“Mom, where are they?” he asked. “Why did they leave? Didn’t they like being here?”
She explained that they had to leave, that war wasn’t a game, and that other Guests would arrive to fill the void they left.
“You can still take care of your animals,” she said, trying to comfort him.
“I prefer pheasants,” he whined. “Don’t you understand—it was different! They even called me ‘friend,’ and they didn’t think of me as a little boy, but as their guardian.”
Antonina caressed his blond hair. “You’re right,” she said, “this time you were a big boy, and you helped in a very important way. You do understand that it’s a secret and you mustn’t tell anybody about it, right?”
She saw anger jump in his eyes. “I know that better than you do!” he snapped. “These things aren’t for women,” he said contemptuously, then whistled for Wicek. All she could do was watch sadly as the two disappeared into the bushes, knowing Ryś had to cope with yet another abandonment and another secret he could never tell. “If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner,” Gdańsk-born philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in an earlier era, but “if I let it slip from my tongue, I am its prisoner.”[84] Recording the day’s events in her journal allowed Antonina to juggle secret-keeping and secret-telling—one substance, like water, that merely assumed different shapes.
CHAPTER 30
1943
DURING SUMMER, THE BLACK FLY’S MARDI GRAS, CLOUDS of insects tormented the zoo as usual and anyone abroad at sunset wore long sleeves and pants, despite the heat. Inside the villa, Wicek the rabbit, on the prowl for something edible, heard a squeaky noise and hopped toward the kitchen, where he found Kuba the chick eating. During dinner, Kuba sometimes roamed the table, pecking up crumbs, with Wicek watching from a distance until, in one broad leap, he would suddenly appear next to a chunk of bread or a bowl of potatoes and start gobbling, to the fright of the chick and the great amusement of the humans.
Whenever Ryś lay awake after curfew, waiting for his father to return home, rabbit and chick perched on the edge of his comforter and sat vigil with him. According to Antonina, at the sound of the doorbell all three would grow excited and listen for Jan’s footsteps on the hall stairs, which echoed hollowly, because the wooden staircase floated right above steps leading from the kitchen to the basement, and the space resounded like a muffled drum.
Ryś would search his father’s face for exhaustion or worry, and sometimes Jan’s chilly hands unwrapped food he’d bought with food stamps, or he returned with an exciting story, or pulled another animal from his magic backpack. After Ryś fell asleep, Jan would quietly head downstairs as the rabbit hopped off the bed, the chick slid down the comforter, and both animals followed him to the dining room table for his evening meal. According to Antonina, the rabbit inevitably jumped onto Jan’s lap and the chick crawled onto Jan’s arm, then climbed to his neck, where he curled up in the jacket collar and slept; and even when Antonina removed Jan’s dishes and replaced them with papers and books, the animals refused to leave the warmth of lap and collar.
WARSAW ENDURED A BRUTALLY cold winter in 1943. Ryś caught a bad chest cold that sharpened into pneumonia, and he remained in hospital for several weeks, recovering without the punch of heavyweight antibiotics. Penicillin wasn’t discovered until 1939, in war-bound Britain, which couldn’t spare scientists to hunt the most fecund mold for human trials. But on July 9, 1941, Howard Florey and Norman Heatley flew to the United States on a plane with blacked-out windows, bearing a small priceless box of penicillin, and joined a lab in Peoria, Illinois, where they studied luxuriant molds from all over the world, only to discover that a strain of penicillin from a moldy cantaloupe in a Peoria market, when submerged in a deep vat and allowed to ferment, yielded ten times as much penicillin as competing molds. The requisite trials finally proved the drug’s value as the best antibacterial agent of its day, but wounded soldiers didn’t start receiving it until D-Day (June 6, 1944), and civilians and animals not until the end of the war.
When Ryś finally returned home, ice and snow had already started melting from the spring garden, and he could help weed, delve, and plant, with Wicek (whose fur had changed from black to silver gray in winter) hopping beside him, stride for stride like a well-trained dog. The nearly fledged chick pecked at the freshly turned soil, pulling up fat pink worms, and Antonina noted that the real chickens, the ones roosting in the chicken house, treated Kuba like an outsider, pecking him fiercely. However, Wicek allowed the chick to climb onto his back and nest deep, and she often saw them hopping around the garden together, rider and steed.
Before the war, the zoo had undulated from one landscape to another—mountains, valleys, ponds, lakes, pools, and woods—depending on the needs of its animals and Jan’s fancy as zoo director. But now that the zoo fell under the Warsaw Parks and Gardens Department, Jan answered to a bureaucrat who envisioned one continuous pullulation of green, with every woodlet, hedge, or obelisk echoing the others, according to his design. For that he needed Praski Park and, especially, the zoo’s large lawns and arboretum.
In the spring, Director Müller of the Königsberg Zoo, hearing that the Warsaw Zoo had been destroyed, offered to buy all the usable cages. His zoo, though considerably smaller than Jan’s, nestled in a fortress city founded by Teutonic knights and thought to be impregnable. Late in the war, Churchill would target Königsberg for one of the RAF’s controversial “terror raids,” ultimately destroying most of the city (zoo included), which finally surrendered to the Red Army on April 9, 1945, when it became known as Kaliningrad.
But in 1943, as self-crowned “Father of Warsaw,” Danglu Leist, the German president, didn’t want his city to be out-shone by a smaller one, and he decided Warsaw should have its zoo once more. Antonina described Jan as “ecstatic” when Leist invited him to submit a budget for a reborn zoo, remarking that even with the zoo animals gone, the buildings destroyed, the equipment dilapidated, the zoo still prospered in Jan’s heart and imaginings. At last, “phoenix-like,” she thought, the zoo, his career, and his passion for zookeeping might flourish again; and his Underground work could only profit from the bustle of an open zoo’s daily life, with its moving mosaic of visitors, animals, and workmen, against which the villa’s escapades might fade. A restored zoo would vitalize every contour of their life; it was perfect. Too perfect, Jan felt. He began immediately analyzing the plan for flaws, foremost that Poles were “boycotting all amusement activities created by the enemy.” Normally the zoo offered a wellspring of research and programs, but, fearing a Polish intelligentsia, the Nazis had allowed only elementary schools to stay open; all high schools and universities were banned. With the zoo’s teaching role abolished, it could offer only a small gallery of animals, and with food scarce and the city markets empty, how could the zoo justify feeding its animals? What’s more, a zoo might hurt the city’s economy, Jan reasoned, or expose him to danger if he didn’t run it according to German dictates. While such problems seemed insurmountable, Antonina admired Jan’s self-sacrifice, which she felt showed “character, bravery, and a realistic mind.”
84
Arthur Schopenhauer,