The Zookeeper’s Wife (16 page)

"You know, Mother," Ryś said one day, "Szczurcio is learning how to open his cage. He's not stupid!"

"I don't think he's quite
that
smart," Antonina replied.

Szczurcio spent hours fiddling with the wire, grabbing the ends with his fingers and trying to untwist them, and after a night's crafty work, he finally succeeded in unknotting the wire and lifting up the sliding door, scrambling down a chair leg to the floor, shimmying up the water pipe, and sliding into the marshlike kitchen sink. Then he leapt atop the stove, climbed onto a warm radiator, and fell asleep. That's where Ryś found him in the morning. Returning him to his cage, Ryś closed the door and knotted the wire even tighter.

Early the next day, Ryś ran through the house to Antonina's bedroom, where he cried out in alarm: "Mom! Mom! Where's Szczurcio? His cage is empty! I can't find him anywhere! Maybe Balbina ate him? I have to go to school, and Dad is at work! Help!"

Still bedridden, Antonina couldn't help much with this dawn crisis, but she deputized Fox Man and the housekeeper, Pietrasia, to launch a search party, and they dutifully scouted all the closets, sofas, easy chairs, corners, boots—any bolt-hole where a muskrat might hide—with no success.

Because she couldn't believe the muskrat had simply "evaporated like camphor," she suspected Balbina or Żarka of mayhem, and had cat and dog brought to her bed for close inspection. There she carefully felt their stomachs for any suspicious bulges. If they'd eaten such a large animal—almost the size of a rabbit—surely their bellies would still be swollen. No, they felt slender as usual, so she declared the detainees innocent and released them.

Suddenly Pietrasia ran into her bedroom. "Come quick!" she shouted. "To the kitchen. Szczurcio is in the stove chimney! I started a fire the way I do every morning, and I heard a terrible noise!"

Using her cane, Antonina slowly rose from bed onto her swollen legs, carefully descended the stairs, and hobbled into the kitchen.

"
Szczurcio, Szczurcio
," she called sweetly.

A scuffling noise in the wall. When a soot-covered head poked from the chimney, she grabbed the fugitive's back and pulled him out, whiskers coated in grime, front paws singed. Gently, she washed him in warm water and soap, over and over, trying to remove the cooking grease from his fur. Then she applied ointment to his burns and placed him back in his cage.

Laughing, she explained that a muskrat builds a lodge by heaping plants and mud into a mound, then digging a burrow from below water level. This muskrat wanted a lodge not a cage, she said, and who could blame it for creating a facsimile world? He had even bent the metal burners to fashion an easier route into the chimney.

When Ryś returned from school that afternoon, he was thrilled to find Szczurcio back in his cage, and at dinner, as people carried food to the table, Ryś regaled all with the adventures of Szczurcio and the stovepipe. One little girl laughed so hard that she tripped on her way from the kitchen, spilling a full bowl of hot soup over Fox Man's head and onto Balbina, who had been sitting in his lap. Springing from his chair, Fox Man bolted into his bedroom, followed by his cat, and closed the door. Ryś ran after him, spied through the keyhole, and whispered regular reports:

"He took off his jacket!"

"He's drying it using a towel!"

"Now he's drying Balbina!"

"He's drying his face!"

"Ooooh! No! He opened the cage with his parakeets!"

At this point, Magdalena couldn't stand the suspense any longer and flung open the door. There stood Fox Man, the house concert master, column-like in the middle of the room, with parakeets circling his forehead like merry-go-round animals. After a few moments they landed on his head and started digging through his hair, pulling out and eating the soup noodles. At last Fox Man noticed the crowd in the doorway, silent and agog, waiting for some explanation.

"It would be a pity to waste such good food," he said of the bizarre scene, as if he'd found the only and obvious thing to do.

