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church, looking down into the third courtyard of the castle. The view is vertiginous — a suicidal plunge. My eye is not drawn now to the baroque palaces lining the edge of the courtyard or to the needle obelisk in the center, but to the flagstones of the courtyard arranged in a diagonal grid of black-and-white squares. It is an optical illusion, I know, perhaps induced by blood flow, but I do not see a commonplace pattern. I see something more sinister: The flagstones appear to me as a grid of cages, a captivity into which one might fall.
    The second photograph was taken in India. A man falls face-first into the River Ganges, his arms stretched up. He wears a cloth around his waist, but is otherwise naked. His face is touching the sacred waters: The bridge of his nose has not yet broken the skin of the river, while his mouth, chin, chest, and palms are already submerged. Streamers of bandage float about the pilgrim, and flowers and spent pieces of charcoal from funeral pyres. The surface teems with reflections of the quick and the dead, but the crop is such that none of them are in view. It is a lustrous print, black as boot polish. In my mind’s eye I place colors of lapis, caramel, and henna in it. I make a comet of it in the deep of my brain. On it is written, by the author, “ Reka života a smrti, ” or River of life and death. It is dated 1937. That means nothing. This photograph punctures time, as Dürer punctures time. It could be a thousand years in the past, or so far in the future as to make of our ČSSR a forgotten dream.
Emil
    MAY 8, 1973
    T HE RED-STAR RED FIGHTER JETS have all flown away to their bases in the mountains. The “zoo historian” leans forward on a hard chair and speaks to me of the flood that swept the Persian leopard from its cage, of waters that rose over the Prague Zoo and the gardens of the Troja Chateau by the zoo, where we sit now in his shabby office in inexplicable gloom, so that we are no more than shadows to each other. He tells me of seals swimming up to the steps of the chateau in floodwaters I imagine to be the color of the Ganges, and similarly full of new dead.
    “They looked to me like giant newts, coming at the end of the world,” he says. “They swam around the baroque statues depicting virtues and vices, of which only charity remained eerily above water.”
    We come to the question of captivity.
    “I am a historian of captivity,” he says.
    “The captivity of people also?” I ask.
    “A passing knowledge,” he says.
    “Giraffes?”
    He smiles.
    “I recently instructed a zookeeper in the history of giraffes,” he says. “I will speak to you of gyrfalcons, polar bears, and giraffes.”
    “Go on,” I say unsteadily.
    I prepare my pen. I am the giraffe man now and I must know more of these vertical beasts than the viscoelasticity of their arteries.
    I smell the soil of the vineyard coming through the open window. I hear the animals in the zoo, beyond the walls of the chateau. He coughs phlegm into a cloth. His office is damp, littered in the corners with mice droppings. I look away, out through the open window, and see candlelight flickering in the chapel above the vineyard.
    “The Romans were dazzled by the proportions and colors of the giraffe,” he says, quelling his cough, “which they took to be the offspring of a camel and a leopard, so camelopardalis or camelopard; others thought better camel-hyena, that a hyena had taken a camel mare and the offspring, the giraffe, was mute on account of the violence of the hyena’s entry. In any case, the giraffe was of limited entertainment value to the Romans. It could not easily kill or defend itself from being killed. It could not roar or trumpet. If it appeared in a ring at all, it was only as a curtain-raiser at the beginning of the games. Five thousand wild animals were slaughtered for the inaugural games of the Colosseum. Eleven thousand were put to the sword during the four months of games marking the victory