Giraffe (4 page)

“I want you to listen to me now, Emil,” my father said.

“I’m listening.”

“This other Emil wants to show us it is possible for a child to be upstanding without the authority of a uniform.”

“A child such as me?”

“Such as you.
Tischbein
means table leg in German. You can depend on a
tischbein.
Just as there is no question the Tischbeins, mother and son, despised all the Nazis stood for. That’s why the Nazis burned
Emil and the Detectives.
They thought it subversive. They threw
Emil
on the pyre.”

“They burned him, really?”

“Yes, imagine that,” my father said. “As if he were a pestilence.”

I DO IMAGINE IT. Fictional Emil going up in flames, page by page, hands in pockets, rocking back on his heels, his shy smile not changing, his innocence intact. There is no more book-burning.
Emil and the Detectives
simply goes unpublished. A few copies of the book are locked away in the cellars of my country’s libraries, secured there behind heavy doors so that no one can hear fictional Emil’s cries of “Stop, thief!” as he races through the streets of Berlin.

There are other signs of burning in this ČSSR of 1973. We run here and there through the woods in fear of mass incineration during nuclear drills, remembering as we run in suits and masks students who doused themselves in gasoline and made human torches of themselves in protest at our captivity. Pinned to the breast of every child during sessions of Communist indoctrination, there are enamel badges showing three flames, the largest for Party members, the smallest for little children learning to march and sing workers’ songs, and the other for teenagers asked to stand at attention beside the grave of a revolutionary martyr, on which flickers an eternal flame. This is another thing I notice about Communism: how its youthful symbol is a book of knowledge set alight and no one comments on it.

THE LIGHT IS ALCHEMICAL in the kitchen now, on the clear fluted jars of dried mushrooms and forest honey. I pick up a paper airplane from a chair and float it across the room. An old postcard rests against a jug of wildflowers on the long table. Only objects with utility or resonance remain apparent in our house: The card must have been left out for a purpose. I pick it up. It was sent from Munich in 1899 to a long-dead Freymann, living then in the Hradčany district of Prague. The address marks out Bohemia as a province of Austria. The message is written in a florid hand but conveys only that the sender will return to Prague by the Thursday morning train. I turn it over. A self-portrait by Albrecht Dürer stares out at me. It dates from 1500. I study the braided hair, the trimmed beard, the expensive fur coat of martens and mink. I note the long fingers scandalously set in mock benediction: This is Dürer as Christ. I hold the postcard up to this strange light. Art can puncture time, so that what has passed can become what is yet to be. The note on the card was written in expectation of a journey to a Bohemia that is no more, while Dürer’s self-portrait is futuristic, pushed far out beyond this ČSSR. And this is the way it is with the photographs on the walls of the villa. They were taken by avant-garde Czechoslovakian photographers before the Second World War, before the exterminations, the clearances, the departures and silences, but they are openings, windows speaking to me of some moment not yet arrived.

I VENTURE ONTO the observation deck on the roof terrace, which juts out over the garden like a diving board or a gang-plank. My grandfather had it built: He owned a small airline and wished to see his planes taking off from a nearby grass runway. The pilots dipped low over Nad Pat’ankou Street in those hopeful days, and my grandfather leaned back against the deck railings and waved his hat at them as they set off for Dresden and Vienna and sometimes as far as Bucharest, which was all glamour then, with a Columbia Records shop near Palatul Telefoanelor selling all the new tunes and Dragomir Niculescu’s delicatessen on the corner of Calea Victoriei supplying the fine breads and cheeses, champagnes, beers, and chocolates. “A Dacian King Kong Manhattan,” my grandfather said of the oil barons and Transylvanian industrialists, from whom he made plenty of money. It is my habit to stand on the observation deck on clear mornings and evenings in search of beauty. The photographs in the house have done this to me. They have given me an eye that does not sweep as a human eye should sweep, as a cinematographer sweeps, but one which is always stopped photographic in search of beauty.

