Tiger's Wife, The by Obreht Téa

Author:Obreht, Téa [Obreht, Téa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Military, Adult, Historical, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780385343848
Amazon: 0385343841
Goodreads: 8366402
Publisher: Windsor
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Dabbing the gray corners of The Jungle Book with his handkerchief, my grandfather said:

In ’71, there’s this miracle in a village a little way from here, on the sea. Some kids are playing near a waterfall, this small white waterfall that feeds a deep hole at the bottom of some cliffs, and one day, while they’re playing like that, they see the Virgin in the water. The Virgin’s just standing there, her arms outspread, and the children run home and tell their parents, and suddenly they are calling the water miraculous. The children are coming to the waterfall every day to see the Virgin, and suddenly they’re renaming the local church—the Church of the Virgin of the Waters—and people are coming in from all over. They’re coming in from Spain and Italy and from Austria to see this little watering hole and sit in the church and look at the children who are sitting all day, staring into the water, and saying, “Yes, we see her—she is still there.” Pretty soon some cardinal’s coming out to bless it, and suddenly you’ve got buses coming out of nowhere, trips from hospitals and sanitariums so people can come and look at the waterfall and swim in the water and be healed. I’m talking about really sick people—I’m talking about people with cerebral palsy and faulty hearts, people with cancer. A lot of them are coming in from tuberculosis clinics. And then there’s the people who can’t even walk, people on their last breath being carried in on stretchers. There’s people who’ve been sick for years, and no one can say what’s wrong with them. And that Church of the Waters is handing out blankets, and they’re all sitting out there, the sick people, in the gardens and in the courtyard, all the way out to the sidewalk, just waiting. The sick people, in that heat with the flies around them, with their feet in the water, their faces in the water, bottling it up to take home with them. You know me, Natalia—nothing, for me, has quite the effect of a man with no legs dragging himself down a rocky slope for penance so he can sit in a swimming hole and tell himself he is getting better.

So the University asks me to get a small team together and get down there right away. There’s risk, they’re thinking—all these people, already dying, are under constant strain. They want me to set up a care center, maybe offer some free medicine. I go out there with about twelve nurses and right away we come to understand that these Waters are a thousand miles from anywhere, and the only building on that side of the mountain is the church, and everything that happens here is happening in or around the church. There’s no hospital around, no hotels—not like there will be in twenty years. The miracle is too recent, no one has had the time to profit from it. The church provides shelter for the dying, but the only place they have to put them is the crypt.

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