WE ARE IN GOETHE’S GORGE. There are gingerbread villas on either side, a railway signal box newly built in the shiny metal of Tarkovsky’s Solaris and gardens in which beanstalks climb high against the limestone face. There are pine trees and dramatic outcroppings atop the gorge that make me think of a picture I have seen of Quebec. These heights hold in them the suggestion of snow falling softly one Christmas Eve to come. There is a castle among the outcroppings and a sleek Bauhaus mansion of granite and sliding glass, solid, reaching out into space over the gorge, like the observation deck over the sloping garden at Nad Pat’ankou Street.
Goethe moved through this gorge with a hammer. He reflected and scribbled. He took his hammer to the face of the rock and picked out molluscs from the floor of an ocean that once weighed on this place. The thought of Goethe’s hammer makes me wish to be a geologist engaged in the study of the flow of time, trekking fit and tanned through the Kola Peninsula bounding the White Sea, picking cloud-berries, concerned only with readings of rock formations that have no cosmic collapse and with fording a fast-flowing stream before nightfall.
The sky is polluted in the south with smoke rising from ČSSR and with gray needles that are paneláks, eight units high and four wide. There is a mist on the river and candy cane- colored posts on either bank that constitute the border between DDR and ČSSR. We break through. We pass through no sphere of thought. The bargemen throw out ropes to soldiers and customs men of our ČSSR. Those on the riverbank stop and stare up at the giraffes. A sergeant takes off his hat and mops his forehead with a handkerchief.
“Emil Freymann?” he asks breathlessly.
“Here,” I say.
“Come with me.”
I place a telephone call to the shipping company in a customs office. The sergeant fans himself at the door of the office with a copy of the Rudé Právo, or Red Truth, newspaper. Someone answers the phone now. I wave the sergeant away.
“Take up a pencil,” I say down the phone. “I will begin.”
THERE IS A BARGE tied up by the customs house in front of our barge. It is packed with horses, dogs, a painted caravan, and a truck with Romanian registration. They are Gypsies. They have no home to return to in joy. They find solace in movement. When they are forcibly settled by the authorities and their caravans are taken from them, they become like a broken people. They dance now on the riverbank before the giraffes. They wail and shout up to the beasts. Naked children and children in ankle-length dresses and white goats in yellow ribbons run in delighted circles. A man with skin as dark as that Indian falling into the Ganges plays a feverish tune on his fiddle. Older girls dance around him. I am not diverted by the blood moving up within them, but frame the necklaces of silver coins beating on their chests. The giraffes sway toward the Gypsies, drawn by the music and the coins. Hus invites an old Gypsy woman, a matriarch, onto the barge. He speaks to her as though she were an exotic. And she is the last of her kind: The journeys she has made have been replaced by other, faster journeys. She has spent many seasons behind horses and has seen the world in the narrows of the caravan’s hooped roof in lines of mud, ice, horse manure, verges risen in summer, wasps in autumn feeding on fallen pears, wildcats leaping large across wintry bridle paths, of the sun moving steadily across the sky, changing the light within the caravan, of the quietude of mornings, matched by the music and arguments of the night, a clip-clop near and through Carpathian valleys far away, in time with the passing of self. She is almost blind: She can hardly make out the heads of the giraffes Hus points out to her. Understanding this, Hus reaches down to the woman and takes her hands and presses them firmly against the flank of a Rothschild bull.
“Woman,” Hus says. “We call this animal a giraffe.”
She runs her fingers down the lines of the hide. Her face lights up. She speaks in her own Gypsy tongue. She moves her body closer to the giraffe. She places her head against the dampness of the animal. She says something more. It becomes a narrative. A boy is brought forward from the riverbank to translate for her.
“She is saying, ‘There was a storm on a bowl of water circled by sand,’ ” the boy relates. “She says, ‘This animal was floating on the water when the sky went dark all around. The wind rose. It was hard for the animal to breathe: It felt it could not breathe. Sand blew from around the edges of the bowl into its eyes. The water grew rough. It was hard for this animal to stand. It was thrown from side to side.’ She says, ‘This animal did not fall. It was another who fell.’ ”
The old woman takes her hands away, kisses them, and presses them again on the giraffe.
MY HOMECOMING TO THIS ČSSR of 1973 is not like the return of Pip from the Orient, or of fictional Emil to his hometown of Neustadt. When I see gray swans flying by the castle in the town of Děčín, I feel myself a foreigner. I think now I should have swum perpendicularly to the West German riverbank and exposed myself to the nudists. I should have had them deliver me to the authorities in that sphere and spoken to them of crimson stars in femoral arteries. I seem to have no understanding of the Communist moment they call normalizace, or normalization, whereby hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovakians have lost their jobs for opposing the invasion of 1968, the best replaced with the worst, the patriots with lackeys, the questing with the credulous few. I sit at the front of this barge and the droplets of the Labe wet me and wet Sněhurka behind me and I think that I have not emerged from the side of a hill, but am another soul, windburned and shipwrecked on the shores of Schleswig-Holstein, strayed up the Labe, through Goethe’s gorge, into a windless and haunted hinterland.
My bearings come slowly, like a weather balloon’s descending onto Cuban hills. I see leviathan gravel-making machines in a quarry on a hillside and rectangles cut into the forests on higher mountains that are pistes I have skied. I have carved those steep slopes on which chairlifts now rock lonesomely in parched summer air. I have stood at their sides over my poles, breathing hard into whiteness. My own sense of captivity comes from a recurring nightmare I have of these pistes. I am a skier — a child. I wear goggles, a ČSSR ski hat, jacket, and racing pants. I am clipped into waxed and sharpened skis. The bindings are tight. I have all my equipment, but no movement. I am caged. I drop into a tuck and clatter into metal bars. I am a caged animal. I call out to those who carve turns around me. They pay me no attention. I call out to the pisteurs with their shovels. They glance at me sadly: I am not even a hunger artist to them. I cannot do anything in the cage but ski three or four slalom turns and then herringbone up the slope again, over and over, until the snow melts under me and the grass grows up and I am forced to take off my skis and boots, my hat, jacket, and racing pants, and lie naked on the ground, motionless, waiting for night to come and the stars to show themselves.
We tie up the barge finally in the center of Ústí nad Labem, the town where the opera singer alighted from the train to sing the part of a water nymph. We take our bags and check into a new riverside hotel. Inside the lobby, it is all lacquered plywood and factory-produced tile mosaics describing nothing. I go up and shower and shave. I pack away my giraffe-smelling tracksuit. I dress in a clean white shirt and tie and file with the others into the hotel dining room. A window runs the length of the room, through which we can see the giraffes on the barge in this oily summer light as in a painting by Cranach. Some of the giraffes drop their heads and lift them again, as horses do when trying to loosen their bit. Others remain still and marked above the river in f shapes, just as in that photograph in an East German magazine I have seen, supposedly of the Loch Ness monster in Scotland.