Free Giraffe by J. M. Ledgard Page A

boiler or a bank safe, attacks or makes love to a faceless woman whose arms are stretched up somnambulistically. I study the painting as I study passages from Great Expectations, or carotid arteries.
    Watery meadows appear on either side of us. This is the end of Hamburg. I move up and down the barge now, making notes and sketches of the giraffes for my scientific paper. I am less concerned now with rumination, with the four divisions of the stomach, the Olympic-length intestines, the maneuverability of the tongue, the prehensile and undivided upper lip, the vocal cords that hardly pluck a sound, or even with the laryngeal nerve running from brain to heart and back again, than I am with the viscosity of giraffe blood, five times thicker than water, with a multiplication of crimson stars, in better distribution of oxygen, with the jugular veins several centimeters in diameter, stoppered with one-way valves, in such a way as to regulate flow from the head when it is lifted from the ground. There are thirty-two giraffes here, each with a wonder net hidden from view. When a giraffe splays its legs and sets down its head to drink, the pressure on its cranial vasculature triples. The giraffe’s cerebral blood vessels are too thin-walled to constrict against it. But for the wonder net, the giraffe would collapse, as cosmonauts do when certain g-force is applied. It is the wonder net that keeps the living form of giraffes pushed up, even to resemble creatures from a world of lesser gravity. When the head goes down, its endless shunts and meanders spread elastically across the base of the cranium, absorbing the flow that rushes in through the carotid artery.
    IT IS A HEAT WAVE. I strip off my shirt. I pour a bucket of water over my head, my shoulders, my chest. A man in large mirrored sunglasses drives a cream-colored Mercedes along a country road by the river. I help tend the giraffes. I shovel out dung. I hold up bread to some of the giraffes.
    “No!” Hus shouts. “Not bread! Grain, comrade.” He comes running up with a bucket of grain. He is also without shirt and shoes. He wears a safari hat and a necklace of African beads made of coral.
    “These giraffes will live fifteen years in the wild at the most. They’ll manage thirty years in the zoo with my diet.”
    “Grain?”
    “Not just grain. Alfalfa, formulated pellets, fruit, plenty of beets, switches of elm and alder.”
    “What about the breeding?” I see him now. I see his eyes glint.
    “Breeding! That’s the thing. It all comes down to procreation in the end. We have a social group here. A perfect mix of healthy males and females. All we need to do is sort them correctly.”
    “Just like the Komsomol,” I say.
    He does not hear me.
    “We’ll see our first pregnancies this winter,” he says.
    “What makes you so sure?”
    “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Freymann. You’re a scientist. Look around you. We have a different philosophy. The purpose of a zoo is to breed animals and to entertain the worker. Breeding is the more important. The State recognizes that. And our socialist mind is good for breeding. It wants to know at what temperature, at what angle of entry, between which giraffe bull and which giraffe cow. And the better we breed, the more we entertain. We will build the safari park. Workers will be driven through an open landscape. And we will breed in ever larger groups. We will birth the animals, keeping the best ones, selling the rest, and so continue for generations until we get to our Camelopardalis bohemica. It will happen. The climate in our ČSSR is not so bad. The new giraffes will become accustomed to the winters. They’ll learn to move on ice.”
    I throw bread I would have fed to the giraffes into the Labe. Fish come up for it, eels invisibly too, and gulls arriving inland from the sea drop down to it and slash noisomely on the river.
     
     
     
     
    I SIT IN THE WHEELHOUSE with the zoo veterinarian. Hus is at the other end of