Giraffe (16 page)

I ENTER THE TOWN NOW from my
panelák,
through the oldest gate. I go under the portcullis and on by the brewery with its sign advertising REGENT BEER, SINCE 1379.

I come to the town square, where the plague column stands. A few high windows on the castle are thrown open at this hour to circling bats. Mosquitoes rise from the puddles. I continue by the courthouse of 1572 faced with a Latin inscription and under the all-seeing eye engraved on the lintel of the former Masonic hall. I go by the fountain of St. George spearing a dragon. I pass a socialist grocery, which sells no butter, only margarine. I line up there for oranges. I do not line up for sausages: They are filled with horse guts. I go under the Gothic stone carving of a winged cow. I pass by the shoe shop, which offers hardly any shoes, but only empty shelves lined with brown and yellow flowered wallpaper. I linger by the civic bulletin boards with their announcements, red and gold graphics, and portraits of the spectacled men who govern the Communist moment. I am hardly aware of the footsteps I take to reach here and to return. I remember them only because I repeat them. I am awake but I see dimly now, as a rhino must see through its lanced openings, because I am a sleepwalker by day as well as by night. I am not often awake to this ČSSR of 1973. That is why men are attracted to me. They like my lack of strategy, the way I fall into their arms at the end of an evening, when invariably they say,
“God! You’re like a dancer to me, Amina.”

I feel nothing. If I am in their arms at all it is only because I stumble in sleepwalking when they speak again of carp. It is difficult for me to remember these men or what happens to me from one day to the next. I dry myself among irises on the shore of the Svět and sleepwalk off toward the factory. I am not so different. This is a country of sleepwalkers by day, who drink by night only as a lesser form of sleepwalking. This is a country where the officials say openly they can do whatever they like with it, if they keep the beer flowing. Hardly any of us are ever awake the way operatic Amina is awake, when she asks her friend to lay a hand upon her breast and feel her heart beating up blood within her, and to sing:

The workers in the industrial towns are pulled from their beds with tidal force, but are not woken. They sit glassy-eyed on trams that pass out over fields of beets. The sparking of the wires scatters the geese feeding in the fields, but no one turns from the tram to look at the geese in flight. They hardly acknowledge one another. They stare without awareness at one another’s breasts. They go to work. They mine coal. They pour steel without thought into armored plates such as would dress a rhino. They automatically sluice carp from the Svět into concrete tanks.

The sand gazelles cocked their heads at me. They registered the shape I made and then lowered their heads to graze again. I was awake to the gazelles, as I am awake to the giraffes. I am wakeful when I walk the slopes below the forest that encloses the Svět, and harvest mice scatter before me down smooth ovular holes and make for the balks in the field where the yellowhammers and quail are nested. I wake to the hare breaking for cover, the springing deer, and the skylarks turning away from a merlin in the windless heights. I go attentively down narrowing brambles of blackthorn and blackberries, through creeping thistles and nettles, and emerge in a circle of aspen trees. I take an empty bottle from my bag. I fill it from a spring that rises there, percolating up from deep in the rock. I sit beside the shrine over the spring, dedicated to Mary. I am aware of the wild roses laid beside her blue likeness and the candles burned low. I am held rapt by the grains of sand and flakes of fool’s gold dancing in the clear waters. The Communist moment cannot dull such a place. Even if it cemented it over and punished all those who have laid flowers there, so that the act of worshiping was forgotten, the waters would only well up somewhere else. The officials show no interest in the bend on the gravel road where my parents were hit by a truck. Their interest is in the secret military base in the forest, in the electrification of its perimeter, so the animals will bounce off it, and in meaningful camouflage, so I will no longer see the tips of the missiles dug in there, glinting between the trees. The same officials paste political flyers onto the plague column, masking the pox-ridden faces spiraling up the column and the seraphim with wings as tiny as a sparrow’s supporting those with their heads rolled back. When I am awake and walking by the plague column and see slogans over these mournful sculpted panels, I understand the Communist moment cannot endure; it does not have the imagination. I know Czechoslovakia will awaken in the far future, agitated and bruised, under a spreading linden tree, to a religious revival, or even to a moment without lines in which the customer is always right.

