Zoo Stationee

by David Downing

  More resigned than raging, Russell left without hitting the banister and drove home to Neuenburgerstrasse. Frau Heidegger’s door was open, his Sudeten neighbor sitting helplessly in the chair she reserved for the sacrificial coffee-drinker. Russell flashed him a sympathetic smile and ran upstairs to pack the larger of his two worn-out suitcases with three changes of clothes, a toothbrush, and several books. The latter included Achievements of the Third Reich and the 1937 Coronation edition of the A1 Guide and Atlas of London, which he’d discovered the previous year in a secondhand bookshop on the Ku’damm. Miniatures of their majesties sat side by side over a scrolled “Long May They Reign.”

  The aerodrome at Tempelhof Field was on the other side of the Kreuzberg, about three kilometers away. As they lived fairly close together, Jens had agreed to pick up Paul for a noon arrival at the aerodrome, and Russell arrived with some twenty minutes to spare. The parking lot was small, but the quality of cars—his Hanomag excepted—made up for the lack of quantity. Flying was not for the poor.

  The others arrived five minutes later, Paul with a Jungvolk rucksack on his back, his face a study in repressed excitement. The fur-coated Zarah looked anxious, Lothar like a normal four-year-old. Jens ushered them into the one-storey terminal building, clearly intent on smoothing their path. As Zarah disappeared in the direction of the ladies room, he took Russell aside.

  “It went well yesterday?” he asked.

  Russell nodded.

  “And you understand that you must not talk or write about your visit?”

  Russell nodded again.

  “For everyone’s sake,” Jens added pointedly.

  “Look!” Paul called out from a window. “It’s our aeroplane.”

  Russell joined him.

  “It’s a Ju 52/3m,” Paul said knowledgeably, pointing at the plane being fueled out on the tarmac. “It has a cruising ceiling of 6,000 meters. It can go 264 kilometers an hour.”

  Russell looked up. The sky was clearer than it had been. “We should see a lot,” he said.

  “We’ll be over the Reich for two hours,” Paul said, as if nothing else was worth seeing.

  Zarah had returned. “Time to go through customs,” Russell told his son, feeling a flutter of nerves run down his spine.

  Jens led the way, chatting and laughing with the officials as if they were old friends. Zarah’s large suitcase was waved through unopened, as was Paul’s rucksack. Russell’s suitcase, however, they wanted to inspect.

  He opened it up and watched, heart in mouth, while the customs official ran his hands through the clothes and came to the books. He looked at these one by one, ignoring those in English and settling on Achievements of the Third Reich. He skipped through a few pages, and gave its owner a quizzical look.

  “It’s for a nephew in England,” Russell explained, suddenly conscious that Paul was looking at the book with some surprise. Don’t say anything, he silently pleaded, and Paul, catching his eye, seemed to understand.

  The man put it back with the others and closed the suitcase. “Enjoy your journey,” he said.

  Once Jens and Zarah had said their goodbyes, the four of them walked out across the tarmac to the silver aeroplane. It had a stubby nose, three engines—one at the front, one on either wing—and windows like rectangular portholes. LUFTHANSA was stenciled on the side, a large swastika painted on the tailfin. A short flight of steps took them up to the door, and into a vestibule behind the passenger cabin, where their cases were stowed. In the cabin itself there were five leather-covered seats on each side of the carpeted aisle, each with a high headrest. Theirs were the four at the rear, Russell sitting behind Paul, Zarah behind Lothar.

  The other passengers came aboard: a youngish English couple whom Russell had never seen before and four single men, all of whom looked like wealthy businessmen of one sort or another. Judging from their clothes one was English, three German.

  A mail truck drew up beside the aeroplane. The driver jumped down, opened the rear door, and dragged three sacks marked DEUTSCHESPOST to the bottom of the steps. A man in a Lufthansa uniform carried them aboard.

  “We used these against the communists in Spain,” Paul said, leaning across the gangway to make himself heard above the rising roar of the engines. “They were one of the reasons we won.”

  Russell nodded. A discussion with his son about the Spanish Civil War seemed overdue, but this was hardly the place. He wondered if Paul had forgotten that his parents had both been communists, or just assumed that they’d seen the error of their ways.

  The pilot and co-pilot appeared, introducing themselves with bows and handshakes as they walked down the aisle to their cabin. The stewardess followed in their tracks, making sure that everyone had fastened their leather safety belts. She was a tall, handsome-looking blond of about nineteen with a marked Bavarian accent. A predictable ambassador for Hitler’s Germany.

  Out on the tarmac a man began waving the plane forward, and the pilot set them in motion, bumping across the concrete surface toward the end of the runway. There was no pause when they reached it, just a surge of the engines and a swift acceleration. Through the gap between seat and wall, Russell could see Paul’s ecstatic face pressed to the window. On the other side of the aisle, Zarah’s eyes were closed in fright.

  Seconds later, Berlin was spreading out below them: the tangle of lines leading south from Anhalter and Potsdamer stations, the suburbs of Schonefeld, Wilmersdorf, Grunewald. “There’s my school!” Paul almost shouted. “And there’s the Funkturm, and the Olympic Stadium!”

