Giraffe Read online

  I have slept and risen and sleepwalked in the night, and slept once more in my cot under a poster of the Alps. My eyes open first to a scene of Swiss railways, to a red train passing over a tumbling river, up to slopes of Cembra pine and larch, sharpened peaks, and a skier carving a dreamy S on hickory skis down pistes to an operatic village of tiled rooftops and seemingly beyond, out of the poster, down my hair, into my narrow place. The arias recede. I throw back my sheets and move about my room. Light plays on my body, settling in the cups of my heels and in warm bars across my flat stomach. I select a record and place it on the turntable. I set down the needle. A Brahms lied for mezzo-soprano sung long ago comes forward respectfully and fills the room.

  I go to stand before the sink and sponge under my arms and between my legs. The dress I pull on clings to my skin. I put a kettle on the stove and light a flame under it. I stand still, listening to the music. I look up once more at the faded lithograph on the wall showing John the Baptist standing in the River Jordan, his arms stretched up as though about to lift into the clouds. The piece ends. I pour myself tea. I stand out on the balcony and sip it. It is long before work. The light is fragrant, the air also — there are two white and ocher butterflies dancing just out of reach.

  There is the Svět and the forest. The sky beyond the forest is yellow. Industrial towns are hidden over there, at the root of monstrous chimneys. They grow on the proclamation of the Communist moment. The rain falls acid on them, the trees in their municipal parks die, and I have seen frogs there burst in toxic ditch water. My town is older and much smaller than those industrial towns. It follows the orders handed down from Prague, but it does not grow in consequence. It was not created under any red banner. It has its own memories. Here and there it follows its own logic. The chimneys here are short and few: Our famous town zoo has a chimney, the brewery has a chimney, so also does the Christmas-decoration factory, where I work. My town is not poisoned. It is saved from the industrial towns by a ring of forest, where men march now between secret military bases.

  The industrial towns pull men and women from their beds with tidal force. These workers rattle out of the industrial towns at dawn, on trams that spark out over fields of beet, and alight at factories, foundries, and the square mouths of coal mines. I once took such a journey. It was odd to be moving across fields on a tram, with no buildings in sight. A man sat across from me, arms folded, in the beret and knee-length leather coat of 1950s worker fashion.

  “I pour steel,” he said, out of the silence, “into blocks that are made into pylons, to hold up power lines.”

  He stared at my breasts — not in lust, but looking through me, seemingly occupied by a memory that meant something to him.

  “Please look away,” I said.

  “What’s that?” he said. “Was I looking?”

  “I cannot bear your look any longer,” I said.

  His eyes fell to his boots, but with the same blank expression.

  The white and ocher butterflies are gone. I stand here on the balcony and look out over the back of my town. I see the roof of my factory. I see the River Labe flowing in its channel. I see the town walls, the steeples and turrets within, the bright prick of the golden eagle atop the plague column, the castle, the brewery. I see a brewery worker cycling along the gravel road that runs around the end of the Svět to the zoo. I watch him pedal through the parkland, around the fateful bend, dropping out of sight in the fruit trees around the baroque chapel of St. Michael.

  THE CASTLE AND THE ZOO are reflected in the Svět, which looks natural, but was man-made centuries ago, when they flooded the flats with marsh water. The men who crisscross the Svět call themselves fishermen because they harvest the carp, but they are more like farmers, sowing seed and fertilizer on the face of the waters, as on a field. The Svět stands a little higher than the streets of my town, so that when they used to cut and drag blocks of ice from the pond in winter, they wore down the banks containing it, and caused the waters to spill out, flooding the deep cellars with thrashing fish. The Svět and the forest have their own rhythms. Winter, spring, summer of storks lifting languidly from their nests on the brewery roof, autumn of short copper days — my autumn of dreamlike afternoons reading in the town library, looking at the departing birds, and the maple leaves swirling up against the boards of the outdoor ice-hockey rink, in which boys play out games in the sand with tennis balls, waiting for winter.

