The scientist looks up from his test tubes and smiles now, a half-smile of this place, like the half-light cast by the floodlights.
“His enemies took his hair and had it wrapped around the forearm of a servant. ‘Now die,’ they said. The boy shrugged and knelt. He told the servant to hold his hair up tight when the ax fell. The ax came swinging. At the last moment, the boy jerked forward, dragging down the servant’s forearm with his locks. The blade cut off the servant’s hand. The boy’s hair was covered in the servant’s blood. He jumped up and berated his enemies for the mess they had made of his hair. They gathered around and beat their shields. They favored displays of courage. They were delighted with the boy. They gave him a sword and released him.”
“Where do you work?” the scientist asks.
“The Christmas-decoration factory in the town.”
“Why are you here? The keeper?”
I shake my head. “The giraffes. They awaken me.”
He nods. He is about to say something more, but stops. There is another rifle shot. He takes three empty jars and runs out again.
I AM ESCORTED FROM the zoo in the daylight. I cannot look back. I can only look down. The army dogs are barking outside the walls, the wolves answering from inside. I am giddy. I imagine the gorillas calling out to me as I pass: Viva! viva! viva! viva! Amina!
All the paths are quicklime, marked with footsteps, and little bodies of shot birds.
“Keep moving,” the secret policeman says.
So I do.
I AM IN A SHOWER. I lift my breasts. I scrub myself at their command. They hose me with disinfectant.
There is no operatic aria in here. I do not walk over a turning mill wheel to my lover. These men wear goggles and face masks. I see under their suits the red-star badge of the StB.
“You carry the contagion,” one of the men says.
“You are a risk to national security,” the other says.
“Once more,” they say together.
So we begin again with the disinfection.
They open the flap of a tent. They sit me down here on a bench. I put my head in my hands. My hair falls down. I am naked under these overalls. I am shoeless as in my sleepwalking, but am perfectly awake to this May Day. I cannot dull myself. I hear a voice speaking to me.
“My hair is clean now,” the scientist says.
I feel myself to be in that centrifugal ride. I go around and around. I cannot lift my arms up, much less lift off like John the Baptist toward an unimagined color. I am no longer aerated: The chlorine does not pass through me but burns my skin. The centrifugal ride has me. I am pinned to the cage. I am so heavy now, I cannot lift my head. I cannot reply.
Jiří
MAY DAY
MAY 1, 1975
IT IS MAY DAY. The gore I have produced is there for all to see. I wade through the yard. I climb the fence. Emil, if that is his given name, is here by the last truck, exposing film the StB officer took through the night: It will be as if this night never happened.
I walk away in this suit slowly, deliberately. I seem to hear zookeepers crying. A kangaroo hops up in its cage. I see other beasts indistinctly. I cannot tell one cage of apes from another. I come to the zoo gates. Secret policemen and functionaries come up to me.
I am slapped on the back.
I turn. It is Máslo.
“Well done, Sobotka!” he says excitedly.
I AM TAKEN INTO A disinfection unit. They take the Mauser and drop it in a vat of solution. They take the satchel, the thirty-three remaining cartridges, and the cigarettes.
“This is all for burning,” they say.
I am stripped of the suit. My spectacles are taken and dipped in solution too. Goggles are placed on my face.
“Eyes shut. Tighter.”
My hair is soaped and soaped again. They spray me with disinfectant. I am hosed as a horse is hosed. They take off the goggles and wash out my eyes and nose and now my ears and mouth.
I AM GIVEN BACK THE clothes I arrived in. I am led to an empty tent and made to wait here. It is a field-hospital tent. There are plastic windows stitched into it that let in a watery light.
The flap opens. A secret policeman brings in the girl who held up the flashlight for me. He sits her down across from me. She has been disinfected also. They have given her overalls to wear in place of her dress. She is bent over, her head in her hands. She does not look up. I cannot see whether she is weeping quietly or is asleep.
IT USED TO BE THAT farmers would take straw and rub it in the mouth of an infected cow and then take the straw and spread it in the mouths of the other cows, so the herd would share the sickness, be milked together, the milk dumped, and would together develop an immunity and recover. I do not know what the contagion is, or if it has been contained through destruction, just as you cut down trees to save a forest during a fire. Perhaps a swallow escaped into the night and infected the cowshed of a collective farm or a fox slipped out through the cages, like the girl slipped in. I know the May Day parade will proceed around the town square with red tractors and brigades of children whirring like clockwork to anthems. The cows will be milked across the ČSSR today, the milk poured out for children, and the surviving okapi will move about its cage in the zoo undisturbed, sneezing quicklime.
“REMEMBER,” THEY SAY. “You were hunting black grouse.”
“Yes,” I say.
“You can go, comrade.”
I AM GIVEN THE MAUSER. I do not have to sign for it. I have not signed my name to anything.
“The strap,” I say. “I’ll need the shoulder strap.”
They find it and hand it to me.
A TALL MAN GRABS ME NOW. I look up. It is Alois Hus, the zoo director. While I have been shooting, he has been crying. I flinch. He might hit me, or embrace me.
“Comrade Sobotka,” he says, embracing me. “Did any survive?” he asks.
“No.”
He bites his lip.
“Alois, forgive me,” I say. “It was a horrific night. I will have nightmares about it for the rest of my life.”
“Twenty-three of those giraffes were pregnant. Did they tell you?”
“No.”
“I’m happy it was you.”
“Just a single shot each time,” I say.
“This was the greatest migration,” he says. “You must understand that they found us on the grasslands, at the edge of red hills. They came to us. You can’t imagine.”
It is true. I understand okapi and cannot imagine what it is to be a giraffe and to move in harsh light at such a height, with long steps. I do not tell him of the burning pages of Red Truth swishing through the witching night, or of how difficult it was to thread those heavy heads with my sparkler. I do not tell him how the felling of each giraffe was more violent to me than finding birds’ nests and squirrels crushed in trees I have cut.
SOLDIERS ARE DRIFTING OFF toward the May Day parade together with secret policemen. I attach the shoulder strap to the Mauser. The barrel drips onto the white-powdered path. I see Emil sliding a metal case onto the backseat of his official car, a Tatra 501. He is showered and smartly dressed. He gets into the front seat and is driven off behind the last truck, just departed, carrying the cow Sněhurka.