The Midnight Zoo Read online

  Andrej rocked his sister, watching the seal swim. When its whiskery snout unexpectedly broke the surface he nearly cried out, thinking it meant to leap onto land. Instead it took a wheezy breath and resumed its flight back and forth. Its ceaseless glide to nowhere was a piteous thing to witness. Andrej had never seen a living being so stifled, so pointlessly driven. “Do you think it remembers the ocean?”

  It would hurt less if it had forgotten, but the bear replied, “Of course it remembers. Its mind is filled with the crashing of waves. The ocean called out to it from the moment it was born. Its ancestors swam there; its kin swim there today. It remembers the ocean because its blood and bones cannot forget it. Somewhere out there, there’s a gap in the water, a place which is hollow because the seal isn’t there.”

  Andrej thought about it — the notion that the world was riddled with holes where certain people and animals were meant to be, but weren’t. “I’ve never seen the ocean,” he mused. “I don’t know what it looks like. Do you?”

  “No I do not,” the bear admitted.

  Andrej nodded. Uncle Marin would have known. He rested his cheek atop Wilma’s warm head. “Is there a gap in the mountains somewhere?” he asked.

  “Of course,” the bear replied. “I’m not there.”

  Andrej considered the great brown beast slouched behind the bars, its broad stump of grizzly muzzle and its long warlock claws. The stone had flattened the bear’s coat smooth in places so the hair lay against its body like rich soil. “How did you come here?” he asked.

  The bear drew a breath and heaved it out as a sigh. “You can’t catch a grown bear and put it in a cage. You can only take a cub from a den. But before you do that, you must deal with the cub’s mother, who’ll fight to protect her infant without any care for her own life.”

  Andrej said nothing. He remembered the last words he’d heard his own mother speak: Run, children. And he had done as she’d commanded, and run. He had run with the memory of his mother standing straight and tall, her dark hair riding the breeze as she’d turned to look for him. When, hours later, he had crept through the trees, the clearing where he’d last seen her was empty but for the burned-out shells of caravans, and boot prints where soldiers had been.

  Tomas, meanwhile, had returned to the cache of food, piling into the hammock of his shirtfront the biscuits, apple and cheese. The llama, which was quite tame, had lifted the apple out of his palm and crunched it wetly with peg teeth. Tomas didn’t know what a kangaroo ate, and the marsupial didn’t seem to know either; so the boy had broken some biscuits and scattered them inside the cage, and the kangaroo, after much timid sniffing, hopped forward to nibble at the shards. “Funny little creature,” Tomas whispered; privately, he liked the kangaroo best. He came to the bear’s cage now, and reached between the bars to place the cheese on the stone floor. “You might be hungry later,” he said. Sidling close to his brother, he muttered, “What does an eagle eat, Andrej?”

  “Bunnies,” said the wolf, licking liverwurst from its chops.

  “Baby chamois!” said the monkey, its face rosy with raspberry jam.

  Andrej said, “Why don’t you ask the eagle?”

  “It won’t answer,” warned the bear.

  “Why not?” Tomas frowned. “Can’t it speak?”

  “It’s not that it can’t, only that it won’t. No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can’t answer anything except I cannot. And those words are so painful to its feathery spirit that a caged bird prefers to say nothing.”

  The llama was cleaning its face with a fastidious tongue; pausing in its ablutions it said, “That eagle has been in that cage since the day it hatched from an egg. I remember when it was hardly bigger than a mouse, the ugly tiny thing; the zoo’s owner used to feed it mashed lizard from a spoon. It’s never flown through the sky, that eagle, never once in its life. Yet it broods and mopes over something that’s never been. It is a very silly bird.”

  The bear didn’t comment, only raised its eyes to the night. Andrej followed its gaze into the sky. “Can you see it?” asked the bear.

  “I can,” said Andrej: an empty place amongst the stars, where the eagle should have been.

  “I thank you for the cheese,” said the bear.

  Andrej told his brother, “Give the eagle some pieces of ham.”

  “And what about the seal?”

