The Midnight Zoo (5 page)

The wolf said,
“None of us know why your war is happening. Your squabbles aren’t something we care about. When a wolf clan battles another, it’s usually over territory. Probably this is the reason for your warring, but who knows? People aren’t wolves.”

“I wish
I
was a wolf,” said Tomas.

The wolf looked at him with distaste, and went on. “We know your war is being fought everywhere, not just here in the village. We can hear it, and smell it. Birds come and perch in the maple, and they tell us that wherever they fly they see your battle, or what’s left after your battle has moved on. They tell us about trucks and tents and lines of men walking from one horizon to another. They speak of tanks and torpedoes and men swooping through the sky with parachutes blooming above them. They describe grenades falling and submarines rising, and men behind wire dropping down in mud and snow. We can’t see much from these cages, but we see these things.”

The bear spoke up dismally. “We can’t see anything except each other.”

“You’re complaining?” squawked the chamois. “At least you don’t have to stare at that idiot chimp and the sourpuss all day!”

The lioness didn’t react, but the monkey swore brutally, streaking the length of its enclosure and thumping into the bars. The chamois chortled tauntingly and the monkey flung itself about, a jungle scream sheering from its wide-open mouth. The wolf regarded them indifferently, waiting until the monkey collapsed into seething silence before looking back at the children.

“The birds say our village is different from others,” it said. “They say it’s the sorriest village they can see. But the invaders mustn’t think it’s sorry enough, because sometimes they send more planes, and drop more bombs. Maybe the village will be sorry enough when nothing is left of it, not even a hole in the ground. No earth, no air, no sky, no light —”

“No zoo,” said the llama.

“No zoo,” the wolf agreed.

Tomas asked, “Why does the village need to be sorry? What did it do?”

“It fought back,” said the chamois lordishly.

“It fought the invaders?” When Tomas thought of the invading soldiers, he thought of the day in the clearing. He thought of stories his father had told of dark forests coming angrily to life. “That was brave.”

The wolf lay down on its white belly, stretching out its legs. “Not all the villagers fought, only some of them. But to the ones who did, it wasn’t about bravery. It was something that had to be done. They could not do nothing. This land was their home, their territory. They
had
to fight for it. Never mind that
their
kind have seized so much
wolf
territory, cut down our trees, set traps in our ground, caved in our dens, pursued us to —”

“Don’t!” moaned the bear, turning aside its great head. “Don’t talk about that.”

The wolf said carelessly, “They do the same to bears. Anyway, these villagers formed a secret gang, and began to talk of vengeance. They knew they wouldn’t triumph in the end — the invading clan is strong, its weapons are deadly, its numbers are countless, it’s spread through this land like a creeper through a tree, and much farther than that, according to the birds: they say there’s no end to the invaders, that they infest every place from sea to sea and also
on
the sea, floating, slinking — but the gang vowed that if their homeland was going to be taken from them, it wouldn’t be taken easily. They knew that other people in other places were fighting the enemy too — burning crops, souring water, barricading roads, destroying firewood — but such sabotage seemed puny to the gang, the kind of mischief that the invaders would expect, as a fox expects to have fleas. The gang didn’t want to be fleas. They wanted to be a swarm of wasps. They swore that, helpless though they might be to keep their territory, before it was lost they would make their enemy regret setting foot upon it.”

Andrej and Tomas had sat down in the dusty grass, and Wilma, bundled on the bench, was making no sound. The brief summer night was nearing its darkest time, yet the moon still lit the zoo with a creamy light, turning the circle of cages into a place like a chapel, somewhere solemn and fragile and holy. The lioness’s tail was quietly switching, and specks of ash were still wafting to earth, but nothing else seemed to move.

“A train track runs between the hills behind this village,” the wolf continued. “We can hear the wheels and whistles from here. The track is important to the invaders because it leads to where they want to go, which is everywhere — every town, every hilltop, every shore. The invaders are people after all, and people are always hungry for more. The locomotives that ride the track are also important to the invaders. With the trains, the invaders can move their strength and determination and everything else an invading pack needs quickly, and in formidable amounts.”

Andrej thought of geese and starlings explaining this logistical information to the captive audience at the zoo. A parrot in a cage had once said
hello
to him, and then called itself a
pretty bird
. He wondered what it had been thinking.

“The gang of resistance fighters knew that if they could stop the trains, the invasion would be lamed and halted,” the wolf went on. “Not halted forever — the enemy is like a stream, it runs and runs, and a rock thrown into a stream might disturb the water but it won’t stop the current — but halted long enough to teach their enemy that a small pack can give a nasty bite.”

Tomas, who always had sympathy for the underdog, made fists of enthusiasm. The wolf leaned forward on its elbows, bringing its nose to the bars. Its ears flattened, and a glint of tooth showed behind the curl of black lips.

“The resistance fighters swore themselves to loyalty on pain of death. They arranged to meet in a private place where they could scheme undisturbed. They met in that place night after night, and eventually they thought of a plan. They invented code words and signals which would keep the plan a secret. Secrecy was vital: they didn’t want anyone trying to stop them, or giving their plot away. And the secret held: until the night they put their idea into action, no one else in the village suspected what was to come. Yet the resistance fighters weren’t the only ones who knew what would happen, and how, and when.
We
knew it too.”

“Can you guess how we knew?” asked the llama. “Take a guess how we knew.”

“The birds!” Tomas burst out triumphantly.

The wolf cocked its head; the chamois sneered aloud. “
Birds,
he says! Imagine!”

