It couldn’t be withdrawal syndrome as he’d had plenty to drink.
Schoch tried to focus on the object. A child’s toy, a tiny elephant as pink as a marzipan piglet, but more intense in colour. And glowing like a pink firefly, right at the back of the hollow, where the ceiling of the cave met the sandy ground.
People sometimes stumbled across Schoch’s cave, a hollow eroded from beneath the riverside path, and he might find the occasional junkie’s gear, condoms or fast-food packaging. But he’d never seen evidence of a child’s visit before.
He closed his eyes and tried to get something like sleep.
But then he had a ‘merry-go-round’, which was what he called those states of inebriation when everything started spinning the moment he crawled into his sleeping bag. In all these years he’d never managed to put his finger on what caused drunkenness to become a merry-go-round. Sometimes he was certain it was the volume consumed, while on other occasions he suspected it was down to the mixture of drinks. And then there were days like today when – so far as he could recall – he hadn’t drunk more than yesterday, or anything different, and yet everything was still spinning.
Maybe it was something to do with the weather. On the way home the Föhn wind had chased the thick clouds over the river, intermittently tearing them apart to reveal a full moon. Full moon and the Föhn: maybe that was the reason for his merry-go-rounds, at least a few of them.
He’d never found out whether it was better to keep his eyes open or closed either.
Schoch opened them. The toy elephant was still there, but it appeared to be a little further to the right.
He closed his eyes again. For a moment the little elephant spun beneath his eyelids, leaving a streak of pink.
He immediately wrenched his eyes open.
There it was, flapping its ears and lifting its trunk into an S-shape.
Schoch turned over onto the other side and tried to stop the spinning.
He fell asleep.
Schoch had been drinking for too long for this to be a hangover worth mentioning. But also too long to recollect every detail from the previous evening. He woke later than usual, with a dry mouth, gluey eyes and his pulse racing, but no headache.
The heavy raindrops were making the twigs of the bushes at the entrance to his cave bounce up and down. Beyond these, in the dawn light, Schoch could make out the grey curtain of rain and hear its even drone. The Föhn had abated and it felt unusually cold for June.
Schoch wriggled out of his sleeping bag, stood up as far as his low-ceilinged billet would allow and rolled up his bed tightly. He tucked his shirt into his trousers and reached for his shoes.
He always took them off by the opening to the cave – far enough inside so they wouldn’t get drenched by a sudden downpour – but now he could only find one. After a while he located the other shoe outside the cave, lying in a puddle beside one of the dripping bushes. Schoch couldn’t recall this ever happening before, no matter how hammered he’d been. Perhaps he ought to slow down a bit.
Cursing, he fished out the blue and white striped trainer, took the tatty Nivea towel from his holdall and tried to pat the shoe dry.
It was hopeless. Schoch slipped his foot into the cold, damp trainer.
A vague thought flitted through his brain, something from last night. Something strange. But what? An object? An experience? Like a forgotten word or name that’s on the tip of your tongue.
He couldn’t hold on to it, and meanwhile he was starting to freeze as the cold from the shoe crept up his leg. He needed to move and get some warm coffee in his belly.
Schoch put on a yellow raincoat that he’d pinched one day from a construction site. It had once borne the logo of the construction firm, but now it was flecked with tar and only the word ‘Building’ was still visible. He stuffed his sleeping bag into the stained holdall that contained a few more of his belongings. Pants, socks, T-shirt, shirt, wash bag and a wallet with his papers. The rest of his things were stored in the Salvation Army hostel; Schoch was on good terms with the man who ran it.
He pulled a baseball cap over his matted hair and stepped outside. He left nothing behind in the cave.
The rain was so heavy that he could only just make out the far bank of the river. Schoch struggled up the slippery embankment, losing his footing twice. By the time he’d reached the riverside path his trouser legs were smeared with mud up to the knees.
Schoch had inherited his sleeping place from Sumi, the man who’d introduced him to life on the streets back at a time when there were still rules among the homeless. Such as the one that said you respected other people’s sleeping places. Now it wasn’t like that any more. These days you could come home to find someone else already camped there. In most cases it was a labour migrant, someone who’d come to the country in search of work.
Sumi had discovered the billet shortly after the flood of 2005, when the river level had risen so high that in several places it had hollowed out the ground beneath the path and washed away a large proportion of the vegetation.
By chance, Sumi had noticed the gaping hole from the other bank. The only downside was that the cave was easily visible. But luckily, one of his jobs before ending up on the streets had been as an assistant gardener. From further downstream, where the river basin was broader and the water hadn’t reached the embankment, he’d dug out some shrubs and replanted them in front of the cave.
He baptised his sleeping place River Bed and spent almost eight years dossing there. Schoch was the only other person who knew of it. ‘When I croak,’ Sumi used to say, ‘you can have my River Bed.’
‘You’ll drink us all under the ground,’ Schoch would reply.
But then Sumi died suddenly. Drying out. Delirium tremens.
This had strengthened Schoch’s resolve never to stop drinking.
Not a soul was about on the riverside path. The early joggers he usually met at this time of the morning had been kept at home by the rain. It wasn’t long before Schoch’s dry shoe was just as soaked as the wet one. The rain ran down his beard and into the neck of his coat. Jutting out his chin, Schoch wiped his beard with the back of his hand. He urgently needed his second coffee now; he’d slept through the first one.
Further along the path he passed a weir, where there was a small platform. Two concrete posts were sunk into the embankment, to which a rescue pole was attached. It was a notorious spot because a whirlpool formed on the downstream side of the weir, especially when the water level was high. Schoch could hear shouting coming from the platform.
He walked on until the vegetation on the bank no longer blocked his view. Two men, one tall, one shorter, were standing on the concrete platform, prodding the brown water with the rescue pole below the eddy.
‘Need any help?’ Schoch tried to shout, but his voice was so hoarse that he failed to utter anything audible.
He cleared his throat. ‘Hey! Hello!’
The tall man looked up. He was Japanese or Chinese.
‘Has someone fallen in?’
Now the man with the rescue pole looked up too. A redhead with shaven hair.
‘My dog!’ he cried.
Schoch raised his shoulders and shook his head. ‘Whirlpool of death,’ he shouted. ‘Nothing gets out of there alive. It’s swallowed plenty already. Forget the dog and concentrate on not falling in yourselves!’
The man with the rescue pole kept prodding the water. The other man waved to Schoch, said ‘Thanks!’ in English, and turned back.
Schoch continued on his way. ‘I warned them,’ he muttered. ‘I warned them.’
The ravens were skulking on the railings of the restaurant terrace, watching for the slightest inattention from the waiter guarding the warm buffet. From the terrace you could hear the waves of the Indian Ocean.
Jack Harris was sitting at the second table from the back. This gave him the best view of the assortment of backpackers, businesspeople and the last expats sticking to their jour fixe at the Galle Face Hotel.
He’d been waiting around here for three weeks now, glugging too much Lion lager. Occasionally he’d get into conversation with a tourist, and once an American woman travelling on her own was so impressed by his career that she followed him up to his room. Harris was a vet, specialising in elephants.
Mostly, however, he spent the nights alone in his room. It was nicely situated; it might not directly face the sea, but it did look out on the large grassed area where the colonial masters once played golf and where countless souvenir stands and food stalls now plied their wares. Sometimes during these lonely nights he’d open one of the two windows, light a cigarette and gaze down at the lights of the lively Galle Face Green and the fluorescent surf of the ocean.
Voices and laughter mingled with scraps of music, and clouds of smoke rose from the food stalls into the light of the outside bulbs, while now and then the wind blew over the aroma of charcoal and hot coconut oil.
Harris got up and helped himself from the buffet. For the second time. He shovelled a not particularly gastronomic hodgepodge of curry, stew and gratin onto his plate and returned to his table, where the staff, unprompted, had placed a ‘Reserved’ sign in his brief absence.
He was eating too much.
Jack Harris was forty years old, from New Zealand, and looked like Crocodile Dundee gone large. Or so he thought. His wife, who’d left him eight years before – how time flew! – thought he looked more like a sheep shearer.
The divorce threw him off the rails. He’d been living with his wife, Terry, and the twins, Katie and Jerome, in a large bungalow in Fendalton, the smartest suburb of Christchurch, running a veterinary clinic with his partner and earning good money.
Sure, he’d had the odd affair, but just when he was improving on this front he caught Terry with his friend and partner. A terrible shock. He was prepared to forgive the two of them and attempt a fresh start, but although Terry wanted a fresh start too, she didn’t want a fresh start with him. After their divorce she married his partner.
Harris got himself hired as a vet on various game reserves in Asia. He’d only been back to New Zealand three times since, to see his children. They’d grown into teenagers and on their last meeting had made it plain that they didn’t think much of his rare visits. Contact with them was now restricted to modest bank transfers on their birthdays or at Christmas and the occasional awkward Skype call. Harris didn’t need to pay any maintenance and his own infidelities hadn’t been disclosed during the divorce.
A few tables further on two female tourists were feeding the ravens. He’d already noticed them on his first visit to the buffet. About thirty years of age, German-speaking, no beauties, but determined to experience more than just foreign culture and nature on their trip – this was something Harris had an eye for.
They were having great fun watching the birds land on the table and nibble their food. Harris could have impressed the women by pointing out that this was a good way of contracting cryptococcosis and psittacosis – not completely false, nor completely true either. He was just about to go up to the dessert buffet and make a remark to this effect when his mobile rang.
The display said ‘Roux’.
Harris answered, listened, said, ‘Hold on,’ took a pen from his jacket and jotted down some numbers on the back of the list of daily specials. ‘I thought it would never happen,’ he said, before finishing the conversation and dialling another number.
‘Kasun?’ he said into his phone so loudly that a number of guests turned and stared. ‘Get yourself to Ratmalana. Now!’ He made the international gesture for ‘The bill, please’ to the waiter, and when it wasn’t brought immediately Harris went up and signed the slip. On the way to his room he called his contact at the heliport.
Harris ordered a taxi and quickly put on his work clothes – khaki trousers and faded short-sleeve denim shirt. From the wardrobe he took his instrument case, which he’d already packed and checked over and over again for this long-awaited opportunity.
Barely five minutes after the phone call he was in a taxi on his way to Ratmalana Airport, fifteen kilometres to the south of Colombo.
A quarter of an hour later he was there. Kasun, the young man assigned to him by the Department of Wildlife Conservation, was waiting for him beside a Robinson R44, a light, four-seater helicopter. Its rotors had started spinning as soon as Harris’s taxi came into sight.
When Harris got to the chopper, Kasun was already strapped into the back seat, his headphones on.
The pilot increased the rotor speed, the small aircraft rose slowly and hovered over the runway for a moment. Then the pilot lowered its nose and they set off towards the south-east.
They’d flown the last few kilometres at low altitude above the railway line and could see the stationary train from far away. A few metres behind the engine a group of people were gathered around the injured elephant.
The pilot flew higher to give them an overview of the situation. Not far from the site of the accident was a clearing, at the edge of which stood a few huts. Enough room to land.
Apart from a handful of old women and small children the village was deserted. Those not working in the fields had gone to the scene of the accident.
Laden with instrument case, a hard-shell cool box and various containers, the stocky Harris and his tall, loose-limbed assistant hurried along the narrow path that led from the clearing to the railway line in the forest.
As usual in Sri Lanka, it was over 30 degrees with more than 90 per cent humidity. When they reached the railway embankment Harris’s shirt was sticking to his large torso. They laboured their way up the gravel and began heading northwards along the tracks. The site of the accident had to be just beyond the bend.
Not a scrap of shade fell onto the railway line; they were at the mercy of the roasting sun. It stank of the hot creosote that the wooden sleepers were impregnated with. And of the passenger lavatories.
Now they could see the train as well as the people grouped beside the embankment.
Just before they reached them, Harris instructed his Sri Lankan helper to go first to clear the way. Kasun barked some instructions in Sinhalese, and all Harris understood were the English words ‘National Wildlife Department’. The curious villagers and passengers from the train immediately moved aside.
Before them lay the little elephant and beside it knelt a young woman, stroking its head.
‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ she said, choking back the tears.
The animal’s eyes were wide open, it was biting its trunk and its hind legs stuck out at an unnatural angle. Harris put down his case and opened it.
‘Are you a vet?’ the tourist asked him in her American accent.
Harris nodded. He took out a syringe and filled it from an ampoule.
‘Will she be okay?’ the American woman asked, worried.
Harris nodded. He lifted the injured animal’s right ear. The network of veins on the back stood out prominently. Harris chose a swollen one as thick as a finger, positioned the needle, and injected the contents of the syringe.
‘Painkiller?’ she asked.
Harris nodded once more. ‘Painkiller,’ he muttered, checking his watch.
The elephant seemed to relax. The tongue slid from her mouth and lay on the trampled grass like a weary snake. The American tourist kept stroking the baby elephant’s head, which was dotted sparsely with long hairs. ‘Shhh, shhh,’ she said, as if to a child going to sleep.
Harris checked his watch again and made a sign to Kasun. He understood and touched the woman’s shoulder, who flinched and looked up at him.
Now Harris could see how young the tear-stained face was.
‘Let’s go, miss,’ Kasun said.
The American looked at Harris for help.
He nodded. ‘Everybody leaves now. We have to do some surgery.’
Slowly she got to her feet, looked back down at the baby elephant, wiped the tears away with the heels of her hands and looked at Harris. ‘You put her to sleep, didn’t you?’
He didn’t reply.
She turned around and was led away by the train guard to the group of passengers waiting a few carriages further on in the shade of the trees at the edge of the forest.
Harris took off his sweat-drenched shirt and replaced it with a green surgeon’s gown. Kasun clapped him on the back and handed him the disinfectant. Its glycerine content made it easier to put on the surgical gloves.
The vet listened to the little elephant through his stethoscope. After three minutes he nodded to Kasun, who was also now wearing sterile, disposable gloves. Kasun took the large scalpel from the instrument case and passed it to Harris.
Harris set the blade beside the eighteenth rib below the spinal column and opened up the lumbar region of the dead elephant.
Seat 11A had two advantages: there was no seat beside it and it was the furthest back in business class aboard this Boeing 787-9. Behind was room enough for the cool box carrying the baby elephant’s ovaries.
Harris had just managed to catch the Etihad 265, which would take him from Colombo to Zürich via Abu Dhabi in a little over fourteen hours. He’d drunk his way through the champagne, claret and liqueurs on the menu and was now on his goodnight beer. Perhaps he’d get a little more sleep in the remaining four hours of the flight.
Business class was only about half full. Most passengers were asleep, but here and there he could make out the pale flicker of a screen.
