Giraffe Page 19

  I SEE VOKURKA. He does not approach me. He does not recognize me. He moves between the StB officers and the senior Communists. He is not as innocent as his name. He has grown predatory, into one of those tarpon he spoke of, who have learned to come up for air in the mangrove swamps while smaller fish asphyxiate in stagnant waters.

  I FIND ALOIS HUS ALONE, sitting on quicklime. He looks up at me desperately, then with recognition.

  “Freymann,” he says without surprise.

  “Yes, Alois,” I say.

  “You were in there?”

  “I had a scientific interest,” I say awkwardly.

  I am in my clothes now. I can put my hands in the pockets of my tweed trousers. I do so.

  “Was the shooting done cleanly?” he asks.

  “As cleanly as possible.”

  His hands and knees are muddy.

  “I’ve been in a field,” he says. “I’ve been on my knees all night. I’ve been listening to the shots.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “They didn’t have to kill them,” he says. “They could have done something else. It’s political. They don’t want animals running free.”

  There is silence, then he strikes up again.

  “They could have dug a pit and filled it with solution,” he says. “They could have walked the giraffes through the pit and ducked them under the solution, just for a moment.”

  “Like a baptism?” I say.

  “Yes,” he says, his eyes far away.

  Amina

  ČARODĚJNICE

  APRIL 30, 1975

  THEY HAVE SET UP a centrifugal fairground ride under the Gothic winged cow to celebrate May Day. You stand in a cage and it spins around. There are no doors, no belts. You spin around and around and gravity binds you in.

  I cross the town square. I step over the sundial shadow of the plague column. Children with hooked paper noses go by me dressed in black. They carry broomsticks. One child chases the others, desperately, as though the space between them were a wasteland.

  THERE WAS A TIME when witches were burned at the stake in the town square and the corpses were thrown into the Labe to float away, toward the sea. We are taught in our stories that there were three sisters before there were witches. Kazi had the gift of healing. Teta had the gift of finding what was lost. Libuše had the gift of foreknowledge and ruled this land before it was Czechoslovakia. She went down to flowing water and saw the future in the pools. She sat cross-legged on a carpeted platform under a linden tree. People came to her and she dispensed justice to them. Women had authority then; they were the shamans. When Libuše handed power over to men, many women refused to be subjugated. They rose up; they cut down hundreds of men in pitched battles. They fought for seven years, and when the men finally took power, many of the women fled to the forest. They were saturnine. They kept themselves apart. They became witches. They ruled the imagination of Czechoslovakia by night as the priests did by day. They nurtured the memory of the three sisters. They directed their spells against men and the animals that profited men. They lived in caves and in dwellings of green branches. They gathered wild herbs and seeds. They tapped sap from the trees and scooped out from hives combs of wild honey. Czechoslovakia came to be afraid of the witches. They believed the witches spread disease among their livestock. Every year on the witching night they took lengths of cord, had them blessed by the priest, and tied them around the throats of their cows and sheep. Only then did they celebrate the end of winter and carouse through the night, into May Day. Čarodějnice is no longer about the protection of animals, which are units of production, and have no blessing in the Communist moment. No cord is tied around the neck of a cow tonight, save to bind it tight in the dark shed of a collective farm.

  I RUN TOWARD THE ZOO. I take the secret path, behind the chapel of St. Michael. I come to the town swimming pool. It is very beautiful now. It is filled for summer and is ghostly blue from the lights within it. I keep out of sight. I creep from the pool up the slope. I slip in the mud. I get up to the path that runs by the zoo wall. I can smell the elephants on the other side. I can hear them thumping. Soldiers are patrolling the path. They are marching up and down with their machine guns. Against what enemy? I wait in the shadows for them to pass. I find a gap in the wall. I squeeze through.

