Giraffe Page 2

  The River Vltava flows past this building at cross-purposes with the snow. I cannot say how deep it is. As deep as two people, the one standing on the shoulders of the other? As deep as four people? I try to picture the contours of its bed, to calculate where the current scores it most deeply. I imagine the fish within it, hovering against the flow, their mouths in a bony O, their gills opening and clamping. I consider water passing over their scales, the viscosity of their eyeballs. There is a reflection on the water of the snowflakes, wheeling crystalline across, and of the clouds opening and closing, although the surface of the Vltava is smooth, because the wind runs above the ČSSR but hardly ever comes down and touches its face. I catch sight of a furled swan. It speeds away on the current, in the direction of Suchdol. Its whiteness reminds me of an angel, of a painting I have seen of the archangel Michael. I frame the swan, I photograph it with my eye. This is what I do when I see beauty. I take a picture. I shutter it with a blink, keep it in my mind, and turn it this way and that until the Communist moment recedes and beauty is in the ascendant.

  The elevator opens. A small man steps out, biting his knuckles. His hands are doll-sized, white as porcelain. He looks at me inquiringly.

  “Freymann?” he asks.

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  “Come with me, will you,” he says, in Czech.

  His voice is high-pitched, a warble. He is the “shipping director.” I follow him down the length of the corridor. It is long and dimly lit. This is another thing I notice about Communism: how it lengthens and darkens the corridors of ČSSR, year by year, into the corridors of nightmares.

  He ushers me in.

  “Sit down, please,” he warbles. “I won’t be long.”

  He picks up the telephone and calls a “port” far away. I light another Red Star and tap it out into an ashtray, which rests on a stand next to my chair.

  It is maritime in here. Large maps detail the shipping lanes of the Black Sea and the Baltic. There is an oil painting of an Austro-Hungarian schooner in a gilt frame. A scale model of a new Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, or COMECON, oil tanker sits on a side table. A coil of rope and an anchor are on the floor next to a Murmansk Shipping Company crate marked with the symbol of a pacing polar bear. I am removed from Czechoslovakia in this office: That is its purpose. It is not for me to be intimate with such salt-washed things. I have never seen the sea, and when I imagine it, I envisage only a passage from a children’s story in which boys pick yellow starfish from rock pools while gulls sweep and bomb above and waves break somehow polyphonically in caves beyond.

  This is a shipping company in my landlocked country, on which no wave has ever broken, where there is not a single vantage point from which to sit and contemplate the turning of a tide; in my Czechoslovakia, which has no memory of the sea and no words for spume or barnacle or jetsam. In our fairy tales the first kings do not arrive windburned in longships from across the sea. They grope blindly from out of the side of breast-shaped hills, caked in peat, as though they are a crop sown by God for this land and no other. Our freshwater streams are narrow, shallow, unpeeled by the moon, are tepid, muddy, and thick-haired with reeds. Only milk-aspected fish, voles, vodníks, and rusalkas move in them. We have no seals, no mermaids. Brine arrives in tins, from overland. The helical narwhal tusks and dolphin fetuses arranged on the shelves of the Strahov Monastery in Prague were purchased through an intermediary: The monks of Prague have not confessed before the body of any ocean, still less made their stand at the edge of the Atlantic, on wet-black cliffs among the storm petrels, as the Irish monks have done.

  The windows in here give and release like a lung. We could be in a cabin of an old airship tethered over the Holešovice district. The tower is poorly constructed, of the Communist moment. It will not last. It is all glass. It will soon be shattered, just as the greenhouses of Czechoslovakian country manors were shattered with the coming of Communism.

  The shipping director puts down the phone and lets out an involuntary spasm. “So you’re the giraffe man?” he says in Russian.

  “Yes,” I say in Czech.

  “Speak Russian in here.”

  “If you like,” I say in Russian.

  “I do like,” he says. “What exactly is the nature of your work?”

  “I study blood flow in vertical creatures, in men and giraffes. The morphology of the jugular vein and such.”

  He looks blank.

  “Yes?” he says.

  “The work has application for cosmonauts and high-altitude fliers,” I say. “For instance, the skin of a giraffe is thick to protect it from thorns and is so tightly wrapped as to take on the qualities of an anti-gravity space suit, such as we should like to design, which does not allow blood to settle in the lower extremities of the body.”

  “I see,” he says.

  “I am especially interested in the journey blood makes through the brain of a giraffe.”

  He blinks.

  I must also look blank. I am distracted now with the thought of circulation in a cosmonaut who falls down to the desert from space and feels the weight of his own body there in the sand as a mortal pin through the breastplate of his silver suit — as though he were a butterfly pinned to a specimen case.

  “Are your giraffes ferocious beasts?” he asks.

  “Not at all. Giraffes are timid and tolerant of one another. They share food. They seldom fight. They have few enemies, comrade director, because their territory is up, in the branches of trees, rather than along. Although it is true that a giraffe can kick out in any direction with the force of several horses, and leopards have been found decapitated and lions with their heads caved in from where a giraffe struck them with full force of hoof.”

  He considers this.

  “Are they swift?”

