Giraffe Read online

  He catches his breath. I look out and regard a soldier, walking now through the vineyard to the candlelit chapel, a machine gun in his hand.

  “When Rome collapsed,” he continues, “the pits binding men and giraffes together were filled in and no more giraffes came to Europe.”

  “The Dark Ages were not illuminated by any giraffe?”

  “None: the Roman skills of capturing and transporting wild animals were forgotten. No one knew anymore how to drive a jackal demented with the flashing of metal shields or how to use drums to lure a bear through an oak grove to a clearing in which a lamb runs unhappy circles around a stake.”

  “Cigarette?” I ask.

  He shakes his head.

  “In the medieval period, gyrfalcons and other creatures of the north came to be more sought after in Europe than giraffes,” he says. “You’ve heard of these birds?”

  “Yes,” I say, and inwardly see an Estonian walking on water, looking up.

  “Marco Polo believed the gyrfalcon hatched on an island so far north the Pole Star appears behind you. Kublai Khan favored them in his personal caravan while, in a dust cloud trailing to the horizon, several thousand falconers handled lesser birds. Gyrfalcons were valued for their beauty and for the way they had learned to hover in the ceaseless winds of Iceland and Greenland, on Novaya Zemlya and other islands in the Kara Sea and the White Sea. When gyrfalcons swept back their wings and dived in those places, it was impossible to hear the sound of their fall for the splintering of the ice field. Yet they accommodated the wind, they were not distracted, they kept a straight line, they made their target.”

  He offers more tea.

  “Now we come to polar bears and giraffes,” he says. “In 1235, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick the Second arranged for a line of beasts to parade behind him to Worms in celebration of his marriage to Isabella, the sister of Henry the Third of England. Most of these beasts came from his court in Palermo. They included a column of lynxes and apes of many kinds chained to Muslim slaves, who were themselves chained to one another by metal collars. There is no record of a giraffe having made that wedding journey to Worms, as surely there would have been if one had walked across the Alps at that time. Nor is it possible that the polar bear presented to Frederick by Haakon the Fourth of Norway was among the animals: it had been shipped to Damascus in 1233 as a gift to al-Kāmil, the sultan of Egypt.” He pauses.

  “I’m following,” I say.

  “In 1229, al-Kāmil ceded Jerusalem to Frederick in the bloodless Sixth Crusade. Ten years before that, the sultan had stood and listened respectfully as Saint Francis of Assisi preached to him of the rights of animals and on the question of the soul’s captivity.”

  “What of the polar bear?”

  “It was likely captured as a cub in Spitsbergen,” he says. “No such animal had ever been seen in the Muslim world. It was led out in the cool of early mornings on a long rope to the banks of the River Barada and there encouraged to fish. So also was the polar bear Henry kept in the Tower of London, which was led down to the Thames each day so that it might catch a portion of its daily meat ration in salmon. Henry’s polar bear was probably also a gift from Haakon. It was Haakon who had done most to introduce gyrfalcons to the courts of Europe and to the Muslim world. He sent a shipment of gyrfalcons to Henry, and his gyrfalcons flew over Frederick’s Palermo. The Frankish city,” he says, lost in the damp room, littered with droppings and without illumination, “which the Arabs called Al-Madīnah, had broad avenues, with a turquoise sea before it and yellow wheat plains behind it, through which jackals ran untroubled. Four springs rose in its suburbs, in which Muslims came to mosques at the call of the muezzin. Gardens and fruit trees were abundant. In the churches there were finely worked windows, which shone on altars of colored marble. Christian women of Palermo came to those churches on holy days dressed as Muslim women.”

  “Which is how?” I ask.

