Giraffe Read online

  “Take a look,” he says.

  He pulls out a photograph from his wallet and hands it to me. He is standing in snorkeling suit, flippers still on his feet, between a girl and a young boy whose hair is bleached by the sun. There is a stone harbor wall behind them.

  “That’s Daniela and that’s little Mirek. She’s eight. He’s six.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Yugoslavia last summer. My wife took it.”

  His daughter leans close into him, her hand in his, her head on his elbow. His son stands with arms folded to the right of Vokurka. He has consciously made himself distinct from him. Vokurka looks satisfied.

  “Has it been worth it?” I ask.

  “Has what?”

  “The compromises. Joining in with the Party. Playing along.”

  “I can’t think what you mean.”

  He is embarrassed, a little frightened. I have crossed a line. My heart beats faster for saying it. My blood roars through narrows of ligament. It is the opposite of being a boy and saying to a girl for the first time, “I want to be with you.”

  Emil

  JUNE 22, 1973

  IT IS THE SECOND night on the barge. We do not tie up but continue, our ascent sleepless through DDR. We have passed the town of Tangermünde and are thumping slowly now through Magdeburg in this early hour, the hour, as Dante has it, “that turneth back desire in those who sail the sea,” the hour of lowest blood pressure, when people most often die. I have insomnia. I sit here under this tarpaulin listening to Sněhurka and the other giraffes shifting in their crates and banging their legs against the planking.

  There is no movement in Magdeburg save a giraffe-colored fox picking through rubbish on the embankment. This is the town where the astronomer Tycho Brahe alighted on his journey from Copenhagen to Prague. He had lost the tip of his nose in a duel and replaced it with a metal piece that must have shone as he leaned his head back to regard the heavens with his naked eye. Brahe discovered stars simply by stopping and staring more intently than anyone else. I think now of how many more stars Brahe would have discovered if he had worked with giraffes — had employed giraffe eyes. Perhaps even the modern constellation Camelopardalis, sunk deeply by Perseus and Cassiopeia.

  Giraffes are not like insects, who feel the world before them with pubic antennae, or bats shining sonar through the dark, or other vertebrates who smell or hear the world. Giraffes see the world. The giraffe eye is the largest in the animal kingdom, several times larger than the human eye, larger still than the eye of a mermaid. It is almond-shaped, framed by long lashes that in Africa blink away flies and swarming gall-ants, but in Magdeburg now only flutter. The optic nerve of a giraffe is as thick as an index finger, and the celestial view that plays through the nerve on the brain of a giraffe — of stars invisible to the human eye and all the subtle colors denoting the age of the star, which twinkle prehistorically down on us — is more finely grained than any Brahe could have hoped for. The height of the giraffe makes a watchtower of it. With its vision and vantage point, a giraffe can see a man shifting on his haunches a kilometer away. It is not that a giraffe has a mystical power of prophecy or foreknowledge, as the Egyptian hieroglyph had it. It is only that a giraffe sees the present before any other animal: When it shifts on the grassland, all the impalas and gazelles raise their heads in alarm. And if by chance a hyena were to happen upon the riverbank here in Magdeburg, chasing away the fox licking now at the butcher’s waste, in this hour that turns back resolve, the giraffes about me, even proud Sněhurka, would see the hyena as demonic and try to take flight. The crates would stop them, and their eyes, if I should frame them, would open wide and whirl in terror about their sockets, so that they should feel the thickness of their own optic nerve.

  HERE IS SOMETHING: a Trabant 601 trailing black smoke, rattling over a cobbled square in which Martin Luther preached and Lucas Cranach the Elder painted. I wonder now what these men would have made of the giraffes if they saw them now. I wonder if they’d run up to the riverbank and exclaim, “Giraffe!”

  Would they cut and keep an image of these thirty-two beasts for a sermon or a painting? I look up from my calculations and coded notes, down the avenue of giraffe necks, and I see that of course they would exclaim. Of course they would preach and paint, for this is a biblical and painterly scene.

