Giraffe (27 page)

THE RENDERING PLANT IS A whaling station of my imagination, a pier smeared crimson with fat jutting into cobalt Antarctic waters in which elephantine mermaids feed on krill and penguins, but beached somehow upon landlocked Czechoslovakia.

The smell is of giraffes being rendered and of rancid chicken feathers filling a warehouse to the ceiling waiting to be melted into a putty and fed to other chickens, just as the giraffes will be ground into dry meal and fed to cattle in the neighboring collective farms.

“The meal will be perfectly sterile, comrade,” the head of the plant says. “No contagion can survive our machines.”

He hands over several files of paperwork.

“It hasn’t been an easy night,” he says. “We’ll need compensation. The giraffe bones have beaten the blades inside our Destruktor machine out of shape.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I say.

I tear the files in two and hand them back to him.

“Put these in with your chicken feathers,” I say.

MY ARM IS TO MY mouth. My goggles are steamed up with deathly fluids. I almost slip into a hole swilling with pale blue bowels. The butcher who cut out the tongue is here on the cutting floor. He’s swinging an ax. Sněhurka hangs, enormous, upside down on a metal chain, together with the remains of a Rothschild bull and calf. Her neck is broken; her tongue hangs out. Her eyes are open. A square of hide has been cut from her body.

“Some of her hide is missing,” I say.

The butcher shrugs. “Lots of things missing here, pal,” he says.

I ask him about the pregnancy — she must have been pregnant. He takes a narrow blade, like a screwdriver. He sinks it into her belly. Clear fluid comes out. He moves the blade around.

“She’s full all right, pal,” he says.

THERE ARE POOLS AT THE back of the rendering plant in which the blood, the giraffe blood, is cleaned into a clear fluid. The fluid drains into a stream and flows with the stream by fields of rape, through oak groves, down into the River Orlice, into the Labe with its Czech-speaking
vodníks,
down to the port of Hamburg, into the Heligoland Bight, across the North Sea, skirting the English salt marshes where Pip tended Magwitch, drifting into the Atlantic, washing chemicals over tapering glass eels, sinking deep off Mauritania into the ocean conveyor, circulating north on the conveyor all the way to the Barents Sea, where fictional Emil perhaps drowned soundlessly in a U-boat, and ending in a floe of jade ice on which a polar bear waits patiently over a breathing hole, with cocked paw, for surfacing seals. Our souls resemble water, Goethe says. So too our bodies. There is a flow within us, rising and falling, unidirectional to the heart. There is a flow without also. We circulate. We are drawn up, we fall back down to earth again. It is all hemodynamics.

I PUT MY HAND ON the shoulder of the other StB man. I drop my head. I breathe deeply. I have nothing left to vomit.

I LEAVE MY IMAGINED whaling station. I strip off the chemical-warfare suit; again I have had to wear it. I throw away the goggles. I am perfunctorily showered.

“How far is the nearest village?” I say to the plant manager.

“Five kilometers.”

“I’ll walk. I need some air.”

I take the metal case from the car. I handcuff it to my wrist. I send the car ahead. I will return to Prague later today. I will sit on the roof terrace on Baba Hill, not mentioning any of this to my family, not looking in the direction of the Prague Zoo.

I AM SURROUNDED BY fields of yellow rape. The witching moon has faded into a blue sky. This is the end of the road. It runs from here in a perfectly straight line to the village. It must have been laid down by the Nazis when they built the rendering plant in their campaign to sanitize their Protectorate. There are blossoming fruit trees lining either side of the road. The stream runs beside it in a ditch, headed for somewhere beyond the Barents Sea. The nettles are thick along the stream. I part them. I crouch down, I teeter. I put a hand to the water and calculate the flow. Finger-length trout dart away from me.

I go on under blossoms — pink, magnolia, apple-white, and snow-white. I am not Pip. Fictional Emil is far away, is soundless. I see a flight of newly returned swallows dipping toward the rapeseed and rising again. The professional cyclists of the Tour of Czechoslovakia must be awake now and racing hard toward the black mills of Austerlitz, following the route crows took in the time of Napoleon and still take now. I see the village in the distance, a little downhill. I walk toward it, back into the Communist moment. The May Day parade will be smaller there this year — the dairy workers will be forbidden to march. The road under me has been sprinkled with chloramine. I leave my footsteps in it, some kind of vertical outline of myself. I tighten my grip on the metal case, in which are my forty-seven test tubes of giraffe blood and a single giraffe tongue floating in preservative. Music comes to me, forms. It is the last piece of our Czech-born Gustav Mahler’s
Song of the Earth:
“Der Abschied,” or “Farewell.”

