The Prison Book Club

by Ann Walmsley

  “Peter, what did you think?” asked Derek, whom Carol had asked to lead that month’s discussion.

  “It was a good read,” said Peter, referring to his notes. “I think the author was trying to say the zoo itself was just an inherent spot for goodness. It represents life, nature.” As opposed to the Nazis’ murderous campaign, he explained. His comment made me recognize how extreme evil can occasionally provoke extreme good. One becomes necessary in the face of the other. His choice of the word inherent stayed with me too. The zoo celebrated life forms in all their diversity. And while some animals kill others for food in the wild, I could think of no animals, other than human beings, who killed out of cruelty or ideology. I remember the Canadian realist painter Alex Colville saying once, in reference to his depictions of animals, that he didn’t believe that any animal was evil or capable of malice.

  Parvat tucked his long hair behind his ears and expanded on Peter’s idea, arguing that the Zabinskis had a heightened degree of empathy because they were more in touch with nature. “It was easy for them to care for humans, ’cause they were caring for animals,” he said in his somewhat sleepy voice, with its cultivated cool. And Antonina went beyond just caring for animals, I thought. The way Jan Zabinski described it, his wife had an uncanny sixth sense in which she seemed able to intuit what the animals were thinking. In one scene, Antonina appeared to understand that it was the moving fingers of human hands that scared the lynx kittens. In another she discerned that their baby badger was sociable and benefited from long companionable walks.

  The men were intrigued to discover in the book that the Nazis’ eugenics program extended to animals as well as humans. The Nazis despised animals that had “degenerated” from racial purity, and sought to rebreed extinct animals that they considered noble and pure, including European bison, aurochs and forest tarpans. Some of the animals that the Germans looted from the Zabinskis’ zoo were taken expressly for that purpose. “A little twisted,” commented Gaston, in a dry understatement.

  Meanwhile, Peter highlighted some of the more startling details of the book. He reminded the men about the passages describing how Jews altered their appearances to avoid detection. “Re-skinning, for example,” he said, “having your foreskin surgically brought back over again.” Specifics like those are what readers take away, he said, when reading books on the war. He also talked about the Nazis creating anti-Semitic children’s literature. “These little things are just as atrocious as the bigger things.”

  The men puzzled over what it was about Antonina that gave her the power to defuse situations when the SS were on the property snooping around. “She could talk to these SS guys and get them to back off,” said Derek. “I mean the power that she had was extraordinary.” I recalled one scene in which a German soldier questioned Antonina about a fire near their barracks. She coolly deflected the blame by pointing out that the haystacks near the barracks were often used by German soldiers to entertain their girlfriends and smoke. It reminded me of the scene in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society where Elizabeth invents an alibi that deters a suspicious German patrol.

  Peter proposed that maybe Antonina’s power derived from her ability to read and calm people, as she did animals. Joao recalled that the author attributed some of it to Antonina’s Aryan features. Parvat took a different tack by observing: “Women tend to have a certain power, especially attractive women.” Dread disagreed, saying her power wasn’t sexual. In my view, some of Antonina’s charisma derived from her determination to make life fun by filling the house and grounds with other animals: rabbits, badgers, muskrats, dogs, hamsters, pigs and even cats that would nurse baby foxes. It was a way to stay sane in the face of terrible uncertainty.

  Carol, looking particularly cheery in her oversized pink plastic glasses and long mauve scarf, jumped in next. “Maybe I could throw this out as a thought,” she said. “The book was about sacrificing yourself and your safety for others.” I loved Carol’s predictability in always raising the theme of helping others.

  Peter took Carol’s thought a bit further by suggesting that the Zabinskis’ courage was a more complicated gamble than simply putting their own safety at risk. “The author pointed out that there was cumulative responsibility,” he reminded us. If Polish citizens were found to be harbouring Jews, the penalty would have been immediate death for them, their family, their employees on the grounds and their neighbours. The severity of that punishment was far more extreme than in many other countries, where the consequences for sheltering Jews was prison. “That’s a whole different ball game,” said Peter.

  “It’s really something to put all those people at risk,” said Carol.

  Then Peter made a breakthrough comment. “I think that the people that are actually at risk catch on and start to do it as well,” he said. “The overall good is more contagious than the evil. Then those people say, ‘Yeah, she’s putting us at risk, but we should be helping too,’ and it just goes around.” The humanity in that statement, the innate goodness, thrilled me.

  And, as Michael pointed out, Antonina anticipated that eventually the war was going to end, and they just had to hang on a little longer.

  “I have to say that I really wondered if I’d be able to be as courageous as Antonina,” offered Carol. “I had a very—I had a funny feeling I wouldn’t be.”

  “I wouldn’t risk my family,” intoned Dread, without any of Carol’s hesitation. Dread had two children. “Even though I know it would be a courageous thing, I wouldn’t do it.”

  “It’s hard to turn people down,” said Peter. Several of the other men said “yeah.”

