Lindsay Kennedy is a native New Yorker currently living next door in Connecticut. "The Paper Tiger" is her first published fiction piece.
Nina did not want to pose with the tiger, but as the animal was the circus’s greatest attraction and people had come for miles around to see it, she felt she could not refuse when her turn came. She and her mother had come all the way from the city, taking two buses and then walking nearly three miles from the station to the pavilion, which was decorated with bright banners in many colors; there were even pictures of animals painted along the exterior walls. Many of these were animals Nina had seen in Petrograd’s Illustrated History of the Animal Kingdom, a huge volume that her uncle had given her on her last birthday. Despite its prodigious size, she had already gotten through the entire thing three times, and now needed only to hear the name of an animal in order to spout numerous facts about it. The gazelle, for example, thrived in Africa and the Middle East and looked like a small deer, while the koala lived in Australia and ate eucalyptus leaves. The whale shark, an enormous animal, was actually quite gentle for its species, while a sting from a brightly-colored jellyfish, as fanciful as a flower, could kill a swimmer before he reached the safety of shore. Nina could repeat with flourish any informative bit about any animal and devoured details with pride; only the tiger, with its burnished fur and angry expression, frightened her. Whenever she came to its picture in the Illustrated History, she would quickly turn the gilded page, her heart striking painfully against her ribs.
That afternoon, in the gloomy light rain, she held her mother’s hand as they entered the pavilion. It was a gray October afternoon, the sort of afternoon that makes one hate autumn: the leaves were practically gone from the trees, and the naked branches were stark against the dull sky. The weather was turning colder, and the rain fell in sharp needles against her face and hair. She had not worn her galoshes, and she stepped as delicately as she could around puddles to avoid soiling her new shoes.
“Hurry along, Nina,” her mother said, tugging her hand. “Keep up.” They had entered the pavilion, and Nina could hear the muffled roar of the crowd just ahead, amassed in the stands and waiting for the show to begin. Her mother handed their money to the girl manning the ticket booth; the girl, a bored-looking teenager with pale eyes and dark hair, smiled suddenly at Nina, who refused to smile back.
“Aw,” said the girl, “she’s shy. That’s cute.”
“She isn’t shy,” Nina’s mother said. “Come, Nina. Say something.”
“The koala lives in Australia and eats eucalyptus leaves,” Nina said mechanically. The girl raised a black eyebrow, as thin and ugly as a pencil smudge, and Nina scowled.
“Nina,” her mother said, irritation coloring her words. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it. I meant you should say Good morning, or something similar.”
“Do you have any koalas here?” Nina asked, ignoring her mother and addressing the girl directly.
“No, we don’t,” the girl replied, the mask of boredom descending over her face once more. “We have giraffes, horses, a lion, and seals—”
“Hey, Miss,” cut in a voice from behind them. Nina turned. A tall man holding the hands of two sour-looking children was glowering at the girl in the ticket booth. “Would you hurry up and quit yakking? The kids would like to see the bears before someone turns them into a rug.”
“Yeah, all right,” came the response, and Nina felt herself being pulled away from the booth. They were almost beyond it when the girl called after them.
“Hey!” she yelled, and Nina turned to see her staring at them, wide-eyed, her face pressed to the window’s bars in urgency. She looked like a strange caged animal. “I nearly forgot. We have a tiger. Big, all the way from like, Asia or somewhere. You can get your picture taken with it before the show. It’s included in the admissions price. It’s over there, on your left.”
“Oh, a tiger,” Nina’s mother said, and her voice took on that effervescent whispery quality that it had whenever she was about to make Nina do something she didn’t want to do. “How exciting! Let’s have your picture taken with it. It’ll only take a minute.”
“I don’t want to,” said Nina. “I want to get popcorn.”
“We will,” her mother replied, her voice still high and silvery, like a fairy’s in a children’s story. “There’s plenty of time for that. But let’s see the tiger first.”
The line to see the tiger was long and filled with misbehaving children, and while they waited Nina held her mother’s hand and tried to think of a plausible excuse as to why she should not have her picture taken. Under no circumstance could she say that she was afraid: her mother’s voice would take on that bright feathery quality again, and she would probably say something along the lines of There’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s just like the tiger in The Jungle Book. Nina hated that story and knew it would be useless to tell her mother that the tiger in The Jungle Book was neither cute nor innocent. It was useless to argue with reality: the tiger could take animals more than twice its size. It had fearsome yellow eyes that, in pictures, looked angry. Nina had no desire to confront those eyes in person.
“Do you think the tiger is hungry?” Nina asked her mother. She tried to be casual, presenting to her mother her most bored and uninterested face, but in reality she was quite afraid. What if the tiger hasn’t had his lunch yet? she thought, her mind besotted with worry. Hopefully he’ll eat one of these other kids before he gets to me.
Nina’s mother did not reply. Beyond the line waiting to see the tiger, the entrance to the circus loomed dark, the curtains pulled back to reveal a black swath of nothingness from which disembodied voices emerged, excited and shrieking. This made Nina feel even worse: first there would be the tiger, then the entrance into that cave of supposed wonders that she was not, suddenly, sure she wanted to experience. She looked up at her mother, whose hand she still clasped, but Nina’s mother was engrossed in conversation with a woman ahead of them who was holding a little girl dressed in blue, like Alice on her way to Wonderland, and with a large white bow in her hair.
“This is Patricia’s third time having her picture taken with the tiger,” the woman announced, as though this were some fantastic achievement.
“Really?” said Nina’s mother, her voice still possessed of the same golden glaze. “What a brave girl you are, Patricia!”
