Giraffe Page 7

  “Please do.”

  “Last year, after quite another voyage, I found myself disembarked at the Romanian port of Constanta. I had a day to myself before taking the evening train to Bucharest. I walked from the modern port to the old part of the town, which contained decaying mosques, villas, and a museum displaying Roman antiquities. I walked as far as the marina. Some men were setting up a fairground ride there; it had eight arms, and at the end of each was a carriage that circled, I suppose, at great speed, but would always start and stop at the same point, going nowhere, no matter how many revolutions it made. Turning back toward the port, I came upon a shutdown casino in which swallows were nesting. They were newly returned from Africa. I watched them fall from their wattled nests in the eaves, like cliff divers, and rise vertically again, all the while reflected in the long windows and shadowed on the white and gold rococo plasterwork. I was hardly aware of the sun setting into the land. The swallows gave me a sense of the true meaning of migration.”

  “Which is?”

  “Certitude. The certitude of returning home. Swallows fly with utmost joy, ever so lightly, from Africa to Constanta and on to our ČSSR, over grasslands, deserts, seas, marshes, forests, mountains, all of these. They are joyful because they are forever returning home. ČSSR is home, all places in between are home.”

  “Unlike the giraffes.”

  “Who have no home now, but only crates.”

  “Could you tell me how the one giraffe died on the voyage?” I ask. I look at him blankly, as I have been instructed to by the shipping company, in order to produce uneasiness in the listener, so that they open up.

  “Let me first state that giraffes are not meant to stand on the deck of a ship for weeks at a time.”

  “Granted.”

  “All went well for the first part of the voyage,” he says. “The engine gave out off Zanzibar, but those were pleasant days. We passed around the Cape of Good Hope in calm waters and saw no storm until we were off the coast of Mauritania. Even the storm petrels fell upon our ship that night seeking shelter. I fled to my bunk below the waterline and clung miserably to myself. There was a terrible creaking, as though the hull were being torn open. I was certain we would sink into the Atlantic. I wept. I hoped for nothing more than to be washed up onto a Mauritanian beach. Of course the ship did not come close to sinking. It was only my Czechoslovakian sensibility. The storm subsided. I remembered my duty. With some effort, I made it up to the bridge. The ship’s mate was at the wheel. “One of them is down,” he said. I realized he was talking about the giraffes. I went with a sailor onto the deck. Waves were still breaking on the tarpaulins. The giraffes were sliding and braking and swallowing salt water. We went to the crate. I pulled back the tarpaulin. There was a young male twisted, broken-necked, on the floor. We jumped in. A wave knocked us off our feet onto the dead giraffe. It looked so much smaller folded together like that in the water. Nothing more than a foal. I did an examination. It is all in the report.”

  “There’s no name in the report.”

  “That giraffe had no name. We hadn’t yet thought of one. It had no distinguishing features. It was not taller or shorter than the other young giraffes. It was not a leader or a loner. Its hide was forgettable.”

  “What happened to the body?”

  “We decided against an autopsy. We attended to the other giraffes through the day. When the waters calmed, Hus had the Slovak tractor man and a few of the sailors distract the other giraffes with feed. We winched up the carcass. It was heavier than we had supposed. The legs had already stiffened. It swung and cracked against a funnel and fell to the deck. Other giraffes panicked. They started forward in their crates. Some of them began kicking out at the sides of their crates. Captain Schmauch did not like that. He kept calling down for us to calm the animals. Hus came over and we quickly pushed the dead giraffe overboard. It was exceptionally hot and still. The ocean was flat and violet-colored. I remember how we could see the streak of the Mauritanian desert and sharks circling in the violet. The giraffe floated for a time. Its neck and head were the last to go under. Its eyes were closed in such a way as to give the quite wrong impression — of restful sleep.”

