Giraffe (17 page)

My job is to take spheres and other shapes of glass and dip them in colors. Each piece has a stem, an umbilical cord; the paint flows down it, coloring the glass from the inside. When the piece has been further decorated on the factory floor above, or in the cooperatives in the villages around the town, the stem is snipped, set with a metal cap, and dressed with a ribbon or a wire on which it can be hung from a Christmas tree. It is not easy to mix the pigment into the polish. Consistency changes with the shape and quality of the glass. It is not possible to say, This is white, or This is cobalt. You have to be a chemist here, as well as a worker. The pieces we color correctly are exported; the pieces we get wrong make up the domestic quota. So it is that the Christmas trees of ČSSR shine off-color in shades of mustard. We make shapes of Santa Claus with a full sack, bells, pine trees, sailing ships, angels, bears, and reindeer. Some of the spheres we color are hand-painted with tropical scenes of Vietnam for the American market. We color shapes of Uncle Sam to be dressed with a cotton-wool beard. We dip shapes of American fighter jets. The orders are not openly mentioned by the factory committee of Communists demoted to this lowly enterprise on account of alcoholism or depression. The shapes of the American fighter jets serve also as planes for the Soviet market. The greatest demand in the domestic market is for red spheres. We dip them in Christmas red and send them to be hand-painted with a hammer and sickle so that they might better crown Communist trees in place of an angel. I have hardly any memory of the dipping, only of the redness itself, which is matte, not shiny like Christmas silver, and does not give out light, but rather sucks it in, offering no reflection, so that when I pull out a tray of red spheres and bend down to inspect them, I find myself invisible in them and feel the light around me diminished.

ONE OF THE WOMEN WAVES a packet of Red Star cigarettes. We all leave the machines. We go to stand by the open window at the end of the factory floor, where we can see the sky and the copper leaves falling from the trees. I take a piece of bread and hold it out in my hands. A blackbird comes now, a factory bird, and takes the bread with a single gentle peck. We drop the burning ends of our Red Stars into the undergrowth below. The conversation is distant, befitting those who sleepwalk by day. The women speak of the availability of certain foods and of the latest television serial. I do not have a television. It is enough for me to read the schedule of the state channel number one:

I listen to my records and to Radio Vltava, the classical-music station. I will skip the stories of our Communist history and listen to Liszt’s “Fantasia Quasi Sonata” followed by
Melodies of Our Dear Cuban Friends.

I AM YOUNGER than the other women. We do not have so much in common. I do not volunteer myself to them, except when they ask me of giraffes. I have told them of how the giraffe keeper approached me in the springtime and asked why I was so often there under the sycamore tree and I said it was because the giraffes awakened me. They know I sit for two or three afternoons each week before the giraffes. To them the zoo is a contrivance, a diversion they rarely bother with, while to me it is a place where I am fully aware, even in these autumn days, when there are few visitors, no wasps in the garbage cans, and no ice-cream vendor pushing his cart. I can say to the other women with certainty that giraffes are silent, mute as a penguin in a children’s story. I have related the story the keeper told me of the zoo’s vet in the 1950s who took it upon himself to eat a cutlet from every creature then in the zoo, if not from a dead animal then from the amputated limb of a living animal, such as a female chimpanzee whose arm was caught in the bars of her cage. When the women said I was making it up, I described to them how the vet cut off his cutlets with surgical precision, wrapped them in newspaper, and fried them up at home. I told them how he demanded the zookeepers exhume a black panther that had died while the vet was on vacation. He pretended to examine it, discreetly cut off a piece of meat, and made a marinated dish of it, which he served up to the young and unsuspecting zoo director. All of this, I told them, came to light when the vet died and his diary surfaced, along with a recipe book.

Andrea asks me about the giraffes and I take another Red Star and tell her of how one of the Rothschild cows stood on her hind legs and tried to eat from an overhanging branch of the sycamore tree.

“What else?” Hana says.

“The zoo director ordered an okapi be put in with the giraffes. It cowered in the corner and the giraffes treated it unpleasantly, as though there was some long-standing disagreement between them.”

“What’s an okapi?” Eva says, from the windowsill.

