Only the Animals

by Ceridwen Dovey

  At this point in the brown bear’s story, the black bear cleared his throat. ‘We’ve got visitors,’ he said.

  It was dark in the zoo by now, darker than it had ever been before the siege started, for the city of Sarajevo no longer relied on electricity. It had become medieval, lightless, its citizens forced to fetch water from underground springs and to wash by candlelight. And the zoo was no longer a modern thoroughfare for the ogling masses. Now the few who dared visit brought sacred offerings of food. The two last remaining animals had become central to the city’s very survival, to the idea of the city’s survival.

  The witch withdrew into the shadows. Two men were approaching the cage, a soldier and his much younger brother, a boy of no more than sixteen. They paused at the fence, their eyes adjusting to the deeper darkness within the pit, trying to see the bears.

  ‘Where are they?’ the younger one whispered.

  ‘There,’ his brother said. ‘There are two, one black and one brown. You can see their eyes shining.’ He threw the bunch of nettles they’d brought for the bears into the enclosure.

  The brown bear moved out of the cave, allowing herself to be seen more clearly.

  ‘Do you remember them?’ the older brother whispered. ‘From when we used to come here when you were little?’

  ‘This one is blind,’ his brother said. ‘The brown bear is blind.’

  ‘She was always blind. Don’t you remember?’

  The young brother stood and looked in turn at the black bear and the brown bear, and realised that he had never had his gaze returned by any animal at the zoo.

  The older brother’s thoughts turned to their parents, hoping they had taken his advice not to go outdoors together anymore, though their parents had never, in their twenty years of marriage, not taken their morning walk in the park to feed the birds by hand. The birds were mostly gone now, a rare sighting in Sarajevo that summer.

  The witch waited a while after the brothers had left before slipping out of her hiding place. She lit another cigarette and brazenly smoked it, announcing to anybody who might be watching from a distance that she was there, alive, smoking.

  ‘You know what I miss,’ she said. ‘Ripe strawberries. I could smell them from my apartment window when spring arrived, when the wind blew in from the east, from the fruit fields. But nobody could get to them because of the barricades around the city. Same with the new potatoes. Rotted in the soil.’

  ‘One of the soldiers tossed me a snail a few days ago,’ the black bear said derisively. ‘A snail. Think of it. And he threw it to me with regret, as if he were throwing me a steak marbled with fat.’

  ‘Snails are all the rage in the city,’ the witch said. ‘Pity there’s no butter to eat them with. They don’t taste right boiled and bare. That’s all snails are, really, an excuse to eat butter.’

  The brown bear took a startled, rattling breath. She was determined to keep telling her story about the human prince turned into a bear.

  ‘By the time Karol’s regiment was moved to Iraq – the Germans were nearby, threatening the oil fields – the bear was no longer a cub,’ the brown bear said. ‘With his simple animal presence he had elevated them all, every single soldier, above their slogging daily tasks. Those in charge saw beyond this sentimentality – they knew a good mascot could do wonders for productivity, keeping the men hard at work supporting the shifting lines in the Middle East.

  ‘There, at their new base, to the men’s great delight, were women – and, even better, they were Polish women, members of the Women’s Signal Corps, camped alongside them in an even drier desert than the one they’d just left in Palestine. The men and women were encouraged only to mix at mealtimes, and some parts of the camp were segregated, but the heat made everybody lax. One afternoon, as the men and women sat down together in the balmy mess tent to eat lunch, the bear appeared with ladies’ underwear draped over his head and one very large-cupped beige brassiere caught in his claws. Not only had he stolen their underwear in a stealthy raid on the clothesline in the women’s camp, but he’d decided to take the pole too, and he marched up and down and around the mess area holding it up like a rifle, in perfect mimicry of a military drill.

  ‘When those in charge decided he should be punished, the bear put his paws over his eyes and looked truly ashamed, and nobody – not a single man – would agree to take up the pole and administer the punishment. The bear was careful to look contrite for a couple more days, until Christmas arrived and all the women spoiled him with figs and dates, and a whole jar of honey to himself.