“Tiger,” replied Patricia tonelessly.
Nina thought of saying that Patricia couldn’t possibly be brave if there was nothing to be afraid of in the first place but thought better of it. Her mother would reprove her and, possibly, deny her popcorn as punishment for being rude in public, and Nina desperately wanted popcorn. If she had to be forced to get her picture taken with the tiger, she wanted to get something out of it in the end.
“Yes,” Patricia’s mother continued. “She loves all animals. Ever since she was a baby, when she would crawl to anything that moved. Her ability to relate to animals is amazing, my husband and I say it all the time. We’re always going to the zoo, and even the staff there—and these are professionals—are astonished by her ability. They call her—Patricia, tell the nice lady what they call you.”
“Tiger,” was Patricia’s flat answer.
“They call her Little Jane Goodall! You know, like the scientist. Can you believe that? ‘Here comes little Jane Goodall!’ they say. They’re such nice people but, of course, we must keep reminding them that her name is actually Patricia. We don’t want her to grow up conceited.”
“Jane Goodall traveled to Africa when she was twenty-six years old,” Nina blurted out.
Although the Illustrated History made no mention of her, Nina had found a book on Jane Goodall on her last trip to the library and had read with interest of her studies of chimpanzees, another fearsome animal, in Africa. She had wondered, after finishing the book, what it might be like to live among the animals in the jungle and thought that she might like it someday. Until then, she had only the Illustrated History to keep her occupied, but it was better than nothing.
Both mothers stared at her, and Patricia, her head sagging under the enormous white bow, bestowed on her a gaze so vapid that Nina wondered if she was even conscious. Patricia’s mother cleared her throat awkwardly and shifted her daughter in her arms. Nina’s mother, her silvery voice tinged with something akin to embarrassment, said only, “Nina knows a great deal about animals and scientists.”
“Is that so?” said Patricia’s mother, and it was clear from her tone that she did not believe it. “What can you tell us about the tiger, sweetie?”
There was a challenge to the question. Nina, besotted with nervousness, looked ahead of her. The line towards the tiger had advanced slightly but she still could not see the animal, although a young child emitted a high-pitched shriek. Nina wondered if the kid was being eaten. If so, none of the adults seemed concerned, which set her heart beating faster against her ribcage. Abruptly, her mother brought her back to reality.
“Nina,” she said, some of the gossamer quality having gone from her voice, “answer the lady’s question. I know you know all about tigers.”
Nina pulled herself together and mentally ran through the list of things she could remember from the Illustrated History. It wasn’t much, considering she couldn’t bear to spend too long on the pages that detailed the tiger and its facts, but she regurgitated the ones she knew. “The tiger is an apex predator, and its tail is approximately half the length of its body. Its fur is useful for camouflage. Tigers are good swimmers and can eat up to seventy-five pounds of food at once.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Nina could see her mother nodding. “Do you have a favorite tiger, Nina?”
“No.”
“Oh, yes you do! The one in The Jungle Book, remember?”
Nina saw Patricia’s mother raise her eyebrows at this. Nina flushed, embarrassed.
“Well, seeing a tiger in person is much different,” Patricia’s mother said condescendingly. “It’s a living breathing animal, after all.” And then, to Nina’s mother: “Patricia has seen the tiger before, but are you sure your daughter can handle this experience? I don’t want to question anyone’s parenting, of course, but this is not The Jungle Book. This is reality, not fiction.”
Nina’s mother started to stammer something, but Nina, suddenly angry, broke through.
“I’ve read Petrograd’s Illustrated History of the Animal Kingdom five times,” she said, feeling not the least bit guilty about the embellishment. “It is not fiction. It was written by zoologists—” Nina did not actually know if this was true, but the list of long and distinguished-sounding names that occupied the Contributors section seemed practically scientific—“and they are auth-auth-authorities in their field. That means they’re very smart. And so am I.”
Patricia’s mother, having shifted her daughter from one hip to the other, looked down at her sourly. Out of the corner of her eye, Nina caught her mother’s fraught embarrassed expression.
“I’m sure you are, dear,” said Patricia’s mother in a tone that indicated the conversation was over. She turned away from them, but Patricia, her head resting on her mother’s shoulder, continued to gaze vapidly at Nina.
“Tiger,” she whispered.
Nina felt a shiver of fear, and then her mother’s hand on her shoulder, sharp and pinching. “That wasn’t very nice, Nina,” she said. Nina turned to her.
“I don’t want to see the tiger,” she said. “Can we please just get popcorn?”
“Nina, we’re almost there,” her mother said. Her voice was flat, pancaked out by sudden frustration. “See how the line is moving? We’re almost next. It won’t take long to have your picture taken, and then you can have popcorn and see the circus. We came all this way, after all.”
“We came all this way to go to the circus,” Nina protested, but her mother ignored her. The line was starting to move faster now, the shrieks of other children and the babble of the adults mixing into a cacophony of sound that set her trembling. The tiger was near; soon she would see it, with its terrible eyes and fearsome jaws. What would she do?
