General Jaruzelski at the Zoo
“Even a flounder takes sides.”
—Stanislaw J. Lec
MACIEK THE CHIMP SAW GENERAL JARUZELSKI coming down the gravel path that ran by his cage. There were two men with him. One was looking around nervously, as if he had lost something; the other was the zookeeper.
Maciek endured his hunger cramps, believing that if he performed well enough the visitors would give him a banana.
Maciek jumped up and down.
The general failed to notice.
Maciek did a backflip.
Still the general paid no attention. He seemed to be hiding behind his dark glasses.
Maciek leaped onto the bars and shook them.
The general stopped and smiled.
This was it! Maciek was sure that the bananas were close by; his cramps would soon end.
Maciek rattled the bars until his arms and shoulders hurt.
The zookeeper began to talk to the general.
Maciek’s eyes watered from the pains. He lay down and held his belly. There had been no bananas for so long now, and there would be no bananas again today.
“It’s been difficult for us lately, general,” the director of the zoo said softly. “I appreciate your stopping by to take notice of our problems.”
The general smiled at the diplomacy of the director’s words, but the truth was otherwise. Nostalgia for the zoological pleasures of his boyhood had prodded the general to come here during his lunch hour, nothing more.
“People can get along in the worst of times,” the youthful director continued politely, “but animals are unable to stand in long lines or take vitamins, or eat the variety of foods we do. This chimp’s digestion requires special oils from bananas. Cuban oranges have helped, but they’re not quite right. You see his pain. He hasn’t had a banana in three months. Of course, we could feed him easily if he were a human being.”
The general stepped up to the cage. It seemed that the chimp was watching him with unusual attention.
“What is it?” the director asked.
The chimp got up and came to the bars. Pain slipped through the general’s stomach, and he felt a craving for bananas. Suddenly he was gripping the bars from inside the cage. His muscles ached from the dampness. He peered into his own dark glasses and saw a shadowy chimp face staring back, baring its teeth.
He stumbled back from the bars into the arms of his security man.
“Maciek is in great pain,” the director said as the general steadied himself.
They walked on. People were feeding the elephants, the general noticed as he tried to shake off the delusion he had experienced at the cage. The biscuits, he saw, were the shortbread kind, expensive and hard to come by. These people had stood in long lines to buy them for the elephants. Why had the delusion come upon him? I must be a man of conscience, he told himself. Or I’m losing my mind.
“Even the smallest thing you could do for us,” the director said, “would help us save some of the animals.”
“You anticipate deaths?” the general asked, adjusting his glasses.
“Of course, without a doubt.”
General Jaruzelski recalled his private meeting with the university professors. They had made him feel guilty and sad, as the young zookeeper was doing more gently. They had not understood, in their inquisitorial fervor, that the Russians would invade their beloved Poland. It was a matter of camouflage, he had told them with tears in his eyes, to make the Soviets think we are like them, for as long as it took for Poles to become free within their own borders. The jealous, fearful bear had to be put to sleep, as the Czechs, Yugoslavs, and Hungarians were doing....
“The Bulgarians sent us some fruit for the animals,” the director was saying. “They didn’t even ask for payment in trade, and we’re grateful. But, you see, it’s got to be the right fruit—bananas for the chimps, raisins and nuts for the birds....”
“Raisins and nuts?” the general asked. The demand was familiar in its seeming extravagance.
The director shrugged shyly. “The grains we’re getting are not really for them. Our birds need special kinds of seeds. They develop rashes, lose feathers and coloration when they don’t have raisins and nuts. How can I do my job when I have to ignore facts of biology and diet?”
The general nodded and they walked on, followed by the security man. Even Polish animals were extravagant, a Russian would quip, needing exotic feed in keeping with the national character.
“There won’t be much I can do,” the director was saying, “when they start to die.”
It was a matter of doing the effective thing, the general told himself, and not what was popular or satisfying to old scores and hatreds. His own father had died at the hands of the Russians. Surely that personal loss makes me a credible Pole? The bloodbath could start again quickly, no doubt about it. What did they know, those who had never held responsible public office? Their emotional siege was making him hallucinate.
“I would like to call to your attention,” the director said more insistently, “that the problems of our zoos are widely reported in the Western media. American newsmen were here with video equipment, I’m sorry to report. They had the proper permits, of course.”
The general felt a moment of respect for the director. The fellow knew what to say to be heard. A responsible, conscientious young man, not at all like so many corrupt officials.
“Are you a Party member?” the general asked.
The zookeeper smiled. “Unfortunately, no, general. I’m a zoologist, not political.”
They never were, the general thought with a twinge of resentment. Like the animals, they couldn’t be political, even though they lived in a political situation. They cared more for their career specialties, even for the animals, than they did for Poland.
The biscuits were sweet, but there was little in them to make the elephant strong. The people who brought them had kind, pitying faces, but they also seemed to know the two-leggeds who hid food in the nearby buildings and seemed to want elephants to perish.
The elephant knew that dying-time was near, and that he would have to do it right here, with no privacy at all.
