Only the Animals

by Ceridwen Dovey

  ‘When the ruins of the monastery above Cassino first became visible, this place where so many men on both sides had died – were dying – in agony, their souls too fresh to join the ancient ghosts of the Benedictine monks, Karol knew he should never have brought the bear with him. Yet he was guiltily glad of the bear’s presence beside him on the steepest of the narrow mountain passes as the truck followed the eerie, disembodied glow of a white towel hung about the shoulders of another soldier walking in front. This was the only way, as they moved through the chemical fog designed to keep their movements secret from the Germans, to have some idea of the curves of the road without headlights. The bear sat with his paws over his eyes most of the time, a gesture so ridiculously human that it made Karol smile in the trickiest moments of manoeuvring the truck, keeping him calm.

  ‘The new traumas – camping below the monastery, watching its silhouette appear against the dawn sky, knowing that most of the Polish soldiers sent the night before to cross the Rapido River to reach the hill town had drowned – did not dull Karol’s older ones: the last sight of his baby son, the cattle train, the icy alien gulag. It felt instead as if each one pulled at the same psychic tear in the fabric of himself, and might split that fabric in two. Only the bear kept Karol human, or better than human – kept him just whole enough to remain kind. I am because you are, he said to himself over and over, looking at the bear asleep beside him. I am because you are.

  ‘One morning, after six days and nights of such violent shelling it had been impossible to sleep or think, they saw a lone Lancers Regiment pennant flying from the monastery’s ramparts. Somebody had risked his life to attach it to the highest remaining wall, to let it be known that the battle was won.

  ‘That same morning, to take his mind off his grief – a battle won on paper, but so many drowned, stabbed, exploded or sliced apart by bullets – Karol did a sketch of the bear carrying an artillery shell on his shoulder. He asked a friend to make a badge of this logo, and soon everybody in the company had it on their sleeve or hat or lapel. It was easy to get approval for it after the enormous losses the Poles had suffered, losses they were told had not been in vain, for the Cassino victory led to others. Rome fell, and Ancona, and finally Bologna. By the start of the following summer, the Germans had surrendered.

  ‘Within days of the end of the war, Karol entered into one of the happiest times in his life, a voluptuously, almost indecently carefree time of limbo, with no decisions to make or responsibilities to take on because his fate was in the hands of the Allies. And all the while he knew that at the end of this sumptuous period of rest he would be reunited with his wife and son.

  ‘He and the bear were granted a furlough on the Adriatic coast, billeted on a small farm run by a childless elderly couple. Their hosts did not seem to be grieving any specific losses, and the lack of a common language meant there could be no complicated conversations about guilt and blame. Mostly they co-existed in luxurious silence.

  ‘Karol and the bear spent most days on the beach, along with most of their regiment, who had been billeted in the same area. Karol lay on his back and dug his feet under the sand, and imagined the same scene repeatedly: returning home with the bear by his side, ambling along the main road into his village, and seeing the look of joyful disbelief on his little boy’s face.

  ‘His reveries were interrupted at least once a morning by female screams, and every time, his blood moved more quickly from shock; for so long he had heard only male noises of distress. Then the screams would be replaced by laughter and strings of Italian curses, for the bear had snuck again into the sea and surfaced in the middle of a group of female bathers. For this trick the other soldiers rewarded the bear handsomely with cigarettes, for of course the women had to be apologised to and placated, and then names and smiles were exchanged and halting conversations in Italian begun.

  ‘But months passed and Karol’s euphoria began to fade as he watched his homeland being toyed with like a puzzle piece. Torrid deals were made with Stalin. The men were told they would be sent to Scotland to be demobbed instead of going home. They heard terrible stories about soldiers who had been prisoners of war, the few who were brave or sentimental enough to return to Soviet-occupied Poland, being put back on cattle trains to new death camps, or to familiar Siberian ones, or sent to the fatal gold mines of the Arctic Circle. They were told to be cautious, to bide their time.

