Giraffe (8 page)

I CANNOT SLEEP. I lie on this upper bunk in a cabin on the ship. A voyage has ended in which I have played no part. There are signs of departure, in sheets crumpled on the floor, cigarette butts, and reams of DDR newspapers. There are things that have been spoken of in this cabin far from land which cannot be repeated now. The regime, which appeared indistinct in the doldrums, comical even has drawn back into focus. I stare at a photograph pinned to the side of the greasy plywood bunk, forgotten in the rush to disembark. I take it down. It is a black-and-white photo of a woman striding down a concrete pier. She wears a bikini. Over her shoulder is a packed beach. The Cyrillic lettering above the ice-cream stand identifies the beach as Bulgarian. The woman is moving fast by the camera. The lens is turning to meet her. It is a fleeting image, such as I might frame with my eye. It is impossible to say whether the woman is irritated or simply impatient to be gone into the air at the end of the pier and down into the Black Sea. She is no mermaid returning to its element. She is large: Her breasts are barely contained in their flowered cups. Her skin is downy and smooth. There is a scar below her navel, punctured along its edges where the stitches have been recently drawn. She has no tail of a harbor porpoise, no flukes containing wonder nets. Her legs instead end in cheap COMECON plastic sandals.

I pin her back into the plywood. I switch on the transistor radio I have brought with me. I am no longer downhearted: I feel a slight buoyancy of the
Eisfeld
on the harbor waters. This is my first night in West Germany, in the new chain of flowers. I tune the dial. I listen. The songs belong to the West German moment, which is recognizably now the opposite of the Communist moment, in which time is marked out by clocks, loudspeaker announcements, and revolutionary parades no one comprehends; but there is no
now
and it is possible to live without remembering the year, and to have no sense of time passing, save in the changing colors of the seasons. Some of the songs playing are in English. A line in one of them pierces me.

The waters of Hamburg harbor are under this ship and gulls are turning somewhere above. There is a northern sky brightening out there. I cannot see it from in here. There is no porthole in this cabin, no ring of light. I am sunk below the waterline.

JUNE 20, 1973

I
UNDERSTAND THE RIVER ELBE, or Labe. I have words to describe its course and to detail the life upon and within it. It runs twelve hundred kilometers from the Krkonoše Mountains in Czechoslovakia to the North Sea. It is a river. It wants to show us the sea. If the engines on the barge were cut now, it would carry us on its back through the port and city of Hamburg, by the scarlet poppy fields of Schleswig-Holstein, to its estuarine mouth fourteen kilometers wide in embrace of the world, and with plunging flow might beach us on the island of Scharhörn or Neuwerk, where we might settle, we few Czechoslovakians, with our state-owned giraffes, to breed a new subspecies under a domed and ever-changing sky, with feed brought from Cuxhaven. Or perhaps the Labe, with the last of its strength, would push us out beyond the two islands altogether, and we should be tossed on this barge across the Heligoland Bight, deep into the North Sea, and wash up at last, bleary and bruised, on the salt marshes I can only suppose lie black and tan along the shores of England, perhaps the same marsh over which Magwitch stumbled in leg irons before being captured and transported to Australia, there to provide Pip with his great expectations. We might pull ourselves free from those marshes after some days and drift on into the harbor of an English seaport, where, under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, the cubs of dancing and fighting bears must have been gagged and hidden on small vessels from Puritans who had orders to shoot them, and voyaged from that seaport to any land where the bear cubs could grow and move from town to town.

Ships pass around us in the port. Some of them sound their horns on sighting the giraffes, who shimmer in the hot morning light like the granary towers in the port. There is no drift back to the sea. The engines on the barge are not cut. They thump us out into the Labe, away from Schmauch, waving his cap on his ship’s bridge, just as I see the outline of my grandfather waving to his propeller planes. We pass under a bridge. It is thick with early morning traffic. Sunshine catches on the mirrors and windows of the cars now. I frame a hippie with long hair sitting in the lotus position on the bridge before the broken-down engine of his van.

The Labe is poisoned. There are no salmon alive in it. No polar bear could be led out to fish its portion from these waters. Swimmers emerge with a mustard scum on their skin and a sweet taste in their mouth. Only eels pass upstream with us. They pulse in from the ocean, tapered, like ghostly parts of an atom, working in through smaller and smaller rivers of DDR and ČSSR, until settling at the turn of a stream, or in the stillness of a millpond. I cannot say whether their migration is of their own will or is an act of remembrance, just as some liken flowing water to the subconscious and take the passing through it to be a passing through memory.