“Birds don’t know what happens at night,” said the llama. “Owls do, of course, but owls don’t gossip. They mind their own business, owls. They look at you with those big scary eyes and they don’t care what —”

The wolf interrupted, “It wasn’t because of birds. It was because of Alice.”

“Alice,” whispered the kangaroo — and the word fluttered around the zoo like an autumn leaf across an unmown field,
Alice Alice Alice Alice,
skipping and flitting and gliding and diving as if the animals were reverently repeating the word in their heads and the zoo was indeed somewhere holy, a place where thoughts could be heard.

She was born unexpectedly,
in a garden in spring, surrounded by clouds and worms and butterflies, entering the world mere minutes before her mother left it without ever having held her child in her arms. In the weeks that followed, many people reached out, willing to take the bewildered baby from the embrace of her grief-stricken father. The village felt keenly the loss of the young woman, who had been such a joy and an ornament. Everyone longed to ease the burden of the widower, whose family had lived in the hamlet for centuries. The father accepted the village’s sympathy, and was grateful for the dishes brought to his door. But despite the advice of concerned souls he held tight to his newborn daughter, and would not send her into the care of a nurse. The baby was all he had left of his wife, and he wouldn’t be parted from this remnant. More importantly, he was not a man who was made bitter by fate. He had spent all his life watching animals, and had learned from them to live with grace. There was grace in accepting death when it came, even if it seemed to come too early, and too cruelly. Accepting death meant cherishing what remained of life. And the baby girl was a small armful of life, and her father kept her near as a reminder that everything that dies also lives on.

He named her Alice.

She grew up motherless but she hardly knew it, for she had a hundred mothers in the village: women who pushed her stroller when she was small, kissed her bruised knees when she was a toddler, sewed her dresses when she was old enough to go to school. She had many friends among the children of the village, for she was bold and quick-witted and talkative, and she had the talent for roguishness that most children find admirable. Her father let her run wild, that is true. He thought his daughter had lost enough, and that she shouldn’t lose freedom as well. She was often punished for her rascally ways, but she took her whippings as a proud child does, as the inevitable conclusion to a fine adventure. She was clever in school, which made the teachers like her, but also lazy, which made her their frustration. She knew all the dogs and cats in the village, and every shop owner as well, and could often be found slouched against a counter, regaling the storekeeper with her ideas and opinions. She knew every corner and crook of the streets, the shortcuts and the scenic routes across town, the vantage points of rooftops and spires. She knew the farms that surrounded the village, who lived where and what crops they grew. She knew the rocky land that lay beyond the farms, and would race her bicycle on open roads and wander far along the train tracks that threaded through the hills, discovering all that could be discovered of the world in a single day. There would come a time, Alice knew, when she would find out what lay beyond a day’s bicycle ride. There were other towns in this country, other countries beyond its borders, and oceans beyond them. The world belonged to and was waiting for her. But for now she belonged to her father and to her village, for there were few in the hamlet who did not think of her as their daughter too. Under their protection, she was growing up fast. “There’s our Alice,” people would remark as she sauntered by, already tall and beautiful, as her mother had been, her fingernails chipped and blackened, as her father’s often were. “How’s our Alice today?”

And of all the places she loved in her small, cobbled version of the world, Alice’s favorite place was her zoo.
Her
zoo, for it had been built by her great-grandfather and passed down to her father, and one day it would be owned by Alice herself. Of course, she had to share it: every day the wrought-iron gate was opened to the public, who dropped a brown coin into a tin in exchange for the chance to stare at, and be stared at by, a beast. Alice knew the zoo needed the money the visitors brought, but she didn’t like the visitors. They were noisy and, she gradually realized, idiotic. They talked too loudly, made absurd remarks. Alice preferred it when the zoo was empty but for herself and her animals and her father. Every morning before school she walked the circle of cages, murmuring private messages to the creatures behind the bars, passing little treats to them, touching them if they stood within reach. The sight and sound of her was familiar and peaceful, and the animals liked her. Some of them were almost her pets, having arrived at the zoo as infants and been raised in the kitchen of Alice’s home until they were strong enough to live in the zoo.

As Alice grew older, so too did the animals. The years brought things new and wonderful to her; for the animals it bore no such gifts. No challenges or adventures unfurled their horizons for them. The jaguar, the gibbon, the wildcat, the deer: all these woke each morning, as Alice did, and likewise went to sleep each night, but time gave them only old age and eventual death. The badger she’d adored as a toddler turned gray by her tenth birthday, and passed away. The peacock was discovered one evening lying in a puddle of its own glorious feathers. Alice was fourteen when the jaguar died, having lived all its life in the zoo. It had hated the cold weather, and feared the visitors. Its coat had been so black as to be blue. She had never seen her reflection in the creature’s copper eyes. Its gaze had always looked beyond her, searching for the jungle. As she stood in a snowy field helping her father dig the cat’s grave, Alice hoped that death had freed the jaguar, that maybe it was climbing vine-twisted trees now, or lapping up the warm waters of a river. She hoped so; she wept.

The jaguar was replaced by a young lion, for the zoo needed a large cat to draw in the visitors. The lion was a magnificent beast, its roars shook the entire village, and Alice loved it dearly, as she continued to love all the animals: but she found herself thinking that the zoo was not the marvelous place she’d always believed it to be. She detested the visitors who talked so brassily, who laughed at the animals and poked fingers at them. She despised the visitors’ ignorance of the nature of living things. More painfully, she came to feel it was wrong to keep living creatures in cages. “This is hell for them!” she cried. “I hate this zoo! I’m ashamed of it!”