Giraffe Read online

  “You’re quite sure the giraffes have the contagion?” he says.

  “Without question,” I say. “We repeated the test. They have the African strain, number two.”

  “Do you have the vaccine for that strain?”

  “No.”

  “How long would it take to obtain and administer such a vaccine to livestock in a radius of twenty kilometers?”

  “Months.”

  “Sooner?”

  “Impossible,” I say.

  I TELL HIM NOW of the process of testing, of serologic and isolation testing, of catalysts suspended in petri dishes, corpuscles of sheep’s blood, injections, of blisters on the soft footpads of guinea pigs.

  He nods slowly.

  “Which animals are vulnerable?”

  “All the even-toed ungulates,” I say. “Giraffes and camels, cows, sheep. Not horses, dogs, or people.”

  “How dangerous is it?”

  “That depends on how it manifested itself. If it was recently introduced, it is contagious in the extreme. If it was dormant for some years, for instance in a cyst under a hoof, and triggered by stress, then less so. Dormant strains take several passages, from one animal to another, to reach full strength.”

  “Is there any way of knowing?” he asks.

  “Not for sure.”

  “What of the giraffes?”

  “The policy is clear,” I say. “If an exotic animal has the contagion, it must be destroyed. There must be no risk of exposure to livestock.”

  HE LIGHTS ANOTHER CIGARETTE and turns and stares at a weeping-willow tree across the Ohře, as though taking a photograph of it. I look beyond the willow to the spot where Jewish prisoners were forced at gunpoint to dump barrows of ash into the river. Thousands of Jews died from disease and hunger in the ghetto that existed inside the fortress during the war. They were cremated. Their ash was heavy, white in parts. The wheelbarrows had to be pushed by two people, two pushing the remains of thirty or forty. Those desolate brigades must have gone ever so slowly along the bank, by the trout pool. They must have struggled when they came down to the water. Some of the wheelbarrows must have been tipped in whole and washed out by the flow. A little of the ashes must have floated on the surface, like gruel, and flowed down through the Protectorate and through the Reich also, all the way to Hamburg, while the rest, the grit, sank straight to the bottom and is perhaps still there.

  “OBVIOUSLY, THE OUTBREAK will need to be reported to the international authorities,” I say.

  He flushes again. “That will not be possible.”

  “The Office International des Épizooties must be told. That is the law.”

  “This is a matter of national security,” he says, hardening. “National security is above the law. The OIE will not be informed. The orders are clear: You will cover up everything, write nothing down, give instructions orally. This is from the top, Tuma. This is from the Politburo.”

  “I understand the order,” I say, after a silence. “They’re taking a terrible risk. Suppose the contagion is at full strength. Suppose it spreads from the zoo to a collective farm. Our economy is centrally planned. Our animals live in huge concentrations. There are two million cows and four million other livestock in ČSSR. You know how they grow and live in dark, slopping cities of sheds. The contagion can move between the sheds, like a fire, ravaging all the beasts in them and in the collective farms DDR and the farms of Poland. It can come in through the mouth or through broken skin. It can be carried in breath and saliva, in milk, in piss and shit, in hay, in other feed, by the fork turning the feed, by the worker turning the fork, or else by a bird flying overhead. In the early stages, the animal will run a high fever, the tongue will blister, there will be a massive reproduction of the virus in its circulatory and lymphatic systems. Then pox and sores will break out on the udders and on other parts of the body. The hooves will swell and bleed. The animal will no longer be able to stand. It will topple to the ground. Its gums will also swell and split. It will not be able to eat or drink. Even if it survives, it will be finished as a unit of production. You kill the animal and all of it is infected: the blood, the organs, the flesh, the skin, the eyes. Czechoslovakian animals have no immunity against this strain of the contagion. If it is carried out of the zoo on the air of our ČSSR, it would make preceding outbreaks look incidental.”

  The young man looks at me steadily. His manner has straightened. He no longer seems to belong in a breezy film.

  “Which is why any breach of confidentiality will result in immediate arrest,” he says.

