Giraffe (6 page)

I STEP ABOARD. I see the giraffes and am dumbfounded. I stop. I stare up. I have worked with one living giraffe, but an old giraffe, a zoo animal, weary, blind, hunched somehow under those electric lights. I have seen nothing like this. There are so many of them, and wild, not of a zoo, and impossibly stretched. There is no such animal! They scrape this cirrus as towers of the Qasr al-Qadim. Tarpaulins have been drawn across the crates, so that only their necks and shoulders are visible, and this makes them more unthinkable. I run my eye up and down their necks. They are too tall for me to frame. I try not to think of blood pressing up inside them, but instead to consider their muscle and bone. I dwell on their necks, of the same seven vertebrae that push up my skull, but each one as thick as a chair leg and grooved, as by a carpentry machine, the better to hold the slabs of muscle needed to keep the neck upright. These necks are the greatest natural selection. The tallest giraffes survived. All others perished — or disappeared into the jungle. I cannot say how I missed these towers while walking toward the
Eisfeld,
or why I have not thought of them on my journey, but have instead given myself over to a chain of flowers and imaginings of a lighthouse set by a cool green sea. I take a step closer. I place my bag down on the deck. The smell of the giraffes is pungent, like racehorses sweating in a paddock after the Pardubice steeplechase. I count thirty-two animals, reticulated and Rothschild both. They make no sound. When they move, they cease to be towers or minarets, but are instead something flowing underwater, or perhaps a slender tree swaying. There is no urgency in them: They do not in any way resemble the orangutan I passed one winter afternoon in the Prague Zoo, which beat on the Perspex window of its cage to attract the attention of every passerby, as though from the inside of an airless cockpit.

A sailor takes up a bucket of grain and brings it to me — it is his voice I heard from below.

“Hold your hands out — cup them,” he says.

I do so. He pours grain into them.

“Now hold them up to a giraffe. That one there. The Czechoslovakians call her Sněhurka.”

I see why: Her underbelly is a blizzard.

“I’m Czechoslovakian,” I say, still in German. “
Sněhurka
means ‘Snow White’ in Czech.”

The sailor nods and looks up.

Sněhurka slides her tongue out to me. It is the length of my arm, dark as a blood blister. She takes the grain. I feel her lips and teeth against my palm.

The same sailor guides me inside now. He swings open a heavy metal door. I dip my head. The lightbulbs are caged in wire. I breathe in spaceship air, stale, smelling of fuels. We slide down ladders, from one deck to another. The sailor opens and closes steel hatches. There are slogans on the doors. There are hammers and sickles. There are red stars. We pass a galley in which I see pans firing and spitting on a gas cooker. The sailor shows me into a saloon, where the ship’s officers are taking breakfast. I recognize the captain of the
Eisfeld
from a picture in the ring binder given me by the shipping director. I introduce myself. I stand here with my hands in my pockets, rocking on my heels.

“Well, sit down then, comrade!”

I sit.

His name is Hans Schmauch. He looks as I have hoped a sea captain would look: elderly, with cropped silver hair and beard, craggy, weathered, with a red nose.

“My father was a sea captain also,” he says suddenly. “He plied the Baltic Sea. He brought back iron ore from Sweden and timber from Finland. And here I am bringing back giraffes from Africa.”

He tells me of the plans for unloading the giraffes. Each animal will be hoisted up by crane and set down on a Czechoslovakian barge that will draw alongside this morning. I will go with the barge when it departs up the River Labe, tomorrow. The
Eisfeld
will sail home to Rostock.

Over coffee, I make my authority known to Schmauch.

He frowns. He waves me off.

“You have your business and I have mine,” he says.

His voice is quieter now, seemingly worn away by typhoons.

“You must understand that the ocean is my only ideology,” he says. “Since my passage is across the surface, I am not much interested in the interior of things. Monsters may cruise beneath, but I choose not to speak of them. Where the giraffes are heading and the rest of what you mention is of little interest to me. I am happy to have delivered them. The truth is that the giraffes unsettle me. It is best for me to regard them as not quite alive, like pictures on a postcard.”

“That is a strange thing to say.”

