“I’ll see what’s happening,” I say.
I drop from the truck to the road, turning an ankle on the gravel. The rain is like a sheet. Within a few steps I am as wet as the woman.
She calls out, “Why must you transport missiles into the forest?”
She is beautifuclass="underline" short, light, her hair photographic black, her eyes wide-spaced and large, liquid, opal like a giraffe’s. She takes a step back and dissolves once more into the storm. She might have walked up from the Labe or from the fishpond here, yes, like a rusalka, or at least a nymph such as the opera singer was playing in Ústí nad Labem; out for love, a ripple that cannot be perceived.
“We’re not going to the forest,” I call back. “We’re heading to the zoo.”
She is somewhere there, in the slant of rain and headlights.
“What’s happening?” I call. “What’s the matter?”
She steps forward again. “Nothing,” she calls in a voice that is sad, not shrill.
“Please, get off the road. We need to pass. We have living animals.”
I limp back to the truck. When I turn, she is nowhere to be seen.
“She’s by the tree over there,” the driver says, pointing a finger.
I see her looking up as we pass. I follow her in the mirror. She steps quickly onto the road after the truck.
The giraffes no longer scatter under the lightning strikes. They remain huddled together, leaning out, looking back at the last stretch of their assisted passage.
We come to the zoo gates. The driver presses hard on the horn. The gates open wide. We enter.
I STEP DOWN from the truck, into the rain once more.
Hus comes running up in his safari hat.
“We thought you would have been here sooner,” he says.
“We were careful,” I say.
“Do you have enough for your scientific paper?” he asks.
“I think so,” I say.
We shake hands. I turn from him. I look finally at Sněhurka and the other giraffes. I must leave. The zoo is not my place. Sněhurka’s head does not drop now. It is raised even higher, so that her f shape becomes an I, the better to glimpse that rusalka over the walls of the zoo. She is a giraffe, she has two gaits — walking and galloping. Where will she gallop in this place, where the horizon is forever defined for her? I am sad not to have seen her in the wild, not to have been there on the grassland one day in the dry season when she and the other giraffes ran at full tilt, not away from Hus and Vokurka, not that day, but another day, when they were running toward some temporary home under acacia trees, their necks affording them lateral inertia, the legs on one side moving, then the legs on the other, in just the same way as camels and okapis run. I am too late. Sněhurka will become a zoo animal. Her eyesight will falter. Distances will mean less to her. She will look across less often. Her view will instead be drawn down, to Czechoslovakians stopped and staring up at her.
A lion roars. Sněhurka and other giraffes start forward and wish to take flight from the wet floor of the truck. Hus laughs. Perhaps he is right; perhaps the giraffes will come to understand that the lion is caged also and can never move on them, but is instead fated to plow, with ruined claws, its own furrow of despair on concrete. Only occasionally, when the light strikes their enclosure in a certain way, as an equinoctial sun struck an Icelandic volcano in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and revealed to explorers an opening to the core of the planet, will the pupils of the giraffes dilate in some contrary fashion, betraying in a clinically observable way, even to a hemodynamicist, a memory of something more than the walls that contain them.
Amina
MIDSUMMER’S DAY
JUNE 24, 1973
THERE IS NO WINTER wonderland in my waking. It is Midsummer’s Day in ČSSR of 1973. It is my birthday. The first light blazes on the walls of my flat, and the ceiling is dappled with the reflected waters of the Svět, which is a fishpond turning with carp, roach, tench, and perch, stretching out of sight from my town and giving out into a small marsh, where a few otters live. My flat is one room of four plastered concrete panels, a few steps one way, fewer steps the other. There is a cupboard with ice-hockey sticks that belong to someone else and a balcony with a view over the Svět. The walls are thin. It is possible to hear the radio playing polkas in the rooms on either side and sometimes shouting and other times lovemaking. I feel trapped in here. It is not a cage, not that, only the sense of inevitability that comes each time I walk out over the frozen Svět in winter, getting just so far, then despite myself, turning, seeing the panelák, seeing my room, seeing my return there, again and again, in patterns of footsteps that will hardly ever change.
I am Amina Dvořáková, no relation to the composer. It is I who awake musical, with arias in my head. It is I who open these hemispheric eyes, which my mother said were starlit, as though from within. How I look is mysterious to me. I am shy, bookish, and musical, ill-fitting. I most resemble the romantic suicide in a prewar Czechoslovakian film called Vzpomúnka na ráj, or Memories of Paradise, which begins with colliers shouldering coal through a Prague of 1935 that is more dense and alive with itself, where coal smoke hangs in a blanket over green domes of old churches, and the shops in the new parts of town are done up with bright lights that promise to blink on and off forever. That suicide whom I resemble stands on the Charles Bridge, looking straight out from paradise into the cinema, at me, and then about her politely making sure there is no beau around who might feel the need to save her. She jumps down into the River Vltava. Her skirt flies up. Splash! She sinks without trace. The film cuts to the surface of the water, breathtakingly oil-black, twinkling with indistinct lights. The effect is of submersion, as though we Czechoslovakian cinemagoers are no longer supposed to be looking from the Charles Bridge to the river, but from the underside of the Vltava at the sky, and to understand by this that the romantic suicide is nothing of the sort, but a rusalka returning to her element. My hair is longer than the hair of that rusalka, but not so lustrous; it does not twinkle oil-black like that part of the Vltava, as hers did. Our faces are similar in nose and lips, in cheekbones, alabaster skin, and sensitivity of expression. So too our bodies, slender and slight, aerated, unexpectedly strong. She might feel, as I do, of an incorrect density, light enough to one day glance off the face of the world, and to be no longer possessed by it.
I have slept and risen and sleepwalked in the night, and slept once more in my cot under a poster of the Alps. My eyes open first to a scene of Swiss railways, to a red train passing over a tumbling river, up to slopes of Cembra pine and larch, sharpened peaks, and a skier carving a dreamy S on hickory skis down pistes to an operatic village of tiled rooftops and seemingly beyond, out of the poster, down my hair, into my narrow place. The arias recede. I throw back my sheets and move about my room. Light plays on my body, settling in the cups of my heels and in warm bars across my flat stomach. I select a record and place it on the turntable. I set down the needle. A Brahms lied for mezzo-soprano sung long ago comes forward respectfully and fills the room.