The Midnight Zoo

by Sonya Hartnett

  An anguished cry burst from the cages: the eagle cannoned out of its corner and crashed explosively into the bars.

  Andrej had time to clutch his sister and shut his eyes.

  The air curdled pitch and filthy almost before the bombs hit the ground.

  Andrej heard his mother speaking. “Open your eyes. Child, open your eyes.”

  He wanted to do as she asked — he was so pleased to hear her voice again, so relieved that she’d returned — but his eyes were refusing to obey. “Mama,” he said, and felt a paralyzing sadness because he knew that if he didn’t open his eyes his mother would leave him again, not because she wanted to, but because he hadn’t seen the danger coming and protected her from it. “Open your eyes!” his mother demanded, and Andrej began to cry, because he could not.

  “Kid!” he heard, and this voice he didn’t recognize. It was not his father’s, not Uncle Marin’s, not Tomas’s or his own. Someone else was near. It could only be a soldier. A soldier who knew he was hiding here, a soldier who, in this soupy blackness, couldn’t be seen. Andrej sat still, hardly breathing, unable to call for help.

  For a long time there was silence, an oblivion deeper than sleep.

  When Andrej remembered to think again, he thought he was standing at the bottom of a well. The pit of a well would be cold and filthy and dripping, but Andrej actually felt warm and clean — warm as if sunshine had washed him, and now was cradling him. He had never felt so healthy. But the darkness assured him that he was indeed standing in subterranean depths and that his health must shortly fall away, and that he was destined to shrivel here, in the lonely saturated grave of a water well. “Mama,” he whispered, needing her crucially, but his mother was gone.

  “Kid!” repeated the unrecognizable voice, with an edge of impatience this time.

  “Foal?” said another. “Fawn?”

  “Child,” said the voice which was like his mother’s but was not his mother’s, because Andrej understood that his mother wouldn’t speak to him again, “open your eyes.”

  And Andrej saw that the walls of the well weren’t made of stone but only of darkness, beyond which there was cloudy light. He sighed; his eyes fluttered, and they opened.

  Ash was floating in a haze all around, a fog of parched confetti hovering from the ground to higher than he could reach. When he brushed a hand weakly through it, the haze swirled like a spirit. Beyond this ashy veil he saw the night sky, and recognized the maple branches as something he’d seen before. He was sitting on a green bench. There was grass under his feet. As the haze thinned he saw the tall iron cages, and the shapes of the animals within them. The moon was low and full and shining, just as it had been when Andrej last looked at it. He’d spent forever at the bottom of the well, yet hardly any time had passed. Tomas was still standing beside him, swaying gently. “Andrej?” he said. “What happened?”

  Andrej thought he might have left his voice in the well, and was surprised when words came to his smudged lips. “The airplanes dropped bombs.”

  Tomas pondered this, rocking. “Why did they drop bombs?”

  Andrej didn’t know, and shook his head. Tomas chewed his lip for a time, then rubbed his eyes with his wrist. The drifting ash was coarse to breathe, and he coughed. “Andrej?”

  “Yes? What?”

  “I heard Mama.”

  Andrej felt scattered. Ideas and colors were swimming in his mind. When he spoke, his words sounded odd inside his head, as if he was picking each one out of a large empty box. “Me too. I heard her.”

  “. . . Is she here?”

  “No.” This was the zoo, and the last place he’d seen their mother was in the hills, and the last thing she’d said to him was run. “She was never here.”

  “Oh.” His brother pouted. “I thought she was. I thought I heard her say open your eyes. . . .” He dragged a palm down his face, and suddenly was teary. “I want Mama and Papa,” he said, very small and heartbroken.

  “I know,” said Andrej. “I know that already.”

  Tomas gulped air. “Don’t you want them?”

