Lights Out in the Reptile House (20 page)

“What happened to him?” Karel asked. “Where is he?”

Kehr looked at his watch. “I imagine he's at the zoo,” he said. “Most people have been out of bed and busy for hours.”

“You mean you haven't done anything to him? He wasn't arrested?” Karel asked.

“You sound disappointed,” Kehr said. “Did you think we would hurt him?”

Karel blinked. “Yeah,” he said. “I did.”

Kehr shook his head briefly at the fancies of children and stood up. “We'd like lunch, at some point, at your convenience,” he said. “And our friend the ringtail's been leaving exploratory turds in various places. I can smell them.”

“You're not going to do anything to him?” Karel asked.

Kehr paused at the door. “As I told you, he is the head of the partisan cell in the area,” he said. “Who he meets, who he has contact with, is of some interest to us.”

“Aren't you afraid he'll get away?” Karel said.

“The only people who leave are people we want to leave,” Kehr said tiredly, going down the stairs. “How many times do you have to be told that?”

He checked. He got dressed and said he was going to the market and went to the zoo instead. He slipped in the back gate and found Albert making his rounds. He stayed out of sight. Everything seemed fine. At the gate on the way out, Perren appeared behind him. He was not surprised at seeing Karel. He said, “This area's closed to visitors,” and demonstrated by shutting the gate and giving it a rattle.

So why did he feel the way he did? They'd known about Albert before him and everything was the same. And maybe Albert was doing something he shouldn't've been. But he couldn't sustain the righteousness because the image of himself terrified and selfish and saying the old man's name rose up in front of his eyes while he walked, to renew his self-disgust.

He felt sorry for himself and moped and felt disgusted about that and so moped some more. He wished he'd never gone to the station, blamed Leda, blamed Nicholas, blamed Albert, blamed Kehr, blamed himself. None of it helped. He passed mirrors and scowled, as if no one should have to face what he'd seen.

Days he spent alone. Kehr and his assistants almost always now worked late. At night he lay in bed and Kehr talked. He felt lost and hopeless and didn't protest. Kehr wore his full uniform and explained the stripes and bars and pins signifying the honors and theaters of service and the distinction displayed in training. He left a replica of the antipartisan badge he wore on the lamp table beneath the photo of Karel's mother. He gave Karel a replica of the small ceremonial dagger he wore, with the antipartisan symbol flanking the Party letters on the hilt. He talked with patience and attentiveness while Karel toyed with the dagger or tossed and turned or lay on his stomach with his chin on the pillow and his eyes on the wall.

He talked about some of the unfortunate lapses of discipline Karel had witnessed and suggested that soldiers in such cases were unsuited to their roles, and who after all could blame wolves set to guard sheep?

Karel at one point interrupted to wonder aloud if the Party had done all it wanted to do and was ready to stop.

There was no answer in the darkness. Then Kehr said in a low voice that all they'd done so far was impose the illusion of order, as though they'd laid a slab of glass over a whirlpool.

The people, he went on after a short silence, were always more malleable than expected. They were now habituated to government by surprise, to believing the situation too complicated for the average citizen to comprehend and too dangerous to talk about. They worked hard to live by the rules, and the Party changed the rules, slightly but enough to continue to make obedience compelling work. The appropriate image, he suggested, might be the blind man who continually had to negotiate his way past rearranged furniture.

Of course, some complained, Kehr told him. Most remained where they were: removed from politics.

What about the partisans? Karel asked. He knew who Kehr was talking about: his neighbors, his father, himself, before his naming of Albert. The partisans, Kehr said, believed, as did the Civil Guard, that there was more latent opposition to the Party out there than anyone might think, ready to be agitated into motion.

The partisans understood violence, Kehr said. They understood a central point: that violence was the only way to create a hearing for moderation. And, of course, they didn't accept the consequences of their actions unless they were caught: they didn't stay around to take the punishment.

