“Look at his neck,” one of the Czechoslovakians says. “See how it rolls forward and back with each stride, like the mast of a sailing ship in a heavy sea.”
I STAND LOOSE AND SILENT near the fence. I am aware of the barefoot African boys who feed me branches and fruit, moving by me in the darkness. They carry pails of water and walk with their heads down, watching for sharp stones. I make out their patterns, the contrast between the pink soles of their feet and the dusty black of their calves.
Czechoslovakians move between us, making observations, taking measurements.
“There is socialism in our method,” I hear them say. “Capitalists capture one or two giraffes, while we take an entire herd; because our intention is political, to issue forth a new subspecies.”
Other Czechoslovakians are gathered around the camp-fire. Their white faces are open to laughter and to drafts of clear slivovice, or plum brandy. Their shadows fall giant-sized and gaping-mouthed upon me and upon the other giraffes, who are also silent and sleepless, who also step lightly through these shadows, watching the lanterns the guards swing at the edge of the camp to scare away hyenas. We watch through the night how these guards set down their rifles and drop on their haunches to contemplate the moon or to smoke a Czechoslovakian cigarette.
A CZECHOSOLVAKIAN STOPS before me now.
“Sněhurka is strong enough for transport,” he says to the others. “She will not die at sea.”
“True enough,” one of the others says. “And see how calm she is. Calm enough certainly to survive in our zoo.”
I have no answer to this; I do not even bleat, and so am condemned to further captivity, not only of time and gravity, but in the passage across also. If only I had stood against the Czechoslovakians as the young bull giraffe did, baring my teeth, or stumbled deflated about the back of the enclosure, then perhaps the fence would be opened to me as it is now to the weak and nervous Masai giraffes. They are sorted and set free. They do not buck and skid off as the young bull did, but stand in the camp looking back at the rest of us, the strong and stately giraffes, wondering at our confinement, where food comes easily, without reaching up. Only after shots are fired over their heads do they move off.
THE CZECHOSLOVAKIANS ARE closing down the camp. I am roped again and placed on a truck. I stand tethered here, looking deep into this cool dawn, waiting for them to come with the blindfold. I see a line of other giraffes similarly waiting. I see gray mist shrouding the caps of the red hills; the rains will be here soon. I see a single star low and bright over the grassland. I see the Masai giraffes turning lonely circles on the sunlit horizon, seemingly in flames.
I am driven down rutted tracks through villages I cannot see, to a railhead. My blindfold is removed. I am placed on a cattle car of a train bound for the Indian Ocean. It is crowded with the bodies of thirty-two other giraffes; our necks stretch far out of the car, over the tracks. The train jolts and shunts forward. I bleat once more — the second audible sound I have ever made. It is terrifying to move and yet remain standing still, to feel myself falling but never to strike the ground.
After a day and night, the train passes into a country that is lower and wetter, no longer ash-colored but verdant. African children run alongside when the train slows. They wave and shout up greetings to me and the other giraffes. Some of the children jump up to try to touch me. I look down at them as they rise, or through them. Their small bodies hover for an instant; their fingers stretch out to me. But I am too high, I am out of reach. They fall away again to the blade, which holds them close.
It is night. The train is halted on a cliff above a city. The Indian Ocean stretches out beyond the city, its waters cut up by trade winds. There is a harbor between the city and the ocean where ships are lit like soft glowing embers. The waters of the harbor are motionless, sheltered from the surf by a breakwater of coral. We stand halted on the cliff until the constellations have revolved under the ocean and Camelopardalis is submerged. Now the train starts forward again and I draw breath of the sea. We roll gently down from the cliff to the end of the line, past an old Portuguese fort, striking the buffers on a pier.
DAYS HAVE PASSED, so that I can taste salt on my hide. The sounds of this place have become wearisome, clacking; metal scrapes metal, ropes creak, hooves tear and split on concrete. We stand tall in this quarantine. There is clear water on either side of us, and an East German freighter, the Eisfeld, or Ice Field, is tied up before us. At some points in the day the ship casts a shadow over our enclosure, cooling and comforting us as the acacia trees have done. Czechoslovakians move on and off the Eisfeld with papers and equipment. East German sailors play cards and sunbathe on tarpaulins they roll out on the pier beside us. I have smelled other giraffes in these days, and they have pushed against me. I have stood alone at the edge of the quarantine also, watching movements in the water. I see flashes that I do not fully understand, which are not of an advancing predator, not of a rising hyena, but are the argent tentacles of brand-colored medusas and shoals of red fish advancing forward at great speed and at right angles.
“Sněhurka!”
I lean myself toward the sound, as plants turn toward the light; I have already begun to associate it with food and the offering of myself. I lean down and see a Czechoslovakian staring up at me. He holds a branch. I extend my tongue. I wrap it around the branch and take it. I begin to strip it bare. As I do so, I feel other men moving in behind me with ropes and harnesses. I am hooked once more.
“Now!” the Czechoslovakian shouts.
A crane whirs. I am raised up, off the blade. This is my point of departure. I am no longer in Africa, nor yet set down on the deck of the freighter. I float here, a reticulated giraffe, a camelopard, between shore and ship, sky and ground. My colors are white, dark chocolate, liver-red, russet-rayed in chestnut, yellow, black about my hooves. Saliva drools in strings from my mouth. My eyes are liquid opals, meeting the world enormous. I look down. I see Czechoslovakians and East Germans staring up at me. They shield their eyes. They must see my white belly against the sky.
~ ~ ~
And the communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations.
Emil — A Hemodynamicist
MAY 5, 1973
I AM NOT CONCERNED with the Communist moment, but with some beautiful moment gone before. I am a student of hidden flow. I imagine my own self as blood already passed through the heart and slowed in a distant part of the body, in the foot perhaps, and occupied there in remembrance of the cathedral-arched beauty of the ventricles.
I LIGHT a Rudá hvězda, or Red Star cigarette, and get up from the black plastic armchair by the elevators on the top floor of the “shipping company.” I go to stand by the window. I look down. I inhale.
Československá Socialistická Republika, or ČSSR, unfurls itself before me in factories, towers, and delicate spires worked through with sump-black cobbled streets on which pass only red trams and white police cars and a very few citizens treading slowly along with a downcast air. It is unseasonably cold. Snowflakes sail horizontally in front of the window, not falling, but sailing to the horizon, as though the Earth has tilted and gravity has lost its will. The clouds are scudding now. They break open. A single beam of sunlight strikes the building and illuminates me. I am suddenly the golden center of my own triptych. An elderly couple look up from the street below. They see me, but only for a moment. The clouds close over. My triptych vanishes. My face cools. The couple drop their heads and walk on. So it is: I am no longer visible, I am already a faint outline of what has been.