Giraffe (7 page)

“We drove on, into the night. It began to rain. The rain became torrential, more violent than any storm I have seen in the hills of my Slovak paradise. The thunder shook the windows of the car, and the lightning came in sheets that lit up the earth, even up to the snow fields of Kilimanjaro, like a camera flash. I could see in those lightning strikes how the soil beside the road was shot up in bolts of mud by force of the rain. It was by that strange light that we saw the giraffes. An entire herd crossed the road in front of us. We saw them in one flash, then darkness, then again in another flash, their heads turned now toward us, then they disappeared into darkness once more. It was only a second, or two. They were moving with the speed of horses, although they seemed to me like creatures from another world, of lesser gravity. We had hardly gone any farther when there was an explosion at the front of the car, a bang, like one of those training grenades they set off in the army to get you used to noise. The driver braked. There was a grinding. He stepped out into the rain. I followed him. The front of the car was smashed in and flowing red with blood and rainwater. A hyena lay on the ground. It was a massive animal. Heavier than me. A rib stuck out from its body. We thought it was dead. It stirred. The driver shouted for me to get back into the car. He jumped in after me. We reversed. Some part of the hyena was still caught in the bumper. It was dragged some distance before twisting free. The driver said it must have belonged to a pack of hyenas tracking the giraffes through the thunderstorm. He said hyenas pick off weak or young giraffes during the rains, just as wolves move after sheep under the cover of summer drizzle in my Slovak paradise. We waited there. We watched the hyena rise from the road. Its shoulders were opened to the bone. One of its forelegs was smashed and dangling. It hopped forward into our headlights. It was lit in the beams. It appeared to be staring at us. It was demonic, like a creature you see at the base of those religious statues on the Charles Bridge, freshly emerged from hell.”

I STAND AT THE STERN of the ship. Pennants, neckerchiefs, and other charms have been exchanged. The Czechoslovakians have thanked the East Germans. The East Germans have spoken of giraffes. It is a leaving party now. I am drinking with some of the sailors. I see no lighthouse. I see only silhouettes of the rich buildings of Hamburg lit by neon signs advertising cigarettes, beer, and magazines. The sailors are swapping stories.

“I once glimpsed a mermaid,” the ship’s mate says. “She was laid out on a floating piece of wood, flotsam, between the ship and the cove of a northern island we were steaming by.”

Someone laughs, but uneasily.

“What kind of wood?” someone else asks.

“Oh, I don’t know,” the ship’s mate says. “Planking. A door. A fish box, perhaps. Anyway, she was sunning herself on the wood. It was a hot day. The cove was bright with fish. How to describe her? She had the tail of a harbor porpoise, but speckled orange and black like a mackerel. She was a woman from the waist up, with a navel and breasts, with a green hue to her skin, which appeared from my distance rough to the touch, not scabrous, but prickled, like any skin emerging from cold water. She was small, the size of a child. I could see no gills about her throat, but her nostrils were flattened and appeared to open and close like those of a seal. She had long kelp-colored hair and unnaturally large eyes. She seemed to be singing, or perhaps crying. The sound was anyway closer to a harp than to a human voice. It was the plucking of hairs within the throat. I opened my mouth to call out to the mermaid. I felt a great need for her to look at me, as we all have felt the need for the giraffes to turn to meet our gaze. But the moment my lips parted, even before I made any sound, she slipped from her float and dived down into the cove. The water was clear. I could see her. She dropped right down, faster than any seal. She shimmered between deep rocks, then was gone.”

The sailors are quiet.

“Did you report this?” one of them asks.

“To whom would I report it? To our East German navy? To the Party? In what fashion? They would not believe me. If by chance they did, what would happen then? Some expedition out of Leningrad would catch her. There would be a harvest of mermaids. They would be put to production. No. She was wild as the giraffes there were once wild. Let her swim free.”

I see now it was the ship’s mate who had spoken of the giraffes swinging in the sky—“Let them walk on air,” he had said. The sailors around me believe in his mermaid. I am captivated also, but especially by the hemodynamic possibilities of blood flow in mermaids. Might a mermaid have a single circulatory system, beyond the comprehension of Galen? Or does blood pulse through them in a dual system, with womanly veins above and the wonder net of a harbor porpoise cross-hatched in flukes below?

