IT IS TOO HOT NOW for talk of ice hockey. It seems natural that Vokurka is combing back his thin hair from his sweaty scalp and talking of Cuba.
“I spent a year on the island,” he says. “This was not long after their revolution. I was sent to assist with the defense of Cuba against American biological and chemical weapons. My job was to examine the ballast of American weather balloons, which had drifted from Florida and fallen to earth among the cows in the Cuban hills, some shot from the sky by the Cuban military and others struck down by lightning, in all cases, as I saw once or twice myself, descending like a long mirrored ribbon. The Cubans had an idea that the sand in the weather balloons, which sifted out over the farmland as it lost altitude, might have been infected. The leadership in Havana believed the Americans had impregnated the sand with one contagion or another, designed to lower the fertility of the chickens, weaken the pigs, or damage the cows. I drove around the island testing sand samples and drawing blood from animals in the affected districts. There were a number of veterinarians looking at different biological and chemical threats to Cuban livestock. We were Soviets, East Germans, Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Czechoslovakians. The leadership in Havana took an immediate liking to us.”
“You met the leaders?”
“Several times. We were summoned to a beach villa every few weeks. We announced our findings and the leaders leaned forward in their deck chairs and listened. It was quite different from what I expected. There were cigars, but no oratory. They hardly said anything at all.”
“Were the Americans doing that? Did you find any evidence?”
He shrugs. “Americans are capable of many things. We were careful to make up our own confidential reports in such a way as to leave open the possibility of contamination. I can only say that all the sand samples I and others gathered were sterile. The Cubans had no interest in sending us home immediately. That would have been to admit paranoia, or that the intelligence service had given credence to wild rumors. I was occasionally sent from Havana to the east of the country to draw blood from animals there. The rest of the time I was free to do as I pleased. The Cubans asked me if there was anything I wanted to learn. I told them that I had always wanted to be a frogman. So they placed me in their military frogman course.”
“You became a merman?” I ask.
“A merman? If you like. I spent all my days in the sea. I swam with stingrays in the tidal gaps and sometimes with bottle-nosed dolphins in the reefs. I took up pieces of coral, shark teeth, and small artifacts from among the timbers of shipwrecks. I was also taken fishing in the mangrove swamps. There is a time of year there when the tarpon come inland and feed on the smaller fish. They are as large as salmon and colored similarly to precious metals. They are fast, blood-thirsty, and survive in that stagnant water by coming up to breathe, like mammals.”
“Do you go diving still?” I ask.
“Of course. In the rivers and lakes of our ČSSR.”
“In the Labe?”
“Yes.”
“Surely you can’t see anything.”
“Not much,” he says. “The water is peat-colored. You can make out the shapes of broken plows and cartwheels in it. It is beautiful only on days like this, when the sun reaches into the water. On these days it is like diving into a glass of beer. You can see trout and pike and the hollows in the riverbank and all the cuts in the bed.”
“Are you married, František?” I ask. “Do you have children?”
“Take a look,” he says.
He pulls out a photograph from his wallet and hands it to me. He is standing in snorkeling suit, flippers still on his feet, between a girl and a young boy whose hair is bleached by the sun. There is a stone harbor wall behind them.
“That’s Daniela and that’s little Mirek. She’s eight. He’s six.”
“Where was this?”
“Yugoslavia last summer. My wife took it.”
His daughter leans close into him, her hand in his, her head on his elbow. His son stands with arms folded to the right of Vokurka. He has consciously made himself distinct from him. Vokurka looks satisfied.
“Has it been worth it?” I ask.
“Has what?”
“The compromises. Joining in with the Party. Playing along.”
“I can’t think what you mean.”
He is embarrassed, a little frightened. I have crossed a line. My heart beats faster for saying it. My blood roars through narrows of ligament. It is the opposite of being a boy and saying to a girl for the first time, “I want to be with you.”
Emil
JUNE 22, 1973
IT IS THE SECOND night on the barge. We do not tie up but continue, our ascent sleepless through DDR. We have passed the town of Tangermünde and are thumping slowly now through Magdeburg in this early hour, the hour, as Dante has it, “that turneth back desire in those who sail the sea,” the hour of lowest blood pressure, when people most often die. I have insomnia. I sit here under this tarpaulin listening to Sněhurka and the other giraffes shifting in their crates and banging their legs against the planking.
There is no movement in Magdeburg save a giraffe-colored fox picking through rubbish on the embankment. This is the town where the astronomer Tycho Brahe alighted on his journey from Copenhagen to Prague. He had lost the tip of his nose in a duel and replaced it with a metal piece that must have shone as he leaned his head back to regard the heavens with his naked eye. Brahe discovered stars simply by stopping and staring more intently than anyone else. I think now of how many more stars Brahe would have discovered if he had worked with giraffes — had employed giraffe eyes. Perhaps even the modern constellation Camelopardalis, sunk deeply by Perseus and Cassiopeia.
Giraffes are not like insects, who feel the world before them with pubic antennae, or bats shining sonar through the dark, or other vertebrates who smell or hear the world. Giraffes see the world. The giraffe eye is the largest in the animal kingdom, several times larger than the human eye, larger still than the eye of a mermaid. It is almond-shaped, framed by long lashes that in Africa blink away flies and swarming gall-ants, but in Magdeburg now only flutter. The optic nerve of a giraffe is as thick as an index finger, and the celestial view that plays through the nerve on the brain of a giraffe — of stars invisible to the human eye and all the subtle colors denoting the age of the star, which twinkle prehistorically down on us — is more finely grained than any Brahe could have hoped for. The height of the giraffe makes a watchtower of it. With its vision and vantage point, a giraffe can see a man shifting on his haunches a kilometer away. It is not that a giraffe has a mystical power of prophecy or foreknowledge, as the Egyptian hieroglyph had it. It is only that a giraffe sees the present before any other animaclass="underline" When it shifts on the grassland, all the impalas and gazelles raise their heads in alarm. And if by chance a hyena were to happen upon the riverbank here in Magdeburg, chasing away the fox licking now at the butcher’s waste, in this hour that turns back resolve, the giraffes about me, even proud Sněhurka, would see the hyena as demonic and try to take flight. The crates would stop them, and their eyes, if I should frame them, would open wide and whirl in terror about their sockets, so that they should feel the thickness of their own optic nerve.