The Zookeeper’s Wife

  Understandably confused by their odd scent and snarls, the cat discovered the baby foxes had ravenous appetites, and after lots of licking and feeding they finally began to smell like her, though her repeated attempts to school them in the feline arts mainly failed. Meowing around them in "a quite distinguished tone of voice. . .to teach them how normal cats should speak," she never did persuade them to meow back, and their loud barking constantly startled her. "In her cat's heart, she was ashamed that they barked," Antonina mused, adding that the offspring were loudmouths with "high tempers." But they did master an agile cat-leap onto tables, cabinets, and tall bookcases, and villa-ites often found a baby fox, curled up like a Bavarian soup tureen, napping atop the piano or a chest of drawers.

  Favoring live food, Balbina hunted outside each day to feed her brood, diligently dragging home birds, rabbits, meadow mice, and rats, though, as she soon discovered, she needed to hunt nonstop to still their lidless hunger. Outside, she led the way—a small, thin tabby followed by offspring three times her size with long snouts and fluffy black tails ending in white flowers. She taught them how to stalk prey while crouching low like a sphinx, how to pounce on game, and if one strayed, she meowed harshly until the young fox dutifully trotted back to the fold. Whenever the fox pups spied a chicken, they stalked it, crawling fast on their bellies, then pouncing with sharp teeth to rip it apart, snarling as they fed, while Balbina kept her distance and watched.

  After "giving birth" to several broods of baby foxes, tiring and confusing as that was, Balbina finally got used to their alien ways, and they became half-cat, she half-vixen. Praising the cat's good-citizenry of never attacking housemates, Antonina wrote: "It's as if she has her own moral code." She spared Fox Man's parakeets, even when he released them from their cage; Wicek the rabbit didn't tempt her, nor did Kuba the chick; she didn't bother hunting the invading mouse or two; and if a stray bird flew into the house (a bad omen), she'd eye it lazily. But one new arrival did rekindle Balbina's feral instincts.

  In the spring, a neighbor brought a strange orphan for Ryś's royal zoo—a paunchy baby muskrat with glossy brown fur, yellow-beige belly, long scaly tail, and tiny black eyes. Webbed front paws with fingers help muskrats build lodges, hold food, or dig burrows; when they swim, fringed hind feet make strong canoe-paddle sweeps. Oddest of all, perhaps, four sharp chisel-like front teeth protrude beyond the cheeks and lips, so that a muskrat can eat stems and roots, bulrushes and cattails while underwater, without opening its mouth.

  Antonina found the creature fascinating and gave it a large cage on the porch, adding a glass developing tray from an old darkroom as wading pool, since muskrats are native-born swimmers. Ryś named it Szczurcio (Little Rat), and soon it learned its name and adapted to life in the three-ring villa, spending its days sleeping, eating, or wallowing. Wild muskrats don't tame easily, but in a few weeks Szczurcio let Ryś open the cage, carry him around, and pet or scratch his fur. While Szczurcio slept, Balbina would circle the cage like a mountain lion, searching for a way in. Awake, he tormented her by playing in the little tub incessantly and splashing her with water, which she hated. No one knew why the muskrat tempted Balbina so, but whoever fed Szczurcio or cleaned his cage had to lock the door afterward with small twists of wire.

  Antonina enjoyed watching the muskrat's "exquisite toilette"—each morning, Szczurcio would dunk his face in the pan of water and snort heartily, blow air out his nose, then splash his face with wet paws like a man preparing to shave, and wash for a long time. After that he would climb into the tub and stretch out on his belly, turn onto his back, and roll over several times. Finally he left the bathtub and shook his fur like a dog, splashing mightily. Strangely enough, he often climbed the wall of the cage and sat on the perch like the cage's previous occupant, Koko the cockatoo. There, using his fingers, he would carefully comb water through his fur. Visitors found it a little odd to see a muskrat perching and preening like a bird, but the villa held a bizarre crew even at the quietest times, and he was Ryś's new favorite pet. After his morning ablutions, Szczurcio would eat a carrot, potato, dandelions, bread, or grain, though he no doubt craved the branches, bark, and marsh weeds on which wild muskrats thrive.

