44 pages • 1 hour read
Tea ObrehtThe Tiger's Wife
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: The Tiger
Natalia narrates this chapter from the point of view of a tiger who walks away from the city zoo destroyed by German bombs during World War II. The severely traumatized tiger wanders north, out of the city into the countryside.
Natalia tells the reader that long after her grandfather’s funeral, she visited the village her grandfather grew up in, Galina. Galina sits in a mountain valley and is isolated, unwelcoming, and tiny. Marko Parović, who Natalia tells the reader will figure in the story later, sits on his front porch as Natalia arrives. He purposely gets up and goes inside his house, slamming his door she drives past his house. Natalia explains her arrival in this small town: “[E]veryone will see you, but no one will look at you” (100).
Natalia’s grandfather was raised by his grandmother, Mother Vera. His mother died in childbirth, and his father died soon after. Mother Vera, the town midwife, encouraged Natalia’s grandfather to enter the family business, sheep herding. The town apothecary visited the house many times over the years, and Natalia’s grandfather came to admire and revere him for his abilities to heal and create order from the chaos created by living. The grandfather decided to become a doctor because of his admiration for the apothecary’s orderly, scientific life.
The apothecary gives the grandfather a copy of The Jungle Book. He treasures this book his whole life.
The tiger is sighted in the mountains above the village at the end of December by a village man, Vladiša, while he is searching for a lost calf. He finds the tiger eating his calf. The man does not know what he has seen, returning to the village half hysterical with fear, knowing he has seen the “devil.” From his description, the grandfather recognizes “Shere Khan,” the tiger from The Jungle Book.
Natalia next narrates from the tiger’s point of view. The tiger is lured down into the village by someone leaving pieces of meat out for him, each night closer and closer to the village. Finally, the tiger is lured into a smokehouse, where a woman waits to give him more meat.
The grandfather happens to be going to the well for water on the night the tiger comes into the village. The smokehouse belongs to Luka, the butcher, and his wife, a young, deaf-mute Muslim girl. The grandfather goes into the smokehouse, because he sees the door open. The tiger is inside. The grandfather hides. As the tiger walks by him, he reaches out and touches his fur.
The whole village is terrified about the tiger coming into the village. Luka is furious. He refers to his wife as a “bitch,” grabs her, and forces her back inside the house.
After the nocturnal visit, the men in the village decide to kill the tiger. The village blacksmith owns the only gun in the village, so he’s elected to hunt the tiger. Luka and Jovo, the greengrocer, go with him. The blacksmith has never fired the gun, which is over 100 years old. He fires one shot at the tiger, misses, and as the tiger charges the men, he attempts to reload the musket. It misfires and blows off his head. The other two men run away as the tiger charged. The blacksmith is eaten by the tiger.
Chapter 5 Summary: The Orphanage
Natalia returns to the Ivans’ house just as Barba is going out fishing. She follows him down to the shore, and he explains that the diggers just showed up a couple of weeks ago. Because of the children and not wanting a body on their land, the Ivans have allowed the digging to continue. He pushes off, taking the dog, Bis, with him in his boat.
Natalia returns to the house to get Zóra, and they gather their vaccines and medicines and head for the orphanage.
Zóra is so struck by the sight of the children, all quietly working on art projects, that she hands over almost all the candy they brought to bribe the children after their vaccinations and exams. They proceed to examine and vaccinate the children. Pandemonium breaks out: once one child starts crying, they all do.
Natalia gives Fra Antun an exam during lunch, and he reveals that he has been asked to bless the body when it is found. Further, he happens to share that the village, Zdrevkov, where Natalia’s grandfather died, is only an hour’s drive away. On the pretext of buying more candy as bribes for the children, Natalia takes the car and drives to Zdrevkov.
The village of Zdrevkov is even smaller than the village of Brejevina. She is able to retrieve her grandfather’s belongings, but no one is able to tell her why her grandfather was there or what happened, other than that he collapsed.
Chapter 6 Summary: The Fire | Gavran Gailé
Every Sunday afternoon, the grandfather gathered with other retired doctors at a restaurant in the Old Town. They shared stories of their accomplishments and old times. The grandfather, though modest about his medical career, at one time operated on the revolutionary Marshall Tito, saving his life when his appendix ruptured. Natalia retells this story that she only learned from another medical student, not her grandfather.
The war ended when Natalia was 17, leaving her and the other members of her generation with a future to plan. Natalia chose medicine; she and Zóra both made the top 500 cutoff for medical school.
Natalia and Zórahave a couple of problems that will affect their success in medical school. In the aftermath of the war, there is a shortage of skulls. Each student needs a skull, and they cannot find one. Next, they need a positive reputation to inspire the head of the cadaver program, Mića, to give them access to a cadaver for the rest of medical school. Without a memorable incident, they are doomed. As Natalia says, “Without a weekly cadaver, a corpse to practice on, you were predictably fucked for the remainder of your career in medical school” (155).
