“The fortress looks like a starburst from above,” I say.
“HOW ABOUT THOSE TESTS,” he says. “What’s the verdict?”
“Guilty,” I say weakly.
He pales. He looks suddenly vulnerable, as though his thoughts have been elsewhere and this news has jolted him back.
“Run me through it, please,” he says. “I’ll have to report everything.”
He leans with his back against the metal bars. He smokes and listens intently but writes nothing down.
“We were given a tissue sample from the tongue of one of the giraffes. We tested it to determine the strain,” I say. “You should know there is not one single contagion in this case, but five or six related strains, which cause the same sickness. We have a vaccine against some of these strains but they are specific and have no effect on related strains.”
“You’re quite sure the giraffes have the contagion?” he says.
“Without question,” I say. “We repeated the test. They have the African strain, number two.”
“Do you have the vaccine for that strain?”
“No.”
“How long would it take to obtain and administer such a vaccine to livestock in a radius of twenty kilometers?”
“Months.”
“Sooner?”
“Impossible,” I say.
I TELL HIM NOW of the process of testing, of serologic and isolation testing, of catalysts suspended in petri dishes, corpuscles of sheep’s blood, injections, of blisters on the soft footpads of guinea pigs.
He nods slowly.
“Which animals are vulnerable?”
“All the even-toed ungulates,” I say. “Giraffes and camels, cows, sheep. Not horses, dogs, or people.”
“How dangerous is it?”
“That depends on how it manifested itself. If it was recently introduced, it is contagious in the extreme. If it was dormant for some years, for instance in a cyst under a hoof, and triggered by stress, then less so. Dormant strains take several passages, from one animal to another, to reach full strength.”
“Is there any way of knowing?” he asks.
“Not for sure.”
“What of the giraffes?”
“The policy is clear,” I say. “If an exotic animal has the contagion, it must be destroyed. There must be no risk of exposure to livestock.”
HE LIGHTS ANOTHER CIGARETTE and turns and stares at a weeping-willow tree across the Ohře, as though taking a photograph of it. I look beyond the willow to the spot where Jewish prisoners were forced at gunpoint to dump barrows of ash into the river. Thousands of Jews died from disease and hunger in the ghetto that existed inside the fortress during the war. They were cremated. Their ash was heavy, white in parts. The wheelbarrows had to be pushed by two people, two pushing the remains of thirty or forty. Those desolate brigades must have gone ever so slowly along the bank, by the trout pool. They must have struggled when they came down to the water. Some of the wheelbarrows must have been tipped in whole and washed out by the flow. A little of the ashes must have floated on the surface, like gruel, and flowed down through the Protectorate and through the Reich also, all the way to Hamburg, while the rest, the grit, sank straight to the bottom and is perhaps still there.
“OBVIOUSLY, THE OUTBREAK will need to be reported to the international authorities,” I say.
He flushes again. “That will not be possible.”
“The Office International des Épizooties must be told. That is the law.”
“This is a matter of national security,” he says, hardening. “National security is above the law. The OIE will not be informed. The orders are clear: You will cover up everything, write nothing down, give instructions orally. This is from the top, Tuma. This is from the Politburo.”
“I understand the order,” I say, after a silence. “They’re taking a terrible risk. Suppose the contagion is at full strength. Suppose it spreads from the zoo to a collective farm. Our economy is centrally planned. Our animals live in huge concentrations. There are two million cows and four million other livestock in ČSSR. You know how they grow and live in dark, slopping cities of sheds. The contagion can move between the sheds, like a fire, ravaging all the beasts in them and in the collective farms DDR and the farms of Poland. It can come in through the mouth or through broken skin. It can be carried in breath and saliva, in milk, in piss and shit, in hay, in other feed, by the fork turning the feed, by the worker turning the fork, or else by a bird flying overhead. In the early stages, the animal will run a high fever, the tongue will blister, there will be a massive reproduction of the virus in its circulatory and lymphatic systems. Then pox and sores will break out on the udders and on other parts of the body. The hooves will swell and bleed. The animal will no longer be able to stand. It will topple to the ground. Its gums will also swell and split. It will not be able to eat or drink. Even if it survives, it will be finished as a unit of production. You kill the animal and all of it is infected: the blood, the organs, the flesh, the skin, the eyes. Czechoslovakian animals have no immunity against this strain of the contagion. If it is carried out of the zoo on the air of our ČSSR, it would make preceding outbreaks look incidental.”
The young man looks at me steadily. His manner has straightened. He no longer seems to belong in a breezy film.
“Which is why any breach of confidentiality will result in immediate arrest,” he says.
“I insist you inform the zoo of these results. It’s a mistake not to tell them. It’s a question of decency. It will cause them hurt for a long time.”
“If we tell the zoo, there will be no secret. The zoo director will go to his friends abroad. There will be a protest. The international authorities will have to be told.”
“So what if they are told?”
“Meat and dairy production will be halted. The borders of ČSSR will be closed for months — all of them. There will be no agricultural exports of any kind. We will be marked out as the disease pocket of COMECON.”
“Only for a time,” I say, “until the contagion is brought under control.”
He pushes his hands into his pockets. “The first casualty will be the zoo. The shit of every animal there will be examined under a microscope — your microscope. Whatever you find, even if every test comes up negative, all the animals in the zoo will die and all the animals in the fields and sheds around the zoo will die. All the deer in the forest will be shot, even the stags. The whole land around the fishpond there will be emptied of life. Because that’s how it is when national security is brought into question.”
I say nothing. I look out to the river.
“This will be done by flame,” he says. “The zoo animals and cows and deer will be burned on pyres reaching up to the sky in columns of fatty smoke. The zoo will be plowed under. The staff will be dispersed. There will only be a field, with no memory of a giraffe or of any exotic animal.”
He says all this ever so softly, holding on to a cigarette, as though his hold on the present were only through this tiny glowing cylinder.
There is no stand to be made here. I have given over the results. I have protested. That is all. The State has no interest in bad news. Train wrecks do not make it into its papers, much less contagion. It mercilessly enforces silence. I play my part. I enforce the directives of Soviet laboratories. I copy their methods immediately, without question. I put Russian journals on my shelf and keep British journals in my drawer.