“Go on, shoo,” Josef growled.
The old man looked in the monkey’s direction. “You don’t smell too good to him either, you know.” He paused, then added, “S’pose I oughta get you some bandages, make sure that don’t get infected.”
“Mm,” Josef said. The old man went into the next room. There was the sound of tearing, then he came back holding a soft cloth with a large wet spot that smelled sweetly of alcohol. He nodded to Josef and Josef laid his hands on the table. He winced as the old man began to clean the abrasions, but the smell was comforting.
“Is that silk?” he asked as little by little the cloth took on the color of his drying blood. The old man straightened up and gave Josef a look.
“Clean it yourself. I got other things I have to do. Clean it and get the hell out. No one invited you here!” He hissed out the corner of his mouth at the monkey, who climbed up on his shoulder, then took his rifle and went into the next room.
When Josef was done cleaning his wounds, he folded up the silk cloth, now brown with the oxidizing blood, and laid it on the table. He sat a moment, waiting. Then he got up and knocked on the door to the room the old man had disappeared into. The door opened and the old man came out holding his rifle.
“Well,” Josef said. “I guess I’ll be going.”
“All righty,” the old man replied. “I’ll show you the way.” They walked out the door. “If you don’t want to go back through the woods, just take this road here till you come to the village, then from there there’s a road into town.”
“Thank you,” Josef said.
“So what’s your name, anyway?” asked the old man.
“Josef, and you?”
“Mine don’t matter, old man like me.” He took a deep breath and went on: “If you want the train, though I doubt it’s runnin’, you’ll have to go to the next village. It’s a bit of a hike, but they got a telephone and a telegraph, so you can let your family know.”
“Thank you,” said Josef, eyeing the rifle the old man kept clenched in his hand the whole time.
“Not at all, Josef. Not at all.”
“Well, I’ll be going then,” said Josef.
“All right, then go,” said the old man.
Josef took to the road heading away from the woods, as the old man had described, walking faster and faster, till he was moving at a light trot. He turned around to look back a few times and saw the old man standing at the fence, leaning on it with one arm while in the other he held the rifle. A few minutes later, he heard a shot ring out behind him. His heart stopped and he wheeled around. In the distance he saw the silhouette of the old man, aiming his rifle into the low-hanging clouds, and sensed more than saw the faint haze of smoke rising out of the barrel. Josef didn’t bother to see what came next, breaking into a run. Some time later he came to the village. A dusty road and flowers in the windows. He saw the fork in the road before he reached the square. At the first building he knocked on the door.
“Dobrý den,” he said as it opened. “Good day.”
“Grüß Gott,” said the woman, who looked to be about fifty, lifting her eyes from her sewing. Josef switched to German, explaining that he needed to get to a telegraph or telephone. The woman took him to her neighbors next door. After a brief conversation, they told him which road to take and said, as far as they could tell, most of the German soldiers in the area had surrendered to the Americans. Before he left, Josef decided to ask about the old man. He left out the part about him throwing him down the well.
“Oh, that’s old Mann,” they said. “He used to work in the zoo. Took care of the animals. Supposedly even took some of them home.”
For a few years after that still, people reported hearing strange sounds and voices in the woods. The war came to an end, and without telling the animals the Great Powers drew an imaginary dividing line through the woods. Liberated against their will by U.S. shrapnel and a panicked zookeeper, the animals were now in the Soviet sphere of influence. A few months after the war, there was still talk of snakes as thick around as a grown man’s thigh, of exotic monkeys, large and small, leaping from branch to branch, of giraffes and rhinoceroses, but no one knew exactly what was true and what was fantasy. People also said some starving Russian soldiers devised a plan to hunt them down, but when their commanding officer found out, he turned purple with rage, called the unit to attention, and started screaming at them that no matter how great a victory the Red Army had achieved under the command of Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, it didn’t give anyone carte blanche for unlimited carousing, and he urged them to remember that the military penal code was still in force. Apparently, the Russian officer’s show of outrage on that improvised roll call square southeast of Plzeň gave the animals the gift of another few months, perhaps even years, of life. The fact remains, however, that after several harsh winters the gripping descriptions of wondrous creatures ceased to occur. There was peace, at long last. Peace and quiet.