  WE PASS THROUGH MEISSEN. The sky here is bone-white porcelain, detailed in purple, like the flanks of an okapi. I walk up and down the barge, under wonder nets. Vokurka is at my side. I do not speak anymore of compromises but instead light a Red Star and talk of giraffe physiology. For instance, the way the thoracic vertebrae slip triangularly from neck to tail. I explain to him some of my theories of cerebral hemodynamics.

  “Look,” he says, pointing south. “There’s our ČSSR!”

  He points to the limestone hills separating DDR from ČSSR, like a sailor sighting land. There is a fork of lightning over those hills and another. But I hear no thunder. I see no hyenas tracking us through Meissen.

  DRESDEN APPEARS STRANGELY oriental on the southern sky in a silhouette of minarets and domes of the large Yenidze cigarette factory, built fantastically before the First War in the style of Baghdad, or some other city of the Arabian Nights. Whole parts of Dresden collapsed under a firestorm brought on by a British bombing raid one St. Valentine’s Day. It was said that all the oxygen was sucked up from this point of Saxony that night, so that those not already burned alive or killed by falling masonry were suffocated in heat so intense they experienced no cosmic collapse; their blood boiled away. The view from the Labe is gap-toothed. There is hardly any resemblance here to the paintings made by Canaletto, when the city was known as Florence of the Labe. Zwinger Palace is here, miraculously survived, along with its collection of paintings by Van Dyck, Titian, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and my Lucas Cranach the Elder, as well as Dürer’s Dresden altar-piece. But the Frauenkirche, the great Protestant church, is a pile of blackened rubble. I mark a point in the sky where the gold cross rose above the dome of the church. I look for the space in the air where the organ Johann Sebastian Bach once played was, as I mark the spot in the giraffe where its heart is suspended. I frame this emptiness and I frame other spaces around the rubble where streets and squares with common gardens once stood. Grooms led Arabian mares and stallions evacuated from Polish stud farms through the firestorm on those streets. The flames rose up and the Arabian horses rose up also on their hind legs in the orange light. Some survived, others galloped swift and white through the inferno until the j-shaped brands on their flanks caught flame. They collapsed without oxygen and boiled also. My grandfather spoke of those Polish Arabian horses. He was brought low by such exterminations. He could not forget and related often the fate of the hundred thousand horses brought to Flanders from Texas during the First World War. They were glossy black and chestnut quarter horses, he said, some broken in by cowboys of Czechoslovakian descent, for there were many in the Texas desert who addressed my grandfather in Czech on his travels there — a Novotny and a Švabinsky in the saddle, perhaps, alongside a Gonzalez and a McAllister. The quarter horses were placed on trains at the towns of Marfa and Alpine and sold by auction in San Antonio to British and French government agents, who shipped them on through the port of Corpus Christi to Flanders, there to be drowned in mud, or broken under the weight of guns or injured, or driven to madness and shot by an exasperated officer. That war killed so many horses that the automobile took over and relieved the horse of its burden, and many horses came to be unborn. All suffering is connected. That is the feeling I have now on this barge of giraffes passing through Dresden: One suffering connects to another and binds us, as joy binds us.

  We tie up beyond Dresden. I look back through fields of turnip to the skyline of the city. The night is tropical, African. Crickets click and chirrup in long grass. I leap from the barge to the riverbank and sit with the East German anglers, who set their lines at protractor angles into waters where there are no sardines, no salmon, b
ut only eels searching upward and Czech-speaking vodníks drifting from one soul jar to another, free of the Communist mediocrity above, which is everywhere, even in the fishing rods about me, poorly made by some East German state monopoly, that threaten to break under the tug of the most inconsequential fish. There is no end in sight to the mediocrity: The socialist epoch would have itself extend, red-starred, into a distant future of centrally planned space colonies, and its desire to understand blood flow in vertical creatures on the moon explains the State’s passing interest in my hemodynamics.

  Emil

  ST. JOHN’S EVE

  JUNE 23, 1973

  WE PASS INTO the shadow of limestone gorges, shoveling giraffe dung into the waters of the Labe.

  “What plans do you have after this, Freymann?” Hus asks, looking down.

  “To go to my family country house,” I say.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Not so far from the source of the Vltava.”

