Giraffe Read online

  I walk to the gates past a group of sand gazelles. They appear slight enough, with delicate muscles and polished hooves, to one day lift off the face of the world with me. They bleat and cock their heads in such a way as to remind me of some classical civilization I have read of, in which water was poured into the ears of goats outside the temple so that they bleated and shook their heads vigorously when they were brought before the priests and this was taken as a sign they were willing to be sacrificed. I walk more quickly now by groaning beasts and apes with offset teeth, some spending themselves and others rising or bedding down. The gates are locked behind me. I stand again in the parking lot. The sky is a redder shade of pink now. I look up the slope and pick out a barn in the zoo that might hold the giraffes. I look beyond the zoo to the forest, which encloses the Svět.

  Sněhurka

  JULY 12, 1973

  I ENTERED THIS ZOO with three other giraffes under the violence of a thunderstorm. We leaned toward a Czechoslovakian woman stilled in the rain in the very last moments before the gates opened to us. We stood inside the zoo in an idling truck and glimpsed forms of other animals in the wet dark. I saw white teeth. I saw the cherry flash of baboon rumps. I saw all of the baboons, a legion, gnashing, careening forward at us, dashing themselves against the bars of their cage, falling back and beating their arms on the concrete floor.

  NO LIONESS EVER CAME for me. I moved confidently down beetle-enameled riverbeds. I was darted and captured by Czechoslovakians. I was put on a train. I did not move on that train, but the world revolved under me. I was put on a ship. I did not move on that ship, but the ocean swelled under me. There is no movement now. I am stopped and the blade is stopped under me also. I stand in a metal-sided barn. I am near the doors: I am a leader and I wish to be the first into the light. It is crowded in here. I strike the chests of other giraffes in walking. Fear is contagious in this halt, where there are no barefoot boys to call up greetings, but only a keeper.

  I feel the roof more keenly than the walls. I wish to see the sky, to set myself up, against gravity. I stand here by the door whispering to a bull my memories of Africa, of a certain light that struck there, which elongated my shadow across the red earth. I whisper to him of galloping on the ash-colored grassland, sundering termite mounds with my hooves, of being graceful in my immensity, like a whale in ether. I whisper to him of plantations that revolved under us on the train, where women moved along corridors planted in dark soil, picking fruit. The bull puts his neck against mine and whispers to me of the Cape of Good Hope, of sandy coves on which waves broke like clouds, of sea lions on those sands and barking in the waters about the ship. I whisper to him of albatrosses gliding at our heads, of dropping into a trough in the ocean and rising again, so that the many chambers of our stomachs lifted up our throats. He whispers of the English Channel, of a fog bank stretching from the low coastline of Belgium to the salt marshes on the English shore, of the ship becoming a barge, the ocean a river. And I remember now the river narrowing, so that some of us feared predators in the trees.

  THE DOOR OPENS, to the sky. I am the first out. I push my head back. I stretch myself up, on tiptoe. I feel an updraft within me that is more than rising blood. I move around the small yard. There is no wind here. There are no oxpecker birds to pick the ticks from my back. I look around me. There are materials in the air: It smells of smoke. I see beyond the zoo to shapes of trees and Czechoslovakians laid out in the sunshine. I see a forest encircling a watering hole. I see spires and towers. I hear a lion. I rear back. I drop my head. I feel my blood roaring.

  THE KEEPER PRESSES US back into the barn at the end of the day. I do not sleep. None of us sleeps. We are not bats, who hang down for so many hours and then sweep out on sonar to gorge themselves. We are sleepwalking beasts. Our eyelids flutter but remain open. Our teeth grind in fits of bruxism. We push up. We walk with unfocused eyes through the barn. We bump into one another, not waking but galloping inward across ash-colored grassland and stretching up to the highest branches.

  ~ ~ ~

  Ah! Sweet innocent girl, lovelier for your suffering.

  — FELICE ROMANI

  Amina

  JULY 13, 1973

  I AM NAMED AMINA for the heroine of Vincenzo Bellini’s opera La Sonnambula. They say it is a pastoral tale. Operatic Amina is the prettiest girl in her mountain village, which I picture to be the Swiss village of tiled rooftops on the poster above my bed. She rises at night and sleepwalks. The villagers mistake her for a ghost and think themselves haunted. During one fit of somnambulism, Amina enters the rooms of a count and, dark to the moment, lays herself out on his bed. The count discreetly flees the scene. Amina’s lover is less forgiving. He breaks off their engagement, thinking her unfaithful. The count then publicly defends Amina, in words that often repeat in my head:

  There are some, who, though asleep, behave as though they were awake, speaking, answering when anyone speaks to them, and they are called “sleepwalkers” because they walk and sleep.

  Amina steps from the window of a water mill in the climactic scene. She sleepwalks along a plank set precipitously over the mill wheel. The plank is rotten and gives way, threatening to cast her down into the blades of the wheel. There are gasps and screams from the villagers below, who now recognize her as a wronged girl, not a specter. They cry out:

  God in Thy mercy guide her unsteady feet!

