The Midnight Zoo (8 page)

The shiny streak of animal was sweeping up and down the length of its pool exactly as it had been doing when the children first saw it. Its pace, which was swift, was also unaltering, nor did its ceaseless circuit veer even slightly from its invisible track. Somehow it was propelling itself through the water, although Andrej saw no movement of flipper or tail. The seal seemed nothing more than a shadowy shape that had taken on a relentless life and a strange, perpetual mission. Over Wilma’s sobbing Andrej asked the bear, “Is this all it does? Just swim back and forth?”

“What else should it do?” said the bear.

Patting the baby between her small shoulders, Andrej watched the sea creature flip and glide. Its seamless looping was hypnotic. The ripples it made on the greasy surface of the water were perfectly identical and flawlessly rhythmical, like the beat of an army drum. They lapped the stone edges of the pool and fell back with the most meager splash. The longer Andrej’s gaze followed the animal up and down the pool, the more forcefully he felt the creature’s trapped misery. “Poor thing,” he said. “They should have left it in the ocean. In the ocean, it would never have bumped into a wall.”

“It has never swum in the ocean,” the bear replied. “Somewhere far away there’s a place where the rocks are frozen and sprinkled with snow and the ocean beats the rocks as if it’s trying to crack them like coconuts — I’m not saying this place exists, this is only what I’ve heard; I’m telling you the story as I heard the zoo’s owner tell it, so don’t ask me to explain — and that’s where the seal was born. When it wasn’t much older than that cub in your arms, a boatload of fishermen came to the shore where the seal pup was sleeping beside its mother. The fishermen were hungry, so they ate the seal’s mother. I’ve never eaten seal meat but I imagine it’s salty. Salty, and without bones. They should have finished off the young one too, but it had soft eyes and a fluffy trusting face, and they couldn’t bring themselves to do it . . . but it was a motherless infant now, and out of kindness they couldn’t leave it to suffer. Instead of killing it, they decided to make money from it. I’m not surprised, I’ve seen how much humans love money, how they snuffle around squawking in the grass when they drop the tiniest coin. Anyway, the fishermen took the pup in the boat with them, and whenever they arrived at a port they charged women and children a few coins to pet it.”

Wilma’s cries were simmering down; Andrej cuddled and cooed to her while he contemplated the seal. He had visited countless circuses and sideshows with their garish tents, frisky ponies, cracking whips, shouting spruikers. It wouldn’t have been like that for the seal: he saw dingy corners of pubs and piers, babbling voices, grabbing hands.

“Nothing alive stays an infant forever,” continued the bear. “Some behave as if they have, but the fact is that they haven’t, and they should take a good hard look at themselves. Soon the pup was growing. The fishermen taught it tricks — to beg, to balance a ball, to bark on command — but it was always hungry and needing attention, and eventually the fishermen decided they liked living without their pet more than living with it. Trained and tamed as it was, it would have been a waste to eat it; so they sold it to a man who said he had use for a seal, and this man lost it in a bet to another, who gave it to a man who planned to make a name for himself by writing the world’s longest book about seals, who lost it when all his worldly possessions were taken by the debt collector, for whom everything has a price. The debt collector spread the word that he had a seal for sale. And because the penguin who’d been living in that pool had grown huge and died after gorging on pastries and boiled sweets all its life, the owner of the zoo bought the seal to fill the empty cage, and put a sign on the bars saying
Don’t feed the seal
.”

Andrej rocked his sister, watching the seal swim. When its whiskery snout unexpectedly broke the surface he nearly cried out, thinking it meant to leap onto land. Instead it took a wheezy breath and resumed its flight back and forth. Its ceaseless glide to nowhere was a piteous thing to witness. Andrej had never seen a living being so stifled, so pointlessly driven. “Do you think it remembers the ocean?”

