Giraffe Page 6

I HAVE CLIMBED down a rope ladder from the Eisfeld. I stand below, on the barge. The leaving party is over. The wind rushes in off the fresh waters, filling my lungs with the fast-coming smell of Danish peat bogs. The wind beats against me and causes my hair to unfurl, as a flag should unfurl.

  It is the giraffe called Sněhurka who towers over me at the front of the barge. I recognize her underbelly. I reach inside her crate and place a hand on her. The zoo historian has told me that Egyptians used a hieroglyph of a giraffe to indicate prophecy or foreknowledge. And I wonder why Sněhurka does not kick out at her crate. Can she not see that this Czechoslovakian barge is no ark of Noah, but is instead a vessel charged with delivering her into captivity?

  I look up at her. I want her to meet my gaze, just as the ship’s mate said. She does not. She stares, unblinking, out toward Hamburg, with eyes large, entire as the Heligoland Bight. She might be sleeping, for giraffes are sleepless beasts, who sleep for only a few minutes each day with their eyes open, unblinking, and move as sleepwalkers in that short sleep, like the African somnambulist the Slovak spoke of, who fell to the dust and rose again still with her arms stretched up. I feel Sněhurka’s vein pulsing against my fingertips. I translate the pulse into numbers. I cannot help myself. I am a doubler: I am an agent of the shipping company and of hemodynamics also.

  There is a sound. I see Schmauch in the air between his ship and the barge. He lands. He strides down the barge to me, hat in hand.

  “I want to see the giraffes one more time,” he says.

  “I thought they made you uneasy.”

  “I must take my leave of them all the same. It has been a long voyage,” he says. “There have been moments, comrade.”

  “A mermaid?”

  He smiles.

  “No, not this time. I was thinking of a day I spent fishing off Zanzibar. A blue day, blue as a flame. The engine of the ship had given out and we anchored there for several days, on a dazzling sea, waiting for the repairs to be made. A Persian motored out from Zanzibar in a dinghy to witness the giraffes. He offered to take me fishing. So I went fishing with that man: He was one of those regal men who devote their lives to hunting one living thing or another. We attached his dinghy to my ship by a long rope, as cosmonauts tether themselves to a space capsule. Or perhaps,” Schmauch says, reconsidering, “it was my crew who tied the rope, to prevent me drifting away to Zanzibar, just as a falconer tethers his hawk. In any case, we rowed out as far as the rope would allow and found ourselves sitting upon a dark bloom in the waters, which were sardines come north from the cold southern belt. We took turns casting into the bloom. We were not after the sardines, but the tuna and swordfish we could see parting the bloom. It did not matter to me that landing such a large fish on our small dinghy was unlikely. I was happy watching the sardines swelling and hollowing under us, like bees, or a flock of starlings billowing black at dusk over woods by the seashore. The Persian took it more seriously. He was a fine fisherman. You had only to watch the arc of the line over his shoulder as he cast to understand that. He hooked a swordfish and fought it hard until the line broke and then, without pausing, he tied on a new hook, baited it, and cast into the bloom. ‘Watch this, captain,’ he said. Sure enough, another swordfish ran straight at the bait and was alarmingly hooked through the top of its mouth. The Persian landed that swordfish in the dinghy. There was hardly enough room for it. It thrashed in the salt water at our feet and gashed my leg here, below the knee. It was only when the swordfish stilled, died, that the Persian pointed out that it was the same creature he had grappled with first, still with that hook in its mouth. The Persian held it up by its sword. ‘A swordfish lives by instinct,’ he said. ‘It has three seconds of memory. No more.’ He set down the fish and drew a circle in the air with his hands. ‘Here is the moment,’ he said. ‘It loops, like so, completes, and is gone. That is the mind of a swordfish,’ he said. It was a common occurrence to release a swordfish only to have it run straight back at the hook, without remembrance.”

  Schmauch puts his hand out also and touches Sněhurka.

  “I have thought often of that swordfish in the last weeks,” he says, “how it has no past and no future, but only the present parting of water before its blade, just as I stand on my ship’s bridge parting oceans, without past or future.”