  ‘At Winfield Camp for displaced persons in the Scottish Borders, it was almost impossible to get information from the Soviet-occupied Polish territories – letters were being censored both ways. But Karol kept trying, writing to his wife and relatives, until finally somebody took pity on him and risked writing in a coded way the truth Karol already knew: that his wife and child were no longer alive.

  ‘After this, Karol stopped caring about what might happen to the bear. The other Poles at Winfield watched the bear swim in the frigid edges of the nearby river and told stories about him to anybody who would listen. They sent him on missions to Karol, to do some funny new trick that might restore their connection, but Karol looked at the bear uncomprehendingly.

  ‘When he was informed that the bear would be going to live in Edinburgh Zoo, Karol’s first feeling was envy: if only he could live in an enclosure too, be fed and watered, not ever have anything asked of him again. He was invited to accompany the bear to Edinburgh, to walk him into his new enclosure and remove the chain from around his neck. All this he did, feeling nothing. He built a little pyramid of cigarettes on the ground, and opened a bottle of beer for the bear.

  ‘When it was time to leave, he turned to the bear and put his hands automatically in the creature’s paws. They looked at each other. The bear leaned forward and gave Karol’s cheek a long, mournful lick. He knew he would never see Karol again, though they would live out their lives in the same city. Karol later heard that the bear was in love with a female bear brought to join him in his enclosure. He courted her with such ardour that the whole of Edinburgh was swept up in their romance. Sometimes, on better days, Karol would think of the story Irena had told him, of a human princess trapped in a bear’s body, searching for love. And he would tell himself that tomorrow, tomorrow, he would find the courage to return: to the bear, to his homeland, to himself.’

  The blind brown bear had finished her story. She lumbered down to the dirty water in the moat and began to scrub herself. A ritual cleansing, a preparatory rite. When her fur was soaked through, she returned to the concrete cave and lay down against the wall, shivering and pure.

  The witch lit a cigarette stuffed with tea leaves and ignored for a moment the scornful eyes of the black bear regarding her. ‘So I made some bad business decisions,’ the witch said. She fiddled with the dial of a radio she’d brought with her, finding only static.

  Below them in the city basin, the chocolate factory was burning. The smoke smelled of caramel. Voices surfaced out of the radio’s static, clinging to the pirated frequency, not letting go.

  ‘What is my wife saying? I can’t hear. Say it again please?’

  ‘She said that she is fine, that the children are fine.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘That the children have grown.’

  ‘What is she saying now?’

  ‘That she misses you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She says she misses you.’

  ‘I can’t hear.’

  ‘She says she loves you.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘That’s okay, she says she’s doing fine.’

  ‘Please, I can’t hear you!’

  A day later, the brown bear died. The black bear ate her, limb by limb.

  ‘What was it you really wanted to say?’ the witch said to the black bear, pushing bread that rasped like stone through the fence railings. ‘You asked me to write something down a while ago.’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ said the bear, sucking contemplatively on the brown bear’s thighbone. ‘It couldn’t have been very impor
tant. These days I seem to exist only in the present. I can’t remember anything from yesterday, or the day before that.’

  ‘You do know what you’ve done, bear?’ said the witch cautiously. ‘Tell me you know.’

  The black bear looked at her with contempt. ‘What are you talking about, witch?’

  The witch looked afraid. ‘I thought you knew,’ she said, preparing to leave. She gestured at the brown bear’s clean bones. ‘She was your wife.’

  The black bear did not speak again. On an icy day at the end of October, he died with his paws wrapped around the brown bear’s ribcage, holding it close against his body. In the nearby enclosures, the lay of the bones – once tigers, pumas, leopards, wolves, lions with beating hearts and wet tongues – told the same story: life mates eaten in madness, bones within bones, beloved consumed at last by their lovers.

