“Who’s he kidding?” a butcher says beside me. “Here I am working for twelve crowns and fifty heller an hour and he’s going to shoot me after three warnings?”
THE SUN SETS. I see Čarodějnice bonfires burning beside the Svět. I see the puff of other shotgun discharges, and I see new swallows and an unkindness of ravens drop from the sky.
I make a plan now with the scientist Emil and the giraffe keeper. I can see by the way Emil sweeps back his hair over and over, through his surgeon’s gloves, and by his confession of nausea, that he fears this night as I do. The keeper seems not to be quite awake. His eyes are dulled from many days living in quarantine. His giraffes will be driven into the yard in groups of three or four. I will climb up on the fencing around the yard and fire off my shots. It will be too messy to shoot the giraffes inside, where they could not be easily separated and would be driven mad by the crashing deaths.
The floodlights the StB have arranged are useless. The light they shed is watery, useless. It is wrong to imagine that ČSSR has held within it some elite; the secret police are only a reflection of what is apparent.
“I have a flashlight,” the keeper says. “If you shine the light in their eyes they will be blinded and stayed for a moment. Then you can aim it where you need to shoot.”
He looks away and then, after a long pause, back at me.
“Are you the best shot?”
“I’m a fair shot,” I say. “No more.”
“Do your best,” he says. “Concentrate.”
I light a Red Star. The StB officer comes over with a paper bag.
“Here’s your drink,” he says to me. “Two bottles of Cuban rum.”
“Don’t get drunk,” the keeper says.
“To steady my hand,” I say.
“You’re to fire quickly,” Emil says. “One giraffe, two, three. Can you?”
“I’ll try,” I say.
“If it is not a clean shot, then fire again. I’ll run forward when the last of the giraffes falls.”
I CLEAN THE LENSES of my spectacles. I measure the yard. Thirty steps by forty. The giraffes will break stride and hit the fencing. I attend to the Mauser. I open and shut its bolt. I oil it.
There are fireworks breaking overhead now, from the outdoor ice-hockey rink in the town. I see my chance.
“Emil!” I call. “Send the first ones out. I’m ready.”
THE DOORS OF THE giraffe house open. A bull giraffe stands there. Giant. It makes no sound. It moves slowly out into the yard, clopping on the concrete. I climb up on the fence. I balance. Fireworks continue to burst overhead. It is gloomy, then suddenly white, then suddenly yellow, now bathed in green.
“Giraffe!” I shout, as though calling out, “Timber!” in the forest, as though the giraffe is a silver fir. “Giraffe!”
I level the barrel at the bull. I turn the safety catch to the left. I fire. I put a bullet into green light. It strikes below and behind the ear. It enters into the heavy brain. The giraffe does not slump, but is felled. There is a sound of breaking bone as it hits the ground.
The fireworks burst in red. I put bullets into red light now.
WHEN THE FIREWORK DISPLAY is over and there is no more illumination, the StB officer orders a butcher to hold up a flashlight for me. The keeper drives out three more giraffes. They circle in the yard. I take a long swig of rum.
“Shine the light in their eyes,” I say to the butcher. “Then at the back of the head, below the ear.”
The butcher does so. He shines a light on the
X
-marked spot, the aperture. I am quicker. I lift the Mauser. I level it, I fire. I swing, I level, I fire. I swing again, I level, I fire. They are felled.
THE BUTCHER PUTS DOWN the flashlight and climbs down into the yard with the other butchers. They step there among entwined necks. One of the butchers kicks away a crow shot down and fallen on the giraffes. We are comrades also, we hunters and butchers. We are blessed together by Hubert.
The butchers set down knives, clippers, and lengths of rope. I force myself to watch: I have killed these animals. The butchers’ touch is rough. A twelve-crowns-and-fifty-heller-an-hour touch. They are not respectful or precise. They plant their knives in haunches while they feel behind the knees, then they pull out the blades and sever the tendons with a single cut. There is the sound of slicing. They fold the giraffes up. They rope them to a winch and drag them across the yard, up a ramp into one of the blood-tight trucks. The necks are stamped on in there and broken, so that other giraffes may be piled on top. The trucks are locked down, sprayed with disinfectant, and driven off into the witching night, gathering powder on their tires as they go.
