Only the Animals (7 page)

Sincerely

R.P.

 

Dear Red Peter

          I do not want to worry you – we are fine, mostly. But food is scarce, as you say, and we are struggling to find enough to feed the animals at the zoo. The children and I are surviving on dark bread, a few slices of sausage with no fat, and three pounds of turnips a week. My daughter stole a pound of butter from another child on the street and my younger son looted a stringy piece of boiled beef and we celebrated this with more enthusiasm than if Germany had won the war. Of course we share any food we have with Hazel.

I'm afraid Herr Hagenbeck has not helped us to buy any food on the black market. He has not been to the zoo in a while now. I do not want to disrespect him, and perhaps he is trying as we speak to source extra supplies – but if you see him out in the city at one of the Academy functions, will you remind him of us, and of the animals?

Hazel's latest letter, as you will see, is a little uncouth. But again, in the interests of allowing her free rein to explore and experiment with language, I have noted down, word for word, what she dictated to me. She was quite taken with
The Entropy of Reason
– I have been reading to her from the copy you gave me years ago.
I hope her letter does not embarrass you. It shouldn't. She is quite right about what she can give you. Things that I could not.

Yours

Evelyn

Dear Red Peter

          How will we play bedroom games when I am your wife? Frau Oberndorff is reading Dr Mitzkin's book to me,
The Entropy of Reason
. He warns that humans will be reduced to word machines. They will eat words, drink words, bathe in words, imprison themselves with words, kill themselves with words. Copulate with words.

Will you toss words at me when I swing from the curtains towards you and display my arsehole? Will I throw words at you when you thump your chest and sink your fangs into my rump? I cannot give you much other than a warm body flexible in the ways you would like it, a certain length of arm, bow legs, a barrel torso. Would you like me to be more human, or less human, or more or less human?

Regards

Hazel

 

Dearest Evelyn

          You must let me visit you. Please, darling, don't be stubborn about this. I need to know that you and the children are all right. Do not worry about Herr Hagenbeck finding out – he has gone to Africa to sit out the war, according to rumours among my colleagues at the Academy. I couldn't believe at first that he would abandon the zoo after his considerable financial investment in it (and in me), but I suppose it makes sense. He is a man who puts his own needs first and this has always stood him in very good stead. There will be other exotic animals, other zoos, other apes to train.

I feel sorry for Hazel, truly I do, but now that Hagenbeck is gone, I won't be forced into it anymore. Not just writing to her, but everything, the whole terrible partnership he dreamed up for me. He is gone, Evelyn, he is gone. We are free – almost – to do as we please.

I want to see you. Please. Take me back.

Yours

Red Peter

 

Dear Red Peter

          Thank you for sending us a bushel of potatoes, which we devoured. The children would have eaten them raw if I had not stopped them descending on the sack just in time.

You were right about Herr Hagenbeck. He has indeed abandoned the zoo and gone to Africa. A letter arrived from him today, mailed in Hamburg before he left. After all these years, after all that we have done for him, this is what he had to say:

I must remind you that the incidence of actual starvation in Hamburg is extremely low. The only known cases so far, even through this harsh winter, have been among the inmates of jails, asylums, and other institutions where each adult has access only to war rations, unsupplemented by black market supplies.

My good friend Dr Neumann, Professor of Hygiene at the University of Bonn, has just sent me the results of his most interesting experiment. He limited himself for a month to the food ration for an average person. The outcome is that he lost a third of his weight and was so hungry he found it difficult to concentrate on his work.

But who among us – other than prisoners and madmen – cannot find what he or she needs to survive beyond the official rations? I do believe it is a way of separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

This communal hunger is bringing out our ingenuity as a nation. Take, for example, our efforts to engineer alternative edible fats now that vegetable fats are being reserved for the manufacture of glycerine for propellants and explosives. Industry has stepped in to provide all kinds of solutions: bones are steamed, grease is squeezed from old rags or household slops, oil is wrung from graphite and from seeds and fruit stones. Flavourful berries and leaves are steeped in hot water for tea. We have even invented a surrogate for beer using chemicals rather than malt. Trust in our German nation. We shall prevail.