  “I insist you inform the zoo of these results. It’s a mistake not to tell them. It’s a question of decency. It will cause them hurt for a long time.”

  “If we tell the zoo, there will be no secret. The zoo director will go to his friends abroad. There will be a protest. The international authorities will have to be told.”

  “So what if they are told?”

  “Meat and dairy production will be halted. The borders of ČSSR will be closed for months — all of them. There will be no agricultural exports of any kind. We will be marked out as the disease pocket of COMECON.”

  “Only for a time,” I say, “until the contagion is brought under control.”

  He pushes his hands into his pockets. “The first casualty will be the zoo. The shit of every animal there will be examined under a microscope — your microscope. Whatever you find, even if every test comes up negative, all the animals in the zoo will die and all the animals in the fields and sheds around the zoo will die. All the deer in the forest will be shot, even the stags. The whole land around the fishpond there will be emptied of life. Because that’s how it is when national security is brought into question.”

  I say nothing. I look out to the river.

  “This will be done by flame,” he says. “The zoo animals and cows and deer will be burned on pyres reaching up to the sky in columns of fatty smoke. The zoo will be plowed under. The staff will be dispersed. There will only be a field, with no memory of a giraffe or of any exotic animal.”

  He says all this ever so softly, holding on to a cigarette, as though his hold on the present were only through this tiny glowing cylinder.

  There is no stand to be made here. I have given over the results. I have protested. That is all. The State has no interest in bad news. Train wrecks do not make it into its papers, much less contagion. It mercilessly enforces silence. I play my part. I enforce the directives of Soviet laboratories. I copy their methods immediately, without question. I put Russian journals on my shelf and keep British journals in my drawer.

  “There’ll be a further investigation to make sure the laboratory is not responsible for releasing the contagion,” he says.

  “You have no grounds for suspicion!”

  He puts a hand on my shoulder, returning to his former manner. “I know,” he says. “That’s just the order. The collective farms are to go on producing. The borders of ČSSR are not to be closed, not even for a day.”

  He turns to look out again at the fortress. “Wasn’t Gavrilo Princip imprisoned in there?” he asks.

  “The assassin? Yes. You can see the cell, if you like. They’ve put a plaque on the door. He shot Franz Ferdinand and now he’s a martyr for Yugoslavia, an agitator for Slav brotherhood.”

  “How was it in there?”

  “The cell is above ground,” I say, “admitting light, but in other respects tubercular.”

  “I am going directly to the zoo,” he says abruptly. “I wish to take some blood samples from the giraffes. I’ll need some jars.”

  “Fine,” I say. “How many?”

  “Fifty or so,” he says.

  I pale. “Sorry?” I say, confused.

  He smiles. “Didn’t they tell you?” he says. “It’s the largest herd in the world.”

  “No,” I say. “No one told me.”

  I lead him downstairs. We pass the vault doors. I see him back into his suit jacket and shoes. We walk wordlessly to the sealed
room. I shuffle, he clips. He saunters through the seal, through the showers, to the other side. I see him through the grille of my office window, handing his driver a metal case containing fifty empty jars to be filled with giraffe blood.

  ~ ~ ~

  Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.

  — PSALM 91

  Emil

  ČARODĚ JNICE

  APRIL 30, 1975

  IT IS ČARODĚJNICE — the witching night, the eve of May Day. I try to mark the outlines of witches riding goats and broomsticks on the windless sky. I look for the outlines of demons gliding down on fibrous wings. Demons were meant to be as vertical as men or giraffes. They had the same promising hemodynamics, until gravity got the better of them in the core of the earth and made them inexpressibly hunched, like the hyena a Slovak once spoke to me of. There were witching nights in Czechoslovakia when witches and demons fell from the sky to forest clearings. There were cats gathered on their hind legs around a bubbling pot in these clearings and women who put a hand to the thigh of some malevolent force and were so possessed they could no longer see their own red-faced children, born of previous such unions, trotting around them, shitting maggoty apples as they went. I look again out of the car window. I see no outlines in the sky save a Czechoslovakian Airlines jet. It is witching night in our ČSSR of 1975. The children will dress as witches, the collective farmworkers will drink and throw broomsticks onto bonfires. That is all.