  IT IS LONG BEFORE WORK. There are no fishermen or farmers out on the Svět. There is only a corrugated red float drifting from a campsite on the far side. There is a haze over the brown water. I cannot see as far as the marsh at the end of the Svět, or the clearing by the sawmill in which the archangel Raphael is nailed to a tree, where yesterday I went to place wildflowers, as the drovers once did, and saw a couple riding unsteadily on a tandem bicycle, and in the next moment a pair of dragonflies locked together in flight. I sip my tea and listen to Brahms. My dreams are exposed now, in this light. They fade. I was sleepwalking again and awoke shivering on the stairs. I have a memory of ascension, but nothing more.

  I walk from my panelák to the Svět, to swim before starting work at the Christmas-decoration factory. I come to my secluded place. I slip off my dress — I am that suicide or rusalka, made slender and pale from the chemicals of the factory. I wade out. Cattails scratch my skin. Mud stirs about my calves and at the back of my knees. The water comes up to my hips. I push off. It is tepid in here. I swim out and tread water and look back now, at finches and buntings flitting on the shore, and warblers singing tunes from the highest bulrushes. A muskrat slips in with me, from a hole in the bank. Coots and tufted ducks are about me. Something moves between my toes, some tench’s fin. I swim far out to the float. I climb up naked onto it and drift together with it across this brown water without current, whose bottom holds treasure and hollows where cavemen lit fires an age before the Svět was flooded into being.

  I am an orphan, a factory girl living alone. I have no telephone. Messages are left for me with neighbors, or at the factory, or written in the margins of postcards sent to me from surviving relatives in other parts of ČSSR. I dip glass decorations in paint to be hung from Christmas trees. I attend to my friends and the small responsibilities of my town. I paddle naked on a corrugated red float across the Svět on this morning of Midsummer’s Day. My birthday is of no great consequence. My life will leave no lasting mark. It will be no more than the mark of a cuff button on one’s wrist that quickly fades, or these few ripples vanishing as I slip from the float into the water. It is nothing to be sorry about. I am like the swallows around me on the Svět. I touch the world, I rise again.

  I backstroke to the shore, watching clouds as I go. I dry myself among irises and take a path to the factory that leads by the statue of a Jesuit standing on the head of a whale or a mighty carp, such as are netted in the Svět once in a generation, and by the Spořitelna Savings Bank, which has above its doorway a stone statue of a fisherman cradling a carp. I step lightly on the bridge over the Labe to the factory. I see my colleague Eva waving to me.

  “Amina!” she calls.

  We go in arm and arm, into Christmas colors and fumes. I HAVE WORKED autonomically in the factory all day. I feel awake now in my girlfriend’s arms, on a lawn in the parkland sloping away from the chapel of St. Michael. We have drunk some wine. Mosquitoes and horseflies are on our skin. We can hear the evening train passing through the forest. We can smell each other, and the brewery, and the bog and quicksands that circle the old town walls. The trees above us are swollen in the heat. The crickets are loud. My girlfriend rolls off me.

  “Did you hear what happened on the Svět this morning?” she asks.

  “No,” I say.

  “A brewery worker cycled out there before work with his pockets filled with stones,” she says. “He rowed out to the deepest part of the Svět. He jumped in. He sank. He thought himself dead. His lungs closed to the world. When his feet touched the bottom, he found his body was not
in agreement with his mind. His legs began walking with a will of their own — all the way to the shallows! His head became exposed. Despite himself, he began breathing. A boat laying down fish feed spotted him thrashing in chest-high water, ducking himself, then up again. They weren’t sure what they were looking at. He was dazed, they said, with a bloody nose. They drew close. He lashed out at them. His mind was quite made up against living.”

  “What happened next?”

  “They knocked him out with an oar.”

  “He wanted to escape.”

  “He wanted to die, Amina,” she says with a sad look.

  IT IS GOING TO RAIN. The pressure has dropped. I feel a throbbing in my temples. The castle clock strikes nine.

  “Do you remember,” my lover asks, “the last time we climbed the clock tower?”

  “When my parents died,” I say quietly.

  “The dial on the clock was almost clear.”

