The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht Read Free Book Online

hitching them up by flexing her nose. We would later learn that M. Dobravka had once been a political artist, and that, after we graduated, she moved somewhere else to avoid persecution. Some years later, she encouraged a group of high school students in the production of an antiadministration poster that landed them in jail and caused her to disappear one night on the walk from her apartment to the newspaper kiosk at the corner of her street. Back then, completely unaware of her determination, unfamiliar with the frustration she felt at not having the tools to teach us her own subject, let alone one with which she was unfamiliar, we thought she was hilarious. Then she brought us a gift.
    It was a freak March heat wave, hot as summer, and we had come to school and taken our shoes and socks and sweaters off. The turret was like a greenhouse. We had the door open but we were still moist with perspiration and a tender kind of frenzy that comes from unexpected weather. M. Dobravka came in late and out of breath. She had a large, foil-wrapped parcel under one arm, which she opened to reveal two enormous pairs of lungs, pink, wet, soft as satin. A violation of the meat ration. Contraband. We didn’t ask her where she had gotten them.
    “Spread some newspapers out on the tables outside,” she said, and her glasses dropped immediately. Ten minutes later, faces dripping with sweat, we hovered over her while she tried to butterfly one pair of lungs with a kitchen knife she had brought along with her. The lung strained against the knife, bulging out on either side of the blade like a rubber ball. The meat was already beginning to smell, and we were swatting the flies away.
    “Maybe we should refrigerate them,” somebody said.
    But M. Dobravka was a woman possessed. She was determined to make something of the risk she’d taken, to show us how the lungs worked, to open them up like cloth and point out the alveoli, the collapsed air sacs, the thick white cartilage of the bronchial tubes. She sawed away at a corner of the lung, and, as she went on, her range of motion got bigger and bigger, until we all stepped back and watched her tearing into the side of the lung, her glasses going up and down, up and down as she pressed with one arm and pumped away with the other like she was working a cistern.
    Then the lung slipped out of her hands and slid across the aluminum foil and over the edge of the table, onto the ground. It lay there, heavy and definite. M. Dobravka looked down at it for a few moments, while the flies immediately found it and began to walk gingerly along the tracheal opening. Then she bent down, picked it up, and dropped it back on the newspaper.
    “You,” she said to me, because I happened to be standing next to her. “Get a straw out of the coffee cabinet and come back here and inflate this lung. Come on, hurry up.”
    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.
    M. Dobrovka had also touched upon our relationship to contraband, an obsession that was already beginning to seize the whole City. For her, it was school supplies. For us, it was the same guiding principle, but a different material concern. Suddenly, because we couldn’t have them, because they were expensive and difficult to obtain, we wanted things we had never thought of wanting, things that would give us bragging rights: fake designer handbags, Chinese jewelry, American cigarettes, Italian perfume. Zóra started wearing her mother’s lipstick, and then began looking for ways to buy some herself. Six months into the war, she developed a taste for French cigarettes, and refused to smoke anything else. All of fifteen, she would sit at the table in our coffeehouse on the Square of the Revolution and raise her eyebrow at boys who had probably gone to