  “Don’t worry about that seal.” The wolf had lain down to groom its legs and didn’t look up from the work. “That seal isn’t hungry. It doesn’t think about food. It thinks about nothing except the empty hole in the sea.”

  “It wants to fill its place!” yapped the monkey.

  “Alice,” breathed the kangaroo.

  Wilma whined, and Andrej stroked her head. He looked at the circle of cages and at the inmates inside them. He thought of the life he had lived with his family in the caravan, roaming wherever they’d wanted to go. “The whole world is your home, Andrej,” his father had told him. “We Rom are not like the gadje, these people you see building houses and hoeing fields and fencing off what they claim is theirs. We Rom are closer to the animals than to people like that. Unburdened, unowned, and free.” It was something to be proud of, the state of being free. It was something animals had that humans envied and respected. And yet . . . these zoo animals weren’t free. Dust was more free than they were. The gnats that landed on the surface of the water had more liberty than the seal that swam through it. The iron bars stole away from them the one great gift they were born to have. In sudden frustration and anguish Andrej said, “It’s not right to take a bear from the mountains or an eagle from the sky or a monkey from the jungle or a seal from the sea. It’s not right to lock you in cages where there’s no grass or rivers or trees. It’s a terrible thing to do. The owner of this zoo must be a wicked man!”

  The llama gasped. “Don’t say that! The owner is good! When the owner was here, we weren’t hungry. We weren’t lonely. I wasn’t confused. There were no bombs dropping out of rumble-things. All those bad things only started happening after he went away. So he must be a good man, you see? You see, you stupid child?”

  “The owner is not a wicked man,” the bear agreed. “He is just a man, with the peculiar ways of man. You are a mysterious animal, you know. A bear does what a bear must do to keep itself alive. But a man does many things that he has no need to do.”

  Andrej thought about the day the soldiers found the caravans in the clearing and admitted, “Yes, that’s true.” He looked into the moonlight that lay everywhere over the zoo, wishing he had water to give the animals or something more to feed them, wishing he had . . . the keys. One cage was still cloaked in deathly dark and silence, a silence that was lurking, a darkness like the edge of a disquieting dream. “What about the boar?” he asked. “Is it hungry? Will it eat biscuits? Is it even inside that pen? Or has it gone to fill an empty place in the forest?”

  “Who knows?” said the chamois. “Who knows anything about that boar?”

  “That boar is mysterious, as men are,” said the bear.

  “Find out!” said the monkey. “Put a hand in the cage — find out!”

  The wolf lifted its nose. “I can smell that little pig. His tusks are close —”

  “Find out!” the monkey goaded deliriously.

  “— but he has been silent for a long time, since before the bombs began to fall — almost as if he knew the bombs were coming, and didn’t want to spoil the surprise. That would be typical of him.”

  “Typical of him to find a way out of his cage,” added the chamois, “but to keep it a secret like a trove of buried acorns. An unpleasant and petty little hog, that one.”

  “He was charming as a piglet,” said the llama. “Remember how darling? But he grew into a bore. Furious and furious and furiouser, always sniffling and snuffling and tearing at the bars.”

  “One wouldn’t be surprised i
f he’d chewed his way through them,” concluded the chamois. “He’s always in such a frenzy.”

  The brothers gazed dubiously into the blackness that crouched inside the boar’s cage. Andrej remembered what Marin had told him about wild pigs, how cunning they could be, how treacherous their tusks. The tusks could cut a hunting dog to pieces, or open a man’s thigh to the bone. Andrej closed his eyes and concentrated. Marin had said pigs were clever and vicious, but would he have agreed they were smart enough to escape a locked cage, fierce enough to cut through iron? Marin, he thought: Marin. Opening his eyes, Andrej said sternly, “You’re teasing us.”

  The animals did not reply. The chamois flicked its bob of tail, the llama smacked its lips. The wolf craned forward to sniff the stone where the liverwurst had been. “Where — where — where would it be?” asked Tomas with a splutter. “If the boar has escaped, where will he be?”

  “Out of his cage,” said the llama.

  “That boar likes bombs,” said the kangaroo.

  “And hates everything else,” said the chamois.