All of a sudden a light went on above one of the seats. A few moments later the curtain of the galley moved and an air hostess emerged, went over to the light, bent down, exchanged a few words with the passenger and left. Shortly afterwards she returned with a tray carrying a glass and a can of beer.
Someone else who couldn’t sleep.
Harris was pleased that this mission was coming to an end. He’d had enough of the tropics and was looking forward to Europe, cool nights and talking shop with colleagues. And to the recognition he’d receive – in the short term at least – for the project’s success.
He put on the headphones and selected the Country channel. ‘Lucille’ by Kenny Rogers was playing, the song that had acted as a soundtrack to the most difficult period of his separation.
He was awoken by the captain’s composed voice. They were entering an area of turbulence, he explained, and all passengers were requested to fasten their seatbelts.
In the past Harris used to suffer from a fear of flying. A pathological fear. Until the age of thirty-two he’d only got on a plane once. He was sixteen at the time and had won a round trip in a competition held by a cigarette firm. From Queenstown to Milford Sound in a Gippsland GA-8, a single-engine Australian aeroplane that seated seven passengers.
The aircraft got caught in a storm high above the rugged fjord and Harris swore he’d never get on a plane again if he survived this horror.
He made good on his promise right after the terrifying landing on the tiny Milford Strand airstrip. Harris refused to get back on board and made the five-hour trip back to Queenstown on the cargo bed of a timber transporter.
Harris took his next flight at the age of thirty-two, soon after separating from Terry. Air New Zealand from Christchurch to Perth via Auckland, and from there to Johannesburg and Cape Town, with South African Airways. His journey took almost thirty hours and not for a second did he fear for his life. He wasn’t so attached to it any more.
Ever since that second occasion he’d actually enjoyed flying. He put his unconditional trust in the aircraft and its pilot like a baby kangaroo would in its mother’s pouch.
And now, because of a spot of turbulence, this pilot was costing him the little sleep remaining to him before landing.
The rain had eased up and the sky had turned clearer. Roux could see the Etihad plane approaching. But the traffic hadn’t got any better. He’d be stop–start for another two kilometres till reaching the airport exit.
Roux was angry. Angry at the weather forecast, which was only ever right when you weren’t dependent on it. Angry at Zürich Airport, which was a permanent building site. And angry at himself, who couldn’t even be punctual for this long-awaited appointment.
Of course Harris would call and wait at customs until he arrived with the necessary papers. But Roux was impatient. He was desperate to take possession of the delivery. He’d waited long enough to get it.
The airport exit came into view; just a few hundred metres more until he could peel off from the traffic jam and put his foot down. Adele sang ‘Skyfall’. Roux’s hairy fingers drummed out the rhythm on the steering wheel.
The song was interrupted by a traffic report, warning of the congestion he was stuck in on the A51. ‘Oh really?’ he muttered. ‘Congestion?’
Roux was in his mid-forties. Although wiry and not particularly short, there was something squat about him, for which he had his large head and short neck to thank. He kept his sparse red hair shaved and his bushy eyebrows carefully trimmed, which emphasised the bulges above his eyes and lent a slight bull-like quality to his squatness too.
Finally he reached the place where the hard shoulder on the left opened up into the exit, but the gap between the road marker and the boot of the Volvo in front of him was too narrow for his BMW. If only the arseholes in front of him would move up a bit, he’d be at the airport by now.
Roux honked the horn.
Nothing happened.
He honked again, for longer this time.
The furthest car he could see up ahead moved forward a touch. The one behind closed the gap, and the next one and the next one. Only the Volvo stayed where it was.
Roux angrily pressed his horn, keeping his hand on it. The man behind the wheel of the Volvo responded by shaking his head slowly and deliberately. Then he started his engine and infuriatingly inched his way forward.
As soon as the gap was large enough Roux put his foot down and screeched off the motorway, still honking.
The customs area was a large room with stainless-steel counters. Passengers who’d chosen the green channel – nothing to declare – were streaming past the open exits. Only the odd person followed the red sign and entered clearance.
This is where Jack Harris had been waiting for twenty minutes now beside his wheelie case. He’d put the cool box onto one of the metal tables.
He wasn’t sure if he’d recognise Roux; he didn’t have a good memory for faces and had only met him once, on the fringes of an embryologists’ conference in London on combating infertility. The two of them had attended a lecture on allowing elephant egg cells to mature inside rats. Harris was hanging around the conference because he hoped to make contact with researchers looking for experts in fieldwork. Roux needed someone who could procure some elephant ovaries for him.
They had met after the lecture at Ye Olde Rose and Crown, a pub next to the conference hotel. Harris sensed later that the meeting wasn’t coincidental. Harris was sitting alone at the bar and Roux joined him with two pints of bitter filled to the brim. ‘No sadder sight than a man on his own in a pub,’ he said, in English tinged with a Swiss-German accent. By the second round – it was already Harris’s third – Roux knew that he was a vet specialising in elephants, and when they were on their next drink he asked Harris outright if he knew the best way of getting hold of ovaries from an Asian elephant.
Harris knew.
‘Sorry, Jack, traffic jam!’ said the man approaching him now with an outstretched hand.
Harris had in fact failed to recognise him. He recalled Roux being shorter and fatter.
He took Roux’s hand and shook it. It was clammy. That’s right, he’d noticed this last time: sweaty hands.
Roux was already glancing past Harris at the cool box. Now he took his hand away and placed it on the lid of the container. ‘At last,’ he said. ‘Finally.’
A customs official sauntered up to them. Harris had already informed him that this was an organ transplant and he was waiting for the recipient who had the necessary documents for the import formalities.
Roux showed the official his identification and handed him a slim dossier. The cover bore the red and yellow logo, Gentecsa, and the slogan: Research for the Future.
The customs official slid his finger across the rubric and found the information he needed to complete his form. When he was finished he pointed his chin at the cool box.
‘Is that really necessary?’ Roux asked. ‘It’s vital that the organ stays between 0 and 4 degrees.’
‘I can’t let you through without an inspection.’
Roux sighed and gave Harris a sign to open the box. ‘No more than a second,’ he said.
‘As long as it takes,’ the official corrected, also in English.
Harris snapped open the clasps and flipped open the lid. A sterile box made of milky plastic sat between blue freezer elements. Harris made no move to open it until the official asked him to.
‘You’re endangering a scientific project,’ Roux grumbled.
‘You’re the one dragging this thing out,’ the official responded.
Roux nodded to Harris, who reluctantly took the lid off the container.
What they glimpsed was as small as a child’s fist, with a brain-like structure. It was grey and glistened damply.
‘Don’t touch!’ Roux ordered.
The official slipped a mobile phone from a pouch on his belt and took a photo.
And that was how Sabu arrived in Switzerland.
Reflected on the wet asphalt of the car park were a few vehicles and some lit-up windows in an office block that had formerly been a wire factory. The lights still on were coming from the Gentecsa offices on the second floor.
Roux and two assistants were standing around a stainless-steel table, bent over Miss Playmate, as one of the assistants had christened the laboratory rat.
The rat was called Miss Playmate because she was naked. She was a neutered nude rat adapted to the requirements of the elephant tissue, a laboratory rat missing her thyroid gland to prevent her from creating T lymphocytes, the cells responsible for rejecting implants. This meant that Roux could implant the tiny section from the outer layer of the ovary without the foreign tissue being rejected.
Miss Playmate was anaesthetised and lay beneath the blazing surgical light, all four legs splayed apart and fastened with rubber bands. An incision had been made in her abdominal wall and Roux was working internally with a scalpel and pincers. One of the assistants held the wound open with tiny retractors, while the other passed him the instruments he barked for and dabbed, at ever decreasing intervals, the sweat dripping from his trimmed eyebrows between the surgical cap and mask.
The aim of the operation was to implant into Miss Playmate a piece of the Sri Lankan baby elephant’s ovary with thousands of egg cells not yet capable of fertilisation. The cells would mature inside the rat’s womb and after six months Roux would be able to genetically modify them.
He’d done this operation often enough, as testified by the tree shrews, rhesus monkeys and rabbits glowing green, blue and red in the darkened rooms along the corridor. But this was his first elephant egg cell. And – if everything went according to plan – the elephant he was going to create with it wouldn’t just glow in the dark: the creature’s skin would be an intense pink even in daylight.
This was Roux’s great discovery, known only to his colleagues and, more recently, a silent partner – unfortunately. He’d managed to introduce into the egg cells a combination of luciferins and mandrill pigment!
Luciferins are the compounds that make fireflies glow, for example. And mandrill pigment is the compound that produces the colours in the face and backside of the mandrill. Roux had used the red of the nose.
The most beautiful result of these experiments was Rosie, a ‘skinny pig’, a hairless guinea pig. Roux had injected both genes into the egg cell, which he then fertilised and implanted into the womb of a normal guinea pig.
After two months the surrogate mother gave birth to two pink guinea pigs. One was dead, but the second, Rosie, looked as if she were made from marzipan and glowed in the dark like a moving neon sign.
And without needing any light of a particular wavelength to be shone at it, dear Nobel Prize committee! Rosie didn’t merely reflect, like the laboratory animals of Professor Dr Richard Gebstein.
Gebstein had been Roux’s employer. He was the manager and owner of a genetic engineering laboratory that, among other things, undertook research into gene marking, which often involved the use of fluorescent proteins or enzymes. Roux came to Gebstein straight after he’d finished his PhD and worked for him for almost ten years as an underpaid researcher.
During this time he managed – partly by chance, partly intentionally – to generate a faintly fluorescent green rat, but made the big mistake of showing it to his boss. Delighted by this result, Gebstein gave Roux a not particularly generous pay rise and freed him up to undertake further research into his discovery, on condition that he didn’t disclose it to anybody.
Roux worked day and night on his secret project, and in less than a year succeeded in repeating his experiment. His boss duly feted him, but only a few weeks after this triumph there was a spanner in the works. It began with a trifling argument, when Roux was caught by Gebstein eating his lunch – a sandwich, as always – in the laboratory. Eating in a genetic engineering laboratory with this level of security was an infringement of the regulations, but Gebstein had never commented on it before, except for the odd ‘Bon appétit!’ On this occasion, however, he snapped at Roux, and Roux snapped back.
It was the beginning of a rift that soon led to his sacking. And when Roux read Gebstein’s publication on the interim findings of his experiments, which didn’t mention Roux once by name, it confirmed his suspicion that his dismissal had been carefully orchestrated.
The publication caused a sensation in the scientific and journalistic world and was even cited in research by Roger Tsien, Martin Chalfie and Osamu Shimomura, who’d been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of fluorescent green proteins and their application. Roux felt great Schadenfreude at the fact that Gebstein’s name was absent from the statement issued by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences explaining their decision.
Roux had been out for revenge ever since. He’d set up his own genetic engineering laboratory with a single objective: to compete with and outdo Gebstein’s. For years now this thought had given him the strength and energy to work through the night, genuflect before bank employees and keep inventing new ways to see off the competition.
The scientific success of his firm had become increasingly incidental and the commercial success ever more vital.
His project had the potential to make a double breakthrough, bringing financial reward and scientific acclaim. If he succeeded in creating patentable animals that didn’t just glow in the dark but also were spectacularly colourful in daylight, he would be made in every sense.
When Roux couldn’t get to sleep in his short nights, he’d imagine Gebstein’s face – his neat white beard, blow-dried white hair, feathery white eyebrows, gold rimless glasses, the entire face designed to look erudite – making him the takeover bid that would be so huge he wouldn’t be able to refuse.
Schoch’s hand wasn’t the only one trembling. Around this time almost all of them had difficulty holding their cups in the Morning Sun. It smelled of filter coffee, boozy breath and damp clothes impregnated with smoke. The air was terrible, but if a newcomer stood in the open doorway for a moment, scanning the packed lounge for a free seat, those lucky to already have one would shout, ‘Oi!’ and ‘Close it!’
Most had spent the night outside or in an unheated shelter and were here to warm themselves both externally and internally.
Schoch normally came here to drink his second coffee every morning. He’d have his first at Presto, a shop in a petrol station that opened at six.
But this morning he’d overslept and had come straight to the Morning Sun. He preferred the second cup anyway. You could sit down here and the coffee was better. Although he’d taken a while to get used to the pious sayings that hung on every wall in this small, plain lounge, when facing the choice between pious sayings and expensive coffee, a homeless person didn’t have to think too long about it. Anybody who wanted to could get something to eat here too. But Schoch didn’t want to, not at this time of day. His stomach was still too unreliable. You could never be sure how you were going to react to solid nourishment. He needed to give it time. And a little coffee.
By noon his stomach had sufficiently settled down that he could give it something to eat. Depending on his financial situation he’d have his lunch either at Meeting Point, where people like Schoch came to shower and wash their clothes and could eat for four francs, or at the soup kitchen, where the food was free. If he needed something harder than apple juice to wash down his food, Schoch would dine at AlcOven, a meeting place for drunks, where you could also have a shower and wash your clothes, but were allowed to bring your own beer to accompany a cheap meal.
He usually took dinner at Sixty-Eight, where you could get a decent meal for free, but only in the evenings.
At this early hour – it was just after eight o’clock – most guests at the Morning Sun weren’t particularly chatty. But there were always a few noisy ones, those who’d already taken their first drink of the day. Schoch was one of the silent ones. He never drank before ten. And even when he’d had something to drink he didn’t say much. If he did speak, it was quietly, which lent him an aura of mystery. That and the fact that nobody knew anything about him. Everybody knew the stories of most of the others on the streets, knew what they used to be and what had made them end up here. But they knew nothing about Schoch. One day he just arrived on the scene with old Sumi. The two were inseparable, moved around together and supported each other when they were no longer able to stand up straight.
Supposedly, Schoch was also the one who found Sumi when he snuffed it. He didn’t die from drinking, people said, but from having given up.
Schoch didn’t get close to anyone else afterwards. He kept a friendly distance and remained a mystery.
A young man he’d never seen here before, probably a rejected asylum-seeker needing to go underground, freed up the seat opposite. Within seconds Bolle had sat down. Rapping his knuckles on the table by way of a greeting, he said, ‘Shitty weather.’
Bolle was one of the loud ones. He always had something to say, but it wasn’t always new. Schoch normally avoided him, but in this situation all he could do was acknowledge Bolle’s presence. He shrugged and focused on his cup.
Bolle was blind in one eye, which looked like the white of an undercooked egg. Hence his nickname, Bolle, from the old Berlin folk song: ‘His right eye was missing,/His left one looked like slime./But Bolle being Bolle,/Still had a cracking time.’