  ‘Karol afterwards swore he hadn’t taught the bear this trick of stealing underwear (though in truth he wished he had), but the women decided to take their revenge on the men anyway. Leaving the door to the men’s storeroom open, where the precious supply of beer was kept, they encouraged the bear to help himself. He drank ten bottles and passed out. When he revived, the women snuck him into the men’s wash hut, and by the time he was discovered having a lovely reviving splash, he’d used up two days’ worth of their washing water. After that, a truce was struck.

  ‘The night before the men’s company was due to move on to Egypt, almost every man in Karol’s regiment crept into the women’s camp to say goodbye to a new sweetheart. Karol sat in his tent with the bear, wanting more than anything to go and lie beside a woman called Irena, who at Christmas had given him a stack of handkerchiefs she’d embroidered with his initials, and who had a gorgeous streak of grey through her otherwise auburn hair. He thought about his wife and baby son, now no longer a baby, and when he found he could not quite recall his wife’s face he began to cry. The bear, alarmed, nestled against his side and thought of his own human mother: her hair falling into his face as she leaned into the cot, the apricot smell of her as she nursed him.

  ‘There was a sound outside the tent. Irena’s face appeared through the opening. She crawled inside and sat on the other side of the bear, so that she and Karol were not touching, and began to tell a story.

  ‘“Once upon a time,” Irena said, “a handsome king decided to take a stroll through the gardens of his royal menagerie, admiring the ostriches’ plumes glowing rose-grey at dusk, feeling the pleasant ache in his shoulders from the day’s ring-hunt. He was feeding a plum to one of the zebras when the bear spoke to him.

  ‘“Would you like some honey? the bear said to the king. She was sitting on her back legs and using her paws to eat a waxy chunk of honeycomb.

  ‘“The king had never heard an animal speak before, but he welcomed mystery and was not afraid. He joined the bear in the secret terraced garden in which she lived. Together they ate the honeycomb and watched as the king’s courtiers lit the slow-burning balls of lignite in the palace grounds below, ready for the evening’s games. The bear began to sing a ballad of such beauty that the king fell instantly in love with her. As the dew formed on the grass, they embraced.

  ‘“In the morning, when the king awoke in pain from sleeping on the ground, he did not at first remember what had happened. The bear was still asleep beside him, a warm, wild body, and he thought for a moment that he had fallen asleep on a hunt, beside his dying quarry. What unnatural magic had made him fall in love with a beast such as this? He looked at her sleeping body and was overcome with revulsion and shame. He fled her enclosure and ordered that she be exiled from his kingdom. For the rest of his days he lived with the twin agonies of heartbreak and disgust: he never stopped loving her, or loathing himself.

  ‘“In her exile to the cold islands of the west, the bear gave birth to a daughter, who like her mother was cursed: a human princess trapped inside a bear’s body, with gifts of speech and song and poetry so refined that her mother knew the same fate would befall her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter, and so on forevermore; men would fall in love with them and then destroy them, and themselves, trying to purge this unclean love from their souls. And so it was, and so it still is, and so it will always be.”

  ‘Irena had finished her story. She
reached over and lifted Karol’s hand, kissed it once.

  ‘“I have a wife,” he managed to say in apology, in explanation for his heartless inaction.

  ‘She said softly, “And I have a husband.”

  ‘The bear was evicted from the tent then, quite unceremoniously. Feeling abandoned, he was seized with the urge to run away, and off he loped into the desert. But before he could get very far across the sand, the Dalmatian he detested, with whom he had to share the camp’s affections, began to howl and bark from his post, giving the bear away. Karol fed him treats out of guilt. The bear fell asleep sucking on a date pit, dreaming of the human princess trapped like him in a bearskin, the only woman who might find it in her heart to love him back.’

  In the concrete cave in the Sarajevo zoo, the brown bear had run out of strength. Her mouth was dry, her hips were hurting. She turned her face in the direction of the black bear, sniffing the air between them as if it were sweetly perfumed, intimate. Then she folded herself carefully into the corner of the cave and fell into a feverish sleep. When she woke, the soldier’s body was no longer in the clearing, and she could sense from the more brittle morning air that summer was over.

