CSSR
USSR
USA
ETHIOPIA
WE STOP NOW in a village near the town of Žlunice and buy beers in a pub and drink them, leaning back against the radiator of the truck. I am side by side with the driver. Villagers step from their pub. They stare up at the giraffes. They come close. They take in the circus smell. Some of them offer up soup plates of beer. The giraffes lean down and set their tongues to the beer. They lap it up. They are migrants, learning where they have arrived.
We drive still more slowly through the afternoon, by fields and ponds. The sky in the east is slanted with rain, but it has not rained here for weeks. The streams are running low, the
vodníks
are gasping. This is my country, a windless and haunted hinterland of rivers flowing into a flat center and then off to seas that are bordered by other peoples, who did not emerge from hills caked in peat.
This is my Czechoslovakia, which is caught in a spell of normalization, darkened, like an insect colony under the shadow of a stone, so reduced and forgetting that only crows remember the old patterns and lift from the branches of the same trees as crows in the time of the Napoleonic wars, when there were no factories and no roads and the journey to Austerlitz took days going and longer coming back. It is nothing like the icebound island beyond the Pole Star, where the gyrfalcon hatches, or the mountains of Papua New Guinea, such as the shipping director spoke of, where the air is so thin the helicopters bringing the miners to the gem mines below the glaciers gain no purchase and spin a full circle before regaining control. My country does not teeter on any kind of edge, but the edge of self. It knows nothing of Hamburg but what
vodníks
whisper in pubs, nothing of fictional Emil’s Berlin now divided, and nothing of the salt marshes of the English coast, where Pip once tended Magwitch and so unknowingly secured for a time his fortune. ČSSR is the middle of things, a middling totalitarian state in the middle of Europe, where deep drops in barometric pressure are not met by the shifting of ocean currents but by a pressing-in of the brain, just here, by the temples, a constriction of blood vessels behind the eyes, a certain sudden melancholy, and a pain in porous molars. It is middling roads over middling streams, in which the fleck of trout grown so-so under middling rains must be visible to the keen eyes of the giraffes. It is middling
vodníks
capturing middling souls and potting them in hollows below middling runs of rushes and reeds. It is middling towns with splendid baroque churches of limited congregations and middle-sized
paneláks
haunted by middling quicklime outlines of the dead, and middling factories that never meet the oversized quotas set for them in the Communist moment, and middling villages encircling the towns, where ambitions are no more than those of the
vodník,
that is, to watch over a stretch of river, to preserve souls, and to drink in the pub. Contemplation of my country is enough to bring on nausea. Not seasickness, but land-sickness: I search the horizon for a sea, as a sailor searches for land. I want the meadows to shift under a light swell and the eels to summon up a hurricane, from the Sargasso Sea of their memory, that might swing the bells in the church towers.
We turn north toward the mountains along the Polish border. Schoolchildren from the cities work the hop fields below the hills. A few of them catch sight of the giraffes. They set down their baskets and wave. A bird of prey, a harrier, is circling above. It spies the giraffes and then some morsel creature in the hop field. It pulls back its wings and drops, just as I saw one of those red-starred fighters drop in another summertime, when I was camping in the Orlické Mountains with a girlfriend. She shouted me awake just after sunrise, from outside. The first light was blue-red through the skin of the tent, as daylight must appear in the veins woven about my wrists and ankles. I climbed out after her into the forest clearing. She pointed up at the fighter jet falling silver from the sky. We saw the pilot eject and drift off, like a seed under a parachute. The jet fell nose-first, silent as the harrier diving now, but with a sense of many tons of unsupported metal, and with a violence of flames ripping back over the wings. It passed under the trees. It was gone in a blink. There was an explosion, a fireball, then a secondary explosion. We put on boots and ran through the forest, into smoke, and at last came upon the wreckage of the jet, in a canyon of the River Zdobnice, which flows into the Labe. We teetered at the edge of the canyon and saw the fighter jet lying red-starred below, smoldering through its metal plates, like a speared dragon through its scales.
“LOOK AT THAT.” I point out a shrine at a crossroads. Its window and frame are smashed. The crucifix inside is broken.
“I see it,” the driver says.
