The Tiger's Wife

Natalia, a young doctor on her way to a remote village to vaccinate orphans, talks to her grandmother on a cell phone. Her grandfather died a few days ago, in another remote village. Her grandmother says that he was on his way to see Natalia. Natalia’s grandmother believes that during the 40 days after death the soul can be tempted back to visit by leaving the person’s things exactly as they were when the person died, easing the person’s transition. This period after death is called the 40 days of the soul. She is upset that they have missed the first few days of this period.

Natalia and her grandfather had hidden his advanced-stage cancer and imminent death from her grandmother. Though his body was returned home, his things have disappeared, so Natalia promises to visit the village and retrieve his belongings.

She is traveling with her best friend from childhood, Zóra, to a seaside village orphanage in a neighboring country. Zóra is also a doctor. Both women are on this trip to volunteer as doctors and escape their lives for a few days. Zóra is fleeing the decision about whether she should testify in the criminal prosecution of her boss, a powerful doctor who mistreated a patient. Natalia is fleeing the fallout of a recent suspension, for supporting a nurse’s strike, from the hospital where she works. Natalia hides her grandfather’s death from Zóra, because she does not want to go home and face his death.

The young women arrive in Brejevina and greet their hosts, Barba Ivan and his wife, Nada. They are the parents of the monk, Fra Antun, who runs the village orphanage out of a converted monastery. The Ivans welcome them with a grand meal. As they are eating, a little girl enters the house. She has a terrible cough and is clearly very ill. Her family members are digging in the Ivans’ vineyard. The Ivans do not say why they are there, but they do tell the two doctors that the children all seem to be ill. Natalia assumes that they are laborers kept there after the season’s end out of charity.

To cope with her grandfather’s death, Natalia retells the reader what she knows of his life, entwined with her memories of her grandfather’s folktale about the deathless man.

By the time Natalia is thirteen years old, she doesn’t want to go to the zoo anymore with her grandfather, but a civil war starts soon after, and the authorities close the zoo. The next few years drive her apart from her grandfather; for example, she becomes obsessed with outlawed Western music, which she gets from her boyfriend, Ori, who deals in black market bootleg music. She starts smoking and drinking. She also begins to become interested in a medical career after her teacher manages to bring lungs into class for study and dissection.

Natalia feels very guilty when she lets a government official into their apartment. Natalia, her mother, and grandparents all live together. Natalia’s grandfather becomes very upset by the official’s questions: the grandfather was born in 1932 in Galina, a village to the northwest of the city. He served in the Army from 1947 to 1956. The government official starts asking about Natalia’s grandmother, her family, and her family name. At this point, the grandfather becomes angry, kicking the official’s briefcase, scattering his documents all over the floor, and telling him to get out.

As a result of his political stance—loyalty to the unified state, rather than supporting the war and the divided state—he is forbidden to practice medicine anymore and resigns his position teaching at the University. He secretly continues to take care of his private patients, putting himself and his family at risk.

Eventually, when Natalia begins taking care of her duties at home and spending time trying to interact with her grandfather, her grandfather lets her back into his life. A late-night excursion to see an elephant walk through the city reunites them.

As they watch the elephant be led through the city by a keeper, the grandfather tells Natalia that her stories belong to her and that she must choose carefully whom to share her stories with. Then, he tells her the first story of the deathless man.

Late in the summer of 1954, the grandfather found himself traveling with another doctor to a small village to treat an epidemic. The village leader, Marek, greets them and tells them a strange tale. A man named Davo was found floating face down in a local lake. He was dead. At his funeral, he sat up in the coffin and asked for water. One of the people in the funeral procession proceeded to shoot Davo twice in the back of the head. Now that he is apparently dead again, the villagers nail Davo’s coffin shut and set the undertaker to guard the church entrance. The people believe that their illness, which involves coughing and waking up with blood on their pillows, is somehow Davo’s fault. Natalia’s grandfather knows the culprit is tuberculosis.

He asks to examine the dead man. They all go to the church, where they hear Davo, from inside his coffin, asking for water. They open the coffin and Davo sits up. They see the bullets in his head. Davo proceeds to tell them that he’s been shot before, and that he is not “permitted” to die (66), because his “uncle” will not allow it (67).

Davo explains that when he told a villager that he was going to die, the man held his head under the water of the pond, appearing to kill him. Davo clarifies that he travels around, helping the dying and the dead in “repayment to his uncle” (70). Natalia’s grandfather wants proof that the man cannot die, and Davo makes a bet with Natalia’s grandfather that if he can prove that he cannot die, the grandfather will give him a treasured possession. The grandfather offers his battered and beloved copy of The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling.

The deathless man convinces Natalia’s grandfather to test him by weighting him and putting him in the lake. He does so, and proceeds to sit there all night until dawn. At dawn, the deathless man emerges, very much alive. He tries to collect on his bet, but Natalia’s grandfather believes he’s been tricked and refuses. Gavo, or Gavran Gailé, tells him to remember his wager for the next time they meet and leaves.

Natalia wakes up in the early morning hours before dawn. She cannot process the fact that her grandfather is dead. She gets up and gets dressed in her white coat. She hears the diggers in the field and goes outside to find them.

As she nears the diggers, the nearest man is startled and mistakes her for a ghost. She falls into one of the holes, and they realize who she is. Duré, the father of the sick little girl, is in charge of the digging.

Natalia tries to convince him to let her treat the children, who are all sick. He refuses treatment, saying that they don’t need it. They are digging for the body of his cousin, buried here during the war. Duré believes that the cousin doesn’t like it there and is making them all sick. Natalia struggles not to laugh, but the man is serious.