APRIL 8, 1974

I
SIT ON A bench under the sycamore tree by the giraffe house. I watch the Egyptian geese waddling with clipped wings through the legs of the largest herd of captive giraffes in the world. I am awake. I do not sleepwalk in the zoo. I see again how the giraffes ignore the geese, even though they may have stories to tell of nesting in the Nile among
rusalkas
swum up there from papyrus roots with trinkets of pharaohs, who never venture along the Nile because the thrum of the cities is too much for their watery forms.

A man approaches. He is as tall as the zoo director I have seen striding now and again between the cages.

“Why are you so often here under this sycamore tree?” he asks.

“The giraffes awaken me,” I say.

“What is your name?”

“Amina Dvořáková.”

“I am the giraffe keeper,” he says.

“I’ve seen you,” I say, embarrassed.

He sits down on the bench. We are quiet.

“This is a good angle to watch the giraffes,” he says after some time. “You can see better how vertical they are from here.”

He turns to me.

“I have to tell you,” he says, “we had our first birth last night.”

“Were you present?”

“I came in this morning and there she was. Would you like to see her?”

“Yes.”

It is warm and dark as a nest in the giraffe house. The keeper points to the newborn giraffe. I move quickly to the wooden railing. I look through the slats. She is still covered in patches of membranes. She totters on the smooth floor. She makes it to the belly of her mother and puts her mouth to a large teat.

“See how she runs!” he says. “More easily than she walks — she has such a low center of gravity in these first days.”

I point to bumps on her head, covered with velveteen skin. “Are they horns?”

He nods. “The skin will wear away and the horns will come in time — three or four ossified outgrowths. Look at the mother’s tail.”

It is oxblood-colored with afterbirth.

“Now look at those giraffes nuzzling over there by the door,” he says. “See anything unusual?”

“One is a Rothschild giraffe and the other a reticulated?”

“Not that,” he says. “They only have one ear.”

I see that now.

“This calf will only have one ear too. Too much love! See how her mother is licking. She’ll lick the ear until all the blood vessels are closed off and it shrivels.”

The reticulated cow with the white underbelly comes forward. She leans down over the fence. I put up my hand to her wet face.

“That’s Sněhurka,” he says. “She’s one of the leaders. She is always the first to step out when I open the doors in the morning. She stands quite still in the open with her head pushed back, like this, almost lifting up off the ground. Then she nods and the others venture out.”

He looks up at Sněhurka.

“Animals should be stripped of names,” he says, “but I cannot bring myself to do so in her case.”

The keeper invites me into his room at the back of the giraffe house. He tells me that female giraffes are sociable, except after giving birth, and that males keep to themselves, moving slowly along the fence in the yard to where the okapi live. He brushes aside flies and fruit flies and shows me the feed of apples, pears, carrots, turnips, and beets. He points out the bales of hay and the browse cut from the acacia trees overhanging the fountain of St. George. He speaks of how the lights in the giraffe house come on gradually in the morning to give the impression of the rising sun, of the giraffes who lick the branches painted on the walls, of the tabby cat who goes undisturbed about the bull giraffes in search of mice, and of how the herd ruminates through the night with unblinking and unfocused eyes.

“The single most important thing to understand about a giraffe,” he says, “is that they do not graze down to the ground, but are stretched up to the sky.”

“That is what so awakens me,” I say.

The keeper gives me a searching look. He must also understand Czechoslovakia to be a nation asleep, of workers normalized into sleepwalkers.

He asks me what I have observed of giraffes, coming to the zoo so often in these months and sitting under the sycamore tree. I tell him I have memorized the patterns on the necks of the giraffes so that I can say aloud to myself on the bench, That one is Jánošík and this one is Rudolf, named for the emperor. I tell how the females lower their heads in submission when a male comes sniffing at their root and how some of them raise their tails in fear at the sound of gunfire in the forest.