  I find myself in the zebra enclosure. A crowd of maneless zebras is around me. They eye me. They roll back their lips. They whinny. They run away. A firework breaks overhead, and another. They are shooting up from the sandy floor of the outdoor ice-hockey rink. They rise in burning phosphor and explode into spheres, like Christmas decorations I have dipped.

  I see a secret policeman standing by the ostriches. He is wearing some kind of warfare suit and holding a gun. I run the other way, toward the floodlights arranged over the giraffe house. I know all these paths now.

  More fireworks are bursting. I come to the sycamore tree. I kneel down beside it. Red fireworks go up in celebration of the Communist moment of 1975. My world turns pyrotechnical. I feel inconsequential, not just slight and aerated, but invisible, as though I am looking for my reflection in a tray of red spheres in the factory. I see the giraffe house bathed in red, a truck idling red by the yard, three red giraffes in the yard, red men wearing warfare suits carrying knives, saws, and cleavers. I see a man balanced on the fence with a rifle.

  “Giraffe!” I hear him shout.

  I see the giraffes fall in Christmas red and shatter on the ground, like a decoration. The firework gives out. There is only the weak glow of floodlights.

  I run toward the giraffes. I am knocked to the ground by a secret policeman. I get up unsteadily. My hip is bruised. I am awake. I see everything around me in great detail, but I am not in another place; I have not awoken as operatic Amina, in the arms of my love.

  I am taken and locked in a trailer, where I can see nothing but hear shots ringing out in quick succession after long silences.

  I am taken now to an StB officer. I brush the quicklime from my dress.

  “How did you get in here?” he asks.

  “Through the zebras.”

  “What?”

  “Through the cages.”

  “You’re in serious trouble,” he says.

  The giraffe keeper arrives.

  “Amina!” he says quietly. “You’ve come.”

  I push forward and embrace him. I have not seen him since the quarantine began.

  “You’re under arrest,” the StB officer says.

  The keeper steps in front of me.

  “You’ll have to arrest me first,” he says.

  “We need you,” the StB man says.

  “She’s useful,” the keeper says. “The giraffes know her.”

  We are silent. We stand off from one another. A young man, a scientist, comes forward. He takes the StB officer to one side. The keeper turns to me. “You can be a comfort to the giraffes,” he says. “You can do that.”

  THE STB OFFICER HAS BEEN persuaded to let me stay. I must hold up a flashlight to the giraffes. I must still them in their eyes and then shine on a spot at the back of the head where the sharpshooter is meant to aim.

  “If they see you in the last moment, that will be something,” the keeper says, but oddly.

  I place my hands to his cheeks. I look at him closely through his goggles. He is sleepwalking. He has walked inward from this moment, far away. There are some who, though asleep, behave as though they were awake.

  THE SHARPSHOOTER IS KINDLY, but drunk.

  “Shine it at the back of the ear,” he says.

  I aim the flashlight.

  “Down. Across. That’s it!”

  “Wait,” I say.

  I run into the giraffe house. I go up the stairs to the loft. I take an armful of browse cut from the acacia trees overhanging the fountain of St. George. I bring it back to the fence. I sort the branches.

  “Now,” the sharpshooter says. “They’re opening the doors.”

  I hold a branch up. A yo
ung male approaches. He leans toward the branch. I shine the light in his eyes. He stops. He pushes back his head, he stretches up. Tears roll down his cheeks.

  “Giraffe!” the sharpshooter calls, then pulls the trigger.

  The giraffe is hit. It falls.

  I begin to cry. The sharpshooter climbs down from the fence. He sets down his rifle and holds me tight.

  “Don’t cry,” he says. “Look at me.”

  He smells of drink. He pushes back his spectacles.

  “What you are doing is a mercy,” he says.

  THE YARD IS FILLING with blood. The stench is stronger than the foulest cowshed. The giraffes do not lean. They do not notice me. The keeper and the scientist must light a fire under them to get them out of the giraffe house. Tails burn in the darkness.

  All I can do is find their eyes and fill them with light.

