The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 29

SOON AFTER THE BLUEBELLS FADED IN SPRING, WILD GARLIC clusters grew in the damp shade of old trees, with tiny white flowers oozing a sweet vapor that poured through open windows at dusk, their leaves towering over two feet high in a scramble for light. Some farmers grazed sheep in garlic groves to scent the meat, and others cursed if their cows wandered in by mistake and browsed garlic, tainting the milk. Locals used wild garlic in rejuvenative potions and poultices to lower a high fever, warm fading ardor, dry acne, tune the heart, or ease whooping cough. They bruised the bulbs for cooking, and simmered a wild garlic soup.

“The zoo became immersed in a warm May night,” Antonina wrote, sketching the scene in her diary: “Trees and shrubs, house and terrace were flooded by pale aquamarine, a cool and impassive moonlight. Branches of the lilac bushes bent low with heavy, faded clusters of flowers. The sharp, geometric outlines of sidewalks were highlighted by long black shadows. Nightingales sang their spring songs over and over, intoxicated by their own voices.”

The villa-ites sat listening to Fox Man’s piano concert, losing time and reality in a world lit by candle shadows and the constellations of notes hovering in darkness. “The silent romantic night swelled with the impetuous chords of Chopin’s Etude in C Minor. The music spoke to us of sorrow, fear, and terror, as it floated around the room and through an open window,” Antonina recalled.

Suddenly she heard a soft uncanny rustling coming from the bed of tall hollyhocks beside the window, a noise she alone seemed to decode between notes. When an owl screeched, warning something or someone away from its nest of fledglings, Antonina read the sign and discreetly told Jan, who went outside to investigate. Reappearing in the doorway, he gestured for her to join him.

“I need the key to the Pheasant House,” he whispered. As housewife, she kept the keys, and there were many: some to doors at the villa, others to zoo buildings, still others to doors that once existed, and some that served no memorable purpose but nonetheless couldn’t be tossed out. This key would have come easily to hand because they used it often—unlocking the Pheasant House usually meant a new Guest.

Silently questioning with her eyes, Antonina gave Jan the key, and together they went outside, where they caught sight of two boys diving for cover behind some bushes. Jan whispered that these members of the Underground’s sabotage wing had set fire to German gas tanks and urgently needed to lie low. They’d been told to run for the zoo, and, unbeknownst to Antonina, Jan had been expecting them all evening with mounting worry. Recognizing their hosts, the boys suddenly stepped into view.

“For several hours we hid in the bushes next to the house, because we could hear German language being spoken,” one said.

Jan explained that the lovely weather appealed to military policemen who visited the zoo for long walks, and several had left only about twenty minutes earlier. With the coast clear now, they needed to hurry inside the Pheasant House. Because pheasants were delicacies, a Pheasant House sounded quite grand to the boys, and one teased: “We’ll pretend we’re a rare species, right, Mr. Lieutenant?”

“It’s nothing special!” Jan warned him. “Not luxurious quarters by a long shot. Only rabbits live in the building now. It’s located close to our house, where we can keep an eye on you and bring you food. But I must remind you: from daybreak on you have to practice the silence of the tomb!” He said sternly: “Don’t talk or smoke. I don’t want to hear any noise coming from there! Is that understood?”

“Understood, sir!” they said.

Silence reigned, the jacket of silence one sometimes finds on a still, moonless night. The only sound Antonina heard was a key clicking in a lock hidden beneath the wild vines on the Pheasant House.

The next morning, when Ryś took Wicek into the garden and strolled toward the aviary, Antonina watched him pause to pet Wicek’s long ears and say:

“Be ready now, you old horse! We’re going to the Pheasant House! So, remember: Be very quiet!” He raised a shushing finger to his lips. Together they made their way to the small wooden building, with Wicek at Ryś’s heel.

Inside, Ryś found two boys sleeping on beds of hay, surrounded by rabbits of all sizes, which, like trolls, were busily watching and sniffing at the sleeping humans. Ryś locked the door behind him, quietly set a basket of milkweed on the floor, and tossed around handfuls of the pods and stems for the rabbits to eat. Then he took out a pot of milk with noodles in it, a big chunk of bread, and two spoons.

Studying them as they slept was irresistible for a boy curious about animals and humans, so he edged his face close to theirs and considered how best to wake them, since he wasn’t supposed to stomp, clap, or yell. Squatting, he tugged one boy’s sleeve, which didn’t stir the exhausted sleeper, then he tugged harder and harder, and still the boy slept. Since the hands-on technique didn’t work, he tried something subtler: filling his lungs with air, he puffed at the boy’s face until at last he lifted his hand to swat an imaginary insect and his eyes finally opened.

Half conscious and startled, the boy looked panicky, and Ryś decided it might be time to introduce himself, so, leaning even closer, he whispered:

“I am Ryś!”

“Pleased to meet you,” the boy whispered back, then added emphatically: “I am Pheasant!”

This was an understandable confusion, inasmuch as Ryś is the word for lynx and people hiding at the zoo were given the name of the animal that once lived in their hiding place.

“Yes, but I’m telling the truth,” Ryś insisted, “I really am Ryś, it’s not a joke. I mean Ryś the boy, not Ryś with little crests on its ears and a fox terrier’s tail!”

“Yes, I see that,” the boy said. “I’m only a pheasant today. Anyway, if you were a real lynx and I had feathers, you’d be eating me by now, right?”

“Maybe not,” Ryś said seriously. “Please don’t joke…. I brought you breakfast and a pencil, and—” Suddenly they heard footsteps on a sidewalk nearby and at least two German voices. Ryś and the boy sat twig-still.

After the voices had passed, Ryś said: “Maybe they’re only people heading for their garden plots.” The second conspirator woke up, stretched, and massaged his stiff, cramped legs as his comrade showed him the bowl with soup and handed him a spoon. Still squatting, Ryś watched them eat, waiting until they were finished, then said quietly: “Goodbye. Don’t get bored. I’ll bring you dinner and something to read…. You’ll get some daylight through the little skylight window.”

As he left, Ryś heard one boy say to the other, “Nice kid, isn’t he? And it’s so funny having a lynx guard the pheasants. It would make a good fairy tale, wouldn’t it?”

Ryś returned to the villa and told Antonina all about his adventures with the boys, who hid in the Pheasant House for three weeks while Ryś tended them as his charges, until the Germans gave up searching, new documents were forged, and another hiding place secured. One morning Ryś found nothing but rabbits in the Pheasant House and realized the boys had moved on, which he took personally, as friends abandoning him.

“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.