The Zookeeper’s Wife Read Free Page A

around them. . .calling "Ki-chi, ki-chi," [until] a head with fluffy blond hair would appear and a pair of eyes behind large glass lenses would bend over. . .. It didn't take long to realize that the soft fabric slippers, the blond fluffy head, and the high-pitched voice were all the same object.
    Often dabbling in such slippages of self, aligning her senses with theirs, she tended her wards with affectionate curiosity, and something about that attunement put them at ease. Her uncanny ability to calm unruly animals earned her the respect of both the keepers and her husband, who, though he believed science could explain it, found her gift nonetheless strange and mysterious. Jan, a devout scientist, credited Antonina with the "metaphysical waves" of a nearly shamanistic empathy when it came to animals: "She's so sensitive, she's almost able to read their minds. . .. She becomes them. . .. She has a precise and very special gift, a way of observing and understanding animals that's rare, a sixth sense. . .. It's been this way since she was little."
    In the kitchen each morning, she poured herself a cup of black tea and started sterilizing glass baby bottles and rubber nipples for the household's youngest. As zoo nurse, she was lucky enough to adopt two baby lynxes from Białowieża, the only primeval forest left in all of Europe, an ecosystem Poles called a puszcza , a word evoking ancient woodlands undefiled by human hands.
    Straddling what is now the border between Belarus and Poland, Białowieża unites the two at the level of antler and myth, and traditionally served both countries as a famous hunting retreat for kings and tsars (who kept an ornate lodge there), which, by Antonina's time, fell under the purview of scientists, politicians, and poachers. The largest land animals in Europe, European (or "forest") bison, sparred in its woods, and their decline helped to kindle Poland's conservation movement. As a bilingual Pole born in Russia who returned to Poland, she felt at home in that green isthmus linking different regimes, walking in the shade of trees half a millennium old, where the forest closes in, intimate as a tick, one fragile, fully furnished organism with no visible borders. Pristine acres of virgin forest, declared untouchable, create a realm that airplanes overfly by miles lest they scare the animals or taint the foliage. Looking up through the open parachutes of treetops, a visitor might spy a distant plane banking like a small silent bird.
    Though outlawed, hunting still existed, leaving motherless young animals, the rarest of which usually arrived at the zoo in a crate marked "live animal." The zoo served as lifeboat, and during April, May, and June, the birthing season, Antonina expected crotchety offspring, each with its own special diet and customs. The month-old wolf cub would normally be tended by its mother and family members until two years old. The clean, sociable baby badger responded well to long walks and dined on insects and herbs. Striped wild boar piglets did justice to any table scraps. A red deer fawn bottle-fed until midwinter and skidded, splay-legged, on wooden floors.
    Her favorites were Tofi and Tufa, the three-week-old lynx kittens, who needed bottle-nursing for six months and weren't really self-reliant for a year or so (and, even then, they liked walks on a leash down Praga's busiest street, while passersby gaped). Because so few wild lynxes remained in Europe, Jan went to Białowieża himself to fetch the kittens, and Antonina offered to raise them inside the house. When his taxi arrived at the main gate one summer evening, a guard ran to help Jan unload a small wooden box and together they carried it to the villa, where Antonina eagerly waited with sterilized glass bottles, rubber nipples, and warm formula. As they lifted off the lid, two tiny speckled fur balls stared up angrily at the human faces, hissed, and began biting and scratching any hand that reached for them.
    "Human hands