When she was small she had, quite by accident, locked herself in the attic. She had retreated to its cool magnificence while her parents fought in the house downstairs, and she had played undisturbed with her blocks and toys for what seemed like an age. When she realized that her parents’ voices had ceased, she looked up from her menagerie of stuffed animals and her block kingdom to see that the light coming through the square attic window had faded and the evening was coming on. Collecting her things, she descended the steep attic stairs and tried the door, only to find that the handle wouldn’t turn. At first, she was merely surprised, and she set her things down and turned the handle with all her might, putting her full weight into the door. But despite repeated tries it did not so much as budge, so she resorted to calling for her mother and father. But she called and called and no one came, the attic grew dark and cold, and she began to grow frightened. She banged on the door and jiggled the handle, but still no one appeared. Panicked, she began to scream, yelling for help until finally her voice gave out and she settled down on the bottom stair, near her toys, crying wordlessly. Eventually she must have fainted—or fallen asleep, as her mother liked to remind her was more probable—for her next memory was of being carried out into the great lit hallway and someone saying, “There she is!” and “At last, we’ve found her!” She learned later that her parents, having worn themselves out with fighting, had gone to call her to dinner and, when she did not make an appearance, they searched the house and the yard; then went from neighbor to neighbor; and then ran up and down the street calling her name, with the neighbors at their heels. They were about to call the police when one neighbor inquired if they had checked their attic. They had not, and went back to the house immediately, where she was found. Her parents had another fight about that, too, but all she remembered of it, in the haze of being exhausted and safe in her father’s arms as he carried her to her bedroom—one of his last actions as her parent, for he would disappear from her life shortly thereafter—was her mother saying that she couldn’t possibly have known Nina would go into the attic, to which her father replied that a more attentive mother would have known such a thing, while Nina’s mother retorted that an attentive father would have fixed the lock on the attic door, it was so clearly broken, anyone in his right mind could see that.
The same level of fear, the same desperate hopelessness that had gripped her as the attic had darkened around her was settling over her now as the tiger loomed closer. Nina looked about her for a place to run. If the tiger tried to attack, she would need a quick plan of escape. But there was only the looming mouth of the circus entrance to her right and then, far behind her, the pavilion entrance, already obscured by a crush of people. Perhaps if she ran fast enough—surely all those people would get out of the way if they saw a tiger rushing at them, adults had no scruples when it came to assuring their own safety—she just might have a chance at freedom. She swallowed and turned back towards the line, deeply uneasy.
There were only two families ahead of her now: Patricia and her mother and, in front of them, a jolly-looking father and his lookalike little boy, dressed for the occasion in a green sweater with a knit tiger prancing across the front of it. Nina could see a photographer and, off to his right, another man, tall and thin and with the air of a salesman about him. He introduced himself to the boy’s father as the tiger’s trainer and to the little boy as the tiger’s friend. Nina doubted this; it was one thing for a tiger to have a trainer but quite another for it to have a friend. Anyone who was idiotic enough to attempt to be a tiger’s friend was on the road to being eaten alive for sure and Nina wondered, with no small amount of curiosity, how this man had managed to evade certain death for so long.
“Are you ready to have your picture taken with the tiger?” the tiger’s trainer/friend asked the little boy in the bright enthusiastic voice that adults reserved for children and stupid people. The child nodded, eager and smiling, and his father patted him on the shoulder.
“Come right this way, then,” said the trainer/friend, making an extravagant bow that Nina had seen once in an old movie in which the actors wore tuxedos and top hats, the actresses had been attired in furs and diamonds, and everyone danced in a beautiful ballroom. It was not the sort of thing you saw at circuses, or from people who spent their days around tigers, and Nina felt a tired irritation that here was yet one more adult who obviously believed kids were too stupid to tell when they were being mocked.
The little boy walked forward, his father with him, and at that moment Patricia and her mother moved aside and seated themselves on a small bench that had been placed nearby for “The Tiger’s Next Guests,” as the sign above it indicated. This left Nina with a clear line of sight of the tiger, and her stomach lurched at the sight of the animal.
The tiger was seated on a high dais covered in what looked like red velvet, with gold tassels at either end. It reminded Nina of an old plush ottoman she had seen once in a museum. But what the tiger was sitting on looked new, impressive and, not the least of all, comfortable. The tiger, enormous and orange, with dark stripes threading through his gleaming fur, had his front paws crossed in front of him, one over the other in a very proper manner, and his long tail, which curved around the edges of the imperial cushion on which he sat, was flicking lazily. His golden eyes were devoid of the fierceness that Nina had expected and, as the little boy approached him, he emitted no growl and no roar, nor did he leap and attack. He merely watched as the child ascended a small stepping stool and, after his guest had settled himself comfortably, the tiger turned his large face towards the child’s, tickling the boy with his whiskers in the process.
The child, delighted, laughed and clapped his hands.
“This is Sasha,” the trainer/friend said, “and I can see that he likes you already. How can he not, when you are wearing a sweater that has him on it? Please, put your arm around his neck. Sasha—”and here the trainer/friend emitted a brief commanding whistle—“look this way!”
The tiger turned his head with a regal slowness and blinked.
“Good boy, Sasha, very good,” praised the trainer/friend. Then, to the little boy and his father: “Now we will take the picture. That’s right, sit up straight! Put your arm around him, that’s good! You look splendid. See?” At this, the trainer/friend turned to the line of children and parents behind him. “Do you see how friendly Sasha is? He’s just like your average domestic housecat, only bigger, of course. There is absolutely nothing to be afraid of in any way. He is as gentle as a baby.”
Patricia’s mother, from her perch on the bench, spoke up. “We are not afraid,” she said, casting a small superior glance at Nina. “We know the tiger is gentle, don’t we, Patricia?”
“Tiger,” said Patricia mournfully.
The trainer/friend turned in their direction. “Well, third time’s a charm, isn’t it?” he said to Patricia’s mother. The joviality was gone from his voice and had been replaced by a hard irritated edge. Nina did not know what that expression meant, but she gathered it couldn’t be anything good, for Patricia’s mother reddened and ceased speaking. The trainer/friend turned back to the tiger and the little boy in the green sweater, who had a chubby arm draped around the tiger’s furry orange neck.