Bolle tried to get the attention of the elderly lady, one of the many pious volunteers who helped out here. When she looked over at him, he called out, ‘Coffee schnapps, please!’ He was the only one who laughed; everyone else had heard the joke plenty of times before.
Or they didn’t understand him, like the African man sitting next to him, who said, ‘No German,’ when Bolle, still laughing, repeated, ‘Coffee schnapps,’ and grinned at him.
‘No alcohol,’ Bolle explained in English.
His neighbour replied, ‘No, thank you.’
Bolle now had a laughing fit. ‘No, thank you!’ he repeated. ‘No, thank you!’
When he’d composed himself he turned to Schoch and said, ‘They’ve got a new girl working at Sternen.’
Schoch’s cup was by his lips. Before he took a sip he said, ‘Aren’t you banned from there?’
‘I was,’ Bolle corrected him.
Schoch put his cup back on the table and said in the same dispassionate tone, ‘Because you’ve stopped begging the customers for beer?’
‘Because the new girl doesn’t care. It’s all revenue, she says. Earned, stolen or begged, money is money.’ Once again Bolle had a fit of coughing and laughter combined. ‘Earned, stolen or begged,’ he wheezed.
Schoch failed to react and Bolle tried to change the subject. ‘Ever seen white mice? Not real ones, but in your head.’
Schoch shook his head. Pink elephants, on the other hand, he thought …
‘I have,’ Bolle continued. ‘Last night.’ His bloated red face suddenly assumed a troubled expression. ‘Do you think that’s a bad sign?’
Schoch wasn’t listening. The memory of the tiny pink elephant had suddenly emerged from nowhere. Had he dreamed it? Or hallucinated?
‘Oi, are you listening?’
‘How do you know they don’t exist?’ Schoch said. He placed a franc on the table for his coffee, got up, rummaged on the rack for his yellow raincoat and left.
‘He’s right,’ Bolle mumbled. ‘How do I know they don’t exist?’
All the washing machines at Meeting Point were being used and all the showers were occupied. At most tables in the cafeteria people were waiting for seats to become free. Their clothes were damp and dirty, and their frozen bodies were longing for a hot shower. It might be hours before it was Schoch’s turn.
He knew most of the people waiting and nodded to some of them. Then he left.
The rain had eased up somewhat, but a spiteful little wind had picked up. Schoch pulled the coat around him more tightly and took longer strides.
After ten minutes he’d reached the shiny chrome WC container. It was occupied, but at least nobody was waiting outside. He put his heavy holdall down beside the door and sat on top of it.
Bolle was seeing white mice, and he was seeing pink elephants. Sumi had seen animals too: cockroaches. ‘The size of your fist!’ he’d claimed, clenching his tiny hand.
But that had been when Sumi was in withdrawal. Schoch wasn’t. And Bolle? Unlikely, judging by the state he’d been in at the Morning Sun. But he hadn’t said when he’d seen the white mice. Maybe it was yesterday. Maybe he’d tried to stay off the sauce and it had happened then. Schoch should have asked.
But was it important? If these visions only occurred when you were in withdrawal – which Schoch certainly wasn’t – didn’t that mean the little pink elephant had been no hallucination?
Pink elephants? Come off it!
The electric door to the WC slid open and a young woman stepped out. Her blonde hair hung down in thick strands, some of which were coloured green. She’d reapplied her lipstick and the dark red stood out sharply from her pale face. Eyeing Schoch with tiny pupils, the woman pressed the large shoulder bag more tightly to her slender body and walked away with faltering steps.
Schoch stood up quickly and darted into the WC before the door slid shut again, to save himself the franc he would have had to put in the slot otherwise.
The WC was constructed out of plastic and stainless steel, without gaps and cracks so it could easily be hosed down. The floor around the loo was wet from the water that sluiced the toilet bowl and flooded it each time the door was opened.
Beside the toilet was the loo paper that the woman had used to cover the rim. The smell of patchouli oil hung in the air.
In the metal basin he found a syringe like the ones you could get from the vending machine twenty metres away. Schoch threw it in the bin. Then he undressed, went to the loo, took a flannel and soap from his holdall and washed himself.
In the mirror he saw a haggard-looking man with long hair and an unkempt beard, both blackish-brown and streaked with grey, just like his sparse chest hair.
He looked away and continued washing himself.
Had he drunk more yesterday than on other evenings? Or harder stuff than the litre cans of cheap beer from the supermarket? Where had he been anyway? With the dog lovers at the station as always? Followed by dinner at the soup kitchen? And a nightcap at Hauptplatz tram stop?
He couldn’t recall anything unusual. But was this really his recollection of yesterday? How did it differ from the day before, the day before that, and the day before the day before that? If yesterday had been different from the evenings before and he had no memory of it, wouldn’t the memory of the evening before that leap in to take its place?
Schoch had admitted to himself long ago that he was an alcoholic. But he was a disciplined alcoholic, he kept telling himself. He had his alcoholism under control. He could stop whenever he wanted, as he’d proved several times already. Stopped and, because he’d managed it, started again. He’d stop for good when there was a compelling reason to do so.
Was a pink elephant a compelling reason?
‘Are you sick?’ Giorgio asked.
Schoch had declined the beer he’d been offered. ‘Just not thirsty.’
‘Since when did you drink because you were thirsty?’
Schoch shrugged.
Giorgio was the down-and-out Schoch liked most. His sleeping place lay around one hundred metres upstream from Schoch’s. It was also a hollow eroded by the river, only a little roomier. Giorgio needed more space because he had three dogs. Obedient mongrels with colourful scarves around their necks. He would starve for these dogs and sometimes he did if there wasn’t enough for all four. His real name was Georg, but everyone called him Giorgio. It suited him for he had a moustache he spent a fair time looking after and he always wore a neckerchief like his dogs.
Giorgio was once an insurance salesman and he’d retained his verbosity from that time. Conversations between him and Schoch were very one-sided. But as Schoch liked listening to him – Giorgio was neither pushy, nor nosy, nor stupid – and Giorgio liked talking, this wasn’t a problem for either of them. That’s why Schoch enjoyed spending the hours before lunch with the dog lovers, even though he didn’t really like dogs. There was always beer to be had, even when he’d spent the 986 francs basic subsistence that each homeless person received from the state per month. And they had a cosy regular plot near the station and the wholesaler CONSU. By the river when the weather was good and in the tram shelter if it was raining.
The few seats were occupied so Schoch sat on the ground, leaning against the back of the shelter, listening to Giorgio and watching the passers-by. He knew a few of them by sight because he’d sat here so often as they walked past without paying attention to him or anyone else in his group. Very occasionally he would recognise someone from his former life too. Men in suits, mostly, but also a few women in suits. All older and all passing by without so much as a glance in his direction. Even if they had taken notice of Schoch they wouldn’t have recognised him, twelve kilos lighter, nine years older and with a beard.
‘Got a fag?’ Lilly’s high-pitched whine tore him from his thoughts. Schoch took a packet from his pocket, tapped out a cigarette, but rather than offer it to Lilly, slid it out himself and passed it to her. He didn’t want her jittery, filthy fingers touching the filters of the other cigarettes.
Lilly had appeared out of the blue five years ago as the girlfriend of Marco, a young junkie. She couldn’t have been older than twenty at the time, pretty but prone to abrupt mood swings, and determined to get Marco off the needle. Soon she was addicted herself and when he died of an overdose she was four months pregnant.
The underweight boy she gave birth to was given up for adoption as soon as he’d completed his withdrawal treatment. Lilly stayed with the dog lovers, started selling her body to buy drugs, increased her doses and fell into increasing self-neglect. Now she looked about forty and with her thin, punctured arms and poor teeth couldn’t find punters any more.
Schoch offered Lilly a light.
‘I’ll give her one thing.’ Giorgio grinned. ‘She’s loyal to her brand. Only ever smokes Other People’s.’
‘Very funny,’ Lilly grumbled, going over to the dogs.
Just after twelve Schoch headed for the soup kitchen. His stomach could cope with something to eat now.
Perhaps the macaroni cheese was too stiff a challenge for his stomach; the noodles were swimming in the fat of sweated onions, cream and melted cheese. Nor did the odours of the people sitting next to him help, or the smells drifting over from the kitchen. Schoch let some liquid drip from the baked pasta on his fork, then forced himself to eat a couple of mouthfuls.
The soup kitchen wasn’t renowned for its cuisine, but the food was free. In Meeting Point the food cost four francs – for that you could get four litre-cans of 5.4 per cent beer at CONSU.
But seeing as he was dry at the moment, he could have shelled out the four francs, it occurred to him.
He speared three macaroni on his fork and watched the fat drip off, the process slightly accelerated by his trembling hand. ‘Do you know why I drink?’ Bolle used to yell. ‘To stop my hands shaking!’ Around this time of day Schoch’s trembling had usually stopped. But apart from this, going without alcohol was – as expected – all right. It was just boring.
The rain looked as if it had set in for the day. Schoch walked close to the houses to avoid being splashed by the cars zooming past. Apart from him there was just an old woman and her dog on Blechwalzenstrasse. She was having a tussle with her umbrella, her large handbag and her overweight pet, who was mobilising all four of his skinny legs to resist this sodden outing.
Schoch went into the Salvation Army hostel, took off his wet coat and hung it on the rack. Behind the glass of the reception booth an elderly man looked up from his free newspaper. ‘Is Furrer here?’ Schoch asked.
The man nodded. ‘In the office.’
Schoch went up to the door marked ‘Management’, knocked and went in.
Furrer was a shaven-headed man with a five-day beard. He was probably about fifty, wore jeans, a checked shirt and a corduroy jacket. ‘Take a seat,’ he said, pointing to one of the visitors’ chairs from the junk shop.
Schoch sat down.
‘I’ll get us a coffee.’ Furrer went out and returned with two large cups.
Schoch took a sip. Black with lots of sugar, just how he liked it.
He didn’t know why Furrer was so friendly to him. He had been ever since his first day as manager of the hostel. For a short while Schoch thought it was because Furrer was gay. But a single glance in one of the few mirrors he came across was sufficient to eliminate this possibility. So he’d asked him, ‘How come I get such preferential treatment?’
‘You remind me of someone.’
‘Who?’
‘Don’t know, but it’ll come to me.’
After that he’d avoided Furrer, just to be on the safe side. But one evening Furrer intercepted Schoch outside Sixty-Eight and surprised him with the question, ‘I’ve got a room free, do you want it?’
Schoch shook his head.
‘Why ever not? Winter’s on its way. Opportunities like this don’t crop up every day.’
Schoch spent a moment searching for an answer, then shook his head obdurately. ‘Homeless people don’t have bedrooms.’
Sumi was still alive at the time and Schoch didn’t have a fixed sleeping place. So he was happy to accept Furrer’s offer to store his belongings at the hostel. And later, when he inherited the River Bed, he kept them there. They wouldn’t have been safe in his cave.
Schoch wasn’t the only one for whom Furrer put in safekeeping a few ‘personal effects’, as he called them. Schoch suspected that this allowed him to stay in contact with those homeless people who, like himself, wouldn’t be domesticated. The lockers were in Furrer’s office and it was difficult to access them without bumping into him.
Furrer asked the inevitable question, ‘How are you?’
And Schoch gave the routine answer, ‘Good.’
‘You don’t look it.’
‘I haven’t looked good since I was nineteen.’
‘What about the shakes?’
‘Didn’t have them then either.’
Furrer laughed and shook his head. Then he turned serious. ‘Dr Senn is coming at eight tomorrow morning. Shall I put your name down?’
Dr Senn was the GP who held a surgery once a week in the hostel for those who couldn’t bring themselves to seek out a doctor in their practice.
Schoch shook his head. ‘He’s not going to make me any prettier.’
‘Why don’t you join the group?’
‘The alky group?’ Schoch said with a grimace.
‘Hasn’t hurt anyone yet.’
‘If I want to stop, I’ll stop.’
Furrer nodded thoughtfully. ‘Well, that’s good.’
Schoch stood up and went over to his locker. ‘But if I do stop,’ he said, more to himself than to Furrer, ‘what will I do instead of drinking?’
The question was not meant as ironically as it sounded. When Schoch stepped out of the Salvation Army hostel, he didn’t know where to go. Normally he would have headed straight for CONSU, the wholesaler with the cheapest beer, and bought himself a six-pack. If the weather was good, he would have then gone to Freiland Park and sat on a bench or joined the other homeless people, depending on who was there. In poor weather he might have taken the six-pack to the tram stop at the station and shared it with the dog lovers. And with today’s weather as bad as it was he’d have taken himself off to the AlcOven, where it was warm and dry at least.
But without any beer? Without that spark of happiness that only ever lasted for two or three cans, then was replaced by something that might not have been satisfaction, but was at least its little sister, indifference? How was he going to kill the afternoons and evenings now?
Should he, as Furrer kept suggesting, register as a street vendor for Gassenblatt, the homeless newspaper? ‘It gives you a structured day, your own income and you meet normal people,’ he said. And you can’t drink, Schoch thought. For him, those were precisely the ‘advantages’ that militated against it.
He’d tried it once. Furrer had lent him sixty francs, which had allowed him to buy twenty copies of the paper and keep 100 per cent of the income from these.
But after a short spell beside the escalator of the pedestrian underpass he’d had enough. He felt silly in the light-blue coat and matching baseball cap, and found it so embarrassing trying to talk to people. He recalled how he’d given the vendors a wide berth when he was one of those passers-by.
In almost two hours Schoch had sold a single paper, to an old lady who looked as if she needed the money just as much as him, and he sold the remaining nineteen copies to another vendor at half price. He invested his thirty-four francs in beer and cigarettes and still owed Furrer the sixty francs to this day.
Schoch stood indecisively beneath the porch of the hostel, staring at the pouring rain. He plumped for the closest option.
To begin with he thought the old man next to him was talking to the guy opposite, but then Schoch realised that both of them were talking to themselves. One he knew by sight, the other even by name: Ormalinger. He used to be with the dog lovers. He’d owned a large, shaggy mongrel, a ‘Giant Schnauzer-Alsatian’, as he used to call it. One evening during Carnival the animal had bitten a five-year-old dressed as Darth Vader, who’d threatened it with a light sabre. The injury was only slight, but the ‘Giant Schnauzer-Alsatian’ had been impounded and put down, which turned the alcoholic into a severe alcoholic. Schoch hadn’t realised, however, that Ormalinger had now reached the stage of chatting away to himself unintelligibly.
He nodded, but Ormalinger didn’t react. He probably couldn’t remember Schoch.
