The Zookeeper's War Read online

  The conversation lapsed, and the seamstress began to look awkward, then a minute later she blushed and in a halting voice asked Vera if she would mind holding her place in the queue. They were nearer the front now, and the lines had lengthened. Vera nodded and the seamstress scurried away.

  The man in the suit grunted. ‘More fool her.’

  Promotion in the queue seemed to improve his mood. With both hands he twirled the ends of his moustache. ‘Got a husband?’

  She almost laughed—this was no informer. He was at least twice her age. She admitted to a husband.

  ‘Fighting, is he?’

  ‘Working.’

  ‘Z-card?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I’m exempt too, though I’d fight if they’d let me.’ His chest inflated—the strongman likeness was surely deliberate. ‘As it is, I do my bit. Manufacturing. On contract to the Wehrmacht.’

  She was saved from replying by the return of the seamstress, who crept back to her place, strewing apologies. The strongman demanded to know what she was doing, and the seamstress tensed in fright. She murmured about her place.

  ‘Too bad,’ said the strongman. ‘You leave, you start again.’

  The seamstress looked stricken.

  Vera sighed, turned to the strongman, and for the first time spoke a whole sentence to him. ‘The lady was here first and I’m letting her in.’ She watched as her accented German struck home and then turned and crossed her arms, feeling her scalp contract in the silence at her back.

  Thank God they were nearing the front; the seamstress was next in line. Abruptly the strongman left his place, marched over to the policeman and started speaking in a hushed but animated way. He pointed at Vera. The policeman gazed at her and ambled forward. The whole room was watching as the policeman stopped and asked her name and nationality.

  She gave her name and announced Deutsche, holding the strongman’s gaze. The policeman asked for her papers and she reached into her handbag and took out two envelopes: the first for documents she resented or tolerated—ration card, residency permit and certificate of naturalisation; and the second for those she genuinely valued—her marriage certificate and an employment card that listed her profession as zookeeper. The policeman checked each one in turn, handed them back and told the strongman that everything was in order. The strongman mumbled about duty; the policeman shrugged and returned to his post.

  Vera seethed. She was used to extra attention from officials, but never at the prompting of another civilian. From time to time it was all she could do to remember the kindness of individuals and not curse the entire German people, their language and their works, and above all the strange mittel-European passions that had led them to disaster. She looked at the rows of grey-clad people—to suffer alongside them seemed grossly unjust.

  The seamstress took her turn at a desk and began telling her story.

  At times Vera longed for the lazy ways of her own countrymen, who fought wars readily enough at Britain’s behest but were otherwise happier at the racetrack or the beach. Space and warmth nurtured apathy. She imagined the heat of January and gave in to the mawkish homesickness that often afflicted her these days. Her yearning for Australia seemed physical, and who could say that her flesh didn’t hold a molecular memory of eucalyptus? There was little else to remember it by. The only object she still had from home was a 1938 penny that showed the king on one side and a kangaroo on the other, a gift from her brother who’d had it turned into a necklace.

  The seamstress finished at the desk, turned around and risked a smile. Vera waved her goodbye then stepped forward and answered the official’s questions: address, occupation, number of dependants. She couldn’t have said how many animals were left.

  The official was kindly enough but made no promises about housing, and instead handed over coupons for clothing and food. Vera thanked him and turned to leave, staring in contempt at the strongman before striding out the door.

  On the street she wrapped a scarf around her head and put on sunglasses against flying cinders. Coal and lignite stored for the winter burned steadily in cellars, clogging the air. Although daylight was fading, the temperature was warm, a sinister Indian summer.

