Elefant

by Martin Suter

  ‘Carlo!’ called the woman who looked after the ticket sales, book-keeping, correspondence, telephone and all the other administrative tasks. ‘That Roux guy is here!’

  She’d opened the door to his caravan without knocking, pointing behind to a squat man with shaven hair, carrying an open umbrella and a briefcase.

  ‘Show him in, he’s got an appointment,’ he said gruffly, watching as she – also holding an umbrella – went back over to Roux and indicated the caravan.

  17

  The same day

  The red, white and yellow striped tent with the Pellegrini logo was pitched on the recreation ground beside the recreation hall in a town in eastern Switzerland near Lake Constance, a good hour’s drive from Gentecsa. A dozen circus wagons in the same colours and a motley collection of just as many caravans and mobile homes were clustered behind the big top.

  The picture might not have looked so sad if this hadn’t been the penultimate stop before the end of the season and if it hadn’t been chucking it down so persistently from a murky grey sky.

  The bad-tempered woman from the office pointed to the caravan that said ‘Director’. ‘He’s expecting you,’ she said, before hurrying back to the box office.

  He walked the few metres up to the caravan and knocked. Pellegrini opened the door and invited him in.

  Roux knew the man from the media, particularly from the time when his father was ‘Torn to shreds by lions!’ as one tabloid put it. For a while the same rag ran stories on the circus takeover and the rather indelicate question of when Pellegrini would get married. After that, however, media interest in the director and his circus died down.

  Roux recalled Pellegrini as slimmer, but otherwise he hadn’t changed much in the intervening seven years. Pellegrini was a head taller than him, his shoulder-length hair a touch too black and he stood slightly stooped, as many tall men do.

  The director’s caravan was dominated by a huge desk with three visitors’ chairs. The rest of the space was taken up by three armchairs and a sofa. The walls were covered with old circus posters and photographs from eighty-five years of Circus Pellegrini. The director seemed to be pondering whether to offer his guest a seat by the desk or take him to the more comfortable armchairs; he opted for the latter.

  ‘I’m intrigued,’ Pellegrini said.

  Roux placed his briefcase on the floor beside the armchair. ‘I’m looking for a surrogate elephant mother.’

  Pellegrini smiled. ‘You mean an elephant cow for artificial insemination. You could have told me that over the phone. It’s no secret that we do this.’

  ‘But in this instance it needs to remain one. You see, we’re not talking about artificial insemination.’

  Pellegrini looked at him expectantly.

  ‘It’s a blastocyst transfer. We place a 0.2 millimetre embryo directly into the womb.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s a genetically modified blastocyst.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Would you like a coffee?’

  ‘I’d love one.’

  Pellegrini went over to the espresso machine on the chest of drawers. ‘Lungo or espresso?’

  ‘Espresso please, black, no sugar. Don’t you want to know how?’

  Pellegrini took a capsule, placed it in the machine and waited for the espresso to pour out. ‘You mean how it’s been genetically modified?’

  Roux nodded.

  Pellegrini made himself an espresso too, put both cups on the coffee table and sat down. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to know how. I don’t even want to know that it has been.’

  ‘I understand.’ Roux was fine with that. He wasn’t going to tell Pellegrini the truth anyway. He would have said he was working on a project to make elephants resistant to herpes. Elephant herpes was one of the most common causes of death among Asian elephants in captivity.

  ‘There’s another issue,’ Pellegrini now explained. ‘Rupashi is pregnant, so is Sadaf, Trisha is breastfeeding and Fahdi is a bull.’

  Roux realised that this was all about the price. He’d done his homework beforehand: the fourth cow, Asha, was available. She was also the most experienced. ‘What about Asha?’ he asked innocently.

  ‘Asha is reserved,’ Pellegrini came back quickly.

  ‘Is that a binding commitment?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Nothing’s been signed yet. But we made a verbal agreement.’