WINTER,
1942

T
IME USUALLY GLIDES WITH AN INCOHERENT PURR, BUT IN
the villa it always quickened as curfew hour approached, when a kind of solstice took place and the sun stopped on the horizon of Antonina's day, with minutes moving as slow as mummers: one, a stretched pause, then another. Because anyone who didn't make it home by curfew risked being arrested, beaten, or killed, the hour acquired a pagan majesty. Everyone knew curfew horror stories like that of Magdalena's friend, painter and prose writer Bruno Schulz, gunned down by a spiteful Gestapo officer in Drohobycz, on November 19, 1942. Another Gestapo officer, Felix Landau, who admired Schulz's macabre, sometimes sadomasochistic paintings, had given him a pass out of the Ghetto to paint frescoes of fairy tales on his son's bedroom walls. One day, Landau killed a Jewish dentist under the protection of Günther, another officer, and when Günther spotted Schulz in the Aryan quarter after curfew, walking home with a loaf of bread under his arm, he shot him in retaliation.

If everyone arrived safely, Antonina celebrated another day without mishap, another night unmauled by monsters in the city's labyrinths. Curfew twilight tormented Ryś, so she allowed him to stay up and await the homecomings; then he could fall asleep peacefully, his world intact. Years of war and curfews didn't alter that; he still anxiously awaited his father's return, indispensable as the moon's. Respecting this, Jan would go straight to Ryś's room, remove his backpack, and sit for a few minutes to talk about the day, often producing a little treasure tucked in a pocket. One night his backpack bulged as if it had iron ribs.

"What do you have there, Papa?" Ryś asked.

"A tiger," Jan said in mock fear.

"Don't joke, what's really in there?"

"I told you—a
dangerous
animal," his father said solemnly.

Antonina and Ryś watched Jan remove a metal cage containing something furry, shaped like a dwarf guinea pig, mainly chestnut in color, with white cheeks and spots on its sides like a Sioux horse.

"If you'd like to have him, he's yours!" Jan said. "He's a son of the hamster couple I have at the Hygiene Institute. . .. But if I give him to you, you're not going to feed him to
Balbina,
are you?" Jan teased.

"Papa, why do you talk to me like I'm a little child?" Ryś said, offended. He'd had all sorts of pets in the past, he argued, and hadn't done anything wicked with them.

"I'm very sorry," Jan said. "Take good care of him, keep a close eye on him, because he's the only survivor from a litter of seven. Unfortunately, the others were killed by their mother before I could stop her."

"What a horrible mother! Why do you keep her?"

"All hamsters have this cruel instinct, not only his mother," Jan explained. "A husband can kill his wife. Mothers chase their youngsters away from the burrow and don't care for them anymore. I didn't want to deprive the babies of their mother's milk too early, but unfortunately I miscalculated the best moment and was only able to save this one. I don't have time to take care of him at the lab, but I know you will do a great job."

Antonina wrote that she and Jan found it hard to decide how much to tell a small child about the amoral, merciless side of nature, without scaring him (the war offered frights enough), but they also felt it important that he know the real world and learn the native ways of animals, explicably vicious or inexplicably kind.

"I've read so many stories about hamsters," he said, disappointed, "and I was so sure they were nice, hardworking animals who collected grain for the winter. . .."

"Yes, that's true," Jan said reassuringly. "During the winter he hibernates, just like a badger, but if he happens to wake up hungry during winter, he can eat the grain and go back to sleep until spring."

"It's winter now, so why is this hamster awake?"

"Animals behave differently in the wild. We make captive ones live on a schedule that's unnatural to them because it's easier for us to take care of them, and that disturbs their normal sleep rhythms. But even though this hamster is awake, his pulse and breathing are a lot slower than they will be in the summer. You can check this for yourself—if you cover his cage, he'll fall asleep almost immediately."

Ryś drew a blanket over the cage and the hamster crept into a corner, settled back on its haunches, tucked its head down on its chest, covered its face with its front paws, and fell into a deep sleep. In time, Antonina judged him a "quite self-centered" little being, and "a noisy glutton" who "preferred his own company and an easy life." In a household that porous, where animal time and human time swirled together, it made sense to identify the passage of months not by season or year but by the stay of an influential visitor, two-or four-legged. To Antonina, the hamster's arrival "started a new era on our Noah's Ark, which we later called the 'Hamster Era.'"

