It's amazing how a single animal can rivet the public's attention as we all saw last weekend with the christening of a small seal named Abeba at the Prague Zoo. This creature's claim to fame: that she was the pup of the famous Gaston, the adult male who escaped from the zoo last year when the Vltava river broke its banks and Prague saw floods it hadn't experienced for five hundred years. During those dramatic August days we surveyed Gaston's run for freedom, making it all the way to Dresden before finally being recovered by zoo keepers to be returned to Prague. Viewers thought - all's well that ends well...
But, for Gaston it didn't - the seal succumbed to exhaustion before his return and for a day famous Czech actors and actresses usually splashed across the tabloids like the daily Blesk - were replaced with his fuzzy likeness. We sighed 'Ah, Gaston´ - but with common sense reminded ourselves well, of course it was only an animal. To dwell on his fate would be ludicrous in the face of the catastrophic floods that claimed seventeen in the Czech Republic and destroyed billions in homes, personal belongings, artefacts and collections: books, letters, photographs, in short, memories of lives lived, forgotten, now lost. To paraphrase one of the few good lines from a rather poor recent thriller: photos are individuals' stands against the passing time, a small victory won. All washed away last year.
Abiba, photo: CTK
Gaston won his own little battle in the end, that we now know. Secretly siring a daughter no one ever expected, no one knew about. You can laugh - as we did - after all it is only an animal - making up phoney headlines in the office trying to scrunch as much information in as possible. 'Posthumous legacy of Gaston the seal continues with daughter' and so on. But, the truth is - animal or not - there was something very touching about the birth of innocent Abeba. Not least the event has had enormous symbolic value for the sacrifices and struggles of dozens of zoo workers last year who had to watch many of the creatures in their care disappear under the waters. For zoo officials that can't have been easy. Even the zoo's director Petr Fejk called those the worst days of his life.
Only an animal? More than an animal: fuzzy Abeba can not know that she symbolizes a continuing hope in renewal and recovery, but she does. For that reason alone I will go and visit her newly swimming in her pool. Of course I'll say I'm just taking my nephew.
