The Midnight Zoo (14 page)

Andrej sat down on the bench beside Tomas, who didn’t stop swinging his legs. “Tom, we have to go.”

Tomas looked at him. He knew that, after the encounter with Baba Jaga, his brother had vowed never to be caught in open daylight again. Nevertheless he asked, “Can’t we stay?”

“No. We need to find food.”

It was a good reason, one Tomas couldn’t deny. His stomach was grumbling. But, “We can find food in the village, and come back here,” he suggested.

Andrej shook his head. “There’s nothing to eat in the village. You know that. The mice and birds will have taken everything that wasn’t bombed to pieces. Even if we did find something, it wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t be milk for Wilma.”

Tomas’s eyes slid accusingly to where his sister slept in the pack. His gaze stalked around the zoo then, and Andrej saw all that tussled within him. “I don’t want to, Andrej.”

“That’s what you said before.” Andrej smiled. “First you said you didn’t want to come here, and now you say you don’t want to leave.”

Tomas pouted, ignoring this. The animals were moving lethargically behind the bars, stretching their muscles, licking their paws, sniffing the coming day. The wolf yawned redly. The llama shook its ears. In the light, the creatures were poorer than the night had made them seem. Their bones showed, their coats were scurfy, their cages looked small and unclean. Tomas’s face creased in vexation. “We
can’t
leave them.” He whispered it harshly. “It’s not right, Andrej!”

“I know.”

“There’s no one to take care of them!”

“No, I know.”

“They need help!”

“I know, Tom.”

“So what will we do?”

Andrej said, “We’ll set them free.”

Tomas gasped, and ogled his brother, who was brave and kind and capable of miracles and who would
never
have abandoned the animals to their fate, Tomas was ashamed he’d thought otherwise: scrambling to his knees he gabbled, “Yes! How? How can we?”

Andrej shrugged. “These are cages, so there must be keys. We’ll find the keys and let them out, and they’re smart enough to find their way home.”

Tomas looked wildly around the zoo, wringing his fingers with excitement. He pictured the kangaroo bouncing round the maple, the monkey racing gymnastically through the leaves. “They won’t bite us, will they?” he asked, suddenly unsure; Andrej shook his head and Tomas, feeling foolish, said, “No, I didn’t think so. We’ll open the cages and they’ll just run away. They probably won’t even look back. The eagle can fly. What about the seal?”

Andrej hesitated, his dark eyes dipping, and Tomas saw he’d forgotten about the seal. They couldn’t leave it alone in the zoo swimming back and forth, back and forth until, like a shadow at dusk, there was nothing left of it; yet nor could they haul it from the pool to hobble awkwardly through the broken timber of villages and burnt stubble of the countryside. Tomas watched his brother thinking, his gaze following his thoughts as they moved around the problem. “Uncle Marin would know what to do,” he prompted.

“A cart!” Andrej snapped his fingers. “We’ll find a cart, and put the seal in it, and push the cart to a river, and the seal can swim down the river to the sea!”

“Clever!” Tomas rejoiced.

Andrej stepped from the bench. “Let’s tell the wolf.”

The dying night had turned the wolf’s russet coat the sleety gray of storms. The animal sat up watchfully as they approached. Stopping at the bars, Andrej wrapped his hands around the iron. “Wolf, Tomas and Wilma and I can’t stay. Soldiers are looking for us. But we’re not going to leave you trapped here. We’re going to open the cages and let you out. I know you won’t attack us. You and the bear and the chamois can find your way home to the mountains. The boar can go too, if it likes. The eagle can fly away. Maybe the lioness and the llama and the kangaroo and the monkey can go with you to the mountains. I know it’s not their home, but it’s better than being here, alone, in the zoo. We’ll put the seal into a cart and take it to a river. There’s one not far from here. It can swim down the river to the ocean. Then you’ll all be free.”

In the wolf’s honey-colored eyes the mountains appeared, stark and windswept. The zoo animals looked at each other through the bars, the bear raising its rumpled head. “Did he say they’re opening the cages?”

“He said they’ll open the cages!”

“I heard him, he said it —”

“That’s what he said, they’re opening the cages —”

“They’re opening the cages, they’re letting us out!” The chamois sang it gleefully, prancing in a circle. The monkey screeched and pounced skyward, haring across the bars. The lioness trotted the perimeter of her cage, puffing out brisk roars. Tomas was jumping up and down, the eagle was pacing its perch. The chamois stopped prancing, and started demanding. “You must let me out first! I’ll need a head start on that cat!”