  “A large place?”

  “Yes.”

  “Swimming?”

  “Yes.”

  “Swimming, girls, and beer: a Czechoslovakian summer!” He slaps his thigh. “Coming home!” he says.

  THE COUNTRY HOUSE is on a farm built a little before the Napoleonic wars. It is fenced in with brambles and set on the rise of a flinty field. There is a pond below. There are no slogans in that place. The Communist moment holds no sway there, where there is no industry. The only ideology is parent-ism, of when and how much and how loud. The only regime is mushroom picking, moonshine, and card games. A photograph hangs on the whitewashed kitchen wall. It does not puncture time like the man falling into the Ganges. It speaks to a moment that is gone. My mother stood up to her waist in the pond. I ran with my sister along a wooden jetty that extended then into our pond. My mother pressed the shutter release button. And so my sister and I are captured flying in the photograph, leaping into the air. We are falling. I am gripping my sister’s hand. We are laughing or perhaps screaming. I remember then falling out through the photograph. I let go of my sister’s hand. We entered the pond separately. I sank deep into waters such as Vokurka plays a Cuban frogman in. I looked up to see my sister bobbing near the surface, tucked together, serene, as if she had never left the womb.

  WE ARE IN GOETHE’S GORGE. There are gingerbread villas on either side, a railway signal box newly built in the shiny metal of Tarkovsky’s Solaris and gardens in which beanstalks climb high against the limestone face. There are pine trees and dramatic outcroppings atop the gorge that make me think of a picture I have seen of Quebec. These heights hold in them the suggestion of snow falling softly one Christmas Eve to come. There is a castle among the outcroppings and a sleek Bauhaus mansion of granite and sliding glass, solid, reaching out into space over the gorge, like the observation deck over the sloping garden at Nad Pat’ankou Street.

  Goethe moved through this gorge with a hammer. He reflected and scribbled. He took his hammer to the face of the rock and picked out molluscs from the floor of an ocean that once weighed on this place. The thought of Goethe’s hammer makes me wish to be a geologist engaged in the study of the flow of time, trekking fit and tanned through the Kola Peninsula bounding the White Sea, picking cloud-berries, concerned only with readings of rock formations that have no cosmic collapse and with fording a fast-flowing stream before nightfall.

  The sky is polluted in the south with smoke rising from ČSSR and with gray needles that are paneláks, eight units high and four wide. There is a mist on the river and candy cane- colored posts on either bank that constitute the border between DDR and ČSSR. We break through. We pass through no sphere of thought. The bargemen throw out ropes to soldiers and customs men of our ČSSR. Those on the riverbank stop and stare up at the giraffes. A sergeant takes off his hat and mops his forehead with a handkerchief.

  “Emil Freymann?” he asks breathlessly.

  “Here,” I say.

  “Come with me.”

  I place a telephone call to the shipping company in a customs office. The sergeant fans himself at the door of the office with a copy of the Rudé Právo, or Red Truth, newspaper. Someone answers the phone now. I wave the sergeant away.

  “Take up a pencil,” I say down the phone. “I will begin.”

  THERE IS A BARGE tied up by the customs house in front of our barge. It is packed with horses, dogs, a painted caravan, and a truck with Romanian registration. They are Gypsies. They have no home to return to in joy. They find solace in movement. When they are forcibly settled by the authorities and their caravans are taken from them, they become like a broken people. They dance now on the riverbank before the giraffes. They wail and shout up to the beasts. Naked children and children in ankle-length dresses and white goats in yellow ribbons run in delighted circles. A man with skin as dark as that Indian falling into the Ganges plays a feverish tune on his fiddle. Older girls dance around him. I am not diverted by the blood moving up within them, but frame the necklaces of silver coins beating on their chests. The giraffes sway toward the Gypsies, drawn by the music and the coins. Hus invites an old Gypsy woman, a matriarch, onto the barge. He speaks to her as though she were an exotic. And she is the last of her kind: The journeys she has made have been replaced by other, faster journeys. She has spent many seasons behind horses and has seen the world in the narrows of the caravan’s hooped roof in lines of mud, ice, horse manure, verges risen in summer, wasps in autumn feeding on fallen pears, wildcats leaping large across wintry bridle paths, of the sun moving steadily across the sky, changing the light within the caravan, of the quietude of mornings, matched by the music and arguments of the night, a clip-clop near and through Carpathian valleys far away, in time with the passing of self. She is almost blind: She can hardly make out the heads of the giraffes Hus points out to her. Understanding this, Hus reaches down to the woman and takes her hands and presses them firmly against the flank of a Rothschild bull.