  SCHMAUCH HAS CLIMBED BACK UP to his ship and I am left alone now among the giraffes and their rising blood. The wind is still blowing hard over the plowed fields about Hamburg, allowing the Communist moment no purchase on this Czechoslovakian barge, and blowing such spirits as linger here away from me. I could speak to the sailors of ghosts, as they spoke to me of mermaids. I see outlines of the dead in ČSSR. Not just my grandfather waving to his planes. I see others also. There is no obvious hemodynamic explanation for my condition: It is more than clinical nostalgia. It is not that the dead step living into this 1973, or that I step into the past; I am not so fanciful. The explanation is more likely meteorological. I say only that it is natural for ghosts to linger in a windless country, where there is not even the faintest zephyr to part the dead from the living, that, in the absence of wind, they leave an outline on ČSSR I am sometimes able to frame and keep.

  I glimpse another Czechoslovakia, which I sometimes call Tonakia because the men I see there wear trilbies or bowlers manufactured by the Tonak company. I see in Prague the capital of Tonakia also, which is the Prague of 1933 or some close year. I see quicklime outlines of a vendor hawking ties from a suitcase on Haštalská Street, and an aristocrat running down the center of Národní Street in top hat and tails. I see laundrywomen washing spectral clothes in the rapids of the Vltava before Josef Šejnost’s atelier on the Smetana Embankment, and horses stabled in their hundreds under the hill on which the Bohumil Kafka’s equestrian statue of the Hussite commander Žižka now stands totalitarian. I see students in heavy overcoats chalking a political manifesto on the steps of a convent on Vyšehradská Street, a tinker singing a Moravian folk song while pushing a cart down Belgická Street, and a blind busker winding his music box outside the Hotel Europa on Wenceslas Square. Coal smoke of the Communist moment mingles with coal smoke of Tonakia and drifts ginger and lime together over the outline of long-dead lovers kissing in the shadows of St. Jakub’s church on Malá Štupartská Street and settles in material and immaterial soot on the unfurled spectral wings of geese and swans, nailed like severed angels to the ghostly wooden boards of a butcher’s shop that no longer exists.

  I CANNOT SLEEP. I lie on this upper bunk in a cabin on the ship. A voyage has ended in which I have played no part. There are signs of departure, in sheets crumpled on the floor, cigarette butts, and reams of DDR newspapers. There are things that have been spoken of in this cabin far from land which cannot be repeated now. The regime, which appeared indistinct in the doldrums, comical even has drawn back into focus. I stare at a photograph pinned to the side of the greasy plywood bunk, forgotten in the rush to disembark. I take it down. It is a black-and-white photo of a woman striding down a concrete pier. She wears a bikini. Over her shoulder is a packed beach. The Cyrillic lettering above the ice-cream stand identifies the beach as Bulgarian. The woman is moving fast by the camera. The lens is turning to meet her. It is a fleeting image, such as I might frame with my eye. It is impossible to say whether the woman is irritated or simply impatient to be gone into the air at the end of the pier and down into the Black Sea. She is no mermaid returning to its element. She is large: Her breasts are barely contained in their flowered cups. Her skin is downy and smooth. There is a scar below her navel, punctured along its edges where the stitches have been recently drawn. She has no tail of a harbor porpoise, no flukes containing wonder nets. Her legs instead end in cheap COMECON plastic sandals.

  I pin her back into the plywood. I switch on the transistor radio I have brought with me. I am no longer downhearted: I feel a slight buoyancy of the Eisfeld on the harbor waters. This is my first night in West Germany, in the new chain of flowers. I tune the dial. I listen. T
he songs belong to the West German moment, which is recognizably now the opposite of the Communist moment, in which time is marked out by clocks, loudspeaker announcements, and revolutionary parades no one comprehends; but there is no now and it is possible to live without remembering the year, and to have no sense of time passing, save in the changing colors of the seasons. Some of the songs playing are in English. A line in one of them pierces me.

  The waters of Hamburg harbor are under this ship and gulls are turning somewhere above. There is a northern sky brightening out there. I cannot see it from in here. There is no porthole in this cabin, no ring of light. I am sunk below the waterline.

