Lights Out in the Reptile House Page 6

  Leda announced she couldn’t stand another minute of this and they were going for a walk. Her tone made it clear that Karel’s comment had not been forgotten and that he was at this point the lesser of two evils. He followed her through the gap in the hedge, waving goodbye. “Have a nice time,” Leda’s mother called after them.

  Her walk had a fluidity and purpose that suggested she knew where she was going. He found it hard to fall into her rhythm and imagined someone seeing the two of them: her glide and his uneven, constant adjustments.

  “God,” Leda said, “look at that,” without indicating what.

  “I’m sorry about what I said,” Karel told her. “It was stupid.”

  Leda looked at him and made a lump under her cheek with her tongue. “You’re so fake sometimes I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  The comment was more crushing than the one in the backyard, and he knew what she meant: his losing efforts to keep track of her nuances and formulate strategies to win her over.

  “I just like you,” he finally said. At least it was honest.

  “I like you, too,” she said. They passed an enclosed courtyard where a black-and-white cat with an eye stitched shut stealthily climbed a ladder to the second story. He had a feeling she was waiting for him to go on. So why didn’t he? Did he have any idea what he was talking about?

  They passed a stone bench overhung with carpenter bees, and a terrier puppy sleeping in the sun with its mouth ajar, exhausted from a day’s hysterics. “I don’t know if we’ll ever be really good friends, Karel,” Leda finally said, looking at the dog, and he felt as though he’d watched a door close on him, locking him out of happiness.

  Along the road two women sat unloading baskets of gourds and chatting. On one of the gourds an anole perched, turning his head to examine the vibrations. Leda talked about a friend from school, Elsie, and the night her mother had dozed on the couch and the two of them had drunk sweet fermented wine that Elsie had smuggled in. Elsie kept threatening to throw up and that would make them start laughing all over again, though they had to be quiet. And Elsie’s boyfriend came over and tried to get in, but Elsie didn’t like him anymore, though he didn’t know it. He just stood at the window saying, “Let me in, let me in,” in a voice muffled by the glass. Of course, her mother had missed the whole thing.

  “Who was her boyfriend?” Karel asked quietly. “What happened to him?”

  “I don’t think you knew him,” Leda said. “We shut the sunshades at one point, and when we remembered them he was gone.”

  They walked to the very edge of town. The dry brush in front of them extended to the hills in the distance. They turned and headed back. Leda told him more about Elsie, who was always talking about marriage and supported the regime because she liked the colors and because she’d gotten picked as a flower-bearer for the local celebrations of the Great Trek.

  Leda asked if he was so quiet because of what she’d said, and he said he guessed so. She apologized.

  He smelled flowers somewhere, and sage. Leda said that actually she was worried about Elsie and he said he thought it was a phase, and that Elsie would probably grow out of it. Leda said she thought that was really true and a good point.

  She indicated a cloud she thought was shaped like the outline of their country, and not only could he see no similarity but they couldn’t even settle on exactly which cloud they were looking at. She talked about a dream she kept having involving a tunnel inset with luminous windows. In the windows she could see coral, sea urchins, and champagne bubbles. She asked him why he supposed blue was a common color among reptiles but not among other animals. She asked him if he thought he wanted to work with reptiles when he grew up. He talked to her about exploring someday in the plateau deserts, about finding new species and setting up a Reptile House where they had everything they needed. She asked what sort of things they needed. He told her about gravels and drainage and vivarium design and food storage, registering her responses and noting with pleasure the way she opened her mouth a little the instant before laughing.