“Perfection!” he said. “Now, hold that pose—” at this, the photographer dashed into place—“and on three, smile! One, two, three!”
There were several bright clicks in rapid succession. The little boy smiled with such joy he looked as though he were about to burst. The tiger only blinked, its tail flicking with infinitesimal slowness.
“Wonderful, wonderful!” exclaimed the trainer/friend, as the little boy was helped down by his father, but not before he had bestowed an extravagant pat on the tiger’s enormous head, like a magician with a wand. “It will be a wonderful picture, worthy of a Christmas card! Yes, sir, the picture will be emailed to you, just see that girl over there—” and at this he pointed the father in the direction of a cheerful-looking girl manning a desk and poised in front of a laptop, whom Nina had not previously noticed—“and you will have your picture in no time at all, ready to send to one and all! Goodbye, my friend!” he said to the boy, who waved with such enthusiasm that Nina thought Patricia’s mother should take a cue from him as to how children who loved tigers behaved. “Come back and see Sasha any time! Now, who’s next?”
Patricia’s mother rose from the bench, placed her daughter on her feet, and took her hand. “We are, aren’t we Patricia?” she said brightly. Nina couldn’t imagine how Patricia would top the jolly little boy’s photo session with the tiger and, almost without knowing it, let go of her mother’s hand and crept a few steps forward so she could have a better view of what was to come, whatever it was.
“All right,” said the trainer/friend, his tone once more bereft of the sugary enthusiasm that he had previously displayed. “You know the drill, but let’s try not to have the kid get so hysterical this time, shall we? It disturbs Sasha, and it’s bad for business. The last time you were here, your kid started shrieking like a banshee and half the line turned around and left. They thought poor Sasha was doing her in.”
Patricia’s mother did not acknowledge this, but she leaned down and whispered something to Patricia, who had stopped at the stepping stool with no indication that she was going to ascend. When she still did not move, her mother roughly took her arm and pulled her up the small steps and plunked her down unceremoniously next to the tiger. The tiger emitted a low noise, almost a grunt of surprise; Patricia, for her part, immediately began to scream.
“Christ, not again,” the trainer/friend muttered, while Patricia hollered as though she were being devoured. The tiger shrank back a bit, undoing its elegant crossed paws, and blinked rapidly as Patricia’s screams became louder. Nina watched the scene with no small amount of amusement-laced horror. Patricia’s mother, standing nearby, shouted, “Patricia! Stop that!”
The photographer, who was hovering with his camera, ventured a suggestion.
“Maybe the little girl is scared to pose with Sasha. You shouldn’t force her.”
“I’ll thank you to let me raise my own kid,” Patricia’s mother retorted resentfully, as Patricia’s screams rose into a glass-shattering crescendo worthy of an operatic star. Nina had the urge to put her hands over her ears, the way she did at fire drills at school, but she caught the tiger’s expression at that moment and something in the animal’s large elegant face stopped her. There was a mournful sad quality to the golden eyes and pale whiskers that she had not previously noticed, and suddenly, with a surge of pity, she realized that, like herself, the tiger was afraid. Then, as if from a great distance, she heard the sudden commanding tones of her own voice.
“Shut up!” she said, squarely facing the trio of adults as well as Patricia, whose bellowing ceased as if by magic. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the tiger blink. “Why can’t you all just be quiet? All this noise is bothering him; can’t you see that? Everyone just be quiet for a minute.”
The three adults stared at her for a good ten seconds; Patricia gaped stupidly. Even the people in line behind her were silent, and her mother seemed to have momentarily stopped breathing. Finally, the trainer/friend spoke, his voice reproving yet laced with a dash of surprise.
“Sasha,” he said, “is quite used to noise and children. As his trainer and friend, I know this.”
“You are not his friend,” Nina retorted. A part of her mind, which seemed to be observing her and critiquing her separately, wondered how she had become so bold. “I know this.”
Patricia’s mother found her voice at that moment. “I think you need a lesson in manners,” she said. “You had no right to tell Patricia to shut up. She’s just excitable, that’s all.”
Nina said nothing.
Faced with this wall of juvenile silence, Patricia’s mother turned her intractable parental gaze on Nina’s mother.
“Are you going to make your daughter apologize?”
“What for, lady?” came a voice from the line behind them, whose owner cut in before Nina’s mother could respond. It was, Nina realized, the man who had complained about the bears at the ticket booth earlier. “The kid’s right. Anyone can see your daughter has no business with that tiger, and you’re holding up the line for the rest of us. The circus starts in five minutes, and I don’t want my kids to be late because of you. So get out of the way and let this kid take her picture so things can move along for the rest of us.”
At this, the trainer/friend made a subdued version of the extravagant bow he had bestowed earlier on the little boy in the green sweater.
“Please,” he said, extending an arm and indicating to Patricia’s mother that she should make her exit.
At that, Patricia’s mother snatched up her daughter so violently that the tiger visibly flinched and retreated backwards on the dais. The trainer/friend and the photographer murmured discomfortingly. The mother-daughter pair stormed off towards the exit, Patricia red-faced and hiccupping into her parent’s shoulder, warbling a blubbery Tiger every so often.
“Well,” said the trainer/friend, bringing with effort some of the showman’s joviality back to his voice. Having watched them depart with no small amount of animosity, he was making a renewed attempt at hospitality for his other customers. “That is taken care of, finally. Now, who’s next?”
“I am,” Nina said. The assent, once it was out of her mouth and free in the open air, surprised her.
