Giraffe Read online

  He looks up at Sněhurka.

  “Animals should be stripped of names,” he says, “but I cannot bring myself to do so in her case.”

  The keeper invites me into his room at the back of the giraffe house. He tells me that female giraffes are sociable, except after giving birth, and that males keep to themselves, moving slowly along the fence in the yard to where the okapi live. He brushes aside flies and fruit flies and shows me the feed of apples, pears, carrots, turnips, and beets. He points out the bales of hay and the browse cut from the acacia trees overhanging the fountain of St. George. He speaks of how the lights in the giraffe house come on gradually in the morning to give the impression of the rising sun, of the giraffes who lick the branches painted on the walls, of the tabby cat who goes undisturbed about the bull giraffes in search of mice, and of how the herd ruminates through the night with unblinking and unfocused eyes.

  “The single most important thing to understand about a giraffe,” he says, “is that they do not graze down to the ground, but are stretched up to the sky.”

  “That is what so awakens me,” I say.

  The keeper gives me a searching look. He must also understand Czechoslovakia to be a nation asleep, of workers normalized into sleepwalkers.

  He asks me what I have observed of giraffes, coming to the zoo so often in these months and sitting under the sycamore tree. I tell him I have memorized the patterns on the necks of the giraffes so that I can say aloud to myself on the bench, That one is Jánošík and this one is Rudolf, named for the emperor. I tell how the females lower their heads in submission when a male comes sniffing at their root and how some of them raise their tails in fear at the sound of gunfire in the forest.

  “Giraffes are not like white rhinos with their hooked and squared lips,” I say, gaining confidence. “When a giraffe is scared, it rears away. When a rhino is scared, it runs straight at the object of its fear, its ears flattened back like those of a cat.”

  The keeper is listening. We are awake to each other.

  “The giraffes do not seem sad to me,” I say, “like the polar bears in this zoo are.”

  “Sadness is difficult to see in beasts,” he says. “I cannot say a giraffe is more depressed than a polar bear. I can only say that a giraffe does not frown or smile and is not easily transformed by the act of observation into something human, like animals with soft shapes and juvenilized faces, such as koalas, pandas, lemurs, and certain apes.”

  “Giraffe expressions are unreadable to me,” I say. “They often appear to be looking straight through me, as if I am a ghost to them.”

  He nods. “Early taxidermists,” he says, “exaggerated the ferocity of all animals that came to their table. In their hands, even a mole was poised to spring, its two teeth exposed. After the first specimen giraffe skins arrived from Namaqualand, the taxidermists sought to do the same for giraffes. But whatever they tried, they could not make the giraffe look menacing. It looked in death much as it did in life.”

  “How is that?”

  “Lofty, alien; above all blank. If a giraffe performs at all, it is only a tall-man routine.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “In an anthropocentric world, the point of a lion is to roar at us. In such a world, the point of a giraffe is to tower over us. The giraffe is the tall man, just as the hippo is the fat man. If a giraffe appears in a children’s story at all, it is only on account of its height. A giraffe never converses in a children’s story, just as penguins and other vertical animals are also silent in those stories. And in this respect too the giraffe is nothing like the black bear in the London Zoo that became Winnie-the-Pooh.”

  “Surely their blankness has a purpose,” I say. “A giraffe can be a point of reflection. It can bring out of yourself some feeling you did not know was there.”

  “For you, perhaps, Amina,” he says, not unkindly.

  “The zoo is a place where you can look deliberately at living things,” I say, “which doesn’t happen outside. No one out there examines the faces of cows sent for milking.”

  “The zoo is nothing more than a contrivance,” he says, “to make workers forgetful of the monotony of their lives. They arrive here from industrial towns. They move from cage to cage. What do they want? Not to contemplate, as you seem to do, but to make strange animals see them. You’ve seen how they put their hands through the bars, how they throw in food or litter, and how they wave their arms until the pygmy hippo takes the smallest step in their direction.”