  “Veiled,” he says. “Garlanded in jewels and perfumed. Painted on the forearms and about the face, here and here, in the patterns of henna, so that, as one Muslim poet had it, ‘going to church in Palermo, I came upon antelope and gazelles.’ The palaces of Palermo were similarly set above the city as ‘pearls encircling a woman’s full throat.’ Towers rose out of sight from the Qasr al-Qadim fortress. When Frederick’s gyrfalcon flew over those towers in 1233 and looked down upon the menagerie arranged on the lawns below, it would no longer have seen a polar bear, but it must have spied a giraffe. For a giraffe had come to Palermo from Egypt in 1215, a gift from al-Kāmil to Frederick, the only giraffe in Europe, the specimen from which comes our word for the animal: zarâfa, from the Arabic meaning ‘swift-moving.’ ”

  HE CONTINUES ON, in the darkness.

  “Around the time the cardinal Hippolyte was creating in Europe his menagerie of exotic human beings,” he says, “which included Berbers, Welshmen, and Tartars, Montezuma was further expanding the immense zoo in the grounds of his palace in Tenochtitlán, which is now Mexico City. There were black and golden pumas caged there, together with ocelots, anteaters, and a bison from the North American prairies, a realm the Aztecs called the ‘Land Beyond Night.’ The Spanish tell us these animals were better cared for than the deformed men and women who made up the rest of the menagerie. Those poor souls were wards of the state. Their tongues were cut out. They limped or crawled about their cages. They were forced to drink pulque, or fermented cactus juice. They were a spectacle. At the solar eclipse, they were the first to be sacrificed to the jaguar, to water, to movement, to the sun and stars, or to the god Quetzalcoatl, with beaked brow, who blew storm clouds in over fields of maize. These men and women, sometimes limbless, or else blind, hydrocephalic, hunchbacked, were dragged up steep-sided pyramids by priests wearing masks of jade and obsidian, so that in their last swirling moments, they saw teeth of coral, eyes of red seashell, and chunks of alabaster, along with ingots of gold, eagles, snakes, and grasshoppers. Their opened bodies were thrown from the pyramids, so the sun shone through where their hearts had been. Their remains were cut into pieces and fed to the pumas. It was long before that, in 1405, that the Ming emperor of China, Cheng Zu, sent out a fleet under the command of Admiral Zheng He to open up new trade routes. Zheng He’s sailors saw a giraffe in Bengal that had been sent from Malindi, and mistook it for a qilin, or unicorn — spoken of in Chinese prophecy, which was supposed to be the centerpiece of the Sacred Animal Garden of Intelligence laid out between Beijing and Nanjing several thousand years earlier by Wan, an emperor in the Zhou dynasty — because in China the unicorn was still represented with the horns of a giraffe, while in Europe, thanks to the trade in gyrfalcons and polar bears, the horn of the unicorn had come to be represented with the ivory tusk of the Arctic narwhal.”

  I WALK SWIFTLY HOME NOW, by the statue of charity in the chateau garden, and think of the two keen-eyed creatures brought to Palermo. If the giraffe had looked up, it would have seen the gyrfalcon. It would have been silent, but it would have seen. I try to see the palaces of Palermo as pearls encircling a woman’s full throat and I come, in a turning of comets, to how Shakespeare brought Bohemia together with Sicily in The Winter’s Tale and mistakenly gifted Bohemia a gravel shore on which the Sicilians landed their ships. I walk on, through the smoke-filled night of ČSSR, with the sound of passing trains, and speak the opening line aloud:

  If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia.

  you shall see, as I have said, great difference betwixt

  our Bohemia and your Sicilia.

  Emil

  JUNE 18, 1973

  SNOW PEARS AND SILVER LIMES and white elms flick by outside. It is summer now in Czechoslovakia. Wheat has risen in the fields. Mosquitoes dance over the hidden marshes in the forests. It is bright, sunlit, in here, at the window of my compartment. The train speeds toward East Berlin. My father stood, a little while ago, on the platform of the Hlavní Nádraží, or central station, in Prague. He waved me off. He ran alongside the train as it l
eft. I pushed down my window and reached out my hand to his. Our fingertips brushed, as the wings of birds brush in flight. There was a fear in his eyes, that I might break Pip’s long chain of iron and never return.

  There is a young opera singer in the compartment with me. She has never seen the breast-shaped hills of northern Czechoslovakia before, from which our first kings are said to have emerged, caked in peat. She is moved to tears when I point them out, and name them for her.

