Giraffe Read online

  The pattern of my footsteps extends as far as the giraffe house but no farther. I do not venture into the forest, nor do I often go anymore into the part of town where my lover lives. If I could travel, I would not know where to go. On a tram out from an industrial town, to jump clear into a field of beets? On a train to Prague, to lie on a bunk in a workers’ hostel, to sleepwalk the long corridors of our capital? Or on a bus to Bratislava, to pass from the wrong side the metal signs of giraffes placed along the road every so often as advertisement for the zoo?

  “I’ve been thinking about Egypt,” the keeper says, sitting beside me. “I’ve been thinking of the flight into Egypt. Maybe it is our Egyptian geese, or this postcard I’ve received from the giraffe keeper in the Moscow Zoo.”

  He holds up the card.

  “It’s a painting on silt stone,” he says, “from a Soviet museum of Egyptology, showing geese lifting from the Nile.”

  The geese are single brushstrokes of blue and gray, rising from green and yellow papyrus and lily pads.

  Radio Vltava is playing Jan Jakub Ryba’s Ceská mše vánoční, or Czech Christmas Mass. I drink tea that the keeper brings me now. I say nothing, but think of the harvest mice in their snowed-up balks in the fields and of how strange Christmas is in the town after a year dipping decorations into Christmas colors and harvesting carp for Christmas dinners. The last carp are swimming in tanks beside the plague column. People come for them, not sleepwalking but awake. The carp are chosen, weighed, paid for, and laid on the cutting board. Their skulls of thin bone are heard to pop under the hammer like fingernails.

  “I’ve been thinking again of the history of beasts in Czechoslovakia,” the keeper says. He puts a thermometer in my mouth. “Polar bears first,” he says, reading the temperature. “The first polar bear came through our town in 1799, on a cart headed for Austria. The next polar bears passed by in 1874, on a train with the return of the Austro-Hungarian expedition to the North Pole. That expedition failed to reach the Pole, just as other Austro-Hungarian explorers failed in their attempts to reach the source of the River Congo. Instead they discovered an archipelago north of Novaya Zemlya and named it Franz Josef Land and named a bay on one of the islands for the Czechoslovakian town where our composer Mahler was raised. There were twenty-four in the crew, most of them Austrian and Croatian. The only Czechoslovak came from a village that stood then at the other end of the Svět, near the sawmill. He was responsible for feeding the polar-bear cubs, whose kennels slid and rolled on the open deck in the Barents Sea.”

  “Just as you said our giraffes were tossed around on the ocean on their journey here.”

  “I was coming to giraffes,” he says, smiling.

  He pulls out a newspaper-wrapped parcel tied with string.

  “Merry Christmas, Amina.”

  I sit up. I open it. It is a framed engraving of a young giraffe proceeding through an Alpine village, such as operatic Amina might have sleepwalked through. The giraffe is flanked by two keepers: an Austrian in a cadet-blue jacket and a Muslim in a white robe and sandals. Villagers move beside the giraffe, their mouths open in operatic chorus. Children throw their hats into the air and weave ecstatically between the infantrymen following behind.

  “This is the first documented giraffe in the Austrian empire, crossing the Julian Alps,” he says. “It was one of only three giraffes in Europe then. It landed in Trieste in 1828 and walked from the Adriatic Sea all the way to Vienna, having already been carried across deserts on the back of a camel and by boat down the Nile. It caused a sensation. Ladies in Prague and Brno had giraffes embroidered into their gloves and danced ‘Galop à la Girafe’ at balls. Crowds flocked to Vienna. They clamored at its cage in the Schoenbrunn Zoo.”

  “What became of it?” I ask.

  “It was dead within a year. When they cut it open they found that its pelvis had been fractured when it was tied to the camel.”

  “It must have walked all that way in pain.”

  “It must have limped,” he says. “No one could have known from that animal how a giraffe galloped.”