Within everyone there was a little man claiming Common Sense and Common Decency, Kehr said, but there came a point when people became used to even the unnecessary brutalities. Did Karel ever wonder at what point people would say, of the steps the Party felt compelled to take toward national solidarity, “No, not that”? Did Karel know that all around him people demonstrated that there was nothing they would not stand for? Karel pulled the pillow over his head. Did Karel know that feeling Kehr remembered from long ago, the feeling he'd never forgotten, when he first understood that all sorts of things that had been supposedly forbidden, impossible, and criminal seemed more and more natural, more and more possible, to this new version of himself?

Karel was standing at the stove preparing some simple pastries Kehr had shown him how to make called Prisoners' Fingers while Kehr worked at the kitchen table, every so often taking a break to continue what he called “our discussions.” Karel rolled the dough with dirty hands and didn't retain much of what was being said. He thought about Leda and how much she suspected. He'd asked if he could write to her, and Kehr had said that right then the mail in their area wasn't moving in any direction.

Kehr talked about violence and aesthetic standards, and when Karel's interest was flagging completely he asked what Karel thought should be done with Leda's journals.

Karel turned so quickly one of the pastries made a cricketlike hop and stuck to the wall before rolling off. Kehr was incompletely successful in hiding his pleasure. He repeated the question.

“You have her journals?” Karel asked stupidly.

“We do,” Kehr said. “A search of the house turned them up. We'll save them for her, naturally. I just thought you'd be interested.”

In the other room the ringtail was tapping on something with his claws as if working on a typewriter. “I am,” Karel said.

They were going to be going over there this afternoon, Kehr said. Karel was welcome to come.

All the way there Karel felt guilty and nervous. The house was double-padlocked
BY ORDER OF THE NATION AND THE CIVIL GUARD
and Kehr had the keys. While he got to work with them Karel waited on the front steps. Neighbors peeked from behind blinds and curtains.

Kehr opened the door and went in. He moved some packing boxes from the hall and led Karel to Leda's room and hefted a shallow box off the desk and put it in Karel's arms. Then he left the room.

This was wrong. Karel knew it. The dresser had been dragged over and the floor molding behind it pulled out. He could see the hole where she'd kept the journals. These were things she had a right to keep to herself, things she could have shared with him if she'd wanted to. But he was excited at having secret access: Leda herself answering all his questions. How did she feel about him? How much did she think about him? Was there anybody else?

And suppose this was his only chance? She was gone. Suppose this was the only Leda he'd ever get again?

Kehr seemed to be bumping around innocuously downstairs. It wasn't clear to Karel what he was doing.

There was still time. He could leave it all, let Kehr know he knew he had no right to do this. But what if she'd gotten herself into trouble with what she'd written here? If Kehr or somebody had read it? He'd need to warn her then, or plead her case. He hefted the box higher and said, “That's true,” as if saying it would make it so, and left the room and headed downstairs.

He spread everything in front of him on his desk and then with suppressed excitement limited himself to the first of the three spiral-bound notebooks. It was filled with pencil drawings. She had titled some of them:
Nicholas, Nicholas and David, Nicholas Asleep, Sad Crow and Rabbit, Dog,
and then, filling him with hope and joy,
K's Hands
. That one featured three sets of hands orbiting a lizard's foreleg and claw: one with the right hand curled inside the left (washing?), another hefting a rock, and the third operating a nooser. The design puzzled and bothered him. Was she comparing his hands to the lizard's? Did she think of him in terms of the Reptile House? She'd done the foreleg from life: the toes ending in the sharp curve of claw, the keeled scales. He tried to push ahead but found himself flipping back to that page, unable to stop looking.

