Giraffe (15 page)

The ticket seller looks up at me from behind metal bars.

“One, please,” I say.

“We’re almost closing,” she says.

“I’ll be quick,” I say. “I just want to see the giraffes.”

I do. All I want is to contemplate their stretch up.

“The giraffes aren’t showing, dear,” she says, as if talking of a film, as if the zoo were a cinema. “They’ve only just arrived. They’ll be showing in a few weeks. Still want in?”

“Yes.”

She hands me a ticket stub. The zoo is not expensive. It is a subsidized workers’ entertainment.

I go in. I pick a path at random. I walk swiftly along it, away from the cheetahs, past ornamental ponds. I pass an ice-cream vendor, a man I seem to recognize, pushing a cart with a polar-bear sign. From a cage comes the sound of a radio comedy. I see a zookeeper scrubbing the floor of the cage with a long soaped brush. I hear the comedy break off and the state news broadcast come on. “Now we are switching to Bratislava,” the voice says in state monotone. The news is in Slovak. This is curious. I do not usually notice such things. There is a smell of an incinerator and of dumplings coming from the zoo restaurant, but it is not more powerful than the smell of the animals. I walk on, up the slope. There is propaganda here also, red banners and old Party members in lilac uniforms sitting on benches, but it is easier not to notice it among the wild animals. I look across, but I cannot see any giraffes stretching up, into pink.

I dwell instead on a rhinoceros, such as may have trampled me in my childhood nightmares. It stands enormous and gray in a pit that slopes down to a green stagnant pool. It does not look up, but circles with utmost gravity around piles of beet and mounds of its own dung. Its sides seem like plates of armor, its legs like columns, its ears like feathery cones. It has no neck — the head meets the body directly. Its eyes are small, without color or expression. It better belongs to the dinosaurs, to the rhinos that charged around Czechoslovakia before it was sunk to the bottom of an ocean and raised again molten. I cannot imagine how dimly the world must arrive inside the head of this rhino, whether it sees me through its lanced eyelets, or ever notices the red banner hung over its pit declaring: OUR MORALS ARE FIXED!

I step over a stream of white effluent. I walk on. I come to a cage containing wolves. They also move in gray circles before me. They are large and bony; their lope is springy. And I think of a story told to me in the factory cafeteria of a zoo in the east of ČSSR, in a town that gives out onto wilderness. The zookeeper was walking home at the end of the day, the story went, when he heard his wolves howling as he had never heard them before. He went to investigate and there saw a pack of wild wolves sitting before the cage. The wolf pack had come out from the wilderness and was communicating with the captive wolves, and the emotion between them was deep.

I come next to an aviary. I expect to see an owl. I see nothing. Now comes a flash. And again, like a struck match, lighting the cage. Now I see it. A creature I have never seen before. There is no name on the cage. I have no idea what this creature is or where it is from. I look more closely. It becomes brighter and stranger. I think of the books I have read in the town library. All the sketches I have made. The animals I have dreamed of in my sleepwalking. Still I cannot make sense of it. This creature is the size of a large otter, with an otter’s whiskers. It has the coat of muskrat, like the one who swam in the Svět with me, but orange in color. It has the nose of a dog, the eyes of a fox, the teeth and claws of a leopard, the tail of a kangaroo. It leaps predatorily in the aviary, from one branch to another. A siren sounds, a voice comes over the loudspeakers: “Revered comrades. Please pay attention! The zoo is now closed. Revered comrades. Make your way to the exit.”

I walk to the gates past a group of sand gazelles. They appear slight enough, with delicate muscles and polished hooves, to one day lift off the face of the world with me. They bleat and cock their heads in such a way as to remind me of some classical civilization I have read of, in which water was poured into the ears of goats outside the temple so that they bleated and shook their heads vigorously when they were brought before the priests and this was taken as a sign they were willing to be sacrificed. I walk more quickly now by groaning beasts and apes with offset teeth, some spending themselves and others rising or bedding down. The gates are locked behind me. I stand again in the parking lot. The sky is a redder shade of pink now. I look up the slope and pick out a barn in the zoo that might hold the giraffes. I look beyond the zoo to the forest, which encloses the Svět.

