Only the Animals Read online

  I can hardly wait to see you again tomorrow.

  Yours

  Evelyn

  There was once a Hunger Artist who kept the good people of Stellingen and Hamburg entertained by fasting for forty days and forty nights.

  Do you remember him? Perhaps you visited the zoo on one of your speaking rounds and stopped outside the enclosure where he sat cross-legged in little more than a loincloth? Naughty boys liked to tempt the Artist to eat by throwing peanuts into his enclosure, but the nuts remained untouched in their woody shells. Visitors believed he was creating a masterpiece with his own body.

  But then the people lost interest. Nobody bought season tickets anymore, nobody came in the evenings to watch him starve by torchlight. Even the man he had employed as his professional watcher, to guarantee to spectators that he was not secretly gorging himself overnight, quit his job. Is there anything more ridiculous than an Artist who suffers without an audience? Nobody was there on the forty-first day, when the Hunger Artist crawled out of his cage and sat in the sun to eat an apple.

  The creatures around me are no longer being fed. They would do anything – anything – for food; in fact they debase themselves daily begging for it. Does it matter now? That some of us will die of disease, some of malnutrition, some of exposure? We will all die hungry, but only I will have chosen to starve. The humans are no better. Their bonds are too fragile, held together by not much more than shared food on a table. Is that all that lies between the behaviour of apes and humans? A regular supply of hot meals?

  My thoughts have become an endless source of fascination. I can watch them traipse across my own mind in a parade of startling brilliance. How everything can be ventured; how a fire is ready for all ideas, however strange, in which they burn up and are resurrected! In the corner of my cage, I breathe in the sweet rot of leaves. My cricket chirps at the moon from the warmth of his walnut. The light turns blue before the window. I hope they heat me up and eat me.

  My dearest Evelyn

  Perhaps you are right that this is the safest place for me to wait out the war, now that the authorities have chased me out of my hotel rooms. But still it feels as if I have regressed – sitting here in this empty cage in the laboratory, unclothed, without my pipe to calm me with a twist of white smoke. I can sense Hazel’s apish presence here. Her smell is all over the leaves even if she herself is gone. I’m sorry, my dear, but I have to say, she stank to high heaven! Or perhaps, horror, horror, horror, I am simply smelling myself. I don’t know anymore. I am scribbling on this scrap of paper, waiting for your night visit impatiently, as I used to. But this letter writing is no use, it is an intercourse between ghosts – the ghost of the receiver and one’s own ghost, which emerges between the lines of the letter being written … kisses on paper never reach their destination, they are drunk up en route by these ghouls. I cannot stop thinking of how you fed me a spoonful of pumpkin marmalade this morning from the can that was sold to each household at Christmas, meant to last your family an entire year. You held it out, the spoon, through the bars of the cage, and waited for me to lick the marmalade off. I did. You said you wanted to fatten me up. And immediately I knew I had made a terrible mistake getting back into this cage. Don’t let us miss our chance, darling! Unlock this cage, let me out, let me into your bed!

  HUNDSTAGE

  Soul of Dog

  DIED 1941, POLAND

  Those who are humane toward animals are not necessarily kind to human beings.

  Boria Sax, ANIMALS IN THE THIRD REICH

  But whom, I asked, do I really want

  singly and in fistfuls

  to destroy until nothing is left?

  First of all yourself, said the She-rat.

  In the beginning self-destruction

  was practised only in private.

  Günter Grass, THE RAT

  How do I begin to describe my beloved Master and my life with him before I was exiled to the woods?

  On the day I was presented to him, he was in his magnificent office overlooking the larch trees that were beginning to turn, weeping over a dead canary. I watched as he placed the bird’s body in a tin and gave it to a servant to bury in a special lot within the grounds.

  His sorrow eased as we began to play. He did not tire as humans normally do after a while, and took pleasure in the cinnamon smell of my puppy breath. It struck me for the first time that it was a privilege to be a companion species to humans, a term the scientists at the Society had often used.