The ship’s engineer pours himself more vodka and speaks now in a German coastal dialect.

“Maybe you’re right, comrade,” he says to the ship’s mate. “Maybe you did see this. There is a story of a mermaid from my island of Hiddensee. Just before the Second World War, a local man named Brauhard sailed to the deepest part of our Baltic Sea and there fell in love with a mermaid. He married her and brought her back to Hiddensee in a hold full of water drawn from that deep place, which I suppose to be off the coast of Gotland. The mermaid lived in a tank of that water in the bedroom; on occasion they warmed it and Brauhard stripped off and slept in her arms, her tail wrapped around his legs. The local community was unhappy with the arrangement. Some of them railed against the intermingling of Aryans with mermaids. After some months, when Brauhard was away at sea, bringing back fresh water from the Gotland trench, a mob of Brownshirts broke into his house, led by the postmaster, and dragged his wife by her tail to the strand near Neuendorf. There are photographs of this. It was summer. The sand was hot. They threw her on it and drowned her in air and sunshine within sight of the sea. When Brauhard sailed into the harbor and was told the news, he broke down and wept. He begged his neighbors to tell him why they had done so cruel a thing. They shrugged. The officials sent him a letter stating that relations between a German and a mermaid were illegal.”

The engineer takes another swig of vodka.

“My grandmother witnessed all those events,” he goes on, “and told me there was no need to feel pity for the mermaid since it was subhuman. I should do better, she said, to contemplate the suffering of a single herring on my breakfast plate. If I must pity anyone, she went on, it should be Brauhard, who remained an upstanding citizen of Hiddensee despite the actions of his neighbors, although he never remarried and left his money to the widows of drowned sailors, some of whom, by our island tradition, were said to have awakened when their bodies settled on the seafloor and taken mermaids as brides until the day of judgment, when the drowned are supposed to rise up from each body of water.”

“Did Brauhard give any explanation of how he came to love a mermaid?” I ask. “Was he himself drowned and wakened?”

The engineer pauses. I frame him now; I keep this moment.

“I cannot say that,” he says. “Brauhard said only that the mermaids reminded him of angels he had seen painted on the walls of the whitewashed churches of our Hiddensee.”

I HAVE CLIMBED down a rope ladder from the
Eisfeld.
I stand below, on the barge. The leaving party is over. The wind rushes in off the fresh waters, filling my lungs with the fast-coming smell of Danish peat bogs. The wind beats against me and causes my hair to unfurl, as a flag should unfurl.

It is the giraffe called Sněhurka who towers over me at the front of the barge. I recognize her underbelly. I reach inside her crate and place a hand on her. The zoo historian has told me that Egyptians used a hieroglyph of a giraffe to indicate prophecy or foreknowledge. And I wonder why Sněhurka does not kick out at her crate. Can she not see that this Czechoslovakian barge is no ark of Noah, but is instead a vessel charged with delivering her into captivity?

I look up at her. I want her to meet my gaze, just as the ship’s mate said. She does not. She stares, unblinking, out toward Hamburg, with eyes large, entire as the Heligoland Bight. She might be sleeping, for giraffes are sleepless beasts, who sleep for only a few minutes each day with their eyes open, unblinking, and move as sleepwalkers in that short sleep, like the African somnambulist the Slovak spoke of, who fell to the dust and rose again still with her arms stretched up. I feel Sněhurka’s vein pulsing against my fingertips. I translate the pulse into numbers. I cannot help myself. I am a doubler: I am an agent of the shipping company and of hemodynamics also.

There is a sound. I see Schmauch in the air between his ship and the barge. He lands. He strides down the barge to me, hat in hand.

“I want to see the giraffes one more time,” he says.

“I thought they made you uneasy.”

“I must take my leave of them all the same. It has been a long voyage,” he says. “There have been moments, comrade.”

“A mermaid?”

He smiles.