  When he outgrew the little tub of water, Antonina replaced it with a giant jar Jan had once used in a cockroach study. Szczurcio leapt into the jar when it arrived and splashed with such abandon that Antonina moved his cage into the kitchen, where the floor was ceramic tile and fresh water lay closer to hand.

  "You know, Mother," Ryś said one day, "Szczurcio is learning how to open his cage. He's not stupid!"

  "I don't think he's quite that smart," Antonina replied.

  Szczurcio spent hours fiddling with the wire, grabbing the ends with his fingers and trying to untwist them, and after a night's crafty work, he finally succeeded in unknotting the wire and lifting up the sliding door, scrambling down a chair leg to the floor, shimmying up the water pipe, and sliding into the marshlike kitchen sink. Then he leapt atop the stove, climbed onto a warm radiator, and fell asleep. That's where Ryś found him in the morning. Returning him to his cage, Ryś closed the door and knotted the wire even tighter.

  Early the next day, Ryś ran through the house to Antonina's bedroom, where he cried out in alarm: "Mom! Mom! Where's Szczurcio? His cage is empty! I can't find him anywhere! Maybe Balbina ate him? I have to go to school, and Dad is at work! Help!"

  Still bedridden, Antonina couldn't help much with this dawn crisis, but she deputized Fox Man and the housekeeper, Pietrasia, to launch a search party, and they dutifully scouted all the closets, sofas, easy chairs, corners, boots—any bolt-hole where a muskrat might hide—with no success.

  Because she couldn't believe the muskrat had simply "evaporated like camphor," she suspected Balbina or Żarka of mayhem, and had cat and dog brought to her bed for close inspection. There she carefully felt their stomachs for any suspicious bulges. If they'd eaten such a large animal—almost the size of a rabbit—surely their bellies would still be swollen. No, they felt slender as usual, so she declared the detainees innocent and released them.

  Suddenly Pietrasia ran into her bedroom. "Come quick!" she shouted. "To the kitchen. Szczurcio is in the stove chimney! I started a fire the way I do every morning, and I heard a terrible noise!"

  Using her cane, Antonina slowly rose from bed onto her swollen legs, carefully descended the stairs, and hobbled into the kitchen.

  "Szczurcio, Szczurcio," she called sweetly.

  A scuffling noise in the wall. When a soot-covered head poked from the chimney, she grabbed the fugitive's back and pulled him out, whiskers coated in grime, front paws singed. Gently, she washed him in warm water and soap, over and over, trying to remove the cooking grease from his fur. Then she applied ointment to his burns and placed him back in his cage.

  Laughing, she explained that a muskrat builds a lodge by heaping plants and mud into a mound, then digging a burrow from below water level. This muskrat wanted a lodge not a cage, she said, and who could blame it for creating a facsimile world? He had even bent the metal burners to fashion an easier route into the chimney.

  When Ryś returned from school that afternoon, he was thrilled to find Szczurcio back in his cage, and at dinner, as people carried food to the table, Ryś regaled all with the adventures of Szczurcio and the stovepipe. One little girl laughed so hard that she tripped on her way from the kitchen, spilling a full bowl of hot soup over Fox Man's head and onto Balbina, who had been sitting in his lap. Springing from his chair, Fox Man bolted into his bedroom, followed by his cat, and closed the door. Ryś ran after him, spied through the keyhole, and whispered regular reports:

  "He took off his jacket!"

  "He's drying it using a towel!"

  "Now he's drying Balbina!"

  "He's drying his face!"

  "Ooooh! No! He opened the cage with his parakeets!"

  At this point, Magdalena couldn't stand the suspense any longer and flung open the door. There stood Fox Man,
the house concert master, column-like in the middle of the room, with parakeets circling his forehead like merry-go-round animals. After a few moments they landed on his head and started digging through his hair, pulling out and eating the soup noodles. At last Fox Man noticed the crowd in the doorway, silent and agog, waiting for some explanation.

  "It would be a pity to waste such good food," he said of the bizarre scene, as if he'd found the only and obvious thing to do.

  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.'"