“A giraffe without neck or legs,” I say, “which lives in a jungle, where there is no need for it to stretch up for food.”

We go back to the machines. There is another order for white. Not polar bears, but snowmen. I mix the pigment into the nitroglycerin base in the copper-colored light. I see dimly. This kind of sleepwalking is deeper than a daydream, less than a nightmare. I set the tray of snowmen on rollers and push it into the machine. I pour in the paint. I sleepwalk inward from the factory floor to an evening in a beer garden in which fireflies surround the face of my girlfriend, lighting her up in the darkness. Outwardly, there is the din of whiteness injected into a hundred umbilical cords, of snowmen being born. Inwardly, butterflies are rising from a pool in the bog that circles the old town walls, more subtly colored than any pigment mixed into a polish of nitroglycerin, in apple, olive, Veronese green, lapis lazuli, and lemon marked softly on papery wings.

I pull out the snowmen. A siren sounds, marking the end of the working day. A voice comes over the loudspeakers: “Revered workers, gather please for an educational film in the cafeteria!”

FOG IS DRIFTING OUTSIDE, from the Svět. The concrete tanks by the gravel road are filling with carp. All the apples have fallen and leaves are clumped heavily against the boards of the outdoor ice-hockey rink. I sit here in the cafeteria, next to Eva. The political committee is showing us a short film, for our education.

“Lights out!” someone calls.

The screen lights up. An image is brought into focus. I see soldiers marching by, saluting at a parade. Now soldiers in fatigues are running along a Czechoslovakian riverbank. A missile shoots upward. The film cuts to a meadow in which children are playing. The children wear all the different folk costumes of Czechoslovakia. The title of the film is
The Dress of Our CSSR!

The children sing and laugh. Some of them set up easels and paint pictures of sunshine and clowns, but also animals. The narration marks out these children as future workers at play. The sky darkens, sirens sound. The narrator shouts, “Danger! Look out, children! Dive! Dive!”

The children scream. They run about in circles. They tear at one another and fall to the ground. Some of them curl into balls, as insects do under a spray of insecticide. A blinding flash dissolves into a mushroom cloud. The film cuts back to the army, who are protecting us from destruction. The film ends. The People’s Militia, sitting uniformed in the front row, breaks into applause. They are a rabble, meant to protect the factory from sabotage during an uprising. Most have joined out of a lack of conviction: They believe in nothing, so there is nothing to hold them back. The rest of us are sleepwalkers by day. We do not remark on the banners draped around the town, such as here in the cafeteria: THE TRUE WORKER OBEYS THE WILL OF THE COLLECTIVE.

The Communist moment does not demand that I love it, or be awake to it. It asks only that I do not question it. What can I question? I am below politics. I do not read the articles in the newspaper that begin: “Strict penalties are not enough.,” “Revanchism is a tumor. ”

The political committee of the factory asked me to join their team for the mass gymnastics exercise in Prague. They said I was slight and sinewy enough to be the one lifted from the field to be the point of a red star formed by forty thousand workers. I refused. I am not a socialist heroine, such as appear in mass displays or as models for Communist statues with their hands stretched across in salute. I am an orphaned sleepwalker, named for the same. I dip shapes of glass on a factory floor whose sixteen windows have never been cleaned and cast a murky light, like the underside of the Vltava.

I sleepwalk from the cafeteria to the showers. I stand now under dribbling hot water and soap myself among older women. I am aerated. Water might course through me. I rise on tiptoe. I stretch my hands to the shower head. I wake in this steam. I am not bent double over the dipping machine, I am not watching a political film, nor am I outside in my crumbling town, whose ramparts are splitting, whose Gothic winged cow is broken and without flight, and whose stylish Hotel Crystal Palace stands infested and boarded up on the main square. The factory roof leaks. It is propped up by trees whose branches grow into the building. There are not enough toilets in here. I squat with the other women at lunchtime in that part of the undergrowth where we drop our cigarettes, and urinate there in yellow arcs.

