Only the Animals

by Ceridwen Dovey

  My human skills progressed so quickly that even Herr Oberndorff was shocked one day to see me strolling through the grounds beside Herr Hagenbeck, discussing politics and philosophy. Soon after that, I was moved into the city’s best lodgings, and began to attract record numbers of visitors to the zoo with my speaking engagements and public lectures.

  Which brings me to your second question: why do I want you? For some time I have needed a companion to accompany me in a dignified manner to gatherings and embassy functions, to Academy dinners, to special occasions frequently held in my honour around Hamburg. You were selected from the enclosure of chimpanzees at the zoo and did exceptionally well on the initial aptitude tests. Herr Hagenbeck decided that you too should be trained to be human, and that you would one day become my wife.

  Then there is the matter of the other comfort you will bring, in becoming my companion. It did not seem fitting to Herr Hagenbeck for me to take a human wife for this purpose, nor could I bring myself to overcome my horror of the primitive chimpanzees at the zoo. My one fear – surely nothing worse can either be said or listened to – is that I shall never be able to possess you … I would sit beside you and feel the breath and life of your body at my side, yet in reality be further from you than now, here in my room. Let us not dwell on this, however. These thoughts still make me a little queasy (forgive me).

  Sincerely

  R.P.

  Dear Red Peter

  You will be glad to hear that Hazel has been accompanying me on excursions out of the laboratory, into the city itself. She no longer pulls off her clothes at every opportunity and she keeps her hat on for an extended period. She is comfortably walking upright, and people around me smile at her as if she were one of my children in her bonnet and dainty shoes. Her speaking and comprehension skills are rapidly becoming sophisticated. Herr Hagenbeck feels that she will be ready for you far sooner than expected. My husband would be delighted at her progress, the fruits of his labour. I have not had a return letter from him at the front for many months now.

  Do you remember when my eldest child first began to talk in full sentences, how he would verbalise his thoughts without realising it? I used to eavesdrop on these ‘conversations’, glad to have a direct line into my son’s mind after years of guessing in a parent’s hopeful way at his needs and heart’s desires. You were here then, you liked to eavesdrop with me. You had only just started talking in full sentences yourself.

  Hazel is in the middle of a similar phase, I think. Yesterday I eavesdropped on her in the laboratory and heard her wondering aloud to herself, ‘Am I more similar to a hedgehog or to a fox?’ I had to have a little laugh before going in to her. It helped me forget our collective troubles, for an hour at least.

  Did you send that old Chinese man to the zoo last week? I suspect you did. He gave me a copy of Buber’s recent book of Chinese tales. And a pet cricket, a creature of whimsy. I gave the cricket to Hazel. She likes looking after small creatures. She is a gentle soul.

  And yes, if you are wondering – I do remember that night, reading Buber together, and everything else.

  Yours

  Evelyn

  Dear Red Peter

  Frau Oberndorff gave me a pet cricket. The cricket lives in a walnut shell. If you hold him up and look at him directly, he looks fierce. The man who brought the cricket to the zoo said he would win battles against other crickets if we first chop up a fly and feed it to him to make him violent.

  I went with Frau Oberndorff and the children to stand in the ration lines. One line for each item, a long wait in a line for the weekly allowance of a single egg. Another line, another long wait for the war bread made of fodder turnips. It gives the children sore stomachs.

  My ears are pierced with metal studs to make me beautiful. I can pull on stockings without laddering them. But there are no longer any stockings to be had.

  Regards

  Hazel

  My dearest Evelyn

  I am glad the book of Chinese tales and the cricket were able to distract you for a moment from the misery of recent events. Does Hazel understand what is happening, why food has suddenly become so scarce? I am sure you have explained to her already, but I will also mention it in my letter, in case that helps.

  I am worried about you and the children. Do you have enough to eat? Is Herr Hagenbeck helping you to source milk and meat on the black market? I wish I could send you supplies, but to be frank, I am not having much luck finding extra myself. The waiters in the hotel dining room have started giving me looks when I come down from my rooms to eat the one meagre daily meal they still provide. Perhaps I am imagining it. Luckily, as you know, I don’t eat much. I am grateful to have trained myself into this frugality years ago. It would be beastly to be beholden to something as basic as food at such a time.

  Yours

  Red Peter

  Dear Hazel

  In the interests of your education you should try to grasp what is happening to Germany. The pernicious effects of the British naval blockade, which has cut off the flow of foodstuffs to Germany from the North Sea, are now being felt. For too long we have been importing over a third of our food this way, and most of our fertiliser too, and now we are in trouble. The worldwide drought and crop failure has made it much worse. It goes far beyond a line of women waiting for eggs in the cold. There are strikes and food riots breaking out in our major cities. Food is being used as a weapon against us. England wants to squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak. And we, my dear, are the pips.

  Sincerely

  R.P.

  Dear Red Peter

  I do not want to worry you – we are fine, mostly. But food is scarce, as you say, and we are struggling to find enough to feed the animals at the zoo. The children and I are surviving on dark bread, a few slices of sausage with no fat, and three pounds of turnips a week. My daughter stole a pound of butter from another child on the street and my younger son looted a stringy piece of boiled beef and we celebrated this with more enthusiasm than if Germany had won the war. Of course we share any food we have with Hazel.

