Giraffe Read online

  I am a forester and a hunter. My father was too, and his father before him. I shot my first boar in 1941, not far from this hut. I was a boy then. My view on hunting is sentimental. I believe in an unspoken pact between certain men and certain beasts; by hunting animals, I give them purpose. I am a Communist. I do not disguise my intentions: I am Communist because I wish to remain in the forest. If they ask me certain questions, I will set down my ax and rifle and leave. They do not ever ask me. They trust me because I am known to them only in the trees, where there are no politics, just as Hubert was loved as a young man because he was known only in moments of fraternity in the forest, away from the disputatious, where the only quarry was a beast. I do not have the face of a functionary. There are fools in every walk of life, including the Party. I say so openly. When I go to political meetings, I speak to the point. Unlike the careerists, I do not introduce into my written reports incidental characters who might be blamed if a criticism is raised or vanished if praise is forthcoming. I take responsibility for my actions. When I fell a tree, I count the number of its rings.

  I check the magazine of my rifle now. I load the five rounds. I lock it. I walk away from the forester’s hut. I step quickly into evergreen larches, white firs, silver firs, deodars, Bosnian pines, Austrian pines, Hungarian oaks, downy oaks, sessile oaks, wild service, gray poplars, black walnut, hickory, and full-moon maples. I see the sky through the division of their leaves and the patterns at the base of their cones and in the brightly colored arils about their seeds. I belong to these trees. I wish to leap between them and live in them, in their branches, like some baron. Instead, I move dutifully along the forest floor, daubing trunks with arrows as I go; upward for trimming, downward for felling. I am always in shadow, glimpsing rather than seeing, so that when I emerge from the forest, even into the flat light about the Svět, I am dazzled.

  The roots of the firs are sprung tight under me. I would feel myself lifted from the ground if I broke into a run now. I do not understand captivity in the same way as the fishermen who work the Svět. They are unduly exposed, without subtleties, on the water. The forest is not a cage, as they say. It is a shelter. Startled deer bound from the fields to the forest, not from the forest to the fields; their prance into the trees that sustain them is so acute and airborne as to seem the work of an unseen puppeteer, jerking them on wires.

  I consider Hubert. He dismounted. He unfurled his hands. His fingers I suppose to be snagged from thorns and tethered hawks. Christ spoke through the stag in a voice I cannot conceive, saying:

  Hubert! How long will you pursue the animals of the forest?

  This is a vain and selfish passion. When will you consider

  the safety of your soul, the quickness of your fall. If you

  do not cease hunting, you will go to hell.

  It is contradictory. Hubert bowed down before a beast. He renounced slaughter, but became the saint of hunters and of butchers, who cut up the animals brought out of the forest.

  I FIND A HARE KICKING hard in a trap intended for a pine marten. It is anguished, but uninjured. I pull it free. I hold it up by the back of the head. It pedals the air. It arches itself and slowly closes its eyes, awaiting a mortal blow. I let it go. The hare reminds me of a story told to me of an aristocrat who walked up from the Svět on a summer evening in 1771 and entered the forest under a large setting sun. He went deep into the forest. He set his musket up behind a rock in a clearing. He took out his snuffbox from his embroidered waistcoat. After some hours he saw the largest owl he had ever seen, larger than an eagle, carrying a live hare in its talons. The aristocrat aimed his long barrel at the owl. He fired. The ball passed through the hare but missed the bird. The hare fell dead at his feet, twice hunted, and the owl swooped off, unburdened.

  I put a bullet into damp air as I put an ax to a tree. The bullet drills into the chest of a deer. The deer loosens under the blow; it slumps to the floor. It gives itself out into the fir roots, through the hole I have made in it, and is so pressed down in that moment, with no possibility of rising again, that gravity itself seems to me increased, as if there were a magnet hidden in the foliage and another in the body of the deer and they have met and snapped together at the moment of death. I let my hounds off the leash. I run behind them. The deer is always dead when I lay down my rifle beside it. It is already stiff under my gaze, the throat open like a jug.