“Nina,” protested her mother, her tone strained and unhappy. Nina could sense she was eager to leave. “Perhaps that isn’t such a good idea after the scene you caused.”
“I didn’t cause a scene,” Nina retorted. “Patricia caused a scene.”
“It’s probably for the best that we go. Come on. We’ll get popcorn.”
“You’re the one who wanted me to get my picture taken with the tiger.”
“Perhaps—”
“Madam, if I may be so bold,” intervened the trainer/friend. “The little girl wishes to pose with Sasha, and she has indeed come this far. If you wanted her to get her picture taken, it would be a shame to leave now; and just to show you that I do not think your child has caused a scene, I will throw in a second picture for free.”
“I thought the cost of the photo was included in the ticket price,” said Nina’s mother, her voice querulous.
“Oh, it is. But if you want an additional photo with Sasha, you must pay the girl at the desk over there. We are of course happy to take up to five photos of Sasha and a guest, but for a fee. Sasha’s care is not inexpensive, as I’m sure you can imagine, and payment for these photos helps refute some of the cost, as we provide only the most excellent veterinary care and food to this most extraordinary animal. But in this situation, I will allow you a second picture, free of charge.”
Nina and her mother both hesitated. Nina’s mother was no doubt reflecting on whether she was being had—which, God save her, she was—and Nina remembered her fear of the tiger and how much she had not wanted, initially, to participate in these proceedings. She looked at him and, despite her latent fear, she was able to observe the misery and resignation that had collected on the tiger’s whiskers like so much dew on morning flowers. It was in this moment of hesitation that the trainer/friend aimed a pointed dart at Nina’s heart.
“Sasha,” he said, “is the circus’s greatest attraction. People have come for miles around to see him. How can you disappoint him by leaving without having your picture taken? And when you have come all this way!”
The tiger’s whiskers trembled.
The trainer/friend’s words had the desired effect. Nina, sensing her mother’s hesitation and the tiger’s misery, clambered towards the dais. Her fear still lived in her veins; she could hear it pulsing in her ears. Yet she had managed to push it as far into the background as she could, for her only wish now was to be close to the tiger that she might comfort him. He’s afraid and he’s sad, she thought. He needs me.
The trainer/friend followed her and, when she reached the stepstool, made a show of assisting her up its minute height after Nina’s mother, abandoned at the bench reserved for the tiger’s guests, made a feeble noise of protest. Suddenly Nina found herself next to the tiger and could smell the pleasant animal odor of him. Her right hand was so close to his impressive bulk that she could feel, brushed against her pinky, the soft sharpness of his fur, like pine needles on a Christmas tree. She lifted her hand and ran it across that fur, and in that moment the tiger turned his large face to hers and brushed her cheeks with his whiskers. This must have been what he was trained to do with children, but it did not have the effect on Nina that it had had on the little boy in the green sweater. Instead of delight, she found herself gasping in horror.
Transferred from the tiger’s whiskers to her skin was the feeling of loss. The immensity of it was so great that it nearly knocked Nina backward. She could sense great forests somewhere far away, lush and green, and could almost smell the odors of earth and rain, the humid forest air, the way the undergrowth felt on the tiger’s paws as he padded through it. She could sense the movements of other animals through the forest, could hear their rustlings through the undergrowth, and felt the twitching of the tiger’s ears and the free movement of its long tail, so alive and unlike the languid swishing it displayed on the dais. She could feel the glorious way the tiger’s muscles and limbs moved as it ran, the freedom it had, the sense of safety it enjoyed, the peace of being able to move through the world as it was intended to do, a king amongst the animals.
And then: disaster. There was the noise of a motor, a truck breaking to a stop, men emerging, shouts. The tiger ran through the forest in deep fear. Nina could feel in her own person the terror of the pursuit, the fright of an animal suddenly cornered, the incomprehensible shouting that made no sense to it, and then the sound of a shot, its fur pierced by something sharp, and then darkness overcoming it.
Then there was awakening in fright, caged and shackled, the familiar environment of the forest nowhere to be found; the cage being lifted and moved while the tiger roared in terror; the cage being placed into a large van that took the tiger on a long journey; and finally arriving at a brightly lit place where it was transferred to an enclosure with a concrete floor, where it did nothing but pace all day long as people passed in front of its barred front to view it. Occasionally a smaller door, more like a slot really, would slide open in the back of the enclosure and a dish of water would be shoved in, as well as hunks of meat and other unappetizing offerings. The tiger ate and drank because he was hungry and thirsty—how he longed for the water in the rivers of the forest, cool and clear, tasting slightly of the rocks of the riverbed! How he longed to feel it tickle his whiskers!—and then resumed his pacing. Eventually the pads of his paws became blistered and inflamed, and one grew infected; as such, not many people passed by his enclosure, for no one wanted to see a wounded tiger. He was limping in such a way on the humid afternoon when the trainer/friend appeared outside the enclosure.
Nina could smell the tiger’s fear at the sight of the trainer/friend. The man’s face betrayed nothing, but there was an odor of unkindness emanating from him that the tiger had noticed immediately. Confronted with this memory, Nina became so ill at ease that she had the wish to shed her very skin, like a snake, and crawl away from the dais and the circus and anywhere the trainer/friend might see her. She longed for a place of safety; like the tiger, she felt exposed to the trainer/friend’s direct and monopolizing gaze, at once vulnerable and used, simultaneously frightened and sad that the world, ultimately, should be like this.