  I’m afraid Herr Hagenbeck has not helped us to buy any food on the black market. He has not been to the zoo in a while now. I do not want to disrespect him, and perhaps he is trying as we speak to source extra supplies – but if you see him out in the city at one of the Academy functions, will you remind him of us, and of the animals?

  Hazel’s latest letter, as you will see, is a little uncouth. But again, in the interests of allowing her free rein to explore and experiment with language, I have noted down, word for word, what she dictated to me. She was quite taken with The Entropy of Reason – I have been reading to her from the copy you gave me years ago. I hope her letter does not embarrass you. It shouldn’t. She is quite right about what she can give you. Things that I could not.

  Yours

  Evelyn

  Dear Red Peter

  How will we play bedroom games when I am your wife? Frau Oberndorff is reading Dr Mitzkin’s book to me, The Entropy of Reason. He warns that humans will be reduced to word machines. They will eat words, drink words, bathe in words, imprison themselves with words, kill themselves with words. Copulate with words.

  Will you toss words at me when I swing from the curtains towards you and display my arsehole? Will I throw words at you when you thump your chest and sink your fangs into my rump? I cannot give you much other than a warm body flexible in the ways you would like it, a certain length of arm, bow legs, a barrel torso. Would you like me to be more human, or less human, or more or less human?

  Regards

  Hazel

  Dearest Evelyn

  You must let me visit you. Please, darling, don’t be stubborn about this. I need to know that you and the children are all right. Do not worry about Herr Hagenbeck finding out – he has gone to Africa to sit out the war, according to rumours among my colleagues at the Academy. I couldn’t believe at first that he would abandon the zoo after his considerable financial investment
in it (and in me), but I suppose it makes sense. He is a man who puts his own needs first and this has always stood him in very good stead. There will be other exotic animals, other zoos, other apes to train.

  I feel sorry for Hazel, truly I do, but now that Hagenbeck is gone, I won’t be forced into it anymore. Not just writing to her, but everything, the whole terrible partnership he dreamed up for me. He is gone, Evelyn, he is gone. We are free – almost – to do as we please.

  I want to see you. Please. Take me back.

  Yours

  Red Peter

  Dear Red Peter

  Thank you for sending us a bushel of potatoes, which we devoured. The children would have eaten them raw if I had not stopped them descending on the sack just in time.

  You were right about Herr Hagenbeck. He has indeed abandoned the zoo and gone to Africa. A letter arrived from him today, mailed in Hamburg before he left. After all these years, after all that we have done for him, this is what he had to say:

  I must remind you that the incidence of actual starvation in Hamburg is extremely low. The only known cases so far, even through this harsh winter, have been among the inmates of jails, asylums, and other institutions where each adult has access only to war rations, unsupplemented by black market supplies.

  My good friend Dr Neumann, Professor of Hygiene at the University of Bonn, has just sent me the results of his most interesting experiment. He limited himself for a month to the food ration for an average person. The outcome is that he lost a third of his weight and was so hungry he found it difficult to concentrate on his work.

  But who among us – other than prisoners and madmen – cannot find what he or she needs to survive beyond the official rations? I do believe it is a way of separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

  This communal hunger is bringing out our ingenuity as a nation. Take, for example, our efforts to engineer alternative edible fats now that vegetable fats are being reserved for the manufacture of glycerine for propellants and explosives. Industry has stepped in to provide all kinds of solutions: bones are steamed, grease is squeezed from old rags or household slops, oil is wrung from graphite and from seeds and fruit stones. Flavourful berries and leaves are steeped in hot water for tea. We have even invented a surrogate for beer using chemicals rather than malt. Trust in our German nation. We shall prevail.

  He shall prevail, no doubt, sitting in the lush jungle in Africa while we starve in Hamburg!

  Hazel has insisted on writing to you this week, though you did not write to her. Her thoughts have taken a turn for the poetic, one could say. What follows is closer to impressions one might jot down in a diary. I have persisted in recording them for you, however, as I believe she is going through another important linguistic developmental phase.

  You cannot visit us, not now. My husband wrote to say he will soon be returning on leave.

  Evelyn

  * * *

  The trip into the city. Frau Oberndorff’s face. She runs her fingers through her hair, wipes her nose, yawns with hunger. Her hair has gone dull, no colour in her lips, bloodless.

  She took me and the children to the soup kitchen at the Children’s Home. The youngest child may have turnip disease. The children were given a meal of thin soup made from mangold-wurzel and cabbage, and stock from stewed horse bones. It smelled disgusting and they tell me it tasted worse.

  A doctor working at the Home pointed out to Frau Oberndorff a boy orphan with a swollen stomach. He had a broken jaw and was missing most of his teeth due to rickets. ‘You see this child here, it was given an incredible amount of bread and yet it did not get any stronger,’ the doctor said. ‘I found out that it hid all the bread it received underneath its straw mattress. The fear of hunger was so deeply rooted in the child that it collected the stores instead of eating the food. A misguided animal instinct made the dread of hunger worse than the actual pangs.’