The bear shuffled until it was sitting up. “Are you sure it will be safe?”

Andrej turned to the big animal. “No, it won’t be safe. It will be dangerous. The mountains are far away, and the war is everywhere between here and there. You’ll need to travel at night, and be careful. Stay away from people, and don’t talk to them. There will be lots of danger — but it’s dangerous to stay here, too. There’s soldiers here. There’s rumblethings. You’re helpless in these cages.”

“I will be scared,” the kangaroo decided.

“Don’t be scared!” Tomas cried; his heart bled for the little beast. “You won’t be scared, you’ll be free!”

“Freedom always
sounds
nice.” The llama spoke up primly. “But is it clever? If we leave the zoo, who’ll take care of us? Who’ll bring food and water? Who will change the straw? Where will I sleep? What will I do when it rains? What if I get lonely — who will I talk to? What if something bad happens — what if I fall down a hill?”

“You’ll take care of yourself!” Tomas flung up his arms with the simplicity of it. “You’ll learn how to do it. Everybody learns to look after themselves. When I was young, I couldn’t tie my laces: but then I learned, and now I can!”

“These kids have looked after themselves for two turns of the moon,” said the chamois with disdain. “If they can survive on what meager brains
they
have, one imagines
you
can too.”

“We could look after each other,” offered the kangaroo, but the llama was not reassured. “I’d rather stay here. It sounds too scary.”

“It
is
scary, sometimes,” Tomas admitted. “But the scary bits are what make you brave.”

“You’ll just have to believe us,” said Andrej. “You’re not supposed to have iron bars around you — no one is supposed to have that. You’re
supposed
to fall down hills and get lonely, and find your own food and get wet when it rains. That’s what happens when you’re alive.”

“When you’re filling your space,” said the bear.

“It
can
be frightening, but underneath it’s fine. Like the sun is fine on a nice day, you know?”

The llama looked determinedly doubtful; then, the next instant, reflective. It said, “Sometimes I have a dream that I’m eating blue flowers. They are very tasty, and in the dream I know they’re what I’m supposed to eat, and I’m happy. But I’ve never seen blue flowers in real life. I’ve only seen white flowers growing in the grass down there. Are there such things as blue flowers?”

“There’s all kinds of flowers!” Tomas laughed. “Blue ones, yellow ones, red and pink and green ones — hundreds of flowers! When you’re free, you can eat them all!”

“No,” said the llama, “I only want the blue ones. Something tells me they’re the most delicious. I don’t know how I know it, but I do. And I don’t care if no one believes me.”

Andrej turned to the wolf. “We need the keys to the cages. Is there somewhere special the zoo’s owner used to keep them?”

“There is,” said the wolf.

“Where? They must be close — hidden under a brick maybe, or buried in a vat of grain —”

The wolf said, “The special place where the owner kept the keys was in his coat pocket.”

It took a moment for the meaning of this to sink through Andrej’s mind. Then he said, “Was he wearing the coat when he went away with the lions?”

“He wore the coat everywhere he went.”

Andrej nodded. He shifted his grip on the bars. “Are there spare keys? There must be.”

“Of course there are,” the wolf replied. “It would be unwise to have only one set of keys.”

“Well then? Do you know where they are? Wolf?”

The wolf gazed at him without blinking. Andrej felt it would turn away, but it didn’t. It said, “I only heard of spare keys mentioned once, by Alice to her friends. It was the night before they blew up the train, and they were excited. They’d been using the spare keys to get into the zoo for their secret meetings. That night, Alice said she mustn’t forget to return the keys to the hook in the hallway of her house, where they belonged.”

In his mind Andrej saw the annihilated village that lay beyond the zoo’s wrought-iron fence, the houses that were no longer homes but ranges of rubble, the streets that weren’t streets but repugnant obstacle courses made from the remains of lives. He laid his forehead against the bars and closed his eyes. Tomas asked, “What’s happening? Andrej?”

Andrej opened his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he told the wolf.

“What’s going on?” asked the chamois, craning to peer past the bars.

“There are no keys,” the wolf announced into the dawn.

“No keys?” The llama snorted. “Now you’re being silly. No keys! There are locks, and locks have keys, so there
must
be keys. . . .”