JULY 12, 1973

I
ENTERED THIS ZOO with three other giraffes under the violence of a thunderstorm. We leaned toward a Czechoslovakian woman stilled in the rain in the very last moments before the gates opened to us. We stood inside the zoo in an idling truck and glimpsed forms of other animals in the wet dark. I saw white teeth. I saw the cherry flash of baboon rumps. I saw all of the baboons, a legion, gnashing, careening forward at us, dashing themselves against the bars of their cage, falling back and beating their arms on the concrete floor.

NO LIONESS EVER CAME for me. I moved confidently down beetle-enameled riverbeds. I was darted and captured by Czechoslovakians. I was put on a train. I did not move on that train, but the world revolved under me. I was put on a ship. I did not move on that ship, but the ocean swelled under me. There is no movement now. I am stopped and the blade is stopped under me also. I stand in a metal-sided barn. I am near the doors: I am a leader and I wish to be the first into the light. It is crowded in here. I strike the chests of other giraffes in walking. Fear is contagious in this halt, where there are no barefoot boys to call up greetings, but only a keeper.

I feel the roof more keenly than the walls. I wish to see the sky, to set myself up, against gravity. I stand here by the door whispering to a bull my memories of Africa, of a certain light that struck there, which elongated my shadow across the red earth. I whisper to him of galloping on the ash-colored grassland, sundering termite mounds with my hooves, of being graceful in my immensity, like a whale in ether. I whisper to him of plantations that revolved under us on the train, where women moved along corridors planted in dark soil, picking fruit. The bull puts his neck against mine and whispers to me of the Cape of Good Hope, of sandy coves on which waves broke like clouds, of sea lions on those sands and barking in the waters about the ship. I whisper to him of albatrosses gliding at our heads, of dropping into a trough in the ocean and rising again, so that the many chambers of our stomachs lifted up our throats. He whispers of the English Channel, of a fog bank stretching from the low coastline of Belgium to the salt marshes on the English shore, of the ship becoming a barge, the ocean a river. And I remember now the river narrowing, so that some of us feared predators in the trees.

THE DOOR OPENS, to the sky. I am the first out. I push my head back. I stretch myself up, on tiptoe. I feel an updraft within me that is more than rising blood. I move around the small yard. There is no wind here. There are no oxpecker birds to pick the ticks from my back. I look around me. There are materials in the air: It smells of smoke. I see beyond the zoo to shapes of trees and Czechoslovakians laid out in the sunshine. I see a forest encircling a watering hole. I see spires and towers. I hear a lion. I rear back. I drop my head. I feel my blood roaring.

THE KEEPER PRESSES US back into the barn at the end of the day. I do not sleep. None of us sleeps. We are not bats, who hang down for so many hours and then sweep out on sonar to gorge themselves. We are sleepwalking beasts. Our eyelids flutter but remain open. Our teeth grind in fits of bruxism. We push up. We walk with unfocused eyes through the barn. We bump into one another, not waking but galloping inward across ash-colored grassland and stretching up to the highest branches.