  I STILL HAVE NOT STOOD on any shore. There has not been a moment when I might have walked into a graveyard in the salt marshes on the English coast and stumbled upon Magwitch in chains. I have not been swept back into the waters of the Heligoland Bight. I am a doubler. I serve the shipping company with transmissions in code of The Good Soldier Svejk and other too-obvious texts, and I serve hemodynamics. I have been sent to Switzerland. I sat cross-legged on a sunny platform at the St. Gotthard junction, tossing a five-franc coin, silver and heavy, over and over. I took the train, as instructed: Past the Tobler factory to the highest, wind-sheltered valley of the Upper Engadine.

  I came to the village with the secret laboratory. It was autumn. The larch trees were aflame on the mountainsides. I walked through high grass and dandelions to a wooden barn in the center of a meadow. I pushed aside sheep hung with clanging bells. I entered. I found an elevator behind bales of hay. I descended several stories underground. There I examined vials of blood. I gave a talk on cerebral hemodynamics and was able to gather the information requested by the shipping company. Ascending once more, I saw the meadow anew as a line of defense. When the sheep collapsed, the authorities would know a contagion had escaped. There was a graveyard in the Swiss-Italian village in which were graves of alpinists. I wandered there and sat on the grass by the old church. I was in a great amphitheater of mountains. There was a freshly dug grave near me. I glanced at the new grave-stone, still not dug in, and was amazed. Buried there was:

  EMIL FREYMANN 1901-1974

  A man without an epitaph.

  I SLEPT THAT NIGHT in the Hotel Saratz, overlooking the graveyard. A scientist from the laboratory had dinner with me and later sat with me on the balcony of my room, pointing out the various glaciers and the circling eagles: What you say is interesting, Emil. But the motives of animals have always been under investigation by man. Consider how even here in Switzerland, eels were put on trial by the church and excommunicated from Lake Luzern.

  I AM BEING DRIVEN to the town with the zoo, by hop poles and vineyards. We enter the town now. I give instructions to pass through the town square. I see the plague column once again and factory women of good political orientation in another part of the square in vests and black pumps, huffing and puffing to a revolutionary tune, practicing a mass gymnastics exercise for the May Day parade. A committee member gives instructions through a megaphone. “Up and down!” he says. “Into the star.” He breaks off. “No. Ladies! Ladies. Try to give the impression of being a wave that rises and falls with the anthem.” The music starts again. The committee member claps his hands. “Again. Huddle together. Star shape! And up, and down.”

  We drive on, around the Svět. We come to an armed checkpoint. A notice has been placed here: REVERED COMRADES! THE ZOO IS CLOSED FOR TECHNICAL REASONS. ITS GATES WILL REMAIN SHUT FOR THE COMING HOLIDAYS. THE ZOO DIRECTORATE KINDLY ASKS COMRADES TO POSTPONE

  THEIR VISITS.

  I SIT IN A TRAILER that was set down by crane next to the giraffe house at the beginning of the quarantine. I have replaced a vet from the Ministry of Agriculture. I have been ordered to oversee the liquidation of the giraffes that I ascended the Labe with. I am to shred any written reference here to them. There will be no talk of Camelopardalis bohemica because there can be no talk of the contagion. They will be killed without exception, but their absence will not be remarked on. The zoo will receive no explanation. The OIE offices in Paris will not be informed. Inquiries will be directed to nonexistent desks in the Ministry of Agriculture. Complaints will be met with threats of imprisonment. It will be as if the herd never migrated to Czechoslovakia or, having taken assisted passage here and become acclimatized, they simply walked out through open gates, heading north.

