J. Ledgard - Giraffe

There is no stand to be made here. I have given over the results. I have protested. That is all. The State has no interest in bad news. Train wrecks do not make it into its papers, much less contagion. It mercilessly enforces silence. I play my part. I enforce the directives of Soviet laboratories. I copy their methods immediately, without question. I put Russian journals on my shelf and keep British journals in my drawer.

“There’ll be a further investigation to make sure the laboratory is not responsible for releasing the contagion,” he says.

“You have no grounds for suspicion!”

He puts a hand on my shoulder, returning to his former manner. “I know,” he says. “That’s just the order. The collective farms are to go on producing. The borders of ČSSR are not to be closed, not even for a day.”

He turns to look out again at the fortress. “Wasn’t Gavrilo Princip imprisoned in there?” he asks.

“The assassin? Yes. You can see the cell, if you like. They’ve put a plaque on the door. He shot Franz Ferdinand and now he’s a martyr for Yugoslavia, an agitator for Slav brotherhood.”

“How was it in there?”

“The cell is above ground,” I say, “admitting light, but in other respects tubercular.”

“I am going directly to the zoo,” he says abruptly. “I wish to take some blood samples from the giraffes. I’ll need some jars.”

“Fine,” I say. “How many?”

“Fifty or so,” he says.

I pale. “Sorry?” I say, confused.

He smiles. “Didn’t they tell you?” he says. “It’s the largest herd in the world.”

“No,” I say. “No one told me.”

I lead him downstairs. We pass the vault doors. I see him back into his suit jacket and shoes. We walk wordlessly to the sealed room. I shuffle, he clips. He saunters through the seal, through the showers, to the other side. I see him through the grille of my office window, handing his driver a metal case containing fifty empty jars to be filled with giraffe blood.

ČARODĚ JNICE

APRIL 30, 1975

IT IS ČARODĚJNICE — the witching night, the eve of May Day. I try to mark the outlines of witches riding goats and broomsticks on the windless sky. I look for the outlines of demons gliding down on fibrous wings. Demons were meant to be as vertical as men or giraffes. They had the same promising hemodynamics, until gravity got the better of them in the core of the earth and made them inexpressibly hunched, like the hyena a Slovak once spoke to me of. There were witching nights in Czechoslovakia when witches and demons fell from the sky to forest clearings. There were cats gathered on their hind legs around a bubbling pot in these clearings and women who put a hand to the thigh of some malevolent force and were so possessed they could no longer see their own red-faced children, born of previous such unions, trotting around them, shitting maggoty apples as they went. I look again out of the car window. I see no outlines in the sky save a Czechoslovakian Airlines jet. It is witching night in our ČSSR of 1975. The children will dress as witches, the collective farmworkers will drink and throw broomsticks onto bonfires. That is all.

I STILL HAVE NOT STOOD on any shore. There has not been a moment when I might have walked into a graveyard in the salt marshes on the English coast and stumbled upon Magwitch in chains. I have not been swept back into the waters of the Heligoland Bight. I am a doubler. I serve the shipping company with transmissions in code of The Good Soldier Svejk and other too-obvious texts, and I serve hemodynamics. I have been sent to Switzerland. I sat cross-legged on a sunny platform at the St. Gotthard junction, tossing a five-franc coin, silver and heavy, over and over. I took the train, as instructed: Past the Tobler factory to the highest, wind-sheltered valley of the Upper Engadine.

I came to the village with the secret laboratory. It was autumn. The larch trees were aflame on the mountainsides. I walked through high grass and dandelions to a wooden barn in the center of a meadow. I pushed aside sheep hung with clanging bells. I entered. I found an elevator behind bales of hay. I descended several stories underground. There I examined vials of blood. I gave a talk on cerebral hemodynamics and was able to gather the information requested by the shipping company. Ascending once more, I saw the meadow anew as a line of defense. When the sheep collapsed, the authorities would know a contagion had escaped. There was a graveyard in the Swiss-Italian village in which were graves of alpinists. I wandered there and sat on the grass by the old church. I was in a great amphitheater of mountains. There was a freshly dug grave near me. I glanced at the new grave-stone, still not dug in, and was amazed. Buried there was:

EMIL FREYMANN 1901-1974

A man without an epitaph.

I SLEPT THAT NIGHT in the Hotel Saratz, overlooking the graveyard. A scientist from the laboratory had dinner with me and later sat with me on the balcony of my room, pointing out the various glaciers and the circling eagles: What you say is interesting, Emil. But the motives of animals have always been under investigation by man. Consider how even here in Switzerland, eels were put on trial by the church and excommunicated from Lake Luzern.

I AM BEING DRIVEN to the town with the zoo, by hop poles and vineyards. We enter the town now. I give instructions to pass through the town square. I see the plague column once again and factory women of good political orientation in another part of the square in vests and black pumps, huffing and puffing to a revolutionary tune, practicing a mass gymnastics exercise for the May Day parade. A committee member gives instructions through a megaphone. “Up and down!” he says. “Into the star.” He breaks off. “No. Ladies! Ladies. Try to give the impression of being a wave that rises and falls with the anthem.” The music starts again. The committee member claps his hands. “Again. Huddle together. Star shape! And up, and down.”

We drive on, around the Svět. We come to an armed checkpoint. A notice has been placed here: REVERED COMRADES! THE ZOO IS CLOSED FOR TECHNICAL REASONS. ITS GATES WILL REMAIN SHUT FOR THE COMING HOLIDAYS. THE ZOO DIRECTORATE KINDLY ASKS COMRADES TO POSTPONE

THEIR VISITS.

I SIT IN A TRAILER that was set down by crane next to the giraffe house at the beginning of the quarantine. I have replaced a vet from the Ministry of Agriculture. I have been ordered to oversee the liquidation of the giraffes that I ascended the Labe with. I am to shred any written reference here to them. There will be no talk of Camelopardalis bohemica because there can be no talk of the contagion. They will be killed without exception, but their absence will not be remarked on. The zoo will receive no explanation. The OIE offices in Paris will not be informed. Inquiries will be directed to nonexistent desks in the Ministry of Agriculture. Complaints will be met with threats of imprisonment. It will be as if the herd never migrated to Czechoslovakia or, having taken assisted passage here and become acclimatized, they simply walked out through open gates, heading north.

The zoo is circled with quicklime. Its administration and switchboard have been taken over by the security services. No outgoing telephone calls are allowed and there is only one incoming call each afternoon, to the giraffe house. Outside the zoo walls are army tents and a disinfection unit. The representative of the Central Infection Committee is there, together with the deputy minister of agriculture, the rectors of the Košice and Brno veterinary colleges, and security officers. Alois Hus has flown back into ČSSR this morning. He will be picked up by the secret police at Prague Ruzyně Airport. He will be escorted here, but he will not be permitted to enter the zoo. František Vokurka is also outside. I walked by him dressed in the chemical warfare suit I have been issued. He did not recognize me but told me to hold up. “You’re going too fast, comrade! You need to move like this, languidly, as if you are a frogman underwater.”