J.M. Ledgard writes, in the acknowledgments at the end of his haunting first novel, “Giraffe,” that it “is a true story. The names and orders of events have been changed to protect living persons.” Identities are the only thing protected in “Giraffe.” In the end, no one, not even the reader, escapes unscathed.
The kernel of history that lies at the heart of the novel isn’t revealed until the final pages. It does, however, figure prominently in the jacket copy. In 1975, a zoo in a small Czechoslovakian town was home to the largest captive herd of giraffes in the world. On April 30, the eve of May Day, the zoo was cordoned off by secret police and the herd slaughtered. No explanation for these actions was ever given. Ledgard uses fiction based in the first-person to explore the event and its impact.
The story begins with the birth, and then the capture of Snehurka – “Snow White” to describe the fur on her belly – the giraffe who will become the leader of the herd. In captivity, still in Africa, she hears her captors converse: “‘There is socialism in our method,’ I hear them say. ‘Capitalists capture one or two giraffes, while we take an entire herd; because our intention is political, to issue forth a new subspecies.”‘
The political system, and how it shapes the thoughts and actions of the characters, is the novel’s backbeat – not intrusive, but never far below the surface. Emil, a hemodynamicist charged with accompanying the herd from its landfall in West Germany to its new home at the zoo, introduces himself by saying, “I am not concerned with the Communist moment, but with some beautiful moment gone before. I am a student of hidden flow. I imagine my own self as blood already passed through the heart and slowed in a distant part of the body, in the foot perhaps, and occupied there in remembrance of the cathedral-arched beauty of the ventricles.”
The narrative unfolds with almost a dreamlike quality, in meditative steps. Emil has made a study of giraffes in part because of their circulatory system – it pushes blood into the brain when the head is up yet keeps it from flooding the brain when the head is down – which has applications to spacesuit design. He is a detective of circulation, a poet of blood flow and, in the end, a man who is about making the safe choices.
Some view the collection of animals as a shipment. For others, it is an assisted migration. Yet the sheer size and majesty of the herd cannot help but touch all who see them. One of these is Amina, a factory worker and a somnambulist.
Amina is spending her birthday in June 1973 as she spends most of her days. She leaves a one-room flat to swim in the Svet river before going to her job, dipping glass Christmas ornaments in dye. “The pieces we color correctly,” she explains, “are exported; the pieces we get wrong make up the domestic quota. So it is that the Christmas trees of CSSR (Ceskoslovenská Socialistická Republika) shine off-color in shades of mustard … The greatest demand in the domestic market is for red spheres. We dip them in Christmas red and send them to be hand-painted with a hammer and sickle so that they might better crown Communist trees in place of an angel.”
But on this day, which usually passes unremarkably, Amina is passed on the road during a thunderstorm by a convoy of trucks bringing the giraffes to the zoo. In time, she becomes quite a student of the giraffes; she sits under a sycamore tree, watching them.
The narratives of Emil and Amina progress independently, joined late in the book by those of Jiri, a sharpshooter, and Tadeáa, a virologist. And though the tale seems unfocused, it is never disjointed. It is, instead, a meditation on life in a world that is politically and socially unfamiliar, peopled by characters who in their dreams and motives seem familiar. And it is portrayed in language that unreels slowly, tantalizingly, carefully. The pace – and introspection – of the narrative makes the tale’s violent and inevitable conclusion all the more horrific.
Ledgard is a foreign correspondent for The Economist, and he hints, late in the novel, as to how he might have stumbled across this tale. Whether “Giraffe” is a true telling is anyone’s guess, and that question is ultimately not the important one. What matters most are the people, brought together by the herd of 49 animals who were slaughtered, and how this chance event illuminated and changed those people’s lives.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
Giraffe
By J.M. Ledgard
Penguin, 298 pages, $24.95
