The Midnight Zoo Read online

  When they lifted Uncle Marin by his wrists and ankles, his head slung back and Andrej saw his face and thought of all the things he would now never know.

  The soldier with the stars on his shoulders led the clan out of the clearing. The Rom trudged after him meekly, as if they wished to be led. Their clothes were bright and rumpled, as they always were. The women had multicolored scarves in their hair, the men wore striped and spotty bandannas round their throats. Some wore leather sandals, but most walked in bare feet. The men carrying the shovels and the men carrying the bodies walked slightly apart from their relatives, closer to the soldiers who sauntered alongside.

  Soldiers and Rom headed into the trees on the far side of the clearing. The Rom went in silence, but one of the soldiers was whistling. Andrej sat up on his knees to watch them leave. And saw his mother, at the end of the line, turn back to look into the woods. In a loud fearless voice she called, “Run, children!”

  The strong soldier, trailing casually, didn’t understand Romany, and thought she was shouting at him. He made a grouching noise and shoved her onward with the heel of his hand.

  Andrej stayed in the hollow until his clan and the soldiers had disappeared between the trees and the forest had swallowed them whole, and the horses had lowered their heads to graze and a bird came to peck at a plate. Then he did as his mother told him, and ran.

  The lioness and wolf and bear were lying down in their enclosures, their flanks gently lifting and falling. The monkey, sated to sickness on jam, had retreated to the rear of its cage. The eagle was invisible in its corner; no sound came from the seal’s watery cell. The kangaroo dozed on the prop of its tail. The llama and the chamois had folded their legs and looked like rocks in the dark. The boar’s cage was overcast with shadow. The moon, held up in Night’s great hand, shone lustrously.

  Andrej stood to stretch his limbs. He didn’t feel tired at all. He and Tomas and Wilma had been walking for weeks, and usually, when they slept, it was like laborers, heavily as soil. They’d wake in a barn or a field and it would be a waking like a rising from the dead. But, perhaps because of the radiance of the moon, tonight he was not tired.

  The chamois said, “I don’t understand. Your clan wasn’t stealing the soldiers’ territory. You weren’t eating their food. You weren’t challenging or threatening them. So why did they attack?”

  Andrej answered honestly, “I don’t know.” In the time they’d spent walking he had pondered countless photographs of missing people tacked to lampposts and brick walls, hoping he might discover in their collective images something that would explain why these people, like his people, should have disappeared. The faces were thin and fat, rich and poor, elderly and youthful, male and female. They smiled or stared out from the photographs, all different, all exactly the same. Studying the images made Andrej more confused, rather than less so. None of them explained why the invaders did what they did. His father said this wasn’t a Rom war, but Andrej couldn’t believe that it was, instead, the war of these boys, these young women, these old men.

  “They called us crows.” Tomas, bleary-eyed, raised his head from his knees. “They laughed at our caravans and our statue. They yelled at us. But we weren’t doing anything to them. They’d never even met us. They killed my uncle without speaking one word to him. But he was a good man. He used to find coins behind my ear. If they’d talked to him, they would have seen.”

  “It’s no use trying to make sense of what people do.” The llama sighed. “Who’d think anyone would want to look at a monkey? Yet people used to come to see him every day.”

  The wolf spoke up. “I’ve told you the reason for everything that happens. Somebody decides that they will have their way.”

  “. . . And it has to happen, even if their way is wrong?”

  “If they are mightier than you, yes.”

  Tomas returned his chin to his knees to mull this over. His thoughts crinkled his nose. “I don’t think that’s right, wolf. What if you’re smarter than they are? Sometimes you can win by being smarter than everyone else.”

  “I am smarter than you,” replied the wolf, “yet I am locked in this cage, and you’re walking around free.”

  Tomas grinned. “That must mean I’m mightier than you!”

  “Well,” said the wolf, “we could decide that, if you let me out.”

  Without lifting her head the lioness asked, “So how have you come from the woods to a zoo? Have you run all the way, Andrej?”