I look about me and frame and shutter some beauty now. I stare at the
paneláks,
which are tower blocks made of thin concrete panels, rising gray from Bohnice Hill. I keep a few of their windows that are flecked with twilight, like gem-stones. I keep the portion of the sky that is spangled with coming stars. I keep the kit of pigeons flying in an arrowhead formation down the River Vltava, which flows black and brown, silent, at the base of Baba Hill. I stop the pigeons as they touch the Vltava with their wings. I watch the kit rise now toward the red-starred fighter jets patrolling far above. I keep the white contrails the fighter jets let out, that join one emerging star to another as children join dots to form a picture. I watch these contrails dissolve into the finest tissue lines, like the scars on my wrist where I cut myself with a pencil-sharpener blade as a boy, letting out droplets of blood. I most often frame the way light strikes objects or landscapes. People are harder to frame. They meet my eye when I stare at them and cause me to turn away. If I frame a person, it is fleeting, when he or she is unaware, caught at a strange angle, or in repose. Animals are easier. They move more predictably. I know this because the Prague Zoo is just down there, on the far bank of the Vltava. I can see the cages strung along the riverbank (when the floods came, they carried off a Persian leopard, which miraculously made it, bedraggled, to the shore downstream, where it prowled the flooded meadows for months afterward). On clear mornings I can frame the sea lions parting the waters of their kidney-shaped pool, but it is too dark now to make out the sea lions or to discern the whiteness of the polar bear; it is too dark even to see the tiger burning bright.

I lean over the railing. I measure the space between the deck and the sloping garden. I feel gravity coming up at me, as if with hands, to pull me underwater. I am drawn to the edge of things, to margins and borders. I stand beside windows. I hike up to escarpments and teeter at the lip of limestone quarries. In 1961 my mother was on a team of architects who built the noted swimming pool in the Podolí district of Prague. She designed the high-diving platform. We venture to Podolí once or twice each summer, as a family. The point is not to weave a front crawl through the crowds in the pool, or to sunbathe beside the pool, but to admire the form of her tower, rising slender, yes, like a giraffe. I climb to the top of the platform on such outings. I stand at the edge, at the head of the giraffe, my toes out in space, my hands at my sides. It is my intention to dive. I look out. There is a fine view of Prague up there — not planetary black and gold, but green and blue. I look down at the pool, far below. Invariably, I see a few faces upturned toward me, looking at me, as did the elderly couple when I appeared to them in the triptych of my imagination. It is only then that I experience vertigo. Dizziness overcomes me. I know vertigo has a hemodynamic explanation: It is nothing more than restricted flow through my vertebral artery. Still, I cannot let go. Fictional Emil would dive. He would do a swan dive. Pip would dive. He would be amazed and humbled, but he would dive. He would carefully take off his jacket and laborer’s boots and set them on the platform, and he would fall without understanding, grabbing the air, snatching at it as he fell, in trousers and shirt, calling out for a blacksmith. I stumble backward from the edge. I grab railings, inspired by the railings I grip now. I persuade myself that I am being sensible, that I would drift in my dive under a gust of wind and strike concrete, ending up with a broken neck, paralyzed, with nothing to frame but a ceiling, and not even the cathedral ceiling of Kant. But there is no wind in our ČSSR. There is not even the faintest zephyr to stir the flags of the Communist moment. I teeter, I peer down. But in the end I am about safety; I make the safe choice.

I MOVE BACK from the railing and step dizzily to the study at the far end of the roof terrace. I switch on a lamp. I arrange my giraffe papers and the ring binder from the shipping company on the desk and lay out the diagrams of blood flow on the floor: all the capillaries and shunts I have so far traced through the mesh of the giraffe’s wonder net.

The study is three walls of glass and one of brick. There are two black-and-white photographs on the brick wall that have never changed position. I know them as openings, other types of windows into past and future moments. The first is of Prague Castle in 1932. It was taken from high up on a south-facing flying buttress of St. Vitus’s Cathedral, our national church, looking down into the third courtyard of the castle. The view is vertiginous — a suicidal plunge. My eye is not drawn now to the baroque palaces lining the edge of the courtyard or to the needle obelisk in the center, but to the flagstones of the courtyard arranged in a diagonal grid of black-and-white squares. It is an optical illusion, I know, perhaps induced by blood flow, but I do not see a commonplace pattern. I see something more sinister: The flagstones appear to me as a grid of cages, a captivity into which one might fall.