  “But nowadays nobody would do that,” said a new member whose name tag read TONY. “Back then, there was more sense of family, belonging, tightness.” The comment sounded very much like Dread’s comment when we had discussed O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” and he observed that grand romantic gestures were part of an earlier age of chivalry. Tony’s remark implied that ethical decisions could go in and out of fashion. As I saw it, the whole point is not what others would do, but what you or I would do when confronted with an opportunity to save the life of another human being. But I realized that in prison, minding your own business is part of the survival handbook. So there were no heroes that day in the book club, and I suppose I included myself in that number. I wasn’t sure I could put my family at risk. But Derek reminded us that no one knows what they would do in the instant when a desperate person is standing on your doorstep begging for help.

  “You know,” said Carol. “As I was reading this I was thinking about you fellas. Some of the people that we encounter in this story are people who have lost their home and they are moving through from one safe place to another. Are you going to be able to find that thing called home when you leave here and what effect has that had on you, being placed here for a period of time?” Something about that question made me uncomfortable, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Perhaps it was the question’s implication that family and friends might drift away.

  Tony said he would always know where home was: Toronto. His hair seemed to be slicked down with oil and his head was large in proportion to his body. “The last time I got out, after six years, so much had changed. Stores locked up, an old club taken down. But I know the streets will be the same.”

  Dread wasn’t sure it would be quite so easy. “You have a record, people will stereotype you and it’s not going to be easy,” he said.

  “A child or a wife can affect where home is or was,” said Brad, the only one of the white inmates who wore his hair long. His voice sounded shaky and I wondered whether he had lost a family member.

  “There’s a difference,” said Parvat. “We had an option of coming here or not. We got caught. The Jews got removed out of their places of home.” An important distinction. And then his thoughts took a twist. “For some people, being home is doing drugs and eating once every three days. In here they’re eating three meals a day, so some people love jai
l better than out there.”

  I passed around a piece of paper and a pen and asked the men to write down comments to share with our Toronto women’s book club, which would meet two weeks later to discuss the same book. Then Carol had an exciting announcement. Roddy Doyle had emailed back answers to the men’s questions about his novel The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. Carol asked the book club members who had posed the questions to read his responses aloud. It was Michael’s question that evoked the most interesting reply from the author: “‘Do you believe that abuse is learned and carried from generation to generation? I suspect that Charlo himself was a victim of abuse,’” Michael read, with his slight lisp.

  Then he read aloud the author’s answer:

  “‘I don’t know’ is my answer to that question—and ‘possibly’ and ‘probably.’ But I’m reluctant to say ‘Yes.’ Paula says ‘I don’t know’ quite often in the book, because the possible reasons for Charlo’s behaviour seem too neat and simple; and they seem, almost, to excuse his behaviour. If abusive behaviour is learnt, what then of the men or women who hit their children although they themselves were never hit? It happens.”

  Doyle’s point hit a chord, and the men talked about it as they said goodbye and walked down the hall. Gaston and Peter lingered for a moment at Carol’s request. Carol went to the chaplain’s office and came out with a stack of Professor Duffy’s selected security-cleared classics. She gave them each an armful: The Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad; two sci-fi novels by H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Time Machine; Charles Portis’s western True Grit; and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Peter had already read The Catcher in the Rye and said he was not inclined to read it again. Carol told him the books were his to keep, and he was delighted. “These will make a wonderful beginning to a book collection,” he said. He told Carol, though, that it was likely he would be transferred to a halfway house just before or after our next meeting. It would be a loss for the book club and a personal loss for me, given his fine journal writing.

  Later that afternoon on Amherst Island, the mercury climbed to twenty-eight degrees Celsius in the rare March heat wave and Carol and I brought our pre-dinner drinks outside. Hers looked like a martini, mine was a cold pilsner. A summer haze hung over water that would normally have sheets of ice, and grass was greening where normally a foot or two of snow would lie. Carol was surprised to see dark pink rhubarb shoots breaking through and made plans to weed the asparagus bed in the coming week. We breathed deeply and could smell earth. Dozens of pairs of mergansers floated in the narrow channel between the island and the mainland, like couples promenading. The males roughed up their rakish crests and bobbed their chests impressively into the water in their annual courtship ritual, while the females barked and cronked appreciatively. American robins pecked without success at the still-frozen earth, not far from the month-early scilla and crocus that were opening their throats to the warmth. The scene was soothing after a day in the prison. I couldn’t help thinking that the scene would have delighted Antonina, the zookeeper’s wife.

  With the weirdly early spring, birds were already nesting willynilly around the garden. Carol had found a mourning dove nesting in her bird feeder, meaning that she and Bryan would have to avoid that area until the hatchlings fledged.

  But that afternoon the surrounding chaotic birdlife failed to distract Carol. She was preoccupied with thoughts of recruiting new book club ambassadors from among the Collins Bay Book Club members to help bolster attendance and encourage the slower readers to get through the books. She’d been disappointed that only nine of the twenty-three members had shown up for book club. Her comments revealed again what I had learned about Carol: partial success was never enough. It was not enough that she had founded a book club in a prison. It had to be a good book club and the members had better bloody well show up.