  Andrej turned to her, smiling faintly. “No. I only ran back to Tomas. After that, we walked.”

  His brother had been shuddering with fear when he found him, the baby being shaken in his arms. He had looked saucer-eyed at Andrej and tried to speak, but no words had come out, just a distraught puff of air. Andrej, not knowing what to do, had put his arms around him, muffling his sobs against his chest. The birch trees stood close, waxen and crooked and beautiful. Lively birds hopped from branch to rustling branch. In the fork of a tree, the soccer ball waited.

  Then Wilma began to cry. She started off mildly and quickly worked up to a howl. Terrified the soldiers would hear her and return, Andrej had pulled Tomas to his feet. “Get up, Tomy. We have to go.” Tomas had been sluggish and reluctant. “What if Mama comes back? She won’t know where to find us.”

  “She told us to run,” said Andrej. “She meant run away.”

  They’d picked a path downhill through the woods until they were a good distance from the clearing. Tomas found a nest of mossy boulders and rotten tree limbs, and they waited in its moist cradle for hours. Mosquitoes came for them and needled their flesh. Dirt caked their fingers and toes. A woodpecker tapped out an argument with a neighbor. Tomas and the baby drifted in and out of sleep. Andrej stayed awake listening to far-off comings and goings: the thrum of lorries and motorbikes, the tat-tat of guns fired randomly, the droning of an airplane. The sky stayed blue all afternoon, smoke-streaked to match the children’s smudged faces. Thoughts of his mother and father dipped through Andrej’s mind like doves coming down to drink. He refused to think about Marin. It was important that he should not cry.

  Tomas’s eyes dragged open. “I’m hungry.”

  Andrej had already decided what to do. “Stay here. I’m going back to the clearing. There might be food there. I’ll be back soon, I promise.”

  His brother nodded druggedly, too exhausted to protest. Trusting too, Andrej realized: Tomas had made the decision to trust his brother with his life. The burden weighed Andrej down immediately. “Take care of Wilma,” he said, so it was fair.

  It was a long steep climb back through the forest. Sometimes he scrambled on hands and knees. He remembered their cart horse, Flower, snorting as she’d pulled the caravan along the road that led to the clearing. Andrej and his father had climbed down and walked so she would have less of a load to pull. It had happened only that morning, but seemed something recalled from when Andrej was small.

  Flower wasn’t in the clearing; none of the horses were. The ropes that had hobbled them were lying severed in the grass. The caravans had been halfheartedly torched and stood listing on charred wheels or collapsed onto their axles, their bowed ribs showing through ragged canvas. The Rom’s goods were scattered about — frying pans, cups and plates, paintbrushes, strings of beads, hair combs, farrier tools, dented buckets, wooden toys — some broken and soiled, some safe and whole. The roast lambs had vanished from the spits, but chunks of white chicken remained. The grass underfoot was knotted and trampled. There was a smell of smoke and scorched wool.

  Andrej stood amid the wreckage, the last of the day’s sunshine beaming on his head and the birds chirping to one another, feeling as if his life had slipped off him like a coat and that his heart was exposed to the air.

  The statue of Black Sarah lay in a pyre of coals; Andrej pawed her onto the grass and rolled her around to cool her. The lower half of her body was burned and broke away in chunks, which he swept together into a pyramid and tried to clean with the
palms of his hands. Part of him watched himself in bemusement, aware he was doing something useless, knowing he’d deliberately lost track of what he should be doing. “Help me, Sarah,” he whispered, and his voice sounded odd, watery. Something glimmered in the corner of his eye, and the statue slipped from his mind. The glimmering was Marin’s blood puddled on the earth. Andrej walked close enough for his toes to touch it. The blood was not red, but a shade of ruby-black. It was not wet, but leathery, nearly dry. Andrej saw a dim reflection of himself shift across it.

  “He is dead.” He told the birds that Marin was dead. They flitted, full of life, between the branches. He asked, “Where has everyone gone?”