  She told him her mother admired his steadiness and devotion to the Reptile House. She said she really liked her mother more than it seemed sometimes. She told him about her nanny, whom she remembered as having a beautiful voice and being magical with injuries and animals. Not an old woman at all, pretty, with dark eyes and hair and a coffee smell. She used to tell Leda she was working to make money for her family. She talked along with the radio to improve her language and told stories about her brothers in the desert while she folded sheets and pillowcases. Leda’s mother just fired her one day, to save money, it turned out, though no one told Leda. Her mother said later she hadn’t considered the change important enough to merit discussion. Leda had been home sick from school for two weeks afterward and no one could figure out what was wrong. Everybody had been worried. She figured all the money her mother had saved firing the nanny had been turned over to the doctors. She loved her nanny and told her everything, as her mother said, all her secrets. Now all she had was her journal. When Karel asked what kind of secrets, she said she couldn’t say, or they wouldn’t be secrets.

  An article in The People’s Voice interested him: in the southern swamps the Civil Guard was using snapping turtles tied with rope to retrieve corpses. He tore it out to show Albert. It got him thinking about his old life in the city. It was in the city that he’d first seen a snapping turtle, in a traveling exhibit. It had had a big effect on his growing love of reptiles.

  Summers he and Leda played as often as he could talk her into it at the beach. She had other friends but liked him too. They were walloped by breakers when the waves were good, after storms, and scavenged along the shoreline when the sea was calm. Their favorite place was an underwater rock shelf filled with jellyfish slipping by on the action of the waves. They swam furiously with no style but a lot of splashing. Leda thought it was very funny to carry starfish out of the surf on her arms. The sand dried immediately after a wave’s departure. When they buried each other they would leave their faces bare, and arrange crosses of pebbles atop their chests.

  He remembered the pointed gables of the beachfront hotels and the green cypresses, and one hotel, the Golden Angel, with a painting they both loved in the common room. The subject was a cavalry charge they couldn’t identify. It involved a chaotic spread of chargers all in near-collision and all about to burst the plane of the painting and trample the viewer. Whenever they’d had too much sun, the hotel manager, a tubby man with a bald and sunburned head, would allow the two of them, sandy and barefooted, a few moments in the room on the condition they sit on none of the furniture in their damp suits. They’d crouch or kneel on the thick red carpet in front of the painting. The horses’ nostrils were dragonish and the eyes oversized with fear and excitement. The dragoons riding them were as relaxed as strollers in a summer garden. The dying or about to be trampled infantry below looked thoughtful and melancholy, as if overrun while unexpectedly drowsy.

  Behind the Golden Angel through an alley of oyster shells and cat droppings they found the Seaman’s Hostel, where they could get free fish broth and sermons about children alone in a world like this, and farther up the hill the Sea’s Trade, a little open-air restaurant that looked down into the harbor where the gulls pecked garbage from around the ships, and where when they had some money they could eat pastries stuffed with pink shredded fish and prawns sprinkled with lime juice and crayfish and young eels that Karel always swallowed in too-large pieces, and a weak wine with some melon that made them feel like teenagers. At night there was a fair and a wheel of fortune with a leather flap slapping against nails and they could buy warm fried fish wrapped in newspaper, and ride on wooden bulls with gilded horns on a merry-go-round in and out of the harsh lights of the ticket booth.

  And they loved a place his father called a junk store that featured bins of sheet metal with low glass dividers separating tiny toys: hand-painted soldiers, tin buses, rubber lizards, tiny puzzles, minia
ture knives and pliers, ocean liners with wavering hand-painted waterlines. White horses, golden dice, purple dolphins.

  He had a dream in which Leda led him into a beautiful emerald darkness and talked to him about underground rivers far in the earth, dark caverns dripping with crystal-line water. She whispered something so close to his ear it tickled. She pointed to the volcanically unstable island on the horizon known to them popularly as the Roof of Hell. He could see waterspouts like great spirals of glass taking the sea into the clouds. In the harbor she pointed out enormous whirlpools, racing cavities like inverted bells, pulling the sea down into the earth, leaving the surrounding waters weirdly domed.

