The Zookeeper’s Wife Read Free

summer morning, Antonina leaned on the wide flat ledge of the terrace wall, where apricot tiles, cold enough to collect dew, dampened the sleeves of her red robe. Not all the bellowing, wailing, braying, and rumbling around her originated outside—some issued from the subterranean bowels of the villa, others from its porch, terrace, or attic. The Żabińskis shared their home with orphaned newborn or sick animals, as well as pets, and the feeding and schooling of lodgers fell to Antonina, whose animal wards clamored to be fed.
    Not even the villa's living room was off limits to the animals. With its six tall window panels that could easily be mistaken for landscape paintings, the long, narrow salon blurred the boundaries between inside and out. Across the room, a large wooden credenza displayed books, periodicals, nests, feathers, small skulls, eggs, horns, and other artifacts on its many shelves. A piano stood on an Oriental rug beside a scatter of boxy armchairs with red fabric cushions. In the warmest corner, at the far end of the room, dark brown tiles adorned a fireplace and hearth, and the sun-bleached skull of a bison rested atop the mantelpiece. Armchairs sat beside the windows, where afternoon light washed in.
    One journalist who visited the villa to interview Jan was surprised by two cats entering the living room, the first with a bandaged paw and the second a bandaged tail, followed by a parrot wearing a metal neck cone, and then a limping raven with a broken wing. The villa bustled with animals, which Jan explained simply: "It's not enough to do research from a distance. It's by living beside animals that you learn their behavior and psychology." On Jan's daily rounds of the zoo by bicycle, a large elk named Adam swayed close behind, an inseparable companion.
    There was something alchemical about living so intimately with the likes of lion kitten, wolf cub, monkey toddler, and eagle chick, as the animal smells, scratchings, and calls mingled with human body and cooking smells, with human chatter and laughter in a mixed family of den-mates. At first a new member of the household slept or fed on its old schedule, but gradually the animals began to live in synchrony as their rhythms drew closer together. Not their breathing, though, and at night the sleepy tempo of breaths and snufflings created a zoological cantata hard to score.
    Antonina identified with animals, fascinated by how their senses tested the world. She and Jan soon learned to slow around predators like wild cats, because close-set eyes give them pinpoint depth perception, and they tend to get excited by quick movements a leap or two away. Prey animals like horses and deer enjoy wraparound vision (to spot predators creeping up on them), but panic easily. The lame speckled eagle, tethered in their basement, was essentially a pair of binoculars with wings. The hyena pups would have spotted Antonina coming in total darkness. Other animals could sense her approach, taste her scent, hear the faintest swoosh of her robe, feel the weight of her footsteps vibrating the floorboards a whisker's worth, even detect the motes of air she pushed aside. She envied their array of ancient, finely tuned senses; a human gifted with those ordinary talents, Westerners would call a sorcerer.
    Antonina loved to slip out of her human skin for a while and spy on the world through each animal's eyes, and she often wrote from that outlook, in which she intuited their concerns and know-how, including what they might be seeing, feeling, fearing, sensing, remembering. When she entered their ken, a transmigration of sensibility occurred, and like the lynx kittens she hand-raised, she could peer up at a world of loud dangling beings:
. . .with legs little or large, walking in soft slippers or solid shoes, quiet or loud, with the mild smell of fabric or the strong smell of shoe polish. The soft fabric slippers moved quietly and gently, they didn't hit the furniture and it was safe to be