Giraffe (3 page)

He stops. “So there is a miracle for you,” he says.

“Remarkable,” I say.

“You’ve never seen the sea — have you ever been out of the country?”

“I once went to Hungary.”

“All the more exciting this will be for you, then. What we want from you, Emil, is to travel up to Hamburg and supervise the unloading and passage back to Czechoslovakia of an important shipment.”

“You want me to go west?”

He gives me a weary look.

“Yes, Freymann. West Germany.”

He asks me if I have heard of a zoo in a certain Czechoslovakian town.

“Yes,” I say.

“It is due a shipment of giraffes. Let’s see.” He opens a ring binder with his tiny fingers and lifts out a few pages. “Here we are. Thirty-three giraffes. A record number, by all accounts. The zoo director is sailing with them from Mombasa in the next week or so. The giraffes are the property of the Ministry of Agriculture, although the shipping company underwrote some of the costs of their capture and transport.”

He puts an index finger in his mouth, nibbles. His expression is pained now. “There are concerns about the sale of sensitive information about your ČSSR — or indeed the sale of the giraffes themselves — to unfriendly foreign elements. You’ll travel to Hamburg, keep an eye on things, listen out for what concerns us, and make sure all the property reaches Czechoslovakia in good order.” He looks up. “But that’s all incidental,” he says. “The main point is to establish your cover for future operations. You’ll be a scientist sponsored by a shipping concern, nothing more. So how about it, Freymann — can you manage?”

“Why me?”

“You’re the giraffe man, aren’t you?”

“Just giraffe blood, comrade. I just deal in hemodynamics.”

“You’ve the perfect cover. You’ll get us access to foreign laboratories. Write some scientific paper from this trip. Indulge yourself. Yes?”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I know you will, Emil.”

I stand. I push back my hair. He slips the pages back into the ring binder. I take it. I open it and see written inside the cover in a flowing hand:

“Thank you, comrade director.”

“We’ll make a start on your permissions,” he says, addressing a finger to his mouth.

I go out. I flick through the file in the lengthening corridor. There is the sound of discordant typing, both fluent and clumsy. I lean against the wall. Only a single image of a giraffe comes to me at this moment; all my learning has been reduced to a giraffe of indistinct color. I see the height of the beast; its neck is translucent; I see blood shooting up its carotid artery to the rete mirabile, or wonder net, stretched elastic at the base of the cranium. The giraffe does not move; it does not turn toward me.

I WALK AWAY from the glass tower now, down Jankovcova Street to the Vltava. I turn up my collar against the cold. I come to the river. It is a vein, opened to the sky. It pleases me. I am a hemodynamicist and I cannot help seeing rivers as veins, and veins as rivers. I am given over, as I told the shipping director, to the study of cerebral hemodynamics in vertical creatures, in men and giraffes. That is, the flow of blood toward and through the brain, a journey that has no beginning or end save in the last beat of the heart, at which point the veins collapse — the cosmic catastrophe — along with all calculations. I do not feel the weight of my skull pushed up, as if on a stick, from this soot-dusted embankment. If I could hold it in my hands, here beside the Libeň Bridge, I would be surprised at its heft — most of it blood. My intent is to model the flow of this blood through the brain. I wish to map out its sinks and eddies, its oxbows, and the estuarine channels of the wonder net. I use sound waves to determine the variable depth of arterial walls. (For a long time, arteries were not understood. The garroting of specimen animals for dissection engorged the right ventricle and so emptied the arteries of blood, so they came to be called
arteria,
or tubes, and were assigned a pneumatic purpose, of pumping air around the body.) Blood finds no sea. It courses through narrows and rapids of ligament, flows upward against gravity, and becomes momentarily weightless in the deep of the brain, where thoughts shoot like comets through a firmament of crimson stars that give oxygen but no light. Blood is not opened to the sky; its journey is a hidden flow, is without light, save in the dawntide, which works into the thin blood vessels woven across wrist- and anklebones.

I leave the Vltava and walk now through the warehouses of Holešovice, under Czechoslovakian flags of red, white, and blue and Soviet flags of red slotted into the conical holders the State has decreed must be drilled into the masonry of every building. The flags hang limply. This is something else I notice about the Communist moment: how it celebrates itself in a windless land with a display of flags. I quicken my pace. I am drawn now, like a moth, toward an electric sign blinking on and off over the main gates of a brick-making factory. A space rocket bearing the initials ČSSR bursts moon-ward from the slogan

GLORY TO THE EPOCH OF SOCIALIST

AND COMMUNIST CONSTRUCTION!

The initials ČSSR and the space rocket blink on and off. The slogan is ever lit. I look at the potholed street. I walk under the sign. I do not look up, but see fairground reflections in the puddles of an epoch blinking on, then off.

I catch a tram and walk and come to a pub overlooking Stromovka Park. I step inside. It is yellow in here. The lights are yellow, the tablecloths are stained yellow, the walls and air are yellow with cigarette smoke; there is a jaundiced man propping up the bar, there are maple-yellow ice-hockey sticks lined up by the door. I take a beer and sit in a corner. I pull from my bag a copy of
Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens. It is a Czechoslovakian edition from before the war. This volume means something to me. It belonged to my uncle. Inside the front cover there is an admonition he scrawled in large letters as a child:

I flick through it at random, as the pious do with their Bibles. The paper is yellow. is scrawled on the margin of one page. A few phrases are underlined throughout:

I see an exclamation mark in the margin where Wemmick, the law clerk, carries a fishing rod on his shoulder through London, not with any intent of fishing in the River Thames, but simply because he likes to walk with one:

I shut the book and open it once more and put a finger to a page.

