IT IS AFTER DAWN on Christmas Eve and grim, ever so grim. Ryba’s Christmas mass has long ago played out. The giraffes are shut in.
“I must go,” I say.
“Wait,” he says.
He hands me the engraving. He wraps his scarf tight around me. I stand on tiptoe and kiss him on the cheek.
THE SUN HAS CLEARED the forest. They are playing Christmas games of ice hockey out on the Svět. I watch the puck skipping away. I stop myself. My footsteps are snowed under. I cannot follow them back over the Svět to my panelák. I walk into the town, not sleepwalking, still awake to myself. I come to the town square. It is crowded here. I do not look to where the fishermen take the carp from tanks. I buy roasted chestnuts from a brazier. I listen to the carolers.
Tadeáš — A Virologist
APRIL 29, 1975
I HAVE NEVER SEEN a giraffe. I have not given them a thought. But there is a randomness to every contagion. It touches one creature and spares another. One child gets a black swelling under the armpit, hard like an apple, another sings about it.
I HEAR THE OFFICIAL speaking quietly to my secretary: They have called ahead to warn me I should expect him.
He walks directly in without knocking. He is young, almost boyish. Blond hair falls diagonally across his face. He sweeps it back.
“Tadeáš Tůma?” he asks with a shy smile.
He wears foreign shoes and a foreign suit. He puts his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels. He exudes Prague. There is something familiar about him, removed from the Communist moment, as though he has stepped from a breezy Czechoslovakian film from before the war.
“You’re late,” I say. “I didn’t catch your name.”
He flushes. “I am without a name for the moment.”
“No matter. Take a seat, please. I have the results to the tests the ministry requested.”
He remains standing, rocking on his heels.
“Please do sit,” I say.
It is spring in the secret laboratory I direct, which stands on the banks of the little River Ohře, close to where it meets the Labe. The Communist moment continues here. Outside, a boy in a gas mask is cutting the grass with a scythe. Far away, the city of Saigon is falling. The laboratory is also without name. It is not marked on any map. We deal with animal diseases here. We test blood and tissue samples from beasts eaten away with one pestilence or another, which come to us under cover of night in locked-down trucks. We develop vaccines only; we have no business here with weapons. The plagues and contagion we handle are not generally harmful to human beings. They kill animals or ruin them as a unit of production, which is much the same to the State. The laboratory is an island of loneliness. No train runs to Prague from here, but instead there is a single carriage running once each day through a forest to the industrial towns under the mountains. Aside from the laboratory there is an old fortress of sloping red brick, the size of a town, green-moated and planted with lilacs.
“WOULD YOU CARE to be shown around?” I ask.
“Why not,” he says.
My secretary gives him a white lab coat and slippers. He pulls off his suit jacket and shoes. He folds the jacket with the silk lining out, on the back of a chair.
“What’s your field?”
“Hemodynamics,” he says. “Hence the giraffes.”
We shuffle in the slippers down corridors, from one disinfected room to another. Slippers are the style of ČSSR; we are meant to feel cozy in our isolation.
I stop in front of a vault door of dark gray metal. There is a wheel in the center that you turn counterclockwise to open the door. It makes me think of the hatch on a submarine tower that is quickly closed in the last moment before diving.
“Behind here are further sealed chambers in which the plagues are suspended at appropriate temperatures.”
“What security measures do you follow?”
Taking his elbow, I guide him upstairs, where no one will hear us.
“I can assure you we are very strict,” I say, lowering my voice. “We follow the rules set down by facilities in the USSR, such as the laboratory in Tajikistan, or the laboratory on the Baltic island of Hiddensee. As you know, we are under surveillance. We have certain officers assigned here for protection. They gather information from among our hundred and forty employees. They move among the employees regularly, using first one, then another.”
I should not have said using; I should have used another word.
He looks at me curiously. He is right to look at me in this way. It is unpleasant in here. It is malignant. My secretary watches me, someone else watches my secretary. The technicians are spied upon.
“Go on,” he says.
“There are rules for any laboratory of this kind. The civilian rules, if you like. We change our clothes in an outer building. We strip. We shower. We pass naked through a sealed room. We put on our work clothes on the other side. We follow a strict hygiene. No coming to work with a sickness. No raising of laboratory-sensitive animals at home — no cows or pigs. No visiting relatives who live near a collective farm.”
“Impressive,” he says flatly.
It is not. There is a fear of saboteurs. All plagues and blights, even those found in trees and root vegetables, are tested for a weapons signature. We shuffle around the laboratory from alarm to alarm, in rubber suits and masks with narrow plates of glass; but for our slippers we would appear like insects to one another. The surveillance is always in search of that one agent, or double agent, who might spread a contagion, man-made or natural, through the livestock of ČSSR, just as in 1950 American spies stole into Czechoslovakia and blighted the potato crop with what came to be known as the American bug. All things here are seen through the prism of contagion, yet the security measures are halfhearted. The windows are barred, but they open from the inside. I could let spores out into the sky. I could cast a vial into the waters of the Ohře, as they talk about in the Bible, and poison the Labe. The blood we test, we also pour into the Ohře. It blooms in a pool where the trout circle, like some prophecy of Libuše. Trout come up to the bloom, gulp blood, and move away. No one searches me coming or going, no one monitors the number of vials I place in the vault. I could cycle away past the fortress of sloping red brick to a cowshed and there spread pestilence. This young man, without name, was not fingerprinted or photographed at the entrance. He did not strip and shower. He did not pass through a sealed room. He offered a code word in Russian and walked straight in.
“CIGARETTE, PROFESSOR?”
He offers me a Red Star.
“No, thank you.”
“Do you mind if I do?”
“Not at all.”
He bows his head. He strikes a match and lights his cigarette with a flourish.
I open a window.
“What, no danger?” he asks lightly.
SUNLIGHT FLOODS THROUGH the metal bars and stands in grids on the wall of the corridor; it is a cage in here. The Ohře is running fast with melted snow from the fields. It courses around the gravel bar I sometimes wade out to with my fly rod. I point out to the young man the cannon positions in the fortress on the other side of the Ohře.