The Midnight Zoo (6 page)

She knew how these words would wound her father, he who had devoted his life to the zoo and who loved the animals, and kept them in the best condition he could. Part of Alice wondered if she’d said these things as much to hurt her father as to defend her animals. She knew that all young creatures go through a stage when they are harshly opinionated and emotional, and perhaps she had reached this stage herself. If she were an animal, this was the age when she would turn her back on her parent and her home, and strike out to make her own future. Alice wasn’t going anywhere, she was still hardly more than a child; but she wondered if something inside her wasn’t already leaving her old life behind.

She remained an outgoing, lighthearted girl, but in the next few years Alice began to narrow her circle of friends, to spend more time by herself, and to lose herself often in contemplations. She continued to visit the zoo each morning and evening when the gate was closed to the public and she could be alone with the animals, stroking them, talking to them. She read about the lands they had come from and the lives they might have lived, and told them stories about themselves using all the facts she’d learned. In the gloaming light the animals heard words like
shore,
mountain,
gale,
glacier,
blood,
lair,
cub
. She put her hand between the bars and ran her palm over the chamois’s coat. Her fingernails left five tracks in the smooth dense hair. “I would free you if I could,” she told the beasts that lay listening to her. She did not tell them what else she knew, something she’d known all along, a fact she’d heard her father state a hundred, a thousand times. Freed and returned to their original habitat, the zoo animals would not survive. Some had been born in captivity, and knew no other world. Some had been taken as newborns from their dens, before they’d learned the ways of the wilderness. Some had been found injured and brought to the sanctuary of the zoo, but carried echoes of that injury still. None of them, whatever their history, would be able to survive without bars.

And then life changed for everyone in Alice’s world, though least noticeably for the zoo’s animals. The invasion came.

At first it seemed like a story or a joke. In the village, everything they heard was conflicting and confused: some said the invaders were seizing the nation, some insisted the invaders were only passing through. Some believed the invasion would solve the nation’s problems, protect it, strengthen it, purify it of all that was undesirable; to others, the invasion meant doom to the nation, it was the very worst thing that could happen. Whatever the truth, it very quickly became clear that the invaders, having arrived, did not intend to leave. They were claiming the nation, and meant to claim others. The invading soldiers came like oil out of the ground and flowed everywhere, and the flow could not be stopped.

The nation was poor, and weak compared to the invaders. It stood no chance of driving back such a massive army. There were those who would not have driven it out even if they were able. They wanted the security that the invaders seemed to promise. But there were many, many others who were outraged that the invaders were stealing and debasing their homeland in this callous, lawless way.

Alice and her father were among these many. Alice was infuriated, and burned to retaliate. Her father was more prudent, saying, “The important thing is to keep ourselves safe.” Alice, who was nineteen years old, believed her father a coward. She wanted to fight. And as the months wore by, she heard stories of people who were indeed taking the battle against the enemy into their own hands. Alice decided to do the same. She gathered together her closest friends and said, “This country is ours. It doesn’t belong to the invaders. We can’t stop them, but we can hurt them. We
must
.”

Her friends agreed without hesitation, for they too were young and bold. They needed a plan, and a private place to make it. “The zoo,” said Alice. “No one goes there at night. I have a key to the gate. We can meet in the zoo.”

And so the friends became conspirators. There were seven of them. They convened in the zoo each midnight, and sat on the grass and on the green bench scheming while the village slept and the animals lay quietly listening, their ears tilting to catch every word. The wolf licked its teeth, the bear sighed troubledly, the chamois shook its horned head. The conspirators proposed, argued, agreed, disagreed. When they’d finally settled on their plan, they celebrated by passing around a bottle of wine. The animals watched them drink from it, laughing and buoyant, ruby drops falling from their chins. The resistance fighters looked like children at that moment, children playing at a grown-up game.

They chose the night of their attack with care, having studied the railway timetable and discovered which trains were important to the enemy and which they could ignore. They did not want to hurt anyone, so they made sure to target only the cargo trains. As the chosen night approached, the fighters grew edgy and excited. In the darkness they acted out their plan to the animals, testing it for flaws, rehearsing their individual roles. The llama watched with shining eyes, grinding its teeth in thought.

The night, when it came, was a black one, the moon a thin cat’s claw. As a child, Alice had made many hidey-holes in ditches and rock piles: now the resistance fighters took from these hiding places the explosives and timber they’d stashed there. Working in darkness and silence, they laid the explosives between the train tracks. A little farther down the track they built a pyre across the sleepers. Then they stepped into the blackness to wait.

In the still of night they could hear the locomotive coming from a long distance away. Its wheels shrilled, its engine huffed. The conspirators gripped each other’s hands. The timing of everything had to be perfect. Alice’s heart thumped hard.

When the train disappeared behind a certain hill, the fighters lit the pyre. The timber had been doused in kerosene, so it caught fast and blazed lustily. When the train chugged round the near side of the hill, it found its route blocked by a tower of flame.

The driver slowed the locomotive with much shifting of levers and shrieking of wheels, and brought it to a stop. The driver was a fellow countryman, not one of the invaders. Alice yelled at the top of her voice, “Jump, man! Get away!”

And the driver understood what was about to happen. He leapt from the engine room just as the explosives were triggered beneath the train. A mighty roar and an eruption of white light threw Alice and her friends off their feet. They opened their eyes to see the train on fire and howling like a monster that has crawled up from the boiling core of the earth and exists only in the worst nightmares. Flames lashed from its windows, flashed between the wheels, flapped from the roof like red dragon wings.