  The forest showed no sign that the clan had ever passed through it. Andrej wandered among the trees, his bare arms going to gooseflesh as he moved away from the reach of the sun and into the verdant shadows. The undergrowth compressed beneath his feet with ancient sighs. His fingertips skimmed saplings, twiggy branches, grizzled catkins, flimsy leaves.

  He walked so deeply into the woods that the clearing was smothered from view and the sky crisscrossed by pearly branches before he realized that he knew what he was looking for, and that, if he kept walking, he would find it.

  The soldiers had driven their prisoners into wilderness. They hadn’t taken them down a road or a trail because it didn’t matter where they were going, they weren’t going somewhere or anywhere. They were going to a place that was nowhere.

  Andrej stopped, and his hands floated down to rest on the frail peak of a birch yearling. In every direction gaped silence. The trees clustered round him like sad narrow ghosts. He rocked on his toes, said soft words to himself. He was empty and helpless and afraid, a statue of a boy thrown into the sea or left behind to be swallowed by the desert.

  It was the thought of Tomas and Wilma that got him moving again. They would be hungry and fretful. But the strange thing was that Andrej suddenly craved to return to them. He needed to see his brother and sister with a desperation that sang. He turned on his heels and ran.

  In the clearing he moved quickly, ducking from caravan to caravan salvaging anything he could find that seemed useful. He found tins of beef that the soldiers had overlooked, and a net bag of apples and beans. He found a pan of water in which stood a jug of still-fresh cream. He found coats and boots that would fit boys, and the necessities of babies. In secret compartments in each caravan, he found money. He found a keen folding knife, and wares he might trade, bangles and earrings and hat pins. He packed two sacks until he had as much as he could carry. He gave no thought to those who had owned what he found. He hid the money carefully in the packs. He dressed himself in warm clean clothes and shoes. Lastly he gathered the chicken from the spits and the bread from the dirt, and started down the hill.

  Passing the kite, which lay in the grass, Andrej knew with an abrupt and unquestionable certainty that it was the kite which had brought the soldiers to the clearing. From a long way off it would have been visible, weaving brilliant as a beacon above the trees. In the nights to come, he would dream of kites lifting him into the sky.

  Tomas thought they should wait and wait, because the alternatives seemed difficult and draining and something they might regret; but by the next morning Andrej had chivvied him into walking. They needed water, and milk for Wilma, and they wouldn’t get it in these woods which had already proved how unsafe they could be. “Besides,” said Andrej cajolingly, “if we walk we might find someone. We might find Papa.” He didn’t ask if Tomas believed this could happen, and Tomas never mentioned the possibility again.

  They were accustomed to traveling, and perhaps this made easier the many days and weeks that followed. All their lives had been lived on the road, and it was natural and expected that each morning should bring something new. The road itself was as it had always been: either wide and winding and cut from the earth, or long and cramped and lined with red bricks. On either side of it spread fields sprouting green crops, the farms interrupted occasionally by small farmhouses and big barns and villages that were hardly more than a handful of timber homes. In some places it was easy to believe that the war was something they’d imagined: women and children strolled about doing chores, men smoked pipes out of open windows, puppies romped from doorways to greet them, and everything seemed usual, unchanged. In other places, however, where enemy had clashed with enemy, the war had left great claw marks on the land, and these places were unspeakably awful. Fields stretched smoldering and smoky to the horizon, coils of barbed wire tangling across them, every tree cut down. Dead cows lay in oily puddles, bloated taut and huge; horses sagged killed in their traces, their carts shattered behind them. Bridges were drowned, streets were torn up, houses were on fire and spilling gizzards of bedheads, kitchen tables, bathtubs, typewriters. The air was hazy, smelling of metal and grease and of something grayer and meaner too. One morning, in a village larger than many, they saw people lying higgledy-piggledy, their arms and legs bent in ways that reminded Tomas of puppets and Andrej, chokingly, of Uncle Marin. Their mortal wounds made the children look away to the piles of sandbags, the raided shop fronts, the fountain with its broken stone bowl. In another town, where mattresses had been chunked against windows and walls, they found an abandoned antitank gun and played on it for most of the afternoon. The gun was, the brothers agreed, the best thing they’d ever seen.