  I WATCH THE SCIENTIST move with precision through the blood. He puts jars to the springs of blood and fills and stoppers them. Butchers splash in behind him. I see one of the butchers holding up the head of a giraffe by the horns now, as though waiting for it to deflate.

  FIRST LIGHT WASHES OVER the Svět. It is May Day.

  “Go to the keeper,” the sharpshooter says. “You’ve done your part. There are only a few left. I can see them without the flashlight.”

  I AM IN THE keeper’s room. He is not here. The light is breaking through as it did on the morning of Christmas Eve, when everything was as cold and crystalline as Franz Josef Land. From in here I can hear and smell what is going on outside. I am too awake to step inward to fireflies, butterflies. There is shouting from the butchers: Another giraffe is being hauled up into a truck. I block out the sounds. It is a mess in here. I push back my hair and kneel on the floor and sort the keeper’s papers and his studies of Czechoslovakian animal history.

  “Don’t bother with that.”

  It is the scientist. He is at the door.

  “We’ll have to burn everything,” he says. “It’s all contaminated.”

  “My dress?” I say bitterly.

  “That will be burned too.”

  He is covered in blood. His hair also. He lifts up his goggles.

  “There can be no record of the contagion,” he says. “It will be exactly as if this night never happened.”

  I drop the papers. They scatter over the floor. There will be no more notes of polar bears or of the giraffe with a fractured pelvis who walked over the Julian Alps.

  “What is the contagion?” I ask.

  “You’ve seen the swellings on their flanks,” he says.

  “Most have no marks.”

  “The State cannot afford the risk,” he says.

  He takes off his surgical gloves, scrubs his hands, and snaps on a clean pair. He brushes back his hair. Strands are stuck together with blood.

  “Did you read the stories of our early Slavs?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “There was a story of a boy captured after a battle.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Your hair reminds me of that story.”

  He arranges his jars of blood neatly on trays. He labels the test tubes. He takes a syringe. He draws blood from a jar. He injects it into one of the test tubes. He seals it. He checks it. He places it in a metal case. “My hair?” he asks.

  “A raiding party was captured. They were roped together and sentenced to be executed from the youngest to the oldest and richest. The boy was near the front of the line. He had blond hair, down his back. His friends called him Fine Hair. He was untied and pushed forward. He spoke up when his enemies were about to execute him. He told them they could do what they wanted with him, but they were not to get a drop of blood on his hair.”

  The scientist looks up from his test tubes and smiles now, a half-smile of this place, like the half-light cast by the floodlights.

  “His enemies took his hair and had it wrapped around the forearm of a servant. ‘Now die,’ they said. The boy shrugged and knelt. He told the servant to hold his hair up tight when the ax fell. The ax came swinging. At the last moment, the boy jerked forward, dragging down the servant’s forearm with his locks. The blade cut off the servant’s hand. The boy’s hair was covered in the servant’s blood. He jumped up and berated his enemies for the mess they had made of his hair. They gathered around and beat their shields. They favored displays of courage. They were delighted with the boy. They gave him a sword and released him.”

  “Where do you work?” the scientist asks.

  “The Christmas-decoration factory in the town.”

  “Why are you here? The keeper?”

  I shake my head. “The giraffes. They awaken me.”

  He nods. He is about to say something more, but stops. There is another rifle shot. He takes three empty jars and runs out again.

  I AM ESCORTED FROM the zoo in the daylight. I cannot look back. I can only look down. The army dogs are barking outside the walls, the wolves answering from inside. I am giddy. I imagine the gorillas calling out to me as I pass: Viva! viva! viva! viva! Amina!

  All the paths are quicklime, marked with footsteps, and little bodies of shot birds.

  “Keep moving,” the secret policeman says.

  So I do.

  I AM IN A SHOWER. I lift my breasts. I scrub myself at their command. They hose me with disinfectant.

