I open my eyes once. Aha! This is revelation. I am not the same person. It is not the same Svět, or world. It is obvious to me that no one harvests reeds on the marsh at the end of the Svět, or sets dogs down there each spring to starve or grow mad. I have no unlikely canoe. Skeins of red-breasted geese do not ever migrate over our town. There are no bright-colored beans in my pocket and consequently no beanstalk six hundred and ten trees high. I cannot say there is no magic, but it has not visited me; it has not raised me up or papered a cloud with a collage of my mother and father, and I do not ever expect it to, except in sleepwalking.
I walk away from the zoo gates, which are fashioned in metal shapes of giraffes and elephants. I walk toward the castle in the town. I open my eyes a second time. I am awake on the stairwell of my panelák. I am curled up. I am shivering on concrete, between floors. It is dark. There are no goose wings beating moonbeams onto me. I get to my feet. I look down. I am shoeless: My feet are bare and wet and covered in blades of summer grass and daisies. I climb the stairs. It is quiet in the building. The door to my flat is open. I step inside. I close it gently behind me. I have opened my eyes twice: Am I awake? I climb into my cot under the poster of the Alps. I close my eyes and I pray now for a dreamless sleep.
I sense you will dissolve into mist.
Emil
MIDSUMMER’S DAY
JUNE 24, 1973
TODAY IS MIDSUMMER’S DAY — the nativity of St. John, whose head was paraded on a salver. I am journeying onward to the zoo in a truck carrying four of the giraffes, including Sněhurka. Other trucks have left before us, packed with the vertical beasts, carrying away Vokurka and Hus also, waving his safari hat. I am dusty with river mud from the quay in Ústí nad Labem and softened by several glasses of beer.
It is more parched today than yesterday. Perhaps Hus is right. Perhaps the world is turning on its axis, hippos will come to wallow in the Labe, and Czechoslovakians will come to believe that it is they who have migrated to ČSSR and the giraffes who were here all along. I slump back in the cab of the truck and let my country come at me. Thistles burst from tall grass and rodents I see swirling and gleaming white-toothed and brown and black in the hedgerows. The woods we pass are as thick and lustrous as the jungles of Zaire, where giraffes are compacted down, day by day, into okapi. We drive carefully along back roads, avoiding bridges and skirting the town of Mělník, where the Vltava meets the Labe, the same Vltava that flows by the shipping office and beneath Baba Hill, on whose waters I saw a swan that in its furled state reminded me of the archangel Michael, a snow-whiteness that now makes me think of Sněhurka’s underbelly. I turn to view her and the other giraffes through the window in the back of the cab. The narrowness of the window, a slit in metal, seems to frame their coming captivity. Sněhurka stands off to one side. Her legs are planted for balance, her neck bends, gives as if swaying underwater. She is taller and prouder than the others, or perhaps this is just my imagination, perhaps this is only because I recognize her. They are blind to ČSSR. Their eyes are shut tight. Only when the truck stops do they open. We pass through the center of another town, another broken place, but broken so long ago, by Swedes in the Thirty Years’ War, so as to be a necropolis, whose cobbled streets are set with gravestones of colored marble. Lungs are scorched in the chemical plant on its outskirts; pigs are hitched up on hooks in the meat factory here and cut apart while still conscious: There is hardly a pig in the world who escapes a violent end. The Dresden feeling comes at me again, not precisely of a firestorm, horses, or broken-necked giraffes, or even of this necropolis of marble gravestones, lungs, and twirling pigs, but an understanding only that we are bound together, all of us, by suffering, even more than joy.
I roll down the window. In comes the smell of summer. It is more than rebirth. It is the richest rainy season on the nostrils of the giraffes, of soil, grasses, hops, fruits, of ponds opening and gaining from the bodies of teenagers who swim in them by day and bathe naked in them by night, when there is no one to observe them but a fox silent in the trees. We pass a cement factory in front of which sit workers in stained overalls, smoking, not looking up, not noticing the giraffes that move by them, and the smell of the Communist moment sinks through this sweet summer air in leaded gasoline and black dust.
“We should be heading farther on, to the industrial towns at the foot of the mountains,” the truck driver says.
“Why there?” I ask.
“This is not such a high place, where we are going now. These animals need something to look down on them. Some mountain. Like they had in Africa,” he says.
“Do you know mountains?”
“I was a mountaineer at one time,” he says. “I climbed all the highest peaks of the Soviet Union. I climbed far above the snow leopards in the Pamirs of Tajikistan.”
There is a suggestion in him, in his mannerisms and in his interest in giraffes, of where exactly they have come from and what their habits are, of a previous life, different from his present life.
“What were you doing before this?” I ask. “Apart from mountaineering.”
“I was an engineer at a factory outside Pardubice. We produced turbines for jet engines and shipped them down the Labe on barges.”
“You were fired for political reasons?”
“I caught a worker stealing.”
“You reported him?”
“He was stealing a little each day — cables, plugs, copper wire. I had no choice.”
“How did he react?”
“The usual. ‘You’re a bourgeois, picking on a worker.’ He reported me to the factory committee for my political views.”
“What happened then?”
“I was asked to sign a paper in support of the State. I refused and was fired.”
“You do not look so unhappy.”
“I spoke out before the committee. I held nothing back. I was punished accordingly. The punishment makes me happy — it is a liberation, even,” he says, changing gears. “There’s nothing to be compromised by driving a truck between one town and another.”
WE IDLE AT A JUNCTION by a pale meadow in which a beekeeper tends his hives. The beekeeper stops and stares through his veiled hood at the giraffes. They lean toward him now in return, like giant flowers his bees might feast on. This is a service the giraffe performs: It moves toward those who stand still before it and offers them a sense of otherness.
It is such a bright Midsummer’s Day. The play of light on the concrete granary towers and the military silos we pass on these back roads triggers in me, in a turning of comets, a memory of last summer’s Olympic games in Munich, television images of monochromatic tracksuits with bold lettering on the back
of sprinters and pole-vaulters in forward and upward motion, booming Afro haircuts, mustaches on swimmers, light playing on the concrete walls of the Olympic stadium, light playing also on a concrete path on the body of a murdered Israeli athlete.
CSSR
USSR
USA
ETHIOPIA