THE DOORS OPEN AGAIN. Three more giraffes stand there. They do not step out. The keeper moves behind them. He slaps them on their hocks. He claps, he shouts. They do not move. They smell the blood. They sense the violence. I set down the rifle and walk around and talk through the slats to the giraffe keeper and to Emil.
“You’re doing this all wrong,” I say. “These animals are too strong for you. Try lighting a fire under them.”
“What?” Emil says.
“A fire. It’s what foresters used to move along bullock carts stuck in the mud on the path around the Svět.”
The keeper shakes his head; he can barely speak now.
“Trust me,” I say. “It will take their minds off one fear and put it on another.”
THE KEEPER BRINGS OUT some old copies of the
Rudé Právo,
or
Red Truth,
newspaper.
“Tie a few pages to their tails and set them alight,” I say.
I go back to the fence. I slide down to the base of it, my knees to my chest. I swig more rum.
“You’ve got a nerve, pal,” the butcher with the flashlight says to me, wiping his knives. “You should watch what you’ve started.”
So I do. I climb up on the fence and I watch the keeper wrap sheets of red right around the tail of one of the giraffes. I see Emil lighting the paper with a cigarette. The flames catch. The tail starts to burn. All three giraffes break forward, like bullocks pulling a cart of timber from a slough. The doors close behind the giraffes. The beasts slide now on blood and urine. They gallop around the yard, circling an invisible maypole. There is no sound but their hooves slipping on the wet concrete. One tail swishes, flames. It is another bonfire, another form of Čarodějnice. I level the barrel, I fire. I miss. I hit the neck. The giraffe falls. It kicks out on the ground, wounded.
“Hold me!” I shout to the butcher.
I stand atop the fence for a better angle, one leg on either side. The butcher throws his arms around my nuclear-clad legs. I load. I fire down at the prone giraffe and kill it.
THERE IS SO MUCH BLOOD. I fire a bullet in the air and cause a fountain. It is not a flow of blood from a deer into the forest floor. It sprays up to the chest. Whenever all the giraffes are down, Emil leaps down with glass jars. He squats over the bullet holes. He puts a jar to the fountain and fills it. It takes only a second. There is something of my childhood about it. The blood springs from the giraffes like the pierced side of Christ on the cross in a religious picture, filling grails. Emil seals the jars and wipes the blood from them. He puts a label on each and writes down the name and year of birth of each giraffe I have felled, as the keeper calls them out to him.
“Alenka!” the keeper shouts through tears. “1971.”
THE BUTCHERS WINCH UP the giraffes into a truck, but it is not blood-tight; it seeps. The giraffes are removed. The butchers hose the truck down inside and out. They seal it with sheeting and petroleum jelly. They load the broken-necked animals again.
The Čarodějnice bonfires have burned low. Half of the giraffes are dead. They have been different sizes and colors, but always vertical, always up. We take a break. I leave the butchers to climb the fences. I go to the side of the truck and vomit. My mouth tastes of bile. I swig more rum. I go to stand with the others. There is a beautiful girl, somehow materialized here. She is not wearing a nuclear suit. A secret policeman has her by the elbow; he detained her before, during the firework display. She does not struggle.
“How did you get in here?” the StB officer asks.
“Through the zebras,” the girl says evenly.
“You’re under arrest. You’re in serious trouble.”
“You’ll have to arrest me too then,” the keeper says, stepping forward.
“I get it,” the StB officer says. “Lovers.”
It is such a strange moment. No one has the heart to pursue it. The StB officer does not move the girl on; the keeper does not answer the StB officer. Emil comes forward, soaked in blood. He takes a Red Star from the pack I offer him and wordlessly lights it. We all stand here under the watery floodlights, under the hornets swarming and smacking audibly against the lights. There is no communication with the main gate. Only the trucks move from here, trundling away in leaded fumes. I feel as an okapi must under a Czechoslovian sky. There is a buzzing in my head that is not rum. Too much is revealed. Nothing is glimpsed here; I see everything clearly; I look up and see the shooting stars whole.