  A LETTER TO SYLVIA PLATH

  Soul of Dolphin

  DIED 2003, IRAQ

  Dear Ms Plath

  I’d like to try to get the story of my death out of the way: no more of this terrible anticipation. This is the soldier in me speaking. I have the US Navy to thank for training me to do the deed, then deal with the deed, though it’s in failing to deal that I died. Word games as primers, Ms Plath, you’d appreciate that.

  The other animals who have told their stories here are not as burdened by previous and often foolhardy attempts at cross-species communication as I feel I am. We have a ridiculous history together, humans and dolphins, made more ridiculous each time a dolphin raises her head from the water and hams it up for the camera, or performs another inane trick for the sake of a tossed fish. Scientists have tried to transform us into serious objects of study, but even then there is something a bit off about what happens when they get down to work. Marine biologists start writing tacky utopian tracts about the possibilities of telepathic communication with us; animal behaviourists can’t resist trying to get us to tap away at underwater keyboards to break codes. Science fiction writers generally use their poetic licence to imagine screwing us, which is unsurprising; we have long understood that we occupy a special place in the human erotic imagination.

  So when I was first asked to tell my story, I thought, Absolutely not. But the brief became more interesting when it was suggested I think about a human writer who meant something to me, and let my thoughts of him or her infuse whatever I decided to say. I said I’d participate only if I could use the third person, to avoid becoming a parody of myself, the self-aware dolphin wielding ‘I’ like a toy ball propped between my fins. But as it turns out, ‘I’ is irresistible.

  * * *

  I began by rereading the work of your ex-husband, the British poet Ted Hughes, thinking I might be inspired by him. His famous animal poems were already familiar to me but I realised, as I read them again, that I had misunderstood them on first encounter. Back then, I had admiringly thought he was trying to understand the human by way of the animal, but now I can see that in fact he wanted to justify the animal in the human. I saw right through his mythologising of the poetic process, the animal as symbol of the poet getting in touch with his deepest, wildest, most predatory instincts. The poet as shaman, returning to primordial animal awareness. The poet saying, You have no idea how alive you can feel when you’ve been fishing all morning and fornicating all afternoon! Go forth, fish and fuck yourselves stupid, and you can thank me afterwards. We’re animals, after all!

  Hughes collected animal skins to put on the floors of the homes you and he lived in together, and I imagine he laid them out with great reverence, with not a hint of ironic kitsch. He justified hunting wild animals thus: ‘Do you know Jung’s description of therapy as a way of putting human beings back in contact with the primitive human animal?’ It was all a licence to behave badly. I’ve got nothing against bad behaviour per se, but men – dolphin or human, and here again we are similar – do tend to weave a web of intricate justification around any wrongdoing, and it’s this that drives me nuts. Women behave badly and then, because we don’t have the ego necessary to sustain the same justificatory web, die of guilt.

  I turned to the animal poems Hughes wrote for children, fables that he claimed would help them understand their unconscious thoughts and feelings. This is going to make us money, he told you, his young wife, as he churned one out every morning of your honeymoon in Benidorm before settling down to his real writing. Let’s sell them to Disney! You didn’t mind, you were worried about money. But the poems didn’t make much, perhaps because most of them are wholly inappropriate for children, full of lines about carving knives, murderous relatives, stiff brandy, shark attacks, and one rather bizarre bent hypodermic. The only poem that got it right, ‘Moon-Whales’, which is both tender and off-key in the way children like, happened to be inspired by my own species (dolphins are toothed whales, but not many people think of us as such). For a while I thought I might write my contribution from the point of view of his mythical moon-whale, the most magnificent of all the creatures he imagines living on the moon.

  But still it didn’t seem right. I wondered, What is it I’m resisting here? I turned to your own work – your journals, your poetry – at first to counterbalance the relentless maleness of Hughes’s writing voice. And you helped me understand what it was. That human women need no reminder that they’re animals. So why do your men keep shouting it from the rooftops as if they’ve discovered how to transform base metals into gold? Imagine a male dolphin who has to keep having epiphanies to remember he’s an animal! But we’re special, your men declare, we’re a special-case animal, and part of what makes us special is that we ask the very question, Am I human or animal?

