Giraffe Read Online Free Page A

opens to this page. This is where Pip returns home from Miss Havisham’s for the first time. He has come to understand his position in the world. He sees himself anew, as a common boy with coarse manners and laborer’s boots. I read the passage once more. I try to make the words fit my situation.
    I cannot. I am an adult, Pip is a child. West Germany is not Miss Havisham’s. My education has been limited by the Communist moment, not by poverty, as Pip’s has been. My manners are not particularly coarse, my shoes are foreign, well soled, not those of a laborer. It is true this has been a memorable day for me. I am bound by a long chain of iron, after Pip’s description. But the links are not of my making; they were formed in the year of my birth, 1948, the year in which the Communists took Czechoslovakia by the neck and wrung it. I close my Great Expectations. I look around this pub. The faces I see, one after the other, are yellow, indistinct, banal. They are bound also. They outwardly conform. There is no solidarity here. Solidarity is as likely, the expression goes, as a fire under a waterfall.
Emil
    MAY 7, 1973
    T HE SKY OVER PRAGUE is dashed, flashing. A sudden warm rainstorm washes down in sweet hyphens over Antonín Dvořák’s grave in Vyšehrad, where I kneel now and lay down flowers. Standing, with Slavonic dances in my head, I see the rain passing over the Soviet military barracks in Smichov and wetting the bronze horses rearing up on the roof of the Národní Divadlo, or national theater, and causing Morse code in the sky over Letná Park, toward the apartment blocks of Obráncu miru.
    I am named Emil for Emil Tischbein, the hero in Erich Kästner’s children’s stories, who famously led a band of child detectives through Berlin in pursuit of a thief. I bear an uncanny likeness to the illustrations in those books, as if I am an adult version of Kästner’s boy, grown up in 1960s ČSSR. I have the same mop of golden hair, which falls across my face in the same diagonal way and is pushed back between the fingers of my right hand in just the same manner. I have the same slate-colored eyes, the same button nose. I thrust my hands in my pockets, rock back on my heels, and smile shyly after friends and strangers alike, just as fictional Emil does, in a manner meant to suggest good nature and honesty. I am Czechoslovakian — of course I am; I am bound. But cycling down from Vyšehrad now through Prague in the blushing light of this spring shower, I look more Danish or Pomeranian: The whole of me bears the flaxen mark of the Baltic Sea, which I do not imagine as a dark sea on which a man might walk, indeed not as a sea at all, but as a marine light falling through the unstained windows of a Kaliningrad cathedral flensed of ornament onto the whitewashed grave of Immanuel Kant, while outside, Soviet battleships ride at anchor on vaguely realized swells.
    The rain stops. The sun rolls largely over shining roofs. I freewheel on my bicycle down into Dejvice, around the circle, past the tram stop at Zelená Street, past the Hotel International, and on up Baba Hill. This is my hill: I live atop it. I cycle or walk it daily and barely notice its incline. My feet dig into the pedals now, my body rises without instruction from the saddle. I pass the red-clay tennis courts. The coach waves to me. I wave back. My bicycle rolls from right to left. I physically loosen and lighten as I ascend, as though my calculations and deceptions weigh something and can be cast off as I near home, although I know this is not so, that gravity is more insistent among those we love.
    I step off my bicycle outside the Freymann villa at the end of Nad Pat’ankou Street: my home. The air here is sifted with sulfur smoke drifting in from high chimneys far away. The large windows of the villa glint in the afternoon light. My grandfather commissioned the villa in 1929 to resemble the prow of a big American train running sunlit through the desert