A sailor takes up a bucket of grain and brings it to me — it is his voice I heard from below.
“Hold your hands out — cup them,” he says.
I do so. He pours grain into them.
“Now hold them up to a giraffe. That one there. The Czechoslovakians call her Sněhurka.”
I see why: Her underbelly is a blizzard.
“I’m Czechoslovakian,” I say, still in German. “Sněhurka means ‘Snow White’ in Czech.”
The sailor nods and looks up.
Sněhurka slides her tongue out to me. It is the length of my arm, dark as a blood blister. She takes the grain. I feel her lips and teeth against my palm.
The same sailor guides me inside now. He swings open a heavy metal door. I dip my head. The lightbulbs are caged in wire. I breathe in spaceship air, stale, smelling of fuels. We slide down ladders, from one deck to another. The sailor opens and closes steel hatches. There are slogans on the doors. There are hammers and sickles. There are red stars. We pass a galley in which I see pans firing and spitting on a gas cooker. The sailor shows me into a saloon, where the ship’s officers are taking breakfast. I recognize the captain of the Eisfeld from a picture in the ring binder given me by the shipping director. I introduce myself. I stand here with my hands in my pockets, rocking on my heels.
“Well, sit down then, comrade!”
I sit.
His name is Hans Schmauch. He looks as I have hoped a sea captain would look: elderly, with cropped silver hair and beard, craggy, weathered, with a red nose.
“My father was a sea captain also,” he says suddenly. “He plied the Baltic Sea. He brought back iron ore from Sweden and timber from Finland. And here I am bringing back giraffes from Africa.”
He tells me of the plans for unloading the giraffes. Each animal will be hoisted up by crane and set down on a Czechoslovakian barge that will draw alongside this morning. I will go with the barge when it departs up the River Labe, tomorrow. The Eisfeld will sail home to Rostock.
Over coffee, I make my authority known to Schmauch.
He frowns. He waves me off.
“You have your business and I have mine,” he says.
His voice is quieter now, seemingly worn away by typhoons.
“You must understand that the ocean is my only ideology,” he says. “Since my passage is across the surface, I am not much interested in the interior of things. Monsters may cruise beneath, but I choose not to speak of them. Where the giraffes are heading and the rest of what you mention is of little interest to me. I am happy to have delivered them. The truth is that the giraffes unsettle me. It is best for me to regard them as not quite alive, like pictures on a postcard.”
“That is a strange thing to say.”
“I suppose it is. It might be because the giraffes are creatures of the interior, far from any sea. Certainly it upset me when they became agitated in heavy seas and kicked out at their crates, for days, so that all their legs were bleeding and done in with splinters. Or perhaps it is only that they have passed around the Cape of Good Hope on my ship and no longer have a home, but are instead delivered into captivity. We all yearn for a home, don’t we, comrade?”
“Yes, comrade captain,” I say.
“In dreams I see the parts of the Baltic Sea I sailed as a young man. I dream of approaching a tiny island on my own ship, which is not unlike this ship. There is a little turf on the island and a single birch tree. There is a wooden fisherman’s hut fastened to the rock with cables. It is always winter in my dream. The sea is iced over. The rising bow of my ship splits the ice, opening up a channel of black water to usher me home. Even from a distance I see herring drying on a line, candles burning in the windows, and a lit stove.”
“Is that dream a comfort to you, comrade?”
We stand.
“Such dreams are the anchor of every sailor,” he says.
“The giraffes might dream of a home as you do,” I say.
Schmauch looks thoughtful.
“They might, comrade. I’ll allow,” he says.
He walks away through his saloon. I envy him that his home is a dream, while mine is a certain place, on a hilltop, which cannot be approached by any ship, but only a propeller plane dipping low.
ALOIS HUS IS on the deck, among the giraffes. He is tanned and clean-shaven. He moves clumsily for an ambitious man — for a zoo director. He trips over a bucket of water he himself has set down. He swears. He is extraordinarily tall. I introduce myself now. I look up at him, as I might look up at a giraffe. We speak formally, in precise Czech. I tell him certain things and hold back others.
“Tell me about the shipment,” I say.
“You say shipment, while I prefer the word migration,” he says.
“Forgive me.”
“There are thirty-two giraffes here, the largest group ever transported across the world. This is not a shipment — it is an assisted flight into a new land. For who can say what might happen in the future? The Earth might shift on its axis, so that our ČSSR will become parched and what are now river meadows will become savannah and thorn trees might displace holly trees. If that were to happen, then the descendants of these giraffes might form the basis of a new subspecies.”
He swings his arms in embrace of the giraffes. I look up at him in this daylight, which is clearer than the light of our ČSSR. His expression is perfectly serious.
“Our own Czechoslovakian subspecies?” I say. “Camelopardalis bohemica?”
He lights up. “Very good, Freymann! I like that. Camelopardalis bohemica.”
“What plans do you have for them in the zoo?”
“It will be a family,” Hus says. “We will build a safari park. The giraffes will walk freely through the parkland.”
“To begin with, comrade?” I ask.
I realize we are distant from each other. He looks to the future, to his red-starred giraffes, while I am haunted by the past and engaged in a search for such beauty as will puncture time.
“To begin with,” he says, after a long pause, “they will be put in next to the okapi.”
The okapi is the closest relative of the giraffe — anti-vertical, of limited hemodynamic interest — which evolved away in the middle Pliocene to live squat and unseen in the depths of the Upper Congo River basin, so well camouflaged that its existence was only confirmed by an expedition in 1900.
“Will the giraffes not be perplexed to see how they are giants next to the okapi?”
“Not at all. They will see only that the okapi is more chocolate and purple in parts than they are,” Hus says.