  My possessiveness gratified him. In each meeting my Master attended, I sat at his feet under the table, waiting for the agreeable weight of his hand on my head.

  One late autumn morning after he had walked me in the forest, I lay beside him in front of the fire to listen to a radio address by a man whom my Master seemed to respect. This man announced that animals were no longer to be experimented on without limits, or killed without concern for our suffering. He said something very beautiful: ‘To the German, animals are not merely creatures in the organic sense, but creatures who lead their own lives and who are endowed with perceptive facilities, who feel pain and experience joy and prove to be faithful and attached.’

  I heard a sound from my Master. He was crying, moved by these words. I licked away his tears, and that made them fall more swiftly.

  * * *

  My sister Blondi and I were raised on stories about our grandfather, one of the first of our kind. Our breed was the invention of the scientist von Stephanitz, who believed he was recreating a modern version of the Germanic wolf-dogs that once roamed these conifer forests. Grandfather had taken this responsibility seriously, though he confided to us before he died that he had not known as a young dog how he was meant to behave, what exactly the humans expected of him.

  As he moved beyond the generic playfulness of his puppy days, he had sensed von Stephanitz’s impatience for him to express more particularly his curated genes. Grandfather decided to try being alert and aloof, and all the humans who came to observe him were impressed. Over time, he experimented with other qualities and fine-tuned them. He didn’t lunge at his food, for this seemed to disappoint von Stephanitz by suggesting greed, and he never bonded too quickly with any new human, for von Stephanitz interpreted this as disloyalty. Aggression in the right circumstances was admired, and desire for females was tolerated as long as he only coupled with purebreds. One lonely night, my grandfather howled at the full moon, and von Stephanitz took this as proof of the wolf blood in our breed’s veins.

  Grandfather’s lowest moment – an incident that was not recorded in any research notebooks – was being caught behind a bitch of unknown breeding kept in the same facility for canine medication experimentation, whose hair and teeth had fallen out. He felt the burden then of being the ur-type, and swore off females until von Stephanitz guided my beautiful grandmother into his pen.

  * * *

  A few months after our birth, Blondi and I were taken away from the rest of our litter at the Society for Animal Psychology, and transported to a lodge in the woods far outside the city. We had heard of other young dogs from the Society being taken out into these woods, where they were kept on a leash to avoid breaking one of the humans’ new laws on animal protection, banning the use of dogs in the fox chase. The scientists at the Society were very proud of this law, and of the many others we had heard them discuss at their meetings. Yet it was not until Blondi and I met our new Masters that we began to understand the significance of these laws, and the fullness of our Masters’ compassion for animals. At the lodge, she was presented to the human leader of our country, and I was given to one of his close associates.

  * * *

  My Master was having a massage – his masseur came once a week to knead the tension out of his body – while I lay beneath the chaise longue, breathing in the scent of clove oil. 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, for it offended his sensib
ilities to see me gobble down a bloody steak while he ate lettuce and herbs for lunch. 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.

  ‘Herr Kersten,’ my Master was saying to his masseur, who was an avid hunter, ‘how can you possibly shoot from an ambush at the poor animals which are grazing so innocently, defenselessly and unawares at the edge of the woods? If you take the right view of your action, it is murder pure and simple. Nature is very beautiful, and after all, every animal has a right to live.’

  Herr Kersten said nothing, only grunted a little as he worked on my Master’s tight shoulders.

  ‘It is this point of view which I admire so much in our ancestors,’ my Master continued. ‘Respect for animals is something you find in all Indo-Germanic people. It interested me terribly to hear the other day that Buddhist monks still wear little bells when they walk through the forest, so that the creatures on whom they might step have a chance to get out of the way. But here everyone steps on worms and snails without giving it a second thought.’