  “Yes,” Andrej sighed, and he did; but they weren’t here, and wanting them wouldn’t bring them, and wishing always seemed a fool’s thing. Detached, he watched Tomas shed one tear and then another, and although he wanted his brother to be happy and not to cry, his truest desire was to return to sleep — to sleep as he had done in the family’s caravan, deep in a pile of cushions and quilts, but to sleep on the hard old bench if he had to, because even that prospect was beguiling. He watched Tomas weeping thinly into his palms, and after some time he noticed that his brother was grimier than ever, sprinkled from head to toe with ash like a lamb chop doused in pepper. A lamb chop! The thought made him chuckle, and Tomas looked up wet-faced and scowling. “What’s funny?”

  “You. You’re covered in dirt.”

  “I don’t care! I can’t help it!” Tomas brushed himself down furiously. “You’re dirty too, you know! You’re the dirtiest person in the whole world —”

  “Child!” snapped the voice which seemed like their mother’s but was not their mother’s, and the boys went silent and looked up obediently. The lioness was standing at the bars of her cage. “The little one,” she said. “You’ve forgotten her.”

  Andrej stared at the lioness. Tomas stared at her too. The instant for exclaiming in horror or astonishment came and went while the ash wafted about serenely. Andrej, not knowing what to do, looked to his lap. Wilma lay across his knees, bound fast in the shawl. She was watching him with round eyes, sucking her lip. He brushed away the soot on her face and pinched the snub of her nose, and saw she was alive enough not to like it. He looked at the lioness and, feeling intensely awkward, said, “She’s all right. Thank you.”

  “Bring her to me,” said the cat. “I’d rather see for myself.”

  From across the lawn came a wry bleating laugh. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, kid! Not unless you want to see a lioness eat her dinner!”

  The lioness showed a glimpse of tooth. “Quiet, goat.”

  The chamois bounced forward. “I am not a goat!”

  “Shush, both of you!” whimpered the llama. “The rumble-things will hear —”

  “She must not call me a goat! It’s disrespectful!”

  “Disrespectful to goats,” said the lioness, and the monkey sniggered.

  “Please keep your voices down!” begged the llama, scanning the sky wide-eyed.

  The brothers, amazed, looked first to one animal and then to another, their hearts jumping like skimmed stones. Andrej remembered something Uncle Marin once said: Animals know things you can’t imagine. And they know how to keep a secret. Talking must be one of the things that animals knew, but kept secret. To make a fuss would be impolite, but Andrej couldn’t help it. “You’re talking!” he said.

  “So what?” said the chamois. “Why shouldn’t we? Don’t you think we’ve got anything worthwhile to say?”

  “People talk all the time,” said the llama. “They hardly ever be quiet. They say, Are there any more sandwiches? They say, Don’t touch that, it’s germy. They say, I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. Aren’t we allowed to talk too?”

  “Well — it’s just that — I’ve never heard of animals speaking —”

  “So something is only possible if you’ve heard about it, is that right, kid?”

  “No!” Andrej wished he’d never mentioned it. “It’s just — I didn’t know you could.”

  The chamois said pointedly, “One suspects there’s a lot that you don’t know.”

  Andrej, subsiding into silence, didn’t disagree. Lately the world was proving utterly topsy-turvy to how he’d believed it to be. Tomas, on the other hand, was enchanted by this turn of events. To him it was completely understandable that the zoo’s animals could talk. Locked in the cages with nothing better to do, how could they help but learn the language of the zoo’s visitors? It made sense; it filled him with a giddy excitement and a renewed love for the wo
rld. To the llama he said, “We don’t call them rumble-things. We call them airplanes.”

  “I know.” The creature looked regally down its nose at him. “But I call them rumble-things. You should too. It suits them better.”

  “It does!” Tomas agreed happily. “Rumble-things.”

  The lioness was pacing, her body sweeping goldenly back and forth behind the bars. Her gaze on Wilma, however, stayed absolutely still. “The infant,” she persisted. “Show her.”

  Tomas looked at his brother expectantly; Andrej felt the consideration of all the animals glide over the grass to him. After a hesitation in which he felt ridiculous yet compelled, he gathered his sister in his hands and held her aloft for the lioness to see. The cat’s lime eyes widened, and for a long moment she stared at the infant before spinning away abruptly and slumping to the floor. Tomas gave his brother a smile that any other time would have earned him a cuff over the head; now it stirred the ash in his throat and brought on a coughing fit. “Thirsty,” he croaked.

