I find myself in the zebra enclosure. A crowd of maneless zebras is around me. They eye me. They roll back their lips. They whinny. They run away. A firework breaks overhead, and another. They are shooting up from the sandy floor of the outdoor ice-hockey rink. They rise in burning phosphor and explode into spheres, like Christmas decorations I have dipped.
I see a secret policeman standing by the ostriches. He is wearing some kind of warfare suit and holding a gun. I run the other way, toward the floodlights arranged over the giraffe house. I know all these paths now.
More fireworks are bursting. I come to the sycamore tree. I kneel down beside it. Red fireworks go up in celebration of the Communist moment of 1975. My world turns pyrotechnical. I feel inconsequential, not just slight and aerated, but invisible, as though I am looking for my reflection in a tray of red spheres in the factory. I see the giraffe house bathed in red, a truck idling red by the yard, three red giraffes in the yard, red men wearing warfare suits carrying knives, saws, and cleavers. I see a man balanced on the fence with a rifle.
“Giraffe!” I hear him shout.
I see the giraffes fall in Christmas red and shatter on the ground, like a decoration. The firework gives out. There is only the weak glow of floodlights.
I run toward the giraffes. I am knocked to the ground by a secret policeman. I get up unsteadily. My hip is bruised. I am awake. I see everything around me in great detail, but I am not in another place; I have not awoken as operatic Amina, in the arms of my love.
I am taken and locked in a trailer, where I can see nothing but hear shots ringing out in quick succession after long silences.
I am taken now to an StB officer. I brush the quicklime from my dress.
“How did you get in here?” he asks.
“Through the zebras.”
“What?”
“Through the cages.”
“You’re in serious trouble,” he says.
The giraffe keeper arrives.
“Amina!” he says quietly. “You’ve come.”
I push forward and embrace him. I have not seen him since the quarantine began.
“You’re under arrest,” the StB officer says.
The keeper steps in front of me.
“You’ll have to arrest me first,” he says.
“We need you,” the StB man says.
“She’s useful,” the keeper says. “The giraffes know her.”
We are silent. We stand off from one another. A young man, a scientist, comes forward. He takes the StB officer to one side. The keeper turns to me. “You can be a comfort to the giraffes,” he says. “You can do that.”
THE STB OFFICER HAS BEEN persuaded to let me stay. I must hold up a flashlight to the giraffes. I must still them in their eyes and then shine on a spot at the back of the head where the sharpshooter is meant to aim.
“If they see you in the last moment, that will be something,” the keeper says, but oddly.
I place my hands to his cheeks. I look at him closely through his goggles. He is sleepwalking. He has walked inward from this moment, far away. There are some who, though asleep, behave as though they were awake.
THE SHARPSHOOTER IS KINDLY, but drunk.
“Shine it at the back of the ear,” he says.
I aim the flashlight.
“Down. Across. That’s it!”
“Wait,” I say.
I run into the giraffe house. I go up the stairs to the loft. I take an armful of browse cut from the acacia trees overhanging the fountain of St. George. I bring it back to the fence. I sort the branches.
“Now,” the sharpshooter says. “They’re opening the doors.”
I hold a branch up. A young male approaches. He leans toward the branch. I shine the light in his eyes. He stops. He pushes back his head, he stretches up. Tears roll down his cheeks.
“Giraffe!” the sharpshooter calls, then pulls the trigger.
The giraffe is hit. It falls.
I begin to cry. The sharpshooter climbs down from the fence. He sets down his rifle and holds me tight.
“Don’t cry,” he says. “Look at me.”
He smells of drink. He pushes back his spectacles.
“What you are doing is a mercy,” he says.
THE YARD IS FILLING with blood. The stench is stronger than the foulest cowshed. The giraffes do not lean. They do not notice me. The keeper and the scientist must light a fire under them to get them out of the giraffe house. Tails burn in the darkness.
All I can do is find their eyes and fill them with light.
I WATCH THE SCIENTIST move with precision through the blood. He puts jars to the springs of blood and fills and stoppers them. Butchers splash in behind him. I see one of the butchers holding up the head of a giraffe by the horns now, as though waiting for it to deflate.
FIRST LIGHT WASHES OVER the Svět. It is May Day.
“Go to the keeper,” the sharpshooter says. “You’ve done your part. There are only a few left. I can see them without the flashlight.”
I AM IN THE keeper’s room. He is not here. The light is breaking through as it did on the morning of Christmas Eve, when everything was as cold and crystalline as Franz Josef Land. From in here I can hear and smell what is going on outside. I am too awake to step inward to fireflies, butterflies. There is shouting from the butchers: Another giraffe is being hauled up into a truck. I block out the sounds. It is a mess in here. I push back my hair and kneel on the floor and sort the keeper’s papers and his studies of Czechoslovakian animal history.
“Don’t bother with that.”
It is the scientist. He is at the door.
“We’ll have to burn everything,” he says. “It’s all contaminated.”
“My dress?” I say bitterly.
“That will be burned too.”
He is covered in blood. His hair also. He lifts up his goggles.
“There can be no record of the contagion,” he says. “It will be exactly as if this night never happened.”
I drop the papers. They scatter over the floor. There will be no more notes of polar bears or of the giraffe with a fractured pelvis who walked over the Julian Alps.
“What is the contagion?” I ask.
“You’ve seen the swellings on their flanks,” he says.
“Most have no marks.”
“The State cannot afford the risk,” he says.
He takes off his surgical gloves, scrubs his hands, and snaps on a clean pair. He brushes back his hair. Strands are stuck together with blood.
“Did you read the stories of our early Slavs?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says.
“There was a story of a boy captured after a battle.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Your hair reminds me of that story.”
He arranges his jars of blood neatly on trays. He labels the test tubes. He takes a syringe. He draws blood from a jar. He injects it into one of the test tubes. He seals it. He checks it. He places it in a metal case. “My hair?” he asks.
“A raiding party was captured. They were roped together and sentenced to be executed from the youngest to the oldest and richest. The boy was near the front of the line. He had blond hair, down his back. His friends called him Fine Hair. He was untied and pushed forward. He spoke up when his enemies were about to execute him. He told them they could do what they wanted with him, but they were not to get a drop of blood on his hair.”