  In the Mitte, the old city, bombs had caved in the skyline, dropping telegraph poles, power lines and tram cables onto burnt-out lorries and trams. Shops were destroyed or boarded up, and glass, chunks of plaster and shrapnel paved the streets. Field kitchens had sprouted at the major intersections, and in alleys off Alexanderplatz girls were already soliciting. Outside one bombed-out tenement Vera read the chalked inscription, Everyone in this shelter has been saved. Around the corner: My angel where are you? Leave a message for your Sigi. In a house without walls on Unter den Linden, a man played Bach on a grand piano, and below him, in a lake fed by a burst water main, a fur stole clung to a hatstand. Half the people on the streets wore a uniform: police, air-raid wardens, women postal workers. Soldiers moved in squads and the only vehicles were staff cars and Wehrmacht lorries, as if the army had conquered Berlin and deployed clerks and shop assistants to the front in a fleet of private cars.

  For all the pre-war pomposity of Berlin, the Reich capital, Vera couldn’t help grieving for that other Berlin, an unruly city whose emblem was a crudely depicted black bear. It was the city she had entered in 1934 after arriving by train at Bahnhof Zoo. Berlin had been unimaginably hectic, a maelstrom of human and mechanical traffic. Axel had sent their luggage ahead then insisted on showing her the city on foot, and though tired from the journey she had happily agreed. Her first impressions were disjointed and had little in common with the city she later came to know. Axel was exhilarated, stabbing the air with his hands like the fishermen they’d seen in Naples. A city of four million people, he enthused, ringed by parks and forests, lakes and rivers. Canals and Europe’s biggest inland harbour. More bridges than Venice. She laughed and smiled, sensing for herself the immensity of Berlin in the churning crowds, the cars and lorries and double-decker buses, trams squealing and spitting sparks overhead, trains thundering along the elevated S-Bahn, and a zeppelin in the sky; and later, when she understood the layout of the metropolis, it would seem to her like a wheel on the hub of her home—the green thirty hectares of the zoological gardens.

  Outside a bombed apartment on the Linden, some prisoners of war, Badoglio Italians, pumped air into the ruins through a large canvas pipe, while Hitler Youth and girls of the Bund deutscher Mädel laboured in the wreckage. A row of bodies lay on the pavement, a scene she had witnessed after previous air raids, though not so often that she could look away. The nearest victim was an elderly woman, her skirts obscenely rucked to the waist.

  The Tiergarten was ploughed up like a Flanders battlefield, with many of its oaks and beeches shattered. Camouflage netting above Charlottenburger Chausee had fallen on the road or vaporised.

  Vera turned into the park towards the zoo, and the noise of lorries fell away. At the goldfish pond she passed a marble statue of a bow-wielding Amazon on horseback, the arrow poised to fly eastwards—towards Moscow.

  The trees thinned and through a gap in the branches she glimpsed the tower-bunker next to the walls of the zoo. Flak cannons gleamed on the roof. Rows of shuttered slitwindows made the tower resemble a castle keep. Beside it was a smaller but still imposing structure—the headquarters of Berlin’s anti-aircraft defences. Along with its own battery of cannon, two dish-like aircraft detectors rotated on the battlements.

  At the Landwehr Canal she crossed a footbridge that led to the zoo’s northern gate. Behind her the revolving dishes scooped the last of the sun.

  Axel watched as a fire crew doused the zoo’s restaurant and concert hall. Only the walls remained. Smoke cast mustardcoloured shadows at his feet, and his gaze swirled about with the eddies. He and Vera had feared a truly massive raid, and now the worst had happened. As best as he could estimate, two-thirds of the remaining fifteen thousand animals had been killed. A single attack had demolished a century of
building.

  He turned away from the hall and began a final leg of inspection. At the woodland enclosures, trunks and branches were smashed. All the deer houses were destroyed, including the reindeer chalet, though some of the reindeer had escaped and were pressing against an outer fence. Further north, the sea-lion pool was miraculously unharmed, but beside it a bomb had destroyed the zoo’s hospital and breached the northern wall, revealing the Landwehr Canal and beyond it the Tiergarten. To the right of the hospital the Head Keeper’s cottage was gutted, adding Herr Winzens to Berlin’s homeless. As Axel gazed at the ruins of the cottage, an African hunting dog loped by with an ibis in its jaws.