The AlcOven was an institution for cases so hopeless that it had given up stopping them from drinking. Although no alcohol was offered for sale, visitors were permitted to bring their own wine and beer. And the management couldn’t prevent people sharing the drinks they’d brought with others, nor stop money being exchanged under the table for such generosity.
There were a few who earned a bit of cash selling beer and wine at a slight profit to those who were stranded and couldn’t summon the energy to make it to the nearby CONSU. When the weather was as bad as today, business was good. A lot of passing trade had joined the regulars: homeless people simply escaping from the rain. The dining room was jam-packed and everyone was drinking.
Everyone except Schoch, who wasn’t consuming anything liquid apart from a bowl of free soup.
This he managed without a problem.
Which meant he wasn’t dependent.
The next time one of the sellers offered him a beer he took it.
To combat the boredom.
After the AlcOven Schoch had passed by the dog lovers in the hope that Giorgio might be there, as they had the same route home. And by now Schoch was no longer feeling so steady on his legs.
But Giorgio had already left and at this time of day those who were still there didn’t make much sense. He accepted the beer he was offered out of politeness and set off on his way.
It wasn’t until he hit the riverside path that Schoch noticed it had stopped raining. The river was brown and churned up, taking twigs and branches in its wake. In the west a slim strip of clear sky brightened up the twilight gloom. Slowly and with the utmost concentration, Schoch put one foot in front of the other.
There was a man standing a little further along the path. He wasn’t moving and seemed to be waiting for Schoch.
As Schoch came closer he could see that the man was from the Far East. Short and weedy-looking, but perhaps he had fighting skills.
Schoch made to go past him, but the man walked beside him and asked something Schoch didn’t understand. He kept going.
‘Where is cave?’
I see, Schoch thought, someone after our caves. ‘There aren’t any caves here,’ he replied.
But the man wouldn’t give up. ‘You sure?’
‘Piss off,’ Schoch snarled. Now the man kept his distance.
At the whirlpool stood an elderly man that Schoch knew by sight. He had one of the nearby allotments. ‘They pulled one out of here today,’ he said.
‘A dog?’ Schoch said.
‘A man. With a bag around his neck. Empty.’
The river tugged at some plastic tape that was tied to the trunk of a willow. It had red and white stripes like the tape the police used to seal off a crime scene.
‘I wonder what was in it?’ the elderly man muttered.
Schoch didn’t reply.
‘It’ll turn up at some point. The whirlpool doesn’t keep anything for ever.’
Schoch was about to mention the two men he’d seen early that morning, prodding around in the eddy with the rescue pole. But he had second thoughts. He didn’t want to have anything to do with the police and, besides, there was nothing anybody could do for the drowned man now. So he continued on his way.
The gap in the clouds to the west had closed again, and the twilight blurred the contours of the landscape. Schoch had to pay close attention to the cracks and holes in the asphalt.
After about five hundred metres he’d reached the spot directly above his cave. As ever, he walked on past, in case anybody was watching. And, as ever, he peed up against a nearby poplar and looked around cautiously. When he was sure there were no witnesses he clambered down the steep embankment.
The ground was slippery. Even for a younger, more sober man it wouldn’t have been easy to come to a stop with the bulky holdall at the right place, then climb back up the two metres to the cave entrance. He slipped and caught a projecting root that had saved him more than once before. The entrance was now three metres above him.
Cursing, and on all fours, he waited until he’d got his breath back.
From here the entrance to his cave seemed to have changed. The bushes that partially concealed it in summer looked ragged. A result of the storm, perhaps.
His pause now over, he started scrambling up the slope on muddy hands and knees. When he got to the bushes he saw that they’d been mangled: leaves and twigs ripped off. That couldn’t have been the wind.
Schoch pushed the bag past the bushes into his cave and then crept into the dim light.
There it was again, fluorescent pink and its ears cocked – the phantom from last night!
Schoch held his breath and didn’t move.
The mini elephant stood there motionless too. So still that Schoch breathed out. It had to be a toy after all.
He crept completely into the cave and made a grasp for the elephant. But before he could touch it, it moved. It lowered its head and thrust its trunk into the air with a swing of its head.
Turning around, the creature moved right to the very back and narrowest part of the hollow. Where Schoch’s hand couldn’t reach it.
‘I’m going mad!’ he exclaimed.
And again: ‘I’m going mad!’
Then, more softly: ‘Or I am already.’
In the middle of the cave lay some leaves and stripped branches from the bushes by the entrance. Schoch picked some up and crawled as far back as he possibly could. He held out some leaves to the tiny creature, but it wouldn’t be enticed. It just stood there, occasionally fanning its ears or raising its trunk menacingly.
Schoch clicked his tongue and spoke softly, ‘Come on … come on … come on … tchick-tchick-tchick.’
The little animal put its ears back and started feeling the sandy ground with its trunk. Sometimes it curled the end of its trunk and sometimes it gracefully lifted a leg and let the foot hang there loosely. But it wouldn’t come a single step closer.
At some point Schoch woke up, freezing. It took him quite a while to remember why he was lying like this. The elephant was nowhere to be seen and he was just about to put the whole thing down to a hallucination when he discovered the dung. The same crumbly mounds he remembered from the zoo visits of his past life, only much, much smaller, lay in the part of the cave where the ceiling was at its lowest.
He crawled backwards until he could just about sit up, and looked around. Apart from a few leftover leaves and twigs he didn’t see anything unusual.
He took the sleeping mat from his bag, rolled it out, laid the sleeping bag on top, removed his shoes and got in. Now he heard a rustling by the entrance to the cave, saw movement in the bushes and finally the pink glow of his hallucination.
Schoch kept still and waited. And fell asleep.
He dreamed of a tiny pink elephant glowing in the dark. Someone he didn’t know said, ‘This is no dream, this is real.’ When he looked again the elephant had turned into a little dog. Schoch wanted to stroke it, but the dog ran away. He wanted to follow it, but he couldn’t run.
Suddenly he was beside the whirlpool of death, where Giorgio and Bolle were fishing with long poles. ‘Has someone drowned?’ he called out.
‘You!’ they replied.
Something warm, damp and soft enveloped his thumb.
He felt the dream departing, distancing itself rapidly and inexorably, and leaving him alone.
But the thing enveloping his thumb was still there. It moved, sucking and slurping.
Schoch opened his eyes. The dawn gave his cave a touch of light. The little elephant was beside his hand. It was standing on its hind legs, kneeling on its front ones and suckling his thumb.
Carefully Schoch lifted his other hand and brought it down gently. The pink skin felt warm and as soft as pigskin.
The creature flinched and scurried back to its hiding place. But not as far back as before. Stopping where Schoch could still have reached it, the elephant wiggled its trunk and looked at him expectantly.
Schoch crept out of his sleeping bag, squatted then knelt, and tried to breathe deeply and in a controlled manner to calm the pounding of his heart. What he could see wasn’t a hallucination. You couldn’t touch hallucinations.
But what was it?
A miracle? A sign? Something mystical?
Schoch had never been a religious man, but before his downfall he’d certainly believed in the existence of something that transcended his powers of perception and imagination. A higher reality, and maybe a higher power too.
But like everything else, this belief had crumbled with his downfall. And hadn’t made its presence felt in all the years since.
Until today. For the fact that this fabulous creature from another world, maybe even another dimension, had chosen to reveal itself to him – him! – must have a significance.
Schoch now did something he hadn’t done since childhood: he crossed himself. But this form of homage seemed inappropriate given the significance of the revelation and the fact that it might be an Asian elephant before him, so he put the palms of his hands together in front of his beard and gave a deep Thai-style bow.
The animal felt around on the ground with its trunk.
‘Hungry?’ Schoch asked. He picked up a few leaves and held them out to the elephant.
Hesitantly, and with its trunk outstretched, the creature inched closer. It grabbed hold of the leaves, lowered its wedge-shaped jaw and stuffed them in its mouth. Schoch’s hand brushed the tip of the trunk, which felt soft and silky.
The elephant raised its trunk, indicating that it wanted more.
Schoch put on his shoes. ‘Stay here,’ he ordered. ‘I’ll fetch you some more.’ He pushed past the bushes and got to his feet.
The clouds hung low and the river was still brown and flowing rapidly. But at least it wasn’t raining. Schoch went over to the old willow growing a little way downstream and broke off a few branches. Then he pulled up some clumps of grass and a bunch of buttercups that were growing just above the high water level.
With this harvest he struggled back up the embankment and crept into his cave.
His visitor, still standing in the same place, shot out its trunk when it saw the food.
Schoch fed the little animal with fascination and patience. It was so hungry that he had to go out twice for more. With his penknife he also cut off the lower third of a plastic bottle, filled it with water from the river and watched the elephant sink its trunk in, suck up the water and empty it into its mouth.
Thus the morning passed without Schoch having eaten or drunk anything.
His cheap plastic watch showed 2 p.m. when his little guest went for a lie-down. Schoch thought this was a good idea and lay down beside it.
When he awoke the mini elephant was on its side in a different spot. Its stomach was rising and falling rapidly and its trunk was being thrust out and curled up at irregular intervals. On the ground everywhere were puddles of runny excrement.
Schoch gently laid a hand on the little body as if it were the forehead of a feverish child. It didn’t react. He carefully took hold of the elephant and placed it upright. It stood there, legs splayed, ears and trunk drooping, and beneath its tail the contents of its bowels gushed out, as thin as water. The little creature lay back down even before it had finished. In fact it was more like falling down than lying down.
Drink lots of fluids when you’ve got diarrhoea, Schoch thought. He took an empty bottle and went back down the embankment. It was much easier now; after twenty hours without any alcohol he was quite steady on his feet again.
But he was still panting heavily when he entered his cave with the full bottle. The tiny, pink, magical creature now lay there peacefully, its chest no longer rising and falling and the trunk not twisting any more, but resting limply beside its front legs.
Schoch panicked. ‘You’re not going to die on me,’ he muttered. ‘You’re not going to die on me.’
He shook out the contents of his holdall, wrapped the droopy animal in the towel with the Nivea logo and placed it inside the holdall. Then he hung this over his shoulder and left.
A director is only ever as important as the business they preside over. And unfortunately Circus Pellegrini wasn’t as important as it once had been.
That’s why most of the employees and all the artists who worked for Carlo P. Pellegrini just called him Carlo. Only those veterans of the circus who’d been taken on by his father called him ‘Herr Direktor’.
Back then Pellegrini was still one of the three most important circuses in the country. It played the same venues as the national circus and although its gala premieres may have been rather middle-class events, they were still part of the social calendar.
Its decline began right after the sudden death of Pellegrini’s father, Paolo, at fifty-two. He was the victim of a lion attack, or rather, the victim of the abrupt end of an affair between the animal trainer de Groot and a Chinese trapeze artist, who on the orders of her father, the head of the troupe, had to submit to family discipline and terminate the relationship.
De Groot, an alcoholic who’d stayed dry for fifteen years, suffered a relapse and was confronted by Carlo’s father at a training session where he was clearly drunk. The circus director marched into the cage as he’d often done before – he’d worked with lions himself in the past – and gave de Groot a piece of his mind. Pellegrini ordered him to take the lions back to their cages and sleep off his inebriation.
Tarzan, the star of the lion routine, came to his boss’s aid and attacked Paolo Pellegrini.
He died on the spot.
Carlo had just turned thirty and was unprepared for the role of circus director. His dream was to become a musician, but his plans had been thwarted by his sister Melanie. She had been an enthusiastic circus child and they were agreed that when the time came for the handover she’d become the first female circus director in the country. While he, Carlo, would continue the circus lifestyle, but on tour with a rock band.
Then, however, his sister fell in love with the magician and son of an American circus family, and followed him to the States. Which meant Carlo had no choice but to take over his father’s role.
He might have enjoyed more success if it hadn’t been for his father’s widow. Following the death of Carlo’s mother, Paolo had got married again to Alena, a Russian circus princess who was as old as his son. Although he’d bequeathed the circus to whichever child was going to continue it, he’d set aside a generous pension for his widow, which placed a major burden on the circus budget. Moreover, because she no longer did her horse routine, for which she’d once won a prize, Carlo had to hire an external artiste as a replacement.
He’d never got on with her even while his father was alive, but afterwards open hostility broke out between them. She constantly interfered in the management of the circus, undermined the little authority he had and kept causing upheaval in the team by embarking on affairs with the artistes. Carlo was delighted when she stayed on after a holiday to Ibiza and only returned sporadically. Sporadically, but always unexpectedly.
In his will, Carlo’s father had guaranteed her the right of abode for the rest of her life, which meant that the circus always had to shunt around her luxury caravan.
Another problem was that Carlo Pellegrini had no affinity with animals. He was a poor rider, he’d never been able to overcome his fear of horses and he had zero understanding of them. Losing Alena’s equestrian skills left him in a fix, and he ended up hiring rather mediocre acts twice in succession.
After the tragedy with his father he struck large carnivores from the programme, replacing them with pigs, dogs, goats and other pets in acts that were amusing rather than striking and which could have been entertaining if he’d had a better feel for the routines. The same was true of his choice of artistes. He lacked sufficient professional knowledge or interest to spot the really exceptional artistes. And he couldn’t afford those with the best reputations in the circus world, a problem that worsened each year.
Soon this was even the case at the top venues in the country. He had to make do with the second- or sometimes third-best choice.
The last remaining showpieces of Circus Pellegrini were its Indian elephants. Four cows and an adolescent bull. They’d been the pride of Carlo’s father, who was known as an eminent elephant trainer. After his death Carlo took over the elephant act, even though he didn’t have a clue about these animals either.
That this was at all possible was down to Kaung, his Burmese oozie. Oozie, or neck rider, was the name given over there to elephant keepers.
It was Kaung who’d been training and looking after the elephants for years and who led them around the edge of the ring at every performance. Even Paolo Pellegrini’s act with the elephants had been a bit of a sham. He pretended that the grey giants were obeying him, when in fact they only listened to Kaung.
Keeping the elephants was a costly affair. A fully grown animal ate 200 kilograms of fresh twigs, hay, leaves, fruit and vegetables per day. A year after he’d taken over the circus, Pellegrini was determined to sell them. And he would have done if it hadn’t been for Kaung, who one day came up with the idea of submitting the cows to an international breeding programme. He knew that during the pregnancy a client would pay for feed, veterinary services and care, and then hand over a wad of money after the birth.
Pellegrini was convinced. He applied to a programme that worked with artificial insemination. Three of his cows had already produced babies using this method and prospects were good that this part of his business, at least, would continue to prosper. The clients were most satisfied. The elephants were healthy and so well trained that they patiently allowed the procedure to be carried out.