I DRY MYSELF ON the broken tiles and sit on a wooden bench in the crowded changing room. We are all quiet. Even Hana is quiet. We sit here and we steam, with our palms down on our thighs. We are captive in disappointment. We become dull-eyed and stare without focus at the posters on the wall here: MEAT MEANS HEALTH! and PROTECT US, BORDER GUARDS!

I HAVE A SUDDEN SENSE of the other place I wish to stretch my hands over my head and lift off to. It is more than Prague and the America to which we send our Christmas fighter-jet decorations. It is beyond that part of the sky lined with the pure and holy. I cannot grasp it. I understand it only as a color seen on a butterfly wing, an unseen and unimagined color that lies outside the spectrum, into which glass can never be dipped.

ST. HUBERT’S DAY

NOVEMBER 3, 1974

I
WAKE WITH A start. I see my breath. There is moonlight on the wooden floor. I hear the sound again. I sit bolt upright in my cot. It is closer. I hear it brushing against the side of the hut. I see a form in the window. A stag. It stares directly in, at the antlers arranged on the wall. I am still. I watch the stag breathe on the frosted windowpane, seemingly contemplating the trophies and skullcaps of its kind. It moves off now. Other deer follow it. By the time I get to the window, they are all gone into the forest.

The iron stove is still warm. I throw more wood in it. I brew a pot of chicory coffee. I drink it barefoot now on the steps outside the forestry hut, which are cold, made of stones set down in the forest by a glacier long ago. I am unsettled. It is the saint day of Hubert, the patron of hunters and butchers, who fell prostrate before a stag, between whose antlers was a figure of Christ, fading in and out as our black-and-white television sets do. I see a badger in the half-light, punching through ferns, deeper into this forest, my forest, which surrounds the Svět. The trees creak. It is autumn. Leaves are falling, falling.

I go back inside the hut. I dress. I tuck in my woolen shirt. I pull up my suspenders. I lace my boots up to my knees. I put on my jacket. I set a feather in my cap. I push back my thick, black-framed spectacles. I throw the bloodstained satchel over my shoulder. I take up my rifle, a Mannlicher-Schoenauer 6.5.

I am a forester and a hunter. My father was too, and his father before him. I shot my first boar in 1941, not far from this hut. I was a boy then. My view on hunting is sentimental. I believe in an unspoken pact between certain men and certain beasts; by hunting animals, I give them purpose. I am a Communist. I do not disguise my intentions: I am Communist because I wish to remain in the forest. If they ask me certain questions, I will set down my ax and rifle and leave. They do not ever ask me. They trust me because I am known to them only in the trees, where there are no politics, just as Hubert was loved as a young man because he was known only in moments of fraternity in the forest, away from the disputatious, where the only quarry was a beast. I do not have the face of a functionary. There are fools in every walk of life, including the Party. I say so openly. When I go to political meetings, I speak to the point. Unlike the careerists, I do not introduce into my written reports incidental characters who might be blamed if a criticism is raised or vanished if praise is forthcoming. I take responsibility for my actions. When I fell a tree, I count the number of its rings.

I check the magazine of my rifle now. I load the five rounds. I lock it. I walk away from the forester’s hut. I step quickly into evergreen larches, white firs, silver firs, deodars, Bosnian pines, Austrian pines, Hungarian oaks, downy oaks, sessile oaks, wild service, gray poplars, black walnut, hickory, and full-moon maples. I see the sky through the division of their leaves and the patterns at the base of their cones and in the brightly colored arils about their seeds. I belong to these trees. I wish to leap between them and live in them, in their branches, like some baron. Instead, I move dutifully along the forest floor, daubing trunks with arrows as I go; upward for trimming, downward for felling. I am always in shadow, glimpsing rather than seeing, so that when I emerge from the forest, even into the flat light about the Svět, I am dazzled.

The roots of the firs are sprung tight under me. I would feel myself lifted from the ground if I broke into a run now. I do not understand captivity in the same way as the fishermen who work the Svět. They are unduly exposed, without subtleties, on the water. The forest is not a cage, as they say. It is a shelter. Startled deer bound from the fields to the forest, not from the forest to the fields; their prance into the trees that sustain them is so acute and airborne as to seem the work of an unseen puppeteer, jerking them on wires.