A face was looking at him. The hands held no biscuits. The eyes were great dark patches. The lips were pressed together.
The general wondered why he had liked zoos so much as a child. What had it been about the animals that had made his boyhood happy? That one might escape? Seeing danger contained? We’re surrounded by wild elephants, he thought. One false move and they’ll trample us to death. It will be a long time before the danger passes; elephants are big and sturdy, and take a long time to die....
“Can we count on your help, general?” the young director was saying.
I can’t move, the general thought, feeling elephantine.
“I’ll do my best,” he managed to say finally.
The director smiled gratefully, endearingly, in contrast to the stone-faced professors when he had spoken the same words to them. Nothing short of futile resistance against the Soviets would satisfy them—not his tears, not his acceptance of their just criticisms of the Party. They had grudgingly admitted his good intentions and personal honesty, but they would never support him in their hearts. They would never love him, but he would do what had to be done to avoid bloodshed.
The universities were also zoos of a kind, where the wiser animals had to teach the more foolish ones how to live and die. A Poland outside the Soviet orbit was impossible, but it was up to Poles whether their relationship with the bear would be that of a slave or equal. Feuding would leave no chance for mutual respect, much less eventual friendship. Martial law preserved this possibility, despite the loss of economic support from the West.
“Thank you for listening,” the director of the zoo was saying. “I know that your valuable time is limited.” The scientist smiled again. He seemed a good sort—probably a country boy educated in the city; polite and without guile. He would not be promoted.
/> “I’ll do what I can for you,” the general said, “but put some of the blame on American business. It’s inhumane enough even when it’s not politically directed.” He turned and followed the security man out of the park.
Maciek trembled in the muggy mid-afternoon heat. His stomach rumbled painfully. Someone was angry at him. He felt lost as he listened to the elephants snorting. The birds were silent.
Back in his office the general leaned back in his chair and fell asleep. The animals quarreled with him in a strange language. He couldn’t make it out, but it seemed that they were pleading, insisting, mocking. The strongest animals, he said to them, avoided capture; only the weakest were prisoners.
Despair and a sense of worthlessness seized him. The chimp’s pain mourned in his stomach. He could not escape by waking.
He longed for what he might do to be loved. Polish independence would do it. With the army behind him, the Russians would think five times before invading. He would equal the great General Pilsudski in driving the Russians out of Poland.
But alas, that feat was impossible. Supplies and ammunition for the army were strictly controlled, and for every line of Poles there was a line of Russian soldiers. Polish independence of any kind would cut East Germany off from its master, precipitating German unification, and all of Eastern Europe would rise in a ferment of hope.
Nothing was simple, ever. Justice was a naive, impractical concept. Even the Americans did not really want a free Poland, because such an interface with the Soviets would only benefit the evil empire’s economy. Cartago Delenda Est!
He awoke and almost fell out of his chair as his private phone rang.
“Hallo!” he shouted, pressing the receiver to his ear.
“Wojciech! Is that you?” the Soviet Underminister of Agriculture asked.
“Of course.” The man knew well enough that no one else could pick up on this line. “What can I do for you?”
“Well, it’s the hams again, you see. We need more this month. Special occasion, you see.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“The railroad car will be waiting.”
The corrupt bastard, Jaruzelski thought bitterly, recalling the man’s weakness for Western pornographic cassettes. If he were one of my officials, I’d have hanged him by now. Andropov had turned a blind eye to him but perhaps Gorbachev would remove the parasite.
“This is very good of you, Wojciech, on such short notice. I won’t forget it.”
“Not at all, Minister.”
“You’ve had quite a week, I hear.”
Jaruzelski got up and went to the window, arranging the long cord carefully behind himself. The Minister had once offered him a cordless model, but he had neglected to take him up on it.
“Wojciech, perhaps I might do something for you? Feel free to ask. I have means. I mean if it’s within my power I’ll do it. I promise.”
Jaruzelski saw a man down in the street, reminding him of Maciek in the way he loped along by the buildings. People resembled animals of one kind or another in their faces and manners. Even human artifacts like buses and cars seemed to be animals on occasion....
“Wojciech!”
General Jaruzelski swallowed hard away from the receiver. The pain from the zoo was still in his stomach.
“What’s that, Wojciech!” the Russian shouted as the connection broke up. “I lost you there! What is it you said you want?” There was some coughing and slurping on the line as the Minister downed a shot.
“Minister,” the Savior of Poland asked loudly, with a hint of defiance, “can you send some bananas?”
“Bananas, Wojciech?”
“Yes, for the zoos. Animals are dying. The shortages are an embarrassment. CBS did a story on it.”
“Did you tape it?”
“No, I only heard about it today. Besides, I don’t have a VCR.”
“The Americans are so sentimental about animals! Didn’t I offer to get you a Sony?”
General Jaruzelski was silent.
“I’ll see what I can do,” the Russian said finally.
“Thank you.”