JULY 13, 1973

I
AM NAMED AMINA for the heroine of Vincenzo Bellini’s opera
La Sonnambula.
They say it is a pastoral tale. Operatic Amina is the prettiest girl in her mountain village, which I picture to be the Swiss village of tiled rooftops on the poster above my bed. She rises at night and sleepwalks. The villagers mistake her for a ghost and think themselves haunted. During one fit of somnambulism, Amina enters the rooms of a count and, dark to the moment, lays herself out on his bed. The count discreetly flees the scene. Amina’s lover is less forgiving. He breaks off their engagement, thinking her unfaithful. The count then publicly defends Amina, in words that often repeat in my head:

Amina steps from the window of a water mill in the climactic scene. She sleepwalks along a plank set precipitously over the mill wheel. The plank is rotten and gives way, threatening to cast her down into the blades of the wheel. There are gasps and screams from the villagers below, who now recognize her as a wronged girl, not a specter. They cry out:

Their prayer is heard. Amina makes it to the grassy bank on the other side. She awakes there, agitated and bruised, in the arms of her unworthy lover. Her innocence is proven. She is wed at once. The villagers sing a joyful chorus and in the last line of the opera express their true feelings for her:

This is what my father used to say to me when I misbehaved and he was forced to punish me. I have no such romance. It is strange to be named for an operatic orphan and then to be orphaned, and stranger still, in this age of cosmonauts, to have grown into a somnambulist in resemblance of her. I sleepwalk without wishing it. It is a condition. It comes from too little rest or too much, from being an orphan, and from paint fumes settling under my tongue in the factory or bubbling in a particular way in my chest. The root of all sleepwalking is surely with Adam, who stood with his eyes open and his arms stretched up out of the Garden of Eden, as God reached in and peeled out a rib, from which he fashioned Eve. It began for me as a child with
pavor nocturnus,
or night terrors. The chemicals meant to hold my body in paralysis were not released as they should be, so that my waking and sleeping states became mixed. I was caused to sit upright in bed. I was a little girl, jackknifed in fear. My eyes were wide and rolling. I let out the longest screams, until my parents came and shook me awake and comforted me. It was always impossible for me to explain to them what had so terrified me. It was something more than achluphobia. A charging rhino maybe, or the underside of the world seen slipping away from space, or a childlike understanding of how the finite drifts like the tiniest mustard seed on the winds of the infinite. After I was orphaned and there was no one to wake and comfort me, the night terrors gave way to sleepwalking. I rise at night with dilated pupils. I perform complex tasks in my sleep. I sponge myself at the sink. I cook. I listen to records. I sew. I have vivid recollections in sleepwalking of lifting off. Snatches of the dreams remain with me, as in looking down from a cloud to slicks of goose fat floating on the surface of the Svět, and to reeds being fed to a thresher on the deck of a paddle steamer grounded on a dried-up channel in a marsh. I sleepwalk out of my
panelák.
I walk with the eyes of the hypnotized; I am a ghost to the fishermen stumbling home drunk. I sleepwalk along the edge of roofs in the dead of night, naked, on tiptoe, my arms stretched up like John the Baptist’s, without chorus or lover to witness my foot reaching out into space. I do not fall but often wake bruised and agitated under linden trees or at the base of the helical plague column. I lower my eyes to the painful daylight and sing quietly to myself parts of
La Sonnambula
and lines my mind has added, such as:

The birdsong has quieted outside. I place
La Sonnambula
on the turntable. I set down the needle. I turn the sound low, so as not to disturb my neighbors. I listen. There is scratched silence. The record revolves. Then a first line

My parents were struck and killed at a bend in the gravel road by the Svět. They were flattened by a military truck headed for a secret base in the forest. I sometimes imagine them to have died in other ways, for instance to have been blown from the clock tower or from a mountain above the industrial towns, for they were not large people. I have grown to love the music they left me. I am light and knitted strong with bird ribs. I will reach up. I will lift off the face of the world, just as the arias in
La Sonnambula
stretch up on tiptoe, swell in eights into bel canto, and lift from the stage. The villagers feared operatic Amina would drop into the mill wheel. They did not notice she was walking the plank on tiptoe, with her arms stretched up. They had no understanding that the intent of sleepwalkers is not to dive down like the suicide or
rusalka
from the Charles Bridge, but to lift off into another place, like John the Baptist, perhaps even beyond that part of the sky the religious speak of that is lined with the pure and holy.