Giraffe (25 page)

“Now,” the sharpshooter says. “They’re opening the doors.”

I hold a branch up. A young male approaches. He leans toward the branch. I shine the light in his eyes. He stops. He pushes back his head, he stretches up. Tears roll down his cheeks.

“Giraffe!” the sharpshooter calls, then pulls the trigger.

The giraffe is hit. It falls.

I begin to cry. The sharpshooter climbs down from the fence. He sets down his rifle and holds me tight.

“Don’t cry,” he says. “Look at me.”

He smells of drink. He pushes back his spectacles.

“What you are doing is a mercy,” he says.

THE YARD IS FILLING with blood. The stench is stronger than the foulest cowshed. The giraffes do not lean. They do not notice me. The keeper and the scientist must light a fire under them to get them out of the giraffe house. Tails burn in the darkness.

All I can do is find their eyes and fill them with light.

I WATCH THE SCIENTIST move with precision through the blood. He puts jars to the springs of blood and fills and stoppers them. Butchers splash in behind him. I see one of the butchers holding up the head of a giraffe by the horns now, as though waiting for it to deflate.

FIRST LIGHT WASHES OVER the Svět. It is May Day.

“Go to the keeper,” the sharpshooter says. “You’ve done your part. There are only a few left. I can see them without the flashlight.”

I AM IN THE keeper’s room. He is not here. The light is breaking through as it did on the morning of Christmas Eve, when everything was as cold and crystalline as Franz Josef Land. From in here I can hear and smell what is going on outside. I am too awake to step inward to fireflies, butterflies. There is shouting from the butchers: Another giraffe is being hauled up into a truck. I block out the sounds. It is a mess in here. I push back my hair and kneel on the floor and sort the keeper’s papers and his studies of Czechoslovakian animal history.

“Don’t bother with that.”

It is the scientist. He is at the door.

“We’ll have to burn everything,” he says. “It’s all contaminated.”

“My dress?” I say bitterly.

“That will be burned too.”

He is covered in blood. His hair also. He lifts up his goggles.

“There can be no record of the contagion,” he says. “It will be exactly as if this night never happened.”

I drop the papers. They scatter over the floor. There will be no more notes of polar bears or of the giraffe with a fractured pelvis who walked over the Julian Alps.

“What is the contagion?” I ask.

“You’ve seen the swellings on their flanks,” he says.

“Most have no marks.”

“The State cannot afford the risk,” he says.

He takes off his surgical gloves, scrubs his hands, and snaps on a clean pair. He brushes back his hair. Strands are stuck together with blood.

“Did you read the stories of our early Slavs?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says.

“There was a story of a boy captured after a battle.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Your hair reminds me of that story.”

He arranges his jars of blood neatly on trays. He labels the test tubes. He takes a syringe. He draws blood from a jar. He injects it into one of the test tubes. He seals it. He checks it. He places it in a metal case. “My hair?” he asks.

“A raiding party was captured. They were roped together and sentenced to be executed from the youngest to the oldest and richest. The boy was near the front of the line. He had blond hair, down his back. His friends called him Fine Hair. He was untied and pushed forward. He spoke up when his enemies were about to execute him. He told them they could do what they wanted with him, but they were not to get a drop of blood on his hair.”

The scientist looks up from his test tubes and smiles now, a half-smile of this place, like the half-light cast by the floodlights.

“His enemies took his hair and had it wrapped around the forearm of a servant. ‘Now die,’ they said. The boy shrugged and knelt. He told the servant to hold his hair up tight when the ax fell. The ax came swinging. At the last moment, the boy jerked forward, dragging down the servant’s forearm with his locks. The blade cut off the servant’s hand. The boy’s hair was covered in the servant’s blood. He jumped up and berated his enemies for the mess they had made of his hair. They gathered around and beat their shields. They favored displays of courage. They were delighted with the boy. They gave him a sword and released him.”

“Where do you work?” the scientist asks.

“The Christmas-decoration factory in the town.”

“Why are you here? The keeper?”

I shake my head. “The giraffes. They awaken me.”

He nods. He is about to say something more, but stops. There is another rifle shot. He takes three empty jars and runs out again.

I AM ESCORTED FROM the zoo in the daylight. I cannot look back. I can only look down. The army dogs are barking outside the walls, the wolves answering from inside. I am giddy. I imagine the gorillas calling out to me as I pass:
Viva! viva! viva! viva! Amina!

All the paths are quicklime, marked with footsteps, and little bodies of shot birds.

“Keep moving,” the secret policeman says.

So I do.

I AM IN A SHOWER. I lift my breasts. I scrub myself at their command. They hose me with disinfectant.

There is no operatic aria in here. I do not walk over a turning mill wheel to my lover. These men wear goggles and face masks. I see under their suits the red-star badge of the StB.

“You carry the contagion,” one of the men says.

“You are a risk to national security,” the other says.

“Once more,” they say together.

So we begin again with the disinfection.

They open the flap of a tent. They sit me down here on a bench. I put my head in my hands. My hair falls down. I am naked under these overalls. I am shoeless as in my sleepwalking, but am perfectly awake to this May Day. I cannot dull myself. I hear a voice speaking to me.

“My hair is clean now,” the scientist says.

I feel myself to be in that centrifugal ride. I go around and around. I cannot lift my arms up, much less lift off like John the Baptist toward an unimagined color. I am no longer aerated: The chlorine does not pass through me but burns my skin. The centrifugal ride has me. I am pinned to the cage. I am so heavy now, I cannot lift my head. I cannot reply.

MAY DAY

MAY 1, 1975

I
T IS MAY DAY. The gore I have produced is there for all to see. I wade through the yard. I climb the fence. Emil, if that is his given name, is here by the last truck, exposing film the StB officer took through the night:
It will be as if this night never happened.