  Emil

  JUNE 20, 1973

  I UNDERSTAND THE RIVER ELBE, or Labe. I have words to describe its course and to detail the life upon and within it. It runs twelve hundred kilometers from the Krkonoše Mountains in Czechoslovakia to the North Sea. It is a river. It wants to show us the sea. If the engines on the barge were cut now, it would carry us on its back through the port and city of Hamburg, by the scarlet poppy fields of Schleswig-Holstein, to its estuarine mouth fourteen kilometers wide in embrace of the world, and with plunging flow might beach us on the island of Scharhörn or Neuwerk, where we might settle, we few Czechoslovakians, with our state-owned giraffes, to breed a new subspecies under a domed and ever-changing sky, with feed brought from Cuxhaven. Or perhaps the Labe, with the last of its strength, would push us out beyond the two islands altogether, and we should be tossed on this barge across the Heligoland Bight, deep into the North Sea, and wash up at last, bleary and bruised, on the salt marshes I can only suppose lie black and tan along the shores of England, perhaps the same marsh over which Magwitch stumbled in leg irons before being captured and transported to Australia, there to provide Pip with his great expectations. We might pull ourselves free from those marshes after some days and drift on into the harbor of an English seaport, where, under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, the cubs of dancing and fighting bears must have been gagged and hidden on small vessels from Puritans who had orders to shoot them, and voyaged from that seaport to any land where the bear cubs could grow and move from town to town.

  Ships pass around us in the port. Some of them sound their horns on sighting the giraffes, who shimmer in the hot morning light like the granary towers in the port. There is no drift back to the sea. The engines on the barge are not cut. They thump us out into the Labe, away from Schmauch, waving his cap on his ship’s bridge, just as I see the outline of my grandfather waving to his propeller planes. We pass under a bridge. It is thick with early morning traffic. Sunshine catches on the mirrors and windows of the cars now. I frame a hippie with long hair sitting in the lotus position on the bridge before the broken-down engine of his van.

  The Labe is poisoned. There are no salmon alive in it. No polar bear could be led out to fish its portion from these waters. Swimmers emerge with a mustard scum on their skin and a sweet taste in their mouth. Only eels pass upstream with us. They pulse in from the ocean, tapered, like ghostly parts of an atom, working in through smaller and smaller rivers of DDR and ČSSR, until settling at the turn of a stream, or in the stillness of a millpond. I cannot say whether their migration is of their own will or is an act of remembrance, just as some liken flowing water to the subconscious and take the passing through it to be a passing through memory.

  Because there is no bunk for me on the barge, I volunteer to sleep out on the deck, among the giraffes. I make a place for myself now at the prow. I sweep the area and lay down a sleeping bag. I tie the tarpaulin to the crate holding Sněhurka. We shall part the Labe together. She is wet with spray coming up off the river and has nostrils that open and clamp like those of a seal or mermaid. But she is not a watery creature. She has never wallowed, but instead cools herself under the shade of acacia trees and is camouflaged there by the markings on her hide, which also serve as open windows dissipating heat, just as the frontoparietal hollows atop her skull cool her brain to a lower temperature than her body.

  I sit under the tarpaulin and am lit here by Sněhurka’s underbelly. I open my notebook. Inside is a clipping from a Polish art magazine of Burning Giraffes and Telephones, a painting by Salvador Dali. I unfold it. Three giraffes walk calmly across the horizon, untroubled by the flames bursting from their backs and necks, while in the foreground a massive eye borne on the muscular legs of a Nubian, with the torso of a boiler or a bank safe, attacks or makes love to a faceless woman whose arms are stretched up somnambulistically. I study the painting as I study passages from Great Expectations, or carotid arteries.