Natalia and Zóra get their “incident” for Mića when they cross the border into Romania and attempt to illegally bring their black market skulls home. Natalia is caught with her replica of the Magnificent Fedrizzi’s skull in her backpack. Both women are held in customs. She is forced to call her grandfather to come rescue them, and he arrives in his white coat with his University badge hanging around his neck. He manages to pay off the customs official, but she doesn’t get to keep her skull.
The aftermath of the war has serious consequences for the grandfather. Having grown up on one side of the new border but educated on the other, with an accent from one place and a name from the other, he has no place in the new divided countries. He is not invited back to practice medicine. The family must also decide what to do about their summer home in Verimovo, which now lies on the other side of the border.
The grandfather and Natalia work out a plan to visit the summer home, evaluate the damage, and make repairs to the house. Though Natalia believes the grandfather should sell the house, she gets caught up in his optimism. They arrive and the damage is not as great as they had feared. The neighbors are only outwardly welcoming, however. That night, a fire starts from a drunk’s cigarette on the hill above the houses, and Natalia stands with a saucepan on her head, watering the back of the house to keep it from burning while her grandfather helps the village men fight the fire. She saves the house, but her neighbors lose all of their animals, which die horribly in the fire. The long war has so warped them that they would rather have their animals die in the fire than rescue them only to lose them when war returns.
When the grandfather gets home safely, he tells Natalia the second installment of the deathless man story. In 1971, the grandfather is sent to a remote village where there has been a miracle appearance of the Virgin Mary in a waterfall pool. Dying people gather there for healing. Concerned about the conditions, the University sends a team including the grandfather to help the pilgrims. The conditions are horrible, with the sick and dying sleeping in the basement crypt beneath the church. Locked up next to them are the drunks who are overcome by their celebration of the miracle appearance of the Virgin. The grandfather is appalled by what he finds and does not believe in the miracle.
On duty at night, he hears a voice call for water from the drunk tank. He realizes that it is the deathless man, Gavran Gailé. Separated by a stone wall, they talk through a gap in the stones. Both say they are there to help the dying. The deathless man has been selling coffee to the crowds for several days, and he was put in the drunk tank when he upset a man by telling him that he was going to die. Gavran explains that three people under the grandfather’s care will die before morning. He reminds the grandfather that he needs to pay up on his bet, but the grandfather refuses, saying that everything that Gavran did, when they met fifteen years ago, could be a trick.
Gavran attempts to convince the grandfather by telling him about his life. He explains to the grandfather that he is deathless as a punishment and penance to his uncle, Death. When he turned sixteen, his uncle asked him what gift he wanted. Gavran wanted to be a great physician. Death granted him the ability to tell if a person would live or die by drinking coffee from a special cup. If the man was to live, he would see the path of his life in the cup, and the man would break the cup and leave. If the man was to die, the path of his life would show this in the coffee dregs. The cup would not be broken and the man would die.
Gavran gained great prestige as a healer and a reputation as an honest man because he would take no money from the people he could not help. He was admired for being able to give fearful and uncertain people what they needed: certainty. All was well until Gavran was called to help a young woman. He fell in love with her. When he saw in her cup that she is going to die, he violated his agreement with Death by helping her break her cup. They ran away together. Death found him and forgave him for this one transgression. But Gavran gave his beloved another cup of coffee, again helping her break the cup when he saw her fate. This time, Death did not forgive him. Death took his love away with him, while cursing Gavran with the inability to die.
Doomed to live, Gavran continues his work with the cup. As time passes, his work evolves. Gavran, hoping to run into his uncle and be forgiven, helps gather souls, keeping them safe with him for the 40 days of the soul. They gather at crossroads where Death collects them after the 40 days have passed.
The three people die, and Gavran is gone in the morning.
Chapter 4-6 Analysis
Natalia’s grandfather has many secrets, many stories that he keeps to himself. He teaches Natalia that she should be careful with the stories she tells, when and to whom, when he decides to tell her the deathless man’s story. The story told to her by a fellow medical student, about her grandfather saving Marshall Tito’s life, is only one story that he kept to himself. Natalia knows that there is more to her grandfather and his life than he has ever shared, foreshadowing her search for her grandfather’s childhood stories in Galina, which include the tiger’s wife tale.
Her generational guilt contributes to her decision to become a doctor and to volunteer to help the children that her government’s soldiers made into orphans. This guilt leads her to go to Brejevina, ultimately leading to her discovery of the tiger’s wife story. Without the war, Natalia might never have learned the story of the tiger’s wife. Without the tiger’s wife, she would never have really known her grandfather.
Additionally, the confusion and upheaval of war does not end when guns stop being fired. The fallout of war is long-lasting and the remnants of war live in the behavior and memories of the people. The somewhat threatening behavior of the men in the bar at Zdrevkov, where Natalia goes to retrieve her grandfather’s belongings, and the guilty, odd behavior of the neighbors at the summer house are good examples of this. The visible remnants, such as the orphans or the diggers, reveal only the surface damage done by the war.
