Giraffe (20 page)

He walks directly in without knocking. He is young, almost boyish. Blond hair falls diagonally across his face. He sweeps it back.

“Tadeáš Tůma?” he asks with a shy smile.

He wears foreign shoes and a foreign suit. He puts his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels. He exudes Prague. There is something familiar about him, removed from the Communist moment, as though he has stepped from a breezy Czechoslovakian film from before the war.

“You’re late,” I say. “I didn’t catch your name.”

He flushes. “I am without a name for the moment.”

“No matter. Take a seat, please. I have the results to the tests the ministry requested.”

He remains standing, rocking on his heels.

“Please do sit,” I say.

It is spring in the secret laboratory I direct, which stands on the banks of the little River Ohře, close to where it meets the Labe. The Communist moment continues here. Outside, a boy in a gas mask is cutting the grass with a scythe. Far away, the city of Saigon is falling. The laboratory is also without name. It is not marked on any map. We deal with animal diseases here. We test blood and tissue samples from beasts eaten away with one pestilence or another, which come to us under cover of night in locked-down trucks. We develop vaccines only; we have no business here with weapons. The plagues and contagion we handle are not generally harmful to human beings. They kill animals or ruin them as a unit of production, which is much the same to the State. The laboratory is an island of loneliness. No train runs to Prague from here, but instead there is a single carriage running once each day through a forest to the industrial towns under the mountains. Aside from the laboratory there is an old fortress of sloping red brick, the size of a town, green-moated and planted with lilacs.

“WOULD YOU CARE to be shown around?” I ask.

“Why not,” he says.

My secretary gives him a white lab coat and slippers. He pulls off his suit jacket and shoes. He folds the jacket with the silk lining out, on the back of a chair.

“What’s your field?”

“Hemodynamics,” he says. “Hence the giraffes.”

We shuffle in the slippers down corridors, from one disinfected room to another. Slippers are the style of ČSSR; we are meant to feel cozy in our isolation.

I stop in front of a vault door of dark gray metal. There is a wheel in the center that you turn counterclockwise to open the door. It makes me think of the hatch on a submarine tower that is quickly closed in the last moment before diving.

“Behind here are further sealed chambers in which the plagues are suspended at appropriate temperatures.”

“What security measures do you follow?”

Taking his elbow, I guide him upstairs, where no one will hear us.

“I can assure you we are very strict,” I say, lowering my voice. “We follow the rules set down by facilities in the USSR, such as the laboratory in Tajikistan, or the laboratory on the Baltic island of Hiddensee. As you know, we are under surveillance. We have certain officers assigned here for protection. They gather information from among our hundred and forty employees. They move among the employees regularly, using first one, then another.”

I should not have said
using;
I should have used another word.

He looks at me curiously. He is right to look at me in this way. It is unpleasant in here. It is malignant. My secretary watches me, someone else watches my secretary. The technicians are spied upon.

“Go on,” he says.

“There are rules for any laboratory of this kind. The civilian rules, if you like. We change our clothes in an outer building. We strip. We shower. We pass naked through a sealed room. We put on our work clothes on the other side. We follow a strict hygiene. No coming to work with a sickness. No raising of laboratory-sensitive animals at home — no cows or pigs. No visiting relatives who live near a collective farm.”

“Impressive,” he says flatly.

It is not. There is a fear of saboteurs. All plagues and blights, even those found in trees and root vegetables, are tested for a weapons signature. We shuffle around the laboratory from alarm to alarm, in rubber suits and masks with narrow plates of glass; but for our slippers we would appear like insects to one another. The surveillance is always in search of that one agent, or double agent, who might spread a contagion, man-made or natural, through the livestock of ČSSR, just as in 1950 American spies stole into Czechoslovakia and blighted the potato crop with what came to be known as the American bug. All things here are seen through the prism of contagion, yet the security measures are halfhearted. The windows are barred, but they open from the inside. I could let spores out into the sky. I could cast a vial into the waters of the Ohře, as they talk about in the Bible, and poison the Labe. The blood we test, we also pour into the Ohře. It blooms in a pool where the trout circle, like some prophecy of Libuše. Trout come up to the bloom, gulp blood, and move away. No one searches me coming or going, no one monitors the number of vials I place in the vault. I could cycle away past the fortress of sloping red brick to a cowshed and there spread pestilence. This young man, without name, was not fingerprinted or photographed at the entrance. He did not strip and shower. He did not pass through a sealed room. He offered a code word in Russian and walked straight in.

“CIGARETTE, PROFESSOR?”

He offers me a Red Star.

“No, thank you.”

“Do you mind if I do?”

“Not at all.”

He bows his head. He strikes a match and lights his cigarette with a flourish.

I open a window.

“What, no danger?” he asks lightly.

SUNLIGHT FLOODS THROUGH the metal bars and stands in grids on the wall of the corridor; it is a cage in here. The Ohře is running fast with melted snow from the fields. It courses around the gravel bar I sometimes wade out to with my fly rod. I point out to the young man the cannon positions in the fortress on the other side of the Ohře.

“The fortress looks like a starburst from above,” I say.

“HOW ABOUT THOSE TESTS,” he says. “What’s the verdict?”

“Guilty,” I say weakly.

He pales. He looks suddenly vulnerable, as though his thoughts have been elsewhere and this news has jolted him back.

“Run me through it, please,” he says. “I’ll have to report everything.”

He leans with his back against the metal bars. He smokes and listens intently but writes nothing down.

“We were given a tissue sample from the tongue of one of the giraffes. We tested it to determine the strain,” I say. “You should know there is not one single contagion in this case, but five or six related strains, which cause the same sickness. We have a vaccine against some of these strains but they are specific and have no effect on related strains.”