  THE GIRAFFE KEEPER HAS told me a little of zoos. I now know the Schoenbrunn to be the oldest. I know a cage is something that admits air and light, but no escape. I know the zoo evolved from a place of reflection into one of entertainment, in whose confines giant sloths were poked to death with the tips of walking canes and parasols, armadillos were stoned by curious youths, elephants died from eating the copper coins thrown at them, and giraffes slipped on unwashed floors and could not get up. I know the body of a Czech-speaking zookeeper was stuffed by a Venetian taxidermist and paraded, with glass eyes, on the back of a living camel through the towns of Austria for years afterward. I know the zoos of that time were no worse than the mental asylums, such as existed here in the town castle, where humans were chained to walls, or paced stone floors, goggle-eyed, smeared in their own excrement. I know visitors went by the fountain of St. George and paid an entrance fee into the asylum to watch and jab at lunatics, depressives, boneless women, and fireproof men, as if they were no better than sloths.

  I sleep a few fitful minutes. I wake with a memory that does not belong to Christmas, except that it is another kind of nativity. I am thinking of the octagonal room in the castle. It is a rite of passage in the town to be pushed into that place, which is not so much a room as an eight-sided corridor, lined from floor to ceiling on all sides with specimen cases. The door is one such case, hidden on the inside. Each glass case is filled with fetuses, stillborn babies, and deformed children who have died in infancy. All the curious dead were brought here, along with limbs, eyes, tongues, organs, tumors, and strange growths cut out by surgeons and sunk whole, like the children, in jars of preservative. There are all forms of Siamese twins, unburied, floating across. There are triplets with a single face, and a child of perhaps five years, floating too, with no legs but with perfectly formed toes protruding from the buttocks, and a girl a little younger, bearing three legs. There are adult arms, double-length, bent like spaghetti. There are wax masks of various plagues and venereal diseases, of a cheek done through with many fine holes, as of a needle pushed in and out. I could not bear that place. I wailed to be let out. I wish I had never been pushed in and made aware of such suffering.

  “ARE YOU FEELING BETTER?” he asks. “Your temperature is down.”

  “Shall we let the giraffes out?”

  “For a few minutes only,” he says. “It’s too cold even for Czechoslovakian giraffes.”

  It is still dark and silver outside. The snow squeaks under my boots. I go around with the keeper as he opens the barn doors. The reticulated cow Sněhurka steps out. She gives no sign of recognition. She glides out, up to her ankles in the deep snow, not turning down to us. Steam rises off her in jigsaws and her breath comes in rivers of smoke from her nostrils.

  “Look at her,” the keeper says, clapping his hands together in the cold. “Like a dragon in Franz Josef Land.”

  The giraffes are desperately important to him in the way actors are important to a stage manager, seen always from behind or at side angles.

  Sněhurka pushes her head back. She nods. She snorts and walks back in. No other giraffe ventures out. We close the doors and return to the keeper’s room. He pours me a brandy but does not lift my mood. He instead speaks of another Czechoslovakian zoo, on which bombs fell during the Second World War.

  “There were SS bunkers in the woods behind the zoo, just as we have a secret military base in the forest behind our zoo,” he says. “When the bombs landed in the zoo, most of the animals were cut to ribbons. Those who survived, starved; there was hardly anything to eat at that time in the war. Millions of people were on the move. All the rare ducks were killed for food and the antelope roasted. Some soldiers shot at the polar bear, hoping for his meal, but found he was surviving on a crow, fallen dead from a tree. The director of the zoo had the soldiers arrested. He was a Sudeten German. He did the most to improve living conditions for zoo animal
s in Czechoslovakia. It was he who insisted cages be hosed down, the animals studied, and a proper diet observed.”

  “A pioneer,” I say.

  “No,” he says, “an ardent Nazi. When the town was liberated, he went with his wife to the zoo gates. A British officer approached them. A Scotsman. His kilt swung from side to side. He called out to them. They gave him a Nazi salute. The director put a pistol to his wife’s temple and blew her brains out, then shot himself. It was never clear whether the couple had killed themselves in grief for the fallen Reich or for the destroyed animals.”