  ‘Given the special nature of our project, we’d be prepared to go above the usual rate.’

  ‘Who is we?’

  ‘Me and the international group that’s behind me.’

  ‘May I know which group?’

  ‘No, but I can assure you that they are a most solvent partner.’

  Pellegrini nodded. Then sighed. ‘Turning down our other clients would have a very negative impact on any future projects with them.’

  ‘Well, of course we’d take this into account,’ Roux assured him.

  ‘As well as the fact that the project is secret, I assume. An additional complication.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  Pellegrini took Roux to the animal tent to show him Asha, the elephant cow who was a possible surrogate mother.

  It was quiet in the stalls; the only sounds were the occasional snort from a horse and the rustling of hay that the elephants were eating. Asha was the furthest away in the elephant pen. An Asian keeper was standing beside her, feeding her carrots and talking softly to her in a foreign tongue.

  ‘May I introduce Kaung, our elephant-whisperer? Kaung, this is Dr Roux. He wants to borrow Asha as a mother for his baby.’

  Kaung put his palms together in front of his face and bowed. Roux nodded, gave him a ‘Hello’ and turned back to Pellegrini.

  It was already getting dark when Pellegrini went to get changed for the performance. The bad-tempered woman was garishly made up, and sitting at the evening box office, waiting for the first spur-of-the-moment customers.

  18

  The same day

  Kaung’s father had been an oozie too, as had his father. They lived near Putao, in the very north of his country, and worked in logging camps. At the age of five Kaung was already riding a bull elephant that dragged teak trunks weighing tonnes.

  When he was eleven Kaung ran away, and after months of roaming the country he ended up as a boy monk in a Buddhist monastery to the north of Mandalay. He was a good pupil and was sent to university.

  On 8 August 1988 he took part in the demonstrations against government oppression, which later became known as the 8888 Uprising. The military killed thousands of people and tortured tens of thousands more.

  Kaung managed to flee, making his way across Laos to Thailand, where in Bangkok he signed up on a freighter under the Liberian flag.

  It wasn’t until summer 1990 that he dared go ashore. Kaung jumped ship in Rotterdam and applied for asylum, which he was granted on account of the situation in Myanmar.

  More difficult was finding work. He had to draw a veil over his dream of continuing his studies and becoming a teacher. Eventually he managed to get a job as an assistant in a circus, where they found out how good he was with elephants and from then on employed him as an elephant keeper.

  After two years the Dutch circus sold two of its elephants to Paolo Pellegrini. Kaung accompanied the animals on the journey and was scheduled to spend the first two weeks with them, but Paolo Pellegrini immediately recognised the skill the oozie had with elephants and made him an offer. Although it was scarcely more generous than his Dutch wages, the food was better, the accommodation more decent and he was treated with respect. Kaung accepted.

  He’d been looking after the Circus Pellegrini elephants ever since. And since the sudden death of Paolo Pellegrini, he’d also been responsible for training them behind the scenes.

  19

  Romania

  29 October 2013

  Ashok stood serenely in the area in front of the elephant pens. His right h
ind leg and left front leg were tied with rope.

  Ashok’s mahout held the bull’s trunk and comforted him with some words. Beside the animal an assistant was waiting with a fishing net on a pole. The net was covered with a plastic bag.

  The young man behind the elephant was standing on a solid platform. He wore a plastic apron, arm-length surgical gloves and was removing dung from the animal’s rectum. When it was empty an attendant handed him a hose with which he flushed out the rectum. Then he inserted his arm up to the elbow and started kneading and massaging the prostate.

  Ashok patiently allowed all this to happen. It wasn’t his first time; he was a trained sperm donor – the pride of a small zoo in provincial Romania.

  The grey penis slowly grew from the wrinkly foreskin. The young man on the platform doubled his efforts and the S-shaped penis became erect to its full length of two metres. ‘Get ready to receive!’ the man gasped.

