On the golf course, the mahout found the elephant by the pond, its trunk lingering at its feet. He massaged the hard knot of muscle on its lower back, the corbeled arch that lifted the creature’s mass from the earth. As he readied the elephant for the march on, he wondered how a journey across the seas could change someone. When the elephant regarded its reflection in the still water, did it see a being transformed? Could it? Maybe it was presumptuous of the mahout to think so grandly of the elephant’s capacities, its self-awareness, its very sense of the possibility of a self. Perhaps this sad-eyed creature merely looked at the pond and thought: What a miserable excuse for a sea.
* * *
The convoy reached Skhirat in the early evening. On the way, the mahout had suggested to Adil, one of the Moroccan gendarmes (he had learned their names), that he come sit on the back of the elephant. Adil stripped off his uniform jacket, approached the elephant from the front, hesitated, crept around the side and kept creeping till he made a full circle, and looked imploringly up at the mahout. The mahout laughed. He scratched the back of the elephant’s head and pressed one knee against its neck. It dipped to the ground. Adil tried to look the creature in the eye for reassurance, but it stared beyond him up the road, its ears flapping like fans. He grasped the mahout’s forearm and heaved himself up, gripping the hairy hide with both hands as the elephant rose to its feet and lurched on.
Elephants respond to certainty, the mahout said. You do not need to charm them so much as direct them … Like us, they are logical creatures, and like us, they understand that the order of the universe dictates to them a certain place, a certain rank, a certain dependence on the demands of others. The mahout spoke in Malayalam, but Adil listened to the tumbling words anyway, trying his best to look ahead and not at the road swaying beneath him. The truth is, the mahout continued, that driving an elephant does not require intuition or special intelligence, only a willingness to command … more than that, a belief in your command.
Command was in his blood. The mahout was raised to ride elephants, as was his father, and his father’s father, and as far as he knew all the males of their line snaking back to some letterless past, when man first wrestled the beast into obedience. No better life had presented itself to him than that of driving elephants. He was aware that many in his village were jealous of his trade, the princely work that saved him from the drudgery of the fields. When the news arrived that he would be sent with the elephant to Morocco, his family lit many candles to fend off the evil eye. You’ll come back a big man, they said, and nobody wishes well for big men. He laughed them off: What nonsense! I’ll come back just the same … This isn’t my journey, it’s the journey of the elephant; I’m only an appendage of flesh. Adil squirmed behind him and cars passed, honking. I am commanded to command, the mahout thought, I am an instrument of command, I am an instrument.
From the trailing sedan, the Second Secretary watched the spectacle of the Moroccan gendarme clinging to the elephant. He was surprised to feel a degree of envy. No invitation to mount the elephant had been extended to him. If anyone should first get a turn on the elephant, he thought, it should be me, not that fellow. He filed this grievance away as yet more proof of the strangeness of the mahout and as further evidence, if he needed any more, of the unending injustice that was the daily life of a Second Secretary.
At Skhirat, Adil slid, nauseous, off the back of the elephant, attempted a few steps, and tumbled to his knees. The children of the village roared at his collapse and flocked about the elephant. Marouane, the other gendarme, dispersed them as best he could, but they remained bubbling in the corners of the village square, pantomiming the elephant and its minders. Skhirat’s mayor, who was also its lead cleric, came to shake hands with the visitors and admire the creature. In normal circumstances, the village was used to strangers passing through; it was a stop on the Casablanca–Rabat rail line. But since the interruption of rail service, the place had grown dustier and quieter, and its people were happy to produce a welcome. They brought trellised tables into the square. Pitchers of fresh juices, cups of tea, and miraculous tagines came steaming from nearby houses. All the village’s luminaries—its post office clerk, its librarian, its accountant, its letter-writer, its chief (and only) constable, its doctor, its farm veterinarian (who kept his distance from the elephant, eyeing the creature with trepidation), and so on—assembled to have a meal with the Second Secretary, who was made to repeat, over and over again, in slow French, the basic facts of his life and of his world. The children cheered as the elephant munched carrots dipped in harissa. The gathering continued till late in the evening. When the day’s last azaan interrupted proceedings, the elephant raised its trunk toward the minaret and sounded back, bellowing in its own fashion the call to prayer. All the men of the village trundled away to the mosque except for the librarian, who patted the Second Secretary on the back and smuggled him home to share a bottle of arak.