  “They will drop only a single bomb on us now,” I say, thinking of the film I saw in which children lay curled on the ground while the sky was ablaze.

  “The Svět will boil,” he says.

  It is strange to contemplate this. The Communist moment makes so much of nuclear war, of mushroom-shaped clouds, after which there will be no more rusalkas, all my operatic arias will be melted away, the hollows under the Svět where the cavemen lit fires will be buried in ash, and there will be no trace of giraffes, and of the town only a panel of the plague column.

  “There is a happy ending to my story,” he says. “The giraffes were not killed in the bombing raid, as they were when the bombs fell through the ceiling of the giraffe house in the Berlin Zoo. They ran from one crater to another and so avoided being hit. A Soviet colonel intervened on their behalf when the zoo came under the control of the Red Army. He protected the giraffes. He made sure they were properly fed and cared for, even as he spent his days executing men.”

  IT IS AFTER DAWN on Christmas Eve and grim, ever so grim. Ryba’s Christmas mass has long ago played out. The giraffes are shut in.

  “I must go,” I say.

  “Wait,” he says.

  He hands me the engraving. He wraps his scarf tight around me. I stand on tiptoe and kiss him on the cheek.

  THE SUN HAS CLEARED the forest. They are playing Christmas games of ice hockey out on the Svět. I watch the puck skipping away. I stop myself. My footsteps are snowed under. I cannot follow them back over the Svět to my panelák. I walk into the town, not sleepwalking, still awake to myself. I come to the town square. It is crowded here. I do not look to where the fishermen take the carp from tanks. I buy roasted chestnuts from a brazier. I listen to the carolers.

  Tadeáš — A Virologist

  APRIL 29, 1975

  I HAVE NEVER SEEN a giraffe. I have not given them a thought. But there is a randomness to every contagion. It touches one creature and spares another. One child gets a black swelling under the armpit, hard like an apple, another sings about it.

  I HEAR THE OFFICIAL speaking quietly to my secretary: They have called ahead to warn me I should expect him.

  He walks directly in without knocking. He is young, almost boyish. Blond hair falls diagonally across his face. He sweeps it back.

  “Tadeáš Tůma?” he asks with a shy smile.

  He wears foreign shoes and a foreign suit. He puts his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels. He exudes Prague. There is something familiar about him, removed from the Communist moment, as though he has stepped from a breezy Czechoslovakian film from before the war.

  “You’re late,” I say. “I didn’t catch your name.”

  He flushes. “I am without a name for the moment.”

  “No matter. Take a seat, please. I have the results to the tests the ministry requested.”

  He remains standing, rocking on his heels.

  “Please do sit,” I say.

  It is spring in the secret laboratory I direct, which stands on the banks of the little River Ohře, close to where it meets the Labe. The Communist moment continues here. Outside, a boy in a gas mask is cutting the grass with a scythe. Far away, the city of Saigon is falling. The laboratory is also without name. It is not marked on any map. We deal with animal diseases here. We test blood and tissue samples from beasts eaten away with one pestilence or another, which come to us under cover of night in locked-down trucks. We develop vaccines only; we have no business here with weapons. The plagues and contagion we handle are not generally harmful to human beings. They kill animals or ruin them as a unit of production, which is much the same to the State. The laboratory is an island of loneliness. No train runs to Prague from here, but instead there is a single carriage running once each day through a forest to the industrial towns under the mountains. Aside from the laboratory there is an old fortress of sloping red brick, the size of a town, green-moated and planted with lilacs.

  “WOULD YOU CARE to be shown around?” I ask.

  “Why not,” he says.

  My secretary gives him a white lab coat and slippers. He pulls off his suit jacket and shoes. He folds the jacket with the silk lining out, on the back of a chair.

  “What’s your field?”

  “Hemodynamics,” he says. “Hence the giraffes.”