  Their prayer is heard. Amina makes it to the grassy bank on the other side. She awakes there, agitated and bruised, in the arms of her unworthy lover. Her innocence is proven. She is wed at once. The villagers sing a joyful chorus and in the last line of the opera express their true feelings for her:

  Ah! Sweet innocent girl, lovelier for your suffering.

  This is what my father used to say to me when I misbehaved and he was forced to punish me. I have no such romance. It is strange to be named for an operatic orphan and then to be orphaned, and stranger still, in this age of cosmonauts, to have grown into a somnambulist in resemblance of her. I sleepwalk without wishing it. It is a condition. It comes from too little rest or too much, from being an orphan, and from paint fumes settling under my tongue in the factory or bubbling in a particular way in my chest. The root of all sleepwalking is surely with Adam, who stood with his eyes open and his arms stretched up out of the Garden of Eden, as God reached in and peeled out a rib, from which he fashioned Eve. It began for me as a child with pavor nocturnus, or night terrors. The chemicals meant to hold my body in paralysis were not released as they should be, so that my waking and sleeping states became mixed. I was caused to sit upright in bed. I was a little girl, jackknifed in fear. My eyes were wide and rolling. I let out the longest screams, until my parents came and shook me awake and comforted me. It was always impossible for me to explain to them what had so terrified me. It was something more than achluphobia. A charging rhino maybe, or the underside of the world seen slipping away from space, or a childlike understanding of how the finite drifts like the tiniest mustard seed on the winds of the infinite. After I was orphaned and there was no one to wake and comfort me, the night terrors gave way to sleepwalking. I rise at night with dilated pupils. I perform complex tasks in my sleep. I sponge myself at the sink. I cook. I listen to records. I sew. I have vivid recollections in sleepwalking of lifting off. Snatches of the dreams remain with me, as in looking down from a cloud to slicks of goose fat floating on the surface of the Svět, and to reeds being fed to a thresher on the deck of a paddle steamer grounded on a dried-up channel in a marsh. I sleepwalk out of my panelák. I walk with the eyes of the hypnotized; I am a ghost to the fishermen stumbling home drunk. I sleepwalk along the edge of roofs in the dead of night, naked, on tiptoe, my arms stretched up like John the Baptist’s, without chorus or lover to witness my foot reaching out into space. I do not fall but often wake bruised and agitated under linden trees or at the base of the helical plague column. I lower my eyes to the painful daylight and sing quietly to myself parts of La Sonnambula and lines my
mind has added, such as:

  Dear God!

  Where am I?

  Revered comrade, tell me from what height have I fallen!

  What’s happening?

  Ah, I beg you, comrade, don’t wake me up!

  The birdsong has quieted outside. I place La Sonnambula on the turntable. I set down the needle. I turn the sound low, so as not to disturb my neighbors. I listen. There is scratched silence. The record revolves. Then a first line

  Viva! viva! viva! viva! Amina!

  My parents were struck and killed at a bend in the gravel road by the Svět. They were flattened by a military truck headed for a secret base in the forest. I sometimes imagine them to have died in other ways, for instance to have been blown from the clock tower or from a mountain above the industrial towns, for they were not large people. I have grown to love the music they left me. I am light and knitted strong with bird ribs. I will reach up. I will lift off the face of the world, just as the arias in La Sonnambula stretch up on tiptoe, swell in eights into bel canto, and lift from the stage. The villagers feared operatic Amina would drop into the mill wheel. They did not notice she was walking the plank on tiptoe, with her arms stretched up. They had no understanding that the intent of sleepwalkers is not to dive down like the suicide or rusalka from the Charles Bridge, but to lift off into another place, like John the Baptist, perhaps even beyond that part of the sky the religious speak of that is lined with the pure and holy.

  I ENTER THE TOWN NOW from my panelák, through the oldest gate. I go under the portcullis and on by the brewery with its sign advertising REGENT BEER, SINCE 1379.

  I come to the town square, where the plague column stands. A few high windows on the castle are thrown open at this hour to circling bats. Mosquitoes rise from the puddles. I continue by the courthouse of 1572 faced with a Latin inscription and under the all-seeing eye engraved on the lintel of the former Masonic hall. I go by the fountain of St. George spearing a dragon. I pass a socialist grocery, which sells no butter, only margarine. I line up there for oranges. I do not line up for sausages: They are filled with horse guts. I go under the Gothic stone carving of a winged cow. I pass by the shoe shop, which offers hardly any shoes, but only empty shelves lined with brown and yellow flowered wallpaper. I linger by the civic bulletin boards with their announcements, red and gold graphics, and portraits of the spectacled men who govern the Communist moment. I am hardly aware of the footsteps I take to reach here and to return. I remember them only because I repeat them. I am awake but I see dimly now, as a rhino must see through its lanced openings, because I am a sleepwalker by day as well as by night. I am not often awake to this ČSSR of 1973. That is why men are attracted to me. They like my lack of strategy, the way I fall into their arms at the end of an evening, when invariably they say, “God! You’re like a dancer to me, Amina.”