  “We could see through time,” I say, “all the way to the zoo.”

  “We watched the cogs of the clock. The bells were below us. Remember how we were so amazed the hands on the clock turned in a different direction?”

  “Going backward, never stopping,” I say.

  “We thought if we stood there long enough,” she says, rolling back toward me, “your parents would be waiting when we climbed down.”

  We kiss once and fall silent now. Our conversations often end with a moment that has already gone.

  WE GATHER OUR THINGS and run from the tempest in different directions, to other parts of the town. I hold my anorak over my head, like a flightless glider, and dash between the swollen trees, over silenced crickets, and stop breathlessly at the concrete tanks by the Svět, into which carp are sluiced at harvest time. The tanks are empty now, gathering only rainwater in their deeps. I have seen them full in the Christmas season, when ČSSR demands carp gills for supper. I have seen how those fish beat themselves into the air with the desperation of something that knows it will soon be knifed anyway. They hold themselves up from the crowd below, eyes popping in the air, then fall down onto the backs of other carp.

  I leave the concrete tanks and come out onto the gravel road, which curves inevitably around to the panelák where I live.

  Lightning forks and strikes out on the Svět. A white heron is ahead of me on the road. I make it out before it rotates its speared head, sees me, and lifts away. I see a truck coming slowly up behind the heron. Its headlights blind me. I am paralyzed. The truck stops. A man jumps down from the passenger side. I see him through the rain. He has golden hair. He is about my age.

  “What’s the matter?” he calls.

  I realize now he is calling to me.

  “Nothing,” I call.

  “Please, get off the road. We need to pass.”

  He climbs back into the truck.

  I feel suddenly weak. I stagger to the side of the road. I lean against the trunk of an oak tree, breathing hard. The truck goes past me. I look again. It is not, after all, a military truck heading to the forest. I see the man in the passenger seat staring down at me. I have dropped my anorak and my bag at the base of the tree. I am standing a little out from it with my hands at my sides. The rain seems to pass through me, washing through the paint-spattered rubber clogs I wear. I see something moving behind the cab of the truck, some high load, which is not missiles or logging machinery.

  “Giraffes!” I call out, then put a hand to my mouth.

  Four giraffes blink and gather in the storm light. The sky pours wet down their necks. Without thinking, I run out behind the truck. I stare up at the giraffes. I am captivated by them. Looking at them, I feel awakened. They are as slender as I am, with sensitivity of expression. They are also of an incorrect density, reached up, as on tiptoe, off the face of the world, aimed for that place I would like to be. I see their necks and chests, but not their bodies. I run a little farther behind the truck. The giraffes move toward me. They see me. They lean down. I wish to jump up and touch them, but they are gathering speed away from me. Lightning forks. I see the giraffes in silver, as nacre jigsaw puzzles that are in need of no solution.

  It is just a few soundless seconds. They are gone now, around the bend into the zoo.

  I walk slowly back to the oak. I pick up my anorak and bag. I close my eyes. I see giraffes precisely welted on the back of my eyelids. I open my eyes. I follow my footsteps in the gravel away from the zoo, toward the panelák. I am wet through, as if I have also walked involuntarily from the bottom of the Svět, with stones in my pockets. I must look even more like that rusalka or suicide who jumped from the Charles Bridge. That is not so. I am not a rusalka. I do not belong to the creatures in the water. I am wet with rain and rain comes from above, where I would like to be. My element is air, not water. I am not so important, I am a voiceless worker. I have this one understanding, that I am slight, aerated, strong with bird ribs, and am not meant to be within, or down. I am meant to reach up, as arias and lieder reach, as these giraffes reach. If it were possible, even in sleepwalking, I would stand on the Charles Bridge, with my hands above my head, and lift off out of the Communist moment, just as John the Baptist appeared, on my lithograph, to be rising from the Jordan, on this, the day of his nativity.

