One hot afternoon, my sister distracted her son and my daughter from our troubles by caving in to their requests for more stories about Castor and Pollux.
‘A zoo,’ she said to them, ‘is a very dangerous place for an animal in wartime, for it can mean the difference between life and death for the human inhabitants of a city. But it was not the poor who ate the zoo animals in Paris.’
Our children listened closely. She told them that the rich Parisians had started first on those zoo animals they could in good conscience eat, the ones that were not so far from the herbivores usually adorning their porcelain plates: two zebras, the yaks, five camels, a herd of antelope. Then they ate the flamingos and the single adored kangaroo. Next they shot and ate the lions and tigers. The zookeeper, desperate to save his beloved hippopotamus, said he would only sell it for food if somebody paid eighty thousand francs (the story was he’d been told a tale at his mother’s knee about a hippopotamus). Not even the rich could justify such an expense when there were other zoo animals still to be eaten. They ate their way through the wolf pack, drizzled with deer sauce. Then they ate the passenger pigeons that had so faithfully been transporting secret messages from the French command in Tours.
I heard our children arguing afterwards.
‘I’m Castor!’ my daughter insisted. She was twirling her tail, trying to keep away the flies that kept landing in a black pall across her back.
‘No, you’re not,’ her cousin said. ‘You’re Pollux.’ And he stuck his little trunk in the air and paraded a bit, waiting for her to retaliate.
For once I was glad they had escaped to their make-believe Paris, relieved they still had the energy to pretend.
The next day I took over the telling from my sister. I told them that when it came to the monkeys the Parisians paused. They tried for a while to ignore their hunger. Some wrote editorials to be published in the gazettes, which were distributed around France by hot-air balloon (now that the passenger pigeons were all eaten up) to outwit the circling Prussians, declaring that sometimes it might be better to starve than to eat the meat of a creature that reminded them in some uncomfortable way of themselves, though they could not yet put their finger on exactly what or why that was. They did not credit us elephants with the same exceptional qualities, and so they turned away from the monkeys towards Castor and Pollux, who year after year had patiently borne the weight of the children of Paris on their backs. The chef of a fine-dining establishment on the boulevard Haussmann stepped forward and offered twenty thousand francs for the two elephants. The zookeeper accepted: his family was starving too. He shot Castor and Pollux with steel-tipped bullets in the middle of winter, while they were dressed in their finest headgear.
Our children had always known this was how Castor and Pollux died. But they were slightly older now, more curious about certain details.
‘What do we taste like to humans?’ my daughter wanted to know. She was still suckling, but had started to experiment with new tastes by trying bits of various bulbs from my mouth as I chewed, learning from me which were safe to eat.
I told her that the diners had complained that the trunk was too tough and the flank steak too oily, the consommé bland and the elephant-blood pudding bitter. One month after they ate Castor and Pollux, the French surrendered. The Prussians held a demure victory parade, then sent food by train into the city. The sympathetic English sent over boatloads of pork pies and currant jam. The siege was over, the zoo animals gone.
* * *
In the night, my daughter woke and nudged my leg with her forehead. She looked up at me with serious eyes. ‘I don’t want you to die,’ she said.
I stroked her small body with my trunk until her breathing slowed again, not sure what to say. ‘Are you still awake, sweetheart?’ I whispered.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Did Auntie tell you who the elephants Castor and Pollux were named after?’
‘No,’ she said, breathless with the pleasure of anticipating another story.
‘There is a human myth from long ago,’ I said. ‘From a time when most humans worshipped many gods. They believed a mortal woman, Leda, had given birth to an unusual set of twins. The twins had different fathers, one a mortal named Tyndareus, and one an immortal god, Zeus. These twins were named Castor and Pollux. Castor was mortal, but Pollux was immortal.’
‘Does that mean he couldn’t die?’
‘Yes, that he would live forever. Castor was killed in battle, and Pollux was distraught. He begged his father, Zeus, to make his twin immortal just as he was, so that they could be together for eternity. Finally Zeus agreed, and he transformed the twins into two stars in the constellation the humans call Gemini.’
