Andrej, lying awake in the airless loft while fireflies tapped on the window’s clouded glass, came to see that loneliness and confusion were midges in comparison with the threat that was really stalking them. The monster that had escaped its chains had countless arms and legs and eyes and mouths, innumerable shapes and disguises; and it was merciless even to mothers and children, even to the best of men. They’re looking for people like you.
He saw they must never trust anybody. It would be too easy to become snared. They must avoid other Rom, whose company would attract attention. They must stay alert and invisible and on the move. Something was seeking them.
Andrej had reached across and shaken Tomas, who’d sat up woozily from his pillow of boots. “Come,” Andrej told him. “We’re leaving.” Already he burned to be on their way.
From that night onward the children traveled when darkness could conceal them and fewer people were about, stopping for brief rests or to attend Wilma, then walking on into the dawn. During the day they hid and slept, emerging only if they needed to buy some essential. Baba Jaga had called them leeches, robbers, vermin, and although Mama and Papa and Marin and Nicholae and Emilie and Mirabela and none of the others were any of those things, Andrej was happy for his siblings and himself to become rats — sleeping by day, moving by night, raiding and rummaging, staying out of sight. Rattiness would be their protecting charm. Marin had always said, “It’s a lucky soul that gets put into a rat.”
Hearing his uncle’s voice in his head made Andrej cover his ears. His heart mourned for Marin through every moment, even in his dreams. He pined for the comfort of his mother, the steadfast presence of his father. But Tomas was always there, hungry and jovial and querulous, and Wilma with her round head and button eyes caused practical problems which distracted him countless times a day. When Andrej slept, he slept catatonically. When awake, he was thinking constantly, vigilant to every threat, ceaselessly devising ways to outwit and outrun. And so, although the pain of what he’d lost was ever-present and severe, Andrej had no time for stopping to look long at it, or for looking back.
“Wah-wah-wah,” said the chamois. “No life is without its troubles, kid, not even the life of a rat. Look on the bright side: you aren’t in a cage. You’re free, so stop complaining.”
Andrej, startled from his memories, said, “No, I’m not in a cage, but — I don’t feel free. If you’re free, you should be safe. And I don’t feel safe. I always feel . . . hunted.”
“Boo-hoo,” said the chamois rancorously. “Talk to me about being hunted when you find your foot in a snare, little buck.”
The llama’s tufted ears turned: “How peculiar! You can go anywhere your feet take you, and yet you’re not free. There are no bars around you, yet you’re in a funny kind of cage. That isn’t fair.”
“Cages come and get you,” murmured the kangaroo.
Andrej said nothing; Wilma was in his arms, and he rocked her. The baby was placidly tasting her fingers, peering out from deep in the shawl. Though he’d struggled valiantly to stay awake, Tomas’s eyelids had begun to droop and eventually he had fallen asleep on the bench, feet tucked securely out of reach of any boar. He lay with his hands folded under his cheek, small inside his clothes. Moonlight was tinting the maple leaves white, and draped the grass like a frayed sheet of linen. The light was luminous, but not as crisp as it had been. The world was still veiled by darkness, but the brief summer night had begun its tender bloom into day. Soon peace would end.
The lioness spoke. “Your mother would be proud of you, Andrej. You have taken care of your brother and sister. You have done what she wanted you to do.”
Andrej winced. He hated to remember the boy crouched in the woods watching his mother being led away. “I should have run to her, instead of running away. I might have been able to help her.”
“No. That isn’t what she wanted.”
Wilma mumbled, and Andrej looked at her. He wondered if his tiny sister would grow up to look like her mother — tall, with painted nails and bony feet, and dark hair that reached down her spine. Andrej could remember these things about his mother, but he was forgetting, too. It was hard to hear her voice, or to picture her green eyes and white smile. He could no longer see whole pieces of her — her hands and elbows, her hay-fevery nose. His mother had been taken from the clearing, and from his memory. When Wilma was grown she might indeed look like her mother, but Andrej would have forgotten how to know for sure. Quietly, so as not to disturb Tomas, he said, “I don’t think they will come back. I don’t think I’ll see them again.”
“No,” the lioness agreed.
“Do you think the owner of the zoo will come back?”
“No.”