  Some weeks passed. The people who brought food to the bears, soldiers mostly, but every now and then a brave, impervious civilian, seemed confused by the season’s change. The romance of autumn’s tentative beginning had thrown them just as the frothing cherry blossoms had early in the siege. They caught themselves feeling a familiar nostalgia, the same longing they’d felt at the start of every autumn, at the end of every summer, and they felt betrayed. This peaceful smudging of the colours of the city, this lovely crisping of the air: had the planet not noticed? Why did the change of season still bring with it thoughts of reapplying oneself to pursuits – a return to work, to school, to routine, to betterment – when there could be no return to any of these?

  Now, the sharper the autumn air, the deadlier, for it was fog or rain alone that could give the city respite from the snipers’ relentless surveillance. Winter would be better, perpetual winter would be the right season for a siege. Twigs, trunks, stumps, whole root systems of trees were disappearing from the streets and parks of Sarajevo, to be sold midwinter to desperate families who had burned their way through furniture, floorboards, wooden snow-shoes that the winter before had carried them across the fresh powder of the ski resort at Pale.

  The sirens gave off their timeless moans of measured panic; the Sarajevo Centre for Security broadcast its dispatches:

  The city is relatively calm. A few shells have hit the district of Marindvor, and two or three buildings have been destroyed. From the Lukavica barracks missiles have been fired at the Oslobođenje building, and anyone who has no urgent reason for being in that area is advised to stay away for at least an hour. We will let you know when the area is safe again. You are advised to avoid long lines in front of bakeries or district offices that distribute ration cards; the rocket launchers are aimed at targets where people congregate. Electricity and water services are still interrupted, but we are working on their restoration. Don’t leave your homes unless it is absolutely necessary. You have heard the sirens sound a general alert. Otherwise, it is a nice sunny day …

  On a foggy night, one of the quietest since the siege began, a group of important foreigners made the pilgrimage to feed the bears, escorted by Bosnian militiamen.

  A man wearing a flak jacket and new beige boots dropped his piece of bread through the railings and said to the man in a puffy winter coat beside him, ‘We’ve done it before. Airlifted dogs out of Beirut to animal shelters in Utah. Civil wars tend to be hardest on animals.’

  The woman in the small group took exception to this. ‘You mean, compared to your normal, garden-variety war, when everybody is real careful about not stepping on any bugs on their way to the slaughterfields?’

  The puffy-coated man spoke quietly. ‘But you must see what sort of position this would put us in. Smuggling two bears out of Sarajevo in a food-relief convoy – what does that say to the people left behind? Why bears, not babies? I mean, a busload of children trying to get out of the city was fired on, and we’re spending time worrying about these wild animals? We can’t allow it, I’m afraid.’ He was the only one who had not brought stale bread in his pockets for the bears.

  The black bear was making an elaborate show of leaving some of the bread for the brown bear, knowing how much humans favour displays of fairness in animals. The brown bear did not touch it, however, rousing herself just enough to please the humans, coming forward to reveal her pitiable body and her opaque eyes. Old habits.

  ‘Oh, this one’s blind,’ the woman said. ‘Poor dear darling, poor angel. Has she always been blind?’

  One of the militamen answered, ‘Yes. Since she came to the zoo as a baby.’

  ‘Malnutrition, probably,’ the woman mused. ‘And the other bear,’ she said, looking more closely at the black bear, who was pacing up and down in front of the moat, eyeballing her. ‘Has he always been this … this restless?’

  ‘He’s a bear in a zoo, madam,’ the soldier said flatly.

  ‘I know, I know, I don’t mean —’ She stopped, embarrassed.