‘Is this the same constellation where we see the souls of the elephants Castor and Pollux?’
‘Yes. We see the sibling elephant ancestors looking at each other in profile, foreheads pressed together, just one eye visible for each. And the humans see the immortal mythical twins, never separated.’
My daughter thought about this for a long time, looking up at the sky. Clouds began to efface the stars, but it would mean nothing. Each night the clouds grew purple and heavy, only to clear at daylight without a drop of rain. The first monsoon downpours were long overdue.
‘Are you the mortal twin?’ she said finally. ‘Or is Auntie?’
I smiled. Her logic was sound. ‘When we die, our souls will appear together in the sky,’ I said, not quite answering her question. ‘We will always be watching over you.’
That night we heard the sounds of humans fighting one another with their technologies of fire, somewhere within the southern boundaries of the park.
* * *
When the Muaredzi had almost dried up, our matriarch decided we should move on again, towards a waterhole whose location was a closely guarded secret held only by the matriarch and the next most senior female within the herd. We travelled mostly at night, sometimes forced to keep going during the heat of the day if we could sense the humans were getting too close. They weren’t searching for us – they were distracted by their desire to destroy one another – but we knew that our glowing tusks would be too tempting for men with guns to ignore.
We passed a bachelor herd from another clan, who refused to cede their precedence over the remaining edible grasses and barks, and showed scant interest in the eligible females within our family. It is one of the strictest rules for our species that new life should never be created in times of severe drought. Out of desperation our matriarch challenged them for access to the food, and we charged with her, but it led to nothing. The bachelors stood their ground.
But then something remarkable happened: my sister’s son pushed his way to the front of our herd, through the legs and bodies guarding him, and began to nibble at a patch of grass that was somehow still green, right in front of a bull elephant. My sister and I moved forward immediately to shield him. The bull looked down at him, then turned away and left us in peace. All the young children in our herd ate well that day. One by one, they became sleepy after feeding, sank down onto their knees, and fell over onto their sides to lie in the shade we created for them with our bodies.
When we reached the secret waterhole we drained what was left of it within a few days. Our matriarch determined the only thing to do was return to Lake Urema, despite the risk. On the journey some of the elders in our herd became listless, and we younger women had to nudge them and rumble to them constantly to keep them focused on moving. We began to pass the remains of animals killed and eaten by humans, left beside makeshift cooking fires. At first, only the usual: zebra, wildebeest, buffalo. But then we found a pack of wild dog carcasses and stopped to mourn for them. They are as closely bonded as we are, their packs woven together by mutual affection and trust. We spent time breaking branches to cover their bodies out of respect.
We stayed far from the old dirt roads of the park, except for one crossing we could not avoid, and found it destroyed. The longer route to Lake Urema
took us through unfamiliar territory, tinder-dry like the rest of the park, and it was on this path that we discovered the dead body of the matriarch of the bond group that had left us at the Muaredzi, the same kind leader who had let us stay to drink the last of the water. Her herd must have been in terrible danger to have left her lifeless body uncovered.
My daughter and nephew had never seen a dead elephant before and were terrified of her body. My sister and I had to coax them to join us in grieving for her, moving backwards towards her body and gently touching her with our hind legs, then moving away to circle and hover around her, then forwards to touch her again. Our matriarch led us in keening and throwing sand over the body, then covering her with branches to ease her passage into the earth.
‘Will her soul be in the stars tonight?’ my nephew asked his mother.
It was still years before he would be old enough to be initiated. My sister looked at me and I nodded.
‘Not tonight,’ she said. ‘But soon, when you look up at the sky, you will find her soul there. She died for her family. It is the most heroic death of all.’
For two days we kept vigil with our herd, standing quietly beside the matriarch’s covered body, my sister’s flank against my own, ignoring our thirst.