The second photograph was taken in India. A man falls face-first into the River Ganges, his arms stretched up. He wears a cloth around his waist, but is otherwise naked. His face is touching the sacred waters: The bridge of his nose has not yet broken the skin of the river, while his mouth, chin, chest, and palms are already submerged. Streamers of bandage float about the pilgrim, and flowers and spent pieces of charcoal from funeral pyres. The surface teems with reflections of the quick and the dead, but the crop is such that none of them are in view. It is a lustrous print, black as boot polish. In my mind’s eye I place colors of lapis, caramel, and henna in it. I make a comet of it in the deep of my brain. On it is written, by the author, “
Reka života a smrti,
” or River of life and death. It is dated 1937. That means nothing. This photograph punctures time, as Dürer punctures time. It could be a thousand years in the past, or so far in the future as to make of our ČSSR a forgotten dream.

MAY 8, 1973

T
HE RED-STAR RED FIGHTER JETS have all flown away to their bases in the mountains. The “zoo historian” leans forward on a hard chair and speaks to me of the flood that swept the Persian leopard from its cage, of waters that rose over the Prague Zoo and the gardens of the Troja Chateau by the zoo, where we sit now in his shabby office in inexplicable gloom, so that we are no more than shadows to each other. He tells me of seals swimming up to the steps of the chateau in floodwaters I imagine to be the color of the Ganges, and similarly full of new dead.

“They looked to me like giant newts, coming at the end of the world,” he says. “They swam around the baroque statues depicting virtues and vices, of which only charity remained eerily above water.”

We come to the question of captivity.

“I am a historian of captivity,” he says.

“The captivity of people also?” I ask.

“A passing knowledge,” he says.

“Giraffes?”

He smiles.

“I recently instructed a zookeeper in the history of giraffes,” he says. “I will speak to you of gyrfalcons, polar bears, and giraffes.”

“Go on,” I say unsteadily.

I prepare my pen. I am the giraffe man now and I must know more of these vertical beasts than the viscoelasticity of their arteries.

I smell the soil of the vineyard coming through the open window. I hear the animals in the zoo, beyond the walls of the chateau. He coughs phlegm into a cloth. His office is damp, littered in the corners with mice droppings. I look away, out through the open window, and see candlelight flickering in the chapel above the vineyard.

“The Romans were dazzled by the proportions and colors of the giraffe,” he says, quelling his cough, “which they took to be the offspring of a camel and a leopard, so
camelopardalis
or camelopard; others thought better camel-hyena, that a hyena had taken a camel mare and the offspring, the giraffe, was mute on account of the violence of the hyena’s entry. In any case, the giraffe was of limited entertainment value to the Romans. It could not easily kill or defend itself from being killed. It could not roar or trumpet. If it appeared in a ring at all, it was only as a curtain-raiser at the beginning of the games. Five thousand wild animals were slaughtered for the inaugural games of the Colosseum. Eleven thousand were put to the sword during the four months of games marking the victory of Trajan over the Dacians.”

I consider the cosmic collapse of so many veins. “Rivers of blood,” I say.

“Indeed. Rivers such as would further your studies,” he says.

Is he looking at me in this gloom? I see his hand movements, but not his expression.

“These beasts arrived in Rome from the corners of the known world in stinking wooden crates, some dead, others sick in the head or in the body.”

“What animals,” I ask. “From where?”

He is silent, drawing a map in his head.

“Lynxes, brown and black bears, boars, wolves, and wolverines from the north,” he says. “Tigers from Armenia. Cheetahs from Judaea. Lions, leopards, hyenas, hippos, elephants, and giraffes from Nubia and the lands beyond the Sahara. Many of these beasts were dispatched by specialized gladiators:
venatores.
Others were set one against another. Still others were released, starving, into an arena that contained nothing but men lashed to metal rings in the sand, as though bound to the earth itself. This was not just in Rome. Other wild animals were killed in smaller games across the empire. Their forms and those of the gladiators and the prisoners were tipped together into pits dug after the games, close to the arena. In some places it must have been that the corpse of a fair-haired barbarian from Czechoslovakia, before there was a Czechoslovakia, fell upon the carcass of a freshly speared giraffe, and the two became entwined and rotted as one.”