Siege 13 (5 page)

József knew that Zamertsev didn't believe him, that he was not accusing him of excessive sentimentality so much as lying, or maybe outright craziness, as if between the destruction of the siege and Sándor's ranting, József's brain had also become unhinged. Zamertsev was right in a sense, because it wasn't what happened to the alligators that made Sándor and József wander around the zoo unlocking cages, but rather the arrival of the Soviet soldiers, Zamertsev's men, high atop their horses, demanding that they first release a wolf, then a leopard, and then a tiger, all so they could hunt them, these half-starved creatures that could barely walk never mind run, chasing them down with fresh horses and military ordnance, drunk and laughing and twice crazy with what the war had both taken from and permitted them.

The attendants were into the champagne that night, having discovered a crate of the expensive stuff in one of the locked trunks Teleki left in his office, along with several sealed tins of caviar and a box of excellent cigars. Sándor handed out bottles and tins and matches to József and Gerg
ő
and Zsuzsi, all of them so hungry and tired of thinking about what might happen to them the following week, or tomorrow, or the next minute that they popped the corks as fast as possible and
began drinking, trying to wash from themselves the cold and fear and the dead animals all around, as if by concentrating you could keep only to the taste of what was on your tongue, and think of nothing else.

It was of course Sándor's idea, the action he decided on after he'd drained his second bottle of Törley's, leaving off the caviar, looking at everyone's grubby knuckles, their wincing with the sound of another explosion or rattle of gunfire or the slow fall of flares (falling so crookedly they seemed to be welding fractures in the sky). And so it was neither love nor logic that led them around the zoo that night but drunkenness, jingling keys pulled from Teleki's walls, moving past the carcasses in the monkey house, many of them frozen to the bars they'd been gripping when their heat gave out and they laid their heads onto their shoulders welcoming the last warmth of sleep; or in the tropical aviary, the brightly coloured feathers gone dull on the curled forms, their heads dusted with frost and tangled in the netting overhead, as close as they would ever again come to the sun; or in the aquarium, where someone now gone, perhaps Márti, had broken through the glass of the tanks and tried to chip some of the fish out of the ice, whether in some pathetic attempt to thaw them back to life or to eat them no one could guess. In the end, it was less an organized act than a celebration, less motivated by reason or a goal than a delight in the moment when the cage swung open and something else bounded or crawled or slithered or flew out, the four of them downing champagne and running around, eagerly seeking the next thrill of release, opening after opening, an orgy of smashing those locks they'd worried over for years. And when it was
over, when there wasn't a single cage left to open, an animal to free, then Gerg
ő
and Zsuzsi freed themselves, waltzing out the front gate straight into a warning shout, a halting laugh, a hail of machine-gun fire.

 

Which brought József and Sándor back to themselves in a hurry. “I'll bet it did,” said Zamertsev, leaning over the table and staring at József, the shoulders and chest of his uniform covered with red stars and hammers and sickles and decorative ribbons. “And I guess that's when you got the idea of feeding my soldiers to the lion.”

“It was your soldiers' horses we wanted,” mumbled József, still so amazed by the last sound Sándor had made—he could imagine him tossing his head and baring his teeth and roaring so loudly it could be heard above the guns—that József might have been speaking to anybody, treating Zamertsev as though he was an acquaintance he'd met in a restaurant or café rather than someone who at any moment could have sent him out to be shot. “A lion can live a lot longer on a horse than a man, you know.”

But the truth was, he wasn't so sure, for Sándor had frequently looked down upon the Russian soldiers (both from the roof of the palm garden, and later from the palisades) and licked his dry lips and recalled the Siege of Leningrad, wondering if people in Budapest would end up eating human flesh, as they were rumoured to have done there. At the time, József had not connected Sándor's actions with appetite, but with a hatred of the Soviets, because with all the dead German and Arrow-Cross soldiers not to mention civilians lying in the streets, perfectly preserved by a winter so cold even the
Danube had frozen over, there was no need to hunt the living. Sándor had made strange references to the Soviets and the Red Army as the two of them wandered around the zoo in the waning days of the siege, when most of the fires in Pest had gone out and the Russians were mopping up what was left of the enemy by marching Hungarian men and women in front of them through the streets and forcing them to call out, “Don't shoot, don't shoot, we're Hungarians, give yourselves up”; though to the west the fighting was still thick, relentless, out there across the Danube, on the Buda side of the city, where the Nazis and Arrow-Cross were holed up on Castle Hill, surrounded, running out of ammunition and food, dreaming of a breakout.

