‘Well, there you go,’ she said. ‘That was – when was it? – around the year 1870? 1880? A hundred years ago. So perhaps that is how long it takes.’ She wandered off to strip another marula tree of bark, and returned later in the day, singing loudly and walking in unsteady zigzags across the plain, to join the herd at our waterhole.
Once the sun had set, one of our baby cousins asked the elders to tell the story of our ancestor Suleiman, a story my sister and I had listened to many times with pleasure. But that night I didn’t want to hear about faraway elephants.
‘Suleiman was born in the royal stables of the King of Ceylon in the year 1540,’ one of our great-aunts began. ‘As a young boy, he was sent to Lisbon as part of a diplomatic outreach to King John III and Catherine of Portugal. Though he delighted them, they decided to gift him to their grandson Don Carlos. Suleiman travelled on foot to Spain, but Don Carlos found it too complicated to care for him. He was given to the Habsburg Archduke Maximilian II, who put him on a ship with his wife and children to Genoa. From there Suleiman travelled on foot again, all the way to Vienna, where a special celebration was held to welcome him to the city.
‘In Vienna, Suleiman was given the honour of being the first animal housed in the menagerie within Maximilian II’s newly built palace, the most beautiful Renaissance palace outside Italy. Here Maximilian tried to ensure his new pet’s happiness. He gave orders that the elephant be fed the best exotic fruit from his orchards, and only the fruits Suleiman did not like were served at dinners in the imperial court. In the winter, Suleiman was given a gallon of red wine to drink every day, to warm his blood. On the stone blocks of the entrance to his spacious enclosure, Maximilian ordered one of the court’s scholars to inscribe the words of the Roman historian, Pliny the Elder: The elephant is the largest land animal, and also the nearest to man in intelligence. It understands the language of its country, obeys orders, remembers duties it has learned, likes affection and honours – more, it has virtues rare in man – honesty, wisdom, justice, and respect for the stars and reverence for the sun and the moon.
‘A giraffe was purchased to keep Suleiman company in the empty menagerie, but they did not take to each other, and the giraffe was eventually allowed to roam free in the palace gardens, where she developed a trick the noblewomen loved, of sticking her head through their first-floor windows for treats. Gradually, Maximilian expanded his menagerie as he expanded his empire, acquiring panthers and peacocks, lynxes and leopards, bears and buzzards. But he never managed to find another elephant to join Suleiman; some whispered it was because he didn’t want Suleiman to bond too closely with one of his own kind.
‘One day, when Maximilian brought his most pious priests to visit Suleiman, they found he had written something on the sandy floor of his enclosure: I, the elephant, wrote this. The priests were horrified. They insisted the elephant be killed on the spot, that his writing was proof of demonic forces at work. Maximilian refused, but he understood the risks enough to wipe out Suleiman’s words with the sole of his own slipper. The priests took it upon themselves to have Suleiman secretly poisoned over the course of the next winter, adding arsenic to his daily wine.
‘It took four months for Suleiman to die, and when he did, Maximilian was inconsolable. He told his servants to rub snuff in the eyes of all the other menagerie animals so that they would appear to be crying, in mourning as profound as his own. He decided that Suleiman’s body should be divided up and distributed throughout the Holy Roman Empire so that his domain would never forget him.
‘To the Mayor of Vienna, Maximilian gave Suleiman’s right front foot and part of his shoulder blade – if you look up at the stars, see, there; can you see the shoulder blade and foot together? And next to them, if you join up that cluster of stars, you can see the chair that was made of Suleiman’s bones, that to this day is in the abbey at Kremsmünster. His soul glows at us from these remnants. But most important is his stuffed skin – you have to draw an imaginary line from that trunk star to that tail star to see it – which was housed in royal collections and then in the Bavarian National Museum for a long time, until the humans had their second great war of this century and it disappeared from the collection, never to be seen again.’
I waited for my great-aunt to sigh with contentment at the end of her telling, and for the herd around us to shift and settle. ‘Is it because we don’t have a museum?’ I said. ‘Is that why we don’t tell the stories of our ancestors who lived here in Mozambique?’
‘There is a museum, in Maputo,’ said one of my cousins who had just come of age and was soon to leave the herd, before he was hushed by the elders and we were told by our mother, in no uncertain terms, to go to sleep.
* * *
Our oldest female cousin, who mostly ignored my sister and me though we followed her around devoutly, decided one day during a mini-rebellion against her mother’s control that she would tell us the recent secret history of the herd in our own birthplace.
‘There was a human war in our country that ended a few years after you two were born,’ she whispered to us behind a scrub of thorn trees. ‘Between the Portuguese and the local people, who wanted this country to be independent. You were too young to remember.’
‘Were there any historically worthy deaths of our ancestors in this war?’ my sister asked excitedly.
Our cousin looked over her shoulder before answering. ‘Many of our clan were de-tusked and left to bleed out by the Portuguese as they fled the country,’ she said.
‘Right here? In Gorongosa National Park?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Now you keep your little mouths shut. I’m not supposed to tell you these things. You’ll find them all out when you’re old enough.’
‘When?’ my sister said. ‘When will we be old enough? We turn thirteen this year.’
