The girl seems also alert. Her eyes are large, darting. They fix on me, on the trigger of my rifle, on the doors of the giraffe house. One of the butchers pushes past the floodlights, to the table set with food and drink. He wipes his knife on the apron strung over his suit and puts it in his belt. He does not wipe his hands. They are still dark and sticky as he picks through the salami.
“You disgust me,” the girl says to the butcher.
The butcher spits at his feet and reaches for a bread roll.
“What’s new?” he says.
I step away. I have lost my appetite. I light another cigarette. The fishermen on the Svět say tobacco takes away the smell of blood. My legs are weak.
The StB officer approaches.
“The girl will hold the flashlight for you now,” he says.
I wipe my mouth. I nod.
THE GIRL SHINES THE FLASHLIGHT in the eyes of the giraffes. She stills the beasts.
“The back of the head,” I say.
She steadies the light.
“Giraffe!” I shout.
I level, I fire.
Emil drops into the yard, into the pit. The drains are blocked with congealed blood and waste. He is up to his knees in blood. He splashes away now through contagion. The fallen crow floats there with spread wings.
The butchers are wading now.
DAWN BREAKS. It is May Day in ČSSR, 1975, and I am quite drunk, as I planned to be.
I can see by this light. I no longer need a flashlight.
“Go to the keeper,” I say to the girl.
She moves off into the giraffe house, as voiceless as the beasts I have felled.
There is a delay. The doors open. Three more giraffes stand there. Emil and the girl light a fire under one of them. The keeper is nowhere to be seen. The giraffes splash out. Their heads are rolled back, stretched up. I kill them also.
THERE IS ONE MORE GIRAFFE. They bring her to the door. She is as large as a bull, perhaps eleven hundred kilos. She has a snow-white belly. The girl beats her with a rope on her fetlocks. Emil shouts at her. She does not move. She remains there on the threshold. They light a fire of red right under her. She bleats just once, like a kid goat, and dashes back into the giraffe house. They shut the doors. I hear her inside, dashing herself against the fences and walls. I run around the fence. After some time, we find the keeper.
“She’s not going to make it out,” he says to me, breaking his silence. “You’ll have to shoot her inside.”
I follow the keeper up the stairs in the giraffe house to the hayloft, where feed is set down at the height of giraffe heads. The cow runs back and forth below. She kicks out at the stalls. Her hooves are large and heavy. They leave jagged marks in the wood and circles in the metal.
“Her name is Sněhurka,” the keeper says blankly, “because of the snow-white of her belly and legs. She was a leader in the herd.”
The keeper slips away. I am without a witness. The girl is not here. Emil is not here. The StB officer is not aiming his telephoto lens and photographing me. I am alone in the barn, which is thick with contagion. I lie down on my belly in the loft, on hay and branches stripped clean by giraffes. I am tired. I swig the last of the rum. The stench of the yard is in here. May Day light slants in through the high windows.
It is harder to shoot across. The point of entry is different.
Giraffe, I say to myself.
I turn the safety catch to the left. I am at eye level with Sněhurka. She is running away from me on broken legs. I level the barrel at the aperture. I fire. I miss. The bullet is lodged in the flesh of her neck. She blinks, she swings on her broken legs, but she does not collapse. Blood springs from her neck. I slide back the bolt, I load. I level, I fire. The 57 mm bullet is gone from me. The sound of it reverberates.
Sněhurka buckles. She falls. She does not splash into blood, but crumples, enormous, to straw and dung. I stand. I look down. She is still alive. Her eyes level on me; they mark me. I fire once more. Her body tightens into that fragment of existence when you are no longer living and not yet dead. Her eyes close. Her legs kick out finally, as if a puppeteer is pulling her strings one last time. She is dead. Blood spouts from her, but Emil is not there with his grail. I get down on my knees.
“God grant her light soil,” I say aloud.
THE KEEPER IS NOWHERE to be found. The girl has been taken away. The butchers open the doors now. They stand glistening, knives and rope in hand. They look at Sněhurka and come forward. I force myself to watch them, as one should watch the gutting of a deer you have shot. They cut her tendons. They fold her up, as though she were going back to the womb, not to a truck.
Emil
ČARODĚJNICE
APRIL 30, 1975
NIGHT FALLS AND MORE birds are shot from the sky. We let out a Rothschild calf now with a plaster cast on a foreleg. It hobbles into the yard. Sobotka pushes back his spectacles with lenses so thick his pupils are magnified to cartoon proportions, like the professor overlooking the Ohře. He shoots the calf in the head. I run forward through blood that is deeper now, that is over my ankles. I brush aside a hornet. I fill the jar. I signal to a butcher to bring me meat scissors. I take the scissors, the kind they use to separate joints, and I cut up the length of the cast. I examine the leg. The bone has grown back together. I look at it for a long moment. Finally, I manage to frame it. If I can have one memory from this night, it should be this.
On a corridor at the back of the Národní Muzeum in Prague sits an artifact in a glass cabinet. It is a figurine of polished black stone, a depiction of a bald man metamorphosed into a beetle. The face is perfectly human, as are the arms, delicate fingers, and trimmed fingernails; he might be an Assyrian scribe. About the torso is a shell, from which grow insect legs staved with bristles and hooks, enclosing the yellow fluids and membrances of a beetle and wings, visible in gossamer through a scabby slit down the back. I stand here in blood. For a moment I do not see myself as a vodník waiting to catch a falling stewardess in a Venetian lagoon, but as a man metamorphosing into a beetle. I fly toward the light. I hit a window. I fall on my back. I cannot turn over again. I give myself out in lesser and lesser movements.
A STRANGE GIRL HAS APPEARED out of the witching night, unprotected and distraught. She has been detained for some hours in the trailer and is now brought for questioning. I instruct the StB officer not to send her away but instead to have her hold up the flashlight for Sobotka in place of a butcher. She is doing that now. She is shining a beam in the eyes of a reticulated bull. She blinds and stops the bull with that light. She trains the beam at the back of the head. Sobotka fires. The giraffe falls. The hunter is a miracle. He is drunk and cannot keep his rifle straight. It sinks in his hands. From revulsion also, he says. He sets it down. He crosses himself. He drinks some more. He breathes deeply. He levels the barrel again, for a split second.