"Tiger's Wife"

[fiefoe]

The war and its aftermath:

• He could risk everything on something that in us seemed like towering defiance, but in him amounted to inexcusable stupidity.
• Here and there are signs for a country mending itself: paint store posters, green hardware-stand leaflets pinned to trees.
• “They would have been arguing,” I said. “This is a veterans’ slum, what do you think people do all day?"
• We were seventeen, furious at everything because we didn’t know what else to do with the fact that the war was over. Years of fighting, and, before that, a lifetime on the cusp of it. Conflict we didn’t necessarily understand—conflict we had raged over, regurgitated opinions on, seized as the reason for why we couldn’t go anywhere, do anything, be anyone—had been at the center of everything.
• Slightly younger, we had been unable to ration our enthusiasm for living under the yoke of war; now, we couldn’t regulate our inability to part with it.
• ... all the favor of an obese technical assistant named Mića the Cleaver, the man who prepared cadavers.... then you were ensured a corpse every week, even in weeks of shortage, which were coming now that the war was over.
• For this, you needed a weekly corpse. You needed Mića the Cleaver’s acknowledgment. You needed it so you could take that first step toward nonchalance in the face of death.
• Previously shared things—landmarks, writers, scientists, histories—had to be doled out according to their new owners.
• In my grandfather’s life, the rituals that followed the war were rituals of renegotiation.
• Nobody ever mentions that, at the time, they were so absolutely certain of more war that it was easier for them to let the livestock burn where they stood than to save them, only to have our soldiers return and take it all from them again.
• Despite everything, the building didn’t fall, but stood there, like a jawless skull, while people cheered and kissed and, as the newspapers would later point out, started a baby boom.
• One man had tied wire hangers around his head and put white socks on them as ears and come to stand for Nikodemus, our giant Welsh rabbit.
• When your fight has purpose—to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent—it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling—when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored...

The tiger:

• Necessity drew him slowly out of his domesticated clumsiness. It strengthened and reinforced the building blocks of his nature, honed his languid, feline reflexes
• His eyes must have lit up when he said: “But that’s Shere Khan.”
• The tiger in a clearing by a frozen pond, bright and real, carved from sunlight.
• "You must rid us of this devil in his fiery pajamas."

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