Because there is no bunk for me on the barge, I volunteer to sleep out on the deck, among the giraffes. I make a place for myself now at the prow. I sweep the area and lay down a sleeping bag. I tie the tarpaulin to the crate holding Sněhurka. We shall part the Labe together. She is wet with spray coming up off the river and has nostrils that open and clamp like those of a seal or mermaid. But she is not a watery creature. She has never wallowed, but instead cools herself under the shade of acacia trees and is camouflaged there by the markings on her hide, which also serve as open windows dissipating heat, just as the frontoparietal hollows atop her skull cool her brain to a lower temperature than her body.

I sit under the tarpaulin and am lit here by Sněhurka’s underbelly. I open my notebook. Inside is a clipping from a Polish art magazine of
Burning Giraffes and Telephones,
a painting by Salvador Dali. I unfold it. Three giraffes walk calmly across the horizon, untroubled by the flames bursting from their backs and necks, while in the foreground a massive eye borne on the muscular legs of a Nubian, with the torso of a boiler or a bank safe, attacks or makes love to a faceless woman whose arms are stretched up somnambulistically. I study the painting as I study passages from
Great Expectations,
or carotid arteries.

Watery meadows appear on either side of us. This is the end of Hamburg. I move up and down the barge now, making notes and sketches of the giraffes for my scientific paper. I am less concerned now with rumination, with the four divisions of the stomach, the Olympic-length intestines, the maneuverability of the tongue, the prehensile and undivided upper lip, the vocal cords that hardly pluck a sound, or even with the laryngeal nerve running from brain to heart and back again, than I am with the viscosity of giraffe blood, five times thicker than water, with a multiplication of crimson stars, in better distribution of oxygen, with the jugular veins several centimeters in diameter, stoppered with one-way valves, in such a way as to regulate flow from the head when it is lifted from the ground. There are thirty-two giraffes here, each with a wonder net hidden from view. When a giraffe splays its legs and sets down its head to drink, the pressure on its cranial vasculature triples. The giraffe’s cerebral blood vessels are too thin-walled to constrict against it. But for the wonder net, the giraffe would collapse, as cosmonauts do when certain g-force is applied. It is the wonder net that keeps the living form of giraffes pushed up, even to resemble creatures from a world of lesser gravity. When the head goes down, its endless shunts and meanders spread elastically across the base of the cranium, absorbing the flow that rushes in through the carotid artery.

IT IS A HEAT WAVE. I strip off my shirt. I pour a bucket of water over my head, my shoulders, my chest. A man in large mirrored sunglasses drives a cream-colored Mercedes along a country road by the river. I help tend the giraffes. I shovel out dung. I hold up bread to some of the giraffes.

“No!” Hus shouts. “Not bread! Grain, comrade.” He comes running up with a bucket of grain. He is also without shirt and shoes. He wears a safari hat and a necklace of African beads made of coral.

“These giraffes will live fifteen years in the wild at the most. They’ll manage thirty years in the zoo with my diet.”

“Grain?”

“Not just grain. Alfalfa, formulated pellets, fruit, plenty of beets, switches of elm and alder.”

“What about the breeding?” I see him now. I see his eyes glint.

“Breeding! That’s the thing. It all comes down to procreation in the end. We have a social group here. A perfect mix of healthy males and females. All we need to do is sort them correctly.”

“Just like the Komsomol,” I say.

He does not hear me.

“We’ll see our first pregnancies this winter,” he says.

“What makes you so sure?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Freymann. You’re a scientist. Look around you. We have a different philosophy. The purpose of a zoo is to breed animals and to entertain the worker. Breeding is the more important. The State recognizes that. And our socialist mind is good for breeding. It wants to know at what temperature, at what angle of entry, between which giraffe bull and which giraffe cow. And the better we breed, the more we entertain. We will build the safari park. Workers will be driven through an open landscape. And we will breed in ever larger groups. We will birth the animals, keeping the best ones, selling the rest, and so continue for generations until we get to our
Camelopardalis bohemica.
It will happen. The climate in our ČSSR is not so bad. The new giraffes will become accustomed to the winters. They’ll learn to move on ice.”

