Read Online Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey - Free Book Online Page B

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.
    Â 
    My dearest Evelyn
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 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

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    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
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    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