“What about Alice?”
Alice! The word whisked through the air more urgently than before. Alice, Alice: the animals moved fitfully, shifting their weight, scuffing their feet on the stone. They were calling to her, their cries resounding into emptiness. The lioness said nothing.
Andrej sighed. Tipping his chin, he looked up at the sky. The stars were glinting studs against the sapphire clouds. Uncle Marin had known the names of the constellations. He had known, too, which shining dots weren’t stars, but red and yellow and purple planets. Sometimes he’d said, I wonder what is happening on the purple planet today?
Andrej looked at the lioness, who hadn’t moved. The moonlight made aqua pools of her eyes, smooth golden velvet of her coat. “Do you think the lion and your cubs will come back?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“I feel it,” she said, “as you do.”
Andrej nodded. There was sorrow in him so boundless and powerful that he hardly dared approach it. If it got loose, it would gallop like a bolting horse through a fairground, overturning everything it touched. Very cautiously he asked, “Did you say good-bye?”
“No.”
“I didn’t either . . . I can’t remember the last things I said to them. It must have been silly things like, Come and play soccer, Papa, and I’m not hungry yet, Mama.”
The lioness cupped her ears, considering him. After a time she said, “Wherever they are, they know you would have helped them if you’d been able. They know you would have said good-bye.”
Andrej bit his lip, and nodded again. “All right.”
The lioness continued to watch him. In the cage beside her, the monkey uttered a low groan. The seal broke the surface, sniffed up air and submerged; the water closed over it with a slurp. Beyond the zoo’s gate, in what remained of the town, a broken-backed rafter swooned from roof to ground with a muffled crump of noise. Then there was silence. The animals’ breathing made no sound. The moonlight touching Andrej’s hands looked like powdered crystal. The lioness rose liquidly to her paws. “Andrej,” she said, “bring the baby to me.”
Andrej lifted his head and gazed at her, but did not get to his feet.
“Just for a moment,” said the lioness: in a single stride she had reached the bars and was hovering behind them, her yellow face scarred and eternal. “Not for longer than a moment.”
Andrej looked down to his sister, and it crossed his mind how much easier the past weeks would have been if the baby had gone into the woods with her mother with whom she belonged, with whom she wanted to be. So many long years must pass before she could think for herself and look after herself, and he already had Tomas to tend to. Andrej’s mind thought these things, and was wearied just by thinking them, but his legs were lead and didn’t move. “No,” he said stolidly. “I mustn’t.”
The lioness dodged with agitation, yearning toward the bundled shawl. “It won’t hurt. I promise. All you need do is bring her near.”
Andrej wavered, worried he might cry. The animals were watching, and he could feel the lioness’s longing, and his blood was surging and he wanted to help her but, “I can’t,” he moaned.
“Why not?” Her tail slashed in frustration; she reared up briefly on two legs. “What harm will it do? An
drej, bring her!”
“No.” He shook his head in defiance, his eyes welling with tears. “I won’t. I can’t.” And suddenly he was shouting like a child gone mad: “I won’t! I’m frightened of you! You can’t have her! She belongs to me!”
“Idiot boy.” The words crossed the lawn like flying ice picks, yanking Tomas from his sleep as they speared past, snarled out in a voice so terrifying that it tore the breath from Andrej and he spun to face it believing that the soldier from the clearing had finally come for him. Staring wild-eyed he saw nothing except the stark circle of bars and the maple and frosted grass, but the animals were on their feet and gazing into the stygian core of the zoo: into the wild boar’s cage. “Idiot boy,” said the voice from that blackness, and Andrej, heart hammering, imagined the creature hidden there, its spindly legs and outlandish head, its arched tusks and bristling hide. “What are you worrying about? You think your precious piglet is too good for a lioness? What harm can she, behind bars, do to you, lounging free? What can she do that would be worse than what you’ve done to her?”