  I feel nothing. If I am in their arms at all it is only because I stumble in sleepwalking when they speak again of carp. It is difficult for me to remember these men or what happens to me from one day to the next. I dry myself among irises on the shore of the Svět and sleepwalk off toward the factory. I am not so different. This is a country of sleepwalkers by day, who drink by night only as a lesser form of sleepwalking. This is a country where the officials say openly they can do whatever they like with it, if they keep the beer flowing. Hardly any of us are ever awake the way operatic Amina is awake, when she asks her friend to lay a hand upon her breast and feel her heart beating up blood within her, and to sing:

  That is my heart, which cannot contain the happiness it feels!

  The workers in the industrial towns are pulled from their beds with tidal force, but are not woken. They sit glassy-eyed on trams that pass out over fields of beets. The sparking of the wires scatters the geese feeding in the fields, but no one turns from the tram to look at the geese in flight. They hardly acknowledge one another. They stare without awareness at one another’s breasts. They go to work. They mine coal. They pour steel without thought into armored plates such as would dress a rhino. They automatically sluice carp from the Svět into concrete tanks.

  The sand gazelles cocked their heads at me. They registered the shape I made and then lowered their heads to graze again. I was awake to the gazelles, as I am awake to the giraffes. I am wakeful when I walk the slopes below the forest that encloses the Svět, and harvest mice scatter before me down smooth ovular holes and make for the balks in the field where the yellowhammers and quail are nested. I wake to the hare breaking for cover, the springing deer, and the skylarks turning away from a merlin in the windless heights. I go attentively down narrowing brambles of blackthorn and blackberries, through creeping thistles and nettles, and emerge in a circle of aspen trees. I take an empty bottle from my bag. I fill it from a spring that rises there, percolating up from deep in the rock. I sit beside the shrine over the spring, dedicated to Mary. I am aware of the wild roses laid beside her blue likeness and the candles burned low. I am held rapt by the grains of sand and flakes of fool’s gold dancing in the clear waters. The Communist moment cannot dull such a place. Even if it cemented it over and punished all those who have laid flowers there, so that the act of worshiping was forgotten, the waters would only well up somewhere else. The officials show no interest in the bend on the gravel road where my parents were hit by a truck. Their interest is in the secret military base in the forest, in the electrification of its perimeter, so the animals will bounce off it, and in meaningful camouflage, so I will no longer see the tips of the missiles dug in there, glinting between the trees. The same officials paste political flyers onto the plague column, masking the pox-ridden faces spiraling up the column and the seraphim with wings as tiny as a sparrow’s supporting those with their heads rolled back. When I am awake and walking by the plague column and see slogans over these mournful sculpted panels, I understand the Communist moment cannot endure; it does not have the imagination. I know Czechoslovakia will awaken in the far future, agitated and bruised, under a spreading linden tree, to a religious revival, or even to a moment without lines in which the customer is always right.

  Amina

  APRIL 8, 1974

  I SIT ON A bench under the sycamore tree by the giraffe house. I watch the Egyptian geese waddling with clipped wings through the legs of the largest herd of captive giraffes in the world. I am awake. I do not sleepwalk in the zoo. I see again how the giraffes ignore the geese, even though they may have stories to tell of nesting in the Nile among rusalkas swum up there from papyrus roots with trinkets of pharaohs, who never venture along the Nile because the thrum of the cities is too much for their watery forms.

  A man approaches. He is as tall as the zoo director I have seen striding now and again between the cages.

  “Why are you so often here under this sycamore tree?” he asks.

  “The giraffes awaken me,” I say.

  “What is your name?”

  “Amina Dvořáková.”

  “I am the giraffe keeper,” he says.

  “I’ve seen you,” I say, embarrassed.

  He sits down on the bench. We are quiet.

  “This is a good angle to watch the giraffes,” he says after some time. “You can see better how vertical they are from here.”

  He turns to me.

  “I have to tell you,” he says, “we had our first birth last night.”

  “Were you present?”

  “I came in this morning and there she was. Would you like to see her?”

  “Yes.”

  It is warm and dark as a nest in the giraffe house. The keeper points to the newborn giraffe. I move quickly to the wooden railing. I look through the slats. She is still covered in patches of membranes. She totters on the smooth floor. She makes it to the belly of her mother and puts her mouth to a large teat.

  “See how she runs!” he says. “More easily than she walks — she has such a low center of gravity in these first days.”

  I point to bumps on her head, covered with velveteen skin. “
Are they horns?”

  He nods. “The skin will wear away and the horns will come in time — three or four ossified outgrowths. Look at the mother’s tail.”

  It is oxblood-colored with afterbirth.

  “Now look at those giraffes nuzzling over there by the door,” he says. “See anything unusual?”

  “One is a Rothschild giraffe and the other a reticulated?”

  “Not that,” he says. “They only have one ear.”

  I see that now.

  “This calf will only have one ear too. Too much love! See how her mother is licking. She’ll lick the ear until all the blood vessels are closed off and it shrivels.”

  The reticulated cow with the white underbelly comes forward. She leans down over the fence. I put up my hand to her wet face.

  “That’s Sněhurka,” he says. “She’s one of the leaders. She is always the first to step out when I open the doors in the morning. She stands quite still in the open with her head pushed back, like this, almost lifting up off the ground. Then she nods and the others venture out.”