Giraffe Read online

  There are ten or twelve of us at the dining table. Hus sits at the center. I am at one end. I pick at my meal of pork and cabbage. We all drink. Hus stands now, before the dessert comes. He supports himself with one hand on the back of a chair.

  “Another toast!” he says. “To the tallest of beasts.”

  We all stand once more.

  “Giraffes!” we say.

  This is a toast that will not often be repeated. Hus taps his glass with a knife. We grow quiet.

  “Not long ago,” he says, “a British animal trader was commissioned to bring back a collection of penguins from the South Atlantic. He departed the Falkland Islands with eighty-four penguins. He reached Montevideo with seventy. He arrived in London with eight. Half of the giraffes shipped last year to France and America died in the passage. Capitalists lose most of the animals they capture because they’re driven by greed. Greed. They gather indiscriminately. They don’t look to sex or character. While we socialists gathered our giraffes carefully, before assisting their passage.”

  Vokurka interrupts with clapping. He is not drunk. He is one of those who claps like a marionette at Party meetings.

  “We watered and fed the giraffes on trucks, trains, on ship and barge,” Hus says. “A hundred and fifty buckets of grain each day for forty-four days. Tomorrow we will unload thirty-two of our thirty-three giraffes. We release them onto our ČSSR. They have migrated. They will find a new home in our zoo. They will be happy here.”

  He pauses. He comes to his Czechoslovakian subspecies.

  “Their offspring,” he says, unable to help himself, “will come to enjoy our winters.”

  THE MEAL IS DONE. I am too drunk now to seek out my water nymph at the back door of the opera house. I go instead with the others into the hotel garden. It is windless, but I see no quicklime outlines of the dead; they cannot last in this heat. A bargeman corners me and speaks at me of Hamburg.

  “I visited a strange brothel there,” he says. “You couldn’t imagine. Fancy house on a fancy street — across from a park. I opened the gate. I walked down the path. I thought it must be the wrong place. Still I went on. The house had a square tower covered in ivy. Roses grew alongside the gravel path. I pulled the bell. An old lady opened the door. Refined, you know. I blushed. I held my cap in my hands. ‘Please, sorry,’ I said. ‘Not right,’ I said. Well, that was all the German I had. The old lady slowly looked me up and down. She smiled. ‘Right,’ she said, and waved me in.”

  The bargeman is going on, up the stairs of the house. I light a Red Star. I smoke and try to pay attention to what he is saying to me. I cannot. I am quite drunk now and swaying also.

  I WAKE. IT IS EARLY. I am no longer under a tarpaulin lit snowy by Sněhurka’s underbelly. I am on a hotel bed. The sheets under me are soaked in sweat. I step out into the hotel corridor. It extends unlit to a single window far away. I walk down to that window. I stand here. I look down. I teeter. I see swallows diving and rising. I trace them blue and cream through the air. I see their articulated wings. They sail out over Ústí nad Labem, over the opera house they go, through the foundries, to groves of English oak at the base of the ski slopes. I do not frame the swallows. They are almost like ice-hockey players to me: I could never turn them in such beautiful ways as they turn now. I fancy the swallows speak to one another in patterns of flight about the thirty-two giraffes on the barge below, around whose necks they might also have circled in Africa.

  I go back to my room. I sleep and wake again. I fall back now, remembering my dream, not of Schmauch’s island home in a frozen sea, or my certain home, but the longest dream of a young giraffe with a broken neck falling from a great height, from space even, falling and falling in a smudge of liver red, coming alive as it falls, being somehow oxygenated, mended in the neck, then being metamorphosed in the magic of highest cirrus clouds from a giraffe into a young woman, an air stewardess tumbling head over heels from a broken plane, yes, a Czechoslovakian Airlines stewardess, in a dull uniform, screaming in Czech or perhaps in Slovak, black hair streaming, falling out of summer into a winter’s day, to a river, no, not a river now, a marsh. It is not the salt marsh on the English coast where Pip saved Magwitch that comes up to meet her. It is a lagoon not far from Venice, covered in thin ice. I am aware in my dream that I have never been to Venice, that the city floating on eggshell waters is made of paper cut from the books and magazines I have read. I am in the lagoon. It is me looking up at the flailing stewardess. I hear her screaming now. She falls swan-necked and long-legged through freezing fog: She must see the vaporetto setting out from the distant islands toward the planar façade of the Doge’s Palace. She is growing larger and larger. I hold my arms out to her. I catch her! I speak to her in Czech. I take her fast under the icy water, deep into the lagoon. I am a vodník in my dream, not of the Communist-lit hospoda but fresh as the vodník who appears over the shoulders of Justinian and Theodora in Byzantine mosaics.

