Whistling for the Elephants (15 page)

‘I
guess.’ To be honest it wasn’t something I thought you had to have an opinion
on.

‘How
many colours can you see in Mr Honk? The peacock?’ I didn’t really understand
the question. I plumped for an easy one.

‘Blue.’

‘Really?
Just blue?’

‘Well,
no… uhm… green, yellow… lots,’ I said.

She
nodded. The woman spoke very quietly, as if she was trying not to take up too
much room with her voice. It didn’t bother me. I came from a family of partial
communicators.

‘That’s
it. Lots of colours,’ she said. ‘Well then, here’s what I don’t understand. Say
you’re a trichromate. Well, you are, ‘cause you’re a primate. You can make a
range of colours out of three basic ones but Mr Honk and dogs and cats, they’re
dichromates. They only have two basic colours. So why does Mr Honk need all
those colours if Mrs Honk doesn’t appreciate them?’ I couldn’t think.

‘Maybe
it’s for us.’

‘For
us,’ she repeated. ‘I hope so. Come on.’ The woman led the way. She had very
thin legs and seemed to walk on the very tips of her toes, making no
disturbance in the air. She was still dressed all in brown just like the other
day. She probably hadn’t noticed that I had changed entirely, what with no hat
and no tie. We walked around the outside of the carousel square, past a
Spanish-style house and on to a large, formerly white, gazebo-shaped building.
It was topped with a white dome and a weather-vane shaped like a pig. The woman
opened a door in the side and pushed through some thick, weighted curtaining.
I followed her into an intense tropical heat. Plants were growing so thickly
inside that the view of the rest of the zoo was entirely obscured. Small cages
were dotted about with light bulbs hanging above them, and butterflies flitted
above our heads. The woman reached down for a small cage made of mesh net,
picked it up and put it on a stool.

‘Would
you like to see the most remarkable event in the natural world?’ she asked,
looking straight at me. I supposed that I would. It was not an everyday offer.
We bent down to look into the cage together. Inside were a number of leaves on
stalks. They appeared to have small pearls on them, some darker than others.

‘The
darker ones, they’re about ready,’ she whispered. I looked more closely at the
pearls. They were very fine, with delicate ribs running up the side to meet at
the top of their small round shapes. In the darkest of them something was
moving. Slowly a slit appeared in the pearl. A kind of observation window was
being created by whatever lived in there. There was a pause as the creature
used the observation slit to check the world out. Then slowly it began, from
the inside, to cut a perfect circle off the top of the pearl. It was like
watching the smallest can opener in the world at work. As the top came off,
small hairs were released from the inside of the round container. Then a head
appeared with absurdly large mouthparts. It had no eyes to speak of, but tiny
antennae which seemed to take in the world. For a while there was nothing to
see but the head, then slowly it began to wave its entire top half and wiggle
itself free of the pearl—coloured egg. It exerted pressure on the natal leaf
and pulled hard to release itself. The creature looked like a brown-headed,
naked shrimp. It was not an attractive start in life. The tiny thing was
fantastically vulnerable-looking and yet there were no flaws in its
determination. Once it was free it turned back to its birthplace. The egg was
now empty. A clear, translucent structure. A small rose bowl kept in shape by
its ribbed surface. The creature had no sentiment. It proceeded to eat the
thing.

‘What
is it?’ I whispered.

‘It’s
not what it is,’ the woman replied. ‘It’s what it will be. That little fellow
will turn into the most beautiful owl
butterfly. The change from
caterpillar to butterfly is one of the most remarkable events in the natural
world. Don’t you think “chrysalis” is the most beautiful word in the world?
Look here.’ She pointed to some small brown pods hanging from a branch above my
head. ‘Inside there the body of a caterpillar is being broken down and
gradually an adult formed.’

I
looked closely at one of them. It was dressed from much the same wardrobe as
the woman, but the thing seemed lifeless. It just hung there. Perhaps it was
like the spider. A secret mass of seething emotions. Something fluttered and
landed on my shoulder.

