The Midnight Zoo

by Sonya Hartnett

  “Can you guess how we knew?” asked the llama. “Take a guess how we knew.”

  “The birds!” Tomas burst out triumphantly.

  The wolf cocked its head; the chamois sneered aloud. “Birds, he says! Imagine!”

  “Birds don’t know what happens at night,” said the llama. “Owls do, of course, but owls don’t gossip. They mind their own business, owls. They look at you with those big scary eyes and they don’t care what —”

  The wolf interrupted, “It wasn’t because of birds. It was because of Alice.”

  “Alice,” whispered the kangaroo — and the word fluttered around the zoo like an autumn leaf across an unmown field, Alice Alice Alice Alice, skipping and flitting and gliding and diving as if the animals were reverently repeating the word in their heads and the zoo was indeed somewhere holy, a place where thoughts could be heard.

  She was born unexpectedly, in a garden in spring, surrounded by clouds and worms and butterflies, entering the world mere minutes before her mother left it without ever having held her child in her arms. In the weeks that followed, many people reached out, willing to take the bewildered baby from the embrace of her grief-stricken father. The village felt keenly the loss of the young woman, who had been such a joy and an ornament. Everyone longed to ease the burden of the widower, whose family had lived in the hamlet for centuries. The father accepted the village’s sympathy, and was grateful for the dishes brought to his door. But despite the advice of concerned souls he held tight to his newborn daughter, and would not send her into the care of a nurse. The baby was all he had left of his wife, and he wouldn’t be parted from this remnant. More importantly, he was not a man who was made bitter by fate. He had spent all his life watching animals, and had learned from them to live with grace. There was grace in accepting death when it came, even if it seemed to come too early, and too cruelly. Accepting death meant cherishing what remained of life. And the baby girl was a small armful of life, and her father kept her near as a reminder that everything that dies also lives on.

  He named her Alice.

  She grew up motherless but she hardly knew it, for she had a hundred mothers in the village: women who pushed her stroller when she was small, kissed her bruised knees when she was a toddler, sewed her dresses when she was old enough to go to school. She had many friends among the children of the village, for she was bold and quick-witted and talkative, and she had the talent for roguishness that most children find admirable. Her father let her run wild, that is true. He thought his daughter had lost enough, and that she shouldn’t lose freedom as well. She was often punished for her rascally ways, but she took her whippings as a proud child does, as the inevitable conclusion to a fine adventure. She was clever in school, which made the teachers like her, but also lazy, which made her their frustration. She knew all the dogs and cats in the village, and every shop owner as well, and could often be found slouched against a counter, regaling the storekeeper with her ideas and opinions. She knew every corner and crook of the streets, the shortcuts and the scenic routes across town, the vantage points of rooftops and spires. She knew the farms that surrounded the village, who lived where and what crops they grew. She knew the rocky land that lay beyond the farms, and would race her bicycle on open roads and wander far along the train tracks that threaded through the hills, discovering all that could be discovered of the world in a single day. There would come a time, Alice knew, when she would find out what lay beyond a day’s bicycle ride. There were other towns in this country, other countries beyond its borders, and oceans beyond them. The world belonged to and was waiting for her. But for now she belonged to her father and to her village, for there were few in the hamlet who did not think of her as their daughter too. Under their protection, she was growing up fast. “There’s our Alice,” people would remark as she sauntered by, already tall and beautiful, as her mother had been, her fingernails chipped and blackened, as her father’s often were. “How’s our Alice today?”

  And of all the places she loved in her small, cobbled version of the world, Alice’s favorite place was her zoo. Her zoo, for it had been built by her great-grandfather and passed down to her father, and one day it would be owned by Alice herself. Of course, she had to share it: every day the wrought-iron gate was opened to the public, who dropped a brown coin into a tin in exchange for the chance to stare at, and be stared at by, a beast. Alice knew the zoo needed the money the visitors brought, but she didn’t like the visitors. They were noisy and, she gradually realized, idiotic. They talked too loudly, made absurd remarks. Alice preferred it when the zoo was empty but for herself and her animals and her father. Every morning before school she walked the circle of cages, murmuring private messages to the creatures behind the bars, passing little treats to them, touching them if they stood within reach. The sight and sound of her was familiar and peaceful, and the animals liked her. Some of them were almost her pets, having arrived at the zoo as infants and been raised in the kitchen of Alice’s home until they were strong enough to live in the zoo.

  As Alice grew older, so too did the animals. The years brought things new and wonderful to her; for the animals it bore no such gifts. No challenges or adventures unfurled their horizons for them. The jaguar, the gibbon, the wildcat, the deer: all these woke each morning, as Alice did, and likewise went to sleep each night, but time gave them only old age and eventual death. The badger she’d adored as a toddler turned gray by her tenth birthday, and passed away. The peacock was discovered one evening lying in a puddle of its own glorious feathers. Alice was fourteen when the jaguar died, having lived all its life in the zoo. It had hated the cold weather, and feared the visitors. Its coat had been so black as to be blue. She had never seen her reflection in the creature’s copper eyes. Its gaze had always looked beyond her, searching for the jungle. As she stood in a snowy field helping her father dig the cat’s grave, Alice hoped that death had freed the jaguar, that maybe it was climbing vine-twisted trees now, or lapping up the warm waters of a river. She hoped so; she wept.

  The jaguar was replaced by a young lion, for the zoo needed a large cat to draw in the visitors. The lion was a magnificent beast, its roars shook the entire village, and Alice loved it dearly, as she continued to love all the animals: but she found herself thinking that the zoo was not the marvelous place she’d always believed it to be. She detested the visitors who talked so brassily, who laughed at the animals and poked fingers at them. She despised the visitors’ ignorance of the nature of living things. More painfully, she came to feel it was wrong to keep living creatures in cages. “This is hell for them!” she cried. “I hate this zoo! I’m ashamed of it!”

  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 f
ather, 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.”