She looked surprised we didn’t already know. ‘It is almost time for you to be initiated,’ she said, her eyes softening.
‘But nobody will tell us when that is.’
She pulled a strip of bark off an acacia trunk, exposing its pink underside, and gave a low rumble of frustration. ‘You two have always had special treatment because you’re twins. We didn’t think you would survive at first. Your mother didn’t have enough milk for you both, so one of the aunties shared her milk. The herd has cared for you and protected you from harm. When you are strong enough, you will learn what you want to know.’
* * *
Our cousin was right in saying the time would pass quickly, that we should not wish it away. Soon after my sister and I turned thirteen we experienced our first full night of wakefulness. Instead of falling asleep lying on the ground like the young elephants, she and I found we could not sleep. We kept company with the adult members of the herd, standing awake and protective above the sleeping children. Just before sunrise, we coiled up our trunks on our upturned tusks and dozed on our feet until the sun made the air bright. Only our great-grandmother, the matriarch of our herd, did not doze at all.
In the morning our mother told us we were ready to be initiated. ‘This wakefulness is the first sign that you are ready to be mothers and leaders yourselves,’ she said.
The herd waited for the full moon to arrive, and from the night it rose fat and red above the bush until the night it had melted away by half, we were initiated into the secrets of the herd and the principles by which we should live as adults.
On the third night of our initiation, the matriarch told a story.
‘Many years before you two were born, something terrible happened here. There was a piece of land nearby that the Portuguese thought might be suited to growing crops. They ordered a local hunt supervisor to kill two thousand elephants living on the land. He followed his orders, but he had a scientific bent to his mind. He decided to cut out and collect every unborn baby he found in the wombs of the dead.
‘His ambition grew. He could not stop until he had the world’s only complete collection of elephant foetuses, one for every mon
th of the twenty-two months of our gestation. When he had collected all twenty-two in ascending size, he had them preserved in formaldehyde and donated them to the curator of the Lourenço Marques Natural History Museum – this was before our capital was renamed Maputo – which still displays the jars.’
She looked at the sky. With her trunk she pointed to a knot of stars close together on the horizon and waited for my sister and I to count them. There were twenty-two.
‘You have asked for the stories of your immediate ancestors,’ she said. ‘Their souls are inscribed up there too. But their stories are more difficult for us to tell our young. We have to start you on the tales of elephants from long ago and far away.’
She must have seen the excitement in our eyes at discovering a new layer of constellations in the sky dedicated to our own African ancestors. ‘Death is not something to worship now that you are adults,’ the matriarch warned. ‘It is the province only of the very young to want things to work out badly. The souls in the sky live only as long as we remember their stories. Beyond that there is nothing, not for them nor for us.’
* * *
Though I had been told by the elders of the power it would give me over males, the effects of my first oestrus took me completely by surprise. Adolescent bulls from all corners of Gorongosa began to hang around our herd and wider bond group, gazing at me with open desire and shoving one another away to get a closer sniff of my urine. The attention was intoxicating. But the elders counselled me to ignore these too eager boy-men and wait for an older bull in musth to begin to court me. And soon one did, a bull in his thirties with secretions from his temporal glands streaming down his cheeks. I let him shadow me for a while, glancing over my shoulder at him and enjoying the sound of his calls while he followed. It was the only time in my life that I forgot the presence of my sister and all my family: my world had shrunk to the two of us in consort.
I knew immediately a new life had begun inside me and sang the deep, arched notes I had been taught during my initiation to summon my herd around me to celebrate. They trumpeted and flapped their ears, smelled the spilled semen on the ground, and rubbed their flanks against my stomach, rumbling with joy. My sister stayed by my side all the rest of that day and night, rejoicing. Her own oestrus began soon after. We carried our babies at the same time, through two of the longest, driest summers the herd could remember.
My difficult labour lasted for two days, assisted by my mother and aunts. Finally my daughter was born in her foetal sac, and within half an hour of her birth she stood up, fell over, and was gently nudged up again by my mother. She found her way to my teats and began to suckle. For hours I could not stop rumbling with pleasure and love, soothing her, reassuring her, sharing my wonderful news with our bond group and wider clan throughout the bush. I helped my sister birth her son in the spring days that followed. We laughed together as we watched our babies discover their trunks and try to figure out what to do with them. They would swing them around and back and forth, sucking on them, tripping over them, all the while bewildered as to what these strange things were useful for. At night we stood awake above our sleeping infants, keeping guard beside all the adult women in the herd.
Their new lives cauterised our old longing for a glorious death. My sister and I began to wish for beauty and goodness in life, and tried not to think of death at all. Immune to the old charms, we hardly listened at dusk when the elders told the herd’s babies and children stories of long-dead foreign ancestors under the flowering cashew trees. When my baby girl looked up to piece together the outlines of Castor and Pollux in the sky, I felt nothing but quiet elation at having her skin against my own.
* * *
One day at the beginning of the second dry summer after their birth, I discovered my daughter and nephew painting mud in diamond patterns on each other’s foreheads at the edge of the dwindling Lake Urema, arranging coral tree twigs into headdresses and pretending they were made of velvet brocade and gold thread.