Of the animals they'd released, a few vultures and eagles remained, circling above the zoo and drifting down lazily to feed on the plentiful carrion in the streets. When they returned to their nests, Sándor would wonder what was more poisonous in their bellies, the flesh of communists or fascists. He would say things like that. They held discussions, long into the night, and József said the fascists were wrong to speak of their beliefs, the society they envisaged, as natural, for no animal was ever interested in war for glory, or compiling lists of atrocities, or mastering the world, or getting rid, en masse, of another species, and that more often than not what animals did was tend only to their immediate needs, and in doing so created a kind of harmony . . . “Harmony?” laughed Sándor. “You sound like a communist!” And he spoke of how a male grizzly will kill the cubs belonging to another male so that the female will mate with him; how he'd once heard about a weasel that came into a yard and killed twenty-five
chickens, biting them through the neck, without taking a single one of the corpses to eat; how certain gulls will steal eggs from others, sit on them until they hatch, and then feed the chicks to their own young; how a cat will play with whatever it catches, torturing it slowly to death, all out of amusement. “Does that sound like
harmony
to you?” he asked József.

Zamertsev looked a moment at József, who sat there trembling in the creaking chair in the headquarters the Red Army had put up in one of the half-obliterated mansions along Andrássy Boulevard, still dressed in the ragged attendants' uniform, unwashed these hundred days, his hair matted and filthy, so shrivelled by hunger Zamertsev thought he could see the man's spine poking through the skin of a belly fallen in on its emptiness. Then Zamertsev came around the desk and grabbed József's chin roughly in one hand and said, “I'm not interested in what you think I want to hear. Politics. . . .” He glanced at the interpreter, who raised his eyebrows. “I want to protect my . . . the people's army . . . which means telling me about Sándor, what he did, what I'm dealing with . . .”

Protect the people's army
. József wanted to laugh. If your soldiers had been kept in check, if they hadn't come in wanting a safari all their own, we wouldn't have had to free the animals in the first place. After that, Sándor seemed intent on prowling around the zoo as if he was an animal himself, even though József warned him to stay inside, because there wasn't a day when one of the carnivores that was still alive didn't come upon another, the polar bear devouring the wolves, the wolves taking apart the panther, the lion emerging at night.
But that's how it was then: József working hard to conserve himself, to survive, while Sándor had given up on everything—first sleep, then food, then safety—divesting himself of every resource.

Somehow Sándor had gotten word to the Russians that the lion was living in the tunnels of the subway, and when the other predators were gone—having finally eaten one other, or been shot, or wandered off—then the lion took to eating stray horses. Sándor would point out its victims to József when they went out to gather snow for drinking water, Sándor hobbling along, weakened enough by then to need the help of one of Teleki's canes, though he still had enough presence of mind to show József how it was teeth not ordnance that had made the gaping holes along the flanks and backs and bellies of the horses. “The lion must be weakened,” said Sándor, clutching himself, “otherwise, it would have dragged the carcass away to where it lives, and eaten the whole thing.”

“Or maybe it's too full to bother,” said József, envious of its teeth.

At night, József would awaken and not even turn toward Sándor's pallet, because he knew he wasn't there. Night after night he'd awaken and Sándor would be out. Sleepwalking is what József thought at first, but when he asked about it, Sándor would laugh and say he'd been out “getting horses.” There wasn't a lot to what Sándor said anymore, though truth to tell József himself was having trouble coming up with anything to say, and of saying it, when he did, in a meaningful way.

