Giraffe (12 page)

Some of these dogs appear before me now. They bound along, not venturing out onto the thin ice, but kicking up snow at its edge, barking dementedly, stopping, starting, keeping pace, all the while looking at me. I paddle away from them at a steady pace until I can no longer hear their barking. I am overcome with silence. There is no sound but that of an adder slivering across the ice. I love this marsh, I love it knowing there are places that are not so still and quiet. I stand up in my canoe and stretch my arms up for exclamation, as well as for balance. I am alone in my place at the end of the Svět, or world, the open waters of which I can make out beyond the marsh, polished black like a sacramental stone. I sense in this moment I am more than I expected myself to be, that I am a character in a fairy tale, a prickless hero, one of those noble and true characters who find themselves rescued from a hard life by the intervention of magic, but the magic has not happened to me yet, or upon me. I am sensible to my condition: I am a worker in a workers’ state.

I stand with my arms stretched up in my unlikely canoe, balanced in my hard life. The hands I open to the air are callused and shredded from days of wading out with other workers into deeper water, to my chest, and harvesting reeds with a rough blade. It is not the season for cutting reeds. I am alone in this marsh at the end of the Svět, or world, except for the mad dogs and the skein of red-breasted geese, which flies now under the clouds toward me. The geese are newly arrived from the northern tundra, although this too is impossible; this is the wrong season for geese. They drop lower. Their honking intrudes on the silence. It is distant and intermittent at first and now clearer. They are fat and rubychested; they shift in space, taking turns to fly at the point; they pass over me toward the open water of the Svět, beating music from the air, so close I reach up now and brush their webbed feet, which are charcoal-colored in the winter light.

It is not the season for cutting reeds. It is not the season for red-breasted geese. It is the moment for magic. I reach in my pocket and take out a handful of bright-colored beans. I examine them and throw them one at a time into the water. They are large and heavy. They shine as they sink. I watch them disappear yellow blue green into blackness. I breathe in, I breathe out. It is enough. There is a bubbling from below, a stench of disturbed bottom mud, then a green shooting beanstalk, as fast as a jack-in-the-box, thick as a tree, high as a tree, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, and up, eighty-nine trees, one hundred and forty-four, two hundred and thirty-three, and up, six hundred and ten trees high, yet remaining a beanstalk with the elastic ladder stems of a beanstalk.

The air and water are quieted. I paddle over and leap from my unlikely canoe. There is an instant now in my flight when I look down and see my reflection and understand myself to be no longer a girl, but a woman. I take hold of the beanstalk and settle myself upon it. I run my fingers across its skin of gooseberry down and bumblebee hair. I set a foot on a stem, pull myself up, and so begin climbing. The magic has happened to me and I climb without fear toward the vaulted heavens, as though in a fairy tale. Far, far up, at the height of two hundred and thirty-three trees, my canvas tennis shoes slip from my feet to the Svět. I climb for many more hours, for a day, even, until the red-breasted geese are no more than motes of dust below me, the town and the castle at the end of the Svět no more than the slightest ’, the forest and the patchwork fields small as a;, and the Svět itself a black (). I pass at last from clear sky into snow clouds. My breathing becomes shallow and rapid in the thin air. I lose my footing many times. I am buffeted by fierce winds, which ride here, but never down on the Czechoslovakian marsh.

I break through into another world, without birds, without clouds, above all precipitation except meteor showers. It is a quite different country, squeezed in between marsh and cosmos, a rolling gray land, not Czechoslovakian gray, not normalized in that way, but a gray that comes with lunar proximity. I step off the beanstalk onto the land, which is made of clouds — is a cloudscape, not a landscape. These clouds have substance; they are to air as ice is to water. My feet make no sound in them. When I twirl like a ballerina, I feel myself to be twirling in powdery snow. I walk across this land. I fall down between clouds. It is a struggle to climb up again. Over and over, I slip back into this crevasse until I find purchase, just here, on a lightning bolt. I walk more carefully, watching my step. I lie down and nap at intervals and when I wake, I look up at the stars, which are so close, and think to find new ones with my naked eye, and I hold out my hands to passing cosmonauts, wishing only to stop one of them and practice my Russian.

