Téa Obreht

...fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone, we're left with the concept, but not the true memory--why else...would anyone give birth more than once?

In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.

The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death.

My grandfather would pet the dog, and, in a voice that made him sound like some kind of children's program puppet, he would say: "You're a dog! You're a dog! Where are you? You're a dog!" and the dog's tongue would drop out of its mouth and it would start keening. After a few hours of this, I said, "Jesus Grandpa, I get it, he's a dog," not knowing that, just a few years later, I would be reminding every dog I met on the street that it was a dog, and asking it where it was.

Knowing, above all, that I would come looking, and find what he had left for me, all that remained of The Jungle Book in the pocket of his doctor__ coat, that folder-up, yellowed page torn from the back of the book, with a bristle of thick, coarse hairs clenced inside. Galina, says my grandfather__ handwriting, above and below a child__ drawing of the tiger, who is curved like the blade of a scimitar across the page. Galina, it says, and that is how I know to find him again, in Galina, in the story he hadn__ told me but perhaps wished he had.

Grandfather recently died. He died alone on a trip away from home in a town where no one expected him to be

- "I once knew a girl who loved tigers so much she almost became one herself._ Because I am little, and my love of tigers comes directly from him, I believe he is talking about me, offering me a fairy tale in which I can imagine myself__nd will, for years and years.

It's a sad thing to see, because as far as I know, this man Gavo had done nothing to deserve being shot in the back of the head at his own funeral. Twice.

Eventually, my grandfather said: - You must understand, this is one of those moments.- What moments?- One of those moments you keep to yourself._The story of this war_ that belongs to everyone_ But something like this_ this is yours. It belongs only to you. And me. Only to us.

Believe me, Doctor, if your life ends in suddenness you will be glad it did, and if it does not you will wish it had. You will want suddenness, Doctor.

No matter how grave the secret, how imperative absolute silence, someone would always feel the urge to confess, and an unleashed secret is a terrible force.

In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.

Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger__ wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life _ of my grandfather__ days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.