Lights Out in the Reptile House (14 page)

“So,” the lieutenant said, pleased it was only a girl, “this isn't about a plant?”

“No, it isn't about a
plant
,” Leda said, and her voice rang through the room. The lieutenant made the same patting conciliatory motion the nurse had made. He asked what was going on then, and Leda, grimly, her teeth set, explained it again.

“Ah,” he said. “The Civil Guard.” He nodded. Leda stared at him. He was sorrowful, as if this were all a regrettable local custom or inevitable process that couldn't be prevented. The Civil Guard just did things, he said, and informed the police afterward, if at all. Relatives complained, the police had to write to them, fill out forms, it all took forever. He said he'd complained many times and could show Leda the correspondence on the subject. He said they'd do their best in this case. He asked exactly who in her family was missing.

“No one,” Leda said.

“No one?” the lieutenant said. The humor left his face in a way that frightened Karel. “What're you doing? You think we have time for games?”

“My brother says people were taken from the hospital,” Leda said stubbornly. “I'm not related to them.”

“Concerned citizen,” the lieutenant said. The sergeant grunted.

Leda looked at him. Everything was quiet. “I think you know what happened to them,” she decided. Karel thought, Oh, God.

The lieutenant looked at her a moment more, and then made a show of arranging papers on the counter, indicating the interview was over.

“I could go to the mayor,” Leda said helplessly. The mayor was notorious for his timidity.

The lieutenant gazed around the room for the next citizen in trouble. The shy fat man lifted a hand hopefully.

The lieutenant said quietly to Leda, “You know, a town of three thousand, a country fighting for its life—all that doesn't stop because someone's crying about a missing person.”

“You know something, don't you?” Leda said.

The lieutenant stood. He returned to the back room. Leda left without waiting for the sergeant to get up. Karel stared into the eyes of the fat man opposite him and thought, How am I ever going to keep her out of trouble?

BASILISK

David caught up to them on their way to the mayor's office and told Leda that their mother was worried and angry and wanted Leda home
now
. Karel was relieved. Leda told him she'd come by later to plan strategies. David asked to plan strategies for what and Leda asked him how he got so dirty.

There were four trucks and a donkey cart around Karel's house when he returned. The trucks were open-backed and empty and the cart was being unloaded by a few privates from the Civil Guard.

His house was filled with boxes. It smelled like a rabbit hutch. The privates were unpacking cartons marked
FRAGILE
in the living room and straw and excelsior were all over the floor. There were stacked cages of rabbits and chickens in the hall, and the chickens were making a lot of noise.

The uniformed officer from the Fetschers', from the café, was sitting at the kitchen table. Parts of Karel seemed to constrict as he stood there. He flashed on the way he and Leda used to invent the scariest possible nightmares while safe on the beach in the sun, and had the sense that that was what this was: some sort of play nightmare.

The man was considering a deep open box in front of him. Two chickens were bumping and scraping around inside. Karel remembered his name but the man introduced himself anyway, as Special Assistant Kehr of the Civil Guard.

“Who do you assist?” Karel asked, and the man smiled.

“I should explain,” Kehr said. He started peeling the white inner skin from sections of an orange. Each section took a while. When he judged one properly stripped he eased it into his mouth with an in-the-sun squint at its sourness.

He was going to be billeting himself at Karel's house on national business. He hoped it would not inconvenience Karel seriously. He had laid in some supplies. He reached into the box in front of him to demonstrate, and one of the chickens screamed. In the hall cages the rabbits padded sideways, nervously.

“There's no room,” Karel said. “I live here with my father.”

One of the subordinate officers from the Fetschers' and the café stopped into the kitchen to listen. The other came into the house and remained in the background in the living room. He lit a cigarette on the window seat. The smoke hung around him in a gauzy and unpleasant way.

“Your father's not going to be using his room,” Kehr said. When he saw Karel's face he raised a hand against foolish assumptions. “Right away,” he clarified.

