Only the Animals (21 page)

‘That one looked like it was shot from the Osmica,' a soldier said under his breath, and one or two of the other militiamen laughed.

‘It used to be a popular nightclub on the mountain,' the puffy-jacketed man explained to the other foreigners. ‘Now the Serbs have made it into a bunker.'

When they'd left, the black bear ate the rest of the bread, and the witch emerged, yawning. ‘I've got a joke for you. What's the difference between a clever Bosnian and a dumb one?' she said to the black bear. ‘The smart one calls the dumb one in Sarajevo every day. From abroad.'

The black bear stared hard at the witch as if he didn't get it.

The witch fidgeted. ‘Go on, then,' she said to the brown bear. ‘We've got nothing better to do. Tell us some more about that prince who was turned into a bear.' She winked at the black bear. ‘And they think
you're
the crazy one.'

The brown bear looked hopeful. She sat back on her haunches, tried to get comfortable, though she could feel the bones of her pelvis pressing against the concrete floor of the cave.

‘The prince – in his bearskin – had grown,' she said. ‘When he stood on his hind legs he was twice as tall as Karol, a towering mass of brown fur topped with a black nose. He liked to play-wrestle with the other soldiers, tumbling around in the sand, amazingly tender with the men despite his claws and his yellow teeth.

‘By now the regiment had moved on to a place called Qassassin. Soon they were to set sail for Italy, to the real war – for often it felt to Karol
as if they were playing at war in the Middle East. They worked hard, yes, transporting military equipment to other units in the area, in Syria or back to Iraq, and on any journey Karol
made in the supply trucks, the bear accompanied him, squeezed between two men in the front seat. But the atmosphere in the camp was often festive, and the tents resembled a schoolboys' dormitory: packs of cards scattered around, and dirty socks, and dirtier cartoons poking out beneath the mattresses. There were cute animals everywhere you looked – ferrets, piglets, puppies, foxes, owls, ducks; each regiment seemed to have adopted its own live mascot. Karol
liked to think the bear was different, beyond a mascot, that the bear was really, truly
one of them
. When they sailed for Italy, he would not let the bear be left behind at the sea's edge like all the other half-witted animal mascots. Karol
had a plan.

‘It was early in 1944 when the order came to embark. At the quay in Alexandria, watching enormous cranes load trucks onto a liner converted into a troopship, Karol
thought again of children playing at war: dwarfed by the crane, the trucks and tanks looked like Dinky Toys, small enough to grasp in one fist. He looked at the bear beside him and tried not to panic. The time for petitioning was over – every favour had been called in, every application made – and now it was up to those in the British High Command to decide the bear's fate.

‘“Corporal?” the liaison officer called from within the quay office.

‘Karol
answered automatically, “Sir?”

‘“Not you,” the man said. “I'm talking to the bear.”

‘When the MS
Batory
sailed later that day with a protective convoy and the Polish flag raised, Corporal Bear sat in a spacious cage on deck and chomped his way through his cigarette rations, doubled because of his size. The Persian prince in his bearskin was now officially a Polish soldier, granted a special travel warrant to stay with Karol's
regiment for the duration of the war.

‘When the ruins of the monastery above Cassino first became visible, this place where so many men on both sides had died – were dying – in agony, their souls too fresh to join the ancient ghosts of the Benedictine monks, Karol knew he should never have brought the bear with him. Yet he was guiltily glad of the bear's presence beside him on the steepest of the narrow mountain passes as the truck followed the eerie, disembodied glow of a white towel hung about the shoulders of another soldier walking in front. This was the only way, as they moved through the chemical fog designed to keep their movements secret from the Germans, to have some idea of the curves of the road without headlights. The bear sat with his paws over his eyes most of the time, a gesture so ridiculously human that it made Karol
smile in the trickiest moments of manoeuvring the truck, keeping him calm.

‘The new traumas – camping below the monastery, watching its silhouette appear against the dawn sky, knowing that most of the Polish soldiers sent the night before to cross the Rapido River to reach the hill town had drowned – did not dull Karol's
older ones: the last sight of his baby son, the cattle train, the icy alien gulag. It felt instead as if each one pulled at the same psychic tear in the fabric of himself, and might split that fabric in two. Only the bear kept Karol
human, or better than human – kept him just whole enough to remain kind.
I am because you are
,
he said to himself over and over, looking at the bear asleep beside him.
I am because you are
.

‘One morning, after six days and nights of such violent shelling it had been impossible to sleep or think, they saw a lone Lancers Regiment pennant flying from the monastery's ramparts. Somebody had risked his life to attach it to the highest remaining wall, to let it be known that the battle was won.

‘That same morning, to take his mind off his grief – a battle won on paper, but so many drowned, stabbed, exploded or sliced apart by bullets – Karol
did a sketch of the bear carrying an artillery shell on his shoulder. He asked a friend to make a badge of this logo, and soon everybody in the company had it on their sleeve or hat or lapel. It was easy to get approval for it after the enormous losses the Poles had suffered, losses they were told had not been in vain, for the Cassino victory led to others. Rome fell, and Ancona, and finally Bologna. By the start of the following summer, the Germans had surrendered.

‘Within days of the end of the war, Karol
entered into one of the happiest times in his life, a voluptuously, almost indecently carefree time of limbo, with no decisions to make or responsibilities to take on because his fate was in the hands of the Allies. And all the while he knew that at the end of this sumptuous period of rest he would be reunited with his wife and son.