  DRAGONFLIES AND WASPS hover about Sněhurka and are dispersed now by smoke from bonfires West German farmers have lit at the edge of their fields. The smoke causes Sněhurka to shift in her crate. I lean back against her. Her legs push against my back through the slats. We round a bend in the Labe and come upon a nudist beach. Forms and genitals of West Germans sag on the sandy bank like so many walrus runts and milky curds. I do not frame any of them, but wonder at the ease with which I might defect now, as my father feared when our fingers brushed in parting. Hus and Vokurka are playing cards. The bargemen are occupied with the bend. Only the giraffes will see me go, and they are silent. I could do this; I could slip into these sweet-poisoned waters like a merman and swim perpendicularly to the riverbank and reveal myself there, clothed, before the West German nudists. Yet I do not move. I cannot. If I slip into the water now, my home will become something dreamed, and I cannot dream as Schmauch dreams; I am not a sailor — I have no idea of an island in an icebound sea. There is something else. I am weighed down. I can hardly haul myself over to teeter at the edge of the barge. It is as if I have grown a shell on my back to protect myself from the Communist moment and cannot now shed it.

  WE PASS THE LAST West German village. We brush against the bulrushes on the bank to make way for oncoming barges and so uncover a young couple lovemaking there. They pull back from each other and give out a little gasp on seeing the giraffes. They stand. They stare after the barge. An old man pedaling a bicycle stops also. He places his feet on the tow-path. He leans over the handlebars and stares after the giraffes. This is how it will be for the giraffes. People will stand and stare after them, frame them, and keep them. They will become zoo animals and their form will forever be the cause of exclamation among people and sometimes of reflection.

  The Iron Curtain comes suddenly, as a threading between fallow fields. Floodlights rock across the Labe. American boots strike paths and Soviet jackboots also. There are mine-fields and trenches dug into the root systems of ash trees, such that badgers can make no progress. Beyond the mine-fields is a wall of concrete panels, supple, holding to the contours of the land like segments of snake cartilage. An East German flag flutters over a border post in red, orange, and black, struck with a hammer and sickle. I button up a shirt and put on shoes. I speak in Russian to military officials who come to stand and stare after the giraffes. These officials take off their caps and relax their arms and grow visibly more gentle, as though in looking up at the beasts they have recovered a part of their childhood.

  We continue a little way up the Labe and tie up for the night by an army barracks. There are no Mercedes here. The air is more sulfurous. Our mood has changed: We walk quietly up and down the barge, and the words we use, and the way we use them, are different from in West Germany. It is as if the world is divided into spheres of thought and we have passed from one sphere into another of lesser possibilities, as through a weather front from clear sky to rain.

  I step off the barge into a meadow behind the barracks and stumble through a thicket of yew trees. It is quite dark. It is only now, out in the starlight, that I realize I have passed through the graveyard of a village erased by the Communist moment.

  Emil

  JUNE 21, 1973

  I AM WOKEN NOW by a breeze billowing under the tarpaulin. I look up. It is the middle of the night. Sněhurka is awake in her crate. She is looking out at a red sack caught in the branches of a weeping willow on the far bank. The sack is torn into strips like the red ribbons that vodníks, or watermen, are supposed to hang from willow branches to attract young women. I stare across at the willow. There is always a hope I will see a vodník sitting in the branches, playing a violin sadly to himself.