  “Especially boys,” said the wolf.

  “It hasn’t escaped.” Andrej raised his chin. “It couldn’t have escaped. If it was in its cage when the zoo’s owner left, and no one has opened the cage since then, then it must be in its cage. They’re teasing us, Tom.”

  “Yes, teasing.” Tomas smiled tepidly.

  “Give the boar the rest of the biscuits.”

  “Yes, he’ll like biscuits,” Tomas agreed. But he tugged at his brother’s sleeve and mumbled, “Come with me?”

  The lioness lifted her head to watch them cross the grass. They walked beneath the branches of the maple, past the bench and the mermaid and the packs with their strewn innards. Approaching the boar’s cage they saw the bars harden out of the shadows, saw the sign that said KANEC. Andrej knew that the animals were teasing, that logically the boar could not be loose: but his certainty suddenly revealed itself to have a dank side, like a branch that has lain many months in a puddle, and he paused while moonlight still touched his face, abruptly less sure. “The sign wouldn’t say there was a boar in the cage if the boar wasn’t in the cage,” whispered Tomas, but Andrej knew this was a child’s reasoning, impossible to rely upon. He knew, also, what his father and uncle would expect him to do — what all the animals were watching in expectation of him doing. He must tell Tomas to stop here, he must go forward into the darkness bravely and alone because the strong are duty-bound to protect the weak, it is a law of nature and thus of rightness: and in that instant Andrej understood that the soldiers and their leader were not obeying this law, and that any victory they achieved wouldn’t last because nature’s law would not be overthrown. He wished Alice were here so he could tell her this inevitable truth he’d unexpectedly grasped: that the invaders couldn’t win the war, she didn’t have to blow up a train, there was no need to leave her animals — she had only to wait for nature to right itself, as it always must and will. Bunching the baby inside the shawl he passed her into his brother’s arms, and took from Tomas the biscuits in their crumpled paper bag. “Stay here, where it’s light,” he ordered; then lowered his head to whisper. “If something happens, you run. Don’t try to help me. Hold on to Wilma, and run.” And then, before Tomas could answer, he stepped forward into the blackness and walked up to the wild boar’s cage.

  Scanning the darkness inside the enclosure, Andrej saw nothing except shadows overlapping one another, and a few leaves that had blown between the bars. Such pitchness could conceal a troll. He listened, but heard nothing — no grunt, no scuttling of hooves. Such silence could be the last thing one ever heard. “Boar?” he said. The cage reeked potently of hog, but that didn’t mean the boar was in the pen. It might be hunched at Andrej’s ankles, rankled and with razor tusks. Andrej’s heart thudded; Marin, he called, but felt only emptiness, remembered only that attempts to placate an avowed enemy usually fail, as the village had discovered when it gave away its lions. Nevertheless he stood his ground: “I’ve brought you some biscuits, in case you’re hungry,” he informed the invisible animal. His blood sang as he reached between the bars to lay the offering on the stone. His wrist looked thin and breakable at the end of his sleeve. Withdrawing his hand, he wiped crumbs from his fingers. “I hope you like them,” he told the unshifting blackness. Then he backed away swiftly, but not so swiftly as to seem afraid, into the welcoming moonlight. Tomas, squeezing Wilma, hurried to his side.

  “I told you!” Unscathed and standing in the light, Andrej rode a wave of triumph. “I told you it would be all right!” He wished his father had been here to witness his courage, his mother to approve of his kindness. He was once again convinced that the boar wasn’t free . . . but he had no desire to repeat the experience, and when Tomas said, “The eagle and the lioness haven’t had dinner yet,” he was pleased to cross the grass to where the lioness lived, where a boar might be afraid to go.

  The ham heaved out a repellent odor when they peeled away the tea towel. Andrej stripped off a handful of the stringy pink meat and upended it into the eagle’s cage. The big mahogany bird dropped from its perch to step boldly toward them, talons clicking on stone. Its stately head was like a butcher’s hook, its wings a heavy saddle astride its body. They saw the intricate mosaic of its quills, the rich butter-yellow of its legs and beak, the vitality in its crimson eyes. “Beautiful bird, won’t you talk?” Tomas asked, but the eagle would not.