‘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.
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.
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.
Ashok stood serenely in the area in front of the elephant pens. His right hind 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.
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.
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.’
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.
After four more weeks the embryo was ‘developing well’ and the hormone values of the urine test were satisfactory.
A further four weeks down the line and it already looked like a little elephant. Dr Horàk’s verdict: ‘Nice development, maybe a bit on the small side.’
In the sixth month he said, ‘Stagnation. At this stage the embryo ought to be twice the size.’
One month later he paid his last visit to Asha. ‘Not viable,’ was his diagnosis. ‘Make sure she expels the foetus if it dies in the uterus. You don’t want to lose the cow too,’ he said as he left.
Dr Reber got caught up in the affair the very next day.
Dr Hansjörg Reber was Circus Pellegrini’s vet. He had a one-man practice in Graufeld, a backwater in the Berner Oberland. Three mornings a week he saw patients in his surgery: dogs, cats, even pigeons and guinea pigs. The rest of the time was spent conducting house visits to farmers and horse-owners.
His passion was for elephants, however. He had undertaken further training in this area, as a volunteer at the zoo and on a six-month internship at the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage in Sri Lanka.
Unfortunately there weren’t too many opportunities to apply this knowledge, which was why he offered his services to Circus Pellegrini for nothing, billing only for the horses and two lamas. Pellegrini, on the other hand, permitted himself to pass on costs for Reber’s treatment of Asha to Dr Roux.
The day after Dr Horàk’s diagnosis Dr Reber arrived for routine ultrasound scans of the two pregnant elephants, Rupashi and Sadaf.
Pellegrini, who’d so far kept knowledge of the embryo implant from Reber, now let him in on the secret and asked him to perform an ultrasound scan on Asha too.
Dr Reber confirmed what Dr Horàk had said: far too small, not viable.
‘But is it still alive?’ Pellegrini asked.
‘The heart is beating.’
‘If it dies how will you get it out?’
‘I assume Asha will miscarry.’
‘If she doesn’t, will you remove it?’
‘I can’t – too dangerous. I couldn’t get to it. And surgery’s out of the question.’
‘So I’d lose her?’
‘I assume that she’ll get rid of the foetus herself. I’ve even heard of cases where elephant cows carry a dead foetus around in the womb for years without any problems.’
Pellegrini wasn’t convinced. ‘I hope you’re right.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll be coming every month anyway to check on Rupashi and Sadaf, so I’ll examine Asha too. If things aren’t right with her in the meantime Kaung will notice and call me, won’t you Kaung?’
The oozie, who’d been following the conversation silently and blankly, his arm wrapped around Asha’s trunk, nodded.
Roux didn’t waste any time. Once it was absolutely certain that the experiment had failed, he started looking around for another surrogate mother and found one at a small Austrian circus, which was less convenient logistically, but far more economical. This was important, because he was contractually obliged to pay for Asha’s care, food and veterinary treatment until she was ready for breeding again. He hoped that Asha would miscarry soon to rid him of the double burden.
He couldn’t wait to examine the foetus either, to see if it was pink and contained luciferins that would have made it glow.
Roux had left it that Pellegrini would contact him as soon as the surrogate mother miscarried.
In Austria the implanting of the blastocysts didn’t go as smoothly as with Asha. The elephant cow was not as stoical and on Dr Horàk’s instructions Roux had to have a metal cage made specially. It almost wasn’t ready on time and they only just caught the ovulation.
The transfer still failed. On both attempts the cow moved suddenly and Horàk lost both the intended blastocysts as well as those he had in reserve.
They had to wait four months until Roux had prepared new blastocysts and the elephant’s cycle allowed for another transfer. Seven more weeks would pass until there was absolute certainty that the embryo had embedded.
From time to time he rang Pellegrini and on each occasion the circus owner assured him that the heart of Asha’s foetus was still beating.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked him, when he heard the same news five months after the vets had declared it to be not viable.
‘That’s what Dr Reber says,’ Pellegrini told him.
Roux suspected that the circus director was drawing the whole thing out so as not to lose the contributions. ‘When’s he next coming?’
‘In around four weeks. We haven’t fixed a specific date yet.’
‘I’d like to be there. Let me know.’
When it wasn’t on tour, Circus Pellegrini was housed in the industrial and agricultural zone of a village in the canton of Thurgau. Pellegrini’s father had built stables and storage sheds there, put up two container offices and negotiated a twenty-year contract for a farmhouse, where the family lived between tours.
This is where Dr Hansjörg Reber paid his next veterinary visit to the circus. The elephants were billeted in a dividable concrete stall with metal posts and heavy gates that led into a small outdoor area, also secured with heavy posts.
Pellegrini was waiting for him in Asha’s stall with the oozie and a man he didn’t know. Pellegrini introduced him as Paul Roux, the researcher and owner of the embryo.
Reber took an instant dislike to the man. And his first impression was soon confirmed by Roux’s overblown confidence, his authoritarian way of expressing his wishes and the condescension with which he treated the oozie.
‘Let’s take a look,’ he ordered.
The foetus was now almost fifty-eight weeks and could be seen with an ultrasound device. Reber put it on the folding table that stood beside Asha. It looked like a laptop from the time when they were still heavy and chunky.
Kaung rubbed plenty of gel on the surrogate mother’s flank and Reber started moving the sonic head around.
‘I don’t see anything,’ Roux said disdainfully after a few seconds.
‘You’re looking at the mother’s intestines. It can take a long time for the foetus to appear,’ Reber said, before adding spitefully, ‘That’s if we do actually see it.’
Roux shot Pellegrini a look of reproach and turned back to the screen. ‘Are you sure it’s still there?’
‘Where else would it be?’ Reber asked.
‘Miscarried.’
‘Kaung would have noticed.’
The oozie shook his head. ‘Not gone, still there,’ he said.
And all of a sudden it emerged among the fluid grey outlines. A tiny toy elephant, its trunk clearly visible. Just for a moment, before disappearing again.
‘Is it still alive?’ Roux asked.
‘I think so.’ Reber played the film several times over in slow motion.
‘Well?’ Roux asked.
Reber didn’t reply. He played back the sequence another three times, then he was certain. ‘Its heart is beating,’ he declared.
‘Does this mean it might survive the pregnancy?’
‘I can’t rule it out altogether. But whether it’s viable or not with this growth deficiency …’
‘But the foetus is growing?’
‘If so, then incredibly slowly.’
‘So how big would it be at the normal point of birth in – how many months?’
‘Between seven and eight, maybe nine.’ Pellegrini didn’t have to count; the dates of this deal, which might now slip through his fingers, were fixed in his head.
‘It’s impossible to say how big it would be. First we’d have to know whether the embryo was growing at all,’ Reber pointed out.
‘How can you find that out?’ Roux asked, sounding reproachful again.
‘By comparing it with the last recording.’
‘So compare them!’
Reber nodded. ‘I shall. And I’ll pass on the results to Herr Pellegrini.’
‘You’ll pass them on to me!’ Roux ordered. ‘The foetus is mine.’
Reber looked at him calmly with his eyes enlarged by spectacles. ‘Herr Pellegrini is my client.’
‘But I’m his,’ Roux barked.
Hansjörg Reber hadn’t been deceived by his first impression.
The road was lined with apple trees on both sides. The BMW was going a little too quickly; Roux was lost in his thoughts. About the small elephant and the future.
The vet couldn’t rule out the possibility that the animal might be born alive. It was conceivable, therefore, that in nine months he could be the owner of a tiny pink elephant that glowed in the dark!
A slight bend forced him to cut his speed; only now did he realise how fast he’d been driving.
This wouldn’t just be a great scientific breakthrough, but a commercial one too! His silent partner knew how to manage something like that. International patents, PR work, market positioning. Was there a Saudi prince who wouldn’t wish to buy a little glowing pink elephant for his children? Were there genetic researchers who wouldn’t be delighted by the possibility of marking cells in any colour they liked?
His silent partner was a Chinese genetic engineering firm. One of the biggest. One that decoded masses of genetic material on a daily basis. One that experimented with the CRISPR/Cas system, a method of cutting and modifying DNA.
For someone like Roux this was a hard secret to keep. He, the small researcher with his three-man firm, had a foothold in China’s gigantic genetic engineering industry! In the country with the fewest qualms about genetic manipulation. Where a factory already existed that could clone 100,000 cattle per year, with the aim of increasing this to a million. A country that had undertaken the task of decoding the genome of all its 1.4 billion inhabitants and was in the process of developing the largest genetic database in the world!
His Gentecsa was working together with this great power in bioengineering. And nobody was allowed to know. Not yet!
In the distance a barrier came down and once again Roux noticed while braking how his speed had crept up inadvertently.
A locomotive painted white, red, yellow and black went past with a single coach. The few passengers were all absorbed in something he couldn’t see.
The barrier opened again and the warning light stopped flashing. Roux put his foot on the accelerator and his car started moving again.
Towering in front of him was a black bank of cloud, as if the little train had pulled it here.
Having measured the stills from the two last sonographs, Reber had come to the conclusion that the foetus had grown. Not much, a centimetre and a half perhaps, but it had grown.
He told Pellegrini this over the phone. He couldn’t tell whether the circus director was pleased or disappointed by the news.
An hour later his mobile rang. To his surprise it was Kaung, the oozie.
To begin with Reber found it hard to understand what Kaung wanted. But soon it became clear that he had to talk to him. ‘Are there problems with the elephant?’ he asked.
‘Yes, problems.’
‘Shall I come over?’
‘No, I come.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Is it so urgent?’
‘Very urgent.’
They arranged to meet in a pub near the old barracks, which Kaung knew because Circus Pellegrini had performed there.
It was three o’clock and Sternen was almost empty. It smelled of the lunch that had just gone and of the dinner that was to come. Reber was punctual, but Kaung was already sitting there, alone at a table next to a window with a tulle curtain from the time before the smoking ban. He looked small and thin as he waited there with a bottle of mineral water, wearing a shirt and tie. When he saw Reber approaching the table he got up and offered him his hand.
Scarcely had they sat down than Kaung blurted out, ‘Little elephant not belong Herr Roux. Belong Asha.’
Reber didn’t know what to reply to this. Eventually he said, ‘It won’t survive anyway.’
‘Will,’ the oozie said defiantly.
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘Asha good mother. Baby not sick, just small. Kaung small too.’
The waitress cleared the glasses from a vacated table and came to take Reber’s order.
‘What can I get you?’ She could have been around fifty but had tried in vain to wipe a few years off that with make-up.
Reber ordered a coffee and turned back to Kaung. ‘We can’t do anything except wait. Every time I come I’ll check how she’s getting on and whether the foetus is still alive. And you call me if there’s a problem.’
The waitress brought the coffee in a large cup with brown glaze on a saucer that also carried a biscuit.
‘Do you mind paying straight away?’ She didn’t trust guests she’d never seen before.
Reber wanted to pay for them both, but Kaung had already been made to settle the bill for his water.
When they were alone again Reber asked, ‘What were you hoping to get out of this meeting, Kaung?’
The oozie hesitated. He drank a sip of water, put the glass down, sat up straight and looked Reber in the eye. ‘You protect little elephant. Maybe sacred.’
Reber knew that in Myanmar white elephants were considered sacred. He’d learned too that it was a white elephant who had announced to Maya in a dream that she would give birth to the Buddha. He also knew that in Hinduism they revered the god Ganesha, the elephant-headed son of Shiva and Parvati. The imminent birth of a sacred elephant in the middle of the canton of Thurgau, however, was something he hadn’t reckoned with.
But Kaung was looking at him so seriously and with such expectation that all he could do was nod without irony and say, ‘Maybe.’
Now the oozie smiled for the first time and said, ‘So you help.’ Then his smile faded as he looked past Reber and up. When Reber turned around he saw a bearded, unkempt man standing behind him and looking with one red-ringed eye – the other seemed to be blind.
‘Could you pay for our beers? I’m afraid my wallet was stolen.’ He pointed to a table at the other end of the room, where two men were sitting who also looked as if they were homeless. They waved over at him.
Reber took his wallet from his pocket and looked for a tenner, but could only find a twenty-franc note, so gave this to the bearded man.
‘Wow! You’re a real gent!’ he bellowed, shaking Reber’s hand keenly and returned to his table.
‘Have you done it again, Bolle?’ Reber heard the waitress say.
Kaung had followed the scene with interest and now smiled again. ‘You good man,’ he said. And after a pause, looking serious once more, added, ‘Roux not good man.’
Reber didn’t object.
‘If little elephant live, Roux must not have it,’ he declared. An irreversible decision.
‘How are you going to prevent that?’
‘You help.’
Every time he had to crawl along the Austrian motorways at 130 kilometres per hour, Roux wished the surrogate mother was in Germany, where he’d be able to push his BMW 218 to its full 200 kph.
The surrogate mother in the Austrian circus was causing problems. The foetus had developed normally until now, but the cow’s hormone values were suddenly ‘a touch borderline’, as Horàk said. Horàk, who got on his nerves more and more each time Roux met him. But what was he to do? Horàk was the only one who could implant an elephant blastocyst with any degree of reliability.
The driver behind was tailgating him and flashing his headlights, even though he was driving at 130, just like the Mercedes in front. He didn’t want to cross over into the right-hand lane and get caught among the lorries doing 100.
And now fat drops of rain were splattering on his windscreen too.
Roux maintained his speed, refusing to give in to the jerk hassling him from behind.
Bryan Adams stopped singing and the phone rang. The dashboard computer said, ‘Pellegrini’.
‘I hope you have some good news for me,’ Roux said.
This greeting kept Pellegrini quiet for a moment, then he said, ‘I don’t know if you’ll regard this as good news – the mini foetus didn’t survive.’
Now it was Roux who was lost for words. He indicated right, took his foot off the accelerator and slotted in between two lorries. The tailgater sped past, hooting his horn, and showed him the finger.
‘Miscarriage?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just now?’
Pellegrini cleared his throat. ‘Last Thursday.’
‘What? And I’m only finding out about this now?’
‘I’ve been away for a week.’
‘Away? Why away?’
Now Pellegrini started shouting too. ‘Looking at circus acts, for God’s sake! I need to sort out next season’s programme!’
Roux took a deep breath, then asked more calmly, ‘What does it look like? Anything unusual about it?’
Pellegrini had to clear his throat again before answering. ‘Nothing unusual, apart from the fact that it was very, very small.’
‘If you’ve got it in a normal freezer, please turn it down to its lowest temperature. Minus 18 degrees is too risky as far as I’m concerned. Minus 23 would be safer.’