I walk away in this suit slowly, deliberately. I seem to hear zookeepers crying. A kangaroo hops up in its cage. I see other beasts indistinctly. I cannot tell one cage of apes from another. I come to the zoo gates. Secret policemen and functionaries come up to me.

I am slapped on the back.

I turn. It is Máslo.

“Well done, Sobotka!” he says excitedly.

I AM TAKEN INTO A disinfection unit. They take the Mauser and drop it in a vat of solution. They take the satchel, the thirty-three remaining cartridges, and the cigarettes.

“This is all for burning,” they say.

I am stripped of the suit. My spectacles are taken and dipped in solution too. Goggles are placed on my face.

“Eyes shut. Tighter.”

My hair is soaped and soaped again. They spray me with disinfectant. I am hosed as a horse is hosed. They take off the goggles and wash out my eyes and nose and now my ears and mouth.

I AM GIVEN BACK THE clothes I arrived in. I am led to an empty tent and made to wait here. It is a field-hospital tent. There are plastic windows stitched into it that let in a watery light.

The flap opens. A secret policeman brings in the girl who held up the flashlight for me. He sits her down across from me. She has been disinfected also. They have given her overalls to wear in place of her dress. She is bent over, her head in her hands. She does not look up. I cannot see whether she is weeping quietly or is asleep.

IT USED TO BE THAT farmers would take straw and rub it in the mouth of an infected cow and then take the straw and spread it in the mouths of the other cows, so the herd would share the sickness, be milked together, the milk dumped, and would together develop an immunity and recover. I do not know what the contagion is, or if it has been contained through destruction, just as you cut down trees to save a forest during a fire. Perhaps a swallow escaped into the night and infected the cowshed of a collective farm or a fox slipped out through the cages, like the girl slipped in. I know the May Day parade will proceed around the town square with red tractors and brigades of children whirring like clockwork to anthems. The cows will be milked across the ČSSR today, the milk poured out for children, and the surviving okapi will move about its cage in the zoo undisturbed, sneezing quicklime.

“REMEMBER,” THEY SAY. “You were hunting black grouse.”

“Yes,” I say.

“You can go, comrade.”

I AM GIVEN THE MAUSER. I do not have to sign for it. I have not signed my name to anything.

“The strap,” I say. “I’ll need the shoulder strap.”

They find it and hand it to me.

A TALL MAN GRABS ME NOW. I look up. It is Alois Hus, the zoo director. While I have been shooting, he has been crying. I flinch. He might hit me, or embrace me.

“Comrade Sobotka,” he says, embracing me. “Did any survive?” he asks.

“No.”

He bites his lip.

“Alois, forgive me,” I say. “It was a horrific night. I will have nightmares about it for the rest of my life.”

“Twenty-three of those giraffes were pregnant. Did they tell you?”

“No.”

“I’m happy it was you.”

“Just a single shot each time,” I say.

“This was the greatest migration,” he says. “You must understand that they found us on the grasslands, at the edge of red hills. They came to us. You can’t imagine.”

It is true. I understand okapi and cannot imagine what it is to be a giraffe and to move in harsh light at such a height, with long steps. I do not tell him of the burning pages of
Red Truth
swishing through the witching night, or of how difficult it was to thread those heavy heads with my sparkler. I do not tell him how the felling of each giraffe was more violent to me than finding birds’ nests and squirrels crushed in trees I have cut.

SOLDIERS ARE DRIFTING OFF toward the May Day parade together with secret policemen. I attach the shoulder strap to the Mauser. The barrel drips onto the white-powdered path. I see Emil sliding a metal case onto the backseat of his official car, a Tatra 501. He is showered and smartly dressed. He gets into the front seat and is driven off behind the last truck, just departed, carrying the cow Sněhurka.

I DO NOT TAKE a lift home to my village at the end of the Svět when one is offered to me. I walk up the hill to the forest by the town swimming pool. It is a bright morning. I see Michael touching the pink roof of his chapel, lancing demons and hydras. I break into a run. I enter the trees like a deer from a field.

There is the pine-fresh smell. I am in my living gloom. I go across, deep into the forest, where an okapi might hide. The forest floor is a trampoline of fir roots under me. I pass the secret military base. Its siren will sound out the Communist moment at midday. Squirrels and birds will scatter. Deer will lift their heads. Missile silos will open, as a carp opens its mouth at the surface of the Svět. The siren will cease. The silos will close again. Some of the soldiers will leave the base through a gate in the electrified fence and celebrate May Day with a game of soccer in a clearing.

ČARODĚJNICE

APRIL 30, 1975

C
OME OFF IT,” I say, upset. “We’ve just finished our shift.”

“Tomorrow is May Day,” Jaro says.

We’re a team, Jaro and I. He drives the truck, I cut the meat.

“There’s a new television drama starting tonight,” I say.

“There’s a bonfire celebration,” Jaro says. “It’s witching night.”

“No dice, boys,” the boss says. “Finish your beers. This is the job you were warned about.”

It’s true — we have been warned. We spent a week getting the metal paddles of the Destruktor in order. We were told to prepare the machines for the heaviest kind of horses.

WE DRIVE BACK to the plant. There’s an StB officer here. It must be something different. I was thinking brewery horses, or something. We’re all here. Every driver, every butcher.

“Sharpen your knives and look alert, boys,” the boss says.

“This is a matter of national security,” the StB man says.

“You’ll be properly compensated, if we keep our mouths shut,” the boss says.

WE’RE GIVEN INSTRUCTIONS. Take the Vamberk road, head for the mountains, keep away from the industrial towns, through a forest to a zoo. A zoo! Well that narrows it down. Jaro and I take the three-ton Robur, the other boys are all in seven-ton Škodas.