of Buda castle, flashes of white light whenever the smoke cleared. The sky held odd things—crates falling by parachute onto the ice over the Danube; gliders crashing at night, guided by spotlights into trees and buildings; ash rising like a million flies.
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 fairy tales 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, 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 iceencrusted 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.
Later, when Lieutenant-General Zamertsev questioned József about the lion, trying to get him to reveal where it was hiding, József resisted by speaking instead about the alligators and hippos, about the destruction of the palm garden as the moment when Sándor and he realized they would have to “liberate” as many of the animals as they could. Zamertsev looked at him, and then turned to the Hungarian interpreter and whispered something, and then the interpreter said to József, “You actually thought it was a good idea to let the lions and panthers and cougars and wolves roam free?”
József knew that Zamertsev didn’t believe him, that he was not accusing him of excessive sentimentality so much as lying, or maybe outright craziness, as if between the destruction of the siege and Sándor’s ranting, József’s brain had also become unhinged. Zamertsev was right in a sense, because it wasn’t what happened to the alligators that made Sándor and József wander around the zoo unlocking cages, but rather the arrival of the Soviet soldiers, Zamertsev’s men, high atop their horses, demanding that they first release a wolf, then a leopard, and then a tiger, all so they could hunt them, these half-starved creatures that could barely walk never mind run, chasing them down with fresh horses and military ordnance, drunk and laughing and twice crazy with what the war had both taken from and permitted them.
The attendants were into the champagne that night, having discovered a crate of the expensive stuff in one of the locked trunks Teleki left in his office, along with several sealed tins of caviar and a box of excellent cigars. Sándor handed out bottles and tins and matches to József and Gergő and Zsuzsi, all of them so hungry and tired of thinking about what might happen to them the following week, or tomorrow, or the next minute that they popped the corks as fast as possible and began drinking, trying to wash from themselves the cold and fear and the dead animals all around, as if by concentrating you could keep only to the taste of what was on your tongue, and think of nothing else.
It was of course Sándor’s idea, the action he decided on after he’d drained his second bottle of Törley’s, leaving off the caviar, looking at everyone’s grubby knuckles, their wincing with the sound of another explosion or rattle of gunfire or the slow fall of flares (falling so crookedly they seemed to be welding fractures in the sky). And so it was neither love nor logic that led them around the zoo that night but drunkenness, jingling keys pulled from Teleki’s walls, moving past the carcasses in the monkey house, many of them frozen to the bars they’d been gripping when their heat gave out and they laid their heads onto their shoulders welcoming the last warmth of sleep; or in the tropical aviary, the brightly coloured feathers gone dull on the curled forms, their heads dusted with frost and tangled in the netting overhead, as close as they would ever again come to the sun; or in the aquarium, where someone now gone, perhaps Márti, had broken through the glass of the tanks and tried to chip some of the fish out of the ice, whether in some pathetic attempt to thaw them back to life or to eat them no one could guess. In the end, it was less an organized act than a celebration, less motivated by reason or a goal than a delight in the moment when the cage swung open and something else bounded or crawled or slithered or flew out, the four of them downing champagne and running around, eagerly seeking the next thrill of release, opening after opening, an orgy of smashing those locks they’d worried over for years. And when it was over, when there wasn’t a single cage left to open, an animal to free, then Gergő and Zsuzsi freed themselves, waltzing out the front gate straight into a warning shout, a halting laugh, a hail of machine-gun fire.
Which brought József and Sándor back to themselves in a hurry. “I’ll bet it did,” said Zamertsev, leaning over the table and staring at József, the shoulders and chest of his uniform covered with red stars and hammers and sickles and decorative ribbons. “And I guess that’s when you got the idea of feeding my soldiers to the lion.”
“It was your soldiers’ horses we wanted,” mumbled József, still so amazed by the last sound Sándor had made—he could imagine him tossing his head and baring his teeth and roaring so loudly it could be heard above the guns—that József might have been speaking to anybody, treating Zamertsev as though he was an acquaintance he’d met in a restaurant or café rather than someone who at any moment could have sent him out to be shot. “A lion can live a lot longer on a horse than a man, you know.”
But the truth was, he wasn’t so sure, for Sándor had frequently looked down upon the Russian soldiers (both from the roof of the palm garden, and later from the palisades) and licked his dry lips and recalled the Siege of Leningrad, wondering if people in Budapest would end up eating human flesh, as they were rumoured to have done there. At the time, József had not connected Sándor’s actions with appetite, but with a hatred of the Soviets, because with all the dead German and Arrow-Cross soldiers not to mention civilians lying in the streets, perfectly preserved by a winter so cold even the Danube had frozen over, there was no need
