Elefant
Page 22
In the next scene her playfulness was gone and she stood like a glowing statue beneath a piece of furniture – a chest of drawers or a bed.
The image changed again and now the little elephant was lying on her side next to a blue dog basket. Her pink torso rose and sank. Sabu Barisha was asleep.
The Chinese visitors had stopped commenting on the clips. It was silent in the room, save for the soundtrack of Burmese music.
But then the three men suddenly started whispering again. Sabu Barisha appeared to be injured. Kaung was standing facing the elephant, beckoning her. She moved with difficulty, dragging a leg behind, made two or three steps then gave up and lay down.
‘Is she sick?’ the tall Chinese man said, but didn’t receive an answer.
From now on the little elephant was mostly seen on Valerie’s lap. Or on Kaung’s lap or in his arms, surrounded by oozies bringing her flowers, incense sticks and sweet things. In one shot the pagoda was visible, still under construction. Only in one scene did the elephant try to walk, but the drag of her hind leg had got so bad that she gave up.
Sabu Barisha’s little head now looked shrunken. The bones in her body too were protruding beneath her pink skin. She was always garlanded and surrounded by people in traditional dress, kneeling before her. The camera panned in and her trunk could be seen moving among the flowers.
The music fell silent and the picture cross-faded to a stony-faced Kaung. He lifted up the lifeless body and carried it out of the darkened room. Its glow was extinguished.
Heavy raindrops started hammering onto the corrugated iron of the bungalow, releasing the viewers from the oppressive silence.
On the screen was a large gathering of festively dressed people, kneeling around a pile of logs, decorated with flowers, on top of which Sabu Barisha lay. Two monks and Kaung lit the wood.
The burning of the pyre in long cross-fades was again accompanied by music, but this was drowned out by the rain.
The final scenes showed Kaung and two monks recovering the still-smoking ashes, depositing them into a small, brass urn and bricking this up in the cube in the centre of the pagoda.
The video ended. All that could be heard was the rain.
‘Barisha,’ Kaung said. ‘Rain.’
Valerie wiped the tears from her eyes, pulled the memory stick from the laptop and offered it to Tseng.
He took it without saying anything and left the bungalow, followed by his team.
38
8 March 2018
A small, rusty tugboat, its structure leaning aggressively forward, was pulling a plump container barge with a square, turquoise cabin. A wreath of old tyres protected it from damage when mooring.
‘Just think of all the places these tyres went when they were still attached to wheels,’ Valerie said dreamily.
They were sitting in deckchairs on the small balcony of their cabin, gazing down at the river. The Irrawaddy was greenish brown, the riverbank green, the sky above it grey, blue and pink, like a Zürich pigeon.
They were on their first holiday since they’d set up Sabu Barisha Elephant Sanctuary: one week on a steamer on the Irrawaddy. The visit from the three Chinese men, the detection they’d long feared, had freed them. It was Valerie’s idea to book the trip on the steamer. ‘Let’s do something normal people would do,’ she’d suggested.
‘Are we normal people, then?’ Schoch had asked, raising a smile on both their faces.
Their cabin was in the prow. The only noises were the gurgling of the water beneath the ship’s hull and the drone of the motor far at the back.
Valerie put her hand on Schoch’s, which lay on the armrest of his deckchair. Colourful Buddhist fortune bracelets were tied around both wrists. The river drifted past.
Nests of water hyacinths. A fishing boat. A buoy with the yellow–green–red flag and the white star, marking the presence of a net.
Only rarely would they hear the metallic engine sound of a fishing boat, chugging away from a freshly laid net.
There was no gentler means of transport on air, land or water.
39
Circus Pellegrini
9 April 2018
Dr Roux, Dr Hess and Ben, the elephant keeper, were in Asha’s pen. She was sixteen months pregnant and Dr Hess, on the insistence of Roux, was undertaking yet another – he couldn’t remember the precise number – unnecessary ultrasound scan.
When he’d finished he said cheerfully, ‘As ever, the embryo is perfectly healthy and developing normally.’
‘Normally!’ Roux yelled. ‘Fuck you!’
Asha, whose four legs had been chained up by Ben, as they always were for vet visits, got a fright. She lashed out with her trunk, caught Roux and sent him smashing against the partition wall. Behind it the other elephants trumpeted.
It was the second fatal accident caused by an animal in almost ninety years of Circus Pellegrini.
40
16 December 2018
Six months later Asha gave birth to a healthy baby. It weighed 110 kilos and was 95 centimetres at the shoulder.
The only remarkable thing about this baby bull elephant were the pigment disorders on his forehead, at the root of his trunk and on his ears.
Such a phenomenon occurred from time to time, but in this instance the pink of the depigmentations was more intense.
And in the dark it gave a faint glow.
Acknowledgements
First of all I’d like to thank Prof. Dr Mathias Jucker, director of the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research at the University of Tübingen, because he was the person who told me ten years ago at the international conference on ‘100 Years of Alzheimer’s’ that it would be possible to produce a tiny pink elephant using genetic engineering. This idea has stuck with me ever since.
It was also Prof. Jucker who put me on to Prof. Dr med. Anita Rauch, director and professor of Medical Genetics at the University of Zürich. She told me about her specialist field, primordial dwarfism, and filled me in on the opportunities and dangers of genetics. Many thanks to her.
I’m also most grateful to Dr Robert Zingg, elephant expert and senior curator at Zoo Zürich. He made great efforts to introduce me to the nature and behaviour of elephants, and referred me to another expert, to whom I owe a great deal.
This is Prof. Dr Thomas Hildebrandt, the international expert in the artificial insemination of elephants at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin. He sacrificed much of his time and exhausted his patience explaining reproductive and genetic engineering techniques. He, Prof. Rauch and Dr Zingg checked and corrected the relevant parts of my manuscript. Any remaining mistakes are all mine.
My warmest thanks also to Captain Helene Niedhart, president and CEO of CAT Aviation, who helped me with the description of the flight in the private jet to Singapore and corrected the text.
Thanks, too, to Ewald Furrer and Hans Peter Meier, both of whom earn their living selling the remarkable street magazine Surprise. They gave me an insight into the world of the marginalised and homeless, and a sense of what their lives feel like.
As ever I’m very grateful to my editor, Ursula Baumhauer, for her important creative contributions and her survey of the sometimes rather messy chronology. And thanks to my publisher, Philipp Keel, for his friendly and constructive intervention.
My wife, Margrith Nay Suter, gets a big hug for once again undertaking the difficult task, as first reader, of letting me know what she thought was good and what needed improving.
And to my daughter, Ana: I’m sorry that I’ll never give you a tiny, living, pink elephant, but I hope you’ll understand.
Also by Martin Suter
Small World
A Deal with the Devil
The Last Weynfeldt
The Chef
Allmen and the Dragonflies
Montecristo
About the Author
Martin Suter, born in Zürich in 1948, is a writer, columnist and screenwriter. He worked as a creativ
e director in advertising before deciding to focus exclusively on writing. His novels have enjoyed huge international success. Martin Suter lives with his family in Zürich.
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