  After that dream he lay there trying hard to remember more, especially about Leda at that age, but found that the details had started to disappear and that he could no more make her return that way than he could have altered elements of the cavalry’s charge in the painting they loved. Ultimately all that came back was pieces: her shout, her bare shoulders on the merry-go-round, a yellow shirt he wanted, until he was left only with the dark reach of shadow in the troughs of waves and a glimpse of their discarded shoes on the beach.

  The house was quiet. He looked at the newspaper photo of the snapping turtle. I might as well not have a father, Karel thought. He went downstairs and his father was hungover and reading the rest of The People’s Voice in search of temporary jobs, wincing at the noise when he rattled the paper. He was holding a pen in his teeth and looked blearily over at Karel and said good morning.

  “It’s afternoon,” Karel said harshly. “I’ve been home from school for hours.”

  His father looked hurt and returned his attention to the paper. “I think I got into some trouble last night,” he said.

  Karel didn’t answer. He noted the coffee cup still in the sink, alone, and said, “Didn’t you eat anything today?”

  Something large upstairs groaned and clanked.

  “I think the pipes’re gone,” his father said. “We’re not getting any water.” The plumbing shrieked and roared hollowly in response like prehistoric animals in the distance.

  Karel went over to the window and looked out. Sprute was leading a group of six or so small boys down the street. One of them was also wearing a Kestrel uniform, with an additional white sash. David was in the group. Karel went outside.

  When they reached him he stopped David. The group stopped with him, to wait. Karel asked what was going on. David said he’d been invited to the party following Harold’s initiation. Harold was the other boy in uniform. The party had been outlined in great detail by Sprute, who’d been recruiting at the playground. There were going to be picture cards in color with the Party eagle on them and little bundles of white almond candies and for each guest a statue of a boy and eagle together lifting the flag, and cakes and juices and games. Harold’s parents and the Party together were paying for it. David had already learned the virtues of the Kestrels: Undoubting, Undivided, Rock-Ribbed, Stern, Simple, Brave, Clean, and True. He showed Karel two pennants he’d already been given just for agreeing to come along: one involved yet another eagle; the other read, in script, We Are a Universal People; There Will Always Be a Springtime for Our Greatness. A small bird—representing springtime?—was stitched onto the corner of the second one. No, his sister did not know where he was.

  Karel pulled him out of line. He told Sprute that they had to go home and that Sprute had plenty of kids anyway. He mollified David by not only explaining how much all of this would upset his sister but also by taking him for candy and buying him a week’s worth of sugared violets and waferlike crackers covered with powdered sugar.

  He marched him home, stopping every so often when David dropped something and had to pick it up, and presented him to Leda. She was beautiful. She stood in the doorway in a dress of red linen. She’d been about to go to a friend’s birthday party. Karel registered wistfully that he hadn’t been invited and then explained everything.

  Leda took in her breath and clasped David with his back to her as if he’d been saved from savages. His front was a snowfall of powdered sugar.

  While Karel spoke she listened intently, and when he stopped she didn’t say anything. Her hair was swept up and pinned back and there was a black ribbon around her neck. When she moved her dress flared at the bottom. Instead of thanking him she leaned over her brother, who ducked his head, and kissed him, her kiss tasting familiar and faintly sweet.

  He got home much later, having dawdled through half of town touching his tongue every so often to his lips in the dreamy hope that some of her flavor would return. His father was gone. The kitchen chair was on its side, but the house was otherwise undisturbed. Mr. Fetscher appeared at the door of the adjacent house slowly when Karel knocked, and gestured him in, where he told Karel with a mix of sympathy and irritation that the police had come, or the Security Service—somebody—and had taken his father away.

  At the station the local police seemed genuinely ignorant of what had happened. At home he went from room to room, from the storage space under the kitchen to the attic, searching for his father or clues or anything at all. He found nothing and couldn’t tell how much clothing or what personal effects were missing. He sat on the bed in tears and turned on the radio on his father’s folding bedside table and listened to a lot of garbled, excited talk and fanfare before he realized that what they were saying was that war had been declared.