  The assistant held the collection bag on the long pole at the end of the penis and caught the sperm that came flowing out soon afterwards.

  A lab technician poured it into a glass specimen jar, added the nutrient solution and a little glycerine, to protect the cells against the sharp ice crystals. He labelled the jar ‘Roux/Gentecsa’ and placed it in a freezer that gently chilled the contents down to minus 196 degrees. Twenty minutes later he put it in the steam of a liquid nitrogen container.

  20

  Zürich

  4 November 2013

  Twenty days before, Roux had finally received the good news that Asha’s LH test was positive. This meant that the egg cells would be ready in twenty-five days; with elephants it was possible to predict this accurately.

  To ensure that the cells developed into blastocysts at the right stage at exactly the right time, they had to be fertilised precisely five days before transfer. Which meant now.

  Roux’s hand was never steady enough for this job. He’d wired a monitor up to the microscope where his assistant, Vera, was doing the work, and he was following the process volubly.

  ‘That one, yes, that one! No! Not that one, the other one. Yes, that one!’

  Vera was staring concentratedly into the eyepiece, her right forearm resting on a small cushion to allow her to manoeuvre the wafer-thin glass needle with greater accuracy.

  On the monitor you could see the sperm in the petri dish, swimming in a viscous liquid that was meant to reduce their speed slightly. Vera’s glass needle was following them. She aimed for the sperm Roux was talking about.

  ‘Yes, yes!’ he cried. ‘That’s the chap! Get ’im.’

  Vera tried to place the needle on the sperm’s tiny tail, but it got away.

  ‘My God, is it really that difficult?’ Roux groaned.

  Vera had worked long enough for Roux not to feel nervous in his presence. Another three failed attempts followed, but on the fifth try she got it. The sperm was kept in place for a moment by the glass needle before it went on swimming with a kink in its tail. But slowly enough that Vera had little trouble sucking it up in her pipette.

  ‘Finally,’ Roux grumbled.

  Vera took the petri dish containing the sperm from the stage of the microscope and Roux fetched the first dish with the now fertile egg cell from the incubator.

  He carried it over to the table with the microscope with great solemnity, for in his hands was the result of many years’ work, the reason why he was up to his eyeballs in debt and why he’d had to sell half of Gentecsa to a silent partner whose name was a secret only he knew.

  Roux had genetically modified the egg cells he hoped would liberate him from this hopeless situation. As with Rosie, the glowing pink skinny pig, he’d inserted the pigment from the noses of mandrills and the luciferin from the Lampyris noctiluca species of firefly.

  He – or more accurately Vera, under his instruction – had prepared six egg cells in this way in case the highly complicated implant of the ovum in the elephant cow went wrong. Those that weren’t used would be frozen for future opportunities.

  Vera placed the petri dish into the specimen jar and Roux sat back down in front of the monitor.

  ‘Now concentrate!’ he ordered.

  She looked up from the eyepiece and shot him a weary look. Then, taking a deep breath, Vera got on with her work.

  The glass needle appeared on the screen, gently pushed the egg cell to the end of the holding needle then vanished from the picture.

  Vera’s respiring penetrated the silence of the room before she held her breath.

  Now the razor-thin tip of the micropipette appeared in the picture. It moved closer to the egg cell, touching it in the very middle. There was a slight indentation as the cell wall offered some resistance before giving way and the pipette entered.

  The two of them were still holding their breath.

  Vera carefully began the injection.

  Roux could clearly see the sperm being pushed down the thin channel and leaving the tip.

  As gently as she could, Vera removed the pipette from the cell.

  Only then did they exhale and take another deep breath.

  ‘Yes!’ Roux cried, clapping Vera on the shoulder. Then he stood up and fetched the next egg cell.

  21

  St Gallen, Switzerland

  8 November 2013

  Dr Horàk was one of the foremost experts in the artificial insemination of elephants. And one of the few who, together with his team, had succeeded in implanting a fertilised egg cell.

