The Museum of Biology

by Ben Ehrenreich

I tried to write something about the genocide now underway and the one that is being used to justify it, the one in whose shadow I grew up, but the attempt dropped me into a hole that took days to get out of, so here instead is something about living with the dead that I wrote nearly a decade ago but that is not, I hope, irrelevant now. 

Lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life. 

—Bruno Schulz

There were children running everywhere, hooting as they sprayed each other with water guns and racing down the broad and leafy avenues of the zoo in the sleepy northern West Bank city of Qalqilia. They were giggling in the bird house with the peacocks and the guinea hens and the squawking cranes with their long, black, scythe-like bills. There was a playground too, and ice cream stands, but most of the children stayed in clumps around the animals’ cages, laughing at the baboons’ red rumps, gawking in silence at the melancholy lion. The jackals and the hippopotamus were sleeping. The wolf was panting, running tight, compulsive laps around the dirt enclosure of its cell. Only a few kids bothered to look up at the giraffe standing sentinel outside the gate to the educational museum. It was surrounded by a cage of black wire mesh, but there was no longer much likelihood that the giraffe would wander off. Most of its hair was gone. Its skin was blackened with dust. Viewed from the left it looked merely sinister, but from the right it was ghastly: half the flesh on that side of its face had peeled off, revealing crumbling plaster stuffing and a bulbous green plastic eye. 

The giraffe had died in 2002 when, panicked by gunshots, it ran and hit its head. It took Dr. Sami Khader, the zoo’s veterinarian, seven months to cure the animal’s hide, stuff it, and stitch it together again. 

“You can call us the last zoo under occupation in all the world,” Dr. Sami told me with obvious pride when I met him twelve years later. Most of his problems by then were bureaucratic—the usual travel restrictions and difficulties obtaining supplies, and the fact that all of his attempts to procure new animals required Israeli intermediaries. “In this country,” he said with a shrug, “you cannot live without fighting.”