  With nowhere else to go he returned to the zoo. On the way he checked in again at the police station, which was a madhouse, and the café. The café owner hadn’t seen Karel’s father and wondered if he’d enlisted, or had been called up as some sort of worker. He took Karel inside off the patio and gave him a bitter drink tasting of lime. Karel sipped it while gazing around at a place his father spent time. Did he drink things like this when he wanted to get away from Karel? Was he friends with these people? Were they looking at Karel and thinking, This is the kid he told us about?

  The café owner had his back to him and shifted a bottle along the mirrored glass as if transmitting significant information. He had no answers to whatever question Karel asked. Karel’s leg bobbed independently on the stool and he wanted to break something. He touched his glass to the dark wood between them and made patterns of condensation rings: a seven, a lazy S.

  At the zoo only Albert was working. Albert’s assistant, Perren, told him that the nomads, not content with systematic abuse and provocation, had staged a major raid on a customs hut near the border. They’d killed an elderly official who had been simply tending his pitiful little garden when they struck. Eleven nomad bodies were available as evidence. How they had been killed was not clear. Exactly what their strategic thinking had been was not clear. But the incident had been the last straw and was being handled, the government announced, with grim resolve.

  Perren was playing with two creamy white slowworms, small, legless lizards. They twirled and wound around his fingers like a caduceus. He lifted one to each earlobe while Karel watched, and they clamped on with their tiny jaws and hung like earrings.

  Perren said twelve divisions of the army that had been in the area on maneuvers and four squads of the Special Sections behind them had struck at six that morning and were already encircling the only large city, which he called “the capital.”

  While Karel waited for Albert to give him a few minutes the old man offered a cotton swab of medicine with maddening patience to a recalcitrant pit viper. Karel made tsking and peevish noises with his tongue on his teeth and crossed and recrossed the hallway next to the viper’s glass enclosure with his hands on his head and his elbows out. Opposite them the puff adder struck at the same spot on the pane over and over with his nose and then shot up to the wire netting and down again.

  When he finally heard the news, Albert expressed his sympathy so dryly that Karel was forced to conclude with surprise and dismay that this sort of grief was not transferable. Albert said he thought Karel’s father was probably all right, but as to where he was,
who knew? In this mess he’d be untraceable, at least until things settled down. He really couldn’t have picked a worst time to disappear, Albert remarked. He led Karel down the hall. When he reached his office he turned and saw Karel’s face and seemed genuinely sorry. He said that Karel should come back with him, to his house. Maybe they’d think of something; if not, at least they could have lunch. Had he eaten anything? Karel hadn’t, and was hungry.

  Karel had never seen Albert’s house. He’d barely spent time in his office. The house was on the other side of town. A block or two before it they came to a roadblock, staffed by two soldiers. What the roadblock was supposed to be guarding was anybody’s guess. Albert misunderstood at first and thought the road closed. He led Karel a few streets over to an alternate route, which was also closed. Puzzled, he returned to the first roadblock. He stood looking at it as if to verify its existence while Karel waited in a misery of impatience. The soldiers at the barrier looked at them suspiciously now that they were back. When they finally crossed to the striped sawhorses, one of the soldiers, a thin teenager with a swollen eye, leveled his weapon at Albert’s chest and left it there.

  “What is this?” Albert asked pleasantly.

  “Do you have identification?” the older soldier said. He was a corporal and had his breast pocket lined with candy bars.

  “To go home?” Albert said. He began halfheartedly to fumble through his pockets.

  “You live here?” the corporal said.

  “You saw me go by this morning, when you were unloading these things,” Albert said. “I wondered what you were doing. The gun is unnecessary.”

  From his wallet he extracted a card, his membership in the Herpetological Association.

  “What is this?” the corporal said, after a pause. He held the card as if it were an attempt to humiliate him.

  “It’s the Herpetological Association,” Albert said. “I’m an officer. We study animals, reptiles. Lizards?”