“Giraffes are not like white rhinos with their hooked and squared lips,” I say, gaining confidence. “When a giraffe is scared, it rears away. When a rhino is scared, it runs straight at the object of its fear, its ears flattened back like those of a cat.”

The keeper is listening. We are awake to each other.

“The giraffes do not seem sad to me,” I say, “like the polar bears in this zoo are.”

“Sadness is difficult to see in beasts,” he says. “I cannot say a giraffe is more depressed than a polar bear. I can only say that a giraffe does not frown or smile and is not easily transformed by the act of observation into something human, like animals with soft shapes and juvenilized faces, such as koalas, pandas, lemurs, and certain apes.”

“Giraffe expressions are unreadable to me,” I say. “They often appear to be looking straight through me, as if I am a ghost to them.”

He nods. “Early taxidermists,” he says, “exaggerated the ferocity of all animals that came to their table. In their hands, even a mole was poised to spring, its two teeth exposed. After the first specimen giraffe skins arrived from Namaqualand, the taxidermists sought to do the same for giraffes. But whatever they tried, they could not make the giraffe look menacing. It looked in death much as it did in life.”

“How is that?”

“Lofty, alien; above all blank. If a giraffe performs at all, it is only a tall-man routine.”

“I don’t follow.”

“In an anthropocentric world, the point of a lion is to roar at us. In such a world, the point of a giraffe is to tower over us. The giraffe is the tall man, just as the hippo is the fat man. If a giraffe appears in a children’s story at all, it is only on account of its height. A giraffe never converses in a children’s story, just as penguins and other vertical animals are also silent in those stories. And in this respect too the giraffe is nothing like the black bear in the London Zoo that became Winnie-the-Pooh.”

“Surely their blankness has a purpose,” I say. “A giraffe can be a point of reflection. It can bring out of yourself some feeling you did not know was there.”

“For you, perhaps, Amina,” he says, not unkindly.

“The zoo is a place where you can look deliberately at living things,” I say, “which doesn’t happen outside. No one out there examines the faces of cows sent for milking.”

“The zoo is nothing more than a contrivance,” he says, “to make workers forgetful of the monotony of their lives. They arrive here from industrial towns. They move from cage to cage. What do they want? Not to contemplate, as you seem to do, but to make strange animals see them. You’ve seen how they put their hands through the bars, how they throw in food or litter, and how they wave their arms until the pygmy hippo takes the smallest step in their direction.”

I HAVE SEEN VISITORS who do not look at the creatures in the zoo except through the lens of their camera and curse when they run out of film, as though they have been made blind. Even so, I have often been startled at the way other visitors seem to wake up when they step from under the sycamore tree and exclaim, as I did, “Giraffe!”

NOVEMBER 1, 1974

A
S FAR AS I can see, there are sixteen windows on my factory floor. The light that comes through them is copper-colored with autumn. In winter, the light in here is blue. This is where we dip Christmas decorations in colors. It has few features. There are loudspeakers at either end that give out announcements. There is paint on the floor and the walls and it is splashed thick over the machinery from seasons of Christmas decorations past. There is a pinup of a Czechoslovakian film star, the packaging from a box of English tea, and a red banner draped over one wall that declares in white letters: TRANSCEND FOR THE GLORY OF THE REVOLUTION!

This is where I work. Its fumes are rotting me from within. They break open my skin into sores and cause my organs to burn with a hundred small infections. I take another tray of clear spheres now. I set it on metal rollers. I push it into the mouth of the dipping machine. I open a vat of see-through polish with a base of nitroglycerin. I mix pigment into the polish until I come to the right shade of silver. I heave the vat to a funnel. I pour the resulting paint into the dipping machine. My hands shake. Some of the silver paint splashes on the floor. I press a button. I stand back, eyes streaming. The machine is loud: I can no longer hear what the other women are shouting to one another. It stops. I pull out the tray. The spheres are hot fuming silver. Christmas silver. I inspect the spheres for blemishes and see myself reflected and shortened in them. I see a young woman resembling a suicide or
rusalka,
an orphaned worker in an apron and head-scarf, waiting to get out into the autumn air, to walk beside the Svět.