  I imagine death to come on us, on deer also, like the hand of an anesthesiologist, pulling limbs into cruciform, pushing a needle into a vein. There is a chemical closing over, a kind of drowning. The lungs fill with fluid, as in the womb. The eyes close, or glaze over. I run up to the deer. I drag the hounds off it. I regard it. My first thought is of the space between life and death, the fragment when you are neither living nor dead, which in a deer might be a flickering of a divine stag and in a man the longest purgatory.

  I WALK THE RIDGE ABOVE the secret military base. I see other foresters in the distance, sawing spruce trees for Christmas. I call out to them, but they do not hear me. My father believed in Hubert and in the communion of saints. He described it as a piece of engineering, a turbine: Saints gather up prayers, convert them into love and majesty, and so power the present with hope. I do not believe in such a communion. I observe St. Hubert’s Day only out of respect for my father. He marked the day with a suspension of deer hunting and by taking his hounds to be blessed in the chapel of St. Michael, which stands between the zoo and the town. I went with him. I stood near the altar, holding the muzzled hounds tightly, while around me the music for the mass was performed on hunting horns.

  I reach the edge of the forest. I do not walk out. I take up my binoculars. I look down at the town zoo. I see the giraffes stepping slowly through their enclosure. I see a smaller animal, an okapi. I see a young woman on a bench, looking up at the giraffes as Hubert looked up at the stag.

  I know okapi from my childhood. A Congolese priest, whose education my father sponsored, wrote us gentle letters in Latin of glimpsing okapi in the jungle, and of his sadness on accompanying scientists capturing songbirds:

  We are all of us brightly colored birds, over which the fowler

  death casts a net. We are thrown to the earth, and so

  our song, our form and colors are gone.

  I turn my binoculars on the okapi. The colors are like decaying leaves, the body and neck purple, the legs barred in bluish oil-brown and white. It stands on concrete. It is not right to see it so revealed. It has no understanding of Czechoslovakian daylight. It belongs to the Upper Congo and is meant to move there through boles, creepers, vines, and large leaves, shedding rivulets of water; the priest wrote to us that it was wet in the jungle, “So that whenever an okapi is sighted, it appears to be weeping.”

  I raise my binoculars. I see the town. I see turrets and spires. I see the bog and quicksands about the walls. I avoid the town. It is not a place for me. The birds sit there, silent and listless, on broken gutters. The people I pass wear vacant expressions; they have migrated into themselves as I have migrated into the forest. There is giddiness only in the hospital waiting room, where those waiting have hope that their malaise will be given a name.

  I see the parkland around the chapel of St. Michael planted with English oaks, scarlet oaks, horse chestnuts, Montpelier maples, Cappadocian maples, and black mulberries. I trace the chapel’s fine lines of polychrome sandstone and pink marble, its oval windows raised on the backs of sculpted lions with two tails, the yew trees clumped around its crypt, and the slope of steps from its front doors down to the Svět, the most beautiful, wide steps, set on either side with fruit trees of apple, snow pear, sour cherry, plum, and bullace.

  I focus on the golden statue of Michael. He is flying down at speed, with an oval shield marked in Hebrew and a gold spear, his feet just touching the chapel roof, as though scattering invisible demons and hydras, who, when pierced by his spear, are made aware of their own weight, are taken by gravity, and fall in great fear toward an inf
erno.

  There is a grille at the base of a yew tree through which it is possible to see the zinc coffins lying in the crypt and a stack of skulls, which are foresters and fishermen of the Svět, bulbous as babies in that dark blue light, stitched across the crown, with many teeth or none, flaking, honeycombed through the nose, some split between the nose and lip, congenitally, or with an ax: forester’s mistake. There is an altar in the center of the crypt set with a silver cross and an ivory tusk, spiraled like the plague column in the town, said to be that of a unicorn, but actually the tusk of the narwhal that swims in icy seas. The thought of those seas disturbs me. There are no trees there, nor any soil. The narwhals are massive, corpse-colored, done through with oil and blubber, nothing like the deer that prance from field to forest, whose antlers and skullcaps I hang on the walls of the forestry hut, who collapse into leaves and twigs, bleed into root systems, are dead but still warm when I arrive at them.

