T WAS Sándor who finally posed the question in November of 1944, when it was clear the Red Army would take Budapest from the Arrow-Cross and the Nazis. “If there’s a siege, how are we going to protect the animals?” he asked, looking from one face to the next, totally baffled by the fact that everyone seemed far more interested in how they were going to protect themselves. “We’re going to have to work double hard,” replied Oszkár Teleki, director of the zoo, though Teleki was the first to run off that December when the Russian tanks entered the squares and boulevards, telling his secretary he was going to meet with the Red Army and insist that they respect the animals, and then asking her to pack all of the zoo’s money into a bag, just in case.
Sándor and József were the last to see Teleki leave, intercepting him near the exit and asking whether he had plans in place for the aquarium, where even now the attendants were working around the clock to keep the water from freezing by stirring it with paddles. Both men were suspicious because Teleki was wearing an overcoat belted at the waist, an elegant hat, and was carrying an ivory-handled umbrella in one hand and a suitcase bulging with money in the other, banknotes fluttering from every crack. As well, Teleki wasn’t taking the eastern exit out of the zoo—as he normally did when going home—but the western one, in the direction of Buda, of Germany, and away from the advancing Soviets.
“We should feed you to the lion,” said Sándor, to which Teleki responded by fingering his collar, looking nervous, and telling them he’d be back “really quite soon.” “You’re not going anywhere,” said József, and he grabbed hold of Teleki as he was turning from them, jerking him so hard the old man’s knees gave out and József had to hold him up above the muddy cobblestones.
József was about to do something else to him then—hit him, or pull the suitcase from his grip—but when he saw Teleki’s face—the bared teeth, the eyes darting back and forth, the desperation to escape—looking just like the animals did whenever there was an air raid, explosion of shells, the rattle of gunfire, flames shooting over the palisades, he let him go, knowing that the money would soon have as little currency as a fascist arm band. But if he’d looked a little closer he might have caught something else in Teleki’s face, the city’s future in its wrinkles and lines, a vision of what the next hundred days would be like, when Budapest’s populace would be driven to looting and stealing and scavenging and murder—and there would be much of that, down by the banks of the Danube where the Arrow-Cross executed the Jewish men, women, and children after marching them naked through the snow from the ghetto; or Széll Kálmán Square after the failure of Hungarian and German soldiers to break through the Soviet encirclement, bodies piled in doorways and cellar stairs and in other piles of bodies in an attempt to shield themselves from the rockets and snipers and tanks the Red Army had stationed along the routes they knew they would take—when the dead, whether half buried in ice, the muck of the river, or the frost that settled on them from their last laboured breaths, would speak to Sándor, and Sándor would in turn relay their message to József, the thing he was more and more obsessed with as the nights of the siege dragged on, the metamorphosis at work all around them. In the early days, when József was still alert, still sane enough to ask him what the hell he was talking about, Sándor muttered about human beings turning into “flowers and animals,” and held up Ovid, or some other book he’d stolen from the abandoned library in Teleki’s office, and whistled quietly, reading quietly, until József fell back asleep.
It got so bad that József would need that whistling to sleep, and when it stopped, late at night, and József snapped awake, more often than not he found that Sándor wasn’t there. He’d gone into the night, or disappeared, expending himself as if to prove that becoming nothing could be a transformation too. Though he was always back by morning with his dirty nails and oily face and tattered clothes and the look of someone who’d lost himself along the way.
But before all that, December turned into January. Unlike many of the other attendants, Sándor and József did not have families, and so they saw no reason to go home from the zoo except to risk dying in the streets, or being bombed out of their tiny apartments, or starving to death in the cellars that had been converted into bomb shelters. When the zebras were found slaughtered in their pens, large strips of meat carved hastily from their shoulders and flanks and bellies no doubt by starving citizens, the two men fed what was left to the lion and moved into the vacated stalls, Sándor ranting about how the zebras should still be alive and it was the looters who should have been fed to the lion.
When Márti, another of the attendants, was shot in late January as she was trying to tear up a bit of grass for the giraffe in the nearby Városliget, and somehow managed to stumble back to the zoo, she described in a sleepy voice what she had seen out there in the city. Sándor tried to get her to be quiet, to rest, pulling the blanket to her chin, but she kept speaking of the shapes of flame as a child might speak of clouds, seeing in them animals dead or dying, their souls somehow escaping the bodies trapped in the zoo, transmigrated into fire, taking revenge on the city. She said it was burning, all of it—the Western Station, the mansions along Andrássy Boulevard, the trees in the park like used matchsticks. She’d seen a street where blue flame was dancing through every pothole and crack, playing around the rim of craters, the gas mains ruptured underneath, continuing to bleed. “It was like a celebration,” said Márti, before closing her eyes and falling into a sleep neither József nor Sándor tried waking her from.
The night after she died, they climbed the roof of the palm garden, which gave them a view beyond the palisades toward where the fighting was going on, now far to the west, mortars and tanks and bullets pounding the lower battlements of Buda castle, flashes of white light whenever the smoke cleared. The sky held odd things—crates falling by parachute onto the ice over the Danube; gliders crashing at night, guided by spotlights into trees and buildings; ash rising like a million flies.
Sándor tried to keep reading during those days, scrambling up a ladder to Teleki’s library after the air raid destroyed the staircase, as if the books were more than a distraction, as if they were necessary to hurry his mind along, as if it was possible to stop thinking by thinking too much, by exploding thought, at a time when having a mind was, more often than not, a handicap. Of the two of them he’d always been the one given to dreams, and as they sat on the roof of the palm garden that night, Sándor spoke to József of what he’d discovered in Teleki’s office, an entire library, books ancient and modern, devoted to the subject of animals—“I had no idea Teleki was such an intellectual,” growled Sándor above the crackling of guns—and then began to speak of how characters in myths and stories and fairy tales turned into horses and flowers and hounds and back again, or into other people entirely, crossing limits as if they didn’t exist, becoming something else. “But now, I mean now”—he waved his arms around as if he could encompass the last five centuries—“now we don’t transform. We’re individuals now. Selves. Fixed in place.”
“Well,” said József, turning over Sándor’s ideas, “what difference does it make? They died in wars just like us.”
“Maybe that’s how they explained death,” said Sándor, his face glazed with the light of nearby fires. “Becoming something else.” He gazed down through the glass roof of the palm house. “Anyhow, we’re not dead yet,” he purred, flexing his fingers, József thought, as if they could become claws.
“But did they stay themselves, I mean, when they became something else?”
“That’s just it. There was no self to begin with. Just an endless transformation, a constant becoming.”
“So then a lion was worth the same as a human being.”
“Well, I don’t know about ‘worth,’” said Sándor, smiling at József. “But there wasn’t the same way of telling the differ . . .”
But before Sándor could take the idea any further, he was already crashing through the roof of the palm garden as the shell exploded,