The house was quiet. He looked at the newspaper photo of the snapping turtle. I might as well not have a father, Karel thought. He went downstairs and his father was hungover and reading the rest of The People’s Voice in search of temporary jobs, wincing at the noise when he rattled the paper. He was holding a pen in his teeth and looked blearily over at Karel and said good morning.
“It’s afternoon,” Karel said harshly. “I’ve been home from school for hours.”
His father looked hurt and returned his attention to the paper. “I think I got into some trouble last night,” he said.
Karel didn’t answer. He noted the coffee cup still in the sink, alone, and said, “Didn’t you eat anything today?”
Something large upstairs groaned and clanked.
“I think the pipes’re gone,” his father said. “We’re not getting any water.” The plumbing shrieked and roared hollowly in response like prehistoric animals in the distance.
Karel went over to the window and looked out. Sprute was leading a group of six or so small boys down the street. One of them was also wearing a Kestrel uniform, with an additional white sash. David was in the group. Karel went outside.
When they reached him he stopped David. The group stopped with him, to wait. Karel asked what was going on. David said he’d been invited to the party following Harold’s initiation. Harold was the other boy in uniform. The party had been outlined in great detail by Sprute, who’d been recruiting at the playground. There were going to be picture cards in color with the Party eagle on them and little bundles of white almond candies and for each guest a statue of a boy and eagle together lifting the flag, and cakes and juices and games. Harold’s parents and the Party together were paying for it. David had already learned the virtues of the Kestrels: Undoubting, Undivided, Rock-Ribbed, Stern, Simple, Brave, Clean, and True. He showed Karel two pennants he’d already been given just for agreeing to come along: one involved yet another eagle; the other read, in script, We Are a Universal People; There Will Always Be a Springtime for Our Greatness. A small bird — representing springtime? — was stitched onto the corner of the second one. No, his sister did not know where he was.
Karel pulled him out of line. He told Sprute that they had to go home and that Sprute had plenty of kids anyway. He mollified David by not only explaining how much all of this would upset his sister but also by taking him for candy and buying him a week’s worth of sugared violets and waferlike crackers covered with powdered sugar.
He marched him home, stopping every so often when David dropped something and had to pick it up, and presented him to Leda. She was beautiful. She stood in the doorway in a dress of red linen. She’d been about to go to a friend’s birthday party. Karel registered wistfully that he hadn’t been invited and then explained everything.
Leda took in her breath and clasped David with his back to her as if he’d been saved from savages. His front was a snowfall of powdered sugar.
While Karel spoke she listened intently, and when he stopped she didn’t say anything. Her hair was swept up and pinned back and there was a black ribbon around her neck. When she moved her dress flared at the bottom. Instead of thanking him she leaned over her brother, who ducked his head, and kissed him, her kiss tasting familiar and faintly sweet.
He got home much later, having dawdled through half of town touching his tongue every so often to his lips in the dreamy hope that some of her flavor would return. His father was gone. The kitchen chair was on its side, but the house was otherwise undisturbed. Mr. Fetscher appeared at the door of the adjacent house slowly when Karel knocked, and gestured him in, where he told Karel with a mix of sympathy and irritation that the police had come, or the Security Service — somebody — and had taken his father away.
At the station the local police seemed genuinely ignorant of what had happened. At home he went from room to room, from the storage space under the kitchen to the attic, searching for his father or clues or anything at all. He found nothing and couldn’t tell how much clothing or what personal effects were missing. He sat on the bed in tears and turned on the radio on his father’s folding bedside table and listened to a lot of garbled, excited talk and fanfare before he realized that what they were saying was that war had been declared.
With nowhere else to go he returned to the zoo. On the way he checked in again at the police station, which was a madhouse, and the café. The café owner hadn’t seen Karel’s father and wondered if he’d enlisted, or had been called up as some sort of worker. He took Karel inside off the patio and gave him a bitter drink tasting of lime. Karel sipped it while gazing around at a place his father spent time. Did he drink things like this when he wanted to get away from Karel? Was he friends with these people? Were they looking at Karel and thinking, This is the kid he told us about?
The café owner had his back to him and shifted a bottle along the mirrored glass as if transmitting significant information. He had no answers to whatever question Karel asked. Karel’s leg bobbed independently on the stool and he wanted to break something. He touched his glass to the dark wood between them and made patterns of condensation rings: a seven, a lazy S.
At the zoo only Albert was working. Albert’s assistant, Perren, told him that the nomads, not content with systematic abuse and provocation, had staged a major raid on a customs hut near the border. They’d killed an elderly official who had been simply tending his pitiful little garden when they struck. Eleven nomad bodies were available as evidence. How they had been killed was not clear. Exactly what their strategic thinking had been was not clear. But the incident had been the last straw and was being handled, the government announced, with grim resolve.
Perren was playing with two creamy white slowworms, small, legless lizards. They twirled and wound around his fingers like a caduceus. He lifted one to each earlobe while Karel watched, and they clamped on with their tiny jaws and hung like earrings.
Perren said twelve divisions of the army that had been in the area on maneuvers and four squads of the Special Sections behind them had struck at six that morning and were already encircling the only large city, which he called “the capital.”
While Karel waited for Albert to give him a few minutes the old man offered a cotton swab of medicine with maddening patience to a recalcitrant pit viper. Karel made tsking and peevish noises with his tongue on his teeth and crossed and recrossed the hallway next to the viper’s glass enclosure with his hands on his head and his elbows out. Opposite them the puff adder struck at the same spot on the pane over and over with his nose and then shot up to the wire netting and down again.
When he finally heard the news, Albert expressed his sympathy so dryly that Karel was forced to conclude with surprise and dismay that this sort of grief was not transferable. Albert said he thought Karel’s father was probably all right, but as to where he was, who knew? In this mess he’d be untraceable, at least until things settled down. He really couldn’t have picked a worst time to disappear, Albert remarked. He led Karel down the hall. When he reached his office he turned and saw Karel’s face and seemed genuinely sorry. He said that Karel should come back with him, to his house. Maybe they’d think of something; if not, at least they could have lunch. Had he eaten anything? Karel hadn’t, and was hungry.
Karel had never seen Albert’s house. He’d barely spent time in his office. The house was on the other side of town. A block or two before it they came to a roadblock, staffed by two soldiers. What the roadblock was supposed to be guarding was anybody’s guess. Albert misunderstood at first and thought the road closed. He led Karel a few streets over to an alternate route, which was also closed. Puzzled, he returned to the first roadblock. He stood looking at it as if to verify its existence while Karel waited in a misery of impatience. The soldiers at the barrier looked at them suspiciously now that they were back. When they finally crossed to the striped sawhorses, one of the soldiers, a thin teenager with a swollen eye, leveled his weapon at Albert’s chest and left it there.