  Watery meadows appear on either side of us. This is the end of Hamburg. I move up and down the barge now, making notes and sketches of the giraffes for my scientific paper. I am less concerned now with rumination, with the four divisions of the stomach, the Olympic-length intestines, the maneuverability of the tongue, the prehensile and undivided upper lip, the vocal cords that hardly pluck a sound, or even with the laryngeal nerve running from brain to heart and back again, than I am with the viscosity of giraffe blood, five times thicker than water, with a multiplication of crimson stars, in better distribution of oxygen, with the jugular veins several centimeters in diameter, stoppered with one-way valves, in such a way as to regulate flow from the head when it is lifted from the ground. There are thirty-two giraffes here, each with a wonder net hidden from view. When a giraffe splays its legs and sets down its head to drink, the pressure on its cranial vasculature triples. The giraffe’s cerebral blood vessels are too thin-walled to constrict against it. But for the wonder net, the giraffe would collapse, as cosmonauts do when certain g-force is applied. It is the wonder net that keeps the living form of giraffes pushed up, even to resemble creatures from a world of lesser gravity. When the head goes down, its endless shunts and meanders spread elastically across the base of the cranium, absorbing the flow that rushes in through the carotid artery.

  IT IS A HEAT WAVE. I strip off my shirt. I pour a bucket of water over my head, my shoulders, my chest. A man in large mirrored sunglasses drives a cream-colored Mercedes along a country road by the river. I help tend the giraffes. I shovel out dung. I hold up bread to some of the giraffes.

  “No!” Hus shouts. “Not bread! Grain, comrade.” He comes running up with a bucket of grain. He is also without shirt and shoes. He wears a safari hat and a necklace of African beads made of coral.

  “These giraffes will live fifteen years in the wild at the most. They’ll manage thirty years in the zoo with my diet.”

  “Grain?”

  “Not just grain. Alfalfa, formulated pellets, fruit, plenty of beets, switches of elm and alder.”

  “What about the breeding?” I see him now. I see his eyes glint.

  “Breeding! That’s the thing. It all comes down to procreation in the end. We have a social group here. A perfect mix of healthy males and females. All we need to do is sort them correctly.”

  “Just like the Komsomol,” I say.

  He does not hear me.

  “We’ll see our first pregnancies this winter,” he says.

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Freymann. You’re a scientist. Look around you. We have a different philosophy. The purpose of a zoo is to breed animals and to entertain the worker. Breeding is the more important. The State recognizes that. And our socialist mind is good for breeding. It wants to know at what temperature, at what angle of entry, between which giraffe bull and which giraffe cow. And the better we breed, the more we entertain. We will build the safari park. Workers will be driven through an open landscape. And we will breed in ever larger groups. We will birth the animals, keeping the best ones, selling the rest, and so continue for generations until we get to our Camelopardalis bohemica. It will happen. The climate in our ČSSR is not so bad. The new giraffes will become accustomed to the winters. They’ll learn to move on ice.”

  I throw bread I would have fed to the giraffes into the Labe. Fish come up for it,
eels invisibly too, and gulls arriving inland from the sea drop down to it and slash noisomely on the river.

  I SIT IN THE WHEELHOUSE with the zoo veterinarian. Hus is at the other end of the barge, filing down giraffe hooves.

  “We haven’t been formally introduced,” he says. “I’m František Vokurka. Call me Franta.”

  His name means “cucumber,” but he is a slight man with stained rodent teeth. He wears a stethoscope. There is an exceptionally long tongue depressor in his shirt pocket.

  “Emil Freymann,” I say, holding out my hand.

  “I know who you are,” he says. “No need to worry about the giraffes. No need to worry about any of it. One died on the voyage. The rest are in good shape.”

  “I read your report.”

  “I want you to know that what Hus said yesterday was nonsense.”

  “The new subspecies? The assisted flight?”

  He nods. “This idea of his that the giraffes are engaged in some sort of migration.”

  “They’re captive.”

  “Of course they are.”

  “The safari park?”

  “I’m all against it,” he says, turning over the beans on his plate. “The slopes are too steep. They’re grassy. The giraffes will fall and break themselves on the ground when it rains. They’ll be like girls in high heels coming home from a country dance.”

  “They might get up again,” I say.

  “They would be as good as dead,” he says. “Their legs would be fractured in many places and could never be put back together.”

  “Did you tell Hus this?”

  “Many times.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He’s a careerist. He said the committee has passed the safari park proposal. He said the giraffes had the right to walk free.”

  “They were free.”

  “He means they have the right to walk free in ČSSR. He said the giraffes should be allowed to discover where they have migrated to.” Vokurka pushes back his plate. He starts playing with his tongue depressor. “Let me tell you of migration,” he says.