  The zoo is circled with quicklime. Its administration and switchboard have been taken over by the security services. No outgoing telephone calls are allowed and there is only one incoming call each afternoon, to the giraffe house. Outside the zoo walls are army tents and a disinfection unit. The representative of the Central Infection Committee is there, together with the deputy minister of agriculture, the rectors of the Košice and Brno veterinary colleges, and security officers. Alois Hus has flown back into ČSSR this morning. He will be picked up by the secret police at Prague Ruzyně Airport. He will be escorted here, but he will not be permitted to enter the zoo. František Vokurka is also outside. I walked by him dressed in the chemical warfare suit I have been issued. He did not recognize me but told me to hold up. “You’re going too fast, comrade! You need to move like this, languidly, as if you are a frogman underwater.”

  I do move slowly in this trailer. I sip tea. I pick up the newspapers. I read again of the five-to-two defeat of ČSSR by the USSR in the ice-hockey world championships, quotas and achievements, the opening of the Máj department store on Národní Street in Prague, a new television drama in which an army major proves himself a hero every week, and also in the sports pages of the return to the Communist moment of an eighteen-year-old tennis prodigy called Navrátilová from a world tour that included a string of victories.

  There are also veterinary papers. The giraffe keeper looks out of the window, as though expecting a visitor, while I read of placental retention in the giraffes of the Leningrad Zoo, of arterial studies on vivisected dogs, and of the tendency toward pelvic tendon rupture in male zoo giraffes.

  I am sober. I understand pyres will be built across ČSSR if the contagion is not contained. They were described to me in Prague. A bed of timbers and railway sleepers, a layer of brown coal, oil, straw, the carcasses laid on top, like some funeral in the time of Libuše. I understand the smoke from these pyres, of chlorine-soaked carcasses, will be more poisonous than arsenic.

  I can no longer stop the Communist moment. I find it hard to stop images with my eye in the way I used to, keeping them in my mind and turning them. I stood yesterday in a secret laboratory on the banks of the River Ohře and my eye was drawn to a weeping willow on the far bank, as if in broad daylight I might chance to see a vodník sitting in the branches. The professor running the facility was a small man, unfailingly polite, who offered resistance when called upon to do so, conceded gracefully, and had exceptionally thick spectacles from staring so long into microscopes and vials. He showed me the metal doors securing the animal plagues. The doors reminded him, he said, of hatches on a submarine. I was disoriented when he said that. I had a feeling of being upended, as if I were standing on the flat deck of a submarine, cold water rushing about me, and the only esc
ape were into a chamber of pestilence.

  WE GO INSIDE THE GIRAFFE house again: They are impossible. There is no such animal.

  I still regard these beasts in that way. I have forgotten so much in the last two years, but I cannot forget the towers of the Qasr al-Qadim fortress, over which the gyrfalcon sailed and looked down on the only giraffe in Europe. My eyes are watering: There is a high level of ammonia here. It is too crowded. There have been births since I left here in the summer of 1973, just as Hus predicted. There are now forty-seven giraffes; two others have already been shot. I move among them. They have become fully zoo animals. Their eyes have changed in aspect. I do not look at them closely. I do not want to remember the necks I moved under on the barge. I try to regard them only as hemodynamic specimens, pressing blood to the tin roof. I walk away when I catch sight of Sněhurka’s belly in the crowd.

  “They’re not sick,” the keeper says, following me. “It’s spring. They salivate with the change of feed. That’s all.”

  He is in denial. The African number-two contagion is in their blood and lymph nodes. I see it here and here, in pox, in blisters, manifested in boils in the inner thigh that are black like the plagues spoken of in Athens, shiny, waiting to break open like rotten fruit.

  THERE IS A STORY of a ferryman on the Labe who found himself untouched by a pestilence while his wife and children were struck down. There were the most sorrowful and wretched scenes along the riverbank. Each day the ferryman would leave a parcel of food on the shore and call out to his pox-ridden wife. She would come out of their dwelling with their children. He would, at her heartrending entreaty, row out into the river, within shouting distance only, and so they called to each other loving greetings and he asked after the health of those children not present. When the ferryman could no longer bear it, he rowed his oars hard toward his family, and they took up stones and pieces of wood, even the smallest child, raining them down on him, until he turned back and rowed away, sobbing.