The Tiger's Wife

“Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.” 

The first time this saying appears, the Ivans’ parrot says it. Soon, Natalia learns that this phrase relates to the diggers, who are searching for the body of a family member buried in the vineyard during the war. Duré believes that his family is sick because he buried his cousin’s body instead of bringing it home. The restless spirit curses his family. A soothsayer he hired to help him remove the curse gave him this advice.

“Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life—of my grandfather’s days in the army; his grate love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.”

Natalia begins retelling her grandfather’s life. In speaking his truth, she processes and comes to accept the shock and pain of his death. Through understanding his stories, Natalia reunites with her grandfather once more.

“‛[C]ome on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?’”

Natalia’s grandfather chastises her for not keeping up with him during their weekly walk to the citadel to see the tigers. His constant stream of colorful sayings help keep her memory of her grandfather alive. Such sayings are an insight into his character. He is always teaching and guiding Natalia, even when he’s teasing her for not being stronger.

“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.”

During the war, school supplies, such as fetal pigs for dissection, are impossible to obtain. M. Dobravka, a caring and brave teacher finds a way to teach around the war. Though the bombing has not yet reached the city, daily life has become anything but normal. Natalia here also shows an intellectual interest that reveals her to be like her grandfather.

“‛You have to think carefully about where you tell [your story], and to whom. Who deserves to hear it? Your grandma? Zóra? Certainly not that clown you carry on with at the docks.’” 

Natalia’s grandfather teaches her the power of stories to create or withhold intimacy depending on to whom she tells her best, most personal stories.

“[T]he apothecary—tooth puller, dream interpreter, measurer of medicine, keeper of the magnificent scarlet ibis—was the reliable magician, the only kind of magician my grandfather could ever admire” 

Natalia retraces her grandfather’s early influences. The apothecary was the doctor for the village. A somewhat exotic, interesting, scientific and learned man, the grandfather is drawn to the order and safety of the apothecary and his shop. This quotation demonstrates that even as a child, Natalia’s grandfather yearned for scientific knowledge.

“…I knew immediately that it was the deathless man, and not me, my grandfather had come looking for. And I wondered how much of our hiding his illness had been intended to afford my grandfather the secrecy he would need to go looking for him.”

Natalia is drawn into a world where the deathless man is real, not just a folktale. Unable to think clearly because of her grief and the strangeness of her surroundings, she entertains ideas that she would dismiss or scoff at in the city.

“We were seventeen, furious at everything because we didn’t know what else to do with the fact that the war was over.” 

Natalia describes the feelings of her generation when the war that has overshadowed their childhood is suddenly over. The postwar generation, accused of laxness and laziness, must now fight to make something of their lives in a divided landscape of uneasy peace. The desire to prove something encourages Natalia to give back and make something of her life. She decides to become a doctor, specializing in pediatric surgery.

“’When men die, they die in fear,’ he said. ‘They take everything they need from you, and as a doctor it is your job to give it, to comfort them, to hold their hand. But children die how they have been living—in hope. They don’t know what’s happening, so they expect nothing, they don’t ask you to hold their hand—but you end up needing them to hold yours.’” 

When Natalia tells her grandfather she’s decided to specialize in pediatric surgery, he explains a significant difference between adults and children. His specialization was surgery. He wants Natalia to know what she’ll be facing in life—both as a doctor and as an adult woman.

“’The dead are celebrated. The dead are loved. They give something to the living. Once you put something into the ground, Doctor, you always know where to find it.’” 

The grandfather meets the deathless man a second time, at the waters where some believe the Virgin Mary once. They are arguing about whether death is a punishment or not. The grandfather believes that it is; Gavran says that it is not. As with many of the ideas in this novel, there is more than one way to interpret or to see events. This statement also foreshadows Duré’s finding the body in the vineyard.

“’Fifty strings sing one song, but this one string knows a thousand stories.”

Luka says this to Amana when they meet. It is the beginning of their friendship. This saying exemplifies Luka’s intelligence, quick wit and way with words, as demonstrated in the many songs he writes. Luka’s sensitivity, intellectual interests, and musicianship contrast horribly with how he treats Amana’s sister, his wife.

“He wondered why it never occurred to anyone to know other things—to know, as he knew, that the tiger meant them no harm, and that what went on in that house had nothing to do with Luka, or the village, or the baby: nightfall, hours of silence, and then, quiet as a river, the tiger coming down from the hills, dragging with him that sour, heavy smell, snow dewing on his ears and back.”

