I’m less and less relaxed or patient enough to deal with the children. It’s like everything else: I’m getting too tired or lazy to take all the stupidities in stride. I’m still arguing with Mother, of course. We’re taught that you’re supposed to back your family regardless of the situation. Personally, I can’t raise that much family feeling. I think a person’s relationship to his parents is like the one with his country: respect and obedience, fine, but what if they’re doing wrong?
I’m always arguing with Mom about that, and I feel strongly about it. I never just argue for argument’s sake. (You’re probably rolling your eyes as you read that.) She seems to think I can just drop the issue, like we were talking about tastes in food. Do you? I can’t imagine two people living together and believing different things along those lines. Do we have the right to always be ambivalent just because everything else seems to be? How are things supposed to turn out right if nobody’s willing to work to make that happen?
I’m a fine one to talk. My thoughts are always flying off on tangents, and how often do I do something I really think is brave or right?
See. I always come back to myself.
Who’s done this? Who’s made us different?
I think about what we might do if you came. I’m too tired to make plans, but I do anyway. I had a daydream this morning that made me happy: we were going for a walk near the sea and had the whole day to ourselves.
I get so discouraged! Have I been any use to anyone?
You once told me you thought that because of me you knew a little better what you were supposed to do, supposed to try to be. I think about that a lot. If that were true I’d think it was the greatest thing in our friendship, and the one thing I was proudest of.
Here this was supposed to be a short letter. Now look at it.
Love,
Leda
Perren found him loitering around the turtle enclosures and asked him if he’d forgotten something. He said Albert wasn’t there. He didn’t answer when Karel asked if he’d be in later.
“He’s on his break,” someone Karel hadn’t seen before said. Workers in the area laughed in a muffled and discreet way.
Two soldiers were inside the tortoise enclosure rooting around under the straw and rotting lettuce. One tortoise was hunkered down on top of some dog food soaked in water and sprinkled with bone meal. The other followed their progress inquisitively. At another cage a soldier lifted up the albino mud turtle and inspected it closely. It hung in the air looking miserable.
At the Komodo enclosure two soldiers were tantalizing Seelie through the feeding grate. Herman was quiet against the wall, content to be uninvolved.
Karel told them to stop, and they turned to him the way they’d turn to a yapping dog and told him to move on.
Searches were underway in every section, and the animals were getting anywhere from skittish to traumatized. The anoles were wedged under rocks, and the Nile crocodile stood warily in the center of her enclosure with one of her hatchlings standing in her open mouth and the other two burrowed headfirst under her side.
The snakes were nervous. He could see mites on the hognose, around the eyes. Did Albert know about this? Beside the cobra cages someone had left the rolling tray of mice cubes, small mice frozen in water to prevent dehydration. They were half thawed. Soldiers were gathered appreciatively around a spitting cobra close to the glass, which raised and spread its hood carefully as if searching for information. Perren remarked to them that no one was ever interested in the nonpoisonous ones, and that his old boss had told him once that the wax museums in the capital charged extra for the murderers but the missionaries and reformers and statesmen you could see for nothing.
He had two soldiers lead Karel out, past the mambas, thin and graceful and gliding so swiftly through their stand of field grass they seemed to be swimming, and then past the puff adder, satisfied with its quiet life and few rats. Karel asked if he could stay, and the soldiers said no. A Civil Guardsman shut and locked the gate behind him.
He walked south to the barren hillside he’d visited with Leda. There were still mangy dogs around the refuse dump. He climbed until he reached a place he thought he remembered and then sat in the sun on the scree and looked back at the town and the Reptile House in the distance.
It was already late and he stayed where he was until after dark, watching clouds red from the sunset roll toward the town. He saw a small convoy of six transport trucks parked in an orderly line to the east. The heat from their running exhausts made them flex and wobble. When it was fully dark he could hear cicadas and night feeders starting to move around on the shale, and the convoy started moving, stringing through town like a necklace. Single points of headlights broke off onto each street leading to the zoo and crawled to a stop at the dead ends. When each stopped it went dark. There was about a half hour of silence, and then when Karel got up to go a gathering wail of sirens, and floodlights were trained on the zoo from out of the darkness, and as he ran down the slope half out of control on the loose rock there was the cracking and popping of guns.
The neighborhood around the zoo was completely changed. Soldiers and police and Civil Guardsmen manned roadblocks of oil drums and sawhorses and herded people back into their houses. Karel was turned away at three different points, one teenaged soldier hoisting a rifle butt and shaking it at him to indicate what he was capable of, and finally got through by climbing over the hoods of some transport trucks guarded by two drivers playing dice.
The zoo was on fire everywhere. He tried to shout or call — what? who? — but everything was lost in the roar and wind of the fire’s updraft and the cacophony of the animals. At the inner gate soldiers were coming and going hurriedly while Civil Guardsmen stood in groups discussing the chaos with equanimity. He could smell their coffee. He followed the wall a few hundred feet and scrambled over to get inside. The smoke choked and blinded him and was filled with diesel exhaust and burning rubber. Something collapsed with a crash nearby. There was a whirl of sparks upward and he got a clear view of the fire for the first time, and then the smoke curtained together again and the sparks showered down around him in a golden rain, bouncing and staying lit where they fell. He saw heavy black smoke pouring from the basement windows of the monkey house and saw the intensities of the separated fires and the soldiers still rolling drums away and realized that they had set this, that they were destroying the zoo.
He ran to one and began pulling at his arms and the soldier released his drum with one hand and caught Karel in the temple and ear and the ground swept up and hit him. He got his cheek off the dirt and felt around with his open palms and thought, Seelie and Herman. The side of his mouth was swelling and his jaw throbbed. He staggered to his feet. Something flashed by with a squawk and he registered it as a parrot. High above him a heron flapped into the smoke, glowing red in the reflected light. There were no firemen at work and it seemed as if everyone was on his own: one group was clubbing down flamingoes and another had herded together the wild sheep to protect them. The sheep were bleating in terror and turning in a circle like a storm cloud.
At the Reptile House he didn’t see any of the workers. The doors and windows had been shattered and the fire was mostly inside. As he ran in he was knocked aside by a soldier rushing out, squeamishly carrying at arm’s length an untroubled iguana.