“What's happened to him?” Karel said. “Is he in trouble?”

“None whatsoever,” Kehr said. “At some point we can talk about him. Of course, I asked his permission to make these arrangements, and he granted it.”

“You talked to him? Where is he?” Karel asked. “Where is he? How do I know he said that?” He realized that that was stupid question.

Kehr looked at him. The officer in the kitchen leaned against the lintel of the doorway and guffawed quietly. “You don't,” Kehr said.

The rabbits rummaged and tumbled around in their cages, the sound like someone's drumming fingers. “What are you going to be doing here?” Karel asked.

“That's the nation's business,” Kehr said. “Unfortunately, not yours. We'll expect you to do the cleaning you normally do.” He looked around the kitchen. It was a mess. “And help a little with the dinner. That's at seven.”

Through the window Karel could see neighbors outside, standing around and speculating. “Why are you letting me stay?” he asked. “Why don't you just kick me out?”

“If you'd like, we will,” Kehr said mildly. He was becoming more interested in some papers on the table. “Do you have a place you'd go?”

Karel thought of presenting himself to Leda, and her mother:
The NUP threw me out
. He didn't think he had the courage.

“Of course, I assured your father you wouldn't be displaced,” Kehr said. “In these troubled times.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Karel said.

Kehr leaned back and brushed his palm down his chest like a man sweeping away crumbs. His tunic was lighter than his trousers, and there was a golden pin of a winged hammer on his collar and another of a winged anvil on his breast pocket. The embroidered oval beneath with the sword penetrating the nest of snakes into the skull Karel had seen.

“You have nothing to do but not interfere,” Kehr said. “Which in these times is not easy.”

The interview seemed to be over. Karel hesitated in the doorway. The officer leaning on the lintel regarded him levelly.

“It's a particularly bad time to be a vagrant,” Kehr said. “With the turmoil in the streets and the various bureaus and Special Sections in such competition with each other, and no clear lines of jurisdiction.… I should introduce you to my assistants,” he said. “They'll be staying as well. Assistants Stasik, here, and Schay at the window.”

Neither made any gesture. This seemed to be a joke to them. Karel maneuvered through the boxes and went up to his room.

It looked unchanged. His reptile study sheets and the long-abandoned scraps of a letter to Leda were the first things he checked. They hadn't been moved. From two canteens he kept near the bed since his father had left he drank a cup of water, a cup of warm pineapple juice, and another cup of water. He thought he should get one of those sweating metal pitchers with removable caps. He lay on his bed and listened to boxes and furniture being moved below, the noises punctuated by the occasional chicken in distress sounding like one of the laugh boxes from the amusement shops of his old city.

He went back downstairs after a half hour or so wait. “I need to know about my father,” he said.

“Why are you bothering me already?” Kehr said. “Do you want our relationship to get off on the wrong foot?”

Karel sat down. Everything was going wrong. “It's just that I haven't heard anything from him at all,” he said. “I don't know what's going on.” He realized with some horror that he was close to tears.

“You didn't get a letter from him?” Kehr asked.

Karel looked up guiltily. “No,” he said.

Kehr raised his hands as if standing figurines on his palm. “You feel you've been badly treated,” he said. “And maybe you have.”

Karel felt the self-pity well up in him and had to look away. Most of the boxes and both assistants were in the spare room off the living room and the door was shut.

“It's now one-thirty,” Kehr said. He laid two papers carefully over one another as if matching the edges of puzzle pieces while Karel watched. “The animals have been stacked in the back near your storage shed, which you will clear out for them. At three we'll talk.”

So Karel spent an hour and a half piling the junk from the shed into a heap behind it and arranging the rabbit and chicken cages so they'd get the most of the light and breeze from the doorway. The rabbits hunkered down and watched him with a blank alertness. He caught Mrs. Witz peeking over at him from across the street, but when he stood up to talk to her she went inside.

