That is my heart, which cannot contain the happiness it feels!
The workers in the industrial towns are pulled from their beds with tidal force, but are not woken. They sit glassy-eyed on trams that pass out over fields of beets. The sparking of the wires scatters the geese feeding in the fields, but no one turns from the tram to look at the geese in flight. They hardly acknowledge one another. They stare without awareness at one another’s breasts. They go to work. They mine coal. They pour steel without thought into armored plates such as would dress a rhino. They automatically sluice carp from the Svět into concrete tanks.
The sand gazelles cocked their heads at me. They registered the shape I made and then lowered their heads to graze again. I was awake to the gazelles, as I am awake to the giraffes. I am wakeful when I walk the slopes below the forest that encloses the Svět, and harvest mice scatter before me down smooth ovular holes and make for the balks in the field where the yellowhammers and quail are nested. I wake to the hare breaking for cover, the springing deer, and the skylarks turning away from a merlin in the windless heights. I go attentively down narrowing brambles of blackthorn and blackberries, through creeping thistles and nettles, and emerge in a circle of aspen trees. I take an empty bottle from my bag. I fill it from a spring that rises there, percolating up from deep in the rock. I sit beside the shrine over the spring, dedicated to Mary. I am aware of the wild roses laid beside her blue likeness and the candles burned low. I am held rapt by the grains of sand and flakes of fool’s gold dancing in the clear waters. The Communist moment cannot dull such a place. Even if it cemented it over and punished all those who have laid flowers there, so that the act of worshiping was forgotten, the waters would only well up somewhere else. The officials show no interest in the bend on the gravel road where my parents were hit by a truck. Their interest is in the secret military base in the forest, in the electrification of its perimeter, so the animals will bounce off it, and in meaningful camouflage, so I will no longer see the tips of the missiles dug in there, glinting between the trees. The same officials paste political flyers onto the plague column, masking the pox-ridden faces spiraling up the column and the seraphim with wings as tiny as a sparrow’s supporting those with their heads rolled back. When I am awake and walking by the plague column and see slogans over these mournful sculpted panels, I understand the Communist moment cannot endure; it does not have the imagination. I know Czechoslovakia will awaken in the far future, agitated and bruised, under a spreading linden tree, to a religious revival, or even to a moment without lines in which the customer is always right.
Amina
APRIL 8, 1974
I SIT ON A bench under the sycamore tree by the giraffe house. I watch the Egyptian geese waddling with clipped wings through the legs of the largest herd of captive giraffes in the world. I am awake. I do not sleepwalk in the zoo. I see again how the giraffes ignore the geese, even though they may have stories to tell of nesting in the Nile among rusalkas swum up there from papyrus roots with trinkets of pharaohs, who never venture along the Nile because the thrum of the cities is too much for their watery forms.
A man approaches. He is as tall as the zoo director I have seen striding now and again between the cages.
“Why are you so often here under this sycamore tree?” he asks.
“The giraffes awaken me,” I say.
“What is your name?”
“Amina Dvořáková.”
“I am the giraffe keeper,” he says.
“I’ve seen you,” I say, embarrassed.
He sits down on the bench. We are quiet.
“This is a good angle to watch the giraffes,” he says after some time. “You can see better how vertical they are from here.”
He turns to me.
“I have to tell you,” he says, “we had our first birth last night.”
“Were you present?”
“I came in this morning and there she was. Would you like to see her?”
“Yes.”
It is warm and dark as a nest in the giraffe house. The keeper points to the newborn giraffe. I move quickly to the wooden railing. I look through the slats. She is still covered in patches of membranes. She totters on the smooth floor. She makes it to the belly of her mother and puts her mouth to a large teat.
“See how she runs!” he says. “More easily than she walks — she has such a low center of gravity in these first days.”
I point to bumps on her head, covered with velveteen skin. “Are they horns?”
He nods. “The skin will wear away and the horns will come in time — three or four ossified outgrowths. Look at the mother’s tail.”
It is oxblood-colored with afterbirth.
“Now look at those giraffes nuzzling over there by the door,” he says. “See anything unusual?”
“One is a Rothschild giraffe and the other a reticulated?”
“Not that,” he says. “They only have one ear.”
I see that now.
“This calf will only have one ear too. Too much love! See how her mother is licking. She’ll lick the ear until all the blood vessels are closed off and it shrivels.”
The reticulated cow with the white underbelly comes forward. She leans down over the fence. I put up my hand to her wet face.
“That’s Sněhurka,” he says. “She’s one of the leaders. She is always the first to step out when I open the doors in the morning. She stands quite still in the open with her head pushed back, like this, almost lifting up off the ground. Then she nods and the others venture out.”
He looks up at Sněhurka.
“Animals should be stripped of names,” he says, “but I cannot bring myself to do so in her case.”
The keeper invites me into his room at the back of the giraffe house. He tells me that female giraffes are sociable, except after giving birth, and that males keep to themselves, moving slowly along the fence in the yard to where the okapi live. He brushes aside flies and fruit flies and shows me the feed of apples, pears, carrots, turnips, and beets. He points out the bales of hay and the browse cut from the acacia trees overhanging the fountain of St. George. He speaks of how the lights in the giraffe house come on gradually in the morning to give the impression of the rising sun, of the giraffes who lick the branches painted on the walls, of the tabby cat who goes undisturbed about the bull giraffes in search of mice, and of how the herd ruminates through the night with unblinking and unfocused eyes.
“The single most important thing to understand about a giraffe,” he says, “is that they do not graze down to the ground, but are stretched up to the sky.”
“That is what so awakens me,” I say.
The keeper gives me a searching look. He must also understand Czechoslovakia to be a nation asleep, of workers normalized into sleepwalkers.
He asks me what I have observed of giraffes, coming to the zoo so often in these months and sitting under the sycamore tree. I tell him I have memorized the patterns on the necks of the giraffes so that I can say aloud to myself on the bench, That one is Jánošík and this one is Rudolf, named for the emperor. I tell how the females lower their heads in submission when a male comes sniffing at their root and how some of them raise their tails in fear at the sound of gunfire in the forest.