  They rarely stopped anywhere for longer than a few hours or a night. They rested when footsore or when Wilma was riled. Andrej didn’t know where they were going — he did not think it mattered. When they’d lived in the caravan they had gone where the road took them, and this was what they did now, choosing the path that seemed to promise the best prospects for food or solitude or sunshine. Andrej tried not to think about what was behind them and what waited ahead, sensing the crippling error in dwelling too closely on their situation. It was better just to march on as if this was exactly what two boys and a baby were supposed to be doing. Andrej carried the heavier pack while Tomas bore the smaller one, into which they had tucked Wilma. At first she had argued forcibly against the sack; gradually she came to like it. They spent money when they had to, mostly on fresh milk for the baby, but usually they scrounged for what they could find in deserted houses and unguarded fields. Sometimes they traded sparkly trinkets to the people who still had use for such gewgaws; they met beggars, but without the protection of an adult it felt unwise for them to likewise beg. They filled their flask from pumps in towns, and bathed in marshy lakes while geese flew overhead honking opinions forthrightly. They crossed the paths of other Rom occasionally, but these were unrelated strangers and took only the briefest notice of the children. Andrej saw no reason to ask for their help: so far, he thought they were faring well enough on their own. They never spoke to the gadje unless they had to, and the gadje rarely spoke back except to hustle them along. There were many refugees traveling the roads, some driving carts or pushing them, others on coughing tractors or in open cars, some riding squeaky bikes or trudging horses, others stumbling along on their feet. Some were injured, some seemed numbed, all were troubled and aggrieved. In its destructive push across the country, the war had taken from these luckless souls the mainstays of their lives, their homes and work and neighborhoods, their intentions for a future. Amid this shifting, sunken-eyed crowd, three scrappy Gypsy children were of no interest at all.

  But one day, an old woman tried to take Wilma. She plucked the infant from Andrej’s arms saying, “You can’t take care of her.” Andrej froze with astonishment: it was Tomas who shrieked like a wildcat and leapt like one too, fastening himself to the crone’s shoulder. “Our baby!” he’d wailed, fists flying like cat paws. Andrej had unfrozen to snatch his startled sister from her abductor, who slapped at Tomas until he dropped off like a tick. “Keep her then!” the ghastly stranger had shouted. “The soldiers will take care of her! They’re looking for people like you. Dirty little leeches. Filthy nasty robbers. Vermin, you are! Heathen vermin! The sooner they get rid of the
likes of you, the better off we’ll be.”

  The confrontation spooked Andrej so badly that he found shelter in a church loft and stayed there for two days. The children were used to being called names — despising the Rom was a timeless amusement of the gadje. Andrej had once asked his father why this was so, and his father explained, “People jeer at those who are different from themselves — those who look different, or think differently, or live in different ways. They do it because difference is a frightening thing — sometimes, an enviable thing.” Was this what the woman had felt — fear of them, and envy? Andrej couldn’t believe it. It had been something much worse than that. Something like a monster finally escaped from chains.

  Tomas, recovering from his initial shock, chose to pretend the old woman was Baba Jaga, the legendary flying witch who stole children, and occasionally ate them. “Get back to your horrible house, Baba Jaga!” he cried, chopping at the dusty sunlight that shafted through the church windows. The attack he’d launched upon the crone was the first real stance he had taken against the will of the world. Victory made him arrogant for days, as well as somewhat awed.

  To Andrej, however, the encounter brought an understanding that they were in a special kind of danger, a peril far more fearsome than any crackle-faced hag from a fairy tale. He thought over and over on what the old woman had said. The sooner they get rid of the likes of you. This was what the soldiers in the clearing had been doing: getting rid of the likes of the clan. For some unfathomable reason, the invading army felt such . . . hatred . . . of the Rom that they would kill a man like Marin as readily as they’d swat a bug. And some of the gadje who’d always lived in this land, shoulder to shoulder with the Rom — people like the Baba Jaga woman and who knew how many more — were eager to have it done.