“My soldiers tell me Sándor was meeting with them,” said Zamertsev. “That he was arranging lion hunts in the subway tunnels.”

“You could fit a herd of horses in there,” nodded József. “But it was very dark. And the soldiers were always drunk. And there were bullets flying all over the place.”

“It was one way to feed the lion,” said Zamertsev. “You knew about it. Perhaps even helped him?”

No, József shook his head, and then a second later, he nodded yes, and then stopped, not knowing who or what he'd helped, deciding that it certainly wasn't Sándor. Zamertsev was wrong to think that Sándor was feeding the lion, for that's what József had thought at first as well, as if the lion and Sándor were two separate things. But it was better that Zamertsev think this than what József knew to be the truth, the transformation he'd witnessed the day he'd carried Sándor to the subway entrance, one of the few that wasn't bombed out or buried in rubble or so marked by the lion's presence that even humans could sense the danger there. He'd pressed his body against the door—it was an old service entrance used by the engineers and subway personnel, wide enough to fit a small car, covered with a corrugated metal door—envisioning that awful metamorphosis.

 

As it turned out Zamertsev wasn't like the other soldiers, so easily led into the same trap. He sent for one of his men and told him to get a map of the old Franz Josef Underground Line, staring silently at József until the blueprints were delivered, at which point he spread them across the desk and began tracing the possible routes into and out of the subway, ignoring entirely the service entrance József had told him about. It was as if Zamertsev knew, József thought, as if he'd discerned the bits of the story he'd left out, and was even
now being guided over the map by what József hadn't told him about that last night, when Sándor had crawled over and whispered to him of the effort of getting horses for the lion, of how weak he'd become, though what József really heard in his voice was a hunger so great it would have swallowed him then and there if Sándor had had the strength, if he felt he could have overpowered his friend. “I can't do it alone,” Sándor mumbled. “I can't walk.” When József asked if their friendship no longer meant anything to him, Sándor rubbed the place in his skull where his cheeks had been and said something about “word getting around,” and the soldiers “staying away,” and then paused and smiled that terrible smile, lipless, all teeth. “It's
because
I'm your friend that I'm asking you to do this. There is no greater thing a friend could do,” he said, laughing without a trace of happiness.

József had looked at him then, turning from where he'd been facing the wall, hugging himself as if in consolation for the emptiness of his stomach, for the delirium of this siege without end, the constant fear, the boredom, waiting on the clock, the slow erasure of affection, of the list of things he would not do. “The city is destroyed,” he said, not wanting to do as Sándor asked, not wanting even to address it, for he thought he'd caught another implication in his voice now, one even worse than what the words had at first suggested. “There are people dead and starving,” he continued, “the Soviets are looting, hunting, raping, and you're worried about a lion.
Fuck the lion
,” said József, “fuck everything,” and he turned over on his pallet, lifting the layers of plastic sacks and tarpaulin they used for blankets. But Sándor nudged him again, and when József let out an exasperated moan and
turned, he saw that his friend was already half transformed, the hair wild around his head and neck, his fingernails much longer than József's, and dirtier too, packed underneath with the hide and flesh of horses and men and what else, reduced from malnourishment and injury and trauma to crawling around on all fours. “I need you,” growled Sándor, though he had lost so much by then that it came out like a cough, the cords in his throat too slack, or worn, for much noise, and it cost him to raise his voice above a whimper.

Need me?
wondered József, rising from the sheets and drawing Sándor's head to his chest.
You don't know what you need
, he thought, as if there were two pulses beating in counter-rhythm within Sándor, two desires moving him in opposite directions. He held him like that for a while, feeling his friend's eyelids blinking regularly against his skin, thinking of how Sándor had run out of the zoo after Gerg
ő
and Zsuzsi, trying to gather up their limp forms, of how often they'd found him squatting in the cage of this or that dead animal, as if by lifting a wing or an arm or a leg he might reanimate them, or, as József had once observed, actually put on the animal like a suit of clothes and become it, leaving his humanity behind. At the same time Sándor had been moving in the opposite direction, trying to keep in mind who he was, who he'd been, what he cared about.