I am taken into a tent. The Mauser is inspected, the leather strap removed. “This cannot be disinfected,” a soldier says, holding up the strap. “We’ll have to hold it here.”
“I want it back.”
“Of course.”
I am stripped now inside the zoo gates. I hear a leopard or some other cat mewling. I sit naked on a bench with a pack of Red Stars, matches, spectacles, satchel of cartridges, and the rifle. A man comes in with a hooded suit of the kind used in case of nuclear attack. He holds another suit, boots, goggles, and surgeon’s rubber gloves.
“Put these on,” he says.
I dress. I think of myself as a soldier moving about the secret military base in the forest. I do not put on the goggles.
“I need my spectacles to shoot straight,” I say. “You want me to shoot straight, don’t you?”
I REPORT BACK TO VOKURKA.
“I am a frogman,” Vokurka says, watching me. “I know how it is to wear a suit. The trick is to move slowly and deliberately at all times. Let me see your rifle and ammunition.”
I lay them on a table. A VB officer snorts.
“You’ll need an elephant gun,” the VB officer says.
“What’s that?” I say.
“A few days ago,” Vokurka says, “the VB were brought in to shoot two giraffes dead. They made a mess of it. They shot into the chests of the animals. They caused real suffering. That’s why we called you in.”
“Comrade, how much do the giraffes weigh?” I ask Vokurka.
“The adults? Six hundred to nineteen hundred kilos.”
“Jesus and Mary!” I rip back my nuclear hood. “Listen,” I say, “the heaviest stag I’ve shot weighed two hundred kilos. At most. What am I going to do with a Mauser? It’s a sparkler.”
“I’ve thought about this,” Vokurka says coolly. “This isn’t a hunt. It’s an execution. It’s not a matter of sighting an animal running away from you, between trees. The giraffes will be right above you. The giraffe keeper will guide them out. He’ll steady them for you. You’ll have no problem if you shoot precisely.”
“Tell me where I should shoot.”
“Not into the chest,” he says. “Never into the chest.”
He takes paper and a pencil. “Ever seen a giraffe close up?” he asks.
“Only from a distance,” I say.
I have never been inside the zoo. I have never seen a beast in a cage. In a trap, but not in a cage.
“Let me draw a giraffe for you.”
He sketches a vertical shape.
“You have to aim for the head,” he says. “The bullet must pass into the brain. That’s not easy. The brain is heavy, tens of kilos, and encased in thick bone.”
“Through the eye?”
“No. The best shot is here, just below and behind the ear,” he says, marking it with a cross. “The bone is less thick there, between the jaw and skull. It’s an aperture into the brain.”
“That’s a hard shot,” I say.
“The ear will cast a shadow,” he says. “You can aim for the center of that shadow. If you hit the giraffe here, where X marks the spot, it’s zhasne—lights out. The giraffe will die instantly, even if the neck cord is not severed.”
“How will I shoot them in the dark?” I say.
“Don’t worry about that,” the VB captain says, intervening once more. “The StB have brought in floodlights.”
“One thing,” I say.
“What’s that?” Vokurka asks.
“I’ll need liquor. I can’t do this without a drink.”
I WALK ALONE THROUGH the zoo, in my nuclear suit. I am out of the forest. I am revealed on concrete. I carry the rifle in one hand, the satchel in the other. I see the floodlights. I follow the footprints in the quicklime toward them. I pass zookeepers who are also in nuclear suits. They move between the cages with shovels and wheelbarrows of feed. I move on slowly, deliberately, as if underwater. I see a swallow, the first of the year. I hear a shotgun: I see pellets in the air like flies and the swallow torn and falling now. A man in a nuclear suit comes running up. He stares at me through goggles.
“We’ve orders to shoot them down,” he says.
I come to the giraffe house. A group of men stand by the wooden fencing. They are also in nuclear suits, but wear aprons over the suits. They are sharpening long knives. They are butchers from a rendering plant. There are two Škoda trucks of a special design, from that rendering plant, parked by the giraffe house.
“They’re supposed to be blood-tight,” a butcher says. “We’ll be here all night. You shoot them and we’ll cut them up and drive them off.”
A young man steps from a hut and walks toward me. He is not much older than my son. He wears a nuclear suit, but no hood. Blond hair falls diagonally across his face. He looks foreign.
“Comrade Sobotka?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Emil.”
“Emil what?”
“Just Emil. I’m the scientist.”
He folds his arms and unfolds them, as though he does not know where to put his hands. Behind him comes the giraffe keeper.
“I’m sorry,” I say to the keeper.
He looks away.
“The okapi?” I ask.
“One of them was shot,” he says. “The other is fine.”
Now comes an StB officer. He wields a camera with a telephoto lens, a Zenit PhotoSniper, as though it were also a weapon. He shouts, “Line up!”
We arrange ourselves in a line: secret policemen, butchers, a blond boy, a giraffe keeper.
“ČSSR is in danger,” the StB officer says. “Our national security is imperiled. The contagion must be contained.”
The butchers turn their knives on the points. I stand with my rifle at my side.
“Orders have been given for the destruction of every one of these giraffes. The zoo is sealed off at gunpoint. No one will be allowed to leave until the liquidation procedure is complete. No one will speak of these events. Anyone who does will be prosecuted and imprisoned. It will be as if this night never happened.”
“Who’s he kidding?” a butcher says beside me. “Here I am working for twelve crowns and fifty heller an hour and he’s going to shoot me after three warnings?”
THE SUN SETS. I see Čarodějnice bonfires burning beside the Svět. I see the puff of other shotgun discharges, and I see new swallows and an unkindness of ravens drop from the sky.
I make a plan now with the scientist Emil and the giraffe keeper. I can see by the way Emil sweeps back his hair over and over, through his surgeon’s gloves, and by his confession of nausea, that he fears this night as I do. The keeper seems not to be quite awake. His eyes are dulled from many days living in quarantine. His giraffes will be driven into the yard in groups of three or four. I will climb up on the fencing around the yard and fire off my shots. It will be too messy to shoot the giraffes inside, where they could not be easily separated and would be driven mad by the crashing deaths.
The floodlights the StB have arranged are useless. The light they shed is watery, useless. It is wrong to imagine that ČSSR has held within it some elite; the secret police are only a reflection of what is apparent.
“I have a flashlight,” the keeper says. “If you shine the light in their eyes they will be blinded and stayed for a moment. Then you can aim it where you need to shoot.”
He looks away and then, after a long pause, back at me.
“Are you the best shot?”
“I’m a fair shot,” I say. “No more.”
“Do your best,” he says. “Concentrate.”