Lights Out in the Reptile House (18 page)

He snorted, his hands over his mouth. Was there anybody anywhere who thought he might do the
right
thing? The ringtail sat on its hind legs near the door and licked its paws.

What was this Kehr stuff? What
about
Kehr? There was nothing there. Who knew what the man wanted? But the idea of him stayed with Karel, like the idea of his father coming back. It was as if Kehr had demonstrated how even lives like his could have developed assurance and focus.

He went upstairs and dug out his father's letter. He kept it hidden; he wasn't sure why. He brought it downstairs and reread it.

If he loved Leda there wouldn't be any hesitation, he thought.

That was true. And here he was hesitating. He was the King of Hesitation, he thought bitterly. That's what he should do for his country: hesitate. He slapped his cheek in disgust, and the ringtail looked over with interest.

Kehr had cleared the table of his papers. Someone had set a dish of plums out, recently enough that they were still beaded with condensation. Against the wall there was a copy of the book he'd seen before:
Psychological Operations in Partisan War
. He picked it up. He had the sense the table had been arranged for him, like someone setting out milk and cookies. Outside the window something was startled into flight, the concussion of wings frightening him.

He tried to guess the idea behind the holes in the heads on the cover: bullet holes? The place the information went in? On the first page it said:

Partisan warfare is essentially a political war. Therefore its area of operations exceeds the statutory and territorial limits of conventional warfare, to penetrate the political entity itself, the political animal. In effect, the human being should be considered the primary objective in a partisan war. And conceived of as a military target, the human being has his most critical point in his mind.

He closed and opened his eyes and read the sentence again. He got frustrated after a third try and kept going.

Once the mind has been reached the political animal has been defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets.

This book is a manual for the training of low-level counterinsurgency and antipartisan units in psychological operations, with specific application in the concrete case of the current national struggle with partisan groups and undesirables, both within and outside our present boundaries. Welcome!

Stasik came in, causing the ringtail to circle on itself and show its teeth. Karel put the book back against the wall. Stasik ignored him. Karel stretched and asked about Kehr, and Stasik had no idea when he was coming back.

Kehr never did. Karel waited up, lying on top of his sheets in the darkness, listening.

The next morning Karel found him back at the kitchen table, which was again covered with papers. Someone had made hard-boiled eggs and there was more coffee.

Karel sat at the table in his shorts, and Kehr said something without looking up about the laziness of cooks and teenagers. He finally stopped what he was doing. “Can I help you?” he said.

Karel nodded, and Kehr waited.

“I had a question about traveling,” Karel said.

Kehr looked at him with stone eyes. “Are you going somewhere?” he said.

“No, not me,” Karel said. “Well, I was thinking about it. I have a friend who wants to go somewhere. To the capital. I know travel passes are hard to get right now.” This, he thought, was a real big mistake.

“I thought you were going to continue to work at the zoo,” Kehr said quietly. “I thought you liked to work at the zoo.”

“I did,” Karel said. His stomach felt as it did when he finished pots of coffee himself. “But Albert over there told me he didn't need me for a while. Albert Delp. We had sort of a fight. Or something.”

Kehr's expression didn't change. Karel thought of the rabbits in his shed before dinner, watching him all the way from the door to whatever cage he stopped at. Kehr said, “Nobody's going anywhere right now that's not official business. Nobody's getting travel passes. Unless somebody like me arranges it, as a special favor.” He took out a small pass card, with an antipartisan symbol printed on it, and held it up for Karel to see. Then he pocketed it, and looked back down at his work.

Stasik touched Karel on the shoulder to signal it was time to go. Karel stood up.

“A friend?” Kehr asked, his attention on his work.

“Yes,” Karel said. He waited, but Kehr didn't ask. Stasik led him out.

He told Leda at the restaurant, and she nodded quickly and told him she'd talk to him and left. They hadn't even sat down. She hadn't asked if he wanted to go. He was convinced he'd lost her and broke broom-handle-size sticks on tree trunks all the way home.