“No, not this time. I was thinking of a day I spent fishing off Zanzibar. A blue day, blue as a flame. The engine of the ship had given out and we anchored there for several days, on a dazzling sea, waiting for the repairs to be made. A Persian motored out from Zanzibar in a dinghy to witness the giraffes. He offered to take me fishing. So I went fishing with that man: He was one of those regal men who devote their lives to hunting one living thing or another. We attached his dinghy to my ship by a long rope, as cosmonauts tether themselves to a space capsule. Or perhaps,” Schmauch says, reconsidering, “it was my crew who tied the rope, to prevent me drifting away to Zanzibar, just as a falconer tethers his hawk. In any case, we rowed out as far as the rope would allow and found ourselves sitting upon a dark bloom in the waters, which were sardines come north from the cold southern belt. We took turns casting into the bloom. We were not after the sardines, but the tuna and swordfish we could see parting the bloom. It did not matter to me that landing such a large fish on our small dinghy was unlikely. I was happy watching the sardines swelling and hollowing under us, like bees, or a flock of starlings billowing black at dusk over woods by the seashore. The Persian took it more seriously. He was a fine fisherman. You had only to watch the arc of the line over his shoulder as he cast to understand that. He hooked a swordfish and fought it hard until the line broke and then, without pausing, he tied on a new hook, baited it, and cast into the bloom. ‘Watch this, captain,’ he said. Sure enough, another swordfish ran straight at the bait and was alarmingly hooked through the top of its mouth. The Persian landed that swordfish in the dinghy. There was hardly enough room for it. It thrashed in the salt water at our feet and gashed my leg here, below the knee. It was only when the swordfish stilled, died, that the Persian pointed out that it was the same creature he had grappled with first, still with that hook in its mouth. The Persian held it up by its sword. ‘A swordfish lives by instinct,’ he said. ‘It has three seconds of memory. No more.’ He set down the fish and drew a circle in the air with his hands. ‘Here is the moment,’ he said. ‘It loops, like so, completes, and is gone. That is the mind of a swordfish,’ he said. It was a common occurrence to release a swordfish only to have it run straight back at the hook, without remembrance.”

Schmauch puts his hand out also and touches Sněhurka.

“I have thought often of that swordfish in the last weeks,” he says, “how it has no past and no future, but only the present parting of water before its blade, just as I stand on my ship’s bridge parting oceans, without past or future.”

SCHMAUCH HAS CLIMBED BACK UP to his ship and I am left alone now among the giraffes and their rising blood. The wind is still blowing hard over the plowed fields about Hamburg, allowing the Communist moment no purchase on this Czechoslovakian barge, and blowing such spirits as linger here away from me. I could speak to the sailors of ghosts, as they spoke to me of mermaids. I see outlines of the dead in ČSSR. Not just my grandfather waving to his planes. I see others also. There is no obvious hemodynamic explanation for my condition: It is more than clinical nostalgia. It is not that the dead step living into this 1973, or that I step into the past; I am not so fanciful. The explanation is more likely meteorological. I say only that it is natural for ghosts to linger in a windless country, where there is not even the faintest zephyr to part the dead from the living, that, in the absence of wind, they leave an outline on ČSSR I am sometimes able to frame and keep.

I glimpse another Czechoslovakia, which I sometimes call Tonakia because the men I see there wear trilbies or bowlers manufactured by the Tonak company. I see in Prague the capital of Tonakia also, which is the Prague of 1933 or some close year. I see quicklime outlines of a vendor hawking ties from a suitcase on Haštalská Street, and an aristocrat running down the center of Národní Street in top hat and tails. I see laundrywomen washing spectral clothes in the rapids of the Vltava before Josef Šejnost’s atelier on the Smetana Embankment, and horses stabled in their hundreds under the hill on which the Bohumil Kafka’s equestrian statue of the Hussite commander Žižka now stands totalitarian. I see students in heavy overcoats chalking a political manifesto on the steps of a convent on Vyšehradská Street, a tinker singing a Moravian folk song while pushing a cart down Belgická Street, and a blind busker winding his music box outside the Hotel Europa on Wenceslas Square. Coal smoke of the Communist moment mingles with coal smoke of Tonakia and drifts ginger and lime together over the outline of long-dead lovers kissing in the shadows of St. Jakub’s church on Malá Štupartská Street and settles in material and immaterial soot on the unfurled spectral wings of geese and swans, nailed like severed angels to the ghostly wooden boards of a butcher’s shop that no longer exists.