It would hurt less if it had forgotten, but the bear replied, “Of course it remembers. Its mind is filled with the crashing of waves. The ocean called out to it from the moment it was born. Its ancestors swam there; its kin swim there today. It remembers the ocean because its blood and bones cannot forget it. Somewhere out there, there’s a gap in the water, a place which is hollow because the seal isn’t there.”

Andrej thought about it — the notion that the world was riddled with holes where certain people and animals were meant to be, but weren’t. “I’ve never seen the ocean,” he mused. “I don’t know what it looks like. Do you?”

“No I do not,” the bear admitted.

Andrej nodded. Uncle Marin would have known. He rested his cheek atop Wilma’s warm head. “Is there a gap in the mountains somewhere?” he asked.

“Of course,” the bear replied. “I’m not there.”

Andrej considered the great brown beast slouched behind the bars, its broad stump of grizzly muzzle and its long warlock claws. The stone had flattened the bear’s coat smooth in places so the hair lay against its body like rich soil. “How did you come here?” he asked.

The bear drew a breath and heaved it out as a sigh. “You can’t catch a grown bear and put it in a cage. You can only take a cub from a den. But before you do that, you must deal with the cub’s mother, who’ll fight to protect her infant without any care for her own life.”

Andrej said nothing. He remembered the last words he’d heard his own mother speak:
Run, children
. And he had done as she’d commanded, and run. He had run with the memory of his mother standing straight and tall, her dark hair riding the breeze as she’d turned to look for him. When, hours later, he had crept through the trees, the clearing where he’d last seen her was empty but for the burned-out shells of caravans, and boot prints where soldiers had been.

Tomas, meanwhile, had returned
to the cache of food, piling into the hammock of his shirtfront the biscuits, apple and cheese. The llama, which was quite tame, had lifted the apple out of his palm and crunched it wetly with peg teeth. Tomas didn’t know what a kangaroo ate, and the marsupial didn’t seem to know either; so the boy had broken some biscuits and scattered them inside the cage, and the kangaroo, after much timid sniffing, hopped forward to nibble at the shards. “Funny little creature,” Tomas whispered; privately, he liked the kangaroo best. He came to the bear’s cage now, and reached between the bars to place the cheese on the stone floor. “You might be hungry later,” he said. Sidling close to his brother, he muttered, “What does an eagle eat, Andrej?”

“Bunnies,” said the wolf, licking liverwurst from its chops.

“Baby chamois!” said the monkey, its face rosy with raspberry jam.

Andrej said, “Why don’t you ask the eagle?”

“It won’t answer,” warned the bear.

“Why not?” Tomas frowned. “Can’t it speak?”

“It’s not that it can’t, only that it won’t. No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can’t answer anything except
I cannot
. And those words are so painful to its feathery spirit that a caged bird prefers to say nothing.”

The llama was cleaning its face with a fastidious tongue; pausing in its ablutions it said, “That eagle has been in that cage since the day it hatched from an egg. I remember when it was hardly bigger than a mouse, the ugly tiny thing; the zoo’s owner used to feed it mashed lizard from a spoon. It’s never flown through the sky, that eagle, never once in its life. Yet it broods and mopes over something that’s never been. It is a very silly bird.”

The bear didn’t comment, only raised its eyes to the night. Andrej followed its gaze into the sky. “Can you see it?” asked the bear.

“I can,” said Andrej: an empty place amongst the stars, where the eagle should have been.

“I thank you for the cheese,” said the bear.

Andrej told his brother, “Give the eagle some pieces of ham.”

“And what about the seal?”

“Don’t worry about that seal.” The wolf had lain down to groom its legs and didn’t look up from the work. “That seal isn’t hungry. It doesn’t think about food. It thinks about nothing except the empty hole in the sea.”

“It wants to fill its place!” yapped the monkey.

“Alice,” breathed the kangaroo.