  I fall back into bed. There is so much falling in life. Falling of the shutter on a camera, or of my eyelid to form an image I may keep and turn. Falling of raindrops to the earth, falling of dead, of newborns, and of the unborn in dreams. Sněhurka might have seen the nameless young giraffe thrown overboard off the coast of Mauritania. She might have been among those giraffes who panicked in their crates, who would have run out onto the violet ocean without understanding that only saints and storm petrels and Soviet fishermen can walk on water, or that even if by some miracle giraffes were added to that number, the dead giraffe would sink before them and their gallop away from the Eisfeld would have taken them only onto the shore of Mauritania, to a desert where there are no trees a giraffe might feed on. I have fallen into hands at my birth, just as I will fall again at my death, felled by disease or upended by accident. I will also fall to the earth. My veins will collapse too and all the celestial bodies will fall into a soup of dioxides.

  It is raining now outside the hotel. The raindrops are soft on swallow wings and on the seats of the chairlifts rocking on the mountainside. I close my eyes. It is inexplicable how the mind sparks in this state. Inexplicable why the comets in the weightless deep of my brain should light, softly as a beer advertisement over the Hamburg skyline, some lines of Goethe, which once in a summer love meant something to me:

  Man’s soul

  Resembles water:

  It comes from Heaven

  And must again

  Fall to earth

  For ever changing.

  ~ ~ ~

  If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

  — GEORGE ELIOT

  Amina — A Somnambulist

  ST. JOHN’S EVE

  JUNE 23, 1973

  THIS IS THE MARSH that lies at the end of the Svět, or world. It is larger and wilder and more real to me now in its winter coat. Reeds stand stiff upon it, silvered with frost. The water is thin transparent ice in which filaments of weed have been frozen, fair and glinting, like the hair of a rusalka rising from the boggy bottom. The willows stand golden on the island in the marsh, still with their slender leaves, still with their red ribbons. I pass under these willows now in my unlikely canoe, which is not Czechoslovakian but a type I have seen in picture books about American Indians: stretched like a drum skin and curved at both ends. I break the ice and set a paddle to the water and move past banks of soft earth on the island that are deep in snow, just as in summer they are hidden under thorns and poisonous weeds and darkened by clouds of mosquitoes, which swarm over the dogs set down each spring by men who cannot bring themselves to drown the dogs at birth, and instead let them out onto the island to starve or grow mad on a diet of water vermin.

  Some of these dogs appear before me now. They bound along, not venturing out onto the thin ice, but kicking up snow at its edge, barking dementedly, stopping, starting, keeping pace, all the while looki
ng at me. I paddle away from them at a steady pace until I can no longer hear their barking. I am overcome with silence. There is no sound but that of an adder slivering across the ice. I love this marsh, I love it knowing there are places that are not so still and quiet. I stand up in my canoe and stretch my arms up for exclamation, as well as for balance. I am alone in my place at the end of the Svět, or world, the open waters of which I can make out beyond the marsh, polished black like a sacramental stone. I sense in this moment I am more than I expected myself to be, that I am a character in a fairy tale, a prickless hero, one of those noble and true characters who find themselves rescued from a hard life by the intervention of magic, but the magic has not happened to me yet, or upon me. I am sensible to my condition: I am a worker in a workers’ state.

  I stand with my arms stretched up in my unlikely canoe, balanced in my hard life. The hands I open to the air are callused and shredded from days of wading out with other workers into deeper water, to my chest, and harvesting reeds with a rough blade. It is not the season for cutting reeds. I am alone in this marsh at the end of the Svět, or world, except for the mad dogs and the skein of red-breasted geese, which flies now under the clouds toward me. The geese are newly arrived from the northern tundra, although this too is impossible; this is the wrong season for geese. They drop lower. Their honking intrudes on the silence. It is distant and intermittent at first and now clearer. They are fat and rubychested; they shift in space, taking turns to fly at the point; they pass over me toward the open water of the Svět, beating music from the air, so close I reach up now and brush their webbed feet, which are charcoal-colored in the winter light.