  CHAPTER 23

  NEW YEAR, 1943, APPROACHED WITH ANTONINA STILL MAINLY bedridden, and after three months, cabin fever and lack of exercise had depleted her body and spirits. She usually kept the door to her bedroom open so that she could join, however remotely, the stir of the house, its mingling smells and sounds. On January 9, when Heinrich Himmler visited Warsaw, he condemned another 8,000 Jews to "resettlement," but by now everyone understood that "resettlement" meant death, and instead of lining up as ordered, many hid while others ambushed the soldiers and dashed across the rooftops, creating just enough friction to curb deportations for several months. Surprisingly, sketchy telephone service continued, even to some bunkers, though it's hard to imagine why the Germans allowed it, unless they figured clever electricians could hook up illegal phones anyway or the Underground had its own telephone workers.

  Before dawn one day, the Żabíńskis awoke, not to a chorus of gibbons and macaws as they used to, but to a jangling telephone and a voice that seemed to come from the far side of the moon. Maurycy Fraenkel, a lawyer friend who lived in the dying Ghetto, asked if he could "visit" them.

  Although they hadn't heard from him in quite a while, on at least one occasion Jan had visited him in the Ghetto, and they knew him as Magdalena's "dearest friend," so they quickly agreed. Antonina noted that several nerve-trampling hours followed for Magdalena,

  whose lips were blue, and her face so white that we could see many freckles, normally almost invisible. Her strong, ever-busy hands were trembling. The sparkle had vanished from her eyes, and we could read only one painful thought on her face: "Will he be able to escape and come here?"

  He did escape but arrived a gnarled specimen, bent over like a gargoyle from the Other Side, as people sometimes referred to the Ghetto, a Yiddish term, sitre akhre, for the dim world where demons dwell and zombies wear "a husk or shell that has grown up around a spark of holiness, masking its light."

  The unbearable weight of ghetto life had physically crippled him—his head hung low between curved shoulders, his chin rested on his chest, and he breathed heavily. Swollen red from frost, his nose glowed against a pale, sickly face. When he entered his new bedroom, in a dreamy sort of way he dragged an armchair from beside the wardrobe to the darkest corner of the room, where he sat hunched over, shrinking himself even more, as if he were trying to become invisible.

  "Will you agree to have me here?" he asked softly. "You will be in danger. . .. It is so quiet here. I can't understand. . .." That was all he could manage before his voice trailed away.

  Antonina wondered if his nervous system, adapted to the hurly-burly of Ghetto life, found this sudden plunge into calm and quiet unnerving, if it sapped more energy from him than the distressed world of the Ghetto had.

  Born in Lwów, Maurycy Paweł Fraen
kel had a passion for classical music, many composers and conductors as friends, and he had often organized small, private concerts. As a young man he studied law and moved to Warsaw, where he met Magdalena Gross, whose gift he greatly admired, at first becoming her patron, then close friend, and finally sweetheart. Before the war, she had brought him to the zoo, which he relished, and he had helped the Żabíńskis buy several boxcars full of cement to use in zoo renovations.

  Maurycy soon grew used to life across the river from the lurid Ghetto, and as he ventured out of corners and shadows, Antonina wrote that his backbone seemed to straighten a little, though never completely. He had a sarcastic sense of humor, though he never laughed out loud, and a huge smile would light his face until his eyes scrunched and blinked behind thick glasses. Antonina found him

  calm, kind, agreeable, and gentle. He didn't know how to be aggressive, frightful, or disagreeable even for a second. This was why he moved to the Ghetto when told to, without thinking twice about it. After he experienced the full tragedy of being there, he tried to commit suicide. By luck, the poison he used was too stale to work. After that, with nothing to lose, he decided to risk an escape.

  Without documents he couldn't register anywhere, so officially he ceased to exist for a long time, living among friends but gaunt and ghostly, one of the disappeared. He had lost many voices: the lawyer's, the impresario's, the lover's, and it isn't surprising that he found speaking or even coherence difficult.

  While Antonina lay ill, Maurycy sat next to her bed for hours, slowly recovering his spiritual balance, Antonina thought, as well as the energy to talk again. What weighed heaviest was the colossal risk he created just by being there, and he often referred to Governor Frank's threat of October 15, 1941, the decree that all Poles hiding Jews would be killed. Every Jew receiving help had to deal with this painful issue, including the dozen hidden in the villa and the rest in the animal houses, but Maurycy was especially bothered by the burden he added to the Żabíńskis' lives. It was one thing to expose himself to danger, he told Antonina, but the thought of spreading an epidemic of fear throughout the zoo, the hub of so many lives, piled on more guilt than he could shoulder.