Tiger tales: Two mysteries in The Tiger's Wife

There are two mysteries (at least) in Tea Obreht's novel "The Tiger's Wife": first, why is it that the narrator's (Natalia's) grandfather goes off to a clinic in a remote village of the neighboring Balkan state (Bosnia? Croatia? - Obreht is careful not to identify her narrative with precise geographical or cultural markers, though it's evident that she is writing about the Balkan wars and in particular about the tentative and tenuous peace after the war was resolve by treaty) to die a lonely death? Was he trying to help some patients or war victims? Was he trying to connect one last time with Natalia, who was on her way to deliver medicines to an orphanage relatively close by? Or is there some other reason why he would leave behind his family - who apparently didn't even know or notice that he was mortally ill with cancer? - to die unnoticed and alone? Natalia is expending a lot of energy trying to resolve this mystery - including, what happened to her grandfather's belongings after he died? Why was nothing shipped back home along with his body? The second mystery is: what do all these fables about a tiger roaming through the European landscape signify? The tiger apparently escaped from a city zoo during an air raid in World War II, and then headed north and settled in near a small village, where a deaf-mute butcher's wife began feeding the tiger slabs of pork and other meats. A group of men head off to the woods to kill the tiger, but the episode ends with one of the men shooting himself to death - in what seems to be a suicide, not an accident. I doubt Obreht expects us to take these tiger tales literally - but then what do they signify, as symbol or allegory? I expect the novel to draw these two strands together over the course of the second half, and I expect that the answer to one of the mysteries will be the answer to both.