N
EW YEAR, 1943, APPROACHED WITH ANTONINA STILL MAINLY
bedridden, and after three months, cabin fever and lack of exercise had depleted her body and spirits. She usually kept the door to her bedroom open so that she could join, however remotely, the stir of the house, its mingling smells and sounds. On January 9, when Heinrich Himmler visited Warsaw, he condemned another 8,000 Jews to "resettlement," but by now everyone understood that "resettlement" meant death, and instead of lining up as ordered, many hid while others ambushed the soldiers and dashed across the rooftops, creating just enough friction to curb deportations for several months. Surprisingly, sketchy telephone service continued, even to some bunkers, though it's hard to imagine why the Germans allowed it, unless they figured clever electricians could hook up illegal phones anyway or the Underground had its own telephone workers.

Before dawn one day, the Żabíńskis awoke, not to a chorus of gibbons and macaws as they used to, but to a jangling telephone and a voice that seemed to come from the far side of the moon. Maurycy Fraenkel, a lawyer friend who lived in the dying Ghetto, asked if he could "visit" them.

Although they hadn't heard from him in quite a while, on at least one occasion Jan had visited him in the Ghetto, and they knew him as Magdalena's "dearest friend," so they quickly agreed. Antonina noted that several nerve-trampling hours followed for Magdalena,

whose lips were blue, and her face so white that we could see many freckles, normally almost invisible. Her strong, ever-busy hands were trembling. The sparkle had vanished from her eyes, and we could read only one painful thought on her face: "Will he be able to escape and come here?"

He did escape but arrived a gnarled specimen, bent over like a gargoyle from the Other Side, as people sometimes referred to the Ghetto, a Yiddish term,
sitre akhre
, for the dim world where demons dwell and zombies wear "a husk or shell that has grown up around a spark of holiness, masking its light."

The unbearable weight of ghetto life had physically crippled him—his head hung low between curved shoulders, his chin rested on his chest, and he breathed heavily. Swollen red from frost, his nose glowed against a pale, sickly face. When he entered his new bedroom, in a dreamy sort of way he dragged an armchair from beside the wardrobe to the darkest corner of the room, where he sat hunched over, shrinking himself even more, as if he were trying to become invisible.

"Will you agree to have me here?" he asked softly. "You will be in danger. . .. It is so quiet here. I can't understand. . .." That was all he could manage before his voice trailed away.

Antonina wondered if his nervous system, adapted to the hurly-burly of Ghetto life, found this sudden plunge into calm and quiet unnerving, if it sapped more energy from him than the distressed world of the Ghetto had.

Born in Lwów, Maurycy Paweł Fraenkel had a passion for classical music, many composers and conductors as friends, and he had often organized small, private concerts. As a young man he studied law and moved to Warsaw, where he met Magdalena Gross, whose gift he greatly admired, at first becoming her patron, then close friend, and finally sweetheart. Before the war, she had brought him to the zoo, which he relished, and he had helped the Żabíńskis buy several boxcars full of cement to use in zoo renovations.

Maurycy soon grew used to life across the river from the lurid Ghetto, and as he ventured out of corners and shadows, Antonina wrote that his backbone seemed to straighten a little, though never completely. He had a sarcastic sense of humor, though he never laughed out loud, and a huge smile would light his face until his eyes scrunched and blinked behind thick glasses. Antonina found him

calm, kind, agreeable, and gentle. He didn't know how to be aggressive, frightful, or disagreeable even for a second. This was why he moved to the Ghetto when told to, without thinking twice about it. After he experienced the full tragedy of being there, he tried to commit suicide. By luck, the poison he used was too stale to work. After that, with nothing to lose, he decided to risk an escape.

Without documents he couldn't register anywhere, so officially he ceased to exist for a long time, living among friends but gaunt and ghostly, one of the disappeared. He had lost many voices: the lawyer's, the impresario's, the lover's, and it isn't surprising that he found speaking or even coherence difficult.