  The zoo had closed only once before, in the wake of the last war, but there had been no structural damage and the visitors had returned. As an assistant to his father in the 1920s he had gathered animals from every continent, including Antarctica, and when the Board had appointed him Director he had inherited an institution that had not only overcome the Great War and the Depression but surpassed the belle époque in the breadth of the collection and numbers of visitors. The main difficulty, in fact, had been a lack of space for displaying animals in open-plan enclosures, and though he and Vera had added monkey rocks and the alpine peak, past success had limited expansion. The zoo had remained his father’s realm. Vera had wanted to knock down some of the animal houses, which Flavia liked to denounce as hideous follies, remnants of an imperial grandeur that had always been half imaginary, but visitors adored the animal houses, and members of the zoo’s Governing Board were traditionalists. Secretly, Axel had been relieved. He’d grown up among the palaces, temples and lodges, loving them with a child’s uncritical eye.

  He made his way to the carnivore house, which was still standing but badly burned. Oskar and Zoe, Sheba and her cubs—not a single lion had survived. Bombs had crushed but not burned the northern wing—the nearest cages held the bodies of a puma and two jaguars. The next cage was Gogol’s, a Siberian tiger they had raised from a cub. His body lay beneath fallen masonry.

  The trouble with being born into a golden age was having to live through its decline. War had started the slide, though at first the only signs were mild rationing and the loss of younger keepers to the Wehrmacht, and if anything there were even more visitors than usual. When the bombing had started, however, Berlin’s children had been evacuated, forcing the zoo to depend on soldiers visiting with their girlfriends, or on workers from the armaments factories that ringed the city. Later, when rationing grew stricter, the health of the animals began to suffer. With good food even African animals could flourish in Europe, but without it the cold had taken its toll.

  And now bombs had finished the job. With nothing left for visitors to see, there would be no income, only costs. The Board had long ago written off its losses, and the only hope now was government charity.

  Axel trudged along the cratered banks of Neptune’s Pool. In the middle the bronze god was still straddling his dolphins. The wind was warm and smoke slid in layers, merging with a ceiling of cloud.

  He mounted the front steps of the aquarium, saw that the front doors had blown outwards, and in the vestibule found a freshwater crocodile bleeding from its ears and nostrils. A hind leg lost and a lacerated flank. Dorsal scoots missing, leaving narrow wounds. Axel knew he should act but couldn’t stomach another killing. He would have to send a keeper. He stepped over the crocodile and limped into the tank room.

  Inside, the devastation was total. Something big—an aerial mine perhaps—had crashed through the glass roof and detonated in the central atrium, smashing the crocodile stream upstairs and bringing soil, rocks and palm trees down onto the tanks. Thousands of fish lay dead on the floor, among them stingrays and sharks, as well as crocodiles. Axel waded into the wreckage. The smell was bad and would only get worse. He stooped to right an upturned turtle, but its shell was cracked and the turtle dead.

  The aquarium had been his favourite part of the zoo, a haven where he had liked to watch the fish: curtains of herring, grave-eyed perch, porcupine fish like thorny barrage balloons. Where the tropical tank had been, dead fish carpeted the floor: mottled blenny, banded perch, damsel-fish and painted moki; then in a pool edged by jagged glass an octopus stirred. Valvular gills pulsated in her jowls. Her eyes, which were banded and shrewd like a goat’s, pierced his own as he loomed above her. He made a mental note to arrange a rescue.

  In the freshwater tank a giant catfish lay thrashing in knee-deep water. Axel hooked his arms beneath the fish, hoisted it up, and staggered to the door, feeling the stab of its whiskers through his coat. Outside, the smoke stung the lining of his nostrils. Feeling foolish, he struggled through the slush to Neptune’s Pool. The catfish was probably riddled with glass; this was a sentimental act. He stopped and lowered it into the water where it lay sideways as if already dead, then quivered and sank into the murk.

  His overcoat stank, and on one sleeve a fish scale gleamed. He heard Herr Winzens call his name and turned around and saw the Head Keeper on the bank with a man at his side dressed in a black suit and butterfly collar. Men in overalls, some with notebooks, were gathered on the promenade.

