The dear earth blossoms and greens again in spring
Everywhere and eternally the horizon shines blue
eternally, eternally
Steve — A Foreign Correspondent
ST. HUBERT’S DAY
NOVEMBER 3, 1999
SHOOT HRABAL ON THE balcony,” I say to the photographer.
It’s getting late. The light is going.
Hrabal zips up his tracksuit and shuffles out with the photographer. He was a butcher of some kind, in some state enterprise. Not a Communist, not ever, he says. He’s been unemployed for years. He’s thinking of voting Communist now — there’s the story.
I follow them out. It’s freezing. Hrabal lights a cigarette, a Camel. He’s got emphysema, but he can’t help himself. I get him to show me the view. There’s a nice red light; there’s already snow on the mountains. The industrial town sprawls out on all sides in other gray panel-built tower blocks and extinct chimneys.
“The air is clearer now since the foundries closed,” Hrabal says. “You can see all the way across to the ski jump now.”
It’s true. I see bodies launching off a ramp, seemingly out across the town.
“What’s new, Hrabal?” I say. “What’s changed?”
He points out buildings: a new supermarket, a new indoor ice-hockey arena, a new Škoda car dealership.
“Make sure you get the mountains in the background,” I say to the photographer. “And tell him not to smile. He’s supposed to look aggrieved.”
“There used to be trams running far out into the country-side,” Hrabal says. “All gone.”
I see a Czech Railways train, just one carriage, red — like one of those little Swiss trains — moving away into a forest.
“That’s where we’re going tomorrow, Steve,” the interpreter says, pointing to the forest. “The fishpond, remember? The carp harvest?”
I turn to the photographer.
“You’ve got those pictures already, haven’t you?” I say.
“Sure,” he says, shooting Hrabal with a fisheye. “Good shots for the weekend paper. Carp in copper light, a castle, the works.”
HRABAL INSISTS ON MAKING US TEA.
“Quickly, then,” I say to the interpreter. “I don’t want to be here all night.”
We sit in his living room. It is quite bare. There is only, on the floor, an animal skin, russet and snow-white in parts.
“ASK HIM IF IT’S a leopard,” I say.
The interpreter calls Hrabal in from his kitchen. She asks the question.
He looks at the skin. He laughs.
“Zirafa! ”
“It’s a giraffe skin,” the interpreter says.
“From Africa,” I say.
“Ne!” the butcher answers, directly. “Není africká. Je československá. Je to československá Zirafa! ”
“What’s that?”
“He says, No, the giraffe was from Czechoslovakia. He says it was a Czechoslovakian giraffe.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Giraffe is a true story. The names and the order of events have been changed to protect living persons.
Those familiar with former Czechoslovakia will recognize Amina’s town as a composite of Dvůr Králové, Kuks, and Třeboň. The secret laboratory is in the garrison town of Terezín, where thirty-three thousand Jews and hundreds of Czechoslovakian resistance fighters perished during the Second World War. The rendering plant sits a little way from the village of Žichlínek.
The Dvůr Králové Zoo is still awaiting an official acknowledgment and explanation of the liquidation of its forty-nine giraffes, forty-seven of them on the night of April 30, 1975. It was the largest captive herd in the world. Twenty-three of them are thought to have been pregnant.
Thanks to the zoo, to veterinarian Dr. S., who was much maligned in the matter, to the sharpshooting forester Mr. P., who still has nightmares about pulling the trigger, and to all the sleepwalkers by day and by night in the ČSSR 1973-75.
Thanks to Prof. H., for returning from retirement to his secret laboratory. To the Vánoční Ozdoby Factory in Dvůr Králové—may your Christmas decorations twinkle on. To the butchers and drivers of the Veterinární Asanacní Ústav in Žichlínek.
Thanks also to K., A., and M., for your translation and insights; you dug out the truth.
Or most of it: Prof. K., Prof. D., and Dr. T. may shed further light on whether the giraffes needed to be shot. Their records have disappeared; their memory is faulty. At least one giraffe tongue was sent to the university in Brno: It has not been found. Nor is there any trace of the jars of giraffe blood collected by a security-service operative on the night of the shooting.
KABUL AND PRAGUE, JML