  “Woman,” Hus says. “We call this animal a giraffe.”

  She runs her fingers down the lines of the hide. Her face lights up. She speaks in her own Gypsy tongue. She moves her body closer to the giraffe. She places her head against the dampness of the animal. She says something more. It becomes a narrative. A boy is brought forward from the riverbank to translate for her.

  “She is saying, ‘There was a storm on a bowl of water circled by sand,’ ” the boy relates. “She says, ‘This animal was floating on the water when the sky went dark all around. The wind rose. It was hard for the animal to breathe: It felt it could not breathe. Sand blew from around the edges of the bowl into its eyes. The water grew rough. It was hard for this animal to stand. It was thrown from side to side.’ She says, ‘This animal did not fall. It was another who fell.’ ”

  The old woman takes her hands away, kisses them, and presses them again on the giraffe.

  MY HOMECOMING TO THIS ČSSR of 1973 is not like the return of Pip from the Orient, or of fictional Emil to his hometown of Neustadt. When I see gray swans flying by the castle in the town of Děčín, I feel myself a foreigner. I think now I should have swum perpendicularly to the West German riverbank and exposed myself to the nudists. I should have had them deliver me to the authorities in that sphere and spoken to them of crimson stars in femoral arteries. I seem to have no understanding of the Communist moment they call normalizace, or normalization, whereby hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovakians have lost their jobs for opposing the invasion of 1968, the best replaced with the worst, the patriots with lackeys, the questing with the credulous few. I sit at the front of this barge and the droplets of the Labe wet me and wet Sněhurka behind me and I think that I have not emerged from the side of a hill, but am another soul, windburned and shipwrecked on the shores of Schleswig-Holstein, strayed up the Labe, through Goethe’s gorge, into a windless and haunted hinterland.

  My bearings come slowly, like a weather balloon’s descending onto Cuban hills. I see leviathan gravel-making machines in a quarry on a hillside and rec
tangles cut into the forests on higher mountains that are pistes I have skied. I have carved those steep slopes on which chairlifts now rock lonesomely in parched summer air. I have stood at their sides over my poles, breathing hard into whiteness. My own sense of captivity comes from a recurring nightmare I have of these pistes. I am a skier — a child. I wear goggles, a ČSSR ski hat, jacket, and racing pants. I am clipped into waxed and sharpened skis. The bindings are tight. I have all my equipment, but no movement. I am caged. I drop into a tuck and clatter into metal bars. I am a caged animal. I call out to those who carve turns around me. They pay me no attention. I call out to the pisteurs with their shovels. They glance at me sadly: I am not even a hunger artist to them. I cannot do anything in the cage but ski three or four slalom turns and then herringbone up the slope again, over and over, until the snow melts under me and the grass grows up and I am forced to take off my skis and boots, my hat, jacket, and racing pants, and lie naked on the ground, motionless, waiting for night to come and the stars to show themselves.

  We tie up the barge finally in the center of Ústí nad Labem, the town where the opera singer alighted from the train to sing the part of a water nymph. We take our bags and check into a new riverside hotel. Inside the lobby, it is all lacquered plywood and factory-produced tile mosaics describing nothing. I go up and shower and shave. I pack away my giraffe-smelling tracksuit. I dress in a clean white shirt and tie and file with the others into the hotel dining room. A window runs the length of the room, through which we can see the giraffes on the barge in this oily summer light as in a painting by Cranach. Some of the giraffes drop their heads and lift them again, as horses do when trying to loosen their bit. Others remain still and marked above the river in f shapes, just as in that photograph in an East German magazine I have seen, supposedly of the Loch Ness monster in Scotland.