He shall prevail, no doubt, sitting in the lush jungle in Africa while we starve in Hamburg!

Hazel has insisted on writing to you this week, though you did not write to her. Her thoughts have taken a turn for the poetic, one could say. What follows is closer to impressions one might jot down in a diary. I have persisted in recording them for you, however, as I believe she is going through another important linguistic developmental phase.

You cannot visit us, not now. My husband wrote to say he will soon be returning on leave.

Evelyn

*   *   *

The trip into the city. Frau Oberndorff's face. She runs her fingers through her hair, wipes her nose, yawns with hunger. Her hair has gone dull, no colour in her lips, bloodless.

She took me and the children to the soup kitchen at the Children's Home. The youngest child may have turnip disease. The children were given a meal of thin soup made from mangold-wurzel
and cabbage, and stock from stewed horse bones. It smelled disgusting and they tell me it tasted worse.

A doctor working at the Home pointed out to Frau Oberndorff a boy orphan with a swollen stomach. He had a broken jaw and was missing most of his teeth due to rickets. ‘You see this child here, it was given an incredible amount of bread and yet it did not get any stronger,' the doctor said. ‘I found out that it hid all the bread it received underneath its straw mattress. The fear of hunger was so deeply rooted in the child that it collected the stores instead of eating the food. A misguided animal instinct made the dread of hunger worse than the actual pangs.'

The bedbug. Hard decision to squash and eat it, and not give it to my cricket for his supper. But I was very hungry.

 

My darling Evelyn

          Thank you, thank you, a thousand times, for yesterday. I suspect when you saw me standing at the door your first instinct was to slam it shut, and if it hadn't been for the children's joy at seeing me, I would not have been invited inside. I was shocked to see you looking so thin, my dear. I scoured the city for black market supplies this morning, with no success – some of the people waiting in a ration queue threw stones at me when they saw me lurking nearby. Nobody wants to see an ape eat when there are humans going hungry.

I want to say that you have done well with Hazel. She is sweet, and very clever. She should not fear her fate now that Herr Hagenbeck is no longer here to force our union. I agree with you that her intensive training should be stopped for now – there are more important things for all of us to worry about – and when your husband returns he can decide how to proceed. Is it strange that I think of her as one of your children? Perhaps we could care for her as such in the future.

Do not worry, darling, I will stay away now that you are expecting your husband to return any day. The single touch of your smooth hands as you said goodbye will sustain me.

R.P.

 

Dear R.P.

        I have troubling news of Hazel. A few days ago she found your notes to me, enclosed in the same envelopes containing the letters for her. She can read quite well now, though how much she understood of their full meaning I am not certain. Since then, she has stopped eating. She refuses all food I offer her, and has retreated to her old cage at the back of the laboratory, where she used to live before she learned her manners. I am hoping this is a temporary side effect of extreme hunger – eating simply makes one hungry again; not eating at least does not give the stomach false hope. However, I thought it best to let you know.

As I asked you in person, please do not write until you hear from me again, just in case.

Yours

Evelyn

PS: Hazel refused to dictate a letter to you. I'm sorry.

 

Dear Red Peter

          Perhaps you have already heard. My husband is dead. He did not make it home from the front. It is no use pretending; you know how I felt about him. I will not miss his cold rage. But I grieve for my younger guileless self, the girl I was when I agreed to marry him. And for the children. They don't understand, not really. We are all distracted by our hunger. Strong emotion uses up a lot of energy, and we don't have much of it anymore.

I haven't told Hazel. She was always partial to him, despite his cruel training methods. We are out of coal for heating, and my little household's supplies of both petroleum and methyl alcohol are almost used up. The colder and darker it becomes in the lab, the stronger Hazel's will seems to be to remain within her cage. The children and I try to keep her company in there as often as we can, when we are not standing in the ration lines.