  I was listening closely, as usual, for my Master liked to tell Herr Kersten about his philosophical beliefs. Something about being half naked in a heated room filled with the scent of essential oils made him talkative, and Herr Kersten was a good listener – he did not interrupt, and he never asked my Master to repeat himself, even if his words were sometimes a little blurry because his face was pressed into the cushions.

  ‘You may not know this, Herr Kersten,’ my Master said, ‘but I used to be a chicken farmer in my previous life. That’s right. I used to chop off chicken heads as easily as one, two, three. Then somebody gave me Hermann Hesse’s book Siddhartha. Have you read it?’

  Herr Kersten dug his knuckles into the knots in my Master’s neck, making the small bones click. ‘No, Herr Himmler, I have not.’

  ‘It is remarkable. It’s set in ancient India and based on the life of the Buddha. After I finished it, I wanted to know more about Hinduism, and Professor Wüst, who is an expert in this field and my spiritual guide, suggested I read the Bhagavad Gita, one of the Hindu scriptures. It tells of the adventures of the world’s greatest warrior, Arjuna, and the guidance his god Krishna gives him along the way. It helped me realise that the rotten luck I’d been having in my life was because of all the bad karma I attracted from killing chickens. I read passages from it each night before bed.’

  I thought of the few chickens I had managed to kill and eat in my life before becoming a vegetarian, and felt sick. And hungry. I thought of how good their blood tasted, of how prettily their feathers floated through the air.

  * * *

  The other appointment my Master kept without fail, every other week, was his meditation sessions with Professor Wüst, held in the sacred crypt beneath the north tower of the castle at Wewelsburg. I loved going there because, on rare occasions, I would see Blondi accompanying her Master to the castle and we would be allowed to play together in the grounds, or in the circular entrance hall, where we liked to try to dig out the Black Sun embedded in the marble floor. Sometimes we were allowed to visit others of our kind in the settlement nearby – relatives and friends who had also been bred and trained at the Society, who were working as guard dogs, making sure that the slaves who were carrying out my Master’s grand renovations of the castle did their work properly. Our favourite place of all was the castle crypt itself, huge and dark, with a single flame that never stopped burning. If we barked down there, the sound was tremendous; dozens of dogs barked back at us out of nowhere.

  If Blondi wasn’t at the castle, I would stand watch beside my Master and Professor Wüst while they sat cross-legged on the crypt’s stone floor to meditate in silence. Afterwards they would talk through aspects of their beliefs so that my Master could in turn provide strong spiritual guidance to his underlings.

  On my final visit to Wewelsburg – it was the last time I was to accompany my Master to the castle before my betrayal, before my banishment – he and Professor Wüst, after meditating for some time, began to discuss how to inspire their followers to be courageous in battling our enemies, for a war had been declared, and Germany was destined to win it.

  ‘I have been giving this some thought,’ Professor Wüst said. ‘We need to focus the men on the spiritual dimensions of battle. Perhaps we could mention Krishna’s injunction to Arjuna to kill his kin, and his assurance that Arjuna would in no way do any damage to his higher self in carrying out this sacred duty.’

  I already knew who Krishna and Arjuna were; like me, they were vegetarians.

  My Master mused on this. ‘I think we may even be bold and compare the Führer to Krishna. Our leader, too, arose at the time of his country’s greatest distress, when we Germans could not see a way out. He is the reincarnation of one of those great figures of light. A line came to me in my sleep last night, and I would like to use it somehow – the one who merges with the Führer frees himself from everything, and is not bound by his deeds.’

  ‘That’s very good,’ Professor Wüst said. ‘One issue, however, that has been concerning me is how we explain to the uninformed that the inspiration we take from ancient India, and Hinduism, goes all the way back to the Aryan conquerors who invaded that country thousands of years ago, who inspire us through their example, and with whom I believe our Germanic peoples share a spiritual heritage.’