I throw bread I would have fed to the giraffes into the Labe. Fish come up for it, eels invisibly too, and gulls arriving inland from the sea drop down to it and slash noisomely on the river.

I SIT IN THE WHEELHOUSE with the zoo veterinarian. Hus is at the other end of the barge, filing down giraffe hooves.

“We haven’t been formally introduced,” he says. “I’m František Vokurka. Call me Franta.”

His name means “cucumber,” but he is a slight man with stained rodent teeth. He wears a stethoscope. There is an exceptionally long tongue depressor in his shirt pocket.

“Emil Freymann,” I say, holding out my hand.

“I know who you are,” he says. “No need to worry about the giraffes. No need to worry about any of it. One died on the voyage. The rest are in good shape.”

“I read your report.”

“I want you to know that what Hus said yesterday was nonsense.”

“The new subspecies? The assisted flight?”

He nods. “This idea of his that the giraffes are engaged in some sort of migration.”

“They’re captive.”

“Of course they are.”

“The safari park?”

“I’m all against it,” he says, turning over the beans on his plate. “The slopes are too steep. They’re grassy. The giraffes will fall and break themselves on the ground when it rains. They’ll be like girls in high heels coming home from a country dance.”

“They might get up again,” I say.

“They would be as good as dead,” he says. “Their legs would be fractured in many places and could never be put back together.”

“Did you tell Hus this?”

“Many times.”

“What did he say?”

“He’s a careerist. He said the committee has passed the safari park proposal. He said the giraffes had the right to walk free.”

“They were free.”

“He means they have the right to walk free in ČSSR. He said the giraffes should be allowed to discover where they have migrated to.” Vokurka pushes back his plate. He starts playing with his tongue depressor. “Let me tell you of migration,” he says.

“Please do.”

“Last year, after quite another voyage, I found myself disembarked at the Romanian port of Constanta. I had a day to myself before taking the evening train to Bucharest. I walked from the modern port to the old part of the town, which contained decaying mosques, villas, and a museum displaying Roman antiquities. I walked as far as the marina. Some men were setting up a fairground ride there; it had eight arms, and at the end of each was a carriage that circled, I suppose, at great speed, but would always start and stop at the same point, going nowhere, no matter how many revolutions it made. Turning back toward the port, I came upon a shutdown casino in which swallows were nesting. They were newly returned from Africa. I watched them fall from their wattled nests in the eaves, like cliff divers, and rise vertically again, all the while reflected in the long windows and shadowed on the white and gold rococo plasterwork. I was hardly aware of the sun setting into the land. The swallows gave me a sense of the true meaning of migration.”

“Which is?”

“Certitude. The certitude of returning home. Swallows fly with utmost joy, ever so lightly, from Africa to Constanta and on to our ČSSR, over grasslands, deserts, seas, marshes, forests, mountains, all of these. They are joyful because they are forever returning home. ČSSR is home, all places in between are home.”

“Unlike the giraffes.”

“Who have no home now, but only crates.”

“Could you tell me how the one giraffe died on the voyage?” I ask. I look at him blankly, as I have been instructed to by the shipping company, in order to produce uneasiness in the listener, so that they open up.

“Let me first state that giraffes are not meant to stand on the deck of a ship for weeks at a time.”

“Granted.”

“All went well for the first part of the voyage,” he says. “The engine gave out off Zanzibar, but those were pleasant days. We passed around the Cape of Good Hope in calm waters and saw no storm until we were off the coast of Mauritania. Even the storm petrels fell upon our ship that night seeking shelter. I fled to my bunk below the waterline and clung miserably to myself. There was a terrible creaking, as though the hull were being torn open. I was certain we would sink into the Atlantic. I wept. I hoped for nothing more than to be washed up onto a Mauritanian beach. Of course the ship did not come close to sinking. It was only my Czechoslovakian sensibility. The storm subsided. I remembered my duty. With some effort, I made it up to the bridge. The ship’s mate was at the wheel. “One of them is down,” he said. I realized he was talking about the giraffes. I went with a sailor onto the deck. Waves were still breaking on the tarpaulins. The giraffes were sliding and braking and swallowing salt water. We went to the crate. I pulled back the tarpaulin. There was a young male twisted, broken-necked, on the floor. We jumped in. A wave knocked us off our feet onto the dead giraffe. It looked so much smaller folded together like that in the water. Nothing more than a foal. I did an examination. It is all in the report.”