* * *
We were a day’s walk from Lake Urema when they surrounded us. A group of hungry villagers no longer willing to wait it out on the other side of the park boundary, prepared to confront their terror of lions to come hunting for food. Not soldiers, not poachers, but starving families, come on foot. Our herd immediately closed ranks to protect the babies, pushing them into the centre and forming a protective barrier around them with our bodies.
Our matriarch charged, but the villagers had expected this. My sister, who was exposed on the outside ring of the herd, was shot and fell. I felt the herd trying to move me away, to keep me bundled within their vortex, the babies bound even more tightly within it, but I could hear my twin calling for me. I went to her and nudged her to get up and keep walking, and when she couldn’t I lay down beside her. I don’t remember being shot, or feeling any pain. I know she and I were both focused on the herd as they moved away with our children hidden from sight between their bodies, willing them to disappear to safety.
As we were dying, our foreheads pressed together, one of the humans stepped forward and placed a single orange in the gap between our trunks. It was an act of kindness, I think, a way to thank us for our sacrificed flesh. I was already too far from the appetites of life to eat it, but the smell made me briefly happy – we were children again, two sisters playing beside the fence separating us from a fragrant orchard of oranges, longing to die gloriously and have our souls pointed out to the youngest in the herd on warm evenings: see, there are the stars which form their trunks, and there are the stars of their tails.
TELLING FAIRY TALES
Soul of Bear
DIED 1992, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
What does it mean to be human? Perhaps only the animals can know.
Boria Sax, founder of Nature in Legend and Story (NILAS)
‘Witch, write this down,’ said the black bear.
‘Why should I?’ said the witch, who had brought old bread to the bear’s enclosure. She split a loaf against her knee.
‘You know very well I can’t speak to humans without you,’ the bear said.
‘I would counsel you, in this situation, to keep your dignified silence and say not a word,’ said the witch. She threw the bread, one angular piece at a time, into the bear pit. ‘Or you will be judged on our terms.’
‘So be it,’ said the bear, ignoring the bread. He was sitting in shallow water in a moat fed by the stream running through the zoo’s grounds.
‘Eat, bear, before your friend wakes up,’ the witch said.
‘My friend,’ the bear said sarcastically, looking at a sleeping brown bear in the cave at the centre of the enclosure. ‘I’m waiting for her to die so I can eat her.’ He chewed at the bread.
‘Why wait?’ asked the witch.
‘People would stop risking their lives, dodging sniper bullets to bring me bread, if they thought I had no heart, eating her while she’s still half alive,’ the bear said.
Somewhere further down the slope of the hill in the city under siege, a shell landed, fired from the front line on the distant green and lethal valley ridge opposite.
‘The stadium?’ the witch guessed. ‘The medical school?’ She squinted a little until the answering smoke rose. ‘Lion Cemetery. Another interrupted burial,’ she said with something like satisfaction. But still she shrank a little, putting her body closer against the fence of the enclosure. It was late summer in Sarajevo, and thirst was driving more citizens of the city to risk being hit by enemy shells or snipers in their search for drinking water.
‘I wish they would bring the bodies to me,’ the black bear said. ‘Instead of this bread.’
The witch didn’t respond. She thought she’d seen movement across the deserted grounds of the zoo, near where the monkeys once lived, but it was just wind in the leaves of a lone oak tree. The zoo was trapped in a no man’s land adjacent to the encircling front line of the Serb soldiers who had taken the city hostage. Not many trees had survived.
The bear lifted himself onto his hind legs and gazed through the fence with a carnivore’s longing at the body of a Bosnian soldier who had been shot earlier that day bringing food from his own rations to the two bears, black and brown, the last surviving residents of the zoo. Nobody had yet been able to drag his body out of the clearing near the empty aviary, across the exposed ground back to the Bosnians’ improvised military base. They were waiting for cover of night. ‘How’s black market business?’ the bear asked the witch.
‘Brisk,’ the witch answered. ‘Sugar and salt, bully beef, lightbulbs, flour – the staples. I’m getting rich, in Marlboros at least.’