  “Don’t ask us for water,” warned the chamois. “We haven’t got any.”

  “There’s nothing in the flask.” Andrej had meant to fill it in the town. “We can go into the village and find a pump —”

  “No!” Tomas’s good cheer was doused in an instant. “Don’t go out there, Andrej! It’s dangerous! I’m not thirsty now.”

  But Andrej was curious: he placed Wilma on the bench and stood up carefully. Ash cascaded from his clothes, and swilled and spiraled in his wake as he crossed the grass. With Tomas protesting at his heels he found the smattered pebble path, and followed its crunchy length to the road.

  The horseman Night raised the flame in his lamp so he too could see what the children saw.

  The moonlight lay velvetly on what remained of the village. The long wrought-iron fence, where the ZOOLOGICKÁ ZAHRADA sign hung, was bent and buckled as bad teeth. The cobbled road was cratered in places, crumped into hillocks in others. The bombs had toppled the last of the buildings, including the stump of the bell tower. Flames burned higher than they had done, laying claim greedily to the new fodder of collapsed timber. Broken glass glittered on every surface, like fireflies caught in an appalling web of smashed furniture and cleaved stone. Papers and clothes were scattered through the debris, and feathers from torn pillows blizzarded everywhere. The air was smoky, gritty against the teeth, and noisy with the groaning of ruin. It was dangerous, Andrej saw. Not everything that had fallen had arrived in its final resting place yet. If something happened to him — a sliding plate of glass, a brightly sparking wire, a javelin-like pipe standing up from the ground, poised at the place where he tripped — Tomas and Wilma would be alone. Tomas was holding tight to his sleeve, willing him not to leave them. “I’m not thirsty,” he was assuring his brother. And even in the glowing moonlight, from where he stood Andrej couldn’t see a water pump. He might have to walk everywhere before he found one. Better, safer, to wait until dawn. Tomas was chirpy as he followed his brother back into the zoo, eager to put the distraction behind them. “Why did they drop the bombs?” he asked. “Wasn’t the village flat enough already?”

  “Maybe they didn’t want to carry them anymore.” Andrej shrugged. “Maybe they were heavy, and they accidentally dropped them.”

  “That’s not the reason, Rom.” The wolf spoke for the first time, and the brothers halted mistrustfully, remembering the fright the animal had given them. The beast seemed even more fearsome now that it could speak. There was no guessing what such a being might say. It knew that they were Gypsy children, and might know anything more.

  But Andrej recollected his courage, and remembered that the wolf was caged. He looked it in the eye and asked, “What is the reason, then?”

  The wolf sniffed loudly, as if scorningly, and sat down on its haunches. “The same reason there is for everything,” it replied. “I will have my way.”

  The wolf said, “None of us know why your war is happening. Your squabbles aren’t something we care about. When a wolf clan battles another, it’s usually over territory. Probably this is the reason for your warring, but who knows? People aren’t wolves.”

  “I wish I was a wolf,” said Tomas.

  The wolf looked at him with distaste, and went on. “We know your war is being fought everywhere, not just here in the village. We can hear it, and smell it. Birds come and perch in the maple, and they tell us that wherever they fly they see your battle, or what’s left after your battle has moved on. They tell us about trucks and tents and lines of men walking from one horizon to another. They speak of tanks and torpedoes and men swooping through the sky with parachutes blooming above them. They describe grenades falling and submarines rising, and men behind wire dropping down in mud and snow. We can’t see much from these cages, but we see these things.”

  The bear spoke up dismally. “We can’t see anything except each other.”

  “You’re complaining?” squawked the chamois. “At least you don’t have to stare at that idiot chimp and the sourpuss all day!”

  The lioness didn’t react, but the monkey swore brutally, streaking the length of its enclosure and thumping into the bars. The chamois chortled tauntingly and the monkey flung itself about, a jungle scream sheering from its wide-open mouth. The wolf regarded them indifferently, waiting until the monkey collapsed into seething silence before looking back at the children.

