Giraffe (11 page)

“Take up a pencil,” I say down the phone. “I will begin.”

THERE IS A BARGE tied up by the customs house in front of our barge. It is packed with horses, dogs, a painted caravan, and a truck with Romanian registration. They are Gypsies. They have no home to return to in joy. They find solace in movement. When they are forcibly settled by the authorities and their caravans are taken from them, they become like a broken people. They dance now on the riverbank before the giraffes. They wail and shout up to the beasts. Naked children and children in ankle-length dresses and white goats in yellow ribbons run in delighted circles. A man with skin as dark as that Indian falling into the Ganges plays a feverish tune on his fiddle. Older girls dance around him. I am not diverted by the blood moving up within them, but frame the necklaces of silver coins beating on their chests. The giraffes sway toward the Gypsies, drawn by the music and the coins. Hus invites an old Gypsy woman, a matriarch, onto the barge. He speaks to her as though she were an exotic. And she is the last of her kind: The journeys she has made have been replaced by other, faster journeys. She has spent many seasons behind horses and has seen the world in the narrows of the caravan’s hooped roof in lines of mud, ice, horse manure, verges risen in summer, wasps in autumn feeding on fallen pears, wildcats leaping large across wintry bridle paths, of the sun moving steadily across the sky, changing the light within the caravan, of the quietude of mornings, matched by the music and arguments of the night, a clip-clop near and through Carpathian valleys far away, in time with the passing of self. She is almost blind: She can hardly make out the heads of the giraffes Hus points out to her. Understanding this, Hus reaches down to the woman and takes her hands and presses them firmly against the flank of a Rothschild bull.

“Woman,” Hus says. “We call this animal a giraffe.”

She runs her fingers down the lines of the hide. Her face lights up. She speaks in her own Gypsy tongue. She moves her body closer to the giraffe. She places her head against the dampness of the animal. She says something more. It becomes a narrative. A boy is brought forward from the riverbank to translate for her.

“She is saying, ‘There was a storm on a bowl of water circled by sand,’ ” the boy relates. “She says, ‘This animal was floating on the water when the sky went dark all around. The wind rose. It was hard for the animal to breathe: It felt it could not breathe. Sand blew from around the edges of the bowl into its eyes. The water grew rough. It was hard for this animal to stand. It was thrown from side to side.’ She says, ‘This animal did not fall. It was another who fell.’ ”

The old woman takes her hands away, kisses them, and presses them again on the giraffe.

MY HOMECOMING TO THIS ČSSR of 1973 is not like the return of Pip from the Orient, or of fictional Emil to his hometown of Neustadt. When I see gray swans flying by the castle in the town of Děčín, I feel myself a foreigner. I think now I should have swum perpendicularly to the West German riverbank and exposed myself to the nudists. I should have had them deliver me to the authorities in that sphere and spoken to them of crimson stars in femoral arteries. I seem to have no understanding of the Communist moment they call
normalizace,
or normalization, whereby hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovakians have lost their jobs for opposing the invasion of 1968, the best replaced with the worst, the patriots with lackeys, the questing with the credulous few. I sit at the front of this barge and the droplets of the Labe wet me and wet Sněhurka behind me and I think that I have not emerged from the side of a hill, but am another soul, windburned and shipwrecked on the shores of Schleswig-Holstein, strayed up the Labe, through Goethe’s gorge, into a windless and haunted hinterland.

My bearings come slowly, like a weather balloon’s descending onto Cuban hills. I see leviathan gravel-making machines in a quarry on a hillside and rectangles cut into the forests on higher mountains that are pistes I have skied. I have carved those steep slopes on which chairlifts now rock lonesomely in parched summer air. I have stood at their sides over my poles, breathing hard into whiteness. My own sense of captivity comes from a recurring nightmare I have of these pistes. I am a skier — a child. I wear goggles, a ČSSR ski hat, jacket, and racing pants. I am clipped into waxed and sharpened skis. The bindings are tight. I have all my equipment, but no movement. I am caged. I drop into a tuck and clatter into metal bars. I am a caged animal. I call out to those who carve turns around me. They pay me no attention. I call out to the
pisteurs
with their shovels. They glance at me sadly: I am not even a hunger artist to them. I cannot do anything in the cage but ski three or four slalom turns and then herringbone up the slope again, over and over, until the snow melts under me and the grass grows up and I am forced to take off my skis and boots, my hat, jacket, and racing pants, and lie naked on the ground, motionless, waiting for night to come and the stars to show themselves.

We tie up the barge finally in the center of Ústí nad Labem, the town where the opera singer alighted from the train to sing the part of a water nymph. We take our bags and check into a new riverside hotel. Inside the lobby, it is all lacquered plywood and factory-produced tile mosaics describing nothing. I go up and shower and shave. I pack away my giraffe-smelling tracksuit. I dress in a clean white shirt and tie and file with the others into the hotel dining room. A window runs the length of the room, through which we can see the giraffes on the barge in this oily summer light as in a painting by Cranach. Some of the giraffes drop their heads and lift them again, as horses do when trying to loosen their bit. Others remain still and marked above the river in
f
shapes, just as in that photograph in an East German magazine I have seen, supposedly of the Loch Ness monster in Scotland.

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:

ST. JOHN’S EVE

JUNE 23, 1973

T
HIS 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.