  “Milešovka and Kletečná are the highest,” I say. “Then Lovoš, Oblík, Milá, Deblík, Boreč, and Hazmburk, with its old church.”

  She looks sickly. Her skin is thin, pale, as translucent to me as the neck of the unmoving giraffe I pictured in the corridor of the shipping company. I am diverted now by her operatic blood. I see it, coursing up. I make my hemodynamic calculations.

  “Are you all right?” I ask.

  “I’m fine, really I am,” she says. “Are they very old? The hills, I mean.”

  “Oh, yes, epochs old. They’re volcanoes. You could journey down through them to the center of the earth.”

  We can see only a few of the hills now. I frame one. It is seductive from this distance, a mound of soft earth and sweet grass with a nipple thicket of beech trees.

  She is going as far as the town of Ústí nad Labem. She has a part in a production of Dvořák’s opera Rusalka that is playing there.

  “Just a small part,” she says shyly, “of a nymph rising to the surface of a stream.”

  “Still,” I say.

  “Where are you going?” she asks.

  I unfold a map for her, which includes parts of West Germany. I put a finger to Hamburg.

  “I’m going here,” I say.

  My eye is drawn to the sea beyond Hamburg. I point also to the town of Cuxhaven.

  “Here also.”

  I draw my finger around the islands of Scharhörn and Neuwerk, which I imagine as two black dots — gull’s eyes staring up from a yet-vague swell. “Also here, to these two islands.”

  I indicate with a sweep the Heligoland Bight beyond Scharhörn and Neuwerk. “I’d also like to sail here.”

  “You must have seen the sea many times,” she says.

  I blush. I cannot lie so directly.

  “No,” I say. “I have only ever read stories of the sea.”

  I WAKE NOW in Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or DDR. The compartment is empty. That is Saxony out there, so flat and untroubled; those are Trabant 601’s, little plastic wonder cars of DDR, putt-putting along moonlit country lanes overhung with elms and goat willows.

  East Berlin’s train station comes in an electric sign whose lettering, OSTBAHNHOF, brings with it an immediate sense of fictional Emil waiting at a street corner for a signal, and of me somewhere unborn in the Charlottenburg district, in West Berlin, flashing him that signal with a mirror from the window of an apartment. But my stop in divided Berlin is short. There is no thief for me to pursue: My wallet is untouched. I walk from this platform to another and board the night train to Hamburg. I arrange myself by the window. The train pulls out of the station, out past the columns of the great Pergamon Museum, within which I know are the winged bulls of Persepolis. Soldiers come into the compartment. They lower the blinds and secure the window against the dead of night with a padlock, so that I pass through the Iron Curtain unseeing and unseen, with only the stamping of documents to mark my release.

  Emil

  JUNE 19, 1973

  I HAVE ARRIVED in Hamburg. It is just before dawn. The sky is orange and red. I was blind, but now can see — isn’t that what they sing in America? It is a little like that. There is no one watching me. There is no one at my back. I am the watcher now. I take a taxi to the port of Hamburg, where there might be a shore and wind and spume on the wind. I roll down the windows. I let the brightness of the northern dawntide pass in through the veins woven across my wrists. West Germany comes at me in different-shaped buildings and signs, in extraordinary cars and buses and in kiosks and flower stalls streaming with color. All this new information is painful to me. There is too much here to frame and stop.

  The taxi drops me off by the gates of the port. The East German freighter is pointed out to me. It is a narrow ax in the far distance. I walk toward it now in disappointment. The port is not as I hoped it to be. I want to be made aware of how far I have come, I want to walk down to a gravel beach. I want to frame a buoy and a lighthouse. I wish to teeter on a shore, over seaweed, and be overcome with a different kind of vertigo, that is not restricted flow through my vertebral artery, but a vertiginous sense of possibility. But there is no sea here: The sea is far away. The port is urban. The ships do not ride at anchor as Soviet battleships do, but bristle against one another in a hive. They bob on metal-colored water in narrow channels marked off by granary towers and bounded with toxic mud, where I see rats scattering now from one clump of weed and rope to another.

