The Midnight Zoo (15 page)

“It’s true,” Tomas piped up. “If Mama is searching for us, this is where she’ll come.”

The lioness gave the children a long look, her serpentine tail flipping. Andrej stood defiant under her stare.
Every war is everyone’s war, lioness,
he wanted to say.
Every life is everyone’s battle
. What he said was, “We’ll stay here, and we’ll look after you. We’ll find somewhere to hide if the soldiers come. We’ll find food and water and straw for you, and things for you to play with. We’ll bring sandbags to protect you from bombs, and put roofs on your cages so the weather doesn’t get in. We’ll use timber to build walls for you, so you can have privacy. But mostly what we’ll do is
search
. We’ll search for hacksaws to cut through the bars, or crowbars to pull them apart. And we’ll search for the spare keys. They must be somewhere. We’ll search every street until we find the owner’s house, and then we’ll search the house even if it’s just a pile of stones: the keys will be there. I don’t know how long it will take — maybe a day or a month, maybe a whole year — but we can do it, lioness. I
want
to do it.”

Tomas declared, “I would
rather
do that, than do anything else.”

“How nice for you!” bleated the chamois balefully. “To while away your life doing exactly what you want! Pity about those of us who can’t! The boar is right: people are all the same. First we were prisoners of the zoo’s owner, and now we’re prisoners of two boys. The owner said he’d come back, but he didn’t. You say you’ll find the keys, but you won’t. You’ll search a little, but then you’ll get bored, and then you’ll disappear like everyone else.”

The handsome goatlike beast stood glowering, its horns glinting ebony in the light. The other animals looked from it to Andrej, who eyed his challenger with dignity and said, “That’s not true, chamois. Maybe I haven’t got the keys in my hand, but I
do
already have them. All I need to do is find them — and I will. Finding them will be the easy part. You wait and see.”

“Pshaw! Pretty talk!”

“
I
believe you,” said the kangaroo. “I think you’ll find the keys.”

“So do I,” said the bear. “I believe you.”

“What will happen then?” asked the llama.

Andrej said, “I’ll tell you what will happen then.”

The chamois, disgusted, retreated into the shadows. Tomas shifted over to let Andrej sit on the bench, and passed Wilma to him when Andrej reached for her. Hugging the small warmth of the baby, Andrej glanced up to the sky. Three or four stars were glowing faintly there, but although the moon was gone, the sun hadn’t yet arrived; and no breeze was blowing, and nothing living made a sound. For a few brief moments the land and time and life itself hung in a state of calm stasis.

Andrej shut his eyes, and thought of all the things Uncle Marin had taught him. In his memory he heard words spoken around firesides, at bedsides, along the banks of roads. In the dark, he saw the world revealed before him. In his mind, he turned the keys.

First they released the eagle
. The huge bird with its pagan face watched as the gate of its cage creaked back on its hinges. It was momentarily suspicious of the big gap between the bars. But then, through the gap, it sighted a square of blue sky that was unlined by black talon marks of iron. It launched itself from its perch, and as it soared through the gate its wings spread as wide as a table. The air dislodged by the first great sweep of feathers flattened the grass of the zoo. Upward to the sun the eagle powered, spiraling on the morning air. It opened its throat and let out its cry, the sound of ice and pinnacles. Against the white sky its jet silhouette soon became no more than a speck.

They opened the other cages one by one. The bear stepped down from the stone floor, huffing as its claws met lawn. In the sunshine its auburn coat looked irresistibly warm and cuddlesome. The monkey didn’t wait for its gate to open wide, but streaked chittering through the narrowest gap. Up the maple it bolted, out to the flimsiest twig. The lioness hesitated, showing her teeth to the unbarred space; she sniffed the opened doorway carefully before deciding to trust it. The seal, hearing the groan of its gate, stopped swimming and lifted its head; leaping from the water, it slid across the stone and onto the grass in one fluid and glistening movement, and propped there on its flippers. The wolf, released, leaped athletically to the grass and rolled around on its back in ecstasy. The boar poked its scruffy snout out from under the straw: sensing freedom, it emerged and shook itself spryly, trotting forward on dapper legs. The chamois butted the bars with its horns, eager to escape. It pushed through the partly open gate and ran bucking round the tree. The llama departed its cage with decorum, its soulful eyes blinking in the sun. It bent its long neck and tentatively nibbled at the grass. The kangaroo approached its open gate nervously, balancing on toes and tail. Soil under its feet made it spring joyfully, gangly limbs going everywhere.

They walked from the zoo without looking back at the cages and the mermaid and the maple and the gates that hadn’t closed.

The monkey led the way for them, expertly finding a path through the wreckage of the village. They walked north, toward the mountains, passing hamlets and fording rivers, watched as they went by astonished old men and befuddled babies and invaders too flabbergasted to stop them and ask questions. Sometimes, when they rested, small children gathered round, wanting to pat the animals, believing they were pets. The lioness hunkered and snarled at them, the wolf showed its long teeth, but the llama and the monkey let themselves be caressed in return for buttered bread. They walked through villages wearied by the war, and through others that the war had ignored. They stepped past demolished houses, trod through meadows dappled by blooms. They traveled slowly, the seal and the bear setting an ambling pace, the kangaroo and monkey skipping ahead and returning to report on what lay beyond the next corner. Their mood was fine — even the wild boar’s. Its exceptional nose found mushrooms and unearthed vegetables in the fields. High above, they sometimes glimpsed the eagle, its wings unfolded on a shelf of warm air.

And finally the farms and roads gave way to the stones and precipices of the mountain range. Inside this coarse earth were buried gold, mercury and coal. Across the serrated ranges grew pristine forests of oak and fir. The wind blew cold over this taciturn country, and every slight noise — a sliding pebble, a snapping branch — rang out brittle and loud. The strange party of children and animals climbed until they reached a place from where they could see nothing but peaks and forest in every direction. Here the eagle finally disappeared into the clouds.