‘A
crimson patch longwing. Look, it has a wing like a bag to catch the air. It
would expand like a balloon but it has tiny ligaments inside the wing to stop
the upper and lower membranes separating too far. Isn’t that brilliant? That
one’s perfect. You can get crippled butterflies. It’s very important that their
wings are allowed to expand and dry quickly when they emerge, otherwise they
can’t fly. Did you know that a leaf-mining moth spends almost its entire life
between the upper and lower surfaces of a single leaf?’

I was
trying to imagine such a thing but when I looked up the woman was gone. She was
weird. Outside the gazebo I could hear whistling so I let myself out and
followed the noise. Over in a corner of the park was an old barn. Like the rest
of the park, it was halfway between standing up and giving up. The red wooden
building was everything I had imagined about America before I came. It screamed
life on the prairie, Kansas, the Wild West, bounty hunters and people spitting
tobacco. The doors were open and light and hay spilled out in equal quantities.
The whistling was coming from inside so that’s where I headed. A young woman
was sitting at the very top of several bales of hay stacked almost to the roof.
She was playing a wooden flute. It was a strange tune which I had never heard
before. It wasn’t that high-pitched stuff which really only dogs find
attractive, but it didn’t exactly sound like spring water either. I don’t know
why I was so drawn to it. I stepped toward the barn, mesmerized. It should have
been a magic moment but a cat leaped from the shadows and landed on my
shoulder. I shrieked. The young woman looked down and laughed.

‘Hello,’
she said.

Typically
the cat slipped away. Cats never take responsibility. ‘Sorry,’ I stuttered. ‘The
cat … I didn’t expect…’

The
woman began climbing down. ‘Hey, don’t sweat it. Mac is like, evolving. He is
reconsidering his life. I mean zoo cat is hard, you know, it’s a big
responsibility. Also,’ she lowered her tone confidentially, ‘I do not think he
has been the same since his near-death experience. The marabou stork swallowed
him whole and Miss Strange had to persuade it to disgorge him.’

I
realized it was the woman from the Pop Inn. The one Hubert had been speaking to
when I bought Rocco’s funeral card. She was young, maybe twenty, but very
relaxed for a grown-up. She moved like water in a plastic bag, as if she were
almost boneless, and glided to a stop in front of me. Her eyes were wider than
seemed possible and she smiled as if that was all she ever did.

‘Cosmos,’
she said, looking at me with that smile.

‘What
is?’ I asked.

‘My
name. And you?’ ‘Dorothy,’ I said.

She
looked at me. ‘Nah. I don’t think so.’

No one
had ever doubted me on that point before. ‘It is. Dorothy. Dorothy Kane,’ I
said defensively.

‘Woah,
bad aura. No. No. Dorothy is so wrong. Kane. Sugar. I’m going to call you
Sugar.’

A
nickname? Someone had given me a nickname? I nearly died of delight.

‘Here,
help me with this, Sugar.’ She tucked a homemade wooden flute into a tie-belt
round her middle and moved to shift a large hay bale. I raced to grab the other
end. I would have moved the earth for her. It was too heavy but I didn’t want
Cosmos to know that I thought so.

‘Cosmos?’
I tried out the name.

‘Yes?’

‘Who is
the… uhm… brown lady?’

‘The
brown lady? Oh, Helen. She’s like…

A mouse
ran out from under the bale. Cosmos gave a strange girly shriek. A Judith sort
of noise. It wasn’t what I would have expected.

‘Damn,’
she said, dropping her end of the bale with a shiver. For a brief moment she
was less cool than before, then she looked at me and tossed her head with a
laugh. The little bell on her head rang and she relaxed back into easy mode. ‘Indians
used to live here and they were very together. They believed that animals and
humans were created as companions, that the animals are our spiritual equals,
which is so cool, but I have some kind of block with mice. I’m meditating on
it.’ I realized I was still holding my end of the heavy bale so I put it down.
Cosmos smiled her wide smile at me.

‘You
want to like, check out the zoo?’

I
shrugged, trying to adopt some of her nonchalance. We wandered out of the barn
and stood in front of the large doors.