During the night, the Second Secretary snored, drunk, on the librarian’s sofa. Adil slept on a bench. The mahout tucked his chin into his knees and dozed against the slumbering bulk of the elephant. Marouane stood awake, vigilant for any mischievous children lurking at the edges of the square. Nothing happened until an hour before the morning azaan. A shape formed in the provincial gloom and drifted toward the elephant. It was the cleric-mayor. Peace be upon you, Marouane said. And you, the cleric-mayor returned. He rolled up the sleeves of his robe and worked his way around the horizontal elephant. I just want to check, he said half to himself, I just want to check. Marouane watched him dubiously. Check what? The cleric-mayor had already knelt by the elephant’s loins. He startled. Well, I’m just curious if the creature is Muslim. In three strides, Marouane had grabbed him by the collar, dragged him away, and dropped him to the ground. He looked down on the older man. You fool, you bumpkin … Be decent and keep your crazy ideas to yourself … Does a donkey have religion? Can a donkey be Muslim? How can this animal be Muslim? The cleric-mayor straightened himself, jabbing a finger into Marouane’s uniform. Boy, he snarled, have some respect … That peaceful creature is more of a man than any of your kind will ever be.
The commotion woke the elephant and by extension the mahout. Alarmed by the sudden rise of the animal, the cleric-mayor made apologetic noises and ghosted away. The mahout saw Marouane’s agitation. He pointed at Adil sleeping on the bench, urging the gendarme to follow his colleague’s example. Marouane nodded and slumped off. The elephant snorted. It stamped its feet. It wrapped its trunk around the mahout’s waist, hugging the man close. Whatever beliefs it did possess, it certainly disliked being roused from its dreams.
The mahout stood for a little while, stroking the elephant’s trunk until it sunk once more to its knees, then rolled to its side. They were alone in the village square. At this time before dawn in the mahout’s own village, the roosters would be outdoing one another, the potholed roads would already be clanging with traffic, his family in their multitude would be scratching and groaning and clucking in the shared sleeping space. Morocco had so much room, so much silence. The mahout watched Skhirat take shape in the leavening dark. There was an enviable modesty to the even spread of low buildings, the humble bakery warming its ovens at the edge of the square, the grace of the mosque’s silhouetted minaret, the peace of all its obscurity. He knew that this was a tiny country pinned between desert and sea. He knew that his own country was large by any estimation. And yet the calm of this small place felt infinite.
The elephant nuzzled his hand and murmured in its sleep. He buried his face in its ear. He whispered: Sleep well, my beauty, sleep well, my prince. If you dream, don’t dream of home and don’t dream of me. Dream of the sea. You and I are now so alone in this world … Dream of the sea, my life, dream of the sea.
The elephant seemed to sleep, but its trunk wrapped more tightly around the mahout. It refused to release him. As sensitive as the mahout was to each tremor of the elephant’s body, so too was the creature attuned to its driver. It
could feel the energy in the man, the insistent force pushing against bone and skin, so different from his usual ocean of calm. The mahout stroked the elephant’s ear, the softer hairs of the inner flap and the harder exterior. After the elephant began to snore, the mahout leaned against the creature and wept. The elephant only shuddered in its sleep. Elephants, like humans, are capable of tears, but it’s unclear if their tears have anything to do with emotions. As light began to escape down from the eastern mountains, the elephant loosened its grip and let the mahout go.
Dawn came with the first azaan. Adil shook awake, as did Marouane. The village crawled into its quiet, habitual motion, with the small aberration of an elephant sleeping at its center. The Second Secretary staggered to his sedan for his toiletries. By the time he finished brushing his teeth next to the well, both the gendarmes stood before him, delivering the news as best they could that the mahout had disappeared.