  The vodník looks after a stretch of a river or stream. He lives among eels in pools where trout circl
e. It is the vodník who causes a river to burst its banks in spring, carrying off a Persian leopard, and to sink low in summer. It is he who pulls under the unsuspecting fisherman and the drunk ferryman; he is the one who catches and cradles the mortally stricken child who has broken through thin ice. It is so striking, so very Czechoslovakian, that the vodník belongs to a single stretch of river, between a linden tree and a bend, or between a weir and a certain copse of crab-apple trees. He is not like the mermaids the East German sailors spoke of, who sink freely down from a cove and sing, with plucking of throat hairs, to whales in the faraway deep. There were vodníks before there were Czechoslovakians. In certain Byzantine mosaics you can see over the shoulders of Justinian and Theodora to a vodník half risen from a warm lagoon. The vodník has been too long exiled in our landlocked Czechoslovakia to move anymore in the sober and athletic way of those mosaics. He has grown thin and is seen most often in the local hospoda, or pub, where he fancies his green skin is disguised in the weak electric light of the Communist moment. He keeps his webbed hands deep in his pockets, except when buying rounds, but is nevertheless easily recognized by his ridiculous top hat, which has no place in ČSSR, or even in Tonakia, by the water dripping from the pockets of his jacket, the rank smell of his breath, and the weeds gathered about his ears. He is not a bad creature, not a frightening animal. He is not a potential candidate for any zoo. On the contrary, the vodník is a spiritual creature, a caretaker of souls. It is he who preserves all those who come to him. He snatches their descending forms but wants none of them. Those he takes, he takes on higher command. He puts their souls in ceramic jars, which he sets in orderly fashion on the shelves of his home, like the jars of pickled dolphin fetuses neatly arranged in the library of the Strahov Monastery in Prague. There the souls await the final judgment priests used to speak of, in which the drowned will rise from the rivers and the seas, even from the deep of the Baltic, rising straight up through the clouds, shedding lily pads and barnacles, but not before, as scripture has it, the second and third angels have poured vials into the rivers, turning them to blood, and killing all other living things within them, including the vodník. If this is so, if this comes to be, then the vodník is truly good, and his mournful violin playing from weeping willows hung with red ribbons is not just a declaration of his loneliness, but also of the dreadful end that awaits him and his river.

  The red sack beats against the willow and lifts from the tree and is carried away on a wind that will give out long before it reaches ČSSR. I look again and can see no vodník in the branches. I look again at Sněhurka. Her eyes remain open, unblinking, and I cannot say whether she is awake now or sleepwalking. I lie back again on my sleeping bag. I close my eyes. I remember at once what my father shouted to me as the train pulled out of the station in Prague: “Remember, Emil, that all the vodníks on the Labe, even as far as Hamburg, are Czech-speaking!”

  I am woken at first light by the shouting of the bargemen and by ropes being thrown from the riverbank to the barge and by the racing of the barge engines. We continue up, deeper into this sphere of lesser possibility. I go to the wheelhouse and drink coffee and smoke Red Stars with Hus. We find common cause in ice hockey. We talk of ČSSR’s star players. We share victories. We do not bond; we are too far apart for that, I searching for beauty, he for subspecies, but we come within speaking distance.

  The names come easily.

  “Then we had Maleček, Zábrodsky, Drobny,” I say.

  “While now we have Nedomansky, Suchy,” Hus says. “Not forgetting Černy, Holík, Št’astny, and of course Hlinka.”

  “Especially Hlinka,” I say. “The last victory over the Russians!” I exclaim, forgetting myself.

  “That was something,” Hus says. “We’ll remember that even if the world falls apart and comes back together in a better way.”

  I am given over to puncturing time and to hemodynamics and doubling, but only in ice hockey do I find myself quickened by the present. I am a fan. I jump on trams throughout Prague with my friends, going from one arena to another. We sit close to the ice in those places, among the factory workers from Kladno. We revel in the Rolbar ice machine polishing the surface before face-off, the players lacing plastic helmets under their chins in a tight bow, the leap from bench to ice. We mark the arc of bodies on blades and the quality of the stick handling — all of it too fast for me to frame. We drink cheap beer and smoke and duck when pucks fly up. We heckle players and whistle at the Soviet troops watching up in the rafters in their soft boots of the steppe. Playing ice hockey is even more pleasurable. I skated through childhood and skate still on winter weekends when the village ponds are frozen. I stand tall on the ice. I push out with my legs. I feel myself falling forward. It is not vertigo-inducing; it can be halted with a square turn of my skates. It is a swordfish moment, a loop on crystal, with no past or future save for a wrist-shot slapped into the goal from a narrow angle.