He stopped by the Reptile House in desperation, but Albert was out, or wouldn't see him.

He paced his room and haunted Leda's street the next day, unable to approach Kehr to try again or Leda to tell her he was going. He sat in his room that night and thought, I should be packing. Saturday morning he helped Stasik and Schay unload boxes and odd folding frameworks of wood and metal that neither of them would comment on, and then made their lunch. In the afternoon they sent him to the market. At one point while dragging his baskets from vendor to vendor he held up a melon and thought, She's doing it right now. He imagined her leading Nicholas through the gates, Nicholas looking over his shoulder at that place for the last time. He hand-washed Stasik's uniform cap, which had a thin looping arc of a bloodstain across the brim. He made dinner. He cleaned up with water and ammonia some hard-to-reach messes the ringtail had left. Finally he got away in the early evening, and ran all the way to her hedge. Lounging soldiers watched him go by and tried to lead him with pebbles, arguing over whose came closest.

The neighbors were standing around her house under the streetlight, discussing something. There was an over-turned red wagon on the sidewalk. He recognized it as David's. Most of the lights were on in the house, including in Leda's room. Their front door was open. He began running again.

The collected neighbors watched him go by and into the house as if this were one of the expected developments.

The hall light was still on. Moths looped and staggered beneath it. One drawer of a small chest in the hallway was pulled out. One of the family photos atop the chest was tipped over and lying on its face. A corner of the rug was turned up.

He shouted for her and felt cold and terrified and ran from room to room. There was a half-filled suitcase on the kitchen floor. There were folded and unfolded blankets heaped on the table. He recognized empty spaces in the living and dining rooms, marked by faint outlines on the floor, and realized furniture was missing. On the dining-room table a black-and-gray spider the size of a child's hand had centered itself on one of the dinner plates.

In her room he couldn't tell how much was gone. Some drawers were empty and the dresser top looked bare. Her bed was unmade and the folds in the bedclothes formed a face. On the floor by the dressing table he found an abandoned blouse that kept the shape of her shoulders.

Outside one of the neighbors folded her arms and told him they were gone.

“Did they say where they were going?” Karel asked. He scanned the yard: a dishtowel hung from the prickly pear along the walk.

“No,” the woman said. “And neither did the police.”

“The police took them?” Karel asked. His throat felt closed.

They certainly did, the woman said. The whole bunch. Her companions murmured. He could see in her expression the beginnings of the notion that maybe this kid who was so interested was wanted, too.

He ran to the police station. He had to stop four different times, swaying and bent low, hands on his thighs, gasping for breath. Sweat stung his eyes.

There was an open-backed truck filled with darkness in front of the station. When he stopped to wipe the sweat from his eyes with both hands an upright piano skidded from the back of it and fell the four feet to the street. It landed with a tremendous noise and sprang open like a trick box. Two soldiers appeared where it had been in the back and threw out a full-length mirror. It pitched aerodynamically onto the piano and shattered with a spray of flashing glass. These were Leda's family's, he recognized them, and he rushed to the back of the truck and caught the leg of a soldier emerging from the darkness with an end table. The soldier kicked his hand away like a vine or rope and Karel grabbed for it again, idiotically, and the soldier holding the table looked down at him and he recognized then that the soldier could kill him and that that would be the end of it. He stood there, dumb with the knowledge, and while he did he could see the soldier formulate the decision not to. He understood from his expression that the decision represented what Albert used to call, when deciding which individual to choose when gathering specimens, a whim.

Someone put a hand on his shoulder and turned him around, and Kehr was standing there in full uniform. “Let's leave our friend here alone,” he said. The soldier set the table down on the truck bed and saluted. Kehr nodded and turned Karel away, leading him with a hand on the back of the neck.

Very dangerous, very foolish, he said. He shook his head as if Karel had been caught climbing the roof of his house. Karel was still both astonished and relieved and was trying to formulate a question.

“Regular troops, recruited to help out,” Kehr said, leading him into the station. “Working under the assumption that the taking of souvenirs was allowed whenever they assisted in a mousetrap.”

