you?” he said to her. When she did not respond, he took her hand and shook it a little. “Your name—what is your name?” But she only smiled.

To make matters worse, the house—which Luka remembered as a place teeming with loud bodies, running feet, crying children, two frying pans on the stove at all times—was silent. Luka’s father, worn by old age into a crooked-backed cripple, sat alone by a low fire. Without greeting, he looked at the new bride as she stepped over the threshold and said to his only remaining son, “Couldn’t you do any better than some bitch of Mohammed?” Luka did not have the strength to tell his father, with relish, that he had meant better, that somehow he would remedy everything once Korčul was gone.

With this distant hope growing in him again, Luka resigned himself to his temporary life. Even without Amana, he would find a plan for the gusla, for his songs, for the School of Music. In the meantime, he had only the deaf-mute girl, an old incontinent man, the ceaseless death screams of the sheep in the smokehouse, and his own rage at the unfairness of it all.

What surprised him most was how quickly he came to tolerate his wife. She had big eyes and a quiet gait, and sometimes when he looked at her he saw Amana, even called her Amana once or twice. She needed some guidance—he had to show her how to warm the stove, where the cistern was, had to take her into the village several times to show her how to do the marketing—but he realized that once she knew how something was done, she took it over herself completely, developed her own routine for doing it. She was everywhere: helping in the smokehouse, washing his clothes, changing his father’s soiled trousers. Without complaining, without uttering a syllable, she carried water from the well and walked the old man down the porch stairs every day for a breath of fresh air. Sometimes it was even pleasant to come home in the evenings, and have someone to smile at him.

Could Luka have left her there, in Galina, with the old man, once he had recovered from the initial shock of what had happened to him? Could he have taken some of his father’s money from the coffer hidden under the baseboards of the house, left for the City on his own, found someone to take Amana’s place? Almost certainly. After the first few times he followed the deaf-mute girl into town to disperse the children who would assemble behind her to make faces and shout the obscenities they had picked up from their parents at her retreating back, he realized that he had worsened matters by bringing her here, that people were beginning to talk.
Look at that girl
, people were saying,
look at the deaf-mute he’s brought home—where did he get her? What is he trying to hide?
Their attention drove him to panic, made him more determined to flee than ever; but, in doing so, it also deepened his predicament, pointed out to him the many ways he would have to uncouple his life in order to abandon it again.

Then there was the afternoon he came home to find her with Korčul in the attic: his father, in a gesture masquerading as affection, had brought out his box of war relics, and Luka came upstairs to find the deaf-mute girl sitting cross-legged with the box across her knees while the old man knelt behind her, one hand already on her breast.

“She’s a child!” Luka kept screaming after he had thrown Korčul against the wall. “She’s a child, she’s a child!”

“She’s a child!” Korčul screamed back, grinning wildly. Then he said: “If you don’t start producing sons, I will.”

He could not leave her there, he realized, because, Mohammedan or not, child bride or not, Korčul was going to rape her, if he hadn’t already—force her down while Luka was out of the house—and she would be powerless to stop him.

And so Luka stayed, and the longer he stayed the farther that burning dream seemed; the more insults Korčul flung at him, the more questions people entering the butcher’s shop asked him about his wife, the more he came to see her as the reason he was still there. In those moments, his wife’s silence terrified him. It terrified him because he knew, and knew absolutely, that she could see every thought that passed through his head. She was like an animal, he thought, as silent and begrudging as an owl. And what made it considerably worse was that, despite his belief that it was his right to think whatever he wanted—he had, after all, been cheated, and what did she want from him, this girl, when he had been unfairly crippled by fate?—he found himself wanting to explain it to her, wanting to tell her that none of it was her fault, not the silence, not the marriage, not Korčul’s advances. He wanted to explain, too, that none of it was his fault, either, but he was having a difficult enough time convincing himself.

The day things finally broke, it was high summer, incredibly hot, and Luka hadn’t been able to get away from the heat. She was scrubbing the laundry in a corner of the kitchen, and his father was snoring wetly in one of the many empty bedrooms. Luka had come in to rest for the afternoon, to wait out the worst of the day before heading back to the shop. Plums had ripened in the orchard, and he had brought three inside, was slicing them on the empty table when he turned the radio on; and then, just like that, he recognized the Monk’s nasal twang, an octave higher than it should have been, cutting through the melody of one of Luka’s own songs like some kind of terrible joke. His body seemed to fall away from him.