“You’re quite sure the giraffes have the contagion?” he says.

“Without question,” I say. “We repeated the test. They have the African strain, number two.”

“Do you have the vaccine for that strain?”

“No.”

“How long would it take to obtain and administer such a vaccine to livestock in a radius of twenty kilometers?”

“Months.”

“Sooner?”

“Impossible,” I say.

I TELL HIM NOW of the process of testing, of serologic and isolation testing, of catalysts suspended in petri dishes, corpuscles of sheep’s blood, injections, of blisters on the soft footpads of guinea pigs.

He nods slowly.

“Which animals are vulnerable?”

“All the even-toed ungulates,” I say. “Giraffes and camels, cows, sheep. Not horses, dogs, or people.”

“How dangerous is it?”

“That depends on how it manifested itself. If it was recently introduced, it is contagious in the extreme. If it was dormant for some years, for instance in a cyst under a hoof, and triggered by stress, then less so. Dormant strains take several passages, from one animal to another, to reach full strength.”

“Is there any way of knowing?” he asks.

“Not for sure.”

“What of the giraffes?”

“The policy is clear,” I say. “If an exotic animal has the contagion, it must be destroyed. There must be no risk of exposure to livestock.”

HE LIGHTS ANOTHER CIGARETTE and turns and stares at a weeping-willow tree across the Ohře, as though taking a photograph of it. I look beyond the willow to the spot where Jewish prisoners were forced at gunpoint to dump barrows of ash into the river. Thousands of Jews died from disease and hunger in the ghetto that existed inside the fortress during the war. They were cremated. Their ash was heavy, white in parts. The wheelbarrows had to be pushed by two people, two pushing the remains of thirty or forty. Those desolate brigades must have gone ever so slowly along the bank, by the trout pool. They must have struggled when they came down to the water. Some of the wheelbarrows must have been tipped in whole and washed out by the flow. A little of the ashes must have floated on the surface, like gruel, and flowed down through the Protectorate and through the Reich also, all the way to Hamburg, while the rest, the grit, sank straight to the bottom and is perhaps still there.

“OBVIOUSLY, THE OUTBREAK will need to be reported to the international authorities,” I say.

He flushes again. “That will not be possible.”

“The Office International des Épizooties must be told. That is the law.”

“This is a matter of national security,” he says, hardening. “National security is above the law. The OIE will not be informed. The orders are clear: You will cover up everything, write nothing down, give instructions orally. This is from the top, Tuma. This is from the Politburo.”

“I understand the order,” I say, after a silence. “They’re taking a terrible risk. Suppose the contagion is at full strength. Suppose it spreads from the zoo to a collective farm. Our economy is centrally planned. Our animals live in huge concentrations. There are two million cows and four million other livestock in ČSSR. You know how they grow and live in dark, slopping cities of sheds. The contagion can move between the sheds, like a fire, ravaging all the beasts in them and in the collective farms DDR and the farms of Poland. It can come in through the mouth or through broken skin. It can be carried in breath and saliva, in milk, in piss and shit, in hay, in other feed, by the fork turning the feed, by the worker turning the fork, or else by a bird flying overhead. In the early stages, the animal will run a high fever, the tongue will blister, there will be a massive reproduction of the virus in its circulatory and lymphatic systems. Then pox and sores will break out on the udders and on other parts of the body. The hooves will swell and bleed. The animal will no longer be able to stand. It will topple to the ground. Its gums will also swell and split. It will not be able to eat or drink. Even if it survives, it will be finished as a unit of production. You kill the animal and all of it is infected: the blood, the organs, the flesh, the skin, the eyes. Czechoslovakian animals have no immunity against this strain of the contagion. If it is carried out of the zoo on the air of our ČSSR, it would make preceding outbreaks look incidental.”

The young man looks at me steadily. His manner has straightened. He no longer seems to belong in a breezy film.

“Which is why any breach of confidentiality will result in immediate arrest,” he says.

“I insist you inform the zoo of these results. It’s a mistake not to tell them. It’s a question of decency. It will cause them hurt for a long time.”

“If we tell the zoo, there will be no secret. The zoo director will go to his friends abroad. There will be a protest. The international authorities will have to be told.”

“So what if they are told?”

“Meat and dairy production will be halted. The borders of ČSSR will be closed for months — all of them. There will be no agricultural exports of any kind. We will be marked out as the disease pocket of COMECON.”

“Only for a time,” I say, “until the contagion is brought under control.”

He pushes his hands into his pockets. “The first casualty will be the zoo. The shit of every animal there will be examined under a microscope — your microscope. Whatever you find, even if every test comes up negative, all the animals in the zoo will die and all the animals in the fields and sheds around the zoo will die. All the deer in the forest will be shot, even the stags. The whole land around the fishpond there will be emptied of life. Because that’s how it is when national security is brought into question.”

I say nothing. I look out to the river.

“This will be done by flame,” he says. “The zoo animals and cows and deer will be burned on pyres reaching up to the sky in columns of fatty smoke. The zoo will be plowed under. The staff will be dispersed. There will only be a field, with no memory of a giraffe or of any exotic animal.”

He says all this ever so softly, holding on to a cigarette, as though his hold on the present were only through this tiny glowing cylinder.

There is no stand to be made here. I have given over the results. I have protested. That is all. The State has no interest in bad news. Train wrecks do not make it into its papers, much less contagion. It mercilessly enforces silence. I play my part. I enforce the directives of Soviet laboratories. I copy their methods immediately, without question. I put Russian journals on my shelf and keep British journals in my drawer.

“There’ll be a further investigation to make sure the laboratory is not responsible for releasing the contagion,” he says.

“You have no grounds for suspicion!”