The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 22

^{WINTER, 1942}

TIME USUALLY GLIDES WITH AN INCOHERENT PURR, BUT IN the villa it always quickened as curfew hour approached, when a kind of solstice took place and the sun stopped on the horizon of Antonina’s day, with minutes moving as slow as mummers: one, a stretched pause, then another. Because anyone who didn’t make it home by curfew risked being arrested, beaten, or killed, the hour acquired a pagan majesty. Everyone knew curfew horror stories like that of Magdalena’s friend, painter and prose writer Bruno Schulz, gunned down by a spiteful Gestapo officer in Drohobycz, on November 19, 1942. Another Gestapo officer, Felix Landau, who admired Schulz’s macabre, sometimes sadomasochistic paintings, had given him a pass out of the Ghetto to paint frescoes of fairy tales on his son’s bedroom walls. One day, Landau killed a Jewish dentist under the protection of Günther, another officer, and when Günther spotted Schulz in the Aryan quarter after curfew, walking home with a loaf of bread under his arm, he shot him in retaliation.

If everyone arrived safely, Antonina celebrated another day without mishap, another night unmauled by monsters in the city’s labyrinths. Curfew twilight tormented Ryś, so she allowed him to stay up and await the homecomings; then he could fall asleep peacefully, his world intact. Years of war and curfews didn’t alter that; he still anxiously awaited his father’s return, indispensable as the moon’s. Respecting this, Jan would go straight to Ryś’s room, remove his backpack, and sit for a few minutes to talk about the day, often producing a little treasure tucked in a pocket. One night his backpack bulged as if it had iron ribs.

“What do you have there, Papa?” Ryś asked.

“A tiger,” Jan said in mock fear.

“Don’t joke, what’s really in there?”

“I told you—a dangerous animal,” his father said solemnly.

Antonina and Ryś watched Jan remove a metal cage containing something furry, shaped like a dwarf guinea pig, mainly chestnut in color, with white cheeks and spots on its sides like a Sioux horse.

“If you’d like to have him, he’s yours!” Jan said. “He’s a son of the hamster couple I have at the Hygiene Institute…. But if I give him to you, you’re not going to feed him to Balbina, are you?” Jan teased.

“Papa, why do you talk to me like I’m a little child?” Ryś said, offended. He’d had all sorts of pets in the past, he argued, and hadn’t done anything wicked with them.

“I’m very sorry,” Jan said. “Take good care of him, keep a close eye on him, because he’s the only survivor from a litter of seven. Unfortunately, the others were killed by their mother before I could stop her.”

“What a horrible mother! Why do you keep her?”

“All hamsters have this cruel instinct, not only his mother,” Jan explained. “A husband can kill his wife. Mothers chase their youngsters away from the burrow and don’t care for them anymore. I didn’t want to deprive the babies of their mother’s milk too early, but unfortunately I miscalculated the best moment and was only able to save this one. I don’t have time to take care of him at the lab, but I know you will do a great job.”

Antonina wrote that she and Jan found it hard to decide how much to tell a small child about the amoral, merciless side of nature, without scaring him (the war offered frights enough), but they also felt it important that he know the real world and learn the native ways of animals, explicably vicious or inexplicably kind.

“I’ve read so many stories about hamsters,” he said, disappointed, “and I was so sure they were nice, hardworking animals who collected grain for the winter….”

“Yes, that’s true,” Jan said reassuringly. “During the winter he hibernates, just like a badger, but if he happens to wake up hungry during winter, he can eat the grain and go back to sleep until spring.”

“It’s winter now, so why is this hamster awake?”

“Animals behave differently in the wild. We make captive ones live on a schedule that’s unnatural to them because it’s easier for us to take care of them, and that disturbs their normal sleep rhythms. But even though this hamster is awake, his pulse and breathing are a lot slower than they will be in the summer. You can check this for yourself—if you cover his cage, he’ll fall asleep almost immediately.”

Ryś drew a blanket over the cage and the hamster crept into a corner, settled back on its haunches, tucked its head down on its chest, covered its face with its front paws, and fell into a deep sleep. In time, Antonina judged him a “quite self-centered” little being, and “a noisy glutton” who “preferred his own company and an easy life.” In a household that porous, where animal time and human time swirled together, it made sense to identify the passage of months not by season or year but by the stay of an influential visitor, two-or four-legged. To Antonina, the hamster’s arrival “started a new era on our Noah’s Ark, which we later called the ‘Hamster Era.’”