It was “The Enchantress,” a song he had written with and about Amana, reduced from its slow tempo, intended for the gusla, to a frenzied ode about debauchery. He half expected to wake up moments later and find that he had passed out drunk the night before—but he didn’t, he just sat and sat there on the kitchen chair while the song moved through the verses, and then it was over, and the radio had moved on to something else. His songs had moved on without him, too, moved on to the School of Music.

He looked up to see the girl standing over him, his wet shirt slung across her shoulder like skin.

“Listen,” he said to her, and touched his ear and then the radio. He ran his fingers over the top of the mahogany box. She stood there, smiling at him. In that moment, he was still himself. Then she made a gesture, something like a half shrug, and she leaned forward, took one of the plum slices from under his knife, put it under her tongue, and turned away to go outside. He was up before he knew what he was doing, pushing the table onto her, pinning her facedown under the full weight of it. The sound her body made when she struck the floor stayed in him, and he stood over her and kicked her ribs and head until blood came out of her ears.

Everything about that first time surprised him. His own inexplicable rage, the dull thud of his boot against her body, her soundless, gaping mouth and closed eyes. He realized that he had gone on hitting her far longer than he had intended, because he had been expecting her to cry out in fear or pain. He realized afterward, while he was helping her up, that his curiosity about whether she could even produce sound had just been fulfilled, and, now that it had, there was even more rage than ever: rage at himself, rage at her for looking so surprised and forlorn and subdued when he brought the water in to wash the blood off her face.

He told himself that it would never happen again. But, of course, it did. Something had opened in him, and he could not close it again. It happened the night of his father’s funeral, when it was just Luka and the girl and the house, silence everywhere. He thought,
after me, there will be no children, no one left
, and rolled on top of her. He would try, he told himself, to fuck her—he would try. But it had been months since he had managed it, and, feeling her under him, small and tense, as still as death, he couldn’t. He couldn’t even hurt her that way. Hitting her didn’t help, either—but it made him feel like he was doing something, interrupting her judgment at the very least. The injustice of it, that judgment he knew was there but couldn’t force out. He couldn’t force her to voice it, and he couldn’t force her to put it away.

Eventually, it was just the fear in her eyes when he walked in, just the way her shoulders shrank back when she was scrubbing the floor and felt his footsteps through the floorboards. The fact that she could see him that way, a side of himself that surprised him. Sometimes he would throw things at her: fruit, plates, a pot of boiling water that hit her at the waist and soaked through her clothes while she panted and her eyes rolled in terror. Once he held her against the wall with his body and slammed his forehead into her face until her blood seeped into his eyes.

People in Galina now, they give a thousand explanations for Luka’s marriage to the tiger’s wife. She was the bastard child of a notorious gambler, some say, who was forced on Luka as payment for a tremendous debt, a shameful secret that followed him back from those years he spent in Turkey. According to others, he purchased her from a thief in Istanbul, a man who sold girls at the souk, where she had stood quietly among the spice sacks and pyramids of fruit until Luka found her.

Whatever Luka’s reason, there is general agreement that the girl’s presence in his life was intended to hide something, because a deaf-mute could not reveal the truth about the assorted vices he was presumed to have during his ten-year absence: his gambling, his whoring, his predilection for men. And perhaps, in some part, that is true; perhaps he had allowed himself to think he had found someone to put between himself and the village, someone whose appearance, if not her disability, would discourage people from making contact while he secluded himself and planned a return to his dream that would never be fulfilled—she would remind them too much of the last war, their fathers’ fears, stories they’d heard of sons lost to the sultan. Never mind, the villagers thought, that he had found a wife who could never demand anything of him, never reproach him for being drunk, never beg for money.

But, in keeping her, Luka had also stumbled into an unwelcome complication. He had underestimated the power of her strangeness, the village’s potential for a fascination with her, and now people were talking more than ever. The secrecy she had been intended to afford him had turned his life into a public spectacle. He could hear them chattering now, gossiping, speculating and flat-out lying about where she’d come from and how he had found her, asking each other about the bruises on her arms, about why Luka and his wife were rarely seen in public together, why she’d yet to bear him a child—every possible answer leading only to further questions, further humiliations. It was worse than the first winter of their marriage, when he had brought her with him to church on Christmas, and the entire congregation had whispered afterward,
What does he mean by
bringing her here
? Worse even than the following Christmas, when he had not, and they said,
What does he mean by leaving her at home?