While Antonina lay ill, Maurycy sat next to her bed for hours, slowly recovering his spiritual balance, Antonina thought, as well as the energy to talk again. What weighed heaviest was the colossal risk he created just by being there, and he often referred to Governor Frank's threat of October 15, 1941, the decree that all Poles hiding Jews would be killed. Every Jew receiving help had to deal with this painful issue, including the dozen hidden in the villa and the rest in the animal houses, but Maurycy was especially bothered by the burden he added to the Żabíńskis' lives. It was one thing to expose
himself
to danger, he told Antonina, but the thought of spreading an epidemic of fear throughout the zoo, the hub of so many lives, piled on more guilt than he could shoulder.

In Antonina's bedroom, shelves and drawers recessed into white walls, and the bed nestled in a shallow alcove, from which it jutted like a well-upholstered pier. All the furniture had been crafted from silver birch, a plentiful tree in Poland, both hard and durable, a pale wood whose fibers vary from plain to flame-like, with here and there brown knots and fine brown traces of insects that once attacked the cambium of the living tree.

On the south side of the room, beside tall windows, a glass door opened onto the wraparound terrace; and on the north side, three white doors led to the hallway, the attic, and the step-in closet where Guests hid. Instead of the lever handles of the villa's other doors, the closet bore a high keyhole, and though it offered little space inside, a Guest could curl up there among the glide of fabrics and Antonina's comforting scent. Because the closet opened on both sides like a magician's trunk, bunched clothes concealed the opposite door whichever way one looked. As safety hatches go, it served well, especially since its hallway door began a foot or so above the floor, suggesting only a shallow cupboard, which a pile of laundry or a small table could easily disguise.

One day Maurycy, seated in a bedside chair, heard the housekeeper Pietrasia on the stairs and he hid in the closet, nestled among Antonina's polka-dot dresses. As Pietrasia left the room, Maurycy quietly emerged and sat down, but before Antonina could say a word Pietrasia opened the door and rushed back in with a housekeeping question she'd forgotten to ask. Seeing a stranger, she stopped abruptly, breathed hard, and frantically crossed herself.

"So you will continue to take salicylic acid," Maurycy said to Antonina in a doctorly tone, and delicately holding her wrist, he added: "And now I will check your pulse." Later, Antonina wrote that her anxious pulse wasn't hard to feel, and that his own had pounded down to his fingertips.

Pietrasia studied their faces, finding them calm, and shook her head in confusion. Mumbling that she must have had some sort of vision problem or blackout, she left the room, rubbing her brow and shaking her head as she went downstairs.

Antonina called Ryś and said: "Please bring me the
doctor's
coat and hat and let him out of the house by the kitchen door, so that Pietrasia will see him leaving. After that, call her to check on the chickens. Do you understand?"

Ryś blinked his eyes, thought awhile, and then a smile crept over his face. "I'll tell her that this morning I accidentally let a chicken out and we have to find it. Then the
doctor
can sneak back in through the garden door. That would work."

"Thank you for being so smart," Antonina told him. "Now hurry!"

From then on, Maurycy only roamed the house at night, after the housekeeper had left for the day and he could safely prowl downstairs, as if on forbidden tundra. Every evening, Antonina found him walking back and forth across the living room, slowly, reverently, so that he "would not forget how to walk," he explained. At some point, he'd pause to check on the hamster he'd befriended, before joining other Guests for Fox Man's piano concert.

One evening, between Rachmaninoff preludes, Fox Man took Maurycy aside and said, "Doctor, I'm bad at paperwork, and some of it's in German—a language I don't speak well at all. My fur business is growing and I really need a secretary. . .. Maybe you could help me?"