When Josef got to the station, it was clear the trains weren’t running. Nobody knew when they would be, and as the dispatcher pointed out, even if they were running, it wouldn’t be wise to take them, since there was an army using them now, and the army using them now probably wouldn’t be using them for long. The telegraph and telephone weren’t working. He recommended to Josef that he stay in the village. Then Josef got an idea. He would go back through the woods. He had been sorting things out in his head along the way, and as he spoke to the dispatcher he realized he was actually glad the trains weren’t running, the wires weren’t transmitting, and he had to stay where he was. He didn’t know why at first. But then he realized he was glad because he didn’t feel any fear anymore, he was no longer terrified. His blood wasn’t pounding through his veins like a hunted animal. The moment the dispatcher had said his fill, he got the idea to go back. He bought some food in the village, ate, and headed back the same way he had come, only now he avoided the places where he might be seen by any of the people he had spoken to before. He felt no need to talk to them and didn’t know how he would be able to explain in his broken German why now he wanted to go back through the forest he had fled from just a few hours earlier. So he went back. He stayed off the roads, since there was still a risk he might run into soldiers, but he tried to stay in sight of them, as he had before. He skirted the village, forded the stream, and had to backtrack several times because he got confused, but eventually he figured out the right direction, and found the path he had taken. He knew the return trip wouldn’t take as long. As he came in view of the lone farmstead where he had met the old man, he discreetly took a wide arc around it, listening closely. Not a sound. As he walked past, he stopped to look several times. But there was no sign of the old man and even when the wind let up he didn’t hear a thing. Finally Josef came to the woods. He felt safe here. Now that he knew where the animals had come from, the only thing that upset him was he couldn’t remember if spiny anteaters were African or Australian. Walking through the woods, he had to backtrack several times, but after a while he found the path he had run down before. He slowed down, looking around him. Every now and then he would stop, look, and listen, soaking up the smells and sounds. Now he longed to see the animals that had terrified him before, to balance out the fear and dread with his newfound excitement. The animals, however, were nowhere to be seen. Except for the wind and his footsteps, except for the rustling leaves and the thumping of his heart, the woods were silent. Josef decided to change his approach. He thought deep and hard, trying to free himself of emotion. The question is, he said to himself, where are they? Meanwhile he realized he knew next to nothing about the animals. I don’t even know what they eat. I don’t know what they eat at home, in their own environment, never mind here in the for them exotic territory southeast of Plzeň. I wonder what they think about being here? After a while he realized he wasn’t going to figure out where the animals were hiding, but what irked him the most was not knowing what they ate. Then he got thirsty. He vaguely remembered where he had been when he came across the stream on his first trip through the forest. So he rotated the image in his memory 3.142 radians, which is the same as one hundred and eighty degrees, and found his way there unerringly within a few minutes. He rinsed off his face, had a drink, and suddenly realized that every animal, wherever it’s from, has to drink eventually. They get thirsty just like me, he thought. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that before. He set out along the streambed and, little by little, as he got closer to the city, the stream changed into a brook. He followed the brook all the way to a factory at the start of the suburbs, but didn’t see a single animal apart from two red squirrels. The city was in the midst of an uproarious celebration. An advance unit of the U.S. Army had arrived in Plzeň. All the chewing gum had been handed out, and no one, except for his fiancée, Květa, had even noticed Josef was missing. He also found out that several smaller German units had surrendered after a violent shootout in the woods outside of town. At first he didn’t think anything of it, but later he realized his father, who came to spend his summers here and knew almost everyone in town, was talking about the same woods Josef had passed through twice that day. He also heard that during the shootout the private zoo near the castle had been peppered with bullets and some of the animals had probably been caught in the crossfire between the advancing Americans, the retreating Germans, and the Russians closing in on them. He kept the whole adventure to himself for quite some time, but eventually he confided in Květa, who made a quick trip out there with his parents in the summer. She got upset and told him he was crazy, did he realize what could have happened to him? Josef didn’t pay much attention to her reaction. He was still mainly disappointed that he hadn’t seen any animals on the way back. The fact that he had probably crossed the front line twice in one day wasn’t what stuck in his memory. Then Květa told him that as soon as everything settled down, they could finally get married as they had promised each other at the start of the war. As usual, Květa realized that she couldn’t get too angry with him, or rather that there was no point, since it wouldn’t do any good anyway. When a few days later they announced their intention to their parents, Květa’s mother, a former deputy chief of the regional Sokol organization, a patriotic gymnastics club, recovered from the surprise to deliver a lengthy improvised speech, in which she emphasized that the two of them were young, in love and full of energy, which was not a particularly revelatory statement, that thank God they had all been lucky enough to survive the war, which was true, and that after the second war her generation had been through, Europe and the rest of the world had obviously learned their lesson, a claim which was boldly optimistic.