He left a piece of paper there as a bookmark and paged quickly along looking for other parts of his body. He came across an old man with Albert's hair and tired expression, dressed in a zoo smock. He was holding a bird in one hand and a gun in the other. His legs ended at the ankles. Whether he was supposed to be standing in something or Leda couldn't draw feet Karel couldn't tell. It looked like Albert, and the connection disturbed him. More and more he was having the queasy feeling that his whole world was interconnected behind his back. The bird had a leafed branch in its beak. There were lines radiating out from the man's head. Holiness? A thought? A headache? A vulture or other huge bird sat in space above him. She'd drawn
NUP
on its breast, the letters curved to fit.

He shut the notebook. He'd look at the drawings more later. He wanted more of her voice and thoughts.

On the first page of the second notebook it said,
This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me
.—
Leda Schiele
. A sheaf of pages following that had been torn out. The first entry remaining had no date but was numbered
17,
at the top of the page.

Elsie was right: I hurt her feelings, and where did I get the right to do that? I'm never happy with anyone else but where do I get the idea I'm so great? From the bottom up I need to work on myself. I say I want to be an artist but what do I do to prove it? I hardly draw anymore and I have zero patience for my books. We learned to draw pretty well in school even though our art mistress was mediocre and very young, and what've I done with what I learned? At least I've stopped turning out complete trash like I did with Mr. G. Sometimes the other thing that cheers me up is that I think I'm learning, and that's the main thing. The rest should come by itself.

It's not a game anymore. My ambition should be to perceive things clearly and calmly. I'm surrounded by false information and false people. For my sake and my family's I have to figure out the truth and act on it. And how is the truth discernible? The truth is discernible first by means of logic and second by the precise investigation of things. Nicholas's treatment an ex.

She sounds like Kehr, Karel thought. What wasn't a game anymore?

Why do I let what other kids think about me affect me? Don't listen or care so much about what others say. You retain your independence when you don't rely on what other people can take away.

Do not do yourself what you dislike in others.

Develop yourself. Develop yourself.

I have to find friends I can trust. I never feel completely happy or relaxed around people. It's like every word I have to examine from every angle, and I always have to watch myself. I hate it. I should not close myself off. I should develop for what's coming a hard head and a soft heart. Too many people around here have the opposite!

Every day someone I thought was half all right turns out to be an idiot. The little idiots support the big idiots. Today the radio was going on as usual about things I can't even talk about, they make me so angry. Nearly everyone's lost their minds. Everything runs on lies, everything generates lies, everything is so tangled and mixed up it's getting so I can't imagine it any other way.

My pessimism is getting worse. I feel like skepticism and cynicism are poisoning my soul. I want to save it by running away, but where to? Instead, I create a wall around me and keep adding to it. Who will climb it? Why do I want anyone to?

God, listen to me.

I have to see clearly and be stronger. For all my big talk about self-improvement I'm still working at the same old pace. I get childishly pleased with every bit of progress I make, but every day I see how far I have to go.

There was a poem entitled “Anxiety.” Most of it had been furiously crossed out. He could decipher only
perhaps I will learn/perhaps I will draw them,
and in the final long stanza, two phrases:
never-ending,
and
leaves me tethered
.

A mimeographed note was folded into the next page:
I hereby permit my daughter Leda Schiele to use the outdoor and indoor swimming pools. __________ : Father's Signature
. Someone had drawn a line through
Father's
and had written
Mother's
.

There was an short entry in a code, nonsense words repeating themselves in various patterns, followed by:

can't remember

possibly

not sure

oh

There was another.

Man was
CREATED
to have these doubts and terrors and miseries of self-examination. I believe that. So he can't just vegetate, like a plant or a lizard, because his mind won't leave him alone. What the mind tells the soul we say to the state:
WE WILL NOT BE SILENT. WE ARE YOUR BAD CONSCIENCE.
(save)

He shut the journal and put it down. He stacked the other two on it and put all three in his bottom drawer. Then he went downstairs and outside, past Kehr, who kept an eye on him as he went by. Out away from the house he cleaned the shed in the company of the rabbits for the rest of the afternoon.