  The man in the new boots turned to her. ‘It happens sometimes, to animals in captivity. Zoochosis, it’s called. They go a bit nuts, do strange things, pace obsessively, lick the walls, sway, pull their fur out, hit their heads against the bars. And that would have been even before the shelling started.’ This man had A+ stencilled on one of his chest pockets: his blood type in case he was wounded and the city’s dwindling blood stores hadn’t dried up entirely, in case somebody paid attention.

  ‘That’s the thing,’ the man in the puffy coat said. ‘They’re just going to end up in another zoo someplace else. Still crazy.’

  ‘Do you know what Sarajevo – the name – means?’ the woman said to nobody in particular. ‘The Turks gave the city its name. It means palace in the fields. Isn’t that beautiful? Palace in the fields.’

  The militiamen snapped their heads around in unison, towards a sound in the darkness. From the farthest edge of the siege line, across the valley, a missile blurred its way through the fog. A warning that tonight’s ceasefire was the briefest of reprieves, that if it weren’t for the fog, the fireworks would have burst until daybreak.

  ‘That one looked like it was shot from the Osmica,’ a soldier said under his breath, and one or two of the other militiamen laughed.

  ‘It used to be a popular nightclub on the mountain,’ the puffy-jacketed man explained to the other foreigners. ‘Now the Serbs have made it into a bunker.’

  When they’d left, the black bear ate the rest of the bread, and the witch emerged, yawning. ‘I’ve got a joke for you. What’s the difference between a clever Bosnian and a dumb one?’ she said to the black bear. ‘The smart one calls the dumb one in Sarajevo every day. From abroad.’

  The black bear stared hard at the witch as if he didn’t get it.

  The witch fidgeted. ‘Go on, then,’ she said to the brown bear. ‘We’ve got nothing better to do. Tell us some more about that prince who was turned into a bear.’ She winked at the black bear. ‘And they think you’re the crazy one.’

  The brown bear looked hopeful. She sat back on her haunches, tried to get comfortable, though she could feel the bones of her pelvis pressing against the concrete floor of the cave.

  ‘The prince – in his bearskin – had grown,’ she said. ‘When he stood on his hind legs he was twice as tall as Karol, a towering mass of brown fur topped with a black nose. He liked to play-wrestle with the other soldiers, tumbling around in the sand, amazingly tender with the men despite his claws and his yellow teeth.

  ‘By now the regiment had moved on to a place called Qassassin. Soon they were to set sail for Italy, to the real war – for often it felt to Karol as if they were playing at war in the Middle East. They worked hard, yes, transporting military equipment to other units in the area, in Syria or back to Iraq, and
on any journey Karol made in the supply trucks, the bear accompanied him, squeezed between two men in the front seat. But the atmosphere in the camp was often festive, and the tents resembled a schoolboys’ dormitory: packs of cards scattered around, and dirty socks, and dirtier cartoons poking out beneath the mattresses. There were cute animals everywhere you looked – ferrets, piglets, puppies, foxes, owls, ducks; each regiment seemed to have adopted its own live mascot. Karol liked to think the bear was different, beyond a mascot, that the bear was really, truly one of them. When they sailed for Italy, he would not let the bear be left behind at the sea’s edge like all the other half-witted animal mascots. Karol had a plan.

  ‘It was early in 1944 when the order came to embark. At the quay in Alexandria, watching enormous cranes load trucks onto a liner converted into a troopship, Karol thought again of children playing at war: dwarfed by the crane, the trucks and tanks looked like Dinky Toys, small enough to grasp in one fist. He looked at the bear beside him and tried not to panic. The time for petitioning was over – every favour had been called in, every application made – and now it was up to those in the British High Command to decide the bear’s fate.

  ‘“Corporal?” the liaison officer called from within the quay office.

  ‘Karol answered automatically, “Sir?”

  ‘“Not you,” the man said. “I’m talking to the bear.”

  ‘When the MS Batory sailed later that day with a protective convoy and the Polish flag raised, Corporal Bear sat in a spacious cage on deck and chomped his way through his cigarette rations, doubled because of his size. The Persian prince in his bearskin was now officially a Polish soldier, granted a special travel warrant to stay with Karol’s regiment for the duration of the war.