“Andrej . . .” whimpered Tomas, but Andrej, shielding Wilma, held up a silencing hand. He stared into the darkness that consumed the boar’s cage, each muscle ready to move. If the beast was free — if the lock had rusted or the creature had shredded the bars and now was loose and coming for him — Andrej would stand his ground. He was not afraid; his heart, still pounding, beat with a blind sense of outrage. He glanced at the cages surrounding the boar’s, saw the wolf, the chamois, the llama. Even if they could help him, Andrej knew they would not. They understood that life is a battle fought alone. And Andrej, in that moment, was ready to fight — he was eager for it. All the injustice he’d suffered was clenching in his fist and prickling in his eyes. He would endure nothing more in dumb helplessness. If the boar came for him, he would hurt it as much as he could. He would kill it if he was able.
But from the boar’s cage came nothing, no scuffle of feet nor snort of hot breath, nothing but the voice which was like satin under a millstone, silky and bruised and ruined.
“She was only a cub, that lioness, when a hunter shot her mother so he could tell a tale of changing something fierce and glorious into something humbled and hideous. He stove in the heads of her littermates because he deemed a swift death beneath his boot the kindest thing for them. He spared her, the smallest cub, and sent her across the ocean as a gift to his fiancée. It was important that his beloved be seen to have the best of everything — and what could be better than a lion cub? What he failed to remember, that foolish hunter, is that even a runt lion is still a lion.”
Andrej stared into the shadows, scarcely breathing. Tomas, on the bench, had burrowed into his jacket. The wolf’s silver hackles were raised.
“The bride-to-be was delighted with her new pet. None of her friends owned such a prize, so they were all satisfyingly jealous. The cub was dressed in ribbons and bows, and when dining on the choicest cuts she wore a little bib. At night she slept on the bride-to-be’s bed, and when the dew was off the grass in the morning she was walked around the garden at the end of a velvet cord. She chased peacocks over manicured lawns, and marzipan mice across great halls. She was driven through cities in open-roofed cars so people on the streets could marvel at her. When the jealous friends or regal guests came to visit, she was brought out to entertain them. If she played like a kitten and made everyone smile, she was given a slice of butter. If she hid or hissed or struggled or bit, she was given a little smack. Her world was a rich one, finely dressed and perfumed. She could not have asked for more affection or better care. But a lion in a spoiled lady’s boudoir is still a lion, isn’t she?”
It was not a question, and Andrej said nothing. The llama shuddered, blinking wide eyes.
“Time passed. The cub was growing. She had never done anything a lion does — never feasted on zebra, never lapped from a lake, never roared to her sisters across a sunstruck plain — but the marrow of her bones knew what she was, and what she’d been born to do. Her claws knew, her teeth knew. Her pride knew.
“Soon came the day when the bride-to-be would become the bride. The hunter had returned from his bloody jaunts, the church was frothy with flowers, the priest and the guests were gathering. Naturally, the bride wanted her wedding to be the talk of the season. Months earlier she had visited the jeweler and ordered a diamond-encrusted collar and leash. Now, shut in a room to one side of the church while the guests shuffled into their pews, the girl in her ivory dress and veil asked that the cub be brought to her. The idea was that the bride should be accompanied down the aisle not just by her father but by the tamed beast as well, this symbol of beauty and freedom subdued, of splendor captured and contained.
“The animal that was brought to her was hardly a cub any longer, however. The cat was a yearling, bigger than any dog, with big clumsy paddles of paw concealing claws that could carve marble. What the cub thought of the white, towering, lace-veiled spectacle that was her mistress we don’t need to wonder, given what happened next. The wedding day did become the talk of the season, but not for the right reasons.
“In a life filled with bewildering, unnatural sights, this anemic specter was the one which changed a lion cub into a lioness. As the ghostly bride reached down to fasten the diamond collar, the petrified beast lashed out a paw, and opened the bride’s face from ear to ear.”
One of the animals breathed harshly, trampling the stone. An old maple leaf dislodged and made a papery sound as it tumbled from branch to branch. Wilma burbled, and the boar paused to listen. Then it went on.
“Can you picture the scene, boy? The rents torn through the veil. The porcelain cheeks slashed by arching wounds, elegant as a poet’s flourish. Ruby blood flowing in sheets from these wounds, swamping the heirloom pearls. Rivers of crimson pouring down the white bodice, flooding the layers of dress. The diamond collar dropping with a dainty clink to the floor. The scream that flew out the door like a kestrel, soaring up into the rafters. The confused rush and flutter of the guests. The face of the hunter when he saw his beloved, her loveliness erased. Can you picture it in your mind, boy? Because the hunter always would. He’d see the spitting cub and the flailing bride, both of them pressed in horror to the floor, two lives in which he’d meddled and now must stir himself to muddle further, because he could never marry a disfigured woman, and the beast must face the consequences of being born a vicious lion. Off he marched, wax-faced with affront, to fetch the one thing in the world that would never disappoint him: his gun.