“A mousetrap?” Karel said.

Kehr looked as if he'd been insufficiently discreet. A technical term, he said. Anyway, as Karel could see, they'd taken the news that the furniture was still the property of the state badly.

“Aren't they going to return it?” Karel said.

“In some areas it's wise not to push these types too far,” Kehr said. He signaled the sergeant on duty at the desk, and the sergeant opened the swinging gate to the rooms in the back. They were blocked by a woman with thin arms and sunken eyes who was trying to regain the sergeant's attention. She asked him to check again on her little boy. Kehr excused himself, and when she stepped aside he brushed by her. Karel followed. The sergeant told her that there were no children here and that this was not a kindergarten.

At a blank door Kehr paused and looked down the hall at a corporal seated on a child's chair and reading a magazine. Kehr waited for his attention and then pointed interrogatively at the door, raising his eyebrows. The corporal saluted, and nodded yes, that was the one. Karel could hear voices behind it.

Kehr mimed an “oh” and nodded thanks and then delicately turned the handle. He held the door open and gestured Karel through. He said he'd give him a few minutes. When Karel hesitated, Kehr reassured him with a puzzled look, as if to suggest he had no idea why Karel might hesitate. Once Karel was through he shut the door behind him with exaggerated politeness.

The Schieles were all in the room, with three suitcases and a bundle made from a bedsheet tied with rope. Two of the suitcases were open, and Stasik and another member of the Civil Guard Karel didn't know were going through them, holding shirts and pants up, giving each a gentle shake at eye level and dropping it on the floor. Leda was standing against the wall. David and Nicholas were sitting beside her on a bench. Their mother was in a folding chair nearby. Leda caught his eye but didn't change her expression, and he didn't cross the room to her. Mrs. Schiele was looking at her suitcases as if someone were spitting in them or filling them with animal parts.

Stasik nudged the other Civil Guardsman and pointed out Karel, and they left everything where it was, and waited for him to get out of the way so they could leave the room.

Mrs. Schiele thanked God once the door closed. She'd been crying. She seemed to believe things had been turned around by his presence. “I told Leda your friend would help straighten this out,” she said gratefully. “I told her.”

“Be quiet, Mother,” Leda said. David waved a hello. He had a paper cup on the floor next to him, and a toy boat, and he was shaking iridescent water from the boat.

“What happened?” Karel said. He was talking to Leda. She was looking at him closely, and he was chilled by her expression.

“You tell me,” she said. “I took Nicholas for the walk and when I got him home your friend Kehr was already there. They had David and my mother and were loading the piano into the back of the truck.”

“More and more people kept getting into the truck after we did,” David said. “We kept having to move over.”

“That piano is an antique,” Mrs. Schiele said. “Do you think they'd just
take
it like that?”

“How'd they know so soon?” Karel said.

“What a good question,” Leda said.

“I didn't do anything!” Karel protested. “I didn't tell anybody!” He took a step toward her. Nicholas looked at him intently and then returned his attention to David.

Leda turned her head a little and kept her eyes on him. He couldn't tell whether she believed him or not.

“Now I'm accused of kidnapping,” Leda said. She seemed fiercely calm. “And they say they found other things, publications, in my room.”

“You mean those newspapers? Those pamphlets?” Karel said, and realized from her face that she thought someone was listening.

“I told them people come and go from my house all the time,” Mrs. Schiele said. “With all the work I do for the Women's League it's a shock if I'm home at all. With membership drives and contribution collections they absolutely run us ragged. Who knows what's where? Who knows how things get in your house?” She shifted in her folding chair, and Karel understood that even she realized they were being listened to.

He crossed to where Leda was standing. She was giving David and Nicholas hard candy from her pockets and they were filling their cheeks like squirrels. Nicholas had figs in one hand as well, and David had between his legs a hat-sized bag with most of his smaller toys in it. It was as if in a modest way she was spoiling them in anticipation of disaster.