‘Good for you,’ said the bear.
In the cave, the stringy brown bear was stirring. She rolled onto her back and stretched. Her eyes were open but pale, blind. ‘Hello?’ she said. She sniffed the air.
The black bear rolled his eyes at the witch. ‘Hey, fatso.’ He crunched through the last loaf of bread.
The brown bear did not move from the entrance to the cave. She put one paw in her mouth and sucked on it. After a while she said, ‘Hello, witch.’
The witch ignored her, lit a cigarette. ‘There’s something about smoking on a hot day that feels decadent,’ she said to the black bear. ‘Like eating ice cream in winter.’
The thin brown bear inhaled the smoke, and felt light-headed. It was the same brand of cigarette the head zookeeper and his wife had smoked. They’d liked to stroll along the manicured paths at dusk after the zoo was closed and the animals fed, smoking and talking about the things that are important to people in peacetime: the weather, back pain, bills needing settling, a funny cartoon in the newspaper.
‘Once upon a time, a human baby, a prince, was turned into a bear,’ the brown bear said.
‘Here she goes again,’ said the black bear to the witch.
‘Let her waste her last breath on stories if she wishes,’ the witch said. ‘She’ll taste better with a bit of fairy tale still on her tongue.’
The blind brown bear licked the wound between her claws, and fixed her vacant gaze on the black bear. ‘This baby was a Persian prince, destined for great things. But his mother had sought the help of a witch to make the king marry her, and her son was the price she agreed to pay. A year after his birth, just when she was beginning to think she’d beaten the spell, she woke one day to find a bear cub swaddled in her son’s crib. Terrified that the king would discover her secret, she turned the little bear out of the palace, whispering to him as she set him down in a forgotten fold of the mountains that he should go as far away as he could, and never come home.
‘Now, this little cub did not know it as he fell into a lonely, trembling sleep, but a young Pole named Karol was among a group of soldiers wal
king through those same mountains, a father who had survived great hardship in a war camp far away in Siberia. These were the early days of the Second World War, and men everywhere were on the move.
‘Karol discovered the bear asleep, his paws twitching as he dreamed. While Karol stood watching, the cub gave a snore so loud he woke himself up, and Karol immediately fell in love with him. He had watched his own baby boy sleeping the night before his arrest in Poland, after the Russians invaded. Every day in the camp in Siberia, and every day since the Russians decided to let the Polish prisoners of war go freely to their deaths fighting the Germans instead, he had longed to hold his son’s tiny body against his chest, to feel his rapid miniature heart beating against his own.
‘That night, when the men made camp, the bear slept beside Karol, curled into an enamel washing-up bowl. The other men laughed at this, but not as much as you might expect, and soon they were competing for the bear cub’s affections, coaxing him back down the tree trunks he liked to climb at perilous speed, holding his paws so that he could learn to walk like an unsteady toddler. But the cub returned each night to sleep in his enamel bowl beside Karol.
‘There was never any question of whether the bear would come with them when they set off again, moving through the mountains towards British Palestine, where the men were to be regrouped and absorbed into the Polish army. No time to come to terms with anything that had happened or to mourn any loss; no time for anger about the cattle trains they’d been packed onto in Poland to carry them to Siberia; no time to rejoice at being free from the camp or to fear the death that freedom might hold within it – for there was a war to fight.
‘When they arrived in Palestine, Karol’s transition into his new regiment was eased by the bear, who was adopted as their mascot and enthroned on an upturned bucket to keep court outside the tent of the commander himself. There he sat like a regular little prince, unperturbed by the sandpaper winds that blew in across the desert, slowly drinking a beer in the worst of the day’s heat. Often he could be found beneath the water truck taps, and anybody who passed could not resist dousing him, for his gaze was so direct, so beseeching. When Karol took his shower in the ablutions hut, the bear came with him, and there in the middle of the naked men he would stand lathering his little belly as naturally as could be.’
Only the Animals Page 14
