Detail from the front cover of The Tiger's Wife
Natalia is a paediatrician living in a fictional Balkan country that was torn up by a war not long ago, who is on her way to an orphanage together with her friend Zorá to inoculate the children there. During this trip she hears that her grandfather died in another town, far away from home. Apparently he had told her mother and grandmother that he was going to visit Natalia. Natalia was the only one, besides her grandfather himself, who knew that he had cancer. The body of her grandfather was returned home without his belongings and Natalia goes to look for them. Through all this Natalia reminisces about her childhood and inadvertently about the stories her grandfather shared with her: the story of the tiger’s wife and the story of the deathless man.
When he was a young boy living in a village with Mother Vera, Natalia’s grandfather befriends a deaf-mute woman who was once the wife of a butcher that physically abused her. The reader gets a lot of background information on both the deaf-mute woman and Luka the abusive butcher, and often it’s almost like you could drown in the stories because they go so (too?) deep. An escaped tiger makes its way into the village and the deaf-mute woman feeds it with meat from the butcher shop. The villagers have never seen or heard of a tiger – except for Natalia’s grandfather who has read The Jungle Book – think that it’s the devil. Once Luka finds out about his wife’s feeding ritual with the tiger he becomes enraged. Not too long after he finds out, Luka dies under mysterious circumstances. The tiger keeps visiting with the deaf-mute woman and, because he’s curious, Natalia’s grandfather goes to the butcher’s shop one night to check it out. When it appears that the deaf-mute woman is pregnant, the villagers speculate over whose child it is and end up thinking that it must be the tiger’s. From then on, the deaf-mute woman becomes known as the tiger’s wife. Natalia’s grandfather decides to help this woman and they fast become friends.
Later on in life, when Natalia’s grandfather is a doctor, he has some curious meetings with a guy who claims he is the deathless man. The deathless man, actually called Gavran Gailé, explains to her grandfather that his uncle is Death and that Death had given him the ability to find out whether people were going to live or die by letting them drink coffee from a special cup. When a person was going to live, he or she had to break the cup. But then the deathless man met a woman (the sister of the tiger’s wife!) and ran away with her. The woman became very ill and, even though the cup predicted that she would die, he made her break the cup so she could live. His uncle became so angry with him that he punished him by making him deathless; he could not die. Eventually the woman dies and the deathless man spends all his time paying his debt to his uncle by tending to the dying and accompanying the dead to their resting place.
Is it a coincidence that her grandfather meets the deathless man at times that he is in a perilous situation? I wouldn’t know. I do know, however, that his meetings with the deathless man are by far my favourite parts of the book. Natalia tries to figure out why her grandfather went away from home to die and I think she suspects that he went looking for the deathless man. I was left wondering whether this had actually been the case.
There are essentially four storylines in this book: Natalia in the present, Natalia’s relationship with her grandfather in the past, her grandfather and the deathless man and her grandfather and the tiger’s wife. Each of these stories also split into other storylines, which make “The Tiger’s Wife” an intricately spun web in which you can easily get stuck. The book is a great story-telling feat by the young (26), Belgrade born, Téa Obreht. I’m definitely going to keep an eye out for her future works.
Téa Obreht