  This seemed to irritate my Master, and he raised his voice. ‘That is why I am working so hard on transforming this castle into a private sanctuary, a spiritual retreat for the highest leaders among us! If we can educate them properly in our ideology, they, in turn, will educate their subordinates.’

  I growled at Professor Wüst. I did not like him. I had seen him secretly eating meat at mealtimes when my Master wasn’t watching.

  ‘If our Führer is Krishna, do you know what that makes you?’ Professor Wüst said with reverence. ‘You are Arjuna, the greatest warrior of all the lands.’

  ‘I am Arjuna,’ my Master said, smiling, and again, more loudly, ‘I am Arjuna.’ A hundred eerie voices repeated his words, reverberating around the crypt.

  ‘Shall I read to you now?’ Professor Wüst said to my Master. ‘I have a parable from the ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi that I would like to share.’

  This was part of their ritual. At the end of each session, my Master lay flat on his back on the floor in what Professor Wüst called ‘corpse pose’, while the Professor read aloud to him.

  ‘Lie back, close your eyes, let the words infuse your being so that you may take the highest wisdom from them,’ Professor Wüst said. ‘Breathe deeply, in and out, in and out.’ He waited until my Master was still except for his chest rising with each breath; then he began to read:

  Count Wenhui’s cook was busy dismembering an ox. Every stroke of his hand, every lift of his shoulders, every kick of his foot, every thrust with his knee, every hiss of cleaving meat, every whiz of the cleaver, everything was in utter harmony – formally structured like a dance in the mulberry grove, euphonious like the tones of Jingshou.

  ‘Well done!’ exclaimed the count. ‘This is craftsmanship indeed.’

  ‘Your servant,’ replied the cook, ‘has devoted himself to Dao. This is better than craftsmanship. When I first began to dismember oxen, I saw before me the entire ox. After three years’ practice, I no longer saw the entire animal. And now I work with my spirit, not my eyes. When my senses caution me to stop, but my spirit urges me on, I find my support in the eternal principles. I follow the openings and hollows, which, according to the natural state of the animal, must be where they are. I do not try to cut through the bones of the joints, let alone the large bones.

  ‘A good cook exchanges his cleaver for a new one once a year, because he uses it to cut. An ordinary cook exchanges it for a new one every month, because he uses it to hack. But I hav
e been handling this cleaver for nineteen years, and even though I have dismembered many thousands of oxen, its edge is as keen as though it came fresh from the whetstone. There are always spaces between the joints, and since the edge of the cleaver is very thin, it is only necessary to insert it in such a space. Thus the gap is enlarged, and the blade finds enough places to do its work.

  ‘Nevertheless, when I come across a tough part, where the blade encounters an obstacle, I proceed with caution. First, I fix my eye on it. I hold back my hand. Gently I apply the blade until that part yields with a muffled sound like lumps of earth sinking to the ground. Then I withdraw my cleaver, rise, look around, and stand still, until I finally dry my cleaver with satisfaction and lay it carefully aside.’

  ‘Well spoken!’ cried the count. ‘By the words of this cook I have learned how I must look after my life.’

  That was the end of the parable that Professor Wüst read to my Master that day. I tried to think through what it might mean. It reminded me of something I had heard my Master say to his masseur once, while Herr Kersten was pounding the backs of his legs: ‘Herr Kersten, what do oppressed people learn from being oppressed? Do they learn compassion, kindness or empathy, a desire to prevent suffering in others? No! They learn only this: next time, get a bigger stick.’

  * * *

  It is difficult for me to tell of my exile from my Master, though I deserved to be punished for my unfaithfulness.

  I had been unwell, and stayed alone in my Master’s office in front of the fire while he walked in the woods outside.

  A strange man entered the office and I felt immediate rage that he should dare to enter my Master’s domain with such nonchalance. I warned him with a growl, and when he did not back away I jumped up at him, knocking him over, and framed his neck with my teeth. I could sense his neck artery pulsing, and if he had so much as twitched I would have pierced it.