Giraffe by J. M. Ledgard

smell of giraffes, which is already familiar to me. I sit up against the crate containing Sněhurka. Time is stretched here as it must have been on the Eisfeld broken down off Zanzibar. It will snap back when the journey ends and I will no longer be able to remember the details, such as the shape and color of giraffe hooves, just as I can no longer properly remember the details of my army service. I feel Sněhurka’s legs behind me, through which veins run like vines, and I perform equations to represent the journey of blood through those veins to the ventricles of her heart, powerful as an elephant’s heart, on into thick-walled arteries, up the neck against the hydrostatic pull of gravity to her head, pushed impossibly high on an f -shaped stick. I feel her pulse. She cannot wish her heart to stop beating, any more than I can. So much of this life is without choice. I am grateful for that. I know that, were it possible, I might wish my heart would stop for a few seconds on a long afternoon in ČSSR, and I cannot be certain that if I felt that stoppage within me, if I felt crimson stars falling and the coming cosmic collapse, I would have the courage to strike up my heart once more.
    IT IS TOO HOT NOW for talk of ice hockey. It seems natural that Vokurka is combing back his thin hair from his sweaty scalp and talking of Cuba.
    “I spent a year on the island,” he says. “This was not long after their revolution. I was sent to assist with the defense of Cuba against American biological and chemical weapons. My job was to examine the ballast of American weather balloons, which had drifted from Florida and fallen to earth among the cows in the Cuban hills, some shot from the sky by the Cuban military and others struck down by lightning, in all cases, as I saw once or twice myself, descending like a long mirrored ribbon. The Cubans had an idea that the sand in the weather balloons, which sifted out over the farmland as it lost altitude, might have been infected. The leadership in Havana believed the Americans had impregnated the sand with one contagion or another, designed to lower the fertility of the chickens, weaken the pigs, or damage the cows. I drove around the island testing sand samples and drawing blood from animals in the affected districts. There were a number of veterinarians looking at different biological and chemical threats to Cuban livestock. We were Soviets, East Germans, Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Czechoslovakians. The leadership in Havana took an immediate liking to us.”
    “You met the leaders?”
    “Several times. We were summoned to a beach villa every few weeks. We announced our findings and the leaders leaned forward in their deck chairs and listened. It was quite different from what I expected. There were cigars, but no oratory. They hardly said anything at all.”
    “Were the Americans doing that? Did you find any evidence?”
    He shrugs. “Americans are capable of many things. We were careful to make up our own confidential reports in such a way as to leave open the possibility of contamination. I can only say that all the sand samples I and others gathered were sterile. The Cubans had no interest in sending us home immediately. That would have been to admit paranoia, or that the intelligence service had given credence to wild rumors. I was occasionally sent from Havana to the east of the country to draw blood from animals there. The rest of the time I was free to do as I pleased. The Cubans asked me if there was anything I wanted to learn. I told them that I had always wanted to be a frogman. So they placed me in their military frogman course.”
    “You became a merman?” I ask.
    “A merman? If you like. I spent all my days in the sea. I swam with stingrays in the tidal gaps and sometimes with bottle-nosed dolphins in the reefs. I took up pieces of coral, shark teeth, and small artifacts from among the timbers of shipwrecks. I was also taken fishing in the mangrove swamps. There is a