  Amina

  JULY 1, 1973

  THE SKY IS PINK, the Svět petaled with fish coming up for flies, and swimmers making for shore. My town has slowed and sunk in the heat. The bogs and quicksand circling the town walls are dried up and cracking open. I stand in the parking lot of the zoo, getting up the nerve to enter. It is an hour before closing. The parking lot empties around me, buses departing to the industrial towns under the mountains. Each bus carries workers and their children, people like me, but more alert, as though awakened by the otherness inside the zoo. I gather myself. I walk to the gates shaped in metal forms of animals. I have not stepped in here since I was a child, when my parents were alive. There is no wind to carry the smell of it across the Svět, but I see it reflected in the water by day and there are nights when I hear trumpets and howls through my open windows.

  The ticket seller looks up at me from behind metal bars.

  “One, please,” I say.

  “We’re almost closing,” she says.

  “I’ll be quick,” I say. “I just want to see the giraffes.”

  I do. All I want is to contemplate their stretch up.

  “The giraffes aren’t showing, dear,” she says, as if talking of a film, as if the zoo were a cinema. “They’ve only just arrived. They’ll be showing in a few weeks. Still want in?”

  “Yes.”

  She hands me a ticket stub. The zoo is not expensive. It is a subsidized workers’ entertainment.

  I go in. I pick a path at random. I walk swiftly along it, away from the cheetahs, past ornamental ponds. I pass an ice-cream vendor, a man I seem to recognize, pushing a cart with a polar-bear sign. From a cage comes the sound of a radio comedy. I see a zookeeper scrubbing the floor of the cage with a long soaped brush. I hear the comedy break off and the state news broadcast come on. “Now we are switching to Bratislava,” the voice says in state monotone. The news is in Slovak. This is curious. I do not usually notice such things. There is a smell of an incinerator and of dumplings coming from the zoo restaurant, but it is not more powerful than the smell of the animals. I walk on, up the slope. There is propaganda here also, red banners and old Party members in lilac uniforms sitting on benches, but it is easier not to notice it among the wild animals. I look across, but I cannot see any giraffes stretching up, into pink.

  I dwell instead on a rhinoceros, such as may have trampled me in my childhood nightmares. It stands enormous and gray in a pit that slopes down to a green stagnant pool. It does not look up, but circles with utmost gravity around piles of beet and mounds of its own dung. Its sides seem like plates of armor, its legs like columns, its ears like feathery cones. It has no neck — the head meets the body directly. Its eyes are small, without color or expression. It bett
er belongs to the dinosaurs, to the rhinos that charged around Czechoslovakia before it was sunk to the bottom of an ocean and raised again molten. I cannot imagine how dimly the world must arrive inside the head of this rhino, whether it sees me through its lanced eyelets, or ever notices the red banner hung over its pit declaring: OUR MORALS ARE FIXED!

  I step over a stream of white effluent. I walk on. I come to a cage containing wolves. They also move in gray circles before me. They are large and bony; their lope is springy. And I think of a story told to me in the factory cafeteria of a zoo in the east of ČSSR, in a town that gives out onto wilderness. The zookeeper was walking home at the end of the day, the story went, when he heard his wolves howling as he had never heard them before. He went to investigate and there saw a pack of wild wolves sitting before the cage. The wolf pack had come out from the wilderness and was communicating with the captive wolves, and the emotion between them was deep.

  I come next to an aviary. I expect to see an owl. I see nothing. Now comes a flash. And again, like a struck match, lighting the cage. Now I see it. A creature I have never seen before. There is no name on the cage. I have no idea what this creature is or where it is from. I look more closely. It becomes brighter and stranger. I think of the books I have read in the town library. All the sketches I have made. The animals I have dreamed of in my sleepwalking. Still I cannot make sense of it. This creature is the size of a large otter, with an otter’s whiskers. It has the coat of muskrat, like the one who swam in the Svět with me, but orange in color. It has the nose of a dog, the eyes of a fox, the teeth and claws of a leopard, the tail of a kangaroo. It leaps predatorily in the aviary, from one branch to another. A siren sounds, a voice comes over the loudspeakers: “Revered comrades. Please pay attention! The zoo is now closed. Revered comrades. Make your way to the exit.”