Giraffe Read Online Free Page B

down to Los Angeles. Other functionalist villas were built on Baba Hill then to break the pull of Hapsburg Prague, which hovered planetary on the horizon in black and gold. But the Czechoslovakia these villas were erected to celebrate has long since been plowed under. There have been so many departures from this hillside — to death camps, hard-labor camps, internal exile in villages or industrial towns, to New York, London, Munich, and Tel Aviv. Baba stumbles on as Prague stumbles on, as a wasted body in a fine suit.
    I open the front door. I call out. There is no answer. I walk on into silence, into cream and mercury. I feel myself to have boarded some train in a desert, for this is a home of passage, in which there is hardly anything of the Communist moment. My father was raised here. My brothers and my sister and I have been raised here. I descend the stairs now by spare walls, untouched but for a few art photographs. I open the windows of my room onto the garden, lined with dark pine trees, which slopes down to the Dukla soccer stadium below. In summer, the shadows of my parents and the trowels and forks they carry about the garden play on the walls of my room, comforting me and keeping alive within me a sense of childhood.
    My father read Emil and the Detectives aloud to me as a child. He read tenderly, because he understood the horrors awaiting fictional Emil. If that boy, also with slate-colored eyes, grew into a man and left the pages of the book, he would die fighting in the siege of Stalingrad or drown soundlessly in a U-boat far out in the Barents Sea. If he remained a boy like Peter Pan and lived the same adventure over and over, there would come a time when he was delivered into a Berlin that was burning. And who would care about the money stolen from him — those few notes removed from his jacket while he slept on the train, which made for the adventure — if he had alighted at Berlin Zoo station not in 1930, as the book has it, but in 1944, when the bombs were falling? How many child detectives would fictional Emil have been able to rally to his cause then, when real boys yet smaller than him wore uniforms, carried guns, and died in large numbers?
    “Emil Tischbein is free in the way I wish you to be free,” my father said.
    This was at a family celebration in a country orchard. There were striped deck chairs, Chinese lanterns, beer and sausages cooking on an open fire. Blossoms drifted among the elderly relatives, who sat as they had as children, with their feet in a stream.
    “I want you to listen to me now, Emil,” my father said.
    “I’m listening.”
    “This other Emil wants to show us it is possible for a child to be upstanding without the authority of a uniform.”
    “A child such as me?”
    “Such as you. Tischbein means table leg in German. You can depend on a tischbein. Just as there is no question the Tischbeins, mother and son, despised all the Nazis stood for. That’s why the Nazis burned Emil and the Detectives. They thought it subversive. They threw Emil on the pyre.”
    “They burned him, really?”
    “Yes, imagine that,” my father said. “As if he were a pestilence.”
     
     
     
     
    I DO IMAGINE IT. Fictional Emil going up in flames, page by page, hands in pockets, rocking back on his heels, his shy smile not changing, his innocence intact. There is no more book-burning. Emil and the Detectives simply goes unpublished. A few copies of the book are locked away in the cellars of my country’s libraries, secured there behind heavy doors so that no one can hear fictional Emil’s cries of “Stop, thief!” as he races through the streets of Berlin.
    There are other signs of burning in this ČSSR of 1973. We run here and there through the woods in fear of mass incineration during nuclear drills, remembering as we run in suits and masks students who doused themselves in gasoline and made human torches of themselves in protest at our captivity. Pinned to the breast of every