The Second Secretary was incredulous. Disappeared? Impossible. Skhirat was mobilized to find the mahout. Children swarmed the rooftops. Scooters buzzed down the road in both directions. Farmers turned over their cauliflowers. The chief constable furiously blew his whistle. There was no trace of the man. At the post office, the Second Secretary sent a message to the embassy. MAHOUT ABSCONDED STOP PLEASE ADVISE STOP. The Indian ambassador rang the post office. He’s vanished, has he? The Second Secretary said he had. That’s a real pity, the ambassador lamented, but what to do, it’s pure physics … You propel an object a certain distance and you just can’t expect it to come to rest, it will keep going forward. You take a man this far from his benighted village and he’ll lose all interest in going back … so it goes. But, sir, the Second Secretary interjected, what do we do about the elephant? I don’t know, the ambassador said, Rabat isn’t all that far. Yes, the Second Secretary agreed, but how do we move the elephant? Why are you asking me? the ambassador snapped. If I were a mahout, I wouldn’t be here having this bloody conversation with you, would I? Just do whatever it is you need to do.
The Second Secretary sat on the hood of his sedan, staring at the elephant. It looked back at him, long-lashed and indifferent. He imagined the various means at his disposal that would convince this accumulation of flesh to proceed down the last stretch of highway to the capital. Perhaps he could lay down a trail of carrots all the way to Rabat. Or maybe if all the children pushed hard enough, they could inch the elephant up the road. Or better yet, why not just leave the elephant here for the people of Skhirat? Why not be generous and gift them the problem?
Pitying the glum resignation of the Second Secretary, Adil was stirred to provide the solution himself. He came forward to the elephant and placed his hand behind its head, speaking to the creature in Arabic. It inspected Adil and blinked. Time to go, the gendarme said, and time to give me a lift. There was a pause, the kind of uncertain stillness that humans might call hesitation, but that elephants would of course understand differently. The creature bent down. Gingerly, Adil clambered on top. The elephant returned to its feet. Adil’s prodding steered it onto the road. For the first time in two days, the Second Secretary smiled. Allons-y! he cried. Allons-y!
It was imperative to get going before Adil’s luck ran out and the elephant decided to stop cooperating. The convoy reassembled and bid a hasty goodbye to Skhirat. All the villagers waved, except for the cleric-mayor. From the window of the mosque, he had seen the mahout slink away in the early hours, seen the alien gleam in his eyes, the rootless abandon of the wanderer. It was a sad spirit, one the cleric-mayor could not comprehend and dared not interfere with; who was he—who had never seriously left his village nor contemplated doing so—to judge the actions of a stranger come to a strange place? So he kept his peace. God be with you, the cleric-mayor said to the departing rump of the elephant, god be with you.
* * *
They had reached the outskirts of Rabat when the handlers from the royal gardens finally materialized and relieved them of the elephant. For the cameras, the ambassador posed in front of the creature with Adil, the hero who saved the day and strengthened the bonds between the people of India and Morocco. It was reported to the newspapers that the mahout had been incubating a mysterious tropical disease that killed him en route to Rabat. The ambassador asked the Second Secretary to ensure that Adil’s wife received a very tasteful flower arrangement. The Second Secretary did as he was told.
When the princess returned during her holidays, she was enchanted by the elephant. She would lie next to it and read aloud her books of philosophy and critical theory. She introduced it to champagne. The princess was so enamored of the creature that she insisted it accompany her on a trip to the beach. The elephant hurried over the dunes at the sight of the ocean, the clarion call of its trunk greeting the waves. Everybody laughed as it played in the surf. It seemed to enjoy being knocked over in the shallows, finding its feet, retreating to the beach, and then wheeling its bulk around for another charge against the sea. It all seemed a pleasure, but the elephant was sad that no matter how earnestly it plunged into the water, the tide always drove it back to shore.
A UNITED NATIONS IN SPACE
In between sessions, the ambassadors come to the viewing vestibule and search the shadowed half of the earth. They crowd the portholes. Where once they might have seen the bright fuzz of cities and towns, now the dark patches are profound. It’s not simply a case of the electricity being cut, the lights winking out, the streets and homes rolled away. No, Kiribati thinks, it’s as if humanity’s white webs have been colored black … a black more velvet than the night, continental in its spidery sprawl.