  There is no operatic aria in here. I do not walk over a turning mill wheel to my lover. These men wear goggles and face masks. I see under their suits the red-star badge of the StB.

  “You carry the contagion,” one of the men says.

  “You are a risk to national security,” the other says.

  “Once more,” they say together.

  So we begin again with the disinfection.

  They open the flap of a tent. They sit me down here on a bench. I put my head in my hands. My hair falls down. I am naked under these overalls. I am shoeless as in my sleepwalking, but am perfectly awake to this May Day. I cannot dull myself. I hear a voice speaking to me.

  “My hair is clean now,” the scientist says.

  I feel myself to be in that centrifugal ride. I go around and around. I cannot lift my arms up, much less lift off like John the Baptist toward an unimagined color. I am no longer aerated: The chlorine does not pass through me but burns my skin. The centrifugal ride has me. I am pinned to the cage. I am so heavy now, I cannot lift my head. I cannot reply.

  Jiří

  MAY DAY

  MAY 1, 1975

  IT IS MAY DAY. The gore I have produced is there for all to see. I wade through the yard. I climb the fence. Emil, if that is his given name, is here by the last truck, exposing film the StB officer took through the night: It will be as if this night never happened.

  I walk away in this suit slowly, deliberately. I seem to hear zookeepers crying. A kangaroo hops up in its cage. I see other beasts indistinctly. I cannot tell one cage of apes from another. I come to the zoo gates. Secret policemen and functionaries come up to me.

  I am slapped on the back.

  I turn. It is Máslo.

  “Well done, Sobotka!” he says excitedly.

  I AM TAKEN INTO A disinfection unit. They take the Mauser and drop it in a vat of solution. They take the satchel, the thirty-three remaining cartridges, and the cigarettes.

  “This is all for burning,” they say.

  I am stripped of the suit. My spectacles are taken and dipped in solution too. Goggles are placed on my face.

  “Eyes shut. Tighter.”

  My hair is soaped and soaped again. They spray me with disinfectant. I am hosed as a horse is hosed. They take off the goggles and wash out my eyes and nose and now my ears and mouth.

  I AM GIVEN BACK THE clothes I arrived in. I am led to an empty tent and made to wait here. It is a field-hospital tent. There are plastic windows stitched into it that let in a watery light.

  The flap opens. A secret policeman brings in the girl who held up the flashlight for me. He sits
her down across from me. She has been disinfected also. They have given her overalls to wear in place of her dress. She is bent over, her head in her hands. She does not look up. I cannot see whether she is weeping quietly or is asleep.

  IT USED TO BE THAT farmers would take straw and rub it in the mouth of an infected cow and then take the straw and spread it in the mouths of the other cows, so the herd would share the sickness, be milked together, the milk dumped, and would together develop an immunity and recover. I do not know what the contagion is, or if it has been contained through destruction, just as you cut down trees to save a forest during a fire. Perhaps a swallow escaped into the night and infected the cowshed of a collective farm or a fox slipped out through the cages, like the girl slipped in. I know the May Day parade will proceed around the town square with red tractors and brigades of children whirring like clockwork to anthems. The cows will be milked across the ČSSR today, the milk poured out for children, and the surviving okapi will move about its cage in the zoo undisturbed, sneezing quicklime.

  “REMEMBER,” THEY SAY. “You were hunting black grouse.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “You can go, comrade.”

  I AM GIVEN THE MAUSER. I do not have to sign for it. I have not signed my name to anything.

  “The strap,” I say. “I’ll need the shoulder strap.”

  They find it and hand it to me.

  A TALL MAN GRABS ME NOW. I look up. It is Alois Hus, the zoo director. While I have been shooting, he has been crying. I flinch. He might hit me, or embrace me.

  “Comrade Sobotka,” he says, embracing me. “Did any survive?” he asks.

  “No.”

  He bites his lip.

  “Alois, forgive me,” I say. “It was a horrific night. I will have nightmares about it for the rest of my life.”