HERE IS SOMETHING: a Trabant 601 trailing black smoke, rattling over a cobbled square in which Martin Luther preached and Lucas Cranach the Elder painted. I wonder now what these men would have made of the giraffes if they saw them now. I wonder if they’d run up to the riverbank and exclaim, “Giraffe!”
Would they cut and keep an image of these thirty-two beasts for a sermon or a painting? I look up from my calculations and coded notes, down the avenue of giraffe necks, and I see that of course they would exclaim. Of course they would preach and paint, for this is a biblical and painterly scene.
WE PASS THROUGH MEISSEN. The sky here is bone-white porcelain, detailed in purple, like the flanks of an okapi. I walk up and down the barge, under wonder nets. Vokurka is at my side. I do not speak anymore of compromises but instead light a Red Star and talk of giraffe physiology. For instance, the way the thoracic vertebrae slip triangularly from neck to tail. I explain to him some of my theories of cerebral hemodynamics.
“Look,” he says, pointing south. “There’s our ČSSR!”
He points to the limestone hills separating DDR from ČSSR, like a sailor sighting land. There is a fork of lightning over those hills and another. But I hear no thunder. I see no hyenas tracking us through Meissen.
DRESDEN APPEARS STRANGELY oriental on the southern sky in a silhouette of minarets and domes of the large Yenidze cigarette factory, built fantastically before the First War in the style of Baghdad, or some other city of the Arabian Nights. Whole parts of Dresden collapsed under a firestorm brought on by a British bombing raid one St. Valentine’s Day. It was said that all the oxygen was sucked up from this point of Saxony that night, so that those not already burned alive or killed by falling masonry were suffocated in heat so intense they experienced no cosmic collapse; their blood boiled away. The view from the Labe is gap-toothed. There is hardly any resemblance here to the paintings made by Canaletto, when the city was known as Florence of the Labe. Zwinger Palace is here, miraculously survived, along with its collection of paintings by Van Dyck, Titian, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and my Lucas Cranach the Elder, as well as Dürer’s Dresden altar-piece. But the Frauenkirche, the great Protestant church, is a pile of blackened rubble. I mark a point in the sky where the gold cross rose above the dome of the church. I look for the space in the air where the organ Johann Sebastian Bach once played was, as I mark the spot in the giraffe where its heart is suspended. I frame this emptiness and I frame other spaces around the rubble where streets and squares with common gardens once stood. Grooms led Arabian mares and stallions evacuated from Polish stud farms through the firestorm on those streets. The flames rose up and the Arabian horses rose up also on their hind legs in the orange light. Some survived, others galloped swift and white through the inferno until the j-shaped brands on their flanks caught flame. They collapsed without oxygen and boiled also. My grandfather spoke of those Polish Arabian horses. He was brought low by such exterminations. He could not forget and related often the fate of the hundred thousand horses brought to Flanders from Texas during the First World War. They were glossy black and chestnut quarter horses, he said, some broken in by cowboys of Czechoslovakian descent, for there were many in the Texas desert who addressed my grandfather in Czech on his travels there — a Novotny and a Švabinsky in the saddle, perhaps, alongside a Gonzalez and a McAllister. The quarter horses were placed on trains at the towns of Marfa and Alpine and sold by auction in San Antonio to British and French government agents, who shipped them on through the port of Corpus Christi to Flanders, there to be drowned in mud, or broken under the weight of guns or injured, or driven to madness and shot by an exasperated officer. That war killed so many horses that the automobile took over and relieved the horse of its burden, and many horses came to be unborn. All suffering is connected. That is the feeling I have now on this barge of giraffes passing through Dresden: One suffering connects to another and binds us, as joy binds us.
We tie up beyond Dresden. I look back through fields of turnip to the skyline of the city. The night is tropical, African. Crickets click and chirrup in long grass. I leap from the barge to the riverbank and sit with the East German anglers, who set their lines at protractor angles into waters where there are no sardines, no salmon, but only eels searching upward and Czech-speaking vodníks drifting from one soul jar to another, free of the Communist mediocrity above, which is everywhere, even in the fishing rods about me, poorly made by some East German state monopoly, that threaten to break under the tug of the most inconsequential fish. There is no end in sight to the mediocrity: The socialist epoch would have itself extend, red-starred, into a distant future of centrally planned space colonies, and its desire to understand blood flow in vertical creatures on the moon explains the State’s passing interest in my hemodynamics.
Emil
ST. JOHN’S EVE
JUNE 23, 1973
WE PASS INTO the shadow of limestone gorges, shoveling giraffe dung into the waters of the Labe.
“What plans do you have after this, Freymann?” Hus asks, looking down.
“To go to my family country house,” I say.
“Where’s that?”
“Not so far from the source of the Vltava.”
“A large place?”
“Yes.”
“Swimming?”
“Yes.”
“Swimming, girls, and beer: a Czechoslovakian summer!” He slaps his thigh. “Coming home!” he says.
THE COUNTRY HOUSE is on a farm built a little before the Napoleonic wars. It is fenced in with brambles and set on the rise of a flinty field. There is a pond below. There are no slogans in that place. The Communist moment holds no sway there, where there is no industry. The only ideology is parent-ism, of when and how much and how loud. The only regime is mushroom picking, moonshine, and card games. A photograph hangs on the whitewashed kitchen wall. It does not puncture time like the man falling into the Ganges. It speaks to a moment that is gone. My mother stood up to her waist in the pond. I ran with my sister along a wooden jetty that extended then into our pond. My mother pressed the shutter release button. And so my sister and I are captured flying in the photograph, leaping into the air. We are falling. I am gripping my sister’s hand. We are laughing or perhaps screaming. I remember then falling out through the photograph. I let go of my sister’s hand. We entered the pond separately. I sank deep into waters such as Vokurka plays a Cuban frogman in. I looked up to see my sister bobbing near the surface, tucked together, serene, as if she had never left the womb.