  I agreed that it was discouraging that only Peter and Parvat, and perhaps Michael, had finished the book. I mostly understood why Gaston only managed to get to page 100. He’d had his parole hearing to prepare for, college courses to finish and classics to read, as well as the book club book.And also, he told me after the meeting that, lately, he’d been more eager to read “positive spiritual books” because the themes of war and domestic violence were depressing. I told Carol we should keep that in mind for book selection. But what about Dread, who hadn’t cracked the spine? He had offered no excuse. I said to Carol that perhaps with the departure of Ben, his buddy and foil, Dread no longer had an enthusiastic reader on his unit to encourage him along. I also reminded her of Albert’s stunning excuse at the meeting for why he’d come without his book read, and, in fact, without his book: “We got flooded in 4A Block,” he said. “When I woke up there was a couple of inches of feces and urine water in my cell.” And floating on top was his copy of The Zookeeper’s Wife. Derek had remarked that that was better than ‘The dog ate my homework,’ and we all laughed.

  And what about the empathy that I’d hoped the book would elicit? It was there in Peter’s remarks, and sometimes Michael’s and Parvat’s. But it was less evident among the others that day. How different from the unrestrained empathy that the members of our women’s book club often expressed.

  Within a week Carol had wrangled a meeting to deputize new ambassadors: Peter, and also Michael. She coached them on using their intuition to identify likely readers. Some might already be readers, she said, but others might just be desperate for something to counter the loneliness of prison. She wanted ten to fifteen men to show up every time. She reminded them that one inmate had had a good outcome at a parole hearing in which he and one of the parole board members discussed at length a book he had read in the book club.

  Dread, a veteran ambassador, shared his philosophy with the new appointees on how to encourage readers who were having difficulty getting into a book. “The book is not a predator. It’s a prey. You have to go after it. It’s not like a Sidney Sheldon read. Sidney Sheldon books are predators that go after you.” Predator and prey. It was the second time in a month that an inmate had made that observation, making me think that some inmates saw the world that way in prison, and possibly even outside it.

  After the meeting with the ambassadors, I sat down for individual visits with Gaston and Peter. Gaston arrived with the news that he’d been granted day parole and would be out as soon as a halfway house could find him a bed. Of the classics prescribed by Professor Duffy, he’d finished The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, The Red Badge of Courage and Timothy Findley’s novel The Wars. Dread announced that he had a parole hearing the following month. Two of Carol’s ambassadors were already moving on.

  Peter had proudly brought his journal along to our meeting. In the two months since I’d given it to him, he’d written ninety-three pages. His entry about The Zookeeper’s Wife on March 11 in particular was notable: “The zoo, the animals, their influence, need of care, played a huge role in the family’s resilience, determination and logistical operation,” he wrote. “I found the animals’ respect for each other really quite remarkable and something I would have never imagined.” He then turned his attention to the animals that appeared at the prison:

  The geese, that sometimes come in the hundreds, eat the grass, shit the grass and go on their way. The grass is so similar to the way it goes in, it may very well just keep on growing after it comes out. Seagulls. Pigeons. And crows that are sometimes large enough to prey on the pigeons. These crows have a calculating look to them. In the summer of 2010 we had a hawk on the premises. Its behaviour and the behaviour of everything else in reaction to it, was simply awesome to watch. I came to realize that the resident bird population here is not unlike the resident and employed human population here. Predator, preyed upon, and scavenger. But, among the human element it is difficult to discern which is which.

  I read that passage several times, noting yet another reference to predators and prey. Here was a man who was becoming more aware of the na
tural world through his journaling. Also, he was thinking like a writer. With my encouragement, he had even begun paying attention to the smells of the prison and writing about them. And he seemed to have absorbed some of Diane Ackerman’s descriptive powers. On March 29 he wrote:

  Ann brought up the “prison smell.” Jails and prisons all smell the same, not unlike hospitals in that manner. It’s very difficult to describe. The cleaning chemicals most certainly contribute. The floors, every square foot, are cleaned every single day and the vapors of such over the years likely linger in unseen crevices and no doubt permeate the concrete itself. The lack of sensuous stimulation is in fact what the prison smell is—an absence of other scents. No breeze with smells of trees, flowers or gardens. No scented candles or potpourri. No ashtrays, empties or leftovers. No perfume. No rubber, asphalt or exhaust. There is not even a whiff of your meal before it arrives. No smells of spring with earth’s exhalation after winter. No wind off the water in the summer and no thick lingering aroma that accompanies autumn’s dropped leaves or its unmistakable departure when the cold air seals it down.

  Unlike nearby Millhaven, a maximum-security prison, which had wire fencing through which the inmates could often see deer and other wildlife, Collins Bay’s high walls blocked the view of the outside world. From Peter’s perspective, that meant the inmates’ awareness of what lay beyond the walls was perceived mainly through sound: traffic, train horns, the occasional police siren and even what he described as “the high-pitched revolutions of speed bikes.” He concluded that the deprivation of the senses reduced him and the other men to animals.

  He also wrote in depth about Les Misérables, which he’d borrowed from the library. How had he had time to do that, while reading the classics and the book club book? He thought Victor Hugo’s writing had a peculiar rhythm, which he initially attributed to translation, then realized it was the author’s narrative style. He wrote in his journal: