The Zookeeper's War Read online

  For my grandmother, Marion Marcus, 1901–2003.

  With love and thanks for other stories.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  Copyright

  ONE

  The air-raid sirens bayed. Searchlights probed the dark and Berlin’s outer flak ring opened fire, setting the birds in the aviary screeching and flapping. The zoo’s blackout was total. Weeks had passed since the last air raid, and Vera was shocked by her body’s quick recall, the lurching of her stomach and the trembling. As usual she felt the vulnerability of the animals. Always there were casualties.

  Alongside her strode Axel, snow flicking off the boot of his good right leg. His limp was bad tonight. From the corner of one eye Vera sensed the swaying of his shoulders, then she turned and saw his barrel chest and felt oddly reassured, as if Axel were built of tougher matter than muscle and bone.

  They passed the waterfowl lake, the kitchens and the administration, Vera longing to be back at the villa asleep. A flare lit the minarets of the primate house, and on the snowy hub of the roundabout she glimpsed Artur Winzens, the Head Keeper, a small straight-backed man. He was too elderly for the army, though Vera feared that soon even Herr Winzens would have to go—since Stalingrad the regime had called up youths and older men. The keeper’s breath was wreathed.

  In the west the drone of bombers joined the rumbling of flak, and the searchbeams flailed like the legs of an upturned beetle. Axel greeted Herr Winzens in a jovial tone then paused to watch a flare tinge the aquarium green, and silently Vera gave thanks for her husband’s aplomb—a legacy, she supposed, of his service in the trenches half a lifetime ago, a gift to weigh against the shrapnel in his hip.

  Cut into the soil at the centre of the roundabout was a staircase that led down to a steel-plated door. Herr Winzens drew the bolt and Vera followed him into the air-raid shelter, which stretched beneath the garden bed as far as the sculpted elephant gates at the front of the zoo. Cantilevered planks along each wall could seat two hundred people, but apart from nuisance attacks there had been few raids in daylight when visitors were about, and at night only she and Axel and Herr Winzens sheltered here. Locals used the two tower-bunkers in the Tiergarten, which together held thirty thousand people.

  Herr Winzens lit a kerosene lamp and hung it from the ceiling, bolted the door and handed out blankets and electric torches. From a thermos Vera poured hot chicory into mugs, warming her gloves on the enamel. The droning of the bombers was louder than usual and she glanced at the concrete ceiling.

  Axel tore newsprint into narrow strips, which they each dipped in a bucket and crammed into their ears just as the flak on the tower-bunkers opened up, shaking the earth. Vera straightened on the bench, her spine a spear, then leaned into Axel’s loose embrace.

  Flak shrapnel clattered on the promenade, and overhead the bombers roared. The first explosions raised a wall of noise, beyond anything Vera had heard before. She seized the plank beneath her thighs and the explosions rolled nearer, a Bombenteppich—the carpet she had thought was a metaphor. It was vast this time. Axel let go of her and jabbed a finger at his throat, shocking her until she realised he was pointing at the cork tied around his neck. She tugged her own from inside her collar and bit down as a thousand-pounder hit, jolting her seat and punching the air, then a brace of bombs detonated in sequence, juddering the walls. Vera drove both hands to her ears but the din increased as explosions and the engines of the bombers merged, whole squadrons indistinguishable from one another. The flak towers barked. Vera pressed on her ears and felt her blood hammer.

  Overhead she heard whistling that started high and sharp and deepened exponentially, making her think of mathematics, the brutality of numbers. As she lunged, the force of the blast snatched her up, drove her spine against concrete and emptied her in space. Idly she wondered if she was about to die, then a blow stunned her chest and she skidded and stopped. There was an oddly domestic tinkling of glass. She was lying face down in darkness, breathing dust. One of the men was writhing on her legs. She called Axel’s name but couldn’t hear her own voice, then a torch, Herr Winzens’, lit swirling dust and she turned and saw Axel’s face, a powdered mask, his mouth shaping her name. She tried to answer but coughed. The air stank of cordite, smoke and kerosene. Herr Winzens flashed the torch across her eyes, and she got to her knees. Axel was yelling, demanding to know if she was wounded. Just battered, she said. He raised a thumb. Herr Winzens was bleeding from a cut on the chin but claimed to be unhurt.

  The blast-door was dangling and edged with glare, and through the gap came the crash of more bombs and flak. Axel got up and shouldered the door into its frame, leaving Vera to imagine what was happening on the surface.

  Axel lay beside her and put an arm about her shoulders. Air raids had lasted two hours before, but never at this ferocity, and if another bomb didn’t kill them, there was a chance they would suffocate.

  For several minutes more the bombs kept falling, then abruptly the explosions stopped, leaving flak and the machine guns of Luftwaffe night-fighters, until these too fell away. Vera gagged on smoke, and sweat drenched her back. She scrambled to the blast-door, gripped the latch and felt its heat on her gloves. Herr Winzens looked aghast—there was no all-clear—but Axel helped heave the door off its hinges, letting in heat and a blood-red light. Most of the steps were missing. Flames billowed in the sky.

  Vera followed her husband to the lip of a crater that flickered with pale-blue phosphorus. Splashes of the incendiary had pockmarked the snow. The bird house was a pyre and the music rotunda a tree of flame; the conservatory on the top floor of the administration was burning. Only the aquarium was not on fire, though a red glow silhouetted a bite in the roof. The air was dense, a hot sirocco. No creature of any size could have survived above ground.

  In the tenements to the south a time-bomb exploded, sending a pulse through the earth under Vera’s shoes. Axel asked Herr Winzens if he’d go to the Civil Defence for help, and looking relieved to have orders the old man set off for the entrance gate, which Vera could see had been hit. Beyond it, Kurfüurstenstrasse was a gully of flame, sharp gusts tearing slate off the rooftops. Embers jerked upwards on spirals of heat. Vera felt the earth begin to shake, looked down, and saw that her knees were trembling.

  Axel pointed to the fire in the conservatory and said there was still time to get the studbooks from his office. This made sense, though meanwhile more animals would die, and she would have gone alone to fight the fires if one person could have handled the water tanker. Instead she took Axel by the arm and together they entered the building.

  The lobby was dark, the air full of ash, the stairs funnelling wind to the conservatory. Vera followed Axel into the office, leaning into a gale that howled through smashed windows. On the walls, framed photographs chattered in the wind, most of them of Axel’s father: Herr Frey beside a newborn giraffe; shaking hands with the Kaiser; watching black men loading wildebeest onto the deck of a freighter.

  Axel opened his desk and started yanking out the studbooks, and Vera began pulling the pictures off the wall and jamming them into the crook of her arm, leaving only an obligatory portrait of the dictator. Axel opened the gun cabinet and retrieved the Mauser.

  She was anxious now to get away and
hurried Axel through the foyer. Outside, the wind was scorching and gaining force, turning the snow on the promenade to slush. She shivered—last summer in the Hamburg firestorm many had died from burnt lining of the lungs. The horizon glowed as if circled by sunsets. She had no idea how to begin to save the animals.

  In a blizzard of sparks from the burning rotunda she saw a dense, moving light—a fire that drew nearer, leapt and veered, until she recognised a zebra mare in flames. The animal’s eyes were big with fright and, what seemed worse, a kind of injured amazement. Axel tried to block the mare’s path but she swerved with ease, her back a cape of flame. She galloped through the wreckage of the entrance gate, struck a lamppost, lurched sideways but somehow kept upright and, before Axel could reach her, clattered off into the darkness.

  ‘The zoo is finished,’ said Vera.

  The thought had stalked her all day and now she had voiced it. Axel didn’t respond. In the lamplight of Flavia’s tiny flat, his face was weary.

  ‘It might not be so bad,’ said Flavia. ‘Tomorrow you might see things differently.’ Her optimism sounded genuine and Vera was touched—usually it was Flavia who needed consoling. Incongruously, she was decked out as a 1920s flapper, still in costume from a party the night before, despite a day spent striding through the smoke and rubble.

  Vera shook her head and listed the losses: the elephant pagoda, the camel and antelope houses, the aviary and aquarium. The primate house half destroyed, the woodland enclosures burnt. Thousands dead across the zoo. Axel said nothing, and his silence confirmed all her fears.

  She couldn’t yet bring herself to speak of the villa. Four years earlier she had told herself that she could endure the war if her home was spared, but staring that morning at the ruins of the villa the absurdity of this bargain had struck her in full. A contract had to be enforceable. She would have fewer possessions now than when she’d left Australia a decade ago.

  ‘Well, you’re alive and that’s the main thing,’ said Flavia, injecting the platitude with fierce conviction. She got up, apologised for the lack of proper food, and offered them a plate of canapés from the Hotel Bristol. The canapés, she claimed, were a gift from the Rumanian ambassador, though she was just as likely to have tipped them into her handbag by stealth. With the Soviets advancing on Bucharest, the Rumanian legation knew their days were numbered, and according to Flavia they planned to enjoy whatever time was left to them. The party had moved underground at the start of the raid and gone on until morning.

  Flavia brought water from a pail she’d filled on the street. Her narrow dress made her look half starved, though in reality she scrounged more in a week than a heavyworker ate in two. The electricity was down and the canapés unheatéd, but Vera devoured them anyway. Axel ate in silence, hunched under a blanket.

  When the food was finished, Vera offered to tidy up, the habit of courtesy stronger than exhaustion, but Flavia gently pushed her back into the chair.

  It was good to be cared for. After a day fighting fires and tending animals with burns, most of which had died regardless, Flavia’s sympathy left her teary with gratitude. It was Flavia who had found her in a trance of fatigue at the zoo, and Flavia who had persuaded Axel to come away at last. She had led them through a city that Vera had barely recognised, no longer a place of concrete and stone but of smoke and shifting light. The air was scarcely breathable. For all Vera could tell, they might have been on Mars, so it was a surprise to reach Meinekestrasse, behind the old synagogue, and see that number sixteen was virtually untouched.

  Flavia washed their plates in a pail then poured each of them a glass of schnapps. The forecast was for cloud, she said. ‘With luck the British won’t come tonight.’

  From Flavia, this was tactful. Usually she welcomed air raids and would try to provoke Axel by saying so, arguing that the raids would shorten the war, since people repeatedly forced underground would behave like worms when it came to a fight. Axel would only laugh and accuse her of masochism. The raids stiffened public resolve, he said, and Vera suspected he was right.

  Flavia finished her schnapps and began to make a bed on the sofa. ‘For me,’ she explained. ‘You two take my room.’ Vera tried to argue, but Flavia had more energy. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I owe you.’

  Twice before, she’d been bombed out herself—in 1941, when it was a novelty that drew sympathy from strangers, and in the big raid of the previous August, when only her friends had cared—taking refuge at the villa on both occasions until the Air-raid Damage Office had found her a flat, each smaller than the one before. Vera had hoped never to call in the favour.

  Flavia hustled them into the bedroom and found two sets of men’s pyjamas. Vera felt filthy and her skin reeked of smoke, yet she clambered gratefully under Flavia’s eiderdown, sensed Axel’s weight beside her and slept.

  Hours later she woke, not knowing where she was, then smelt smoke and remembered the animals. Even now, she couldn’t grasp that so many had died. Would not. Not yet.

  Flavia’s room was windowless, the only light coming from under the door. On the ceiling Vera could make out two fissures that collided and forked apart. Beside her, Axel was snoring softly, while in the other room Flavia was already up, a sign that morning was well underway. Vera lay still, reluctant to trigger another day’s events—there would be bureaucracies to deal with, necessities to find. In the past she had always dismissed platitudes about the futility of plotting a course in life, since in her case she had chosen more often than drifted, but the war had narrowed choice and lately she had felt like a passenger on the train that according to rumour had torn through the U-Bahn in a previous raid when shrapnel killed the driver.

  Axel shifted and stopped snoring. He would want her to wake him. She could smell his odour, a blend of smoke and stale sweat. His hair was thick and—unjustly, given his added years—had no more silver in it than hers. His expression was tranquil. While the war had ground her down, making her vulnerable to coughs and colds, Axel had stayed robust. For all the worry of the zoo, he’d remained optimistic. He was the constant in her life. However forbidding the future might be, the man who lay at her side would make it endurable.