  I say that I do not disguise my intentions. Well then, there is a fear in me from catechism. Thinking of these things, of crypts, saints, and Congolese priests, seems to make the forest floor brittle and thin as the ice under which the narwhal plows. I fear the judgment that will cause the ground to open and cast me down, so that I will feel the weight of my own body. I am a Communist because I do not wish to believe. I hold to ČSSR out of fear and am openly relieved at its banality.

  I remain in the forest now. I take a long swig of liquor from my hip flask and turn back toward the hut. If I were forced to leave the forest, it would be for the mountains. Alpine heights are the only exposure I favor. I wish the forest had not been ground so low by a glacier long ago. I wish it would rise steeply, far higher than the slope with a single rope tow pulling up skiers, above any treeline. I imagine in idle moments a mountain on which socialism with a human face might be built. It would rise from the Svět tall as Pik Communism in the USSR. There would be no factories or paneláks on it; all the humdrum living would happen elsewhere. At its base would be a maternity hospital where babies might be born with a view of the Svět. A little higher would be nurseries and primary schools, then secondary schools, vocational colleges, up to universities, military academies, agricultural and forestry institutes. On the broad slopes of the mountain would be gymnasiums, stadiums, registry offices where marriages might be recorded, cinemas, theaters, a symphony hall, tearooms, beer halls. Large chalets serving inventors and explorers would be scattered in meadows of wildflowers. Sanatoriums performing lifesaving procedures would be hidden above, in stretches of larch, before a lake of melted snow. So my ČSSR would go, higher and higher, with all life beneath it, so the ground would not become brittle or give way, until reaching the state homes for the elderly in the snowy heights among the chamois and finally the crematorium a little higher, on the glacier, outside of which brass bands would gather and play mournful Czechoslovak tunes as the ashes of the dead were cast onto a breeze, which might blow at that altitude.

  Amina

  ST. HUBERT’S DAY

  NOVEMBER 3, 1974

  I WALK FROM THE zoo now with the smell of giraffes and strip and step naked into the Svět. This is my last swim of the year. The waters are very cold now about my ankles. The reeds along the shore have all broken. The warblers are gone. A single mosquito bites the back of my knee. It falls swollen under the weight of my blood to the skin of the water and perishes there. I push off. I gasp. I swim quickly out to where rowers stroke a boat in eights.

  Afterward, I dry myself onshore and wrap myself in a blanket. I light a cigarette. The first frost will be here soon; it is already thick in the forest. I walk along by the Svět. There is a dead fox here on the path. I turn it over with my foot. Maggots squirm curious out of neat round holes in the flesh. Ants and flies are inside also, carrying off the last jelly of the eyes. I see a seagull flying low over the Svět and settling on the tideless water. I saw in the film Memories of Paradise gulls flapping under the Charles Bridge, hovering in hope of bread or cake, hardly looking when the suicide or rusalka fell through their flock to the river. I look up at the gray sky now and see a white-tailed eagle and an osprey. I see a rapid shard of aquamarine, which may be a kingfisher. I walk on, toward the marsh at the end of the Svět where the otters live.

  The desolation of the marsh affects me. I am drawn to it. There are otter tracks in the mud, the claws cut sharply in, the tail dragging. I go on. I wade through ferns and nettles, which rise to my shoulders and bloom in purple and white. I come to the forest. I do not like it. I feel enclosed there. I walk along the forest floor in the gloom, under woodpeckers. I break into a run now, as if through a thunderstorm. I run until I reach the clearing by the sawmill, where the wood carving of the archangel Raphael is nailed to the trunk of an old beech tree that stands sentinel at the crossing of three paths. Raphael leans forward from the beech, his face covered in the woody husks of beech fruit. His arms are stretched up, in flight above the forest. He is oak and cherrywood painted in white. He is chipped in places, revealing other layers of white. I want him to turn and look down toward me, as a giraffe sometimes does. I want him to see me. I stand under him. I put my hands up above my head; I seek to lift off, to that place of a never-imagined color. My fingers touch the lowest carved feather of his wings.