Pellegrini didn’t reply.
The downpour became heavier and the lorry in front of Roux slower. ‘Hello? Did you hear what I said? Minus 23 degrees!’
‘The foetus isn’t frozen,’ Pellegrini confessed in a soft voice.
‘What then?’
‘It’s not here any more.’
‘Where the hell is it then?’ Roux was shouting again.
‘Kaung took it to the animal corpse disposal centre.’
‘But you knew that—’
‘Yes, I did. But Kaung didn’t.’
‘I hope you booted him out.’
‘I’d have to boot out the elephants too.’
‘I’m going to sue you,’ Roux screamed. He darted out of the convoy of lorries and put his foot down.
Just before the Feldkirch/Frastanz exit he was stopped by the motorway police. He’d been driving at 178 kph. Roux’s BMW was confiscated.
Sixty per cent of her time was spent working in the animal hospital and the rest was taken up by free consultations in the back room of a second-hand clothes shop. Having set up the street clinic, she now ran it and was its sole employee.
Valerie was in her early forties and an attractive woman, but not immediately. She had short black hair and occasionally disguised her shyness by being excessively tomboyish.
The last patient had left and she opened the window of her surgery to let out the pong of the dog and its master.
Then someone else arrived.
She’d seen him before but she didn’t know he had a dog. Or was it a cat he had in the holdall? He placed it on the examination table.
‘I’m closed, actually,’ she pointed out.
‘It’s an emergency.’
Now she recalled where she’d seen him: with the dog lovers at the station. She’d occasionally pass by to check whether there were any new dogs that hadn’t been seen by her and were lacking a chip or their inoculations, and whether there were owners who hadn’t completed the obligatory dog courses. In fact all this was rather rare. The homeless adored their dogs and wouldn’t risk them being taken away. She knew owners who’d come running to her with their four-legged friends at the first sign of any pain, whereas they’d never go to the doctor themselves, however urgent the need.
Valerie kept an eye on the dog scene all the same. She felt responsible for the pets of those without a home. She wouldn’t have had to start up the street clinic otherwise.
The man now in her surgery after closing time sometimes hung around with the dog lovers. He was one of the silent ones. And she’d noticed something else: his teeth. Most of the alcoholics and junkies on the streets had terrible teeth, whereas he seemed to care for his. Valerie had seen him laugh once and it looked as if they were still all there and white. Perhaps he visited the outpatient clinic of the institute of dental medicine, which offered free treatment to the homeless and marginalised.
‘What have you brought me?’ Valerie asked. She didn’t know his name.
He hesitated. ‘This comes under doctor–patient confidentiality.’
She smiled. ‘Vet–patient confidentiality. Even stricter.’
He opened the zip. ‘You won’t have seen anything like this before.’
‘I’d be very surprised.’
The man put his hands into the bag, carefully took out a pink toy elephant and laid it on the examination table.
Valerie grinned. Either the guy was pulling her leg or he wasn’t quite right in the head. It was quite common among addicts.
But then the toy moved. The trunk coiled, the small body convulsed and something flowed out of its mouth. The creature threw up.
Valerie put a hand over her mouth as if suppressing a scream. The man was right: she never had seen anything like it before. It was a tiny elephant, forty centimetres long at most and thirty tall. It had the proportions of a young animal and the skin of a … a marzipan pig! Just a bit wrinkly, and with pink hair on its back.
‘Where did you get that from?’ she blurted out.
‘I’ll tell you later. Do something – it’s dying.’
The tiny elephant doubled up again. Now something flowed out from behind. Watery, mixed with undigested green matter.
Valerie went to a cupboard and tied a rubber apron around herself. She put on some surgical gloves and came back to the little patient. ‘What did it eat?’
‘Grass, leaves, that sort of thing.’
‘Can you be more specific?’
‘Well, the stuff that grows where I sleep.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘By the river.’
‘What did the grass look like?’
‘Like … like grass. Long, thin, green. With flowers.’
Valerie’s ears pricked up. ‘Yellow ones?’
‘Yes. Buttercups.’
She went back to the cupboard, took out a rubber pump and filled it with water. She pushed the hose end into the creature’s mouth. It struggled a bit, but Valerie was able to carefully push the hose deeper into the gullet until it felt slight resistance.
‘What are you doing?’ the man asked.
‘Flushing out the stomach. The poor thing’s poisoned.’
‘By what?’
‘Buttercups.’
‘Buttercups are poisonous?’
‘Yes. Some slightly, others seriously.’
‘But they’ve got such a wholesome name,’ he said, surprised.
She pressed gently on the water-filled rubber pipe. Soon water mixed with plant residue was flowing out of the trunk.
Valerie repeated the procedure until the water running out was almost clean. Then she gave the elephant an enema until the water that end was no longer cloudy.
She went to the medicine cabinet and mixed a black liquid, which she drew up into a transparent tube, the end of which she inserted into the patient’s gullet again. Then she pumped the contents of the tube into its stomach. ‘Physiological saline solution to combat the loss of liquid. And charcoal powder, which binds the toxins,’ she explained.
During the treatment, which took almost an hour, the owner of the strange creature stood there anxiously and helplessly. She kept listening to the elephant with her stethoscope and taking its temperature, and each time he asked, ‘Is everything all right?’
Each time she replied, ‘I don’t know,’ which was the truth. She had no idea what the pulse of a thirty-centimetre-high pink elephant should be; she doubted that anybody on earth did.
She fetched some towels, gently patted the patient dry, laid it down on a second towel and covered it with a third.
After a while the elephant stopped curling and stretching its trunk, and it closed its eyes.
‘It’s dying,’ the alcoholic said.
She took her stethoscope and listened. The pulse was considerably lower than before.
‘I don’t think so. I think it’s better. I think it’s asleep.’
It sounded as if the man wanted to say something in reply, but couldn’t because his voice was refusing to play along. Valerie looked at him and saw that his eyes were moist. He turned away and coughed.
She went to the sink, filled two glasses of water and passed one to him.
He thanked her and gulped it down.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Schoch.’
‘First name?’
‘Everyone calls me Schoch.’
‘Okay, Schoch, where did you get this?’
‘It was suddenly there in my sleeping place.’
‘Where do you sleep?’
‘I don’t like to say.’
‘Vet–patient confidentiality.’
‘In a cave by the Limmat.’
‘Hmm.’
‘It glows in the dark.’
Valerie looked at him in amusement. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me.’
They both gazed down at the tiny creature, which now was breathing deeply and calmly.
‘Let’s sit down,’ she said, pushing over one of the bar stools that the patients’ owners sat on, and taking one for herself.
‘Who knows about this?’
‘I haven’t told anyone.’
‘Good. Keep it like that, Schoch, do you understand? Tell no one. Whoever it belongs to will want it back at any price.’
He nodded.
‘What you’ve got here is an impossibility. It’s a global sensation. Do you understand me, Schoch?’
‘Yes, for Christ’s sake.’
It went quiet until Schoch said, ‘If it’s an impossibility, then how is it possible? How come it exists?’
‘Genetic manipulation.’
‘Oh, you mean …’
‘What else? It’s the great industry of the future. The Chinese are the ones doing it most brazenly. For example they’ve bred and patented tiny pigs. They did it for research purposes to begin with, because pigs make the ideal laboratory animals. And mini pigs are much simpler and more economical to deal with. But now you can buy them as pets and toys. I bet you can make mini elephants with the same technology too.’
‘Crazy,’ Schoch murmured.
‘Have you ever heard of glowing animals?’
Schoch shook his head.
‘Come, I’ll show you.’ She went over to her computer and turned the screen in his direction. Then she typed the words into the search engine. Monkeys glowing green, hares glowing blue and sheep glowing red appeared on the screen.
Schoch stood up and came to the screen. ‘Are those for real?’
‘As real as that over there,’ she said, pointing to the mysterious animal. ‘Someone even won a Nobel Prize for it.’
Shaking his head, Schoch moved over to the examination table and looked at the creature like a father gazing at his sleeping baby.
Valerie stood beside him.
‘Is it going to survive?’
She shrugged. ‘Poisoning can cause permanent damage. Kidneys, liver, circulation, etc. I don’t know, we’ll have to nurse the poor thing back to health and keep it under observation.’
Schoch sighed. ‘Great. My cave’s going to be ideal for that.’
It was dark when Valerie Sommer’s clapped-out Peugeot estate stopped outside a villa high up on the Zürichberg. A hedge that hadn’t been clipped in ages blocked the view of the building.
Valerie rummaged in her bag and finally found the remote control. She turned around to Schoch, who was sitting in the back beside the bag with the pink dwarf elephant, and said, ‘This comes under vet–patient confidentiality too.’ She pressed the remote control and a metal gate rattled and creaked to the side, revealing a double garage behind. She drove the car forward and waited till the gate behind them had closed.
Now one of the two garage doors opened and she drove in.
A green vintage Mercedes was jacked up in the other half of the garage. The number plates had been removed and the cream-coloured roof carried a thick layer of dust.
Once the garage door had closed again Valerie motioned to Schoch to get out and she went ahead. She took him through several utility rooms into a kitchen and then into a large, dark room.
‘Look!’ Schoch said. Valerie came closer. He’d opened the zip of the holdall completely and let her look in.
The elephant was lying on its side; the eye facing them was open. And the tiny pink body was glowing.
They stared at it in silence for a while, then looked at each other. Valerie smiled and shook her head in disbelief.
‘I told you,’ Schoch whispered.
She pressed a switch and a few of the candle-shaped bulbs on a brass candelabra lit up, bathing the entrance hall in gentle light. The room was panelled up to the ceiling and a drab oriental carpet covered the parquet floor. In the middle stood a round table bearing a brass sculpture. A stag being brought down by half a dozen hounds.
The decoration on the heavy front door was repeated on the five other doors that led off the hallway into other rooms. Above each of them was a light patch in the wood panelling in the shape of a shield, like the ones for mounting hunting trophies. It smelled of dust and stale air.
‘Who lives here?’ Schoch asked.
‘Nobody.’
She went and opened one of the doors. Behind it was a lift, also entirely clad in wood. A mirror with black spots was set into the central panel.
They went up to the first floor, where the air was even mustier. The light from the lift fell into a landing from which three corridors led. This was laid with a thick carpet and it had a round table precisely in the middle, bearing the bronze of a naked female archer.
Valerie led the way down one of the corridors. At the end she opened a door into a spacious room with a double bed, sitting area and a door that led to a bathroom.
It smelled of drains. Valerie turned on the sink and bath taps and flushed the loo. ‘The traps dry out if they go too long without any water flowing through them. That’s why it stinks in here.’
In a cupboard she found a towel that she handed to Schoch. ‘Wait an hour if you don’t want a cold shower. I’ll go and switch the boiler on now.’
When Schoch hesitated, she added, ‘It wouldn’t do any harm.’
They went back into the sitting room. ‘Take a seat, I’ll be right back.’
She left the room and returned with a small dog bed, woven from wicker and painted light blue. The rim was lower in the middle to make it easier for a small dog to climb in. In many other places it had been gnawed away. Inside was a small mattress with holes revealing the yellow foam inside.
They lifted the small elephant from the bag and laid it in the basket.
‘I don’t know much about elephants, but if I’m not mistaken they’re nursed for the first two or three years of their lives.’
‘What with?’
‘Elephant milk.’
‘How do you get hold of that?’
‘I don’t know if they can cope with cow’s milk, it might be too fatty. I’ll find out tomorrow.’ She took a mobile phone from her pocket. ‘Do you know how to use one of these?’
‘I’m told they’re getting simpler. If that’s true, then yes. I used to be able to.’
‘I’ll dial my number, see?’ She showed him. ‘All you’ve got to do is press the green ‘Dial’ button and it will call my phone. Do it the moment you think that something’s not right with the elephant and I’ll come straight away.’
‘You’re not sleeping here?’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t.’
‘Whose house is this?’
‘My parents’.’
‘Where are they?’
‘Dead.’
‘I see.’
‘Stay inside, don’t show yourself, don’t open the door to anyone and keep quiet. Tomorrow I’ll bring you both something to eat.’ She pointed to a huge antique cupboard. ‘The bedclothes are in there.’
‘I don’t use bedclothes.’
‘Will you manage without food till tomorrow morning?’
He nodded. ‘I’m not much of an eater.’
‘And without drink? Will you cope without that, Schoch?’ She stared at him sceptically.
‘I’m not much of a drinker, either.’
The Persian carpet was softer than Schoch’s cave. He’d taken the flowery throw from the bed as a blanket and as a pillow he used a seat cushion from one of the armchairs. This allowed him to look into the light-blue dog basket where the miniature elephant lay.
It hadn’t vomited for three hours, nor had any diarrhoea. Once it tried to scrabble to its feet, but failed.
But the elephant wasn’t asleep; its round eyes were wide open, it kept moving its head restlessly and most of the time its trunk was flailing around.
Schoch had tried several times to lay his hand on the warm, soft body, but on each occasion the fantastical creature became more unsettled, as if wanting to shake him off.
Now he was just lying beside the elephant, watching it.
In the distance a bell chimed three times and he could hear the wind rustling the old trees.
The shutters and curtains were closed, but Schoch had opened a window to let in some fresh air.
Who has a house like this, but doesn’t live in it? he wondered. Can’t sleep in it, but holds on to it?
The elephant drew in its front legs, pushing them beneath its body, and tried to get up.
‘Shhh,’ Schoch said. ‘Shhh, shhh.’
It seemed to respond to him. At any rate it turned its head slightly in his direction and laid it back down on the tatty mattress.
‘Shhh, shhh, shhh,’ Schoch said again, placing his hand gently on the small, faintly quivering body.
‘Shhh, shhh, shhh.’
This time it let him keep his hand there. It even seemed to relax.
‘Shhh, shhh, shhh.’
The round eyes closed. Opened again. Closed. Opened. Stayed open.
Schoch didn’t dare withdraw his hand. He tried to make it as light as possible and gazed at the slumbering creature as it lay peacefully in its own pink glow. A creature from another planet.
Schoch’s gaze fell on his hand: coarse, dirty and shaky. He got up gently, went into the bathroom and found a nailbrush. There was also a new bar of soap in one of the many drawers. When he unwrapped it from the crinkly lime-green paper, something flaked away from the now crumbly outer layer.
He held the soap under the running water and rubbed it between his hands until it lathered. Then he washed his hands thoroughly, brushed away the black beneath his long, brittle nails and trimmed them with some nail scissors that he found in an incomplete manicure set.
Schoch tiptoed back into the bedroom.