I have cut up the few clothes my husband left behind – they had been hanging uselessly in the cupboard since he left – and made small towels for the children out of them. We were down to a single bath towel for the whole family to use. I have impetigo rash from wearing the same unwashed wool suit for weeks, but there is no soap to be had.

Hazel dictated the note below to you. She is still not herself; she is not thinking clearly. Nothing I can do or say will induce her to eat.

Give me some time, darling, to pull myself together before you visit.

Yours

Evelyn

 

Did you get yourself a bit of pork in the recent Pig Murders, Red Peter? A fair share of the fatty spoils? I hear the pigs were so skinny there was almost nothing on them. Nine million hogs ordered slaughtered by the government to give everybody a break from months of meatlessness.

Of course, how could I forget? You don't eat meat.

 

Dearest Evelyn

          I am sorry I disregarded your plea and came to see you the very day I received the letter about your husband. But I am not sorry for taking you in my arms and kissing you, tasting your tears, feeling your ribs pressed against mine. I am hungry, darling, starving, but only for you.

In my delirious joy at holding you again I forgot to apologise for my appearance. Since the American cotton shortage, and the decree that men can no longer keep more than two suits of clothing, the police decided to enter my rooms at the hotel and requisitioned my suits from the wardrobe, and I have had some trouble finding suitable attire since. I don't think I was specifically targeted, not this time at least. At the Academy I have heard stories about how dire this shortage is. A colleague told me of a soldier at the front who was issued a shirt made from a woman's winter blouse, gathered with a ribbon around his neck. He refused it, and said he would rather die of cold in a shirt made of paper.

For the first time in many years, I find myself grateful to have fur. It seems this war is slowly stripping me of the trappings of being human, thread by thread. But that is fine, as long as I am never again stripped of you.

Yours always

Red Peter

 

Dearest R.P.

        The boots you found for my little girl to keep her feet warm while she is unwell fit her perfectly. The varnish on the paper uppers has cracked a little, but nothing I can't fix.

Hazel's fasting has continued. She asked me to put a sign outside her cage, and dictated what I should write on it:
THE HUNGER ARTIST
. She must have picked that up from the man Herr Hagenbeck hired to fast at the zoo a few years ago, as a summer diversion. Now she wants me to charge spectators a small fee to stand outside her cage and watch her starve, but we do not have many paying visitors to the zoo these days. People get angry when they see animals being fed, even if it is with turnip peels – but you know this already. She has dictated another note for you. I fear she is losing her mind, but whether it is from hunger or as a delayed consequence of her training, I cannot tell.

I can hardly wait to see you again tomorrow.

Yours

Evelyn

 

There was once a Hunger Artist who kept the good people of Stellingen and Hamburg entertained by fasting for forty days and forty nights.

Do you remember him? Perhaps you visited the zoo on one of your speaking rounds and stopped outside the enclosure where he sat cross-legged in little more than a loincloth? Naughty boys liked to tempt the Artist to eat by throwing peanuts into his enclosure, but the nuts remained untouched in their woody shells. Visitors believed he was creating a masterpiece with his own body.

But then the people lost interest. Nobody bought season tickets anymore, nobody came in the evenings to watch him starve by torchlight. Even the man he had employed as his professional watcher, to guarantee to spectators that he was not secretly gorging himself overnight, quit his job. Is there anything more ridiculous than an Artist who suffers without an audience? Nobody was there on the forty-first day, when the Hunger Artist crawled out of his cage and sat in the sun to eat an apple.

The creatures around me are no longer being fed. They would do anything – anything – for food; in fact they debase themselves daily begging for it. Does it matter now? That some of us will die of disease, some of malnutrition, some of exposure? We will all die hungry, but only I will have
chosen
to starve. The humans are no better. Their bonds are too fragile, held together by not much more than shared food on a table. Is that all that lies between the behaviour of apes and humans? A regular supply of hot meals?