  It is not the season for cutting reeds. It is not the season for red-breasted geese. It is the moment for magic. I reach in my pocket and take out a handful of bright-colored beans. I examine them and throw them one at a time into the water. They are large and heavy. They shine as they sink. I watch them disappear yellow blue green into blackness. I breathe in, I breathe out. It is enough. There is a bubbling from below, a stench of disturbed bottom mud, then a green shooting beanstalk, as fast as a jack-in-the-box, thick as a tree, high as a tree, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, and up, eighty-nine trees, one hundred and forty-four, two hundred and thirty-three, and up, six hundred and ten trees high, yet remaining a beanstalk with the elastic ladder stems of a beanstalk.

  The air and water are quieted. I paddle over and leap from my unlikely canoe. There is an instant now in my flight when I look down and see my reflection and understand myself to be no longer a girl, but a woman. I take hold of the beanstalk and settle myself upon it. I run my fingers across its skin of gooseberry down and bumblebee hair. I set a foot on a stem, pull myself up, and so begin climbing. The magic has happened to me and I climb without fear toward the vaulted heavens, as though in a fairy tale. Far, far up, at the height of two hundred and thirty-three trees, my canvas tennis shoes slip from my feet to the Svět. I climb for many more hours, for a day, even, until the red-breasted geese are no more than motes of dust below me, the town and the castle at the end of the Svět no more than the slightest ’, the forest and the patchwork fields small as a;, and the Svět itself a black (). I pass at last from clear sky into snow clouds. My breathing becomes shallow and rapid in the thin air. I lose my footing many times. I am buffeted by fierce winds, which ride here, but never down on the Czechoslovakian marsh.

  I break through into another world, without birds, without clouds, above all precipitation except meteor showers. It is a quite different country, squeezed in between marsh and cosmos, a rolling gray land, not Czechoslovakian gray, not normalized in that way, but a gray that comes with lunar proximity. I step off the beanstalk onto the land, which is made of clouds — is a cloudscape, not a landscape. These clouds have substance; they are to air as ice is to water. My feet make no sound in them. When I twirl like a ballerina, I feel myself to be twirling in powdery snow. I walk across this land. I fall down between clouds. It is a struggle to climb up again. Over and over, I slip back into this crevasse until I find purchase, just here, on a lightning bolt. I walk more carefully, watching my step. I lie down and nap at intervals and when I wake, I look up at the stars, which are so close, and think to find new ones with my naked eye, and I hold out my hands to passing cosmonauts, wishing only to stop one of them and practice my Russian.

  I do not ever stray out of sight of the beanstalk: I have no great expectations of the magic. I think I see my parents walking over down a cumular slope toward me, from another plane, but when I approach I see they are only shapes of my mother and father, formed from a collage of remembered photos. My parents have not magically appeared to me; neither have deities, angels, or giants with castles in the sky. There are no oracles or sudden riches of golden eggs. I do not mind: It is enough for me to be suspended on this cloudscape.

  I circumambulate the beanstalk until the day is ended and the sun sets. The clouds melt under me a little, just as during the day they gathered moisture from the marsh and thickened. I sink in up to my knees. I wade the last steps to the beanstalk. I take hold of its gooseberry and bumblebee skin. I take one last look at the meteor showers, and my parents blowing flat and tattered in the astral wind. I begin climbing down. I slide from one stem to another. A lightning bolt gashes me. I howl. I slide down through the snow clouds and come again into the enormous sleet-washed space, which is carpeted, I see now, with ČSSR. It is still winter in this space. I see white forests stretching all the way to Prague. I slide down for many hours. I rest on bigger leaves. I continue, until my thighs are rubbed raw, and I reach the thick air where the red-breasted geese fly. They fly beside me, beating off moonbeams. I take a deep breath. Down I go until I am thirteen trees high over the Svět and now three and here, on this broken stem, I slide from the beanstalk to a gravel road outside the front gates of the zoo, which stands near the town at the other end of the Svět.