Then, the final scenes: the trainer/friend speaking with someone, gesturing at the tiger and his paw, money eventually exchanging hands; the tiger being spirited out of his concrete enclosure under the cover of night, and being handled roughly; and then, most awful of all, arriving at a place more miserable than the concrete one, where he was subjected to long hours of learning to jump through flaming hoops, and walking on his hind legs, and being hit or even shocked with an electrical prod when he did not perform well, or when he was tired, or when he became frightened and roared too loudly. There were long days of performing with the circus before shouting crowds that threw things into the ring, things that occasionally hit him, and long nights of travel, shackled in his small cage, attempting to rest, his hind leg hurting from where the chain dug into his fur. But one day, after he had laid down in the ring during a performance and refused to get up, the trainer/friend concocted the idea that if the tiger was going to rest he might as well be put to work while he did it; therefore, the habit of circus-goers getting their picture taken with the tiger was established. In order to facilitate this, the tiger was worked even longer hours to ensure that he would be docile and was hit so mercilessly that even the sight of the trainer/friend was enough to render him quiet and submissive. Even so, the trainer/friend always gave him a shot of something right before every photo session that made him feel tired and slightly sick. This powerful combination led him to move very little on the plump raised cushion, no matter how many children might poke or prod or scream in his rounded furry ears, in which the sounds of the lost forest still echoed.
These feelings of sadness, of longing for the forest, of immense unhappiness: they never left the tiger, and of late they had been joined by another feeling altogether, that of utter and complete hopelessness. This, Nina realized, was a fateful feeling. It was heavier than any chain, it was worse than any lack of food or water. Despair could kill and, as sure as she knew her own name, Nina surely knew that the tiger was going to die from it.
She met the tiger’s sad gaze and depthless amber-colored eyes that were wells of sorrow. She did not know if the tiger could understand English but she knew it could understand the essence of her, so she said something she had not expected that she would ever have said, with a confidence born out of wanting to avenge another’s injustice and misery.
“What is your name?” she whispered. “I know it isn’t Sasha. That’s not a forest name.”
“Little girl,” broke in the trainer/friend. “You must face forward if you want your picture taken.”
Nina ignored him and continued to gaze at the tiger. From somewhere far away she heard her mother’s voice, imploring and limp, totally lacking in either authority or understanding.
“Young lady,” the trainer/friend interrupted again, his tone melodious and laced with sugary courtesy, “if you face forward, Sasha will as well.”
“His name is not Sasha,” Nina retorted, not altering her gaze, “and we will not face forward. What are you going to do about it, hit me?”
From the corner of her eye, she saw the trainer/friend flinch. The photographer, who had been standing at the ready, lowered his camera and murmured something.
Nina brushed her hand against the tiger’s burnished fur. From that immense bulk no longer came the pleasant animal odor but rather a smell of despair and, underneath that, rot; the tiger’s paw had no doubt become infected again, or the leg that was constantly chained had met the same fate. Nina could feel again the animal’s fear and sadness, but this time it was coupled with something else: her own anger. She raised her eyes to the trainer/friend, the photographer, her mother, the man with the two kids who had complained about the bears. “All of you,” she said, “are awful.”
Her mother made a sound that was akin to a mouse being stepped on. The trainer/friend, abandoning his air of false gentility, adopted the curt tone that one would take with an opponent.
“Little girl,” he said, “do you want your picture taken or not? There are a lot of other people waiting to see Sasha, you know.”
“Stop acting like I’m the one with the problem,” said Nina. Her voice was another person’s: adult and toneless, with a dangerous inflection that set the photographer’s pulse going. “You’re all here waiting to get a photograph with a chained animal, a sad animal, an animal that you—” and here she pointed at the trainer/friend—“took from people who stole him from the forest. You’re a thief, and everyone here is helping you steal the tiger over and over again every time they sit for one of your stupid pictures.”
“Nina,” her mother said, finding her invalid’s voice at last, “it’s not polite to point.”
“Shut up!” Nina retorted. Never in her life had she felt more frustrated or annoyed by her mother’s lack of competence. Sitting on the dais with the tiger and surveying the milquetoast parent who had forced her to participate in the degradation of an animal, she saw with a child’s clarity that what her mother fundamentally lacked was courage. I can do without many things, thought Nina, but I can’t do without courage. I’m not going to be polite and quiet any longer because it’s easier and less frightening to do so. I am not going to be what the grown-ups expect me to be; I’m going to be what the tiger expects me to be.
“That’s it, the show’s over,” said the trainer/friend curtly. “Madam, if you would be so kind as to remove your daughter so that another child can have a photo taken with Sasha. It’s all right, you may approach. Sasha will not bite.”
“But I might,” said Nina, as her mother hesitatingly approached the dais. “Don’t anyone come near me. I’m sitting right here until you pack up your camera and let Sasha go.”
“Go where, my dear?” said the trainer/friend, his tones clipped and icy. “This is Sasha’s home.”
“Do you think I’m stupid? This isn’t his home, it’s a two-bit circus. His home is the forest, far away from here.”
“Be that as it may, he cannot go back to the forest. His home is now where I say it is, and he is my tiger. Now come down from there. You’re holding everything up.”
“He is not, and never will be, your tiger. He is no one’s tiger.”
“Come on, you brat!” yelled the guy who had complained about the bears. “You’re not the only kid here. I paid good money to get in here and my kids have waited long enough to see this animal, so move it.”
“That’s their problem,” said Nina, and as her tone became angrier, she seemed almost to expand before the adults. Afterwards, when she had to give her statement to the police, Nina’s mother would swear that her daughter had become somehow taller, her face fuller, her eyes more animal-like and deadly. She did not know her own child, she realized. She did not understand, and perhaps never had, exactly how love born of anger could transform someone.