The tiny creature was lying a metre from the basket, trying to stand. Schoch hurried over, squatted down, picked it up, stood it gently on its feet and let go carefully.
Now the elephant, legs apart and its trunk hanging down, stood there shakily, as if it might topple over again at any moment.
Schoch lifted it up and laid it back down in the basket. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you, erm …’ What were elephants called?
He only knew one elephant name: Sabu, the beast who a few years ago had escaped from the circus in Zürich, taken a long bath in the lake and then gone for a stroll along Bahnhofstrasse. He’d remembered the name because the elephant’s story had struck a chord. Like Schoch, he’d bailed out of a comfortable life.
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you – Sabu.’
He was woken up by somebody sucking his little finger. Sabu had left the basket and was glowing beside his left hand.
He took it away circumspectly and checked the time. Seven o’clock already. Some light was seeping in through a chink in the curtains. He pushed the curtain a little to one side. In one of the shutters a louvre was missing, allowing Schoch to see some fir trees in an unmown meadow and a pavilion with garden chairs tilted against the edge of a table.
Schoch was startled by a handful of chords from a rock guitar. Sabu, too, spread its ears and raised its trunk.
It took him a while to realise that the music was coming from Valerie’s mobile. He pressed ‘Accept call’.
‘Everything okay?’ her concerned voice said.
‘The elephant’s hungry.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It’s sucking my finger.’
‘That’s a good sign. I’ll bring something over as soon as the shops have opened.’
‘Those I know are already open.’
‘But they don’t sell coconut oil.’
In the two hours he spent waiting for Valerie, Schoch got to grips with the mobile phone. In his past life of course he’d had mobile phones, but back then you couldn’t take films with them. He had a few attempts at videoing Sabu, who kept trying to suck his little finger.
Eventually they heard the squeaking of the electric gate. Soon afterwards a heavily laden Valerie came into the room.
She unpacked her shopping bags. Thermos flask, Tupperware, twigs with green leaves, bottles of mineral water. ‘Coconut oil is the base. Baby elephants can’t digest the fat in cow’s milk. Coconut oil is enriched with all manner of minerals and vitamins. I’ll teach you the recipe.’
She shook one of the baby bottles, removed the protective lid, and gave it to Schoch.
‘Me?’
‘If it’s suckling your finger …’
He crouched down to Sabu and offered it the teat.
The elephant took it in its mouth without hesitation and started sucking.
‘There you go!’ Valerie beamed.
Schoch smiled. ‘Do you think it’ll pull through?’
‘That depends on you.’
‘Me?’
‘Whether you manage to do this every three hours. And spend twenty-four hours a day with it.’
Schoch looked at Valerie aghast.
‘Those are the rules of the game for hand-rearing elephants.’
‘I can’t do that without help.’
She shook her head. ‘Don’t look at me. I’ve got a job.’
‘Me too.’
‘What’s that then?’
‘Homeless person.’
They watched the baby elephant sucking eagerly at the bottle. ‘Sabu,’ Schoch said. ‘I’ve named her Sabu.’
‘What makes you so sure it’s a girl?’
‘Well, there’s nothing underneath.’
‘Male elephants keep their testicles in the abdominal cavity. And their penis in the skin of their stomach.’
‘So she could be a boy?’
‘You call a male elephant a bull.’
‘A bull,’ Schoch said with a grin as they continued to gaze at Sabu.
‘There was an Indian Hollywood actor called Sabu,’ Valerie said.
‘And that female elephant who escaped from the circus.’
Sabu had drained the bottle. Valerie held out a twig. The elephant fished it with her trunk and stripped the leaves off with her mouth.
‘You must be hungry too.’ Valerie took a couple of ham rolls from one of the shopping bags.
‘Thanks.’
‘And something to drink.’
She put a bottle of mineral water beside the rolls.
‘Or would you rather have this?’ She took out a litre can of beer.
Schoch shook his head. ‘You can take that back.’
She packed the beer away again.
Sabu tossed the bare twig in a high arc and clearly wanted more. Valerie put the greenery she’d brought on the floor and Sabu launched into it.
‘To think she almost died yesterday,’ Schoch said.
‘Maybe it was more of a bad stomach upset than poisoning,’ Valerie said.
As if by way of confirmation Sabu dropped a few balls of dung onto the carpet. Valerie laughed. ‘You’ll never get her house-trained, that’s for sure.’
She put two mugs on the chest of drawers, unscrewed a Thermos flask and poured steaming coffee. ‘Milk? Sugar?’ she asked.
‘Sugar. Lots.’
She handed him the mug and took one of the ham rolls from the wrapping. To his surprise he was able to eat it, even though it was before ten o’clock.
‘What now? Where do we go from here?’ he asked, his mouth full.
Valerie raised her shoulders to her ears and let them drop again.
‘Maybe there’s a place where they look after laboratory animals. Some sort of organisation,’ Schoch suggested. ‘Or the WWF, maybe the animal protection association.’
Valerie was doubtful. ‘Associations that protect animals are usually rather naïve. What we need are people who are as tough as nails. They have to set up a kind of witness protection scheme like you see in films.’
‘When I used to watch films those sorts of schemes tended to go belly up in the end.’ He sipped his coffee.
Valerie had an idea. ‘Greenpeace! This is perfect for them. They’re well organised and they’ve got money.’
‘Greenpeace? They’re good at getting their message out. But can they do the opposite?’
Valerie got ready to go; she was expected in the animal hospital. ‘I’ll ask around and do a bit of research. I’ll come back after work. Maybe by then I’ll have found a solution. Don’t forget – a bottle every three hours, not too much greenery and, as for you …’ she said.
‘I’ve got it under control, for Christ’s sake,’ he snapped.
Sabu was sleeping and Schoch could feel the creeping anxiety at having missed his ten o’clock beer. He decided to take a shower. But when he saw the large tub with its lion’s claw feet, he ran a bath instead. His first for … he couldn’t say how many years.
The water flowed a rusty red from the tap and took a long time to turn clear.
In a china pot he found some bluey-green bath salts, which were so stuck together that he put the whole chunk in the tub, hoping that they would dissolve.
Sabu slept on, disturbed neither by the rushing of the water nor the whistling of the pipes. Schoch got undressed, wrapped the bath towel around his waist and took his clothes down to the ground floor, where he’d seen a laundry room on their way in.
The washing machine was an old model, but not much older than the ones he was familiar with from the charitable washing facilities. He even found an open packet of a brand of washing powder that no longer existed. It had amalgamated into a single clump, but he managed to break off a chunk. He switched the machine on and went back upstairs.
Sabu was still asleep.
The bath was full, the salts had almost completely dissolved, and the water had taken on their bluey-green colour and smelled good in an old-fashioned way.
Leaving the towel on a bathroom stool, Schoch climbed in. The water was too hot – it was a good while before his body got used to the temperature and he was able to sit, then lie down.
His head back, his eyes closed, Schoch allowed his restless hands to swim in the water, like when he was a boy.
What would he have given as a child for a small, living pink elephant that glowed in the dark? He’d only had a guinea pig. Johnny. After a year Johnny turned out to be a girl and died soon afterwards. Of a fatty heart, as his father claimed. If he was being honest, Schoch hadn’t been upset at Johnny’s premature death. It meant he no longer had to muck out the cage and his mother didn’t nag him any more about the stink.
Schoch woke up because the bath had turned cold. He ran some more hot water and washed himself with the flaking soap, which he had to use for his hair and beard too, having found no shampoo.
When he climbed out of the bath and the water level sank, Schoch could see a dark ring around the tub. Even blacker than when he’d been a boy.
He scrubbed the bath with a brush, which lost a large proportion of its bristles in the process.
Schoch then heard a strange noise coming from behind him, something in between squealing, squeaking and chirping. He turned around and there stood Sabu, her trunk and ears raised, staring at his naked form. Schoch put the plug back in and filled the tub to ten centimetres. Then he picked up Sabu and lowered her into the water.
She hesitated for no more than a moment before plunging her trunk into the water and showering her back.
In his search for something to wear Schoch had stumbled across the parents’ bedroom. It was twice the size of the one he’d slept in, had a bathroom with a jacuzzi and a walk-in wardrobe, two-thirds of which was filled with women’s clothes, the rest with men’s suits.
He took one of the suits from the rail and held it up. Three-piece, colour an indeterminate grey. He laid it on the vast double bed, took the jacket from the hanger and tried it on.
Valerie’s father must have been roughly the same height as him. But much fatter. The jacket hung off Schoch like a clown’s costume. In the past it would have fitted him.
Schoch found some braces and tried on the trousers. The same clown-like effect, but it would do until his own clothes were dry. The stripy shirt he chose was passable if he rolled up the sleeves.
The socks fitted him, but the hardly worn suede shoes were far too small. He had to make do with his worn-out trainers.
Thus dressed, Schoch made a tour of the entire house. On the ground floor was a living room and dining room, both with French windows that presumably led out onto a terrace. Here too the curtains and shutters were closed.
At right angles to the two large rooms were smaller ones – a library, a television room, a billiard room and something that looked like a trophy room: faded patches on the panelling indicated that hunting trophies had been unscrewed from the walls. Many pictures must have hung here as well, judging by the pale rectangles with nails on the upper edge.
Hunting weapons were displayed in two glass cabinets, both locked. But the cupboards beside them were open and full of hunting literature, mugs and cups from shooting matches, a collection of tankards and schnapps glasses with hunting motifs, and piles of framed black and white photographs showing hunting parties with their kill. Each of them featured the same man, sometimes fatter, sometimes thinner, mostly with a broad smile. Presumably Valerie’s father.
The contents of these cupboards had been randomly stuffed in, and were probably from the empty cabinets and shelves in the room.
In one of the cupboards he found a cocktail cabinet full of glasses in all shapes and sizes. At the very bottom was a small built-in fridge, its door wedged open with a cloth. Above it was a humidor containing a few dozen cigars.
Bottles were lined up on the shelf above the glasses, some opened, some not – single malt whiskies, gin, vodka, liqueurs and schnapps.
Schoch closed the cupboard and continued his tour.
In the library was an entire shelf of hunting books: The Magic of the Hunt, Before and After Your Hunting Licence, Hunting in the Landscape, Big Game Hunting in Africa. The jacket of the last of these featured an elephant cow with her calf. Schoch took it from the shelf; he might be able to learn something.
In the television room he came across a wrought-iron magazine rack. He skimmed some of the publications, all of which were from 1997 and most of them addressed to Frau Johanna Sommer, presumably Valerie’s mother.
The kitchen looked like it belonged in a restaurant: large stainless-steel work surfaces, a cooker with gas and electric hobs, several fridges, all with cloths to keep them ajar and prevent mould from forming inside. There was also a pantry with two hatches and a small staff area with cloakroom and loo. A chef’s outfit was hanging in one of the lockers; in another he saw a waitress’s apron and a starched cap.
In the corridor that went back to the utility rooms and the garage were some steps that led downstairs. Below was the boiler room with a large oil heater and beside it another door. Schoch opened it and turned on the light.
He found himself in a large wine cellar. The shelves were two-thirds empty, but he reckoned there must still be 300 bottles stored here, all neatly arranged by area, domaine and vintage.
Schoch didn’t stay long in there, but long enough to note that not a single bottle was younger than twenty years old.
When he came back Sabu was standing by the door, as if she’d been waiting for him. Schoch crouched down beside her. At once she wrapped her trunk around his index finger, pulled it towards her with astonishing force and put it in her mouth.
‘I know, second breakfast,’ Schoch said, freeing his finger and going over to the chest of drawers where Valerie had put her shopping. From one of the Thermos flasks he filled a bottle to the mark that Valerie had shown him and held the teat out to Sabu. She began drinking greedily.
‘Know the feeling,’ Schoch muttered.
Valerie used the first opportunity she had to put her animal hospital work to one side and embark on her research. She couldn’t find anything on projects to miniaturise animals while also making them glow in different colours. Nor did she have any luck with which organisation to turn to with their Sabu problem. However, soon she came across a disease which in human medicine was called ‘microcephalic osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism type 11’, caused by a problem with the protein responsible for cell division. A similar protein substitutes for the defective one, but the person remains small.
There were adult people with this disease who were no taller than fifty-six centimetres. But Valerie found no indication that animals could be affected too.
She was called to an emergency: a highly elegant, highly distressed lady had run over her Scottish terrier in the entrance to her garage. The animal had broken both its hind legs and two vertebrae, and had to be put to sleep. She gave the woman a sedative and, because she was now unable to drive her Porsche home herself, Valerie had to keep her company until the driver of her husband’s firm arrived to chauffeur her home.
When she was finally able to turn back to her monitor, she resolved to reduce her workload in the animal clinic to 40 per cent and increase her time in the street clinic to 60. She read more about primordial dwarfism.
Valerie learned that those affected by the disease had a lower life expectancy. Their blood vessels formed protrusions or constrictions, often leading to brain haemorrhages or strokes.
This information made her feel both sad and hopeful.
Schoch took the bottles from the cocktail cabinet down to the wine cellar, locked it and put the key in his trouser pocket. He intended to give it to Valerie. For safety’s sake.
He was just filming himself feeding Sabu the bottle when Valerie came back. She didn’t know whether to feel perturbed or amused when she saw him in her father’s suit. She decided to ignore it.
‘She’s not a bull,’ he told her.
‘Have you looked?’
He nodded. ‘There’s nothing in the skin folds.’
‘All the better.’
Schoch contradicted her. ‘No, it’s not better. Elephants are matrilinear. The females always stay with their mothers and are shaped by them. It’s all in there,’ he said, pointing with his chin at the big game hunting book he’d left on the bed.
‘And it looks as if I’m the mother now.’ He smiled down at Sabu, who was sucking powerfully on the bottle. ‘I can’t spend the rest of my life here playing hide-and-seek and elephant mum.’
‘You won’t have to. She probably won’t live very long.’ Seeing his reaction she wished she’d said it a little less bluntly.
‘Where did you come up with that nonsense?’ he asked angrily.
‘I’ve been doing some research into this form of dwarfism. Not those who are born normal size, then grow disproportionally. But those who suffer from microcephalic osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism type 11. They are born very small and grow slowly, but proportionately, and in the end look like miniature versions of the original. This is what Sabu has.’
‘Why do you say she won’t live very long?’
‘Because people with this disease often die young.’
‘Sabu isn’t a person.’
‘All I’m saying is that if you’re fretting over the decision of whether to – how can I put this? – adopt Sabu or not, it wouldn’t be for life.’
Both of them looked at Sabu drinking from the bottle, her head slightly to one side, her trunk raised and curled inwards.