“I suppose it is. It might be because the giraffes are creatures of the interior, far from any sea. Certainly it upset me when they became agitated in heavy seas and kicked out at their crates, for days, so that all their legs were bleeding and done in with splinters. Or perhaps it is only that they have passed around the Cape of Good Hope on my ship and no longer have a home, but are instead delivered into captivity. We all yearn for a home, don’t we, comrade?”

“Yes, comrade captain,” I say.

“In dreams I see the parts of the Baltic Sea I sailed as a young man. I dream of approaching a tiny island on my own ship, which is not unlike this ship. There is a little turf on the island and a single birch tree. There is a wooden fisherman’s hut fastened to the rock with cables. It is always winter in my dream. The sea is iced over. The rising bow of my ship splits the ice, opening up a channel of black water to usher me home. Even from a distance I see herring drying on a line, candles burning in the windows, and a lit stove.”

“Is that dream a comfort to you, comrade?”

We stand.

“Such dreams are the anchor of every sailor,” he says.

“The giraffes might dream of a home as you do,” I say.

Schmauch looks thoughtful.

“They might, comrade. I’ll allow,” he says.

He walks away through his saloon. I envy him that his home is a dream, while mine is a certain place, on a hilltop, which cannot be approached by any ship, but only a propeller plane dipping low.

ALOIS HUS IS on the deck, among the giraffes. He is tanned and clean-shaven. He moves clumsily for an ambitious man — for a zoo director. He trips over a bucket of water he himself has set down. He swears. He is extraordinarily tall. I introduce myself now. I look up at him, as I might look up at a giraffe. We speak formally, in precise Czech. I tell him certain things and hold back others.

“Tell me about the shipment,” I say.

“You say shipment, while I prefer the word
migration,
” he says.

“Forgive me.”

“There are thirty-two giraffes here, the largest group ever transported across the world. This is not a shipment — it is an assisted flight into a new land. For who can say what might happen in the future? The Earth might shift on its axis, so that our ČSSR will become parched and what are now river meadows will become savannah and thorn trees might displace holly trees. If that were to happen, then the descendants of these giraffes might form the basis of a new subspecies.”

He swings his arms in embrace of the giraffes. I look up at him in this daylight, which is clearer than the light of our ČSSR. His expression is perfectly serious.

“Our own Czechoslovakian subspecies?” I say. “
Camelopardalis bohemica
?”

He lights up. “Very good, Freymann! I like that.
Camelopardalis bohemica.
”

“What plans do you have for them in the zoo?”

“It will be a family,” Hus says. “We will build a safari park. The giraffes will walk freely through the parkland.”

“To begin with, comrade?” I ask.

I realize we are distant from each other. He looks to the future, to his red-starred giraffes, while I am haunted by the past and engaged in a search for such beauty as will puncture time.

“To begin with,” he says, after a long pause, “they will be put in next to the okapi.”

The okapi is the closest relative of the giraffe — anti-vertical, of limited hemodynamic interest — which evolved away in the middle Pliocene to live squat and unseen in the depths of the Upper Congo River basin, so well camouflaged that its existence was only confirmed by an expedition in 1900.

“Will the giraffes not be perplexed to see how they are giants next to the okapi?”

“Not at all. They will see only that the okapi is more chocolate and purple in parts than they are,” Hus says.

Hus slips and slides away across the wet deck and I stand here among his giraffes and think now of how okapi have been compacted down in the gloom, just as pygmies have been.

CRATES ARE TAKEN UP from the forward hold. Water is given to the ship, and diesel also. West German dockworkers listlessly tie and untie lines. Some of the East German sailors depart for Hamburg. They feed the giraffes before disembarking. They hold apples and pears up to the northern sky. The giraffes take the fruit. I watch the sailors stand for a moment on the quay, looking about them, adjusting the lapels on their jackets, as though they have been made foreign by the sea and no longer know what to expect of the land.

The Czechoslovakian barge ties up alongside. The unloading of the giraffes begins. Each crate is harnessed and lowered to the barge. Some of the giraffes panic at the sensation of flying and dropping down toward water. They kick out at their crates. It is disturbing to watch, as Schmauch said. The crates swing like a pendulum. The giraffes look desperately across the harbor as they swing, across and back, from one granary tower to another, searching for certain trees and animals, but finding no acacias and no hippos moving along the poisonous mud banks. Gulls hover above the crates and squawk, yellow-beaked, at the heads of the giraffes as they descend. A sailor stands beside me and also looks up at the swinging crates.

