I DO NOT TAKE a lift home to my village at the end of the Svět when one is offered to me. I walk up the hill to the forest by the town swimming pool. It is a bright morning. I see Michael touching the pink roof of his chapel, lancing demons and hydras. I break into a run. I enter the trees like a deer from a field.
There is the pine-fresh smell. I am in my living gloom. I go across, deep into the forest, where an okapi might hide. The forest floor is a trampoline of fir roots under me. I pass the secret military base. Its siren will sound out the Communist moment at midday. Squirrels and birds will scatter. Deer will lift their heads. Missile silos will open, as a carp opens its mouth at the surface of the Svět. The siren will cease. The silos will close again. Some of the soldiers will leave the base through a gate in the electrified fence and celebrate May Day with a game of soccer in a clearing.
Tomáš — A Slaughterhouse Man
ČARODĚJNICE
APRIL 30, 1975
COME OFF IT,” I say, upset. “We’ve just finished our shift.”
“Tomorrow is May Day,” Jaro says.
We’re a team, Jaro and I. He drives the truck, I cut the meat.
“There’s a new television drama starting tonight,” I say.
“There’s a bonfire celebration,” Jaro says. “It’s witching night.”
“No dice, boys,” the boss says. “Finish your beers. This is the job you were warned about.”
It’s true — we have been warned. We spent a week getting the metal paddles of the Destruktor in order. We were told to prepare the machines for the heaviest kind of horses.
WE DRIVE BACK to the plant. There’s an StB officer here. It must be something different. I was thinking brewery horses, or something. We’re all here. Every driver, every butcher.
“Sharpen your knives and look alert, boys,” the boss says.
“This is a matter of national security,” the StB man says.
“You’ll be properly compensated, if we keep our mouths shut,” the boss says.
WE’RE GIVEN INSTRUCTIONS. Take the Vamberk road, head for the mountains, keep away from the industrial towns, through a forest to a zoo. A zoo! Well that narrows it down. Jaro and I take the three-ton Robur, the other boys are all in seven-ton Škodas.
THE VB HAVE US lined up on a gravel road that runs along one of those big fishponds. We’ve been waiting here for hours. That’s how it goes. You wait around to get at the animals, and then they expect you to steal in and sweep them up in a minute, and we’re telling them, “No, pal. We’re not garbagemen. We’re slaughterhouse men. We’ll take our fucking time.”
SOLDIERS COME BY THE TRUCKS calling for butchers.
“Just the butchers,” they say.
So I go with the other butcher boys up to the zoo. I went to a zoo once when I was a kid, but I can’t remember anything. It’s a real army-and-secret-police powwow here. They’re everywhere, these guys. Sure enough, when they get us through the gates, they have us put on some kind of nuclear-war suit, so we look like idiots to one another now. We march through the zoo in these suits with our butchers’ aprons over the top and all the knives and cleavers hanging off our belts, and I’m thinking, What happens if I accidentally cut a hole in this suit — what happens to me then? I see a rhinoceros and one of the boys points out some small deer asleep on the ground. We go up the hill to the giraffe house. Jesus and Mary. Giraffes! It’s all about giraffes. They give us another speech. The same thing as back in the plant. Only this time they say there is a plague, a contagion or something, not harmful to us, to people, but harmful to other animals. I guess that explains the powder all over the place.
THE KILLING BEGINS. We’re not usually in on the kill. We usually pick up dead animals at the end of fields or on a riverbank and such. They’re animals you never think much about, except at lunchtime, cows and sheep mostly, which are meant to die. This is something different. It turns your stomach. They run the giraffes out into the yard. There is a hunter balanced on the fence. There are fireworks coming up from some celebration and the hunter — he calls himself a hunter — shoots the giraffes by the light of the fireworks.
green
blue
yellow
red
The fireworks have run out now and it’s me, some luck, holding up a flashlight at the fence. I’m supposed to shine it in the eyes of the giraffes, sort of stun them, and then at the back of the head to form some kind of target for the hunter. The yard is filling with blood. It’s getting ripe. The giraffes are too scared to run out. So the keeper starts lighting their tails with bits of burning newspaper.
“See that, pal?” I say to the hunter. “That’s love.”
I BEGIN TO THINK of the flashlight as a weapon. I aim it. I don’t like it at all. So I go over and complain to the StB man, the one photographing everything.
“Fuck off, then,” the StB man says.
“Steady, comrade,” I say.
He brings out a pretty girl in my place. Amazing. A tiny thing. She flew in here out of the night, through all these soldiers, like a bird or something. They say she’s the keeper’s girl. She’s up on the fence now, aiming the flashlight. I don’t feel guilty. I go over and complain straight to the hunter’s face. He’s reloading. He doesn’t look up at me. He just takes another swig from his rum bottle.
“I can’t watch you anymore, pal,” I say. “I love nature and all that. I’m a hunter myself.”
“I’m under orders, comrade,” he says. “I don’t like this.”
“Well, if you ask me, it’s a misuse of the hunting profession.”
THERE IS THIS YOUNG scientist type, who kneels down over every one of the giraffes, as if he’s giving them the last rites or something. He puts a jar to the bullet hole. The blood shoots up. You don’t see that with animals at the end of fields. They’re usually rotted and bloated. These giraffes spray blood right up to your waist. When the jars are full, the scientist closes them up with a rubber stopper, like a pickle jar, or one of those old beer bottles. Then the boys and I jump in. We do our stuff. We’ve got the hang of it already. It doesn’t take long. Three or four animals. One body is like any other. You find the tendons, cut them, and fold it up. The thing is, these giraffes just keep coming. There must be fifty of them. That’s a lot of meat. That’s a hundred and fifty cows. Jesus and Mary, that’s five hundred sheep.
WE GET SOME TEA and meat and bread rolls. I look up at the stars. I like to do that as much as the next guy. It’s a clear night. The first warm night of the year. It’s the witching night too. I see bonfires burning on the hills all around here. Workers are getting drunk there, having a good time, not cutting up giraffes in a crazy nuclear getup, at gunpoint, for twelve crowns and fifty heller an hour. I ask you.