‘How old is she roughly?’
‘She’s still got the proportions of a baby. I’d say she can’t be much older than a year.’
Schoch gave Sabu a probing look.
‘You could live here,’ Valerie said.
‘What would I do all day long alone in this huge house?’
‘You wouldn’t be alone.’
Sabu had finished the bottle. Schoch put it away and started feeding her bits of carrot. He placed one in the palm of his hand and Sabu’s trunk picked it up and put it in her mouth.
‘How many muscles does a human being have?’ Schoch asked.
‘About six hundred and fifty if I remember rightly.’
‘An elephant has around forty thousand. In its trunk alone. Forty thousand!’
‘Just think about it.’
‘What would I do all day long?’
‘What do you do all day long at the moment?’
Schoch pondered this question.
Valerie encouraged him. ‘It would be a job.’
‘Exactly.’
Realising that Valerie was waiting for an explanation, he gave one: ‘That’s precisely what I don’t want. Do you think I would be homeless if I wanted a job? People like me don’t want a home or a job. All people like me want is some peace and quiet!’
Valerie, who liked to have the last word, said, ‘You’d have that here.’
When she’d gone he remembered that he’d wanted to give her the key to the wine cellar.
Schoch was woken shortly after two in the morning by Sabu’s strange, high-pitched trumpeting sounds.
He’d watched the sleeping elephant from his improvised bed until late into the night and mulled over Valerie’s suggestion. He must have fallen asleep thinking about it; he couldn’t remember having reached a decision.
He was still lying on his side, his eyes pointing towards the basket. It was empty, and something was pressing against his stomach.
Sabu was lying on her side, her head lying on her bent right front leg, her trunk curled slightly inwards and her back nestled into his tummy.
She must have sensed that Schoch was awake, for she lifted her head slightly and opened her eyes. She met his gaze. Sabu put her head back down, closed her eyes and went back to sleep.
Schoch didn’t bother turning off the light, but put his hand on the small body and was soon asleep himself.
He was woken a second time by the presence of somebody in the room. Valerie. She’d put down her shopping bags and was taking a photo of the idyllic scene.
Schoch carefully removed the bed throw that served as his blanket and stood up.
Valerie took a video of him standing by the tiny pink elephant, looking dishevelled in crumpled shirt and ill-fitting trousers. ‘I can safely say that this is the first time those clothes have been slept in.’
‘I’ll change in a minute. My things must be dry.’
Valerie put away her mobile and started unpacking what she’d bought for Sabu and Schoch. ‘Have you thought about it?’ she asked, trying to sound as casual as possible.
Schoch nodded.
‘And?’
‘I’ll do it,’ he muttered, then added quickly, ‘for the time being.’
The following morning Sabu had disappeared.
When Schoch woke up – ever since he’d stopped drinking he’d been sleeping through the night – the dog basket was empty, and she wasn’t lying in front of or beside it. He got up and started looking. She was nowhere to be seen in the bedroom. Nor in the bathroom. But she couldn’t have left the room.
Or could she? Might he, half asleep in the middle of the night, have mixed up the bathroom door with the bedroom one and Sabu slipped out unnoticed after him?
Unnoticed? A glowing pink dwarf elephant?
All the same he opened the door, turned on the light and looked around the landing. Nothing.
Eventually he found her under the bed, standing motionless right at the back. Like during their first encounter in his cave. A toy out of reach.
‘Come on, Sabu,’ he called out.
But she didn’t move. Her head was lowered and her trunk pointed straight down with a little hook at the bottom.
Schoch went into the bathroom, put on Valerie’s father’s dressing gown and looked under the bed again. The same picture: a tiny, glowing pink elephant.
Schoch went down into the kitchen and heated up the leftover coffee from the day before. Then he mixed up Sabu’s formula milk for the day, cut up some apples and carrots, toasted two slices of bread, spread them with honey, placed everything on a tray and went back upstairs.
Now Sabu was in the middle of the room. She’d made her way over to his trousers, shirt and underwear and flung them about the room. Her ears were spread wide and she was swinging her trunk from side to side.
She may have been tiny, but she still managed to look menacing.
When he told Valerie about this later that evening she said, ‘She’s trying to earn respect. I’ve seen lapdogs who thought they were big bad beasts. And do you know what? Their owners thought so too, right up till the end.’
Schoch nodded. ‘There are human beings like that too. I’ve known a few in my time.’
‘You must tell me about your past life some time.’
‘Some time.’ He paused. ‘Do you think she knows she’s small?’
Valerie thought about it. ‘No. She hasn’t got anything to compare herself with. But she certainly feels like an elephant. As proud as an elephant. As dignified as an elephant.’
‘And she thinks we’re not paying her the respect an elephant is due.’
‘We’re not.’
From now on their relationship changed. Valerie and Schoch treated Sabu with the awe you show such an unreal creature and left it up to her to decide whether she wanted to be trusting, reserved, playful or strange.
Schoch found this reassessment of his relationship with the little elephant rather convenient, as it gave him the opportunity to read more. For after all these years he’d rediscovered books.
Valerie had brought him everything she could find or order about Indian elephants. She’d also bought him a pair of reading glasses. Or two pairs, in fact. The first hadn’t been strong enough. He’d asked for a pair of 1.5 strength reading glasses. That’s what he’d always had, 1.5. It turned out, however, that now he needed 3.0. He’d read virtually nothing for nine years.
Schoch didn’t just read books about elephants. The villa’s strange library contained a real mixture. Unopened luxury editions of great classics, German translations of international bestsellers from the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the complete works of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff.
He’d chosen the laundry room to read in. It had a barred window that he could open because it was hidden by a large cherry laurel. When you’d spent as much time outside as Schoch had, you sometimes needed daylight and fresh air. The laundry also had a brick floor and two drains, which meant he could hose it down after reading. Sabu, who kept him company as he devoured the books, wasn’t making any effort to become house-trained.
Sabu had begun to determine her mealtimes herself. She kept refusing the bottle at the regular times, demanding it whenever she was hungry instead. Occasionally Schoch tried to ignore her, but she became fractious, made her strange noises, nudged him with her head and wouldn’t let up until he’d put his book down and fed her.
He, on the other hand, kept to his mealtimes. At noon he cooked himself something small. His repertoire wasn’t particularly wide, but it included spaghetti with tomato sauce, a variety of egg dishes, roast meatloaf, bratwurst and suchlike.
While he cooked, Sabu amused herself in the kitchen. She liked playing with a red rubber bone that Schoch had found in a storeroom with other dog equipment, or she’d ceremonially parade around the room, or adopt one of her meditative poses.
After four in the afternoon the clock tended to tick more slowly. This was the time when he most missed his drink. He didn’t have any withdrawal symptoms, if you could describe the slight trembling of his hands for what it was: nervousness.
But once again he was tortured by the symptom that had turned him into an alcoholic in the first place: bloody boredom.
For lunch Schoch made himself a cheese toastie with ham and a fried egg. The idea had come to him by chance. In one of the many kitchen cupboards he’d found a gratin dish of the sort he remembered from the past: orange on the outside and glazed white on the inside. These were the dishes they used for toasties in the restaurant cars of trains. The moment he found it Schoch had the smell in his nostrils and taste in his mouth. His decision was made: today he would have a cheese toastie.
He heated up the oven, cut a thick slice of bread, and placed a slice of ham and three slices of Emmental on top.
Schoch deliberated for a moment, then went down the corridor and the steps that led to the boiler room. He opened the door to the wine cellar and chose a bottle of white – coincidentally there happened to be an Aigle les Murailles, the wine he’d always ordered to accompany his toastie in the restaurant car.
In the kitchen he uncorked the bottle, poured some into a bowl, removed the ham and cheese then placed the slice of bread in the bowl and let it soak up all the wine, before everything was reassembled in the gratin dish and put into the oven.
Schoch heated some butter in a frying pan and cracked two eggs. When they were fried he took the toastie from the oven, placed the eggs on top and brought his lunch to the table.
The shining yellow cheese had oozed out beneath the fried eggs and was sizzling at the edges of the dish. Where the white of the eggs was thinnest it gave a bluish shimmer, while the butter had crisped the edges. He could barely see the ham.
And as for the aroma! Melted cheese, baked ham and hot butter and – white wine.
Forgoing alcohol wasn’t a problem. As a drink. But as a condiment …
That day the boredom set in after lunch already. The prospect of spending from now till evening without human company made him feel edgy.
He tried to take a siesta, but soon gave up and left the room.
‘Are you coming?’ he asked Sabu.
She was standing in the middle of the carpet, swinging her trunk mechanically from left to right and from right to left.
He left her where she was and started prowling around the house.
Shortly after half past two he decided to take a dose of the only psychotropic drug that helped combat these symptoms.
Less than half an hour later he felt relaxed and went back up to see Sabu. She was in a better mood too. She’d stopped swinging her tail and came up to him when he entered the bedroom.
Schoch played with her for a while and made some videos. Then he returned to the wine cellar.
As he came back upstairs he had an idea. On one of his forays around the house he’d noticed in the storeroom a bag of the type used to carry lapdogs. He found the bag and took it to the bedroom.
It was made of slightly tatty, dark blue suede, with a long shoulder strap and decorated with golden rivets. The bag was perforated at both ends and along the sides were plastic windows, which had turned slightly yellow and opaque.
Schoch opened the zip, put Sabu inside and paced up and down.
He didn’t know if she liked this or whether the movement was too much for her, but anyway she lay down.
Schoch put the bag on the chest of drawers. He could barely make anything out through the window, but when Sabu lay like that and her skin touched the plastic it didn’t look like a dog in there.
The right volume of white wine is known to stimulate creativity, and indeed Schoch had another idea. He hung the bag over his shoulder and went to the walk-in wardrobe in Valerie’s parents’ bedroom, where he’d seen a number of furs. Schoch plumped for a simple black Persian stole and took it with him.
After another bottle for them both he was sitting in the tram heading for the city centre, the dog bag containing his dwarf poodle on his lap. He’d be back in plenty of time for the seven o’clock bottle.
Bolle’s old sleeping place had been all right. Underground car park, barely frequented at night, warm, dry and near the places he liked to hang out. The one downside was that they didn’t tolerate him being there during the day, which was a bit of a problem for someone who enjoyed the odd doze in the afternoon. The homeless shelters didn’t allow people to kip there in the daytime, while you kept getting disturbed in entranceways, on park benches and at tram stops.
From that perspective Schoch’s disappearance had been a stroke of luck, although the fact that Bolle had found out about it at the right time had nothing to do with luck. He had his network to thank for that. Bolle knew everyone living on the streets and he cultivated these relationships. He’d visit the relevant meeting points, exchange a few words, crack the odd joke and see to it that people liked him. Through his careful nurturing of these contacts Bolle had found out about Schoch’s sleeping place. And that it had become free.
He was drinking a coffee in the Salvation Army hostel lounge. Beside him was Karlheinz, sipping a peppermint tea. Both were silent until Furrer, the manager, came in, walked across the room, nodded to the handful of guests and went into his office.
‘He’s got more junk to store now,’ Karlheinz muttered.
‘Why?’ Bolle asked.
‘Schoch’s stuff.’
‘Why?’ Bolle asked again.
‘He’s disappeared.’
‘Since when?’
‘Dunno. Giorgio, the guy with the three dogs …’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know. He’s got three dogs …’
‘He found the things in Schoch’s sleeping place. Schoch always takes that stuff with him in the mornings.’
‘Where is his sleeping place?’ Bolle asked.
‘No idea. But it must be wonderful, given how long he’s crashed there.’
Later Bolle quizzed Lilly, the junkie who hung around with the dog lovers. He contrived it so that she begged him for a cigarette, which wasn’t difficult as she was always begging everyone for cigarettes. He gave her half a packet and asked casually if she knew where Giorgio’s sleeping place was.
In the end it cost him an entire packet plus five francs before she spilled the beans.
That same day he packed his rucksack and went to the place she’d described to him. He found Giorgio’s cave even though it was well camouflaged by all sorts of bushes and grass. From there he went a little further along and found Schoch’s hideaway. Slightly less well hidden – the bushes in front were rumpled, a bit smaller and lower – but the cave was dry and comfortable. Plus a toilet and running water right by the door, as he quipped to himself.
It smelled a little strange, like in a stable; there were patches on the sandy floor that looked as if someone had spilled soup, while dry twigs and hay were scattered everywhere.
But this wasn’t a problem for someone who in his last regular job had been team leader in an office cleaning company. He bundled up the twigs to make a brush and swept the muck out of the cave. Then he unrolled his mat, put down his sleeping bag, took a can of beer from the rucksack and toasted his new lodgings. Then he made his way back into town.
The only disadvantage was the distance. From the station it took him between fifteen and twenty minutes, depending on his alcohol level. A bit too much effort for an afternoon sleep. But walking’s healthy, he told himself. And he didn’t need a siesta every day.
He certainly needed one later that afternoon, however. He’d been celebrating this serendipitous change for the better rather over-exuberantly and needed a nap if he was going to spend the evening in company again.
He was heading along the river path, staggering occasionally, and deep in a semi-audible conversation with himself, towards his new home. Some of the allotment-holders were using the rain-free afternoon for a little garden work, but the banks of black cloud were already gathering in the west.
He saw a bench roughly level with Giorgio’s cave and took a brief rest there.
Bolle stared at the rapid, brown river making mischief with its flotsam, and nodded off.
He was awoken by a gust of wind. The bank of cloud had moved closer. Bolle trudged the last hundred metres to the point where he had to leave the path and negotiate the rest of the way along the steep embankment.
Maybe the access issue is another disadvantage with this new billet, Bolle thought. It wasn’t completely without risk if you’d had one too many – which wasn’t a particularly uncommon scenario, if Bolle was being honest.
Now right below the cave, he started scrambling up. Twice he slipped down again, but when he’d finally made it to where he could peer inside through the bushes, he saw that someone was there.
Schoch!
He had his back turned to Bolle and was crouching on the ground, talking to someone. Schoch’s right hand appeared, which had been hidden by his body. It was holding a piece of fur, which he placed on the ground.
Bolle was about to announce his presence, but what he now saw made him lost for words.
Behind Schoch’s silhouette emerged something that looked like a tiny elephant. It was pink, it was moving and it was glowing faintly in the gloom of the cave!
Bolle rubbed his eyes and brow with his hand, shook his head like a wet dog and turned away.
Half running, half slipping, he fled from his vision. When he got to the river path and started hurrying back to the city with a jiggling rucksack there was only one thought in his mind: stop drinking!