The grandfather, at age nine, muses about the propensity of the villagers to lie and to say they have seen things that they couldn’t possibly have seen, instead of observing what is really happening. The tiger comes down to visit the tiger’s wife, but not because he is a devil. 

“Death had size and color and shape, texture and grace. There was something concrete to it. In that room, Death had come and gone, swept by, and left behind a mirage of life—it was possible, he realized, to find life in Death.” 

Dariša the Bear explains how he believes taxidermy defeats death. As a young boy, burdened by the responsibility of keeping his sister alive and caring for her, he finds comfort in the idea that death cannot erase the living completely.

“‛We are all entitled to our superstitions.’”

Fra Antun leaves Natalia at the crossroads, waiting for the mora.

“To me, the persistence of my grandfather's rituals meant that he was unchanged, running on discipline and continuance and stoicism. I didn't notice, and didn't realize, that the rituals themselves were changing, that there was a difference between the rituals of comfort and the preventive rituals that come at the end of life.”

Natalia reminisces upon her grandfather’s response to the continuation of war; he keeps all of his routine the same. Looking back, she can see that he was ill and beginning to decline, but at the time she assumed that he was just the same. She assumes that he will always be a presence in her life.

“The story in the newspaper focused on the tiger, and only on the tiger, because, despite everything, there was still some hope for him. It said nothing about how the lioness aborted and the wolves turned and ate their cubs, one by one, while the cubs howled in agony and tried to run. It said nothing about the owls, splitting open their unhatched eggs and pulling the runny red yolk, bird-formed and nearly ready, out of the center. . . . Instead, they said that the tiger had begun to eat his own legs, first one and then the other, systematically, flesh to bone.”

Natalia describes the zoo animals’ reactions to the bombing of the City. Driven mad, the animals respond by killing their young or each other. It is significant that the tiger’s self-cannibalism is considered a lesser evil.

“All through the war, my grandfather had been living in hope. . . .But now, in the country’s last hour, it was clear to him, as it was to me, that the cease-fire had provided the delusion of normalcy, but never peace.” 

Like a child, the grandfather had optimistically assumed that normalcy would return after the war and that the two countries carved out of one would find a way to move forward. This quotation echoes the grandfather’s description of how children die, in hope, rather than how adults die, in fear. Despite what the reader knows he has seen and been through, the grandfather repeatedly chooses optimism and hope, as when he assumes that all will be restored at the summer house. His hopes are frequently disappointed, but he does not become bitter. 

“When your fight has a purpose—to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent—it has the hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling—when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event—there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it.” 

Here, Natalia describes the endlessness of the war in her country and the how hate is manufactured and passed from generation to generation.

“In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes times to put you in the ground.” 

The grandfather tells Natalia the last deathless man story; he is examining and helping wounded soldiers. The pointlessness of war overwhelms him. Foreshadowing his own death, which is now a little over a year away, he shares with Natalia what he wants. Natalia longs for her grandfather repeatedly throughout the novel; he gets his wish.

“The fish are clear-eyed and firm, but they look like something out of a circus.” 

The grandfather’s expressions are typically colorful and detailed. This description of the fish in the restaurant is representative of the way he sees the world. No absurdity is too small for him to notice. In this case, the waiter is so anxious to please that even the fish displayed for dinner seem to be putting on a performance.

“‛I have no side. I am all sides.’”

The grandfather explains to the deathless man that he is not on the “other side,” or the side of the war about to begin bombing Sarobor the next morning. The grandfather lives his life by this credo: he is born on one side but marries a woman from the other. He lives in Sarobor for many years before moving to the city, on the other side. He does not believe in the differences tearing his country apart.

“‛Suddenness,’ he says. ‘You do not prepare, you do not explain, you do not apologize. Suddenly, you go. And with you, you take all contemplation, all consideration of your own departure. All the suffering that would have come from knowing comes after you are gone, and you are not a part of it.’” 

Gavran Gailé explains the best way to die: suddenly and without warning. He claims that it is better to die without having to fear death’s arrival. The grandfather incorporates some of this philosophy into his own belief that men die in fear, while children die in hope.

“He learned that no matter how grave the secret, how imperative absolute silence, someone would always feel the urge to confess, and an unleashed secret is a terrible force.” 

As a child the Apothecary learns quickly the power of secrets. He remakes his identity to fit into the life of the village: he was born Kasim Suleimanović—a Muslim. He keeps this secret until he reveals it to the tiger’s wife. She can never tell anyone, of course, so he feels he can tell her with no repercussions. This quotation ties to one of the significant themes of the novel. Secrets run through all of the stories, including the grandfather’s.