ALL THE PAPERS ARE SHREDDED, the films exposed, the giraffes burned, so: farewell. The song plays symphonically in the weightless deep of my brain. A poet waits for a friend in the twilight. It is spring there too. While he waits, he looks upon the beauty of the earth. There is birdsong. Owls swoop in long, free cadenzas, not tethered by any conductor. Dragonflies flit on the water, deer move in the forest. Perhaps it is a place like that fishpond by the zoo, which they call the Svět. The friend arrives, only to say farewell forever. The moment is darkening, exquisite, finally resolute. The last words belong to Mahler:

ST. HUBERT’S DAY

NOVEMBER 3, 1999

S
HOOT HRABAL ON THE balcony,” I say to the photographer.

It’s getting late. The light is going.

Hrabal zips up his tracksuit and shuffles out with the photographer. He was a butcher of some kind, in some state enterprise. Not a Communist, not ever, he says. He’s been unemployed for years. He’s thinking of voting Communist now — there’s the story.

I follow them out. It’s freezing. Hrabal lights a cigarette, a Camel. He’s got emphysema, but he can’t help himself. I get him to show me the view. There’s a nice red light; there’s already snow on the mountains. The industrial town sprawls out on all sides in other gray panel-built tower blocks and extinct chimneys.

“The air is clearer now since the foundries closed,” Hrabal says. “You can see all the way across to the ski jump now.”

It’s true. I see bodies launching off a ramp, seemingly out across the town.

“What’s new, Hrabal?” I say. “What’s changed?”

He points out buildings: a new supermarket, a new indoor ice-hockey arena, a new Škoda car dealership.

“Make sure you get the mountains in the background,” I say to the photographer. “And tell him not to smile. He’s supposed to look aggrieved.”

“There used to be trams running far out into the country-side,” Hrabal says. “All gone.”

I see a Czech Railways train, just one carriage, red — like one of those little Swiss trains — moving away into a forest.

“That’s where we’re going tomorrow, Steve,” the interpreter says, pointing to the forest. “The fishpond, remember? The carp harvest?”

I turn to the photographer.

“You’ve got those pictures already, haven’t you?” I say.

“Sure,” he says, shooting Hrabal with a fisheye. “Good shots for the weekend paper. Carp in copper light, a castle, the works.”

HRABAL INSISTS ON MAKING US TEA.

“Quickly, then,” I say to the interpreter. “I don’t want to be here all night.”

We sit in his living room. It is quite bare. There is only, on the floor, an animal skin, russet and snow-white in parts.

“ASK HIM IF IT’S a leopard,” I say.

The interpreter calls Hrabal in from his kitchen. She asks the question.

He looks at the skin. He laughs.

“
Zirafa!
”

“It’s a giraffe skin,” the interpreter says.

“From Africa,” I say.

“
Ne!
” the butcher answers, directly. “
Není africká. Je československá. Je to československá Zirafa!
”

“What’s that?”

“He says, No, the giraffe was from Czechoslovakia. He says it was a Czechoslovakian giraffe.”

Giraffe
is a true story. The names and the order of events have been changed to protect living persons.

Those familiar with former Czechoslovakia will recognize Amina’s town as a composite of Dvůr Králové, Kuks, and Třeboň. The secret laboratory is in the garrison town of Terezín, where thirty-three thousand Jews and hundreds of Czechoslovakian resistance fighters perished during the Second World War. The rendering plant sits a little way from the village of Žichlínek.

The Dvůr Králové Zoo is still awaiting an official acknowledgment and explanation of the liquidation of its forty-nine giraffes, forty-seven of them on the night of April 30, 1975. It was the largest captive herd in the world. Twenty-three of them are thought to have been pregnant.

Thanks to the zoo, to veterinarian Dr. S., who was much maligned in the matter, to the sharpshooting forester Mr. P., who still has nightmares about pulling the trigger, and to all the sleepwalkers by day and by night in the ČSSR 1973-75.

Thanks to Prof. H., for returning from retirement to his secret laboratory. To the Vánoční Ozdoby Factory in Dvůr Králové—may your Christmas decorations twinkle on. To the butchers and drivers of the Veterinární Asanacní Ústav in Žichlínek.

Thanks also to K., A., and M., for your translation and insights; you dug out the truth.

Or most of it: Prof. K., Prof. D., and Dr. T. may shed further light on whether the giraffes needed to be shot. Their records have disappeared; their memory is faulty. At least one giraffe tongue was sent to the university in Brno: It has not been found. Nor is there any trace of the jars of giraffe blood collected by a security-service operative on the night of the shooting.

KABUL AND PRAGUE, JML