  THESE HOURS ARE DAYS. I sweat here under the tarpaulin. I frame a flying fish breaking up through the skin of the river. I drift to sleep in time with the barge engines. I wake to the smell of giraffes, which is already familiar to me. I sit up against the crate containing Sněhurka. Time is stretched here as it must have been on the Eisfeld broken down off Zanzibar. It will snap back when the journey ends and I will no longer be able to remember the details, such as the shape and color of giraffe hooves, just as I can no longer properly remember the details of my army service. I feel Sněhurka’s legs behind me, through which veins run like vines, and I perform equations to represent the journey of blood through those veins to the ventricles of her heart, powerful as an elephant’s heart, on into thick-walled arteries, up the neck against the hydrostatic pull of gravity to her head, pushed impossibly high on an f-shaped stick. I feel her pulse. She cannot wish her heart to stop beating, any more than I can. So much of this life is without choice. I am grateful for that. I know that, were it possible, I might wish my heart would stop for a few seconds on a long afternoon in ČSSR, and I cannot be certain that if I felt that stoppage within me, if I felt crimson stars falling and the coming cosmic collapse, I would have the courage to strike up my heart once more.

  IT IS TOO HOT NOW for talk of ice hockey. It seems natural that Vokurka is combing back his thin hair from his sweaty scalp and talking of Cuba.

  “I spent a year on the island,” he says. “This was not long after their revolution. I was sent to assist with the defense of Cuba against American biological and chemical weapons. My job was to examine the ballast of American weather balloons, which had drifted from Florida and fallen to earth among the cows in the Cuban hills, some shot from the sky by the Cuban military and others struck down by lightning, in all cases, as I saw once or twice myself, descending like a long mirrored ribbon. The Cubans had an idea that the sand in the weather balloons, which sifted out over the farmland as it lost altitude, might have been infected. The leadership in Havana believed the Americans had impregnated the sand with one contagion or another, designed to lower the fertility of the chickens, weaken the pigs, or damage the cows. I drove around the island testing sand samples and drawing blood from animals in the affected districts. There were a number of veterinarians looking at different biological and chemical threats to Cuban livestock. We were Soviets, East Germans, Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Czechoslovakians. The leadership in Havana took an immediate liking to us.”

  “You met the leaders?”

  “Several times. We were summoned to a beach villa every few weeks. We announced our findings and the leaders leaned forward in their deck chairs and listened. It was quite different from what I expected. There were cigars, but no oratory. They hardly said anything at all.”

  “Were the Americans doing that? Did you find any evidence?”

  He shrugs. “Americans are capable of many things. We were careful to make up our own confidential reports in such a way as to leave open the possibility of contamination. I can only say that all the sand samples I and others gathere
d were sterile. The Cubans had no interest in sending us home immediately. That would have been to admit paranoia, or that the intelligence service had given credence to wild rumors. I was occasionally sent from Havana to the east of the country to draw blood from animals there. The rest of the time I was free to do as I pleased. The Cubans asked me if there was anything I wanted to learn. I told them that I had always wanted to be a frogman. So they placed me in their military frogman course.”

  “You became a merman?” I ask.

  “A merman? If you like. I spent all my days in the sea. I swam with stingrays in the tidal gaps and sometimes with bottle-nosed dolphins in the reefs. I took up pieces of coral, shark teeth, and small artifacts from among the timbers of shipwrecks. I was also taken fishing in the mangrove swamps. There is a time of year there when the tarpon come inland and feed on the smaller fish. They are as large as salmon and colored similarly to precious metals. They are fast, blood-thirsty, and survive in that stagnant water by coming up to breathe, like mammals.”

  “Do you go diving still?” I ask.

  “Of course. In the rivers and lakes of our ČSSR.”

  “In the Labe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Surely you can’t see anything.”

  “Not much,” he says. “The water is peat-colored. You can make out the shapes of broken plows and cartwheels in it. It is beautiful only on days like this, when the sun reaches into the water. On these days it is like diving into a glass of beer. You can see trout and pike and the hollows in the riverbank and all the cuts in the bed.”

  “Are you married, František?” I ask. “Do you have children?”