I do not ever stray out of sight of the beanstalk: I have no great expectations of the magic. I think I see my parents walking over down a cumular slope toward me, from another plane, but when I approach I see they are only shapes of my mother and father, formed from a collage of remembered photos. My parents have not magically appeared to me; neither have deities, angels, or giants with castles in the sky. There are no oracles or sudden riches of golden eggs. I do not mind: It is enough for me to be suspended on this cloudscape.

I circumambulate the beanstalk until the day is ended and the sun sets. The clouds melt under me a little, just as during the day they gathered moisture from the marsh and thickened. I sink in up to my knees. I wade the last steps to the beanstalk. I take hold of its gooseberry and bumblebee skin. I take one last look at the meteor showers, and my parents blowing flat and tattered in the astral wind. I begin climbing down. I slide from one stem to another. A lightning bolt gashes me. I howl. I slide down through the snow clouds and come again into the enormous sleet-washed space, which is carpeted, I see now, with ČSSR. It is still winter in this space. I see white forests stretching all the way to Prague. I slide down for many hours. I rest on bigger leaves. I continue, until my thighs are rubbed raw, and I reach the thick air where the red-breasted geese fly. They fly beside me, beating off moonbeams. I take a deep breath. Down I go until I am thirteen trees high over the Svět and now three and here, on this broken stem, I slide from the beanstalk to a gravel road outside the front gates of the zoo, which stands near the town at the other end of the Svět.

I stand here on the road, barefoot in the slush. I see the chapel of St. Michael. I see the slogans, the hammer and sickle above the brewery. It is strange to me how I remember all this around me that did not exist on the marsh. I look across the Svět to the town and see the castle, the brewery, the spires, turrets, and chimneys, and my
panelák.
The windows of my room are open. My light is on. I cannot see myself curled on a cot below a picture of the Alps. I cannot see myself and I feel a parting within me, which is the knowledge that I am sleepwalking again.

I open my eyes once. Aha! This is revelation. I am not the same person. It is not the same Svět, or world. It is obvious to me that no one harvests reeds on the marsh at the end of the Svět, or sets dogs down there each spring to starve or grow mad. I have no unlikely canoe. Skeins of red-breasted geese do not ever migrate over our town. There are no bright-colored beans in my pocket and consequently no beanstalk six hundred and ten trees high. I cannot say there is no magic, but it has not visited me; it has not raised me up or papered a cloud with a collage of my mother and father, and I do not ever expect it to, except in sleepwalking.

I walk away from the zoo gates, which are fashioned in metal shapes of giraffes and elephants. I walk toward the castle in the town. I open my eyes a second time. I am awake on the stairwell of my
panelák.
I am curled up. I am shivering on concrete, between floors. It is dark. There are no goose wings beating moonbeams onto me. I get to my feet. I look down. I am shoeless: My feet are bare and wet and covered in blades of summer grass and daisies. I climb the stairs. It is quiet in the building. The door to my flat is open. I step inside. I close it gently behind me. I have opened my eyes twice: Am I awake? I climb into my cot under the poster of the Alps. I close my eyes and I pray now for a dreamless sleep.

MIDSUMMER’S DAY

JUNE 24, 1973

T
ODAY IS MIDSUMMER’S DAY — the nativity of St. John, whose head was paraded on a salver. I am journeying onward to the zoo in a truck carrying four of the giraffes, including Sněhurka. Other trucks have left before us, packed with the vertical beasts, carrying away Vokurka and Hus also, waving his safari hat. I am dusty with river mud from the quay in Ústí nad Labem and softened by several glasses of beer.