  So I ask them in turn, Can you use echolocation to know exactly what curves the ocean floor makes in every conceivable direction? Can you stun the creature you would like to eat using sound alone? Can you scan the bodies of your extended family and immediately tell who is pregnant, who is sick, who is injured, who ate what for lunch? The tingling many humans report feeling during an encounter with us isn’t endorphins, it’s because we’ve just scanned you to know you in all dimensions. We see through you, literally. Special case indeed. Perhaps you should be asking yourselves different questions. Why do you sometimes treat other people as humans and sometimes as animals? And why do you sometimes treat creatures as animals and sometimes as humans?

  * * *

  I floated all this with a friend I’ve made recently out here, the soul of Elizabeth Costello, an author and philosopher of sorts. She was unimpressed by my ranting. She feels attacking Ted Hughes for harnessing animals for his primitivist poetic purpose is not doing him justice, and that it would be thoroughly unoriginal to take him to task for it.

  ‘It is an attitude that’s easy to criticise, to mock,’ she said. ‘It is deeply masculine, masculinist. Its ramifications in politics are to be mistrusted. But when all is said and done, there remains something attractive about it at an ethical level.’

  When I protested, she cut me short. ‘Writers teach us more than they are aware of,’ she said. She suggested I focus instead on what I want to say to you, Ms Plath. ‘Why a letter?’ she wanted to know.

  I explained that Hughes thought of letter writing as good practice for conversation with the world. I agree with him about that, though clearly not about much else.

  Then she pointed out that despite my determination to get it out of the way early, I’ve been avoiding the issue of my death, and rather well too. It’s harder to get around to than I thought it would be. In part, I think, because when I decided to write this letter to you, it had less to do with the way we both died and more to do with the connection I felt to you as a fellow mother. I have one child; you had two. You might not know that the Greek root of our name, delphis, means womb – we are the womb fish – but I think you would have liked the term, even used it in one of your poems.

  By far my favourite parts of your journals and poems are the insights you share into the quicksand, joyous minutes and hours and d
ays and weeks and years of mothering, and how you did not think of this experience as something that encroached on your other identities, but as something which enriched them. You were not a frustrated housewife forced to stick your head in the oven and turn on the gas because your desire to write had been subsumed by the mundane, miraculous hourliness of being a mother. You describe your priorities so poignantly in one of your journals as Books & Babies & Beef Stew; and for a while, you had the promise of all three – writing in the mornings, caring for your babies in the afternoon, cooking rabbit stew in the evenings if your husband had shot one in the woods, reading at night. Virginia Woolf, as you noted in your journal, described in her own diary receiving a rejection letter from a publisher and dealing with it by frying up a big panful of sausage and haddock in her kitchen. Though you vowed to go one better than Woolf: I will write until I begin to speak my deep self, and then have children, and speak still deeper.

  And that deep self spoke animal truths of which Ted Hughes could only dream. You took enormous creaturely satisfaction in food, in sex, in smells, in your own body and its workings. The smell of your pee first thing in the morning, the texture of your snot when you wiped it beneath a table, the feel of the sun tanning your belly brown and the fine hairs on it blonde, the ‘cowlike bliss’ of breastfeeding your infant son by starlight. You didn’t need any symbolic scaffolding to describe your experience as female animal. Hughes sometimes sounded jealous of animals, for being ‘continually in a state of energy which men only have when they’ve gone mad’. But women have that energy when they’re mothering. If he’d observed you a little more closely instead of searching for his next Big Animal Symbol, he might have noticed this, and done justice to the animal with whom he was sharing his bed. I think this is perhaps what drew you to write about the bees you kept in the orchard of your home: their energy – the energy of a hundred parents keeping their brood alive – reminded you of your own.