  I HAVE SEEN VISITORS who do not look at the creatures in the zoo except through the lens of their camera and curse when they run out of film, as though they have been made blind. Even so, I have often been startled at the way other visitors seem to wake up when they step from under the sycamore tree and exclaim, as I did, “Giraffe!”

  Amina

  NOVEMBER 1, 1974

  AS FAR AS I can see, there are sixteen windows on my factory floor. The light that comes through them is copper-colored with autumn. In winter, the light in here is blue. This is where we dip Christmas decorations in colors. It has few features. There are loudspeakers at either end that give out announcements. There is paint on the floor and the walls and it is splashed thick over the machinery from seasons of Christmas decorations past. There is a pinup of a Czechoslovakian film star, the packaging from a box of English tea, and a red banner draped over one wall that declares in white letters: TRANSCEND FOR THE GLORY OF THE REVOLUTION!

  This is where I work. Its fumes are rotting me from within. They break open my skin into sores and cause my organs to burn with a hundred small infections. I take another tray of clear spheres now. I set it on metal rollers. I push it into the mouth of the dipping machine. I open a vat of see-through polish with a base of nitroglycerin. I mix pigment into the polish until I come to the right shade of silver. I heave the vat to a funnel. I pour the resulting paint into the dipping machine. My hands shake. Some of the silver paint splashes on the floor. I press a button. I stand back, eyes streaming. The machine is loud: I can no longer hear what the other women are shouting to one another. It stops. I pull out the tray. The spheres are hot fuming silver. Christmas silver. I inspect the spheres for blemishes and see myself reflected and shortened in them. I see a young woman resembling a suicide or rusalka, an orphaned worker in an apron and head-scarf, waiting to get out into the autumn air, to walk beside the Svět.

  My job is to take spheres and other shapes of glass and dip them in colors. Each piece has a stem, an umbilical cord; the paint flows down it, coloring the glass from the inside. When the piece has been further decorated on the factory floor above, or in the cooperatives in the villages around the town, the stem is snipped, set with a metal cap, and dressed with a ribbon or a wire on which it can be hung from a Christmas tree. It is not easy to mix the pigment into the polish. Consistency changes with the shape and quality of the glass. It is not possible to say, This is white, or This is cobalt. You have to be a chemist here, as well as a worker. The pieces we color correctly are exported; the pieces we get wrong make up the domestic quota. So it is that the Christmas trees of ČSSR shine off-color in shades of mustard. We make shapes of Santa Claus with a full sack, bells, pine trees, sailing ships, angels, bears, and reindeer. Some of the spheres we color are hand-painted with tropical scenes of Vietnam for the American market. We color shapes of Uncle Sam to be dressed with a cotton-wool beard. We dip shapes of American fighter jets. The orders are not openly mentioned by the factory committee of Communists demoted to this lowly enterprise on account of alcoholism or depression. The shapes of the American fighter jets serve also as planes for the Soviet market. The greatest demand in the domestic market is for red spheres. We dip them in Christmas red and send them to be hand-painted with a hammer and sickle so that they might better crown Communist trees in place of an angel. I have hardly any memory of the dipping, only of the redness itself, which is matte, not shiny like Christmas silver, and does not give out light, but rather sucks it in, offe
ring no reflection, so that when I pull out a tray of red spheres and bend down to inspect them, I find myself invisible in them and feel the light around me diminished.

  ONE OF THE WOMEN WAVES a packet of Red Star cigarettes. We all leave the machines. We go to stand by the open window at the end of the factory floor, where we can see the sky and the copper leaves falling from the trees. I take a piece of bread and hold it out in my hands. A blackbird comes now, a factory bird, and takes the bread with a single gentle peck. We drop the burning ends of our Red Stars into the undergrowth below. The conversation is distant, befitting those who sleepwalk by day. The women speak of the availability of certain foods and of the latest television serial. I do not have a television. It is enough for me to read the schedule of the state channel number one:

  Let’s Speak Russian!

  Hats off! Agricultural Success Stories of the Day

  Quiz: How Well Do You Know Your CSSR?