I demanded to know what they were doing. My daughter told me they were pretending to be Castor and Pollux adorned in finery, giving imaginary Parisian children a ride around the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes. They couldn’t understand my anger, which had its origins in fear, and they ran away and hid from me in the acacia grove. My sister said I had reacted badly by trying to stop their play-acting, that it would only encourage them as it had encouraged us at their age.
She took a different approach and told them everything they wanted to know about Paris and the siege, how the Prussians had encircled the city to starve the Parisians into surrender. She told them that the hungry Parisians had eaten their way through tens of thousands of the city’s horses, until there was not a single horse to be found. Next they started in on the rats, but even the city’s best chefs had not been able to make rat taste good, though they tried hard to entice the wealthy in the expensive dining clubs with cured rat sausage. Once every cat and dog in the city had been eaten, the chefs began to look around for other meat sources for their rich patrons. Rationing was never considered – the rich must eat meat regardless, and the poor were told they should survive on mustard and wine, of which the city had plenty stored.
I gave my sister a warning look.
‘That’s enough for today,’ she said. ‘Time to nap.’
The next morning, my daughter and her cousin talked a baby zebra into pretending to be a horse, and a bush rat into being a city rat, and they chased them as if they were human and hungry. It was normal for our young to test their powers by asserting play-dominance over other creatures in the bush, shooing them along with wide ears, trying to trumpet. The other women in our herd looked on with amusement. But I asked my sister to stop telling the tales, and she agreed for a while to let me distract our children with soft little stories about how the lion got its mane, and how the Milky Way was created from ashes thrown up into the sky by one of our ancestors, to lead his lost lover home.
* * *
It was at this time that strange foreign humans began to occupy the rundown National Park tourist camps in our territory, abandoned since the Portuguese had left. For many years we’d had Gorongosa mostly to ourselves, disturbed only by locals from the villages just outside the park’s reinforced fences who sometimes took shortcuts through the park, if they felt brave enough to come face to face with lions or buffalo. Some of our herd recognised the foreign men’s collective scent from past travels over the Mozambique border into the enormous Kruger National Park on the South African side, before the electric fences separating us from our relatives were built. We watched from a safe distance as these men set up a shooting range. Soon they were bringing local men to the camp and teaching them to shoot at targets.
The elders decided we should be cautious and move further away, towards the eastern edge of Gorongosa. We moved at night while the men were sleeping. As a child, I had always loved walking along the eastern boundary because of the smell of the orange groves the villagers tended on the other side. The citrus scent was so overwhelming that the elders in our herd would collect near the weakest parts of the enclosure, knowing we youngsters would be unable to resist trying to get to the fruit. Oranges have always been our great weakness. But that night there was no heady citrus scent, only smoke from fires on the other side of the fence.
The next night we moved on again, towards the Muaredzi River. It was hardly flowing. Several monsoon seasons had given us very little rain and we had suffered through the resulting dry summers, but Lake Urema still had just enough water for us not to become anxious. Now we were unsure whether to return to Lake Urema and risk being close to the strange humans, or to stay and hope that by some miracle the Muaredzi’s waters might begin to swell. Our matriarch decided we should stay and wait.
After many weeks of waiting, another herd within our bond group arrived, on their way to see if the Mussicadzi River further afield might be flowing more swiftly. We had known for a while that they were coming, having listened closely to the infras
onic sound waves they transmitted. We greeted one another joyously with chirps and barks and constant rumbling, and they spent several nights with us, telling us stories about what they had seen on their journey from the south. They said the foreign humans had many local recruits now, often from the surrounding villages; they burned the homes to the ground and forced the men to fight. Some of them were very young, closer to being children. Other humans had tried to attack the men’s compound within Gorongosa from the air. The travelling herd had seen a pilot crash his helicopter and stagger out wearing a fur-lined aviator cap with an emblem on it that looked like the tools humans use to farm. A Russian, one of the elders said.
The other herd promised to return as quickly as they could, and left to follow their matriarch towards the Mussicadzi. When they finally came back to us, they said that river too was almost dried up. They said a different group of men had moved into the Lion House on the old floodplain near the river – a concrete building, open to the elements, that had been occupied by the same pride of lions and their descendants since the Portuguese abandoned their tourist camps. Now the lions had all disappeared or been killed. We worried about them, dying so secretly. Even the floodplain was dry.
The other herd had fewer babies to look after, and our matriarch and theirs decided it would be best for our herd to stay beside the Muaredzi for its meagre water, while they moved on and tried to find another supply. We held a formal farewell ceremony before they left, making a ring with our bodies close together, breathing in the smell of our kin.
* * *
All through the summer we watched the Muaredzi die a slow death, gradually reduced to a trickle. The adults drank less and less so that our young could have their fill. There was very little to eat – the savanna grasses were too dry, and most of the trees and shrubs we like to pull branches and leaves from had lost their sweetness and were dying too. We dug with our tusks for roots and tubers, for their stored moisture. At night we took extra care to keep our little ones surrounded, for the hyenas were becoming bold in their own hunger and thirst.
Only the Animals Page 13