Safe in their cages inside the zoo, the animals flinched.

The resistance fighters gathered their feet and rushed back to the village. Each went their separate way through the streets, returning like innocents to their beds. None was able to sleep, however. The thrill had been too great. They couldn’t erase from their heads the image of the burning train. They couldn’t stop hearing the almighty
boom
of the explosion, or forget the force of its heat. Everything had gone as planned; everything had gone more than right.

Outside, the church bell was tolling, and flashlight beams went bobbing over the cobbles as the villagers, startled from slumber, hurried out to investigate the commotion. The flames were higher and hungrier now, feeding on the timberwork of the carriages, the wooden crates of cargo. The driver was roaming the tracks half-stupefied, babbling something that no one could understand — eventually he was carted away. There was nothing that could be done to save the train, and no lives or property seemed to be endangered, so the townspeople stood about in their pajamas watching the monster burn. The flames painted their faces orange, and blackened the grass all around. Youngsters in the crowd thought they’d never see anything more exciting. Nobody was afraid.

But by the morning it was widely understood what the addled driver had been trying to say. Resistance fighters had blown up the train, which was all very well and good . . . except that traveling on the train had been an important man, and this man was important not because he was clever or rich or cunning, but because he was a much-loved friend of the invaders’ leader.

Alice heard this news when she came down for breakfast. She sat at the table staring blankly at the buttered toast her father had put on her plate. She had not known that this man, the Leader’s friend, would be on the train. According to her research, nothing but uniforms and metal for making ammunition was supposed to be on the train. She felt her victory sliding away. She felt the dreadfulness of what she’d done. She felt peril rise before her like a tidal wave.

The leader of the invasion would be furious about losing the locomotive and its cargo, and the destruction of the tracks. The resistance fighters had expected this to be so. But to lose his dear friend was a different thing altogether, something that would cut into the Leader’s notoriously passionate heart. He would certainly retaliate against those who had done this thing: and the vengeance of such a ruthless man was an awful thing to contemplate.

Alice saw clearly not only the jeopardy she was in, but the danger she had brought down on her village. She realized too that, although she was almost grown, she still had much to learn. She pushed away the toast and said, “Tata,” a word she hadn’t used since childhood. “Tata, I have something to tell you. It was I who blew up the train.”

She told her father the story of the resistance fighters. Her father, drained and speechless, seemed to listen. She never knew that he was listening most closely to a voice inside his head.
You have lost her,
the voice was saying.
This is the last you’ll see of her
.

At the conclusion of her story, the father told his daughter the only thing he could say. His heart was being broken to pieces, but his voice was calm and even. “Leave this place quickly,” he said. “Get as far from here as you can. Go up into the mountains. I’m told there are resistance fighters hiding there. You’ll be safer with them. You aren’t safe here, Alice. The Leader will be looking for you. And maybe other people will look for you too. People who are our neighbors, people who are angry and fearful . . .”

Alice understood what her father was saying, but she set her mouth in exactly the way her beautiful mother used to do. “Tata, no. I don’t want to. I should stay, and face up to what I’ve done. I have killed a man. I have put the village in peril. Only a coward runs away.”

Her father clutched his head and cried, “Don’t argue with me, Alice! For once, do as you are told! Remember that your life is precious — if not to you, then to me! Make clever decisions, not foolish ones! Be brave when you
have
to be, not when it merely seems noble! Go to the mountains. Find friends there. Keep fighting the enemy. Fight and fight. Fight with every ounce of your courage. I’ll be proud of you, if you do that. I won’t be proud if you simply sit here until they come to drag you away!”

Alice stared. She knew she must go. But her heart tightened with grief, and her eyes filled with tears. “Come with me then, Tata,” she begged. “I don’t want to leave you.”

“I can’t,” her father answered. “I must stay with the zoo. The animals need me.” And this was a truth Alice recognized, she who had been raised alongside the animals and knew better than anyone how deeply they needed somebody to care about them. There was no time to lose — dawn had already given way to day, and news of the train wreck was riding the breeze to reach the ears of the Leader — but while her father packed her bag Alice shielded her face with a cloak and ran through streets she’d known all her life, through a neighborhood that had seen her grow from a child to a woman, through a town that was her center of the world; and went to the zoo.

She walked the perimeter of the cages, skimming her fingers along the bars. She whispered to the creatures that lived behind them, as well as to the ones who had once been and were gone and lived only in her memory. Her life would be different from now on, frightening and exhilarating, reticent and precarious, and Alice felt ready to face it only because she’d lived beside animals who longed for such fierce existences. Time was ticking, and she needed to hurry. Reaching the pebbled path beside the eagle’s cage, she turned for a final look. The kangaroo was watching her, trembling in the cold. There was no minute to spare for running her hand over its scratchy gray face. “I have to leave.” Alice spoke to all of them. “But I’ll come back to you, I promise. Tata will stay, and care for you while I’m gone. But I will come back.”

“And has she come back?”
asked Tomas.

“She has not,” replied the wolf. “The moon has grown big and small and big again, but she hasn’t returned.”

“Lovely Alice,” sighed the llama. “Everything is wrong since Alice went away.”

“Where has she gone?” puzzled the kangaroo.