“People used to put candles and wildflowers before the statues in these shrines,” I say. “No one looks after them now. People do not even see them. They pass them unthinking, as they pass under trees unthinking.”
“You mourn the crucifixes so very much?” he asks.
“Not only the crucifixes. I mourn the forgetting.”
It is getting to be dusk. We stop finally at the edge of the town with the zoo.
“Why are we stopping?” I ask. “It’s late. We’re almost there.”
“I like to reflect for a moment before completing a journey,” he says, stretching. “It’s a habit of mine.”
“Like pausing before a summit?”
He looks at me. “Different,” he says.
There is a sadness in his eyes, which is also a registering of a drop in barometric pressure. A thunderstorm is almost upon us. My teeth begin to hurt. We squat down and smoke Red Stars. Insects whir through the smoke rings we blow. We are parked in the yard of a sawmill. There is wood all around, some of it already cut into planking. The smell of wood shavings makes me think of Pinocchio, who was spared because he spoke up. It was a piece of cherrywood, intended for a table leg. It found voice and called out to the carpenter saying that it had no wish to be cut up and made into something dependable, on which a table could stand. So Geppetto got the piece of cherrywood and fashioned his puppet from it. The puppet became a boy, a he, whose face sweated resin under the Tuscan sun.
We cross the Labe. The river is shallow here and contained in a narrow concrete channel; it flows fast with the last snowmelt of summer. We drive past a factory making Christmas decorations and wind through one-way streets to the main square. We pause beside the well-known plague column, of tusk-colored marble, fashioned after Trajan’s Column in Rome, corkscrewing similarly up into the clouds, celebrating not a victory over the Dacians, but those who succored the victims of the 1713 plague.
Large raindrops splash from a great height onto the dusty windshield. It becomes a thunderstorm. It is not a hurricane summoned up by eels: It is not enough to swing the bells in the church towers. We drive slowly out by the castle and the town brewery. We edge under a medieval gate onto a gravel road that swings in a
U
shape around a fishpond called the Svět that is some kilometers long and bounded by forest to give it a northern aspect. The driver turns on the headlights. The beams open up a way to the zoo. There are lightning strikes across the sky and out over the fishpond. I turn to look at the giraffes through the narrow window.
“Slower,” I say, to the driver. “They’re scattering under each lightning strike.” We edge along through torrential rain, but I see no hyenas tracking us; the hyenas are farther along, in the zoo.
Through the wipers I make out a white heron lifting from the road. Behind the heron is a young woman. She dissolves and resolves in the rain. She holds a plastic anorak over her head, but her dress is soaked through. She holds a hand up against our beams. The driver dims them. Still she does not move. She stares blindly, or blinded, out at us. The driver stops. He looks at me.
“I’ll see what’s happening,” I say.
I drop from the truck to the road, turning an ankle on the gravel. The rain is like a sheet. Within a few steps I am as wet as the woman.
She calls out, “Why must you transport missiles into the forest?”
She is beautiful: short, light, her hair photographic black, her eyes wide-spaced and large, liquid, opal like a giraffe’s. She takes a step back and dissolves once more into the storm. She might have walked up from the Labe or from the fishpond here, yes, like a
rusalka,
or at least a nymph such as the opera singer was playing in Ústí nad Labem; out for love, a ripple that cannot be perceived.
“We’re not going to the forest,” I call back. “We’re heading to the zoo.”
She is somewhere there, in the slant of rain and headlights.
“What’s happening?” I call. “What’s the matter?”
She steps forward again. “Nothing,” she calls in a voice that is sad, not shrill.
“Please, get off the road. We need to pass. We have living animals.”
I limp back to the truck. When I turn, she is nowhere to be seen.
“She’s by the tree over there,” the driver says, pointing a finger.
I see her looking up as we pass. I follow her in the mirror. She steps quickly onto the road after the truck.
The giraffes no longer scatter under the lightning strikes. They remain huddled together, leaning out, looking back at the last stretch of their assisted passage.
We come to the zoo gates. The driver presses hard on the horn. The gates open wide. We enter.
I STEP DOWN from the truck, into the rain once more.
Hus comes running up in his safari hat.
“We thought you would have been here sooner,” he says.
“We were careful,” I say.
“Do you have enough for your scientific paper?” he asks.