  I stand here on the road, barefoot in the slush. I see the chapel of St. Michael. I see the slogans, the hammer and sickle above the brewery. It is strange to me how I remember all this around me that did not exist on the marsh. I look across the Svět to the town and see the castle, the brewery, the spires, turrets, and chimneys, and my panelák. The windows of my room are open. My light is on. I cannot see myself curled on a cot below a picture of the Alps. I cannot see myself and I feel a parting within me, which is the knowledge that I am sleepwalking again.

  I open my eyes once. Aha! This is revelation. I am not the same person. It is not the same Svět, or world. It is obvious to me that no one harvests reeds on the marsh at the end of the Svět, or sets dogs down there each spring to starve or grow mad. I have no unlikely canoe. Skeins of red-breasted geese do not ever migrate over our town. There are no bright-colored beans in my pocket and consequently no beanstalk six hundred and ten trees high. I cannot say there is no magic, but it has not visited me; it has not raised me up or papered a cloud with a collage of my mother and father, and I do not ever expect it to, except in sleepwalking.

  I walk away from the zoo gates, which are fashioned in metal shapes of giraffes and elephants. I walk toward the castle in the town. I open my eyes a second time. I am awake on the stairwell of my panelák. I am curled up. I am shivering on concrete, between floors. It is dark. There are no goose wings beating moonbeams onto me. I get to my feet. I look down. I am shoeless: My feet are bare and wet and covered in blades of summer grass and daisies. I climb the stairs. It is quiet in the building. The door to my flat is open. I step inside. I close it gently behind me. I have opened my eyes twice: Am I awake? I climb into my cot under the poster of the Alps. I close my eyes and I pray now for a dreamless sleep.

  I sense you will dissolve into mist.

  Emil

  MIDSUMMER’S DAY

  JUNE 24, 1973

  TODAY IS MIDSUMMER’S DAY — the nativity of St. John, whose head was paraded on a salver. I am journeying onward to the zoo in a truck carrying four of the giraffes, including Sněhurka. Oth
er trucks have left before us, packed with the vertical beasts, carrying away Vokurka and Hus also, waving his safari hat. I am dusty with river mud from the quay in Ústí nad Labem and softened by several glasses of beer.

  It is more parched today than yesterday. Perhaps Hus is right. Perhaps the world is turning on its axis, hippos will come to wallow in the Labe, and Czechoslovakians will come to believe that it is they who have migrated to ČSSR and the giraffes who were here all along. I slump back in the cab of the truck and let my country come at me. Thistles burst from tall grass and rodents I see swirling and gleaming white-toothed and brown and black in the hedgerows. The woods we pass are as thick and lustrous as the jungles of Zaire, where giraffes are compacted down, day by day, into okapi. We drive carefully along back roads, avoiding bridges and skirting the town of Mělník, where the Vltava meets the Labe, the same Vltava that flows by the shipping office and beneath Baba Hill, on whose waters I saw a swan that in its furled state reminded me of the archangel Michael, a snow-whiteness that now makes me think of Sněhurka’s underbelly. I turn to view her and the other giraffes through the window in the back of the cab. The narrowness of the window, a slit in metal, seems to frame their coming captivity. Sněhurka stands off to one side. Her legs are planted for balance, her neck bends, gives as if swaying underwater. She is taller and prouder than the others, or perhaps this is just my imagination, perhaps this is only because I recognize her. They are blind to ČSSR. Their eyes are shut tight. Only when the truck stops do they open. We pass through the center of another town, another broken place, but broken so long ago, by Swedes in the Thirty Years’ War, so as to be a necropolis, whose cobbled streets are set with gravestones of colored marble. Lungs are scorched in the chemical plant on its outskirts; pigs are hitched up on hooks in the meat factory here and cut apart while still conscious: There is hardly a pig in the world who escapes a violent end. The Dresden feeling comes at me again, not precisely of a firestorm, horses, or broken-necked giraffes, or even of this necropolis of marble gravestones, lungs, and twirling pigs, but an understanding only that we are bound together, all of us, by suffering, even more than joy.