“WHAT WILL I feel?” Damira asked the woman in the white lab coat behind the bank of terminals. The woman had come into the room without introducing herself, and begun adjusting equipment. A graduate student or postdoctoral resident with the project.
“People report different things. Some say they feel nothing at all. Others say the scan brings up memories. That it somehow brushes up against them and brings them back to consciousness. They see their lives. Memory by memory, before them.”
“Like when you die.”
“Yes. That’s what they say, right? That’s the superstition.”
Damira hoped there would be nothing.
She had not agreed, at first, to be backed up. She received the notice on her terminal to report to the Institute, and ignored the summons. She had not come back to Russia for this—had not come back to take part in the Institute’s experiments.
She had come back to get more support for the war against the poachers in Kenya. That is what it was—a war. She called it a war because that was the word she thought might get people’s attention. And she called it a war because just like every war, it existed only for the people it was happening to. Like every war, it was particular to a place and time. Everywhere else, it could be ignored.
In Moscow, life continued as if nothing was happening at all. As if tens of thousands of elephants were not dying. As if the rhino were not already nearly extinct, surviving only in test tubes and zoos. People in Moscow drank fancy Western coffees at three times the price paid in the West and wandered, blank-faced, down Stary Arbat’s cobblestones, lost in self-improvement feedstreams. People were certain that, no matter what the problem was, it could not touch them. People were certain someone else would fix it, if they even thought of the war at all.
She had walked down Stary Arbat herself, that same morning. Had tried to be normal, for one sliver of time. She had stopped for a moment in front of a yoga studio and watched the slow movement of sweating people inside turning from one pose to another, and sipped her overpriced coffee, and tried to be a person she was not.
But the way they moved, slow and certain and aligned, even briefly, with the world around them and with one another made her think of the slow, sure grace of her elephants. They were dying right now. She was here on the Arbat and they were dying right now, their numbers dwindling toward extinction and every death a hole torn in the world.
She tossed half the coffee in the trash, feeling guilty for the waste. But pouring it into her body was just as much of a waste.
A few moments later a voice call came in.
“You have to answer the summons, you know.”
It was Yelena. They had gone to graduate school together. Now she was with the Institute. Not a part of the Mind Bank project. What was the latest thing she was working on? Damira did not know.
“Did they put you up to calling me?”
“No, I saw your name on the list and knew you would be trying to ignore it. But you can’t. They’ll put a hold on your passport. The Duma passed a law. They can strip you of your grant money, do whatever they like. They can even put you in jail, and make you do it. Come by and get it over with.”
“I’m thinking it over.”
“Really. They won’t let you leave. I saw you on the streams yesterday, talking about what is happening in Kenya. You have important things to get back to—don’t let this stand in your way.”
“Have you done it?”
“You kidding? The Mind Bank is for geniuses and heroes. Experts in their fields—like you. Our National Intellectual Wealth, I think they are calling it. Not people who sit around in labs making fruit flies glow in the dark. Nobody’s going to be looking to bring us back from the dead.”
“ISN’T THERE ANY way for us to be … anesthetized?”
“No,” the woman in the lab coat said. “You have to be awake. But it doesn’t hurt. And it doesn’t require anything from you at all. You don’t have to concentrate or anything. All you have to do is relax and let it happen. You probably won’t feel much: most people don’t. Some report a tingling or some other pleasant sensation.”
“Or the memories.”
“Yes, the memories. But most people say those are nice. I saw you on the streams, by the way—it’s terrible what is happening to the elephants. And it’s good you are forcing people to listen. It’s incredibly brave of you, standing up to the international cartels like that.”
But people weren’t listening. And Damira sometimes felt she should stop talking about it. It wasn’t bravery, she thought, it was love. A desperate love that wouldn’t let her allow it to happen.
“When will it start?”
“We’ve already started. Do you feel anything?”
She did not. But then, she saw—very clearly, as if it were in the room with them—a stuffed elephant toy. It lay on its side, as if dropped on the table. On the surface of the table, which had become a scratched linoleum floor.
Her first elephant.
It was her uncle Timur who gave it to her, on one of his returns from a month-long shift in the oil fields of the Timan-Pechora Basin.
Timur was her mother’s older brother. He was Damira’s favorite uncle. His month-long disappearances made him mysterious. She waited for his return for the entire time he was gone. Every knock on the door of their little wooden house in the Tatar neighborhood of Tomsk was Timur. Finding it was not him, she would flee from the visitor in disappointment.
He brought her something every time he came back. The elephant was one of those gifts. Once Timur saw the joy the little stuffed elephant brought her, elephants became the theme of his gifts: first a few more stuffed toys, and then books. Babar, in Russian translation. And, as she got older, books on real elephants.
