“What happened next?”
“They knocked him out with an oar.”
“He wanted to escape.”
“He wanted to die, Amina,” she says with a sad look.
IT IS GOING TO RAIN. The pressure has dropped. I feel a throbbing in my temples. The castle clock strikes nine.
“Do you remember,” my lover asks, “the last time we climbed the clock tower?”
“When my parents died,” I say quietly.
“The dial on the clock was almost clear.”
“We could see through time,” I say, “all the way to the zoo.”
“We watched the cogs of the clock. The bells were below us. Remember how we were so amazed the hands on the clock turned in a different direction?”
“Going backward, never stopping,” I say.
“We thought if we stood there long enough,” she says, rolling back toward me, “your parents would be waiting when we climbed down.”
We kiss once and fall silent now. Our conversations often end with a moment that has already gone.
WE GATHER OUR THINGS and run from the tempest in different directions, to other parts of the town. I hold my anorak over my head, like a flightless glider, and dash between the swollen trees, over silenced crickets, and stop breathlessly at the concrete tanks by the Svět, into which carp are sluiced at harvest time. The tanks are empty now, gathering only rainwater in their deeps. I have seen them full in the Christmas season, when ČSSR demands carp gills for supper. I have seen how those fish beat themselves into the air with the desperation of something that knows it will soon be knifed anyway. They hold themselves up from the crowd below, eyes popping in the air, then fall down onto the backs of other carp.
I leave the concrete tanks and come out onto the gravel road, which curves inevitably around to the panelák where I live.
Lightning forks and strikes out on the Svět. A white heron is ahead of me on the road. I make it out before it rotates its speared head, sees me, and lifts away. I see a truck coming slowly up behind the heron. Its headlights blind me. I am paralyzed. The truck stops. A man jumps down from the passenger side. I see him through the rain. He has golden hair. He is about my age.
“What’s the matter?” he calls.
I realize now he is calling to me.
“Nothing,” I call.
“Please, get off the road. We need to pass.”
He climbs back into the truck.
I feel suddenly weak. I stagger to the side of the road. I lean against the trunk of an oak tree, breathing hard. The truck goes past me. I look again. It is not, after all, a military truck heading to the forest. I see the man in the passenger seat staring down at me. I have dropped my anorak and my bag at the base of the tree. I am standing a little out from it with my hands at my sides. The rain seems to pass through me, washing through the paint-spattered rubber clogs I wear. I see something moving behind the cab of the truck, some high load, which is not missiles or logging machinery.
“Giraffes!” I call out, then put a hand to my mouth.
Four giraffes blink and gather in the storm light. The sky pours wet down their necks. Without thinking, I run out behind the truck. I stare up at the giraffes. I am captivated by them. Looking at them, I feel awakened. They are as slender as I am, with sensitivity of expression. They are also of an incorrect density, reached up, as on tiptoe, off the face of the world, aimed for that place I would like to be. I see their necks and chests, but not their bodies. I run a little farther behind the truck. The giraffes move toward me. They see me. They lean down. I wish to jump up and touch them, but they are gathering speed away from me. Lightning forks. I see the giraffes in silver, as nacre jigsaw puzzles that are in need of no solution.
It is just a few soundless seconds. They are gone now, around the bend into the zoo.
I walk slowly back to the oak. I pick up my anorak and bag. I close my eyes. I see giraffes precisely welted on the back of my eyelids. I open my eyes. I follow my footsteps in the gravel away from the zoo, toward the panelák. I am wet through, as if I have also walked involuntarily from the bottom of the Svět, with stones in my pockets. I must look even more like that rusalka or suicide who jumped from the Charles Bridge. That is not so. I am not a rusalka. I do not belong to the creatures in the water. I am wet with rain and rain comes from above, where I would like to be. My element is air, not water. I am not so important, I am a voiceless worker. I have this one understanding, that I am slight, aerated, strong with bird ribs, and am not meant to be within, or down. I am meant to reach up, as arias and lieder reach, as these giraffes reach. If it were possible, even in sleepwalking, I would stand on the Charles Bridge, with my hands above my head, and lift off out of the Communist moment, just as John the Baptist appeared, on my lithograph, to be rising from the Jordan, on this, the day of his nativity.
Amina
JULY 1, 1973
THE SKY IS PINK, the Svět petaled with fish coming up for flies, and swimmers making for shore. My town has slowed and sunk in the heat. The bogs and quicksand circling the town walls are dried up and cracking open. I stand in the parking lot of the zoo, getting up the nerve to enter. It is an hour before closing. The parking lot empties around me, buses departing to the industrial towns under the mountains. Each bus carries workers and their children, people like me, but more alert, as though awakened by the otherness inside the zoo. I gather myself. I walk to the gates shaped in metal forms of animals. I have not stepped in here since I was a child, when my parents were alive. There is no wind to carry the smell of it across the Svět, but I see it reflected in the water by day and there are nights when I hear trumpets and howls through my open windows.
The ticket seller looks up at me from behind metal bars.
“One, please,” I say.
“We’re almost closing,” she says.
“I’ll be quick,” I say. “I just want to see the giraffes.”
I do. All I want is to contemplate their stretch up.
“The giraffes aren’t showing, dear,” she says, as if talking of a film, as if the zoo were a cinema. “They’ve only just arrived. They’ll be showing in a few weeks. Still want in?”
“Yes.”
She hands me a ticket stub. The zoo is not expensive. It is a subsidized workers’ entertainment.
I go in. I pick a path at random. I walk swiftly along it, away from the cheetahs, past ornamental ponds. I pass an ice-cream vendor, a man I seem to recognize, pushing a cart with a polar-bear sign. From a cage comes the sound of a radio comedy. I see a zookeeper scrubbing the floor of the cage with a long soaped brush. I hear the comedy break off and the state news broadcast come on. “Now we are switching to Bratislava,” the voice says in state monotone. The news is in Slovak. This is curious. I do not usually notice such things. There is a smell of an incinerator and of dumplings coming from the zoo restaurant, but it is not more powerful than the smell of the animals. I walk on, up the slope. There is propaganda here also, red banners and old Party members in lilac uniforms sitting on benches, but it is easier not to notice it among the wild animals. I look across, but I cannot see any giraffes stretching up, into pink.