  “The birds say our village is different from others,” it said. “They say it’s the sorriest village they can see. But the invaders mustn’t think it’s sorry enough, because sometimes they send more planes, and drop more bombs. Maybe the village will be sorry enough when nothing is left of it, not even a hole in the ground. No earth, no air, no sky, no light —”

  “No zoo,” said the llama.

  “No zoo,” the wolf agreed.

  Tomas asked, “Why does the village need to be sorry? What did it do?”

  “It fought back,” said the chamois lordishly.

  “It fought the invaders?” When Tomas thought of the invading soldiers, he thought of the day in the clearing. He thought of stories his father had told of dark forests coming angrily to life. “That was brave.”

  The wolf lay down on its white belly, stretching out its legs. “Not all the villagers fought, only some of them. But to the ones who did, it wasn’t about bravery. It was something that had to be done. They could not do nothing. This land was their home, their territory. They had to fight for it. Never mind that their kind have seized so much wolf territory, cut down our trees, set traps in our ground, caved in our dens, pursued us to —”

  “Don’t!” moaned the bear, turning aside its great head. “Don’t talk about that.”

  The wolf said carelessly, “They do the same to bears. Anyway, these villagers formed a secret gang, and began to talk of vengeance. They knew they wouldn’t triumph in the end — the invading clan is strong, its weapons are deadly, its numbers are countless, it’s spread through this land like a creeper through a tree, and much farther than that, according to the birds: they say there’s no end to the invaders, that they infest every place from sea to sea and also on the sea, floating, slinking — but the gang vowed that if their homeland was going to be taken from them, it wouldn’t be taken easily. They knew that other people in other places were fighting the enemy too — burning crops, souring water, barricading roads, destroying firewood — but such sabotage seemed puny to the gang, the kind of mischief that the invaders would expect, as a fox expects to have fleas. The gang didn’t want to be fleas. They wanted to be a swarm of wasps. They swore that, helpless though they might be to keep their territory, before it was lost they would make their enemy regret setting foot upon it.”

  Andrej and Tomas had sat down in the dusty grass, and Wilma, bundled on the bench, was making no sound. The brief summer night was nearing its darkest time, yet the moon still lit the zoo with a creamy light, turning the circle of cages into a place like a chapel, somewhere solemn and fragile and holy. The liones
s’s tail was quietly switching, and specks of ash were still wafting to earth, but nothing else seemed to move.

  “A train track runs between the hills behind this village,” the wolf continued. “We can hear the wheels and whistles from here. The track is important to the invaders because it leads to where they want to go, which is everywhere — every town, every hilltop, every shore. The invaders are people after all, and people are always hungry for more. The locomotives that ride the track are also important to the invaders. With the trains, the invaders can move their strength and determination and everything else an invading pack needs quickly, and in formidable amounts.”

  Andrej thought of geese and starlings explaining this logistical information to the captive audience at the zoo. A parrot in a cage had once said hello to him, and then called itself a pretty bird. He wondered what it had been thinking.

  “The gang of resistance fighters knew that if they could stop the trains, the invasion would be lamed and halted,” the wolf went on. “Not halted forever — the enemy is like a stream, it runs and runs, and a rock thrown into a stream might disturb the water but it won’t stop the current — but halted long enough to teach their enemy that a small pack can give a nasty bite.”

  Tomas, who always had sympathy for the underdog, made fists of enthusiasm. The wolf leaned forward on its elbows, bringing its nose to the bars. Its ears flattened, and a glint of tooth showed behind the curl of black lips.

  “The resistance fighters swore themselves to loyalty on pain of death. They arranged to meet in a private place where they could scheme undisturbed. They met in that place night after night, and eventually they thought of a plan. They invented code words and signals which would keep the plan a secret. Secrecy was vital: they didn’t want anyone trying to stop them, or giving their plot away. And the secret held: until the night they put their idea into action, no one else in the village suspected what was to come. Yet the resistance fighters weren’t the only ones who knew what would happen, and how, and when. We knew it too.”