  I listen to my records and to Radio Vltava, the classical-music station. I will skip the stories of our Communist history and listen to Liszt’s “Fantasia Quasi Sonata” followed by Melodies of Our Dear Cuban Friends.

  I AM YOUNGER than the other women. We do not have so much in common. I do not volunteer myself to them, except when they ask me of giraffes. I have told them of how the giraffe keeper approached me in the springtime and asked why I was so often there under the sycamore tree and I said it was because the giraffes awakened me. They know I sit for two or three afternoons each week before the giraffes. To them the zoo is a contrivance, a diversion they rarely bother with, while to me it is a place where I am fully aware, even in these autumn days, when there are few visitors, no wasps in the garbage cans, and no ice-cream vendor pushing his cart. I can say to the other women with certainty that giraffes are silent, mute as a penguin in a children’s story. I have related the story the keeper told me of the zoo’s vet in the 1950s who took it upon himself to eat a cutlet from every creature then in the zoo, if not from a dead animal then from the amputated limb of a living animal, such as a female chimpanzee whose arm was caught in the bars of her cage. When the women said I was making it up, I described to them how the vet cut off his cutlets with surgical precision, wrapped them in newspaper, and fried them up at home. I told them how he demanded the zookeepers exhume a black panther that had died while the vet was on vacation. He pretended to examine it, discreetly cut off a piece of meat, and made a marinated dish of it, which he served up to the young and unsuspecting zoo director. All of this, I told them, came to light when the vet died and his diary surfaced, along with a recipe book.

  Andrea asks me about the giraffes and I take another Red Star and tell her of how one of the Rothschild cows stood on her hind legs and tried to eat from an overhanging branch of the sycamore tree.

  “What else?” Hana says.

  “The zoo director ordered an okapi be put in with the giraffes. It cowered in the corner and the giraffes treated it unpleasantly, as though there was some long-standing disagreement between them.”

  “What’s an okapi?” Eva says, from the windowsill.

  “A giraffe without neck or legs,” I say, “which lives in a jungle, where there is no need for it to stretch up for food.”

  We go back to the machines. There is another order for white. Not polar bears, but snowmen. I mix the pigment into the nitroglycerin base in the copper-colored light. I see dimly. This kind of sleepwalking is deeper than a daydream, less than a nightmare. I set the tray of snowmen on rollers and push it into the machine. I pour in the paint. I sleepwalk inward from the factory floor to an evening in a beer garden in which fireflies surround the face of my girlfriend, lighting her up in the darkness. Outwardly, there is the din of whiteness injected into a hundred umbilical cords, of snowmen being born. Inwardly, butterflies are rising from a pool in the bog that circles the old town walls, more subtly colored than any pigment mixed into a polish of nitroglycerin, in apple, olive, Veronese green, lapis lazuli, and lemon marked softly on papery wings.

  I pull out the snowmen. A siren sounds, marking the end of the working day. A voice comes over the loudspeakers: “Revered workers, gather please for an educational film in the cafeteria!”

  FOG IS DRIFTING OUTSIDE, from the Svět. The concrete tanks by the gravel road are filling with carp. All the apples have fallen and leaves are clumped heavily against the boards of the outdoor ice-hockey rink. I sit here in the cafeteria, next to Eva. The political committee is showing us a short film, for our education.

  “Lights out!” someone calls.

  The screen lights up. An image is brought into focus. I see soldiers marching by, saluting at a parade. Now soldiers in fatigues are running along a Czechoslovakian riverbank. A missile shoots upward. The film cuts to a meadow in which children are playing. The children wear all the different folk costumes of Czechoslovakia. The title of the film is The Dress of Our CSSR!

  The children sing and laugh. Some of them set up easels and paint pictures of sunshine and clowns, but also animals. The narration marks out these children as future workers at play. The sky darkens, sirens sound. The narrator shouts, “Danger! Look out, children! Dive! Dive!”