“Lady,” said the complaining guy to Nina’s mother, “aren’t you going to do something about your kid?”
“Come near me and the tiger and we’ll make you into a rug,” Nina said smoothly. “You and your kids and every last one of you.” Nina’s mother, already trembling with equal parts embarrassment and horror, began to cry weakly.
Nina looked down at the tiger, at its sad face, its long whiskers, its golden eyes, and enormous paws. She placed one hand on the tiger’s side and could feel the great bellows that were the animal’s respiration, could feel the heart that beat for no one and nothing save itself and the forest, and the chambers and the valves of that eternal organ from which hope, but not memory, had long since fled. She felt that she had never understood any living thing so much in her life. She intrinsically understood the language of the tiger’s sorrows, its trauma of being misunderstood, of not being heard, of being forced into doing something it didn’t want to do solely for the benefit of others, to suffer amongst those who did not care what it wanted. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry this is happening to you.”
It was at that moment of inattention that the trainer/friend dashed forward and grabbed Nina’s arm, pulling her part way off the dais. She shrieked and reached for the tiger, who did something it had never, in its history of being photographed for the circus, done before: it roared.
Everything came to a stop. Nina, half off the dais, her right elbow held fast in the trainer/friend’s grip, could not even gasp. The trainer/friend, the photographer, the girl at the laptop, the man who had complained about the bears, everyone else waiting in line: all were stunned into silence. Even the cacophony emanating from the circus came to a halt, as if by some sort of mammalian magic the animals in their servitude, the performers in their disgrace, and the audience in its complicity understood that a new voice had made itself known at the circus and they were expected to act accordingly. It was akin to the astonished silence that would no doubt descend upon mankind at the blowing of the Judgement Day trumpets, when divine justice would make itself known from on high in the form of sound and rage.
The tiger roared again and lunged forward somewhat stiffly, constrained by the chain to its back leg. It roared a third time and Nina, her heart expanding with gratitude and joy, broke free from the trainer/friend, scrambled back up on the dais, and took hold of the tiger’s fur, from which the scent of fury emanated.
“Get back!” she screamed. “Get away from us!”
At that moment, something astonishing happened. A great wind swept through the pavilion and lifted everything: Nina and the tiger on the dais, the trainer/friend, the photographer, the girl with the laptop, Nina’s mother, the complaining man and his kids, and everyone else waiting to see the tiger. In the circus section, it lifted the audience out of their seats and the dispirited animals waiting sadly to enter the ring, and it lifted the performers off their tightropes and hoops and bicycles. The trainer/friend, before dying in the ambulance on the way to the hospital after it was all over, had whispered to the emergency medical technicians that the wind was caused by the child’s words. It had sprung up as soon as she spoke—he could almost see it, he said—and it had whirled around with increasing ferocity as she kept screaming and the tiger kept roaring. The wind fluttered the canvas panels that led to the circus section, it rattled the grille on the ticket booth, causing the girl inside to shriek, it shook the roof and sides of the pavilion so hard that they blew upward and outward with a destructive force, exposing everything to the pale October sky. The wind whirled with the strength of a cyclone and threw people and seats and popcorn and the ticket booth and the camera that photographed the tiger in all directions. Just as he was blown backwards into oblivion the trainer/friend had a last glimpse of Nina and the tiger. They were suspended in the air on the dais, the chain gone and the tiger roaring in freedom, Nina shrieking with the sort of rage that the holy innocents must have displayed when Herod’s soldiers arrived to slaughter them.
. . .
There was never any trace found of Nina and the tiger, nor of any of the other animals. The people and refuse from the circus, however, were found for miles, and in various states of injury; the photographer was found a quarter-mile away in a tree, relatively unscathed save for a broken hand—his dominant one, it would be noted—while Nina’s mother was discovered three miles away at the bus station, disoriented and bruised and unable to stop sobbing. The girl manning the ticket booth was found in the booth itself, which had thundered back to earth like a meteor, and when a team of firefighters finally pried open the door she burst out of it like Superman from a phone booth, screaming at the top of her lungs. The man who had complained about the bears was found with his children, flattened to the grass in a field one town over, and he required months of rehabilitation before he was able to walk upright again. But the most grievously injured was the trainer/friend himself, who was the first to be discovered for he had not even left the scene. It took the firefighters a half-hour to dig him out from underneath the pavilion debris and when they finally reached him, they weren’t sure whether it was a person or an animal that they were passing off to the ambulance crew. (A person, those are pants, an EMT had remarked, to which a firefighter replied, Have you been to this circus? They make the bears wear pants here.)
Of course, the idea of terrorism was floated around, and for a time the accident scene was alive with serious-minded agents and explosive ordinance technicians who checked every blade of grass for traces of explosives and flammable material, but nothing was found. As fall decayed into winter it came to be generally accepted by the authorities that no terrorist was so stupidly worthless as to target a low-level circus located outside a city that no one ever visited. Even the most militant of animal rights groups, those that used violence to free animals from the oppression of circuses and factory farms and the like, were thoroughly investigated and found not to be at fault. It seemed, in the end, to be an act of God, much the way insurance companies view hurricanes and earthquakes and flooding.