  The bedbug. Hard decision to squash and eat it, and not give it to my cricket for his supper. But I was very hungry.

  My darling Evelyn

  Thank you, thank you, a thousand times, for yesterday. I suspect when you saw me standing at the door your first instinct was to slam it shut, and if it hadn’t been for the children’s joy at seeing me, I would not have been invited inside. I was shocked to see you looking so thin, my dear. I scoured the city for black market supplies this morning, with no success – some of the people waiting in a ration queue threw stones at me when they saw me lurking nearby. Nobody wants to see an ape eat when there are humans going hungry.

  I want to say that you have done well with Hazel. She is sweet, and very clever. She should not fear her fate now that Herr Hagenbeck is no longer here to force our union. I agree with you that her intensive training should be stopped for now – there are more important things for all of us to worry about – and when your husband returns he can decide how to proceed. Is it strange that I think of her as one of your children? Perhaps we could care for her as such in the future.

  Do not worry, darling, I will stay away now that you are expecting your husband to return any day. The single touch of your smooth hands as you said goodbye will sustain me.

  R.P.

  Dear R.P.

  I have troubling news of Hazel. A few days ago she found your notes to me, enclosed in the same envelopes containing the letters for her. She can read quite well now, though how much she understood of their full meaning I am not certain. Since then, she has stopped eating. She refuses all food I offer her, and has retreated to her old cage at the back of the laboratory, where she used to live before she learned her manners. I am hoping this is a temporary side effect of extreme hunger – eating simply makes one hungry again; not eating at least does not give the stomach false hope. However, I thought it best to let you know.

  As I asked you in person, please do not write until you hear from me again, just in case.

  Yours

  Evelyn

  PS: Hazel refused to dictate a letter to you. I’m sorry.

  Dear Red Peter

  Perhaps you have already heard. My husband is dead. He did not make it home from the front. It is no use pretending; you know how I felt about him. I will not miss his cold rage. But I grieve for my younger guileless self, the girl I was when I agreed to marry him. And for the children. They don’t understand, not really. We are all distracted by our hunger. Strong emotion uses up a lot of energy, and we don’t have much of it anymore.

  I haven’t told Hazel. She was always partial to him, despite his cruel training methods. We are out of coal for heating, and my little household’s supplies of both petroleum and methyl alcohol are almost used up. The colder and darker it becomes in the lab, the stronger Hazel’s will seems to be to remain within her cage. The children and I try to keep her company in there as often as we can, when we are not standing in the ration lines.

  I have cut up the few clothes my husband left behind – they had been hanging uselessly in the cupboard since he left – and made small towels for the children out of them. We were down to a single bath towel for the whole family to use. I have impetigo rash from wearing the same unwashed wool suit for weeks, but there is no soap to be had.

  Hazel dictated the note below to you. She is still not herself; she is not thinking clearly. Nothing I can do or say will induce her to eat.

  Give me some time, darling, to pull myself together before you visit.

  Yours

  Evelyn

  Did you get yourself a bit of pork in the recent Pig Murders, Red Peter? A fair share of the fatty spoils? I hear the pigs were so skinny there was almost nothing on them. Nine million hogs ordered slaughtered by the government to give everybody a break from months of meatlessness.

  Of course, how could I forget? You don’t eat meat.

  Dearest Evelyn

  I am sorry I disregarded your plea and came to see you the very day I received the letter about your husband. But I am not sorry for taking you in my arms and kissing you, tasting your tea
rs, feeling your ribs pressed against mine. I am hungry, darling, starving, but only for you.

  In my delirious joy at holding you again I forgot to apologise for my appearance. Since the American cotton shortage, and the decree that men can no longer keep more than two suits of clothing, the police decided to enter my rooms at the hotel and requisitioned my suits from the wardrobe, and I have had some trouble finding suitable attire since. I don’t think I was specifically targeted, not this time at least. At the Academy I have heard stories about how dire this shortage is. A colleague told me of a soldier at the front who was issued a shirt made from a woman’s winter blouse, gathered with a ribbon around his neck. He refused it, and said he would rather die of cold in a shirt made of paper.

  For the first time in many years, I find myself grateful to have fur. It seems this war is slowly stripping me of the trappings of being human, thread by thread. But that is fine, as long as I am never again stripped of you.

  Yours always

  Red Peter

  Dearest R.P.

  The boots you found for my little girl to keep her feet warm while she is unwell fit her perfectly. The varnish on the paper uppers has cracked a little, but nothing I can’t fix.

  Hazel’s fasting has continued. She asked me to put a sign outside her cage, and dictated what I should write on it: THE HUNGER ARTIST. She must have picked that up from the man Herr Hagenbeck hired to fast at the zoo a few years ago, as a summer diversion. Now she wants me to charge spectators a small fee to stand outside her cage and watch her starve, but we do not have many paying visitors to the zoo these days. People get angry when they see animals being fed, even if it is with turnip peels – but you know this already. She has dictated another note for you. I fear she is losing her mind, but whether it is from hunger or as a delayed consequence of her training, I cannot tell.