The Tiger's Wife

In this chapter, Natalia narrates the bombing in the city, during a different phase of the same war that ended in a cease-fire when she was seventeen. She is now22 and an intern. The city shuts down at first, but then the citizens begin to fight and resist their fear, guarding the zoo and other landmarks during the bombing raids, forming human shields and standing witness to the destruction. Natalia stands vigil at the zoo on her nights off. The grandfather refuses to acknowledge what is happening and does not change his routine.

One night, the grandfather agrees to go with Natalia to the zoo, standing guard with her. The bombing begins, and the grandfather tells Natalia the last installment of the deathless man story. Natalia realizes later that her grandfather was already ill with the cancer that eventually kills him.

The grandfather is called out to treat wounded soldiers, thirteen years before, as the war is just beginning. The general tells him they are going to bomb and invade Sarobor—a Muslim city—the next morning. Sarobor is where his wife, Natalia’s grandmother, was born. Natalia’s grandmother is Muslim, while the grandfather was raised Orthodox Christian. Of course, none of that matters to the grandfather.

The grandfather walks to Sarobor; he wants to see it again once more before it is destroyed. The city is deserted; everyone knows what is coming. He reveals that he and Natalia’s grandmother lived in Sarobor until Natalia’s mother was six years old. They honeymooned in Sarobor, and the grandfather walks to the hotel where they stayed on their honeymoon. He goes to the restaurant inside the hotel.

Gavran Gailé is in the restaurant. The grandfather and Gavran eat a meal together. Throughout the meal, the grandfather is convinced that the deathless man has come for him. Gavran has come for the waiter instead. When the grandfather chastises Gavran for not warning the waiter so he can go home and be with his family, Gavran explains that he will not warn the waiter, because the waiter will die in “suddenness” without suffering or knowing what will happen (300). When Gavran presses him for reasons why he risks his life to be there, the grandfather reveals that his happiest memories are all here in Sarobor, with his wife and daughter. He wants the chance to say goodbye to the city that gave him so much happiness.

At the end of the chapter, Natalia reveals that the zoo was forced to euthanize the tiger, because he would not stop eating his own legs, even after the bombing stopped. The zoo keepers had to take the cubs away from the tiger’s mate the next spring, because she killed one of her cubs. The tiger’s cubs were taken home by the zoo employees, to be raised amongst their children and pets. 

Marko Parović discovers the bloody bear pelt worn by Dariša the Bear early the next morning. He returns to the village to tell everyone what he has found. In his retelling to Natalia, sixty years later, Dariša the Bear fights the tiger after transforming into a bear. They battle, and Dariša is killed.

The villagers panic and begin to lose all common sense. They believe that somehow the tiger’s wife, through her demonic magic, is responsible for Dariša’s death. Though the boy is perhaps too young to understand what has happened to Dariša, he is terrified and feels responsible.

The apothecary’s story appears next. Karim Suleimanović, an orphan, lives in a monastery that is razed to the ground when he is ten years old by an Ottoman Captain and his troops, and he is the only survivor. His name, a Muslim name, saves his life. He is rescued by a marauding band of hajduks and stays with them until he is eighteen. Next, he falls in with a blind itinerant fortuneteller, Blind Orlo. He learns that he has talent as a healer, and he teaches himself how to treat illnesses. Always searching for inclusion and stability, he eventually finds himself in Galina, and he stays. He is extremely ugly, but because of his calm and authoritative manner, people trust him.

The grandfather asks the apothecary to help the tiger’s wife. He mixes up a potion for her and goes to her house. The manner in which he bows to her tells her he is a fellow Muslim; he hasn’t told anyone his secret in over 40 years. This gesture does not make her trust him, however. She remembers that the apothecary treated her after Luka nearly beat her to death. Instead of helping her, he left her with to Luka. She hisses at him like a tiger. The Apothecary gives the grandfather the potion, and the grandfather gets her to drink it. She dies. The potion contained poison.

The German’s arrive later that winter. They hang the apothecary as an example, because they are purging the villages of all educated or authoritative people who might fight against them. He seems resigned to his fate; all the village turns out to see him hanged, hating him. The grandfather despises the village, and he begs his grandmother to leave. After the war, she promises him they will. They do leave the village after the war is over, and the grandfather never returns.

Natalia follows the figure and becomes convinced that she is following the deathless man. She trails him to a deserted house. It is Barba Ivan. He is the mora; he has been retrieving the items left by the villagers to help his grieving wife. She had lost all faith after the death of their son, Arlo, and he began only to help her overcome her grief. Now, he cannot stop taking the items left by the villagers. He cannot disappoint their newly-revived faith, even though it is false.

Natalia returns the bag of her grandfather’s belongs to her grandmother, but she tells the reader that she first opens the bag with Barba Ivan, “absolved by a room which, for the rest of the world, did not exist” (334). The grandfather’s copy of The Jungle Book is missing from the bag, and it is never found.

Natalia imagines that the deathless man possesses her grandfather’s book, “[T]o me, this means that my grandfather did not die as he once told me men die—in fear—but in hope, like a child: knowing that he would meet the deathless man, certain that he would pay his debt” (335). The grandfather left Natalia a page torn from The Jungle Book with a child’s drawing of a tiger, a few tiger hairs, and the word “Galina.”

She goes to Galina to find the story that he never told her: the tiger’s wife. The tiger, the grandfather’s tiger, is never found nor killed. Natalia imagines him still alive on the mountain, calling for his wife.