The girl seems also alert. Her eyes are large, darting. They fix on me, on the trigger of my rifle, on the doors of the giraffe house. One of the butchers pushes past the floodlights, to the table set with food and drink. He wipes his knife on the apron strung over his suit and puts it in his belt. He does not wipe his hands. They are still dark and sticky as he picks through the salami.
“You disgust me,” the girl says to the butcher.
The butcher spits at his feet and reaches for a bread roll.
“What’s new?” he says.
I step away. I have lost my appetite. I light another cigarette. The fishermen on the Svět say tobacco takes away the smell of blood. My legs are weak.
The StB officer approaches.
“The girl will hold the flashlight for you now,” he says.
I wipe my mouth. I nod.
THE GIRL SHINES THE FLASHLIGHT in the eyes of the giraffes. She stills the beasts.
“The back of the head,” I say.
She steadies the light.
“Giraffe!” I shout.
I level, I fire.
Emil drops into the yard, into the pit. The drains are blocked with congealed blood and waste. He is up to his knees in blood. He splashes away now through contagion. The fallen crow floats there with spread wings.
The butchers are wading now.
DAWN BREAKS. It is May Day in ČSSR, 1975, and I am quite drunk, as I planned to be.
I can see by this light. I no longer need a flashlight.
“Go to the keeper,” I say to the girl.
She moves off into the giraffe house, as voiceless as the beasts I have felled.
There is a delay. The doors open. Three more giraffes stand there. Emil and the girl light a fire under one of them. The keeper is nowhere to be seen. The giraffes splash out. Their heads are rolled back, stretched up. I kill them also.
THERE IS ONE MORE GIRAFFE. They bring her to the door. She is as large as a bull, perhaps eleven hundred kilos. She has a snow-white belly. The girl beats her with a rope on her fetlocks. Emil shouts at her. She does not move. She remains there on the threshold. They light a fire of red right under her. She bleats just once, like a kid goat, and dashes back into the giraffe house. They shut the doors. I hear her inside, dashing herself against the fences and walls. I run around the fence. After some time, we find the keeper.
“She’s not going to make it out,” he says to me, breaking his silence. “You’ll have to shoot her inside.”
I follow the keeper up the stairs in the giraffe house to the hayloft, where feed is set down at the height of giraffe heads. The cow runs back and forth below. She kicks out at the stalls. Her hooves are large and heavy. They leave jagged marks in the wood and circles in the metal.
“Her name is Sněhurka,” the keeper says blankly, “because of the snow-white of her belly and legs. She was a leader in the herd.”
The keeper slips away. I am without a witness. The girl is not here. Emil is not here. The StB officer is not aiming his telephoto lens and photographing me. I am alone in the barn, which is thick with contagion. I lie down on my belly in the loft, on hay and branches stripped clean by giraffes. I am tired. I swig the last of the rum. The stench of the yard is in here. May Day light slants in through the high windows.
It is harder to shoot across. The point of entry is different.
Giraffe, I say to myself.
I turn the safety catch to the left. I am at eye level with Sněhurka. She is running away from me on broken legs. I level the barrel at the aperture. I fire. I miss. The bullet is lodged in the flesh of her neck. She blinks, she swings on her broken legs, but she does not collapse. Blood springs from her neck. I slide back the bolt, I load. I level, I fire. The 57 mm bullet is gone from me. The sound of it reverberates.
Sněhurka buckles. She falls. She does not splash into blood, but crumples, enormous, to straw and dung. I stand. I look down. She is still alive. Her eyes level on me; they mark me. I fire once more. Her body tightens into that fragment of existence when you are no longer living and not yet dead. Her eyes close. Her legs kick out finally, as if a puppeteer is pulling her strings one last time. She is dead. Blood spouts from her, but Emil is not there with his grail. I get down on my knees.
“God grant her light soil,” I say aloud.