WE STOP NOW in a village near the town of Žlunice and buy beers in a pub and drink them, leaning back against the radiator of the truck. I am side by side with the driver. Villagers step from their pub. They stare up at the giraffes. They come close. They take in the circus smell. Some of them offer up soup plates of beer. The giraffes lean down and set their tongues to the beer. They lap it up. They are migrants, learning where they have arrived.
We drive still more slowly through the afternoon, by fields and ponds. The sky in the east is slanted with rain, but it has not rained here for weeks. The streams are running low, the vodníks are gasping. This is my country, a windless and haunted hinterland of rivers flowing into a flat center and then off to seas that are bordered by other peoples, who did not emerge from hills caked in peat.
This is my Czechoslovakia, which is caught in a spell of normalization, darkened, like an insect colony under the shadow of a stone, so reduced and forgetting that only crows remember the old patterns and lift from the branches of the same trees as crows in the time of the Napoleonic wars, when there were no factories and no roads and the journey to Austerlitz took days going and longer coming back. It is nothing like the icebound island beyond the Pole Star, where the gyrfalcon hatches, or the mountains of Papua New Guinea, such as the shipping director spoke of, where the air is so thin the helicopters bringing the miners to the gem mines below the glaciers gain no purchase and spin a full circle before regaining control. My country does not teeter on any kind of edge, but the edge of self. It knows nothing of Hamburg but what vodníks whisper in pubs, nothing of fictional Emil’s Berlin now divided, and nothing of the salt marshes of the English coast, where Pip once tended Magwitch and so unknowingly secured for a time his fortune. ČSSR is the middle of things, a middling totalitarian state in the middle of Europe, where deep drops in barometric pressure are not met by the shifting of ocean currents but by a pressing-in of the brain, just here, by the temples, a constriction of blood vessels behind the eyes, a certain sudden melancholy, and a pain in porous molars. It is middling roads over middling streams, in which the fleck of trout grown so-so under middling rains must be visible to the keen eyes of the giraffes. It is middling vodníks capturing middling souls and potting them in hollows below middling runs of rushes and reeds. It is middling towns with splendid baroque churches of limited congregations and middle-sized paneláks haunted by middling quicklime outlines of the dead, and middling factories that never meet the oversized quotas set for them in the Communist moment, and middling villages encircling the towns, where ambitions are no more than those of the vodník, that is, to watch over a stretch of river, to preserve souls, and to drink in the pub. Contemplation of my country is enough to bring on nausea. Not seasickness, but land-sickness: I search the horizon for a sea, as a sailor searches for land. I want the meadows to shift under a light swell and the eels to summon up a hurricane, from the Sargasso Sea of their memory, that might swing the bells in the church towers.
We turn north toward the mountains along the Polish border. Schoolchildren from the cities work the hop fields below the hills. A few of them catch sight of the giraffes. They set down their baskets and wave. A bird of prey, a harrier, is circling above. It spies the giraffes and then some morsel creature in the hop field. It pulls back its wings and drops, just as I saw one of those red-starred fighters drop in another summertime, when I was camping in the Orlické Mountains with a girlfriend. She shouted me awake just after sunrise, from outside. The first light was blue-red through the skin of the tent, as daylight must appear in the veins woven about my wrists and ankles. I climbed out after her into the forest clearing. She pointed up at the fighter jet falling silver from the sky. We saw the pilot eject and drift off, like a seed under a parachute. The jet fell nose-first, silent as the harrier diving now, but with a sense of many tons of unsupported metal, and with a violence of flames ripping back over the wings. It passed under the trees. It was gone in a blink. There was an explosion, a fireball, then a secondary explosion. We put on boots and ran through the forest, into smoke, and at last came upon the wreckage of the jet, in a canyon of the River Zdobnice, which flows into the Labe. We teetered at the edge of the canyon and saw the fighter jet lying red-starred below, smoldering through its metal plates, like a speared dragon through its scales.
“LOOK AT THAT.” I point out a shrine at a crossroads. Its window and frame are smashed. The crucifix inside is broken.
“I see it,” the driver says.
“People used to put candles and wildflowers before the statues in these shrines,” I say. “No one looks after them now. People do not even see them. They pass them unthinking, as they pass under trees unthinking.”
“You mourn the crucifixes so very much?” he asks.
“Not only the crucifixes. I mourn the forgetting.”
It is getting to be dusk. We stop finally at the edge of the town with the zoo.
“Why are we stopping?” I ask. “It’s late. We’re almost there.”
“I like to reflect for a moment before completing a journey,” he says, stretching. “It’s a habit of mine.”
“Like pausing before a summit?”
He looks at me. “Different,” he says.
There is a sadness in his eyes, which is also a registering of a drop in barometric pressure. A thunderstorm is almost upon us. My teeth begin to hurt. We squat down and smoke Red Stars. Insects whir through the smoke rings we blow. We are parked in the yard of a sawmill. There is wood all around, some of it already cut into planking. The smell of wood shavings makes me think of Pinocchio, who was spared because he spoke up. It was a piece of cherrywood, intended for a table leg. It found voice and called out to the carpenter saying that it had no wish to be cut up and made into something dependable, on which a table could stand. So Geppetto got the piece of cherrywood and fashioned his puppet from it. The puppet became a boy, a he, whose face sweated resin under the Tuscan sun.
We cross the Labe. The river is shallow here and contained in a narrow concrete channel; it flows fast with the last snowmelt of summer. We drive past a factory making Christmas decorations and wind through one-way streets to the main square. We pause beside the well-known plague column, of tusk-colored marble, fashioned after Trajan’s Column in Rome, corkscrewing similarly up into the clouds, celebrating not a victory over the Dacians, but those who succored the victims of the 1713 plague.
Large raindrops splash from a great height onto the dusty windshield. It becomes a thunderstorm. It is not a hurricane summoned up by eels: It is not enough to swing the bells in the church towers. We drive slowly out by the castle and the town brewery. We edge under a medieval gate onto a gravel road that swings in a U shape around a fishpond called the Svět that is some kilometers long and bounded by forest to give it a northern aspect. The driver turns on the headlights. The beams open up a way to the zoo. There are lightning strikes across the sky and out over the fishpond. I turn to look at the giraffes through the narrow window.
“Slower,” I say, to the driver. “They’re scattering under each lightning strike.” We edge along through torrential rain, but I see no hyenas tracking us; the hyenas are farther along, in the zoo.
Through the wipers I make out a white heron lifting from the road. Behind the heron is a young woman. She dissolves and resolves in the rain. She holds a plastic anorak over her head, but her dress is soaked through. She holds a hand up against our beams. The driver dims them. Still she does not move. She stares blindly, or blinded, out at us. The driver stops. He looks at me.