J. Ledgard - Giraffe

“No, sir.”

“Can you imagine it?”

“I’ve seen films, pictures.”

“The White Sea is not white, you should understand, but of dark changing colors. On the third day, we hit fish. So many fish! We drew up the net. It was a biblical scene, as you might say. The catch was too large. We could not take it on board. If we had done so, we should have sunk. Yet it was hard to let all those fish go. There was an experienced crew member. A blond Estonian — yes, not unlike you, but older and stronger, with nothing left to prove. While we made plans, he walked off the boat — onto the sea! He walked on water, or rather on the heads and bodies of the fish thrashing there at the surface. When he came to the net, he took his knife, reached in, and cut it open. Fish rushed out. He sank to his knees, as though in melting snow. We thought he would disappear whole into the White Sea and drown. We called out to him. He turned to face us momentarily, then looked up. He smiled and appeared transfixed by a gyrfalcon hovering above in the fierce winds. He contemplated the gyrfalcon for what seemed to us an age, then walked on water calmly back to the boat. Through his labor the net was bled of enough of the fish for us to be able to haul it on board.”

He stops. “So there is a miracle for you,” he says.

“Remarkable,” I say.

“You’ve never seen the sea — have you ever been out of the country?”

“I once went to Hungary.”

“All the more exciting this will be for you, then. What we want from you, Emil, is to travel up to Hamburg and supervise the unloading and passage back to Czechoslovakia of an important shipment.”

“You want me to go west?”

He gives me a weary look.

“Yes, Freymann. West Germany.”

He asks me if I have heard of a zoo in a certain Czechoslovakian town.

“Yes,” I say.

“It is due a shipment of giraffes. Let’s see.” He opens a ring binder with his tiny fingers and lifts out a few pages. “Here we are. Thirty-three giraffes. A record number, by all accounts. The zoo director is sailing with them from Mombasa in the next week or so. The giraffes are the property of the Ministry of Agriculture, although the shipping company underwrote some of the costs of their capture and transport.”

He puts an index finger in his mouth, nibbles. His expression is pained now. “There are concerns about the sale of sensitive information about your ČSSR — or indeed the sale of the giraffes themselves — to unfriendly foreign elements. You’ll travel to Hamburg, keep an eye on things, listen out for what concerns us, and make sure all the property reaches Czechoslovakia in good order.” He looks up. “But that’s all incidental,” he says. “The main point is to establish your cover for future operations. You’ll be a scientist sponsored by a shipping concern, nothing more. So how about it, Freymann — can you manage?”

“Why me?”

“You’re the giraffe man, aren’t you?”

“Just giraffe blood, comrade. I just deal in hemodynamics.”

“You’ve the perfect cover. You’ll get us access to foreign laboratories. Write some scientific paper from this trip. Indulge yourself. Yes?”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I know you will, Emil.”

I stand. I push back my hair. He slips the pages back into the ring binder. I take it. I open it and see written inside the cover in a flowing hand:

giraffe!

“Thank you, comrade director.”

“We’ll make a start on your permissions,” he says, addressing a finger to his mouth.

I go out. I flick through the file in the lengthening corridor. There is the sound of discordant typing, both fluent and clumsy. I lean against the wall. Only a single image of a giraffe comes to me at this moment; all my learning has been reduced to a giraffe of indistinct color. I see the height of the beast; its neck is translucent; I see blood shooting up its carotid artery to the rete mirabile, or wonder net, stretched elastic at the base of the cranium. The giraffe does not move; it does not turn toward me.

I WALK AWAY from the glass tower now, down Jankovcova Street to the Vltava. I turn up my collar against the cold. I come to the river. It is a vein, opened to the sky. It pleases me. I am a hemodynamicist and I cannot help seeing rivers as veins, and veins as rivers. I am given over, as I told the shipping director, to the study of cerebral hemodynamics in vertical creatures, in men and giraffes. That is, the flow of blood toward and through the brain, a journey that has no beginning or end save in the last beat of the heart, at which point the veins collapse — the cosmic catastrophe — along with all calculations. I do not feel the weight of my skull pushed up, as if on a stick, from this soot-dusted embankment. If I could hold it in my hands, here beside the Libeň Bridge, I would be surprised at its heft — most of it blood. My intent is to model the flow of this blood through the brain. I wish to map out its sinks and eddies, its oxbows, and the estuarine channels of the wonder net. I use sound waves to determine the variable depth of arterial walls. (For a long time, arteries were not understood. The garroting of specimen animals for dissection engorged the right ventricle and so emptied the arteries of blood, so they came to be called arteria, or tubes, and were assigned a pneumatic purpose, of pumping air around the body.) Blood finds no sea. It courses through narrows and rapids of ligament, flows upward against gravity, and becomes momentarily weightless in the deep of the brain, where thoughts shoot like comets through a firmament of crimson stars that give oxygen but no light. Blood is not opened to the sky; its journey is a hidden flow, is without light, save in the dawntide, which works into the thin blood vessels woven across wrist- and anklebones.

I leave the Vltava and walk now through the warehouses of Holešovice, under Czechoslovakian flags of red, white, and blue and Soviet flags of red slotted into the conical holders the State has decreed must be drilled into the masonry of every building. The flags hang limply. This is something else I notice about the Communist moment: how it celebrates itself in a windless land with a display of flags. I quicken my pace. I am drawn now, like a moth, toward an electric sign blinking on and off over the main gates of a brick-making factory. A space rocket bearing the initials ČSSR bursts moon-ward from the slogan

GLORY TO THE EPOCH OF SOCIALIST

AND COMMUNIST CONSTRUCTION!

The initials ČSSR and the space rocket blink on and off. The slogan is ever lit. I look at the potholed street. I walk under the sign. I do not look up, but see fairground reflections in the puddles of an epoch blinking on, then off.

I catch a tram and walk and come to a pub overlooking Stromovka Park. I step inside. It is yellow in here. The lights are yellow, the tablecloths are stained yellow, the walls and air are yellow with cigarette smoke; there is a jaundiced man propping up the bar, there are maple-yellow ice-hockey sticks lined up by the door. I take a beer and sit in a corner. I pull from my bag a copy of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. It is a Czechoslovakian edition from before the war. This volume means something to me. It belonged to my uncle. Inside the front cover there is an admonition he scrawled in large letters as a child:

Death is a confirmed habit into which we have fallen.

Learn from Pip

I flick through it at random, as the pious do with their Bibles. The paper is yellow. is scrawled on the margin of one page. A few phrases are underlined throughout:

What larks!

And the communication I have got to make is,

that he has great expectations.