  I come under the rusting hull of my freighter. It is called the Eisfeld.

  “Who goes there?” a disembodied voice calls down from the deck in German.

  “Comrade Freymann,” I call in German. “Representing the Czechoslovakian Shipping Company.”

  “Come aboard then,” the voice says.

  I throw my bag on my shoulder and step up the gangway. It gives and sways under me. I go up slowly now in the knowledge that this ascent will be my only margin and I shall see no shore, no Cuxhaven, no islands of Scharhörn and Neuwerk. I shall not sail across the Heligoland Bight. I look down between the hull and the quay. I feel nothing: It is not nearly dizzying enough.

  I STEP ABOARD. I see the giraffes and am dumbfounded. I stop. I stare up. I have worked with one living giraffe, but an old giraffe, a zoo animal, weary, blind, hunched somehow under those electric lights. I have seen nothing like this. There are so many of them, and wild, not of a zoo, and impossibly stretched. There is no such animal! They scrape this cirrus as towers of the Qasr al-Qadim. Tarpaulins have been drawn across the crates, so that only their necks and shoulders are visible, and this makes them more unthinkable. I run my eye up and down their necks. They are too tall for me to frame. I try not to think of blood pressing up inside them, but instead to consider their muscle and bone. I dwell on their necks, of the same seven vertebrae that push up my skull, but each one as thick as a chair leg and grooved, as by a carpentry machine, the better to hold the slabs of muscle needed to keep the neck upright. These necks are the greatest natural selection. The tallest giraffes survived. All others perished — or disappeared into the jungle. I cannot say how I missed these towers while walking toward the Eisfeld, or why I have not thought of them on my journey, but have instead given myself over to a chain of flowers and imaginings of a lighthouse set by a cool green sea. I take a step closer. I place my bag down on the deck. The smell of the giraffes is pungent, like racehorses sweating in a paddock after the Pardubice steeplechase. I count thirty-two animals, reticulated and Rothschild both. They make no sound. When they move, they cease to be towers or minarets, but are instead something flowing underwater, or perhaps a slender tree swaying. There is no urgency in them: They do not in any way resemble the orangutan I passed one winter afternoon in the Prague Zoo, which beat on the Perspex window of its cage to attract the attention of every passerby, as though from the inside of an airless cockpit.

  A sailor takes up a bucket of grain and brings it to me — it is his voice I heard from below.

  “Hold your hands out — cup them,” he says.

  I do so. He pours grain into them.

  “Now hold them up to a giraffe. That one there. The Czechoslovakians call her Sněhurka.”

  I see why: Her underbelly is a blizzard.

  “I’m Czechoslovakian,” I say, still in German. “Sněhurka means ‘Snow White’ in Czech.”

  The sailor nods and looks up.

  Sněhurka slides her tongue out to me. It is the length of my arm, dark as a blood blister. She takes the grain. I feel her lips and teeth against my p
alm.

  The same sailor guides me inside now. He swings open a heavy metal door. I dip my head. The lightbulbs are caged in wire. I breathe in spaceship air, stale, smelling of fuels. We slide down ladders, from one deck to another. The sailor opens and closes steel hatches. There are slogans on the doors. There are hammers and sickles. There are red stars. We pass a galley in which I see pans firing and spitting on a gas cooker. The sailor shows me into a saloon, where the ship’s officers are taking breakfast. I recognize the captain of the Eisfeld from a picture in the ring binder given me by the shipping director. I introduce myself. I stand here with my hands in my pockets, rocking on my heels.

  “Well, sit down then, comrade!”

  I sit.

  His name is Hans Schmauch. He looks as I have hoped a sea captain would look: elderly, with cropped silver hair and beard, craggy, weathered, with a red nose.

  “My father was a sea captain also,” he says suddenly. “He plied the Baltic Sea. He brought back iron ore from Sweden and timber from Finland. And here I am bringing back giraffes from Africa.”