There are still pockets of lights here and there. Azerbaijan takes comfort in the glow nuzzling the Caspian. DRC beams at the sight of Kinshasa. A man of the pampas, Argentina crosses himself for good Rosario, sitting white on the shores of a new sea. If I’m honest, he thinks, I never cared much for Buenos Aires in the first place. A waiter enters with cups of coffee. Unapologetic, Panama helps herself to two.
Mexico sidles up to Luxembourg. That’s his third, he says to her. Third what? Third glass of milk. They look at the Secretary-General, sleepless and slumped, milk limning his mustache, as he reaches up to shake the hand of the Holy See. Luxembourg shrugs. It’s always morning in space, she says, and it’s always bedtime in space. Mexico stares into his cup. At this rate, it won’t be long before I have to take my coffee black.
The ambassadors troop into the council hall, a converted lounge. A disco ball still hangs from the ceiling. The staff of the MaidenX Orbital Hotel consulted pictures of the original General Assembly and Security Council when arranging the chairs and tables, but they could manage only an approximation. The nameplates of each country bump against one another. There’s little room for elbows, let alone for aides—staffers must follow proceedings elsewhere, listening to audio streams hunched in the main dining hall. When the council president calls the session to order, the ambassadors fumble for their earpieces.
For months amid its other work, the council has been trying to find a site where it might reinstall itself on earth. Bhutan’s offer of his mountain capital was initially welcomed, largely because the Himalayas seemed the most secure place in a world scoured by the oceans. But then the noise of war spread up the valleys, big countries growled at each other over glaciers, and little Bhutan demurred, saying that this might not be the best time to discuss the logistics of diplomatic license plates. Australia put herself forward, evoking the immensity of the continent, but the island was too remote for many members; one may as well be in near-earth orbit as in the antipodes. The ambassadors debated the prospects of other sites, none proving palatable for the majority.
Now Botswana comes under consideration. She makes a modest case. The country’s urban center remains more or less intact, not yet affected by the upheaval of the faraway coasts. The sorghum and millet crops have been strong this year. Gaborone could accommodate a version of the establishment that once held sway in midtown Manhattan, though of course there wou
ld not be the same range of amenities for delegates. Telecom speeds are among the fastest in Africa. From Gaborone, there are air links to many surviving cities, Nairobi, Bamako, Khartoum. I don’t suppose there is a Turkish restaurant in Gaborone, Kazakhstan wonders aloud. Unfortunately not. Well, it’s never too late to start one. Jordan says something and laughs, but the Arabic translator didn’t make it on board the MaidenX, so nobody finds the joke particularly funny.
What about the price of diamonds? the Secretary-General asks, unintroduced. (In an early working-methods session, the council had agreed to loosen the structure of proceedings slightly, since all other structures in the world were loosened.) What about the price of diamonds? I understand it has skyrocketed. Yes, the world is finally recognizing the enduring value of Botswana’s diamonds. Excellent, so were the Secretariat placed in Gaborone, it would require a share of the revenue from diamond exports. Botswana is shocked into silence. France and the United Kingdom nod sagely. As a sovereign country, Botswana says after a pause, Botswana retains full control of the tax revenue from trade across its borders. Borders, the Holy See snorts. Excuse me, Indonesia bristles at the Holy See, observers do not have the floor.
Belgium reaches down the table to touch Botswana on the arm. There is great prestige in hosting an international institution … this would only be a small price for that honor. Our diamonds are our diamonds, sir. Until they are no country’s diamonds, the Secretary-General says. Is that a threat? No, sadly, just a fact … unless we can rally the world around the memory of order, everything will continue to disintegrate. I’ll speak with my capital … there is no precedent for such a request, such an idea. Good show, France and the United Kingdom say, we must be reasonable these days. The Secretary-General nods. I understand your surprise; there is no precedent for any of this at all.
Swimmer Among the Stars Page 5