At three he came back to the kitchen. Kehr was still sitting at the table. They were alone in the house. There was a large olive field telephone dangling a bundled and corded tangle of wires on the kitchen counter. Beside it there was a stack of thin blue books tied with string. They were titled
Psychological Operations in Partisan War
. On the cover of the top one the words were placed one under the other with rows of heads between each. The heads had holes in the foreheads.

Kehr was finishing up with some papers held down with a paperweight that looked like a small hipbone. While Karel got a drink of water and then sat opposite him he rearranged other objects on the table (a set of files, the notepad from the Fetschers', a small cup) as if they were required for what was to follow.

So, he said. Karel put his glass down. Kehr picked it up and took a sip himself. What were Karel's politics?

Karel said he didn't have any.

“Tell me the story of your mother,” Kehr said.

Karel stared. His temples and cheeks felt cold. He felt a vista had opened to afford him a view of just how little he understood what was going on.

“What do
you
know about her?” he said. “Did you talk to my father about her?”

“She left you when you were very young,” Kehr said. “She had artistic ambitions. She died young.”

My father talks to him about her and won't talk to me, Karel thought.

“She was, I'm to understand, a very intelligent woman,” Kehr said. “Strong-willed.”

“How do you know all this?” Karel asked.

“I know a good deal,” Kehr said. “You talk. Then I'll talk.”

So Karel talked about his mother, to this Special Assistant from the Sixth Bureau. He told him what he could remember. He withheld his most specific memory, of his mother embracing him on the tile floor. He was surprised how much it distressed him to talk about this.

Kehr sighed, looking at him. He seemed sympathetic. “Your mother was associated with one of the groups opposed to the NUP in the early days,” he said. “Artists' political collective. Not very astute, not very dangerous.” There were other details, he added, they could talk about some other time.

“That's it?” Karel said. “That's all you're going to tell me?”

“Some other time,” Kehr said. “As I said.”

They sat in silence, looking at each other.

“What are you doing here?” Karel asked. “What do you want from me?”

Kehr explained he was organizing Armed Propaganda Teams for the area. He had other duties as well. The patch Karel was staring at with the sword and the snakes was an antipartisan badge.

Karel looked back at his eyes. “Where'd my father go?” he said. “Did you take him away?”

“Your father has not disappeared,” Kehr said. “As far as we're concerned, no one disappears. We maintain a comprehensive criminal registry. All citizens are recorded there. No one loses himself.”

“The radio's always talking about somebody you're looking for,” Karel said.

“They're like beans in a coffee grinder,” Kehr said affably. “They get stirred around, and sometimes the big ones displace the little ones, but they all move into the grinder.”

Karel pondered the image.

“Your father,” Kehr said, “happily for everyone, chose another route. Your father chose to serve his country and joined the Party. He joined, in fact, the Civil Guard.”

Karel's mouth was dry. “Why would he do that?” he asked. “Why wouldn't he tell me?”

“You're asking me to speculate,” Kehr said. “As for the first question, I imagine he wanted to be part of a movement in which somebody like him—a failure in the eyes of his social class, in the eyes of his family, in his own eyes—can start from scratch. As for the second, I have no idea. But maybe he explains.” He produced a letter from the pile and held it out to Karel.

While he read it Karel felt the same shame he'd felt when Albert had criticized his father. His father's letter was hand-written, and the penmanship if anything was worse than he remembered:

Karel,

I know I didn't handle this in the best way possible but it had to be done this way for reasons you will soon see. Special Assistant Kehr has been good to me and you should cooperate with him. I've discovered two things I can do well: organize and facilitate. Right now I spend a lot of time outside town. I'll try to visit soon. I've given Special Assistant Kehr some money to buy a quarter of a ham or better. Make sure you eat right or you'll get sick. See you soon—

Your father S. Roeder

“The ham we already bought,” Kehr said.

“This letter was sealed,” Karel said.