  “Giraffes can outrun the fleetest horse,” I say.

  “A Turkmen horse even?”

  “Only for a short distance. They tire easily. Their lungs are not big enough to compensate for their size or for the length of their windpipe.”

  “Hunting them must be simple.”

  I nod. “The Omanis used to hunt giraffes by following them on horseback. When the giraffe slowed, they moved in close. They leaned out of their saddle, like this”—I lean out of my chair and indicate the ashtray stand as the leg of the giraffe—“and with a single blow of the sword, severed the hamstrings, popped them, so that the giraffe collapsed forward into the dust, like a falling minaret.”

  “Very good,” he says. “Emil, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “When I say ‘Soviet Union,’ what is the first thing you think of?”

  “Space rockets.”

  “And again.”

  “Desert.”

  “And again?”

  “Forest, endless forest.”

  “Brother?”

  I almost say, Cain.

  “Yes,” I say, flushing. “Of course — fraternal relations.”

  “The proletariat will be triumphant forever. Yes or no?” Another bite of his knuckles.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yes or no?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, good. Are you religious?”

  I want to say, “Communism is a religion also.” I want to say, “Communism is the religion of a flightless bird, a penguin, which has no imagination of flight.”

  “I believe, yes,” I say.

  A small bite on the back of his hand. “Unfortunate.”

  “For you, comrade?”

  “Don’t be trite. I’ve seen a man walking on water.” He looks at me closely. “You don’t believe me?”

  “I’ve no reason not to believe you,” I say.

  “Well, it is true,” he says. “A remarkable sight. I visited the port of Arkhangel’sk and took a fishing boat, which sailed for some days into the White Sea. It was summertime, but the sea was cold — ice drifted to us from the forested shore. Have you ever seen the sea, Freymann?”

  “No, sir.”<
br />
  “Can you imagine it?”

  “I’ve seen films, pictures.”

  “The White Sea is not white, you should understand, but of dark changing colors. On the third day, we hit fish. So many fish! We drew up the net. It was a biblical scene, as you might say. The catch was too large. We could not take it on board. If we had done so, we should have sunk. Yet it was hard to let all those fish go. There was an experienced crew member. A blond Estonian — yes, not unlike you, but older and stronger, with nothing left to prove. While we made plans, he walked off the boat — onto the sea! He walked on water, or rather on the heads and bodies of the fish thrashing there at the surface. When he came to the net, he took his knife, reached in, and cut it open. Fish rushed out. He sank to his knees, as though in melting snow. We thought he would disappear whole into the White Sea and drown. We called out to him. He turned to face us momentarily, then looked up. He smiled and appeared transfixed by a gyrfalcon hovering above in the fierce winds. He contemplated the gyrfalcon for what seemed to us an age, then walked on water calmly back to the boat. Through his labor the net was bled of enough of the fish for us to be able to haul it on board.”

  He stops. “So there is a miracle for you,” he says.

  “Remarkable,” I say.

  “You’ve never seen the sea — have you ever been out of the country?”

  “I once went to Hungary.”

  “All the more exciting this will be for you, then. What we want from you, Emil, is to travel up to Hamburg and supervise the unloading and passage back to Czechoslovakia of an important shipment.”

  “You want me to go west?”

  He gives me a weary look.

  “Yes, Freymann. West Germany.”

  He asks me if I have heard of a zoo in a certain Czechoslovakian town.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “It is due a shipment of giraffes. Let’s see.” He opens a ring binder with his tiny fingers and lifts out a few pages. “Here we are. Thirty-three giraffes. A record number, by all accounts. The zoo director is sailing with them from Mombasa in the next week or so. The giraffes are the property of the Ministry of Agriculture, although the shipping company underwrote some of the costs of their capture and transport.”

  He puts an index finger in his mouth, nibbles. His expression is pained now. “There are concerns about the sale of sensitive information about your ČSSR — or indeed the sale of the giraffes themselves — to unfriendly foreign elements. You’ll travel to Hamburg, keep an eye on things, listen out for what concerns us, and make sure all the property reaches Czechoslovakia in good order.” He looks up. “But that’s all incidental,” he says. “The main point is to establish your cover for future operations. You’ll be a scientist sponsored by a shipping concern, nothing more. So how about it, Freymann — can you manage?”

  “Why me?”

  “You’re the giraffe man, aren’t you?”

  “Just giraffe blood, comrade. I just deal in hemodynamics.”

  “You’ve the perfect cover. You’ll get us access to foreign laboratories. Write some scientific paper from this trip. Indulge yourself. Yes?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “I know you will, Emil.”

  I stand. I push back my hair. He slips the pages back into the ring binder. I take it. I open it and see written inside the cover in a flowing hand:

  giraffe!

  “Thank you, comrade director.”

  “We’ll make a start on your permissions,” he says, addressing a finger to his mouth.

  I go out. I flick through the file in the lengthening corridor. There is the sound of discordant typing, both fluent and clumsy. I lean against the wall. Only a single image of a giraffe comes to me at this moment; all my learning has been reduced to a giraffe of indistinct color. I see the height of the beast; its neck is translucent; I see blood shooting up its carotid artery to the rete mirabile, or wonder net, stretched elastic at the base of the cranium. The giraffe does not move; it does not turn toward me.