  We shuffle in the slippers down corridors, from one disinfected room to another. Slippers are the style of ČSSR; we are meant to feel cozy in our isolation.

  I stop in front of a vault door of dark gray metal. There is a wheel in the center that you turn counterclockwise to open the door. It makes me think of the hatch on a submarine tower that is quickly closed in the last moment before diving.

  “Behind here are further sealed chambers in which the plagues are suspended at appropriate temperatures.”

  “What security measures do you follow?”

  Taking his elbow, I guide him upstairs, where no one will hear us.

  “I can assure you we are very strict,” I say, lowering my voice. “We follow the rules set down by facilities in the USSR, such as the laboratory in Tajikistan, or the laboratory on the Baltic island of Hiddensee. As you know, we are under surveillance. We have certain officers assigned here for protection. They gather information from among our hundred and forty employees. They move among the employees regularly, using first one, then another.”

  I should not have said using; I should have used another word.

  He looks at me curiously. He is right to look at me in this way. It is unpleasant in here. It is malignant. My secretary watches me, someone else watches my secretary. The technicians are spied upon.

  “Go on,” he says.

  “There are rules for any laboratory of this kind. The civilian rules, if you like. We change our clothes in an outer building. We strip. We shower. We pass naked through a sealed room. We put on our work clothes on the other side. We follow a strict hygiene. No coming to work with a sickness. No raising of laboratory-sensitive animals at home — no cows or pigs. No visiting relatives who live near a collective farm.”

  “Impressive,” he says flatly.

  It is not. There is a fear of saboteurs. All plagues and blights, even those found in trees and root vegetables, are tested for a weapons signature. We shuffle around the laboratory from alarm to alarm, in rubber suits and masks with narrow plates of glass; but for our slippers we would appear like insects to one another. The surveillance is always in search of that one agent, or double agent, who might spread a contagion, man-made or natural, through the livestock of ČSSR, just as in 1950 American spies stole into Czechoslovakia and blighted the potato crop with what came to be known as the American bug. All things here are seen through the prism of contagion, yet the security measures are halfhearted. The windows are barred, but they open from the inside. I could let spores out into the sky. I could cast a vial into the waters of the Ohře, as they talk about in the Bible, and poison the Labe. The blood we test, we also pour into the Ohře. It blooms in a pool where the trout circle, like some prophecy of Libuše. Trout come up to the bloom, gulp blood, and move away. No one searches me coming or going, no one monitors the number of vials I place in the vault. I could cycle away past the fortress of sloping red brick to a cowshed and there spread pestilence. This young man, without name, was not fingerprinted or photographed at the entrance. He did not strip and shower. He did not pass through a sealed room. He offered a code word
in Russian and walked straight in.

  “CIGARETTE, PROFESSOR?”

  He offers me a Red Star.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Do you mind if I do?”

  “Not at all.”

  He bows his head. He strikes a match and lights his cigarette with a flourish.

  I open a window.

  “What, no danger?” he asks lightly.

  SUNLIGHT FLOODS THROUGH the metal bars and stands in grids on the wall of the corridor; it is a cage in here. The Ohře is running fast with melted snow from the fields. It courses around the gravel bar I sometimes wade out to with my fly rod. I point out to the young man the cannon positions in the fortress on the other side of the Ohře.

  “The fortress looks like a starburst from above,” I say.

  “HOW ABOUT THOSE TESTS,” he says. “What’s the verdict?”

  “Guilty,” I say weakly.

  He pales. He looks suddenly vulnerable, as though his thoughts have been elsewhere and this news has jolted him back.

  “Run me through it, please,” he says. “I’ll have to report everything.”

  He leans with his back against the metal bars. He smokes and listens intently but writes nothing down.

  “We were given a tissue sample from the tongue of one of the giraffes. We tested it to determine the strain,” I say. “You should know there is not one single contagion in this case, but five or six related strains, which cause the same sickness. We have a vaccine against some of these strains but they are specific and have no effect on related strains.”