  I walk on. I pick up a pinecone. I trace my finger around its spiral base. I am reminded of the Fibonacci sequence we recited in mathematics class:

  one

  two

  three

  five

  eight

  thirteen

  twenty-one

  thirty-four

  fifty-five

  eighty-nine

  I see the sequence in the petals of the last surviving wild roses and in the coil of seeds in a flower head, and I hear it now in some piano concerto in my head that goes with an eight-tone white scale and a five-tone black to give an octave of thirteen notes. The relation between two and three or between thirty-four and fifty-five is the golden ratio. I go on. I keep to the shore, out of the forest. If I were a priest, humble enough, I would search for the golden ratio between the wings of the Raphael, and if I were a scientist I would look for it in the distance between the eyes of a giraffe and in the arrangement of its neck vertebrae.

  Amina

  CHRISTMAS EVE

  DECEMBER 24, 1974

  THERE IS A STORY of an orphan girl from my town who was under the care of an imperial gardener at a palace in Vienna. One of the girl’s responsibilities was to feed the lion kept in the dungeon of the palace. She had a way with the beast. It was familiar with her and allowed her to approach with food and to pet it. The girl would even open the door of the stone cell and allow it to come up the steps from the dungeon and pace the courtyard in the sunlight. In 1669, the gardener arranged for the girl to be married. She came to the lion on her wedding day one last time to bid it farewell. To avoid bloodying her bridal gown, she held out the meat she had brought at arm’s length. Startled by the way the girl held the meat across and not high over its head, as it was used to, and also by the whiteness of the orphan in that gloom, the lion grew jealous, leapt on her, and snapped her neck.

  IT IS CHRISTMAS EVE, long before dawn. I awake, bruised, under a maple tree in the parkland. It is snowing soundlessly. The Svět is frozen over. Skate marks catch in the starlight; an ice-hockey net shimmers far out from the shore. I pause at the bend in the gravel road where my parents were struck down. I walk on, to the zoo. I pass the chapel of St. Michael, where all the countesses lie shrunken in coffins of double oak inside caskets of zinc. I turn and see my panelák, my room, and the pattern of my footsteps, where I tiptoed in sleepwalking, over the frozen Svět.

  I climb up over the zoo gates, knocking icicles off the metal shapes of animals. I walk through the zoo. I am no longer sleepwalking, but I feel faint. My hands and feet are frozen numb. I tremble. I fall again and again into snowdrifts. The paths are hard as iron under the snow. I pass cages. Beasts clear their throats and pay me no heed. I
see chamois run up to the summit of their rocky enclosure and down again. I see a shrewdness of apes asleep in one another’s arms. I linger before the otter-sized predator in the aviary, a fossa, which also trembles from the cold, and leaps from one Czechoslovakian branch to another, with no hope of ever catching a lemur. A tiger pads beside me, or I beside it. I come to the giraffe house, an inadequate barn. I have helped arrange the Christmas tree in front of it. I have dressed the tree with red spheres and with a rejected shape of Uncle Sam. The lights on the tree twinkle across the snow, lighting up the political banner hung over the giraffe house by the zoo director, which reads: WE ARE THE VANGUARD OF A NEW LIFE!

  I make it inside. My head spins in the warmth. I see giraffe legs through slats, rising sheer. I see unfocused and unblinking eyes.

  “Amina!”

  The giraffe keeper, running out of his room, catches me falling.

  “Jesus and Mary! You look half dead.”

  “I fell asleep in the snow,” I say, looking up at him.

  He lays me down on a bed in the corner of his room. He dries my hair. He wraps me in swaddling clothes. I sleep a little.

  I wake to see him arranging a Nativity scene on a table.

  “Merry Christmas,” I say.

  He looks up. “Amina!”

  His face is etched in the strip lighting. He is an intelligent man, not unlike my father, except in giraffe-stained overalls. I have never sleepwalked in his presence. I have never before stumbled and fallen into his arms. He holds the figure of a shepherd in his hand. He places it down among the animals near the manger. He is himself a sort of shepherd to the giraffes. He is the one who pulls them free from the fence, who lances their swellings, and sponges the afterbirth from them. I am happy to be with him now and to put on gloves and help him shovel out what he calls the socialist’s Augean stable.