The Animals of the Budapest Zoo, 1944-1945
from SIEGE 13 by Tamas Dobozy
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 fairytales 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, his head 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, disappearing into the fire and shock waves and rain of glass, while József was able to scramble down before the next mortar fell whistling into the hole the last one had made, scrambling down, and then through the cracked doors of the glass building, shards raining all around, the alligators and hippos of the central exhibit too shocked to snap or charge at him, lifting Sándor's body from where it lay face down in a pool of water, and smiling despite himself when his friend began spluttering, bruises spreading across his face. Two days later, the alligators died, frozen stiff in their ice-encrusted jungle, though the hippos lived on, drawn to the very back of the tank, where the artesian well kept pumping out its thermal waters, the fat on their stomachs and backs thinning away as it fed them, all three growing skinnier and skinnier in the steam.
More about the author & Siege 13 here.