“Oddly enough, it was the bride who saved her. Perhaps the girl had more respect for the creature than she’d shown in front of her friends. Perhaps she was genuinely fond of the animal, and understood the blow had been dealt not in malice, but fear. Perhaps she knew that she too, now forever marred, faced a future in which her happiness relied on the mercy of others. Who knows? Whatever her reason, she stayed the hunter’s hand. Maybe he would have ignored her, given that he loved shooting things more than he loved her. But the wedding guests and the priest were there, and his agonized ex-fiancée was arguing for the cat’s life, and under the circumstances it would not have looked gentlemanly to tell her to shut her mouth.
“And so the cub who was now a lioness was cast out from that lush life, and sent here, to this end-of-the-road place, and put in a cage which was hung with a sign that said WARNING: LION BITES. Because there was a lion in the cage, the first she’d ever seen; but her leonine teeth and bones recognized him, as his teeth and bones recognized her. In each other, they saw the dusty plains, the stumbling zebra, the swampy drinking pool. In the lion’s noble shadow she left behind the petted plaything she had been and became instead a true lioness, who heard in her ears the rattle of sandstorms, whose whiskers were blown by the churning monsoon. A true lioness who lived in a cage, doomed to pace the bars without cease, searching for something she knew, yet couldn’t see. But in time there came three young of her own, and the company of these and of the lion brought
her some serenity. In the wriggling cubs was the proof that, despite the iron bars and the staring faces and the jeweled leashes and the marzipan mice, she was and always had been lion to her core. When she closed her eyes, she saw sweeping visions of magnificence. She saw all things that lions have seen since the first lion left its paw prints on the land. Her life would never be as she would wish it, but the great tribe of lion had not forgotten her.
“But then you started your war, boy, and nothing is as important as what humans want, is it? Nothing is as important as what humans do. You took the lion and the cubs from her as easily as you had taken her littermates and the zebra and the plains. She stood where she is standing now and watched them pushed onto a truck and driven away; she heard them calling until the road unrolled far enough to take even their voices from her. And now she’s a lioness locked in a zoo, and at night she looks at the stars and wonders if the tribe has, in fact, forsaken her, though all her life she’s been true. And now you, you wretched boy, refuse her the sight of your squealing piglet, as if a piglet is too treasure-some to go anywhere near the likes of lion — all the while waging your war with such enthusiasm for death, such carelessness for life, that it’s clear nothing on earth is precious in your eyes. What makes that baby an exception? Amid such carnage, what matters the fate of one more? You disgust me, boy.” The boar gave a slight, low snicker. “You claim to be different from the gadje, but you aren’t. Humans are all exactly the same. Each of you lives in a fever of selfishness and destruction. You persecute the creatures that you fear, yet the species you should fear most is your own. I hope this war buries every one of you. Oblivion is clearly what you want, and I hope your wish is fulfilled.”
The animals stood like exquisite sculptures in their cages, moonlight pouring from their muzzles, their shadows cast onto the ground as if something of their wild natures was seeping over the stone. Tomas sat in rigid silence, his sights riveted to Andrej, who stood staring across the grass into the blackness of the boar’s cage. A piercing like a poison thorn was dragging down Andrej’s spine. He didn’t know if the boar was free, if he must fight or would be spared, and he stood watching for the smallest movement, listening for the faintest sound . . . But then he saw that such guardedness was unnecessary. Even if the boar was loose, it wasn’t going to attack him. The boar wanted him to stand there, pinned beneath moonlight and the unflinching gaze of the animals, drenched by accusations, dredging for more courage than he owned. It had cornered him into making a choice he didn’t want to make, into proving something he feared to prove. It wouldn’t do anything that would allow him to shirk his decision, or earn him their audience’s pity.
The Midnight Zoo Page 9