Wilma whined, and Andrej stroked her head. He looked at the circle of cages and at the inmates inside them. He thought of the life he had lived with his family in the caravan, roaming wherever they’d wanted to go. “The whole world is your home, Andrej,” his father had told him. “We Rom are not like the
gadje,
these people you see building houses and hoeing fields and fencing off what they claim is theirs. We Rom are closer to the animals than to people like that. Unburdened, unowned, and free.” It was something to be proud of, the state of being free. It was something animals had that humans envied and respected. And yet . . . these zoo animals weren’t free. Dust was more free than they were. The gnats that landed on the surface of the water had more liberty than the seal that swam through it. The iron bars stole away from them the one great gift they were born to have. In sudden frustration and anguish Andrej said, “It’s not right to take a bear from the mountains or an eagle from the sky or a monkey from the jungle or a seal from the sea. It’s not
right
to lock you in cages where there’s no grass or rivers or trees. It’s a
terrible
thing to do. The owner of this zoo must be a
wicked
man!”

The llama gasped. “Don’t say that! The owner is good! When the owner was here, we weren’t hungry. We weren’t lonely. I wasn’t confused. There were no bombs dropping out of rumble-things. All those bad things only started happening
after
he went away. So he must be a good man, you see? You see, you stupid child?”

“The owner is not a wicked man,” the bear agreed. “He is just a man, with the peculiar ways of man. You are a mysterious animal, you know. A bear does what a bear must do to keep itself alive. But a man does many things that he has no need to do.”

Andrej thought about the day the soldiers found the caravans in the clearing and admitted, “Yes, that’s true.” He looked into the moonlight that lay everywhere over the zoo, wishing he had water to give the animals or something more to feed them, wishing he had . . . 
the keys
. One cage was still cloaked in deathly dark and silence, a silence that was lurking, a darkness like the edge of a disquieting dream. “What about the boar?” he asked. “Is it hungry? Will it eat biscuits? Is it even inside that pen? Or has it gone to fill an empty place in the forest?”

“Who knows?” said the chamois. “Who knows anything about that boar?”

“That boar is mysterious, as men are,” said the bear.

“Find out!” said the monkey. “Put a hand in the cage — find out!”

The wolf lifted its nose. “I can smell that little pig. His tusks are close —”

“Find out!” the monkey goaded deliriously.

“— but he has been silent for a long time, since before the bombs began to fall — almost as if he knew the bombs were coming, and didn’t want to spoil the surprise. That would be typical of him.”

“Typical of him to find a way out of his cage,” added the chamois, “but to keep it a secret like a trove of buried acorns. An unpleasant and petty little hog, that one.”

“He was
charming
as a piglet,” said the llama. “Remember how darling? But he grew into a bore. Furious and furious and furiouser, always sniffling and snuffling and tearing at the bars.”

“One wouldn’t be surprised if he’d chewed his way through them,” concluded the chamois. “He’s always in such a frenzy.”

The brothers gazed dubiously into the blackness that crouched inside the boar’s cage. Andrej remembered what Marin had told him about wild pigs, how cunning they could be, how treacherous their tusks. The tusks could cut a hunting dog to pieces, or open a man’s thigh to the bone. Andrej closed his eyes and concentrated. Marin had said pigs were clever and vicious, but would he have agreed they were smart enough to escape a locked cage, fierce enough to cut through iron?
Marin,
he thought:
Marin
. Opening his eyes, Andrej said sternly, “You’re teasing us.”

The animals did not reply. The chamois flicked its bob of tail, the llama smacked its lips. The wolf craned forward to sniff the stone where the liverwurst had been. “Where — where — where would it be?” asked Tomas with a splutter. “If the boar has escaped, where will he be?”

“
Out
of his cage,” said the llama.

“That boar likes bombs,” said the kangaroo.

“And
hates
everything else,” said the chamois.

“Especially boys,” said the wolf.

“It
hasn’t
escaped.” Andrej raised his chin. “It couldn’t have escaped. If it was in its cage when the zoo’s owner left, and no one has opened the cage since then, then it
must
be in its cage. They’re teasing us, Tom.”