The blond girl drew her hair slowly back into a ponytail and held it, her elbows out. He envied in people like her their effortless adaptation to the world. He was always puzzling it out, trying to understand and possess by observation. He never succeeded, and he was usually left with something like a sad, studious awe for the spectacle around him.
The league meeting was winding down. He turned from the square and came face to face with the uniformed man from the café. His breath stopped, and the man lowered his eyelids and smiled. There was a badge on his chest of a sword penetrating a nest of snakes into a skull. He moved aside to let Karel by. Karel left at a trot, following two men hauling a pig by the nose and legs to a waiting cart.
He wanted to tell his father about the uniformed man, but naturally his father was gone. He spent the rest of the day in the shade of the back garden watching red-and-black diamondback beetles climb his chair leg. The street was completely quiet. The uniformed man’s gaze still bothered him, and he worked to put it out of his mind. He thought about storm surges and swelling green waves in the funnel-like bay below their old house. The houses had been packed so tightly into the cliff slope that he could spit into his neighbor’s window. The third floor on one side was the ground floor on the other. Red brick patios with weedy gardens stepped downward and dropped away to the port below. Lines of foam edged the beaches.
His new house was flat and dry and hemmed in by desert. All there was for him here was reptiles and Leda. Some ants were circling the flybag at his feet, interested in the bran and milk mash. He picked up the faint dry smell of sage and something else and thought of the sea smell from his old home, especially after a rain.
His father did not come back for dinner, and he made for himself a thick bean soup with some onions and a little meat. He ate it out in the back garden, listening. When it was dark enough that his plate was only a dim glow on his lap he went inside. At the kitchen table he drank some coffee, the sound of the metal cup on the saucer desolate and thin. He sighed and leafed through his reptile study sheets until he found a buried take-home essay he had neglected, due Monday. Across the top he had doodled the labials of the Komodo dragon, and along one column he’d drawn a desert iguana improbably perched in a creosote bush. He reminded himself with dismay that he had to erase all of this. Near the iguana’s open mouth he’d written: Karel Roeder. Standard Seven. Political Studies. That was as far as he had gotten. The questions were unappetizing. He knew what his instructor wanted — only the chronically absent or stone-deaf didn’t — but had no enthusiasm for organizing the material into something readable. He reread the questions the way he would read the ingredients on a can he had no intentions of opening. He read his notes for the answers, scribbled underneath as the question sheets had been passed out:
— man can live only as member of nation, therefore nation transcends group interests. Strong only as cohesive unit.
— Committee of Representatives institution that “expresses political agreement of Government and Nation.” “Documents unity of Leader and Nation.”
— Party inseparable from Gov.
— Party functions by finding and uniting most capable people “thru selection conditioned by day-to-day struggle.”
He flopped it over. He’d finish it tomorrow. He sat at the kitchen table listening to the clock, unhappy, and when it reached ten he got up and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. He left the lidded pot with the remainder of the bean soup and a spoon and a bowl on the table where his father would see them.
From his bedroom he could make out a policeman talking in the glow of a telephone box. The town was dark except for an occasional window and a single bulb lighting the square in the distance. He turned his light out and stayed where he was in the darkness, waiting for his father, or the Schieles, or someone. He saw no movement except the lighter tones of passing clouds. He pulled a chair over and dozed and woke to see the dark shapes of dogs standing in people’s front gardens and peering in their windows. When he fell back asleep even his dreams had become dull and bland, absorbed with packing and unpacking large suitcases from a trunk.
School was closed, Monday, with a curt sign posted on the chained double doors announcing it would reopen in a week. The official reason provided was unsafe stairways that demanded immediate attention. Karel’s father said the real reason was the realignment of the teaching staff. Whatever the reason, Karel lay quiet in his bed Tuesday morning, his arms at his sides, in gratitude.
His father knocked once and said without opening the door that Albert had called from the zoo and had asked if he wanted to work extra hours in view of his free time this week. He could hear his father’s resentment at having to pass on such messages, and he regretted it. When he came downstairs he said, “Who wants coffee?” rubbing his hands together in a parody of anticipation, but the house was empty.
He bought a small hard roll at the café and ate it on the way over to the zoo, wishing he had some juice. The zoo was on a rise along the south end of town, with a view over the square to the northern mountains. It was considered one of the attractions of the region. The new regime was enlarging its budget, and Karel hoped his apprenticeship would become a full position. The site was already bounded by an old stone wall and was being further surrounded by a moat. The moat was at that point a trench. There was to be a bigger restaurant, a concert garden, a monkey island, a new pheasantry, and expanded maintenance and administration buildings. The zoo held, besides the Reptile House, flamingos, cranes, parrots, and endless other birds, camels, llamas, tapirs, wild asses, antelope, bears, wolves, bison, ibex, wild sheep, bongos, gaurs, all sorts of deer, a mountain lion, and three monkeys. They were organized haphazardly, isolated from the looping walkways provided for visitors. In a corner of the complex a square pit represented the promised aquarium. A sign advertized its coming attractions. The centerpiece of the advertising was a lurid painting of some piranha (“the Sanitary Police of South American Rivers”). The Reptile House was next to the pit, near some neglected boojum trees. It was made of ugly yellow brick. A drab sign with an adder’s head in silhouette marked the door. As a department of the zoo it was inadequately supported. In terms of commonly shared materials it always had to make do with whatever the mammal or bird staffs had discarded or could spare. Even with that, it was a model of organization and cleanliness. It held 301 reptiles in 116 species and was roofed with louvered shutters over tessellated glass to control the daylight. There was a crocodile hall and tiers for lizards, tortoises, and snakes. The louvered shutters worked badly but were supposedly to be fixed. There were some prize exhibits: a giant tortoise, a green-and-yellow crested basilisk, an impressive poisonous snake collection, including an albino krait, and two nine-foot Komodo dragons. Karel spent most of his time helping with the feeding and cleaning cages. He had less contact with the prize exhibits but visited them before and after work and was sure a promotion would mean greater responsibilities in those areas.
At the service entrance one of the older staff members looked at him indifferently when he arrived and dumped a sack of rotten turnips at his feet. Karel checked the menial work orders at the food kitchens and storehouses, the hospital, the quarantine station, and the masons’ workshops. In the carpenters’ workshop three men and an apprentice were standing around a box trap as if it were impossibly complex or mysterious. He could hear what he guessed to be the nearby male ibex butting heads; the sound was like great rocks being driven together.