  Soon the wide sheet of the Havelsee was receding behind them, the villages, fields, and forests of the northern plain laid out below. They were about a mile up, Russell reckoned, high enough to make anything look beautiful. From this sort of height a Judenfrei village looked much like one that wasn’t.

  They flew west, over the wide traffic-filled Elbe and the sprawling city of Hannover, crossing into Dutch airspace soon after three o’clock. Rotterdam appeared beneath the starboard wing, the channels of the sea-bound Rhine—or whatever the Dutch called it—beneath the other. As they crossed the North Sea coast the plane was rocked by turbulence, causing Zarah to clutch the handrests and Paul to give his father a worried look. Russell gave him a reassuring smile. Lothar, he noticed, seemed unconcerned.

  The turbulence lasted through most of the sea crossing, and the serene sea below them seemed almost an insult. Looking down at one Hook of Holland-bound steamer Russell felt a hint of regret that they’d traveled by air—not for the lack of comfort, but for the lack of romance. He remembered his first peacetime trip to the Continent—the first few had been on troopships during the War—the train journey through Kent’s greenery, the Ostend ferry with its bright red funnels, the strange train waiting in the foreign station, the sense of striking out into the unknown. He hadn’t been on a plane for the better part of ten years, but he hadn’t missed them.

  But Paul was having the time of his life. “Can you see England yet?” he asked his father.

  “Yes,” Russell realized. The Thanet coast was below him. A large town. Margate probably, or Ramsgate. Places he’d never been. And within minutes, or so it seemed, the southeastern suburbs of London were stretching beneath them in the afternoon sun, mile upon mile of neat little houses in a random mesh of roads and railways.

  The pilot brought the plane down on the Croydon runway with only the slightest of jolts. The entry formalities were just that, and the car Jens had ordered was waiting at the terminal doors. They drove up the Brighton road, slowed by the busy late afternoon traffic. Paul marveled at the double-decker buses, but was more astonished by the paucity of buildings reaching above two storeys. It was only after Brixton that third, fourth, and fifth floors were grudgingly added.

  Russell asked the driver to take them across Westminster Bridge, and was rewarded by the singular sight of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament aglow in the light of the setting sun. As they drove up Whitehall he pointed out Downing Street and the Horseguards; as they swung round Trafalgar Square, Nelson
on his lonely column. The Strand seemed choked with buses, but they finally arrived at the Savoy to find that their fifth-floor rooms overlooked the Thames.

  They must have cost a fortune, Russell thought. He and Paul looked out of the window at the barges on the tide-swollen river, the electric trains of the Southern Railway moving in and out of Charing Cross Station. Away to their left the piles of the new Waterloo Bridge stuck out of the water like temple remains. “This is good,” Paul said, with the air of someone truly satisfied.

  Russell got an outside line and phoned his London agent Solly Bernstein, hoping to catch him before he went home. “I’m just on my way out of the door,” Bernstein told him. “What the hell are you doing in London?”

  “Hoping to see you. Can you squeeze me in tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Ah, just this once. Four o’clock?”

  “Fine.”

  Russell hung up and explained the call to Paul. “I’m hungry,” was the response.

  They ate with Zarah and Lothar in the hotel restaurant. The food was excellent, but Zarah, clearly anxious about the next morning, just picked at her plate. When she and Lothar wished them goodnight and retired to their room, Russell and his son took a stroll down to the river, and along the Embankment toward the Houses of Parliament. Opposite County Hall they stopped and leaned against the parapet, the high tide slurping against the wall below. Pedestrians and buses were still crowding Westminster Bridge, long chains of lighted carriages rumbling out of Charing Cross. A line of laden coal barges headed downstream, dark silhouettes against the glittering water. Some lines of Eliot slipped across his brain:

  The barges wash

  Drifting logs

  Down Greenwich reach

  Past the Isle of Dogs

  He had hated The Waste Land when it came out—its elegant despair had felt like defeatism. But the words had stuck. Or some of them at least.

  “It’s been a long day,” he told Paul. “Time for bed.”

  ZARAH LOOKED EXHAUSTED OVER breakfast next morning, as if she’d hardly slept. Lothar, by contrast, seemed more animated than usual. Paul, asked by his father for an opinion of Zarah’s son, had shrugged and said “He’s just a bit quiet, that’s all.”

  Reception suggested a bank on the Strand which offered currency exchange and a probable safety deposit service, and Russell left Paul examining the huge model of the Queen Mary in the hotel lobby while he swapped his and Zarah’s Reichsmarks for pounds. Safety deposit boxes were available, the cashier informed him proudly. The bank was open until three.

  Their appointment in Harley Street was at 11:00, and Zarah had booked a taxi for 10:00. Trafalgar Square was busy, but the cab then raced around Piccadilly and up Regent Street, delivering them to the doctor’s door with forty-five minutes to spare. A stern-looking receptionist showed them into the waiting room, which was full of highly polished wooden chairs. Paul found a few children’s comics among the society magazines, and went through one with Lothar, pointing out what was happening in the various pictures.

  “How did you find this doctor?” Russell asked.