Collaboration and compromise, he thought bitterly as he hung up and sat down again. Cage bars rattled in his ears, and he felt himself slipping in again behind Maciek’s eyes. His stomach burned as he looked around at his office, at the pale light streaming in through the window, at the locked door with the armed guard sitting outside. The room was a cage. It seemed normal to beg for bananas.
The Soft Terrible Music
EACH OF CASTLE SILVERSTONE’S ONE HUNDRED windows looked out on the landscape of a different country. The iron drawbridge opened on Mars. A stainless steel side gate led out into a neighborhood in Luna City. A small, bronze gate opened in a small, public place aboard Odalisque, the largest of the Venusian floating islands drifting high above the hot, dry desert of the planet. A sliding double door opened through the sheer face of a cliff overlooking Rio de Janiero, where one could stand before an uncrossable threshold. There was also a door that led nowhere. It was no different in function than the other doors, except that it was not set to any destination. This castle, like any true home, was the expression of a man’s insides, desolate places included. When the castle was not powered-up for full extension, it stood on a rocky hillside in Antarctica’s single warm valley, where it had been built in the early twenty-second century by Wolfgang Silverstone, who rented it out occasionally for political summits. In design it was a bouquet of tall, gleaming cylinders, topped with turrets from a variety of castle building periods. The cylinders surrounded a central courtyard, and the brief connecting walls were faced with gray stone that had been quarried from the valley.
The castle got its name as much from the flecks of fool’s silver in the stone as from the name of its builder. The castle also differed from other extended homes, because it was not linked to the houses of friends and relatives, or to apartments and pieds-‡-terre in major cities. The castle had its vistas, and one could step out into them, but its exits were private. Some of them even looped back into chambers within the castle.
Few homes had ever been built with as much care and attention to a human being’s future needs, to his own future failings. Deep within himself, Silverstone knew what would happen, had accepted it, and had made provisions for his fate.
Halfway through construction, he altered some of the keep’s plans to attract a single woman—Gailla, the woman with the perfect memory, who by age eighty had read and retained every novel written since the eighteenth century. Silverstone, in a fit of fibbing, told her that his castle had a library of one thousand previously lost and unknown works, that he found her irresistible, and that if she married him for the minimum allowable term he would give her the key to the library.
As he waited for Gailla’s answer, his nights trembled with odd dreams, in which he felt that he had always known her, even though he was certain that they had never met—at least not physically. Upon waking, he would conclude that he must have seen her image somewhere; or, more simply, that he wanted her so desperately that his unconscious was inventing an unbroken history of romance, to convince him that they had always been together in their love.
What was five years of a term marriage, he told her; another century of life waited. He was not unattractive for a child of fifty, even if he said so himself. The prize of books he offered seemed to draw her curiosity. Its very existence intrigued her. But secret libraries were not unknown. The Vatican still had much of one locked away, and the history of the Middle East and North Africa was filled with stories of vanished libraries waiting under the sands along ancient, dried-up waterways. One more lost library was not an impossibility.
Fearful that she would leave him if he did not make good on his original boast, he told her that his treasure was a library of books that had been saved from the great “paper loss” of 1850–2050, when most acid paper books had crumbled to dust because there had been no money or will to preserve them; the world had been too busy
dealing with global warming and rising ocean levels. He had found the books on his forays into various abandoned Antarctic bases, where the dry cold had preserved the paper. They were mostly mysteries, science fiction, adventure, suspense, bestsellers, and romance novels brought by the base personnel for amusement. Only about a thousand volumes.
As it turned out, she soon discovered that the books were a fraud. Silverstone confessed that he had found only a few; the rest were written to complete extant scraps, cover designs and jacket blurbs, by paid specialists who did not know for whom they were working or that they were part of a larger effort. But fraud or not, it was at least an echo of a newly discovered library, and given enough time, it would become interesting in itself, he assured her, and it seemed to him that she appreciated the compliment of his ploy.
He told her how paper had been made and aged, covers painted, fingerprints of the dead scattered through the volumes. Gailla seemed delighted—for about a month—until she saw how bad the books were, how trite and poorly written. Silverstone was delighted by her bedroom habits—also for about a month. She lost interest in him at about the same time she was able to prove that the books, from internal anachronisms, were fakes.
“How dare you!” she screamed, careful to put on a convincing show. “Why did you do it?”
“To attract you,” he answered, astonished by her perfectly controlled bitterness, which seemed to hide another purpose. “Are you sorry? Would you have bonded with me for myself?”
“You never gave me the chance!” she sang out in a voice that began as a low grumble and ended in a high soprano.
“But you would have,” he demanded, “in other circumstances?”
The question seemed to upset her greatly, and she gave no answer; but Silverstone was convinced that she was holding back a no, and he began to wonder why he had ever been attracted to her. It had seemed to him at the beginning that she would alter the course of his life, change the unknown fate that lay hidden in the back of his mind; and now it seemed to him that nothing could save him from it. It was as if she had known all along about the abyss that threatened to open before him, and was waiting for the right moment to push him into it—after she had tormented him with doubt for a sufficient period of time.
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