It is more parched today than yesterday. Perhaps Hus is right. Perhaps the world is turning on its axis, hippos will come to wallow in the Labe, and Czechoslovakians will come to believe that it is they who have migrated to ČSSR and the giraffes who were here all along. I slump back in the cab of the truck and let my country come at me. Thistles burst from tall grass and rodents I see swirling and gleaming white-toothed and brown and black in the hedgerows. The woods we pass are as thick and lustrous as the jungles of Zaire, where giraffes are compacted down, day by day, into okapi. We drive carefully along back roads, avoiding bridges and skirting the town of Mělník, where the Vltava meets the Labe, the same Vltava that flows by the shipping office and beneath Baba Hill, on whose waters I saw a swan that in its furled state reminded me of the archangel Michael, a snow-whiteness that now makes me think of Sněhurka’s underbelly. I turn to view her and the other giraffes through the window in the back of the cab. The narrowness of the window, a slit in metal, seems to frame their coming captivity. Sněhurka stands off to one side. Her legs are planted for balance, her neck bends, gives as if swaying underwater. She is taller and prouder than the others, or perhaps this is just my imagination, perhaps this is only because I recognize her. They are blind to ČSSR. Their eyes are shut tight. Only when the truck stops do they open. We pass through the center of another town, another broken place, but broken so long ago, by Swedes in the Thirty Years’ War, so as to be a necropolis, whose cobbled streets are set with gravestones of colored marble. Lungs are scorched in the chemical plant on its outskirts; pigs are hitched up on hooks in the meat factory here and cut apart while still conscious: There is hardly a pig in the world who escapes a violent end. The Dresden feeling comes at me again, not precisely of a firestorm, horses, or broken-necked giraffes, or even of this necropolis of marble gravestones, lungs, and twirling pigs, but an understanding only that we are bound together, all of us, by suffering, even more than joy.

I roll down the window. In comes the smell of summer. It is more than rebirth. It is the richest rainy season on the nostrils of the giraffes, of soil, grasses, hops, fruits, of ponds opening and gaining from the bodies of teenagers who swim in them by day and bathe naked in them by night, when there is no one to observe them but a fox silent in the trees. We pass a cement factory in front of which sit workers in stained overalls, smoking, not looking up, not noticing the giraffes that move by them, and the smell of the Communist moment sinks through this sweet summer air in leaded gasoline and black dust.

“We should be heading farther on, to the industrial towns at the foot of the mountains,” the truck driver says.

“Why there?” I ask.

“This is not such a high place, where we are going now. These animals need something to look down on them. Some mountain. Like they had in Africa,” he says.

“Do you know mountains?”

“I was a mountaineer at one time,” he says. “I climbed all the highest peaks of the Soviet Union. I climbed far above the snow leopards in the Pamirs of Tajikistan.”

There is a suggestion in him, in his mannerisms and in his interest in giraffes, of where exactly they have come from and what their habits are, of a previous life, different from his present life.

“What were you doing before this?” I ask. “Apart from mountaineering.”

“I was an engineer at a factory outside Pardubice. We produced turbines for jet engines and shipped them down the Labe on barges.”

“You were fired for political reasons?”

“I caught a worker stealing.”

“You reported him?”

“He was stealing a little each day — cables, plugs, copper wire. I had no choice.”

“How did he react?”

“The usual. ‘You’re a bourgeois, picking on a worker.’ He reported me to the factory committee for my political views.”

“What happened then?”

“I was asked to sign a paper in support of the State. I refused and was fired.”

“You do not look so unhappy.”

“I spoke out before the committee. I held nothing back. I was punished accordingly. The punishment makes me happy — it is a liberation, even,” he says, changing gears. “There’s nothing to be compromised by driving a truck between one town and another.”

WE IDLE AT A JUNCTION by a pale meadow in which a beekeeper tends his hives. The beekeeper stops and stares through his veiled hood at the giraffes. They lean toward him now in return, like giant flowers his bees might feast on. This is a service the giraffe performs: It moves toward those who stand still before it and offers them a sense of otherness.

It is such a bright Midsummer’s Day. The play of light on the concrete granary towers and the military silos we pass on these back roads triggers in me, in a turning of comets, a memory of last summer’s Olympic games in Munich, television images of monochromatic tracksuits with bold lettering on the back

of sprinters and pole-vaulters in forward and upward motion, booming Afro haircuts, mustaches on swimmers, light playing on the concrete walls of the Olympic stadium, light playing also on a concrete path on the body of a murdered Israeli athlete.