  “A friend of Jens at the Embassy here,” she replied. “He said this man was highly thought of. And he speaks a little German.”

  “Little,” as they eventually discovered, was the operative word, and Russell had to function as a full-time interpreter. Doctor Gordon McAllister was a tall ginger-haired man in his forties, with a rather gaunt face, a slight Scottish accent, and an almost apologetic smile. He seemed a nice man, and one who clearly liked children. Effi always claimed that doctors who specialized in women’s problems were usually women-haters, but apparently the same logic did not apply to pediatricians.

  His office was a bright, spacious room with windows overlooking the street. In addition to his desk, there were several comfortable chairs and a large wooden box full of children’s toys and books. “So tell me about Lothar,” he asked Zarah through Russell.

  She started off nervously but grew more confident as she went on, thanks in large part to the doctor’s obvious involvement. She said that Lothar sometimes seemed uninterested in everything, that he didn’t respond when people talked to him, that at other times he would seem to suddenly lose interest in whatever it was he was doing, and just stop. “He’ll be in the middle of eating,” she said, “and just leave the table and go and do something else. And he doesn’t always seem to understand what I’m telling him to do,” she added.

  “He’s four, yes?” the doctor asked.

  “And three months.”

  “Can he recognize different animals?” He walked over to the box and took out a tiger and a rabbit. “Lothar, what’s this?” he asked in German, holding out the tiger.

  “A tiger.”

  “And this?”

  “A rabbit.”

  “No problems there, then. How about colors? Can he recognize them?”

  He could. A red balloon, a blue sky, a yellow canary. Having done so, without warning, he walked across to the window and looked out.

  The doctor asked Zarah about the birth, about Lothar’s eating habits, whether there was any history of problems in her or her husband’s family. She answered each question, and, in a halting voice, volunteered the information that she had considered aborting Lothar before he was born. “I can’t help thinking there’s a connection,” she said, clearly close to tears.

  “You’re completely wrong about that,” the doctor insisted, the moment Russell had translated her words. “There is no possible connection.”

  “Then what is it?” she asked, wiping a tear away.

  “Does he get tired easily? Does he seem weak—physically weak, I mean? Can he lift things.”

  She thought about that. “Jens—my husband—he sometimes says that Lothar lacks strength in his fingers. He doesn’t like carrying things. And yes, he does get tired.”

  The doctor leaned forward on his desk, fingers intertwined beneath his chin. “I don’t think there is anything seriously wrong with Lothar,” he said. “Or at least, nothing that cannot be corrected. There is no name for this, but it isn’t uncommon. Essentially, he has a weaker link with the rest of the world than most people do, but everyone is different in this respect—he’s just a bit more different than the norm. And his link can be strengthened. What Lothar needs”—he ticked them off on his fingers—“is fresh air and exercise, really good, nutrient-rich food—fresh eggs, fresh fruit, fresh everything—and physical stimulation. Regular massages would help. Give and take games—the sort that involve instant physical reactions. And music. All these things stimulate the body, make it more responsive.”

  “But there’s nothing seriously wrong?” Zarah asked.

  “Not in my judgment. No.”

  “And he doesn’t need any tests?”

  “No.”

  She took a deep breath. “Thank you, doctor.” She reached inside her handbag for the neat package of pound notes.

  “You pay the receptionist,” he said with a smile.

  But not usually with cash, Russell thought, as they waited for the taxi which the receptionist had ordered. Zarah, who looked as if a huge weight had been lifted off her shoulders, was eager to get back to the Savoy, where she could telephone Jens. “It’s wonderful news,” Russell told her, and received the warmest of smiles in return.

  Once back at the hotel, they agreed to meet for lunch in an hour. Leaving Paul exploring the lobby, Russell retrieved Achievements of the Third Reich from their room, and came back down.

  “Here’s the room key,” he told Paul. “I’ll be back in half an hour or so.”

  Paul was looking at the book. “Where are you taking that?” he asked. “I didn’t know you had a nephew in England,” he added suspiciously.

  “I don’t,” Russell admitted. “I’ll explain it all this afternoon.”

  He walked down to the Continental Bank, paid a year’s rent in cash for the safety deposit box, and was shown into a small room with a single upright chair and table. A clerk bought him a rectangular metal box and two keys, and told him to press the buzzer when he was finished. “I already am,” Russell said, placing
Achievements of the Third Reich inside and locking the box shut. If the clerk was surprised by the nature of the deposit he didn’t show it.

  “There’s more to the Nazis than meets the eye,” Russell said.

  “I don’t doubt it,” the clerk replied gloomily.

  Lunch was an altogether more cheerful affair than breakfast or the previous night’s dinner, but 24 largely sleepless hours had taken their toll on Zarah. “I’m going to take a nap,” she said. “We’ll see you this evening.”

  Asked if there was anything he wanted to do, Paul suggested a walk down to Big Ben. “I didn’t see it properly in the dark,” he explained.

  They set off down the Strand, stopping in at Charing Cross to see the Southern trains and admire the Cross itself. After circling the Trafalgar Square ponds and climbing on a lion they marched down the Mall toward Buckingham Palace. “The King’s out,” Russell said, pointing out the lowered flag.