“I think so,” I say.
We shake hands. I turn from him. I look finally at Sněhurka and the other giraffes. I must leave. The zoo is not my place. Sněhurka’s head does not drop now. It is raised even higher, so that her
f
shape becomes an
I,
the better to glimpse that
rusalka
over the walls of the zoo. She is a giraffe, she has two gaits — walking and galloping. Where will she gallop in this place, where the horizon is forever defined for her? I am sad not to have seen her in the wild, not to have been there on the grassland one day in the dry season when she and the other giraffes ran at full tilt, not away from Hus and Vokurka, not that day, but another day, when they were running toward some temporary home under acacia trees, their necks affording them lateral inertia, the legs on one side moving, then the legs on the other, in just the same way as camels and okapis run. I am too late. Sněhurka will become a zoo animal. Her eyesight will falter. Distances will mean less to her. She will look across less often. Her view will instead be drawn down, to Czechoslovakians stopped and staring up at her.
A lion roars. Sněhurka and other giraffes start forward and wish to take flight from the wet floor of the truck. Hus laughs. Perhaps he is right; perhaps the giraffes will come to understand that the lion is caged also and can never move on them, but is instead fated to plow, with ruined claws, its own furrow of despair on concrete. Only occasionally, when the light strikes their enclosure in a certain way, as an equinoctial sun struck an Icelandic volcano in Jules Verne’s
Journey to the Center of the Earth
and revealed to explorers an opening to the core of the planet, will the pupils of the giraffes dilate in some contrary fashion, betraying in a clinically observable way, even to a hemodynamicist, a memory of something more than the walls that contain them.
Amina
MIDSUMMER’S DAY
JUNE 24, 1973
T
HERE IS NO WINTER wonderland in my waking. It is Midsummer’s Day in ČSSR of 1973. It is my birthday. The first light blazes on the walls of my flat, and the ceiling is dappled with the reflected waters of the Svět, which is a fishpond turning with carp, roach, tench, and perch, stretching out of sight from my town and giving out into a small marsh, where a few otters live. My flat is one room of four plastered concrete panels, a few steps one way, fewer steps the other. There is a cupboard with ice-hockey sticks that belong to someone else and a balcony with a view over the Svět. The walls are thin. It is possible to hear the radio playing polkas in the rooms on either side and sometimes shouting and other times lovemaking. I feel trapped in here. It is not a cage, not that, only the sense of inevitability that comes each time I walk out over the frozen Svět in winter, getting just so far, then despite myself, turning, seeing the
panelák,
seeing my room, seeing my return there, again and again, in patterns of footsteps that will hardly ever change.
I am Amina Dvořáková, no relation to the composer. It is I who awake musical, with arias in my head. It is I who open these hemispheric eyes, which my mother said were starlit, as though from within. How I look is mysterious to me. I am shy, bookish, and musical, ill-fitting. I most resemble the romantic suicide in a prewar Czechoslovakian film called
Vzpomúnka na ráj,
or
Memories of Paradise,
which begins with colliers shouldering coal through a Prague of 1935 that is more dense and alive with itself, where coal smoke hangs in a blanket over green domes of old churches, and the shops in the new parts of town are done up with bright lights that promise to blink on and off forever. That suicide whom I resemble stands on the Charles Bridge, looking straight out from paradise into the cinema, at me, and then about her politely making sure there is no beau around who might feel the need to save her. She jumps down into the River Vltava. Her skirt flies up. Splash! She sinks without trace. The film cuts to the surface of the water, breathtakingly oil-black, twinkling with indistinct lights. The effect is of submersion, as though we Czechoslovakian cinemagoers are no longer supposed to be looking from the Charles Bridge to the river, but from the underside of the Vltava at the sky, and to understand by this that the romantic suicide is nothing of the sort, but a
rusalka
returning to her element. My hair is longer than the hair of that
rusalka,
but not so lustrous; it does not twinkle oil-black like that part of the Vltava, as hers did. Our faces are similar in nose and lips, in cheekbones, alabaster skin, and sensitivity of expression. So too our bodies, slender and slight, aerated, unexpectedly strong. She might feel, as I do, of an incorrect density, light enough to one day glance off the face of the world, and to be no longer possessed by it.