  Axel climbed the bank and shook hands with the visitor, a tall thin man, who grimaced and wiped his palm on his trousers then introduced himself as an Oberinspektor from the Reich Ministry of Agriculture. Hair receded from each temple above a narrow face. Mid-thirties, Axel judged, certainly younger than himself—always odd to meet younger men in positions of authority. Axel had lost count of the number of times he had lobbied the Ministry to have some of the animals evacuated to regional zoos, but all the hours in anterooms had come to nothing. Evacuation smacked of defeatism, they’d said, and would send the wrong message to the populace.

  The Oberinspektor cleared his throat and announced that the zoo would be audited.

  ‘What sort of audit?’ asked Axel.

  ‘Of surplus food.’

  ‘We’ve no extra food. As it happens, our kitchens were spared, but there’s only a week’s extra food in storage.’

  The Oberinspektor gazed about him. ‘You’ve taken a battering here.’ His tone was concerned.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And lost quite a few of your stock.’

  Axel caught the man’s drift. ‘You’re here to count corpses.’

  ‘Herr Director, I wouldn’t put it like that. We’re avoiding waste. As for counting, it’s living stock we’re interested in. Once the numbers are established, we’ll adjust your rations.’

  ‘Reduce, you mean.’

  ‘In all likelihood, yes.’

  The Oberinspektor’s tone was reasonable, and despite Axel’s annoyance he could see the man’s logic. His own reaction was more of disappointment than disgust, as already he’d mentally assigned the dead animals to feed the surviving carnivores. If the Oberinspektor was a scavenger then so too was he, and like any vulture he’d have to wait his turn.

  ‘I’ve also noticed that your walls have been breached,’ said the Oberinspektor. ‘I’ll arrange fencing to keep out intruders.’

  ‘Other than yourselves, you mean?’

  This was a childish protest, he realised, perhaps even dangerous. The Oberinspektor scrutinised his face and then explained in the same unruffled tone that his men would need some of the keepers as guides. This would slow the rescue and recovery work, but Axel was keen to get the audit over with and asked Herr Winzens to make arrangements. The aquarium would have to wait.

  ‘And I’ll need a map,’ added the Oberinspektor.

  ‘Our maps were destroyed.’

  ‘Could you draw one?’

  Axel considered this and nodded. There was nowhere else that he knew so well.

  He led the Oberinspektor across the promenade and toward the kitchens, a long low building left oddly naked by the destruction of the administration block. Inside, the kitchens were cold and gloomy—echoes, tiles and stainless steel. He lit a candle, poured tea from a thermos and drew up two stools at a bench.
The tea was lukewarm and tasted of grass, and the Oberinspektor set his cup aside. Axel tore a page from an exercise book.

  The map was more awkward to draw than he had imagined. Scale was the problem, and his first attempt went into a bin. He rushed his second effort, feeling uncomfortably like a schoolboy under the gaze of a teacher. The finished map looked askew, as different from the surveyor’s version as an early map of exploration would be from a modern naval chart, but all the enclosures were there and he was anxious now to be alone.

  The Oberinspektor thanked him and made his own way out. Axel ripped another page from the exercise book and again drew the lemon-shaped outline of the zoo, but rather than add the enclosures as he had done before, he sketched in the streets to the south and west, the Canal and the Tiergarten to the north. He paused. At the centre of this new map lay empty space. He put down the pencil and gazed at the blankness.

  Twilight had come on by the time Vera arrived. She looked surprised to see him there and frowned. Her hair was dishevelled, which in candlelight made her look unexpectedly like a gypsy. Soot marked creases he’d never noticed at the edges of her eyes.

  ‘I’ve just seen men pushing dead deer in wheelbarrows,’ she said. ‘What’s going on outside?’

  The outside held a hint of reproach. He told her about the Oberinspektor.

  Vera looked annoyed. ‘We don’t have the time.’