Even after the case had been relegated to that absolute dustbin of police work, the cold case files, the lack of any trace of the animals and the little girl continued to bother some investigators. Spontaneous combustion, a weak theory that not a single investigator believed, was given out as the unofficial cause, although the public was equally dissatisfied with that notion and conspiratorial answers to the question of the exploding circus, one more absurd than the next, began to proliferate across the Internet. Absolutely no one believed Nina’s mother, whose desperate insistence that her daughter and the tiger, along with the bears, the giraffes, the horses, the lion, and the seals, had levitated to the heavens was considered the rantings of a bereaved parent and therefore unfit for any sound consideration. Nina’s mother discovered, too late, that when you do not use your voice you lose it, and for the rest of her life she mournfully looked out windows and up into the sky for her daughter and the tiger, hoping to see them set down to earth like a plane coming in for a gentle and planned landing.
Ironically enough, I was the only one who believed her—me, with my atheist’s logic and my journalist’s skepticism—and I believed her simply because her story was so very absurd. It had surpassed the wasteland of lying and gone so far beyond the boundaries of fantasy that it therefore had to exist within the world of truth. Of all the times I interviewed her, the story never changed: Nina, the animals, the levitation. One day shortly before her death, after she had fallen down the rungs of the economic ladder and landed on public assistance, that paltry waystation that comes right before the gutter, I spoke to her again about that day at the circus. We were sitting in the one-room apartment she occupied, a kitchenette flush against one wall, the bed against the other, the table in between, a sour smell over everything thanks to the communal bathroom that was her immediate neighbor. A picture of Nina occupied a place of honor on a small shelf and, as stalwart as a soldier next to it, I caught a glimpse of Petrograd’s Illustrated History of the Animal Kingdom, the spine cracked and coming apart.
“May I see it?” I asked.
Nina’s mother gestured nonchalantly. She looked much older than she actually was, stooped and pale, with the loose skin of a turkey and the grief of a queen, and I believed in that moment that not even the penitents of the Bible, with their leprosy and parasitic devotion to Christ, had ever possessed as much unremitting despair as she displayed. As I crossed the squalid room to retrieve the book, I thought what a sin it was that the maelstrom that had taken away Nina and the animals had not been powerful enough to take her away as well, for there are some people who simply should not be left behind, not because they deserve the rapture but because they do not deserve its aftermath.
I pulled the book off the shelf and it fell open in my hands, the spine cracking audibly. Much of the fantastic gold leaf was gone from the pages, the edges of which were soiled and ripped, and the beautiful illustrations were faded. But even so I could see its appeal to a child. The animals on its pages had been rendered real through lavishly illustrated pictures and detailed text; there was a level of artistry to it that one simply did not find anymore, in literature or anywhere else. I knew the book was no longer in print and, even in its decrepit state, collectors would have paid such a handsome sum for it that it probably would have lifted Nina’s mother out of poverty, but I also knew that not even for a kingdom would she have parted with it. It was the last remnant of her daughter, and to suggest such a sale would have been on par with the Devil tempting Christ with Jerusalem: offensive and ill-advised.
“It was her favorite book,” Nina’s mother whispered as I brought the ancient volume to the table and set it gently down, where it splayed open forlornly, as though it was a surgical patient.
“Yes,” I said, delicately turning the pages until I got to the section about the tiger. The animal’s fearsome face and faded stripes stared up at me with a harshness that rendered me so uncomfortable that I was compelled to turn the page. When I did, I was surprised to find a fresh page, crisp and white and as new as though it had just come from the printer, immediately after it.
Done in bright colors and still smelling of ink, the illustration that took up nearly the entire page was of a girl and a tiger romping through a dense green forest. The tiger was running slightly ahead, its lean muscles and legs working, its tail stretched out behind it, while the girl was running almost parallel, with her hair streaming out behind her. The forest was spectacular, lush and emerald-colored, with bright orange and red flowers unfurling from the undergrowth and intricate vines curving around the trees. The details were spectacular, the colors luminous, and the girl and the tiger so exquisitely rendered that they seemed to be moving: the girl’s hair and dress in particular gave the appearance of being ruffled by some unseen wind. Just beyond them, scattered throughout the forest, slinking behind trees, peeping out from the undergrowth and perched on branches, were the other animals of the forest. They were watching the girl and the tiger with enormous eyes that glittered with a brilliant lifelike quality.
“Have you seen this?” I asked Nina’s mother in astonishment, turning the book so that she could see the proffered page.
“It was her favorite book,” she whispered.
“But I’ve examined other editions of this book in the past, and this page isn’t featured in any of them,” I protested. “Where did you get this?”
“Tiger,” whispered Nina’s mother.
I looked at her across the table, this fading woman consumed by grief, catatonic from the weight of the years and others’ disbelief, her entire being wrapped up in Nina and the tiger. I turned the book back towards me and I saw new flowers blooming amongst the vegetation, their petals unfurling like fans; I saw the light changing colors as it slanted through the trees; I saw the rivers from which the tiger drank running silver through the forest, and I could almost hear their eternal gurgling. I could see Nina and the tiger, rendered so exquisitely on paper, ineffectual no more, powerful in the extreme, running through the forest in an eternity of freedom. We could all be so free, I thought suddenly, were we not occupied in the infernal business of chaining ourselves.
“Tiger,” whispered Nina’s mother again, and it was then that I realized: rage can create, and so can love, and so can grief. As Nina’s mother whispered, flowers continued to bloom on the page, the animals blinked, and Nina and the tiger, still running, did something extraordinary: they turned their faces towards me, the tiger’s long whiskers splendid and white against its brilliant orange fur, Nina as elegant as Botticelli’s Venus, her expression sublime and, I suspected, mildly indignant at being disturbed. Then the leaves on the trees began to move, and the branches to rustle; from somewhere beyond me the wind began to pick up, building rapidly into the start of a furious howl. I closed the book just as the windows of the apartment, clear and sparkling, began to shake in their frames.