The lonesome mountains were home to the wolf, the boar, the chamois and the bear. Their homeland reached up through their feet and whispered in their ears, making them suddenly lawless: they did not linger to say farewell, but loped away into the undergrowth with a scatter of stone and swish of tail. If they ever saw each other again, it would be as rivals and enemies, as bears and wolves and boars and chamois have been since time immemorial. Their life together in the zoo would be a life forgotten.

The travelers, having watched them run, rested awhile before resuming their journey, living for a time off the forest’s food. Refreshed and fortified, traveling once more, they skirted small towns and great cities where the war crashed and fumed before finally and gladly reaching the tossing sea. A lengthy voyage awaited them, so they packed a raft with food. As soon as the water was deep and green and unbearably chill, the seal slipped without fanfare overboard. It disappeared into the depths, swimming fast, spinning loops, then raced back to break the surface with a spectacular leap. A white cloud reflected in its burnished eyes before it turned and vanished forever with an easy whisk of its flippers.

Their company was diminishing rapidly, but on the raft there was neither sentiment nor patience. The lioness watched as the sail was adjusted and the raft swung south, her asp of tail switching restively. The journey south was arduous, and the lioness had a cattish dislike of water; her jitteriness was compounded by the monkey’s mischievous fiddling with the tiller and sail. By the time they reached the scorched sandy coast she could no longer contain herself: she pounced from the raft in horror, and charged away as fast as she could. Only when she felt the sand become dirt beneath her paws, and saw the flat green savannah stretching before her, and heard the thunder of lions calling in the distance, did she run because she was free.

Having lost sight of the lioness they turned the raft west to traverse the mighty ocean, using as their guide the invisible line of the equator. The waves here were huge, and the ceaseless plunge and swoop made the raft and its occupants groan. The voyage lasted weeks, and they told each other the same stories over and over, and played “I Spy” although there was nothing to spy until the day that land hove unannounced into view. The monkey, in a lather of excitement, behaved appallingly as the companions hiked into the jungle. It ran ahead and disappeared, it returned in time to harass the kangaroo, it plucked up spiders the size of sparrows and brandished them at the llama. Eventually it discovered a troupe of brown bald-faced monkeys exactly like itself squatting amid the branches of a tall tree. The troupe set up a clamor at the sight of the strangers; the monkey swung speedily into the tree, took a place in the branches alongside its kin, and smugly joined in the unfriendly shrieking.

Hurrying away, the depleted company crossed the continent to the open hillock country that was the llama’s home. The clouds drifted low here, speckling rain; the air felt thin and oddly unsatisfying to breathe. The stony earth sprouted swards of silver spearlike grass. In the distance they sighted a herd of wild llamas with their heads raised high, gazing ruminatively at them. The llama gave a snicker of recognition, and cantered away to join them. It stood among the herd and stared back at its old comrades, and it was impossible to tell, after a minute, which of the staring llamas had been theirs.

This left only the three children and the kangaroo. Tomas crouched before its cage and asked the little creature, “Where do you live?”

“I don’t know,” said the kangaroo. It was lost.

Tomas looked across the lawn to his brother. “Can we keep it?”

“No,” said Andrej. “Let me think.” He chewed a thumbnail, trying to remember what Uncle Marin had said.
The truth of an animal is in its shape. Its body tells its truths
. “The kangaroo has a short coat, so it must come from a place where the sun shines. It has long legs for traveling, so it must be a big land. It’s the color of dust, so there must be rocks and bare ground. Does that remind you of anything, kangaroo?”

The marsupial’s ears swiveled, as if to the cackle of strange birds. “I think it’s far. Across the sea.”

“That’s all right, we have the raft, we can sail anywhere.”

So they steered the raft across vast worlds of water until they reached a sprawling land where the sun burned brilliantly and the kangaroo lived, and it bounded away into the haze of haggard scrub and fragrant trees, covering the ground as swiftly as a swallow cuts through the sky. “Good-bye!” Tomas called after it. “I’ll miss you! Don’t come back.”

The haze that hung about them was not the searing sunshine of a faraway land, but the damp of coming dawn; the stone under their feet was the polished floor of cages, not a mountain’s rugged side. Nevertheless the animals lay dreaming of leaves which crumpled beneath their paws, of gales that flattened their ears to their skulls, of pungent tracks and scratch marks left by others of their kind. Tomas sighed contentedly, slouching hands on hips. “Now there’s just you and me and baby,” he said. “What will
we
do?”

“We’ll become pirates,” said Andrej, putting a patch of palm over an eye. “We can sail round and round the world burying treasure and having sword fights. We’ll find Uncle Marin and he can be the captain. When Wilma grows up she will be the meanest pirate of all.”

“She will be!” Tomas laughed, delighted by this future. “Let’s do that, Andrej. Let’s be pirates.”

They would not find the keys: the children and the animals knew it. But they also knew that they had no need to. They had journeyed to the final edge of life, beyond which there were no walls. The iron bars of the zoo fell away, and in their place forests sighed and sand dunes shifted, rivers flooded and mighty herds ran. Infants were born blinking and bloody, life-or-death duels were fought to the end. The sun rose and set, limbs grew stiff and tired, safe shelters were found under shadows, and eyes that had seen much but never enough fluttered and closed forever, and opened brightly again.

There was a lady standing where the pebbly path met the lawn. By the time Andrej and Tomas noticed her, the animals were already on their feet and watching her fixedly, having sensed her coming. The wolf was poking its nose between the bars. The monkey was biting its lip. The llama lifted first one foot, then another. The seal had stopped swimming.