“That was a memorable day to me,” I read, “for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”

I know this passage well. The book often opens to this page. This is where Pip returns home from Miss Havisham’s for the first time. He has come to understand his position in the world. He sees himself anew, as a common boy with coarse manners and laborer’s boots. I read the passage once more. I try to make the words fit my situation.

I cannot. I am an adult, Pip is a child. West Germany is not Miss Havisham’s. My education has been limited by the Communist moment, not by poverty, as Pip’s has been. My manners are not particularly coarse, my shoes are foreign, well soled, not those of a laborer. It is true this has been a memorable day for me. I am bound by a long chain of iron, after Pip’s description. But the links are not of my making; they were formed in the year of my birth, 1948, the year in which the Communists took Czechoslovakia by the neck and wrung it. I close my
Great Expectations.
I look around this pub. The faces I see, one after the other, are yellow, indistinct, banal. They are bound also. They outwardly conform. There is no solidarity here. Solidarity is as likely, the expression goes, as a fire under a waterfall.

MAY 7, 1973

T
HE SKY OVER PRAGUE is dashed, flashing. A sudden warm rainstorm washes down in sweet hyphens over Antonín Dvořák’s grave in Vyšehrad, where I kneel now and lay down flowers. Standing, with Slavonic dances in my head, I see the rain passing over the Soviet military barracks in Smichov and wetting the bronze horses rearing up on the roof of the Národní Divadlo, or national theater, and causing Morse code in the sky over Letná Park, toward the apartment blocks of Obráncu miru.

I am named Emil for Emil Tischbein, the hero in Erich Kästner’s children’s stories, who famously led a band of child detectives through Berlin in pursuit of a thief. I bear an uncanny likeness to the illustrations in those books, as if I am an adult version of Kästner’s boy, grown up in 1960s ČSSR. I have the same mop of golden hair, which falls across my face in the same diagonal way and is pushed back between the fingers of my right hand in just the same manner. I have the same slate-colored eyes, the same button nose. I thrust my hands in my pockets, rock back on my heels, and smile shyly after friends and strangers alike, just as fictional Emil does, in a manner meant to suggest good nature and honesty. I am Czechoslovakian — of course I am; I am bound. But cycling down from Vyšehrad now through Prague in the blushing light of this spring shower, I look more Danish or Pomeranian: The whole of me bears the flaxen mark of the Baltic Sea, which I do not imagine as a dark sea on which a man might walk, indeed not as a sea at all, but as a marine light falling through the unstained windows of a Kaliningrad cathedral flensed of ornament onto the whitewashed grave of Immanuel Kant, while outside, Soviet battleships ride at anchor on vaguely realized swells.

The rain stops. The sun rolls largely over shining roofs. I freewheel on my bicycle down into Dejvice, around the circle, past the tram stop at Zelená Street, past the Hotel International, and on up Baba Hill. This is my hill: I live atop it. I cycle or walk it daily and barely notice its incline. My feet dig into the pedals now, my body rises without instruction from the saddle. I pass the red-clay tennis courts. The coach waves to me. I wave back. My bicycle rolls from right to left. I physically loosen and lighten as I ascend, as though my calculations and deceptions weigh something and can be cast off as I near home, although I know this is not so, that gravity is more insistent among those we love.

I step off my bicycle outside the Freymann villa at the end of Nad Pat’ankou Street: my home. The air here is sifted with sulfur smoke drifting in from high chimneys far away. The large windows of the villa glint in the afternoon light. My grandfather commissioned the villa in 1929 to resemble the prow of a big American train running sunlit through the desert down to Los Angeles. Other functionalist villas were built on Baba Hill then to break the pull of Hapsburg Prague, which hovered planetary on the horizon in black and gold. But the Czechoslovakia these villas were erected to celebrate has long since been plowed under. There have been so many departures from this hillside — to death camps, hard-labor camps, internal exile in villages or industrial towns, to New York, London, Munich, and Tel Aviv. Baba stumbles on as Prague stumbles on, as a wasted body in a fine suit.

I open the front door. I call out. There is no answer. I walk on into silence, into cream and mercury. I feel myself to have boarded some train in a desert, for this is a home of passage, in which there is hardly anything of the Communist moment. My father was raised here. My brothers and my sister and I have been raised here. I descend the stairs now by spare walls, untouched but for a few art photographs. I open the windows of my room onto the garden, lined with dark pine trees, which slopes down to the Dukla soccer stadium below. In summer, the shadows of my parents and the trowels and forks they carry about the garden play on the walls of my room, comforting me and keeping alive within me a sense of childhood.

My father read
Emil and the Detectives
aloud to me as a child. He read tenderly, because he understood the horrors awaiting fictional Emil. If that boy, also with slate-colored eyes, grew into a man and left the pages of the book, he would die fighting in the siege of Stalingrad or drown soundlessly in a U-boat far out in the Barents Sea. If he remained a boy like Peter Pan and lived the same adventure over and over, there would come a time when he was delivered into a Berlin that was burning. And who would care about the money stolen from him — those few notes removed from his jacket while he slept on the train, which made for the adventure — if he had alighted at Berlin Zoo station not in 1930, as the book has it, but in 1944, when the bombs were falling? How many child detectives would fictional Emil have been able to rally to his cause then, when real boys yet smaller than him wore uniforms, carried guns, and died in large numbers?

“Emil Tischbein is free in the way I wish you to be free,” my father said.

This was at a family celebration in a country orchard. There were striped deck chairs, Chinese lanterns, beer and sausages cooking on an open fire. Blossoms drifted among the elderly relatives, who sat as they had as children, with their feet in a stream.