  The children scream. They run about in circles. They tear at one another and fall to the ground. Some of them curl into balls, as insects do under a spray of insecticide. A blinding flash dissolves into a mushroom cloud. The film cuts back to the army, who are protecting us from destruction. The film ends. The People’s Militia, sitting uniformed in the front row, breaks into applause. They are a rabble, meant to protect the factory from sabotage during an uprising. Most have joined out of a lack of conviction: They believe in nothing, so there is nothing to hold them back. The rest of us are sleepwalkers by day. We do not remark on the banners draped around the town, such as here in the cafeteria: THE TRUE WORKER OBEYS THE WILL OF THE COLLECTIVE.

  The Communist moment does not demand that I love it, or be awake to it. It asks only that I do not question it. What can I question? I am below politics. I do not read the articles in the newspaper that begin: “Strict penalties are not enough.,” “Revanchism is a tumor. ”

  The political committee of the factory asked me to join their team for the mass gymnastics exercise in Prague. They said I was slight and sinewy enough to be the one lifted from the field to be the point of a red star formed by forty thousand workers. I refused. I am not a socialist heroine, such as appear in mass displays or as models for Communist statues with their hands stretched across in salute. I am an orphaned sleepwalker, named for the same. I dip shapes of glass on a factory floor whose sixteen windows have never been cleaned and cast a murky light, like the underside of the Vltava.

  I sleepwalk from the cafeteria to the showers. I stand now under dribbling hot water and soap myself among older women. I am aerated. Water might course through me. I rise on tiptoe. I stretch my hands to the shower head. I wake in this steam. I am not bent double over the dipping machine, I am not watching a political film, nor am I outside in my crumbling town, whose ramparts are splitting, whose Gothic winged cow is broken and without flight, and whose stylish Hotel Crystal Palace stands infested and boarded up on the main square. The factory roof leaks. It is propped up by trees whose branches grow into the building. There are not enough toilets in here. I squat with the other women at lunchtime in that part of the undergrowth where we drop our cigarettes, and urinate there in yellow arcs.

  I DRY MYSELF ON the broken tiles and sit on a wooden bench in the crowded changing room. We are all quiet. Even Hana is quiet. We sit here and we steam, with our palms down on our thighs. We are captive in disappointment. We become dull-eyed and stare without focus at the posters on the wall here: MEAT MEANS HEALTH! and PROTECT US, BORDER GUARDS!

  I HAVE A SUDDEN SENSE of the other place I wish to stretch my hands over my head and lift off to. It is more than Prague and the America to which we send our Christmas fighter-jet decorations. It is beyond that part of the sky lined with the pure and holy. I cannot grasp it. I un
derstand it only as a color seen on a butterfly wing, an unseen and unimagined color that lies outside the spectrum, into which glass can never be dipped.

  Jiří — A Sharpshooter

  ST. HUBERT’S DAY

  NOVEMBER 3, 1974

  I WAKE WITH A start. I see my breath. There is moonlight on the wooden floor. I hear the sound again. I sit bolt upright in my cot. It is closer. I hear it brushing against the side of the hut. I see a form in the window. A stag. It stares directly in, at the antlers arranged on the wall. I am still. I watch the stag breathe on the frosted windowpane, seemingly contemplating the trophies and skullcaps of its kind. It moves off now. Other deer follow it. By the time I get to the window, they are all gone into the forest.

  The iron stove is still warm. I throw more wood in it. I brew a pot of chicory coffee. I drink it barefoot now on the steps outside the forestry hut, which are cold, made of stones set down in the forest by a glacier long ago. I am unsettled. It is the saint day of Hubert, the patron of hunters and butchers, who fell prostrate before a stag, between whose antlers was a figure of Christ, fading in and out as our black-and-white television sets do. I see a badger in the half-light, punching through ferns, deeper into this forest, my forest, which surrounds the Svět. The trees creak. It is autumn. Leaves are falling, falling.

  I go back inside the hut. I dress. I tuck in my woolen shirt. I pull up my suspenders. I lace my boots up to my knees. I put on my jacket. I set a feather in my cap. I push back my thick, black-framed spectacles. I throw the bloodstained satchel over my shoulder. I take up my rifle, a Mannlicher-Schoenauer 6.5.