I suffocated him, squashed his head between my leg and body, though there were no females around to compete over and we should instead have become friends. Zeriph never let me forget my stupidity, killing that bull. He felt sorry for the other handler, who grieved over his dead camel as if for a child.
Zeriph had been proud of me, carrying the first piano into the core of our new country. [...]
But for what? I carried that thing of beauty all that way on my back, with the ropes cutting into my bones, so that somebody could tinkle on the keys for the midday drinks at the pub in Alice. That’s what broke Zeriph’s heart, that the piano’s music could mean nothing without the false prophetry of drink.
But this late autumn at the front is unlike any I have witnessed. Without the changing palette of the trees to signal the shift towards winter (the leaves have been exploded off), and the songbirds mostly gone quiet, it becomes difficult to know where I am, in what season, in which century.
I looked more closely at the man driving the mules. He was far too old to fight. The mules showed none of their usual inclination to misbehave and were following him peaceably. “They love him,” I said.
“And he them. I’ve seen a driver refuse to leave his team of battery mules when they became entangled in barbed wire. He died with them.”
“Why are so many of them missing their tails?” I asked.
“When they’re starving, they eat each other’s tails.”
“Don’t eat any of it,” I said.
The tomcat looked offended at my suggesting he would take the food. “I have my own adopted soldier. But you should eat what he’s offering even if you’re not hungry. You might be the only thing keeping him alive until he’s rotated out of the front line and can get some rest.”
They—the humans, that is—seem to think that what sets them apart from other animals is their ability to love, grieve, feel guilt, think abstractly, et cetera. They are misguided. What sets them apart is their talent for masochism. Therein lies their power. To take pleasure in pain, to derive strength from deprivation, is to be human.
I fell in love with you the first moment I saw you, before I was fully human, and from across that gulf of understanding and experience, somehow, miraculously, you felt something for me in return. You alone inspired me to become human, not your husband’s relentless mazes and sorting tasks and word repetitions, not his tantrums when I didn’t do what he wanted, not the whipping, not the sweet fruit he dangled just out of my reach. I wanted to be human so that I might reach out across that chasm and touch you, be touched by you.
Frau Oberndorff gave me a pet cricket. The cricket lives in a walnut shell. If you hold him up and look at him directly, he looks fierce. The man who brought the cricket to the zoo said he would win battles against other crickets if we first chop up a fly and feed it to him to make him violent.
I was starving. My Master had recently begun to follow a vegetarian diet and decided that I should give up all meat too, in keeping with his beliefs [...] Not only that, he was concerned about my karma. He had promised me that if I did as he said, ate no meat, resisted my urge to hunt foxes, and tried to meditate once a day, I might be reincarnated as a human being in my next life. A human being! The thought was intoxicating.
“A wise friend once told me that kindness, like cruelty, can be an expression of domination,” the pig said.
“That makes no sense,” I said scornfully.
Muss said [the zebra mussels] were halfway to covering the whole bottom of the lakes too, that there was not a single native mussel left to tell us stories.
And with a glance at me—a kind of tribute, I’d like to think—she would read out my favorite paragraph of the whole book, a moment that does justice to both the poet Elizabeth and her dog Flush by showing them as equals in their inability to ever fully understand each other: not so different then, from a biographer trying to get into the skin of her subject.
The Soviets were sending animals into space like there was no tomorrow (which, for the animals, there mostly wasn’t), desperate to finalise their research on the viability of manned space flight and the effects on living creatures of prolonged weightlessness and radiation from the Van Allen belts, and get a man on the moon before the Americans. They’d heard rumors that the Americans had sent a bunch of black mice into space and the cosmic rays had turned them grey; this would be undesirable in humans.
But there is mechanical trouble while he’s up there and instead of getting sips of water or tablets, he starts getting zapped by the electric pads wired to the soles of his feet. He gets back to earth, gets out of the capsule and the NASA guys are smiling, holding his hands, but Enos is fucking mad. This used to make me laugh. But up in space, I just had to think about this, about Enos getting buzzed on his feet for doing the right thing—the right thing! what he’s been trained to do!—and I wanted to bite somebody’s face off.
“Death is not something to worship now that you are adults,” the matriarch warned. “It is the province only of the very young to want things to work out badly. The souls in the sky live only as long as we remember their stories. Beyond that there is nothing, not for them nor for us.”
“A zoo,” she said to them, “is a very dangerous place for an animal in wartime, for it can mean the difference between life and death for the human inhabitants of a city. But it was not the poor who ate the zoo animals in Paris.”
As we were dying, our foreheads pressed together, one of the humans stepped forward and placed a single orange in the gap between our trunks. It was an act of kindness, I think, a way to thank us for our sacrificed flesh. I was already too far from the appetites of life to eat it, but the smell made me briefly happy—we were children again, two sisters playing beside the fence separating us from a fragrant orchard of oranges, longing to die gloriously and have our souls pointed out to the youngest in the herd on warm evenings: see, there are the stars which form their trunks, and there are the stars of their tails.
“I’m waiting for her to die so I can eat her.” He chewed at the bread.
“Why wait?” asked the witch.
“People would stop risking their lives, dodging sniper bullets to bring me bread, if they thought I had no heart, eating her while she’s still half alive,” the bear said.
It was dark in the zoo by now, darker than it had ever been before the siege started, for the city of Sarajevo no longer relied on electricity. It had become medieval, lightless, its citizens forced to fetch water from underground springs and to wash by candlelight. And the zoo was no longer a modern thoroughfare for the ogling masses. Now the few who dared visit brought sacred offerings of food. The two last remaining animals had become central to the city’s very survival, to the idea of the city’s survival.
“But you must see what sort of position this would put us in. Smuggling two bears out of Sarajevo in a food-relief convoy—what does that say to the people left behind? Why bears, not babies? I mean, a busload of children trying to get out of the city was fired on, and we’re spending time worrying about these wild animals? We can’t allow it, I’m afraid.” He was the only one who had not brought stale bread in his pockets for the bears.
Perhaps you should be asking yourselves different questions. Why do you sometimes treat other people as humans and sometimes as animals? And why do you sometimes treat creatures as animals and sometimes as humans?
Some native wild dolphins were also killed this way, though we’d tried to keep them away from the area by acting territorially. Officer Bloomington took this especially hard. He hadn’t anticipated it as a consequence and blamed himself for their deaths. He felt that the skilled Navy dolphins at least had a chance of defending themselves, but the native dolphins had been put directly in harm’s way. He tried to record their deaths officially so that this could be prevented on future missions, but his superiors blocked him, worried about a public outcry.
We take killing a human very hard. It is as taboo for us as killing our own babies. We recognise in you what your ancients used to recognise in us and understood as sacred a long time ago, when killing a dolphin was punishable by death. You used to think of us as being closer to the divine than any other animal on earth, as being messengers and mediators between you and your gods. You honoured us with Delphinus, our own constellation in the northern sky.
What a delight to be needed so acutely! Her ex-husband had tolerated her neediness but not cultivated it in himself; her daughter had been determined to establish her independence from the moment she learned to walk. But there I was with my feathers scattering the light to create an illusion of brilliant green, my fat tongue, my perfect toes. I, Barnes, who would—if she cared for me attentively—grow to love and depend on her as my parent, partner, mate.