  Lastly they approached the lioness’s cage, Tomas carrying Wilma, Andrej bearing the ham bone. The lioness rushed to the bars and swiped her paws against them, snarling impatiently. Andrej fed the bone partway through the bars, and she gripped it with her ivory teeth and yanked it into the cage. As it pulled from his hands he felt her force, the force of an avalanche or a hurricane. She consumed the ham in mere moments, her incisors carving the meat from the bone, pinning the bone between her paws and effortlessly eating that too, the bone cracking and splintering horribly. When the meal was as gone as if it had never been, she lay on the stone licking her teeth and considering the children. She gazed particularly at the baby: after much licking and gazing and considering she asked, “Is your infant warm?”

  Andrej glanced at Wilma. The shawl was woolen; the night wasn’t too cold. “I think so.”

  “She looks pale,” said the lioness. “Bring her closer. Let me see.”

  Andrej took Wilma from Tomas’s arms, came forward and held his sister up to the bars. The baby, half asleep, squirmed like a grub in the shawl. The lioness stared; then, in a flash, she was on her feet and speeding toward the bars. Andrej snatched Wilma to him and leapt backward, but the lioness didn’t seem thwarted or insulted: “That’s better,” she said. “Keep her near your body. She will be warmed by the heat of your blood.”

  Andrej’s heart was hammering with shock. He could hardly find words to say. “I know that,” he managed to answer. “My mother told me.”

  “Your mother? You remember her?”

  Andrej nodded shallowly. “Yes, we remember her.”

  “I do not think my cubs will remember me,” said the lioness, “when they are grown, as you are.”

  Tomas, who had shrunk behind his brother, emerged and spoke up timorously. “I’m sad that the lion and your cubs were taken away because of the war.”

  The lioness’s eyes turned toward him. Her head was a magnificent thing, like the head of the sun. Her long willowy body was supple and strong as a river. “Because of your war,” she said.

  “It’s not our war,” Andrej said quickly. “It’s the gadje’s war.”

  “It makes me sad,” said Tomas.

  The lioness’s lime gaze shuttered away from him, returning to the baby. “Three Rom children rambling alone through the night,” she mused. “I think you must have lost a family too.”

  Tomas drew a wobbly breath and said again, “I’m sad.”

  What Andrej remembered perfectly was the scarlet kite. Someone had brought it to the celebration and all
afternoon it zipped and soared above the trees, although down in the clearing there was almost no breeze and the women had to flap their aprons to encourage the cooking flames to bite. Andrej played soccer with the other boys, most of whom were his cousins or in some other way related. The weather was pleasantly warm that day and the boys played without shirts, and in the rough-and-tumble their olive-skinned chests became scuffed with grass and dirt. Whenever Andrej paused to catch his breath, he looked up in search of the kite. Its canopy was cardinal-red, its tail a string of white feathers. He remembered seeing his cousin Mirabela running in circles with the kite jolting and swooping above her and a gaggle of the younger children dashing along behind her, begging to hold on to the string. Tomas was not among them, nor was he playing soccer. He could be shy with people he didn’t know well, and whenever there was a gathering he preferred to stay close to his mother.

  Andrej wished Uncle Marin and some of the other men would join the game. It was always more fun when the grown-ups played too. They kicked the ball cleverly, and with such focused strength; when they scored a goal, they turned cartwheels and ran around whooping. They didn’t take the match seriously, as some of the boys did. That afternoon, however, the men stood talking around the horses, subdued and shadow-eyed.

  It was the Feast Day of Black Sarah. She was the Gypsies’ patron saint. Being their patron saint meant Sarah listened more closely to Rom prayers than to those of anybody else. Praying directly to her increased the chances of a prayer coming true. That day Andrej was praying for a soccer ball of his own. He’d been making necklaces out of painted beads and trying to sell them in towns that they passed, but lately it seemed nobody had need of a necklace, nor patience for the Gypsy boy peddling them. He’d never get a soccer ball without the aid of prayer.