Maurycy had once confided to Antonina that, in seclusion, using an unfamiliar name, he felt like a phantom. This offer of Fox Man's meant Maurycy could become real again, with papers and mobility, and, best of all, residency status in the villa as an employee of the fur farm. Becoming real was no small accomplishment, since occupation ushered in an overgrowth and undergrowth of official identity cards and documents—bogus working papers, birth certificate, passport, registration card, coupons, and passes. His new papers declared him to be Paweł Zieliński, the official secretary of the fox farm, and so he rejoined the household as a lodger, which also meant he didn't have to hide in the upstairs closet, a space now available for another Guest. Becoming real brought psychological changes, too. He slept on a couch downstairs in the hamster's narrow room, adjacent to the dining room, among the rustlings of his favorite pet, and Antonina noticed that his entire mood began to change.

Maurycy told Antonina that every night he prepared his bed slowly with a happiness unknown to him since before occupation, taking pleasure in the simple acts of carefully folding his only suit, frayed as it was, and laying it over a chair beside his own bookshelf, occupied by the handful of books he had salvaged from his old life, in a house where he could sleep unmolested, surrounded by a surrogate family whose presence padded his existence.

For a great many people, the Ghetto had erased the subtle mysticism of everyday life, such reassuring subliminals as privacy, agency, and above all the faith that allows one to lie down at night and surrender easily to sleep. Among the innocence of hamsters, Maurycy slept near his books, with documents that bestowed the status of being real, and, best of all, under the same roof as his beloved Magdalena. Finding love undemolished, with enough space to exist and his heart still limber, gave him hope, Antonina thought, and even renegade "moments of pleasure and joy, feelings he'd lost in Ghetto life."

On February 2, 1943, the German Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad in the first big defeat of the Wehrmacht, but only three weeks later Jews working in Berlin armaments factories were freighted off to Auschwitz, and by mid-March the Kraków Ghetto was liquidated. Meanwhile, the Underground continued attacks of various kinds, 514 since January 1; and on January 18 the first armed resistance began in the Warsaw Ghetto.

During this time of seismic upheaval, more and more Ghetto dwellers washed up on the deck of the villa, arriving weather-beaten, "like shipwrecked souls," Antonina wrote in her diary. "We felt that our house wasn't a light, flimsy boat dancing on high waves, but a Captain Nemo's submarine gliding through deep ocean on its journey to a safe port." Meanwhile, the war storm blew violently, scaring all, and "casting a shadow on the lives of our Guests, who fled from the entrance of crematoriums and the thresholds of gas chambers," needing more than refuge. "They desperately needed hope that a safe haven even existed, that the war's horrors would one day end," while they drifted along in the strange villa even its owners referred to as an ark.

Keeping the body alive at the expense of spirit wasn't Antonina's way. Jan believed in tactics and subterfuge, and Antonina in living as joyously as possible, given the circumstances, while staying vigilant. So, on the one hand, Jan and Antonina each kept a cyanide pill with them at all times, but on the other, they encouraged humor, music, and conviviality. To the extent possible, theirs was a bearable, at times even festive, Underground existence. Surely, in response to the inevitable frustrations brought about by living in close quarters, the Guests uttered Yiddish's famous curses, which run the gamut from graphic ("May you piss green worms!" or "A barracks should collapse on you!") to ornate:

You should own a thousand houses

with a thousand rooms in each house

and a thousand beds in every room.

And you should sleep each night

in a different bed, in a different room,

in a different house, and get up every morning

and go down a different staircase

and get into a different car,

driven by a different chauffeur,

who should drive you to a different doctor

—and
he
shouldn't know what's wrong with you either!

Nonetheless, "I have to admit that the atmosphere in our house was quite pleasant," Antonina confessed in her diary, "sometimes even almost happy." This contrasted sharply with the texture of life and the mood inside even the best hideouts around town. For example, Antonina and Jan knew Adolf Berman well, and most likely read the letter Adolf received in November 1943, from Judit Ringelblum (Emanuel's wife), which told of the mood in a bunker nicknamed "Krysia":

Here a terrible depression reigns—an indefinite prison term. Awful hopelessness. Perhaps you can cheer us up with general news and maybe we could arrange for the last of our nearest to be with us.