I walk on. I pick up a pinecone. I trace my finger around its spiral base. I am reminded of the Fibonacci sequence we recited in mathematics class:
one
two
three
five
eight
thirteen
twenty-one
thirty-four
fifty-five
eighty-nine
I see the sequence in the petals of the last surviving wild roses and in the coil of seeds in a flower head, and I hear it now in some piano concerto in my head that goes with an eight-tone white scale and a five-tone black to give an octave of thirteen notes. The relation between two and three or between thirty-four and fifty-five is the golden ratio. I go on. I keep to the shore, out of the forest. If I were a priest, humble enough, I would search for the golden ratio between the wings of the Raphael, and if I were a scientist I would look for it in the distance between the eyes of a giraffe and in the arrangement of its neck vertebrae.
Amina
CHRISTMAS EVE
DECEMBER 24, 1974
THERE IS A STORY of an orphan girl from my town who was under the care of an imperial gardener at a palace in Vienna. One of the girl’s responsibilities was to feed the lion kept in the dungeon of the palace. She had a way with the beast. It was familiar with her and allowed her to approach with food and to pet it. The girl would even open the door of the stone cell and allow it to come up the steps from the dungeon and pace the courtyard in the sunlight. In 1669, the gardener arranged for the girl to be married. She came to the lion on her wedding day one last time to bid it farewell. To avoid bloodying her bridal gown, she held out the meat she had brought at arm’s length. Startled by the way the girl held the meat across and not high over its head, as it was used to, and also by the whiteness of the orphan in that gloom, the lion grew jealous, leapt on her, and snapped her neck.
IT IS CHRISTMAS EVE, long before dawn. I awake, bruised, under a maple tree in the parkland. It is snowing soundlessly. The Svět is frozen over. Skate marks catch in the starlight; an ice-hockey net shimmers far out from the shore. I pause at the bend in the gravel road where my parents were struck down. I walk on, to the zoo. I pass the chapel of St. Michael, where all the countesses lie shrunken in coffins of double oak inside caskets of zinc. I turn and see my panelák, my room, and the pattern of my footsteps, where I tiptoed in sleepwalking, over the frozen Svět.
I climb up over the zoo gates, knocking icicles off the metal shapes of animals. I walk through the zoo. I am no longer sleepwalking, but I feel faint. My hands and feet are frozen numb. I tremble. I fall again and again into snowdrifts. The paths are hard as iron under the snow. I pass cages. Beasts clear their throats and pay me no heed. I see chamois run up to the summit of their rocky enclosure and down again. I see a shrewdness of apes asleep in one another’s arms. I linger before the otter-sized predator in the aviary, a fossa, which also trembles from the cold, and leaps from one Czechoslovakian branch to another, with no hope of ever catching a lemur. A tiger pads beside me, or I beside it. I come to the giraffe house, an inadequate barn. I have helped arrange the Christmas tree in front of it. I have dressed the tree with red spheres and with a rejected shape of Uncle Sam. The lights on the tree twinkle across the snow, lighting up the political banner hung over the giraffe house by the zoo director, which reads: WE ARE THE VANGUARD OF A NEW LIFE!
I make it inside. My head spins in the warmth. I see giraffe legs through slats, rising sheer. I see unfocused and unblinking eyes.
“Amina!”
The giraffe keeper, running out of his room, catches me falling.
“Jesus and Mary! You look half dead.”
“I fell asleep in the snow,” I say, looking up at him.
He lays me down on a bed in the corner of his room. He dries my hair. He wraps me in swaddling clothes. I sleep a little.
I wake to see him arranging a Nativity scene on a table.
“Merry Christmas,” I say.
He looks up. “Amina!”
His face is etched in the strip lighting. He is an intelligent man, not unlike my father, except in giraffe-stained overalls. I have never sleepwalked in his presence. I have never before stumbled and fallen into his arms. He holds the figure of a shepherd in his hand. He places it down among the animals near the manger. He is himself a sort of shepherd to the giraffes. He is the one who pulls them free from the fence, who lances their swellings, and sponges the afterbirth from them. I am happy to be with him now and to put on gloves and help him shovel out what he calls the socialist’s Augean stable.
The pattern of my footsteps extends as far as the giraffe house but no farther. I do not venture into the forest, nor do I often go anymore into the part of town where my lover lives. If I could travel, I would not know where to go. On a tram out from an industrial town, to jump clear into a field of beets? On a train to Prague, to lie on a bunk in a workers’ hostel, to sleepwalk the long corridors of our capital? Or on a bus to Bratislava, to pass from the wrong side the metal signs of giraffes placed along the road every so often as advertisement for the zoo?
“I’ve been thinking about Egypt,” the keeper says, sitting beside me. “I’ve been thinking of the flight into Egypt. Maybe it is our Egyptian geese, or this postcard I’ve received from the giraffe keeper in the Moscow Zoo.”
He holds up the card.
“It’s a painting on silt stone,” he says, “from a Soviet museum of Egyptology, showing geese lifting from the Nile.”
The geese are single brushstrokes of blue and gray, rising from green and yellow papyrus and lily pads.
Radio Vltava is playing Jan Jakub Ryba’s Ceská mše vánoční, or Czech Christmas Mass. I drink tea that the keeper brings me now. I say nothing, but think of the harvest mice in their snowed-up balks in the fields and of how strange Christmas is in the town after a year dipping decorations into Christmas colors and harvesting carp for Christmas dinners. The last carp are swimming in tanks beside the plague column. People come for them, not sleepwalking but awake. The carp are chosen, weighed, paid for, and laid on the cutting board. Their skulls of thin bone are heard to pop under the hammer like fingernails.
“I’ve been thinking again of the history of beasts in Czechoslovakia,” the keeper says. He puts a thermometer in my mouth. “Polar bears first,” he says, reading the temperature. “The first polar bear came through our town in 1799, on a cart headed for Austria. The next polar bears passed by in 1874, on a train with the return of the Austro-Hungarian expedition to the North Pole. That expedition failed to reach the Pole, just as other Austro-Hungarian explorers failed in their attempts to reach the source of the River Congo. Instead they discovered an archipelago north of Novaya Zemlya and named it Franz Josef Land and named a bay on one of the islands for the Czechoslovakian town where our composer Mahler was raised. There were twenty-four in the crew, most of them Austrian and Croatian. The only Czechoslovak came from a village that stood then at the other end of the Svět, near the sawmill. He was responsible for feeding the polar-bear cubs, whose kennels slid and rolled on the open deck in the Barents Sea.”