  That afternoon she entered a school gymnasium commandeered by the Air-raid Damage Office. Queues ran the length of the hall to where officials sat at school desks interviewing each person in turn. Cursing herself for arriving so late, she joined the queue that seemed shortest. The hall was unheated and Vera tugged her coat tighter. Ropes and gymnastic rings dangled from the ceiling, reminding her of the gibbon enclosure, one part of the primate house that had survived the raid. By the gymnasium doors stood a bored-looking policeman—there on the off chance, she supposed, that this crowd of old men and housewives might riot. But the mood, though sullen, was subdued. Every class seemed represented here—as Flavia liked to say, bombs were a great leveller, especially as no insurer covered loss from acts of war. Vera remembered how in her childhood the neighbouring house of a lawyer had burned to the ground. The worst thing, claimed the lawyer’s wife the next day as she sobbed in Vera’s mother’s arms, was not the burning of the house but the loss of precious photographs and keepsakes. To Vera this had sounded noble, yet now she would give up all the photographs she had saved if such a sacrifice could in some way resurrect the villa.

  For several minutes the queue hardly moved, then the doors swung open and a brawny old man in a tailored suit paced into the hall. He was bald and sported a white walrus moustache stained yellow at the tips. The effect was half gangster, half circus-strongman.

  The man surveyed the room and groaned, strode past the queues and planted himself before a desk, arms crossed, feet apart. The queue shivered with annoyance, and to Vera’s relief an official ordered the intruder back. The man blustered and waved his identity papers, then he turned away, grumbling, as if to leave, only to change direction and stand behind Vera.

  ‘Don’t they know there’s a war on?’

  Vera half turned in acknowledgement. To
day she wanted quiet.

  ‘Some of us have better things to do,’ said the man. ‘They should give priority.’

  She surrendered a brief, chill smile. Lately she’d encountered more than her share of the eccentric, the bombastic or the downright crazy—people attracted, she supposed, by the friendly expression that she wore to offset suspicion about her accent.

  The man in the suit spoke in barking Prussian. ‘It’s not enough that you’ve lost your house—they have to sabotage the war effort.’

  She murmured vaguely but he continued. Some were fighting the war, he said, and others hindering it. If people only stuck together, the nation would reach the final victory. He looked at her expectantly and Vera sensed that she would have to respond or appear defeatist. She said ja, facing sideways, fending off conversation. Mercifully the queue began to move.

  ‘The enemy will pay, gnädige Frau, you’ve no need to worry. He won’t know what’s hit him when the Führer unleashes the wonder weapons.’

  The Wunderwaffen—Vera doubted they existed, but she wasn’t about to say so; the old fool was a Nazi through and through. Though no taller than Axel, he was bigger, better fed. Perhaps twenty years older. His hands were large as dinner plates. The suspicion came to her that he might be trawling for subversion, but even if not a paid informer he was the type who’d denounce you if given half a chance. She let him rant. Until now she’d managed to craft a life in which she rarely had to mix with Nazis, confining herself either to Axel’s friends—scientists who, like him, had no interest in politics—or else to Flavia’s tight-knit theatre crowd, who in private heaped contempt on the regime. Sequestered at the zoo, she’d avoided the fanatics, and for that matter the patriotic majority.

  The suited strongman paused, perhaps sensing her dislike, and Vera leaned towards the woman in front and commented on the slowness of the queues, speaking quietly to stop the strongman overhearing. The woman was middle-aged, brown-haired, sinewy, with anxious eyes crouched deep in their sockets. Forgetting why they were here, Vera asked her where she lived, bringing a look of anguish to the woman’s face. Her flat in Neukölln had been destroyed, she said. She worked as a seamstress in a nearby factory and had an elderly mother to care for. Her sentences were hesitant and brief, as if the full stops were burrows she had to scamper between. Vera explained that until two days ago she had lived at the zoo, and the seamstress looked intrigued. She’d been to the zoo as a girl, she said, and had never forgotten the giraffes. Vera spared her the news that the giraffes had all been killed.