“Let them walk on air,” he says sadly, “for they will never again walk on Africa.”

IT IS AFTERNOON. I sit alone now in the ship’s library, glancing over documents concerning the estimated value of giraffes, shipping costs, and the waiving of customs duties. In a separate stack are the veterinary reports assembled by the zoo veterinarian on thirty-two giraffes and documentation on the death of one giraffe. I study these more carefully and make notes on the blood pressure recorded in certain giraffes before, during, and after the voyage.

Light sits in porthole circles on the plaster busts of revolutionaries and on the glass cabinet containing the political texts. It is confusing. I am in West Germany, but in the Communist moment also. I am in a port where there is no salt, no waves breaking polyphonically. I set aside my hemodynamic notes. I stand. I browse through the other, open bookshelves and come now across a short history of England, published in Dresden. I flick through it and come, by chance, on this page here, upon a curious detail such as the zoo historian would keep, in place of his own memories. On the orders of Oliver Cromwell, I read, all the dancing and fighting bears in London were shot. The only bear spared was a polar bear that in its white apartness, Cromwell said, would better remind Puritan Englishmen of the majesty and unknowability of God’s creation. I close the book and slide it back onto the shelf, and I think now of how that polar bear might have been the descendant of Henry III’s polar bear, which was kept in the Tower of London, and in another turning of comets, I come to a flea-bitten black bear I once saw languishing in the dry moat of Konopiště Castle. I stumbled on that animal on an autumn afternoon with wet leaves spiraling downward. It had small eyes and a white streak on its chest below the throat. It did not meet my gaze, but mewed through its narrow snout and opened up its sores with long yellow claws. It was quite willing to stand vertically on its stinking bed, so its blood flowed not along but upward in expectancy of a wonder net, and dance upright for the meanest piece of bread proffered by children, who leaned far out over the spiked railing beside me. When sunshine finally broke on the back of that bear, it also broke through the patterned windows of Konopiště Castle. I walked in the chambers of that place with a sense of incredulity. The walls were nailed floor to ceiling with the heads of deer, bears, wolves — of every living creature that moved in the wilds, down to the tamest otter, all of them bagged by the archduke Franz Ferdinand, the owner of Konopiště, who was himself shot dead in Sarajevo and made into a trophy of a quite different sort.

EVENING LIGHT COMES through the saloon portholes, settling in soft rings on the chests of sailors. I am taking supper. I sit next to a Czechoslovakian tractor salesman, a Slovak, who has returned from Mombasa with crates of machinery in need of repair. He speaks to me of Africa.

“I was summoned to the Czechoslovakian embassy in Nairobi,” he says. “An embassy car was waiting for me outside the tractor factory near the coast. I hardly spoke during that long drive to Nairobi. I had only recently arrived in Kenya and I was still greatly affected by its sounds and colors, the way women bang on the roof of your car and try to sell you fruit from baskets, and then the baskets themselves, which they have woven from grass that grows high after the rains. There was not much to do in Nairobi: The officials were happy with the way the tractor enterprise was proceeding. I left for the coast the following afternoon with letters of credit. I took the same road, with the same embassy driver, but the land appeared different to me. Perhaps it was because we set off in the afternoon and were driving into night, or simply that we were heading from the mountains to the coast, and not from the coast to the mountains. There were no crowds of women at the edges of the villages we passed through at that late hour, but instead there were small fires burning outside the huts, and infants being carried inside in the arms of their parents. In one village I saw an elderly man performing a dance around such a fire, holding up a knife in a sheath of monkey leather and a spear tipped with a sharpened hippo tooth. I caught sight of a beautiful young woman in another village, sleepwalking between one grass hut and another. I had the driver stop the car. We got out and watched. Her arms were stretched up, like this, as if she were about to dive upward from a board. She walked and tripped in the dust and rose again, not awake but still sleepwalking. None of the villagers tried to stop her. They ran back from her when she passed them, as though sleepwalking were a kind of contagion.