  Although he didn’t know Roux, the latter’s lengthy collaboration with Professor Gebstein, a leading researcher in gene marking, was an excellent reference. And the project of immunising elephants against herpes sounded interesting. Horàk didn’t think it would work, but he didn’t want to let slip the opportunity of practising his team’s blastocyst transfer techniques – flights, hotel, expenses and fee included.

  He also knew Pellegrini and his experienced elephants, but especially his oozie, a true elephant-whisperer and a great help.

  Kaung led Asha in without rope or stick. She walked beside him as quietly as the barefoot Burmese trainer.

  They were in an empty barn in a village near St Gallen. A low platform stood beside a pillar supporting the gable roof, and behind it were a few tables full of electronics. Dr Horàk was accompanied by four assistants, all in green gowns, aprons and gloves.

  Roux was there too. He stood in his green surgical outfit at a safe distance next to Pellegrini, who looked slightly disguised in his freshly ironed overalls bearing the circus logo.

  In response to some words from Kaung, Asha stopped, turned around 180 degrees and stepped onto the platform from the side. The oozie placed a piece of carrot on the pink tip of her trunk, which she curled inwards and put in her mouth, unbothered by the assistant who was emptying and washing her rectum. She didn’t even react when Dr Horàk inserted the rectal probe to check on which side her ovulation had taken place.

  Now came the fiddly part. Horàk had to position the four-metre-long endoscope in the right part of the uterus. The route went through the metre-and-a-half-long vaginal vestibule, ninety centimetres horizontally, then sixty vertically. Then it passed the hymen, which in elephants only tears at birth before growing back, and further on through the vagina, its many folds repeatedly obstructing the path of the endoscope. Finally it had to negotiate the uterine wall until it got to within a metre of the place of ovulation.

  The man on the endoscope opened the vent for the carbon dioxide channel.

  Asha had stopped eating during this procedure, her only reaction to Dr Horàk’s interventions.

  The endoscope had three working channels: one for guiding the catheter; one for the saline solution that could be used to clean the lens if it got smeared; and one for the carbon dioxide to puff up the cervical canal and give a better overview.

  It took half an hour for Horàk to navigate the end of the four-metre-long endoscope to where he wanted it. He had an assistant take over, then directed the five-metre-long
guide tube through the work channel of the endoscope. And a metre further to the tip of the uterus.

  By now the two other assistants on the loupe microscope had loaded the tip of the transfer catheter with the blastocyst, as the embryo was called in this stage of development. They passed the catheter to Horàk.

  With the greatest of care he fed it into the guide tube and pushed it slowly to the end of the endoscope.

  Asha was slightly unsettled for the first time. Kaung stroked the root of her trunk and whispered words of comfort to her in Burmese.

  Horàk pushed the transfer catheter further.

  This was the most critical phase of the implant. If the tip of the catheter came too close to the wall of the cervical canal, or the assistant, out of nervousness, triggered the mechanism a split second too soon, the embryo would be lost.

  But the assistant kept his nerve. Horàk was able to guide the end of the catheter to the uterus.

  ‘Now,’ he said calmly.

  The assistant released the blastocyst. Horàk started pulling out the catheter and another assistant sucked the CO2 back out through the relevant work channel.

  ‘So?’ Roux said impatiently.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ Horàk replied.

  Roux applauded enthusiastically. Pellegrini joined in.

  Horàk waved a hand dismissively at them. ‘I’m the sort of pilot who doesn’t like it when passengers applaud after landing. Landing’s my job.’

  22

  Late 2013 to June 2014

  Seven weeks later Dr Horàk came again with an assistant and performed the first transrectal ultrasound.

  Horàk established that the embryo had embedded itself in the mucous membrane of the uterus.

  Roux celebrated this finding with a visit to Red Moon, which cost his silent partner 4,000 francs, including champagne, a hotel room and a ‘present’ for Semira from Bucharest.