The Zookeeper’s Wife Read Free Page B

with so many moving fingers scare them," Antonina advised softly. "And our loud voices, and the sharp light from the lamp."
    The kittens trembled, "half dead with fear," she wrote in her diary. Gently, she grabbed the scruff of one's neck, loose and hot, and as she lifted it from the straw, it hung limp and quiet, so she picked up the other one.
    "They like it. Their skin remembers their mother's jaws carrying them from one place to another."
    When she set them down on the floor in the dining room, they skittered around, exploring the slippery new landscape for a few minutes, then hid under a wardrobe as if it were a rock overhang, inching way back into the darkest crevices they could find.
    In 1932, abiding by Polish Catholic tradition, Antonina chose a saint's name for her own newborn son, Ryszard, or Ryś for short—the Polish word for lynx. Though not part of the zoo's "four-legged, fluffy, or winged" brigade, her son joined the household as one more frisky cub that babbled and clung like a monkey, crawled around on all fours like a bear, grew whiter in winter and darker in summer like a wolf. One of her children's books describes three household toddlers learning to walk at the same time: son, lion, and chimpanzee. Finding all young mammals adorable, from rhino to possum, she reigned as a mammal mother herself and protectress of many others. Not an outlandish image in a city whose age-old symbol was half woman, half animal: a mermaid brandishing a sword. As she said, the zoo quickly became her "green kingdom of animals on the right side of the Vistula River," a noisy Eden flanked by cityscape and park.

CHAPTER 2
    "A DOLF HAS TO BE STOPPED," ONE OF THE KEEPERS INSISTED. Jan knew he didn't mean Hitler but "Adolf the Kidnapper," a nickname given to the ringleader of the rhesus monkeys, who had been waging war with the oldest female, Marta, whose son Adolf had stolen and given to his favorite mate, Nelly, who already had one baby of her own. "It's not right. Each mother should feed her own baby, and why deprive Marta of her baby just to give Nelly two?"
    Other keepers offered health bulletins about the zoo's best-known animals, like Rose the giraffe, Mary the African hunting dog, Sahib the petting-zoo colt, who had been sneaking into the pasture with the skittish Przywalski horses. Elephants sometimes develop herpes on their trunks, and in captive settings, an avian retrovirus or an illness like tuberculosis passes easily from humans to parrots, elephants, cheetahs, and other animals, and back again to humans—especially in Jan's preantibiotic era, when serious infection could savage a population, animal or human. That meant calling the zoo vet, Dr. Lopatynski, who always arrived on his spluttering motorcycle wearing a leather jacket, big hat with long waving earflaps, cheeks whisked red by the wind, and pince-nez glasses perched on his nose.
    What else might have been discussed at the daily meetings? In an old zoo photograph, Jan stands beside a large half-excavated hippo enclosure that's partly braced with heavy wooden ribs, the sort that flex ship hulls. The background vegetation suggests summer, and all digging had to be finished before the ground hardened, which can happen as early as October in Poland, so it's likely he demanded progress reports and chivvied the foreman. Thievery posed another worry, and since the exotic animal trade flourished, armed guards patrolled day and night.
    Jan's grand vision of the zoo shines through his many books and broadcasts; he hoped that one day his zoo might achieve an illusion of native habitats, where natural enemies could share enclosures without conflict. For that mirage of a primal truce one needs to recruit acres of land, dig interlocking moats, and install creative plumbing. Jan planned an innovative zoo of world importance at the heart of Warsaw's life, both social and cultural, and at one point he even thought of adding an amusement park.
    Basic concerns for zoos both