‘He and the bear were granted a furlough on the Adriatic coast, billeted on a small farm run by a childless elderly couple. Their hosts did not seem to be grieving any specific losses, and the lack of a common language meant there could be no complicated conversations about guilt and blame. Mostly they co-existed in luxurious silence.

‘Karol
and the bear spent most days on the beach, along with most of their regiment, who had been billeted in the same area. Karol
lay on his back and dug his feet under the sand, and imagined the same scene repeatedly: returning home with the bear by his side, ambling along the main road into his village, and seeing the look of joyful disbelief on his little boy's face.

‘His reveries were interrupted at least once a morning by female screams, and every time, his blood moved more quickly from shock; for so long he had heard only male noises of distress. Then the screams would be replaced by laughter and strings of Italian curses, for the bear had snuck again into the sea and surfaced in the middle of a group of female bathers. For this trick the other soldiers rewarded the bear handsomely with cigarettes, for of course the women had to be apologised to and placated, and then names and smiles were exchanged and halting conversations in Italian begun.

‘But months passed and Karol's
euphoria began to fade as he watched his homeland being toyed with like a puzzle piece. Torrid deals were made with Stalin. The men were told they would be sent to Scotland to be demobbed instead of going home. They heard terrible stories about soldiers who had been prisoners of war, the few who were brave or sentimental enough to return to Soviet-occupied Poland, being put back on cattle trains to new death camps, or to familiar Siberian ones, or sent to the fatal gold mines of the Arctic Circle. They were told to be cautious, to bide their time.

‘At Winfield Camp for displaced persons in the Scottish Borders, it was almost impossible to get information from the Soviet-occupied Polish territories – letters were being censored both ways. But Karol
kept trying, writing to his wife and relatives, until finally somebody took pity on him and risked writing in a coded way the truth Karol
already knew: that his wife and child were no longer alive.

‘After this, Karol
stopped caring about what might happen to the bear. The other Poles at Winfield watched the bear swim in the frigid edges of the nearby river and told stories about him to anybody who would listen. They sent him on missions to Karol, to do some funny new trick that might restore their connection, but Karol
looked at the bear uncomprehendingly.

‘When he was informed that the bear would be going to live in Edinburgh Zoo, Karol's
first feeling was envy: if only he could live in an enclosure too, be fed and watered, not ever have anything asked of him again. He was invited to accompany the bear to Edinburgh, to walk him into his new enclosure and remove the chain from around his neck. All this he did, feeling nothing. He built a little pyramid of cigarettes on the ground, and opened a bottle of beer for the bear.

‘When it was time to leave, he turned to the bear and put his hands automatically in the creature's paws. They looked at each other. The bear leaned forward and gave Karol's
cheek a long, mournful lick. He knew he would never see Karol
again, though they would live out their lives in the same city. Karol
later heard that the bear was in love with a female bear brought to join him in his enclosure. He courted her with such ardour that the whole of Edinburgh was swept up in their romance. Sometimes, on better days, Karol
would think of the story Irena had told him, of a human princess trapped in a bear's body, searching for love. And he would tell himself that tomorrow,
tomorrow
, he would find the courage to return: to the bear, to his homeland, to himself.'

The blind brown bear had finished her story. She lumbered down to the dirty water in the moat and began to scrub herself. A ritual cleansing, a preparatory rite. When her fur was soaked through, she returned to the concrete cave and lay down against the wall, shivering and pure.

The witch lit a cigarette stuffed with tea leaves and ignored for a moment the scornful eyes of the black bear regarding her. ‘So I made some bad business decisions,' the witch said. She fiddled with the dial of a radio she'd brought with her, finding only static.

Below them in the city basin, the chocolate factory was burning. The smoke smelled of caramel. Voices surfaced out of the radio's static, clinging to the pirated frequency, not letting go.

‘What is my wife saying? I can't hear. Say it again please?'

‘She said that she is fine, that the children are fine.'

‘Pardon?'

‘That the children have grown.'

‘What is she saying now?'

‘That she misses you.'

‘What?'

‘She says she misses you.'

‘I can't hear.'

‘She says she loves you.'

‘Excuse me?'

‘That's okay, she says she's doing fine.'

‘Please, I can't hear you!'

A day later, the brown bear died. The black bear ate her, limb by limb.

‘What was it you really wanted to say?' the witch said to the black bear, pushing bread that rasped like stone through the fence railings. ‘You asked me to write something down a while ago.'

‘I can't remember,' said the bear, sucking contemplatively on the brown bear's thighbone. ‘It couldn't have been very important. These days I seem to exist only in the present. I can't remember anything from yesterday, or the day before that.'

‘You do know what you've done, bear?' said the witch cautiously. ‘Tell me you know.'

The black bear looked at her with contempt. ‘What are you talking about, witch?'

The witch looked afraid. ‘I thought you knew,' she said, preparing to leave. She gestured at the brown bear's clean bones. ‘She was your wife.'

The black bear did not speak again. On an icy day at the end of October, he died with his paws wrapped around the brown bear's ribcage, holding it close against his body. In the nearby enclosures, the lay of the bones – once tigers, pumas, leopards, wolves, lions with beating hearts and wet tongues – told the same story: life mates eaten in madness, bones within bones, beloved consumed at last by their lovers.

 

A LETTER TO SYLVIA PLATH

Soul of Dolphin

DIED 2003, IRAQ

 

 

 

 

Dear Ms Plath

          I'd like to try to get the story of my death out of the way: no more of this terrible anticipation. This is the soldier in me speaking. I have the US Navy to thank for training me to do the deed, then deal with the deed, though it's in failing to deal that I died. Word games as primers, Ms Plath, you'd appreciate that.