The monkey had gone very still, its gemlike eyes darting. It looked at Andrej, at Tomas, at Wilma, and its pink lip lifted to show its white, flintlike fangs. Then it erupted, throwing itself screaming from rope to rope, sprinting howling across the bars. It dashed to the floor and began to bang its food bowl on the stone so the metal rang earsplittingly. The kangaroo, terrified, careered into a corner and fell kicking; the llama brayed and skittered and went down on the slippery stone. The lioness rushed to the bars that separated her from the monkey and tried to force a paw through, twisting and snarling. The bear rose titanically to its full height, loosed a furious roar. Tomas pushed past Andrej and threw himself at the wolf’s cage, pounding his fists on the iron. The fragile air rang with the catastrophic clangor of misery and rage and betrayal. Andrej caught at his brother’s collar, yanked him off his feet. “Stop!” he shouted. “Don’t do that!”

“It’s not fair!” Tomas writhed. “It’s not fair, it’s not —”

Andrej shook him. “Stop it, I told you! The soldiers will hear!”

The monkey slammed the bowl one last time before hurling it into a corner and turning its back on the children. The kangaroo lay panting, eyes rolling to the sky; a twinge went through the coat of the collapsed llama. The bear went down on its four paws, then slumped onto the stone. Tomas’s eyes were brimming with tears; when Andrej let him go he lurched about blindly, unhappy everywhere. “Andrej!” he gasped. “It’s not fair! What can we do?”

“Get the baby,” his brother said shortly. “You’ve woken her up.”

Tomas mopped his face with one arm while he fished Wilma from the pack with the other, watching with tragic eyes as Andrej dug through the contents of his own pack until he found what he wanted. For the second time that night he held up to the light the corkscrew he’d discovered on the village street. “Yes!” Tomas nodded vigorously. “That’s clever, Andrej!”

Bouncing the baby, he watched in complete and silent faith as Andrej slipped the corkscrew into the lock of the wolf’s pen and rotated the implement artfully. The wolf edged to the center of its cage, ears flicking to the grate of metal on metal. When the bolt ignored the first delicate touch, Andrej became more persuasive, jabbing and wriggling the corkscrew, pushing and shaking the gate: yet the knuckle of iron remained unmoved, slotted dutifully through the locking plate. Andrej swore and stepped back, swiping the hair from his eyes. Tomas and the animals watched as he crossed to the seal’s cage and tried again, stabbing and gouging the corkscrew into the lock’s innards. The bolt remained steadfast, and something ominous happened: the corkscrew bent like a bow. Tense in every muscle, Andrej tried one last time, digging the sway-backed corkscrew into the lock of the lioness’s cage. The feline watched him leerily, ears flattened to her head. Tomas couldn’t bear to see his brother doing his best, and failing: when Andrej’s shoulders dropped he hurried to say, “It doesn’t matter Andrej, it isn’t your fault! We’ll think of another way . . .”

Ferocious with failure, Andrej kicked the earth, flinging the corkscrew into the grass. The stupid war, the stupid soldiers, the stupid corkscrew, the stupid keys: everything conspired against him, everything worked to defeat him. He pressed his body against the bars, feeling tired to the core of his bones. Tired of dodging and hiding, tired of being blown about by chance. Tired of worrying, of making decisions, of being responsible, of being forced to endure. Tired of having things taken from him. Tired by the heaviness of his heart.

The iron was so cold that it seared his skin. His boots were damp, his stomach empty, his hair tangled and his head sore. When he closed his eyes he saw not the blackness of night but the milky light of yet another day, unfeeling as a mountain, remorseless as a whipping.
Help me,
he prayed.
That’s my wish
.

He listened and heard nothing, no breathing or voice or footfall, not even the whisper of leaves. It was unexpectedly lovely and restful, that moment of nothing but quiet. Opening his eyes, Andrej met the eyes of the lioness. For an instant she seemed someone else. Turning from her, he announced, “We’ll stay too. If none of you can leave, we won’t either.”

Tomas caught a shocked breath. The animals simply gazed. “Andrej,” said the lioness, “your mother told you to run.”

Andrej spun to her. “I know. But she must have meant for us to run
somewhere
. When we were on the road, I didn’t know where we were going. I thought we were walking where the road took us, and letting whatever happened happen. I thought we were walking nowhere. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe we were walking
here
. Maybe Mama meant for us to
run here
. Maybe
this
is the space Tomas and I are meant to fill.”