‘You
haven’t been before,’ she said, staring at me so intently that I felt she could
see right into me, ‘so just let it happen to you.’ I wasn’t at all sure how to
do this. Cosmos was wearing a pair of moccasins on her feet. She padded off
entirely silently. I took a deep breath before trying to match her Indian
footprints. My blue sandals suddenly seemed very noisy.

The
once glorious zoological collection had faded rather dramatically by the late
1960s. It certainly wasn’t a zoo in the way that we think of them now It held
no pretence of an educational function. The word ‘conservation’ was never even
mentioned. This was old-fashioned family entertainment with Crackerjack
concession stands and all-concrete floors because they were the easiest to wash
down. Until the place had fallen on financially fallow times, the main response
to the death of an exotic animal had been to order another one off the African
or Indian shelf.

Most of
the buildings were in a kind of pueblo-style architecture. Lots of red brick
with small detailed arches on the walls. The park was laid out in a vast
rectangle with the carousel square at the heart and cages, pits, buildings and
the barn lining the edges. Beyond the carousel stood the butterfly gazebo and
beyond that the penguin pool and a small, defunct restaurant which overlooked
the Amherst River. Although the animal collection had withered there was still
something to see.

There
was a pygmy hippo, two Bruijns echidnas, an aye-aye, several tough-looking
flamingos, a lowland anoa and a rare Western example of the hog—nosed bat.
There was the gentoo penguin, a stubby little fellow with very wide feet which
would have been hell to sandal; and any number of Ne Ne geese. It was a strange
and eclectic family. We stopped for a minute in front of the South American
tapir. It looked like a black pig which had got its head caught in a revolving
door. Cosmos squatted down on her haunches to look at it.

‘The
tapir is so neat. One of the world’s most primitive large mammals. If it wanted
to it could trace its ancestry back twenty million years.’

Wow, I
thought. It’s a good job Father isn’t a tapir. He’d never finish his project.
The sea lion pool with its concrete slide was empty, as was the old bear cave,
but all the animals left had one thing in common. They all had names. In the
farthest corner of the park was an old buffalo.

‘Hrotsvitna
of Gandersheim.’ It wasn’t the buffalo’s type or species. It was her name. I
was amazed. I couldn’t even tell it was a girl. Cosmos gave out little pieces
of information like gentle smoke signals. ‘First known European dramatist. Germany’s
first poet. A woman. Tenth century.’ The buffalo carried on grazing. She didn’t
seem interested in the weight of her title. Nor did Cloelia, the white rhino.

‘Cloelia
was seriously cool,’ Cosmos assured me. ‘She was like, a real star in Rome. She
lived in the sixth century which is super long ago and she was taken hostage by
the Etruscan King Lars Porsenna during an attack on Rome. Anyhow she escaped
and she stole a horse. Then she rode for her life and had to swim this huge
river, the Tiber, to get back to the city. Anyway, the Romans were dumb, they
gave her back. Can you believe it? But old King Lars was so freaked out by her,
you know, impressed with her courage and all, that he freed her and all her
fellow hostages.’ The rhino grunted as if to confirm the story.

We
moved on to Hypatia and Cyril, the polar bears. They were wandering back and
forth in their concrete enclosure, shaking their heads and rubbing their sides
against the wall. Cosmos leaned against the railing. Cyril stood on the spot
and shook his huge, moulting body from side to side in the slow rhythm of the
deranged.

‘Hey, fella,’
Cosmos called softly. ‘You having a bad day?’

It sure
looked like it but it wasn’t a subject I felt confident about. This was the
whole area of happy and unhappy tigers, brown bears taking Tuesdays off and
Rocco not really liking anybody.

‘Do you
think they have bad days?’ I asked cautiously.

‘I don’t
know,’ said Cosmos. ‘People say that animals are happy in a zoo if the babies
play and the adults have babies. I don’t know. I mean like, they had babies in
the concentration camps and that wasn’t too great.’

All the
female animals had been named to provide a history of women’s achievements.
There was Woolf the camel and Tubman the donkey The boy animals had a different
heritage. In the four cages which stood around the carousel were the largest
and most dangerous of the creatures. They were all male and each one had been
named after a deceased zookeeper.