  I WALK AWAY from the glass tower now, down Jankovcova Street to the Vltava. I turn up my collar against the cold. I come to the river. It is a vein, opened to the sky. It pleases me. I am a hemodynamicist and I cannot help seeing rivers as veins, and veins as rivers. I am given over, as I told the shipping director, to the study of cerebral hemodynamics in vertical creatures, in men and giraffes. That is, the flow of blood toward and through the brain, a journey that has no beginning or end save in the last beat of the heart, at which point the veins collapse — the cosmic catastrophe — along with all calculations. I do not feel the weight of my skull pushed up, as if on a stick, from this soot-dusted embankment. If I could hold it in my hands, here beside the Libeň Bridge, I would be surprised at its heft — most of it blood. My intent is to model the flow of this blood through the brain. I wish to map out its sinks and eddies, its oxbows, and the estuarine channels of the wonder net. I use sound waves to determine the variable depth of arterial walls. (For a long time, arteries were not understood. The garroting of specimen animals for dissection engorged the right ventricle and so emptied the arteries of blood, so they came to be called arteria, or tubes, and were assigned a pneumatic purpose, of pumping air around the body.) Blood finds no sea. It courses through narrows and rapids of ligament, flows upward against gravity, and becomes momentarily weightless in the deep of the brain, where thoughts shoot like comets through a firmament of crimson stars that give oxygen but no light. Blood is not opened to the sky; its journey is a hidden flow, is without light, save in the dawntide, which works into the thin blood vessels woven across wrist- and anklebones.

  I leave the Vltava and walk now through the warehouses of Holešovice, under Czechoslovakian flags of red, white, and blue and Soviet flags of red slotted into the conical holders the State has decreed must be drilled into the masonry of every building. The flags hang limply. This is something else I notice about the Communist moment: how it celebrates itself in a windless land with a display of flags. I quicken my pace. I am drawn now, like a moth, toward an electric sign blinking on and off over the main gates of a brick-making factory. A space rocket bearing the initials ČSSR bursts moon-ward from the slogan

  GLORY TO THE EPOCH OF SOCIALIST

  AND COMMUNIST CONSTRUCTION!

  The initials ČSSR and the space rocket blink on and off. The slogan is ever lit. I look at the potholed street. I walk under the sign. I do not look up, but see fairground reflections in the puddles of an epoch blinking on, then off.

  I catch a tram and walk and come to a pub overlooking Stromovka Park. I step inside. It is yellow in here. The lights are yellow, the tablecloths are stained yellow, the walls and air are yellow with cigarette smoke; there is a jaundiced man propping up the bar, there are maple-yellow ice-hockey sticks lined up by the door. I take a beer and sit in a corner. I pull from my bag a copy of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. It is a Czechoslovakian edition from before the war. This volume means something to me. It belonged to my uncle. Inside the front cover there is an admonition he scrawled in large letters as a child:

  Death is a confirmed habit into which we have fallen.

  Learn from Pip

  I flick through it at random, as the pious do with their Bibles. The paper is yellow. is scrawled on the margin of one page. A few phrases are underlined throughout:

  What larks!

  And the communication I have got to make is,

  that he has great expectations.

  I see an exclamation mark in the margin where Wemmick, the law clerk, carries a fishing rod on his shoulder through London, not with any intent of fishing in the River Thames, but simply because he likes to walk with one:

  I thought this odd; however, I said nothing,

  and we set off.

  I shut the book and open it once more and put a finger to a page.

  “That was a memorable day to me,” I read, “for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck
out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”

  I know this passage well. The book often opens to this page. This is where Pip returns home from Miss Havisham’s for the first time. He has come to understand his position in the world. He sees himself anew, as a common boy with coarse manners and laborer’s boots. I read the passage once more. I try to make the words fit my situation.

  I cannot. I am an adult, Pip is a child. West Germany is not Miss Havisham’s. My education has been limited by the Communist moment, not by poverty, as Pip’s has been. My manners are not particularly coarse, my shoes are foreign, well soled, not those of a laborer. It is true this has been a memorable day for me. I am bound by a long chain of iron, after Pip’s description. But the links are not of my making; they were formed in the year of my birth, 1948, the year in which the Communists took Czechoslovakia by the neck and wrung it. I close my Great Expectations. I look around this pub. The faces I see, one after the other, are yellow, indistinct, banal. They are bound also. They outwardly conform. There is no solidarity here. Solidarity is as likely, the expression goes, as a fire under a waterfall.

  Emil

  MAY 7, 1973

  THE SKY OVER PRAGUE is dashed, flashing. A sudden warm rainstorm washes down in sweet hyphens over Antonín Dvořák’s grave in Vyšehrad, where I kneel now and lay down flowers. Standing, with Slavonic dances in my head, I see the rain passing over the Soviet military barracks in Smichov and wetting the bronze horses rearing up on the roof of the Národní Divadlo, or national theater, and causing Morse code in the sky over Letná Park, toward the apartment blocks of Obráncu miru.