The River Vltava flows past this building at cross-purposes with the snow. I cannot say how deep it is. As deep as two people, the one standing on the shoulders of the other? As deep as four people? I try to picture the contours of its bed, to calculate where the current scores it most deeply. I imagine the fish within it, hovering against the flow, their mouths in a bony O, their gills opening and clamping. I consider water passing over their scales, the viscosity of their eyeballs. There is a reflection on the water of the snowflakes, wheeling crystalline across, and of the clouds opening and closing, although the surface of the Vltava is smooth, because the wind runs above the ČSSR but hardly ever comes down and touches its face. I catch sight of a furled swan. It speeds away on the current, in the direction of Suchdol. Its whiteness reminds me of an angel, of a painting I have seen of the archangel Michael. I frame the swan, I photograph it with my eye. This is what I do when I see beauty. I take a picture. I shutter it with a blink, keep it in my mind, and turn it this way and that until the Communist moment recedes and beauty is in the ascendant.
The elevator opens. A small man steps out, biting his knuckles. His hands are doll-sized, white as porcelain. He looks at me inquiringly.
“Freymann?” he asks.
“Yes, sir,” I say.
“Come with me, will you,” he says, in Czech.
His voice is high-pitched, a warble. He is the “shipping director.” I follow him down the length of the corridor. It is long and dimly lit. This is another thing I notice about Communism: how it lengthens and darkens the corridors of ČSSR, year by year, into the corridors of nightmares.
He ushers me in.
“Sit down, please,” he warbles. “I won’t be long.”
He picks up the telephone and calls a “port” far away. I light another Red Star and tap it out into an ashtray, which rests on a stand next to my chair.
It is maritime in here. Large maps detail the shipping lanes of the Black Sea and the Baltic. There is an oil painting of an Austro-Hungarian schooner in a gilt frame. A scale model of a new Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, or COMECON, oil tanker sits on a side table. A coil of rope and an anchor are on the floor next to a Murmansk Shipping Company crate marked with the symbol of a pacing polar bear. I am removed from Czechoslovakia in this office: That is its purpose. It is not for me to be intimate with such salt-washed things. I have never seen the sea, and when I imagine it, I envisage only a passage from a children’s story in which boys pick yellow starfish from rock pools while gulls sweep and bomb above and waves break somehow polyphonically in caves beyond.
This is a shipping company in my landlocked country, on which no wave has ever broken, where there is not a single vantage point from which to sit and contemplate the turning of a tide; in my Czechoslovakia, which has no memory of the sea and no words for spume or barnacle or jetsam. In our fairy tales the first kings do not arrive windburned in longships from across the sea. They grope blindly from out of the side of breast-shaped hills, caked in peat, as though they are a crop sown by God for this land and no other. Our freshwater streams are narrow, shallow, unpeeled by the moon, are tepid, muddy, and thick-haired with reeds. Only milk-aspected fish, voles, vodníks, and rusalkas move in them. We have no seals, no mermaids. Brine arrives in tins, from overland. The helical narwhal tusks and dolphin fetuses arranged on the shelves of the Strahov Monastery in Prague were purchased through an intermediary: The monks of Prague have not confessed before the body of any ocean, still less made their stand at the edge of the Atlantic, on wet-black cliffs among the storm petrels, as the Irish monks have done.
The windows in here give and release like a lung. We could be in a cabin of an old airship tethered over the Holešovice district. The tower is poorly constructed, of the Communist moment. It will not last. It is all glass. It will soon be shattered, just as the greenhouses of Czechoslovakian country manors were shattered with the coming of Communism.
The shipping director puts down the phone and lets out an involuntary spasm. “So you’re the giraffe man?” he says in Russian.
“Yes,” I say in Czech.
“Speak Russian in here.”
“If you like,” I say in Russian.
“I do like,” he says. “What exactly is the nature of your work?”
“I study blood flow in vertical creatures, in men and giraffes. The morphology of the jugular vein and such.”
He looks blank.
“Yes?” he says.
“The work has application for cosmonauts and high-altitude fliers,” I say. “For instance, the skin of a giraffe is thick to protect it from thorns and is so tightly wrapped as to take on the qualities of an anti-gravity space suit, such as we should like to design, which does not allow blood to settle in the lower extremities of the body.”
“I see,” he says.
“I am especially interested in the journey blood makes through the brain of a giraffe.”
He blinks.
I must also look blank. I am distracted now with the thought of circulation in a cosmonaut who falls down to the desert from space and feels the weight of his own body there in the sand as a mortal pin through the breastplate of his silver suit — as though he were a butterfly pinned to a specimen case.
“Are your giraffes ferocious beasts?” he asks.
“Not at all. Giraffes are timid and tolerant of one another. They share food. They seldom fight. They have few enemies, comrade director, because their territory is up, in the branches of trees, rather than along. Although it is true that a giraffe can kick out in any direction with the force of several horses, and leopards have been found decapitated and lions with their heads caved in from where a giraffe struck them with full force of hoof.”
He considers this.
“Are they swift?”
“Giraffes can outrun the fleetest horse,” I say.
“A Turkmen horse even?”
“Only for a short distance. They tire easily. Their lungs are not big enough to compensate for their size or for the length of their windpipe.”
“Hunting them must be simple.”
I nod. “The Omanis used to hunt giraffes by following them on horseback. When the giraffe slowed, they moved in close. They leaned out of their saddle, like this”—I lean out of my chair and indicate the ashtray stand as the leg of the giraffe—“and with a single blow of the sword, severed the hamstrings, popped them, so that the giraffe collapsed forward into the dust, like a falling minaret.”
“Very good,” he says. “Emil, is it?”
“Yes.”
“When I say ‘Soviet Union,’ what is the first thing you think of?”
“Space rockets.”
“And again.”
“Desert.”
“And again?”
“Forest, endless forest.”
“Brother?”
I almost say, Cain.
“Yes,” I say, flushing. “Of course — fraternal relations.”
“The proletariat will be triumphant forever. Yes or no?” Another bite of his knuckles.
“Excuse me?”