Strange, how a life forms from those incidents. How an adult can have so much impact upon the path a child takes. How an adult could give a child a gift without knowing what pathways it would open, what potentials it might reveal. Perhaps the first gift was only happenstance—the object that was available, the only thing left at the store—or simply the thing that had caught Timur’s eye or some unnamable and unimportant reason. And from there it became a game for him—finding something related to elephants for a little girl who was always waiting for him.
Timur had no children of his own. He spent half his life among men like himself, in barracks in the Arctic, at work in the oil fields. He spent the other half in his apartment—a place she visited with her mother only once, in all those years. Only once: the day they found out Timur had been killed.
Damira was twelve. They went with a locksmith and a fistful of stamped permissions, and stood in a cold stairwell for five minutes while the man cursed abominably over the lock, then finally got it open.
And inside there was nothing at all. No—that wasn’t right: there were things—furniture, clothing, a jar of pickles in the refrigerator. There was a souvenir magnet from Kamchatka, a picture on the wall of a mountain range, a battered leather portfolio filled with the documents a person needed to exist in the world.
But what Damira remembered was that there was nothing. The apartment was warm from the central heating—even a bit stuffy, as nobody was around to regulate the temperature by opening a window now and then. It was waiting for his return, but in it was nothing that expressed what Timur was like. Nothing that seemed to belong to him as a particular person. The person who faithfully, every month, found something related to elephants and brought it to his niece. It was as if, in a sense, that act—the repetition of that small act of giving a gift to her—was all that Timur was.
“He needed someone to take care of him,” Damira’s mother said, wiping a finger along the dust on the top of the refrigerator. “We all do.”
She remembered Timur sitting on the edge of her bed. Her mother had gone to the store, leaving Timur to watch over her for a few hours. The evening light poured, salmon-colored, in through the bedroom window. He turned the page, cleared his throat, and began:
“In the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. She had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that she could wriggle about from side to side; but she couldn’t pick up things with it. But there was one Elephant—a new Elephant—an Elephant’s Child—who was full of ’satiable curiosity, and that means she asked ever so many questions…”
Later Damira discovered that, in the original book, the Elephant’s Child was he. Her uncle had changed it to she for her.
Because I am the Elephant’s Child.
DAMIRA SHIFTED HER great bulk in the darkness. She turned her head to look at the others, lined up behind her. Closest to her was Kara, whose head lolled, hanging tiredly. Again and again Kara touched her trunk to the top of her mouth. She was remembering Koyon. The smell of her son. Damira had seen the gesture before. She knew it from her own self—her mammoth self. The end of the trunk could wake memories with the smallest smell, pressed to the Jacobson’s organ in the roof of the mouth. The organ was a pathway into labyrinths of association. Memories arose the way they were called up by a smell in a human mind, but a hundred times more powerfully. Mammoth memories had solidity to them. They were roads one could walk, paths back to other times, into pasts as material and real as the present, conjured with a stroke of the trunk along the roof of the mouth. Hot grass scent—summer—sunshine—sunburn—a cot in a summer camp—blackberry-stained fingers—a boy’s hands tangled in the hair at the nape of her neck. Skim of algae on the water—the boat dock at the village lake—the hollow clunk of one aluminum boat against another—oars in the hands—glide-drift—blisters in the web between thumb and forefinger.
Hands she did not have. A body she did not have. Memories from another life. A Damira she was not.
HER LAST MEMORY of her life before—the life that had been cut short half a century ago—was of sitting in that comfortable chair, in the white of the laboratory. She was drifting, a pleasant buzz in her, a hum distributed through her entire body. For the first time in a long time, she was not thinking of the war. She was simply here, among memories that were further away. Child times, student times. Vanillin of the old libraries guarding books no one had scanned and uploaded. The woodsmoke and frost of winters in Tomsk.
“How are you feeling?” the woman in the lab coat asked.
“Fine.”
“Good. We are nearly done.”
She glanced at her terminal, on the table. At the message floating on the lock screen:
Come quickly. Wamugunda is dead.
DAMIRA STROKED HER trunk along the hair at the base of her legs, where the smell of the blood-trail, of Koyon and Yekenat’s agonies, still lingered. Turning, walking down the line of matriarchs, she touched it to each of their mouths in turn. They were getting tired. She needed them alert. As she touched the death-scent to their faces, as she stroked it onto their flexible lips, she saw them startle. Saw the tiredness fade. They flapped their ears in anger. They tossed their heads in horror.
Good.
When she reached the end of the line, she turned and began to run, gaining speed. She did not trumpet, as she normally would have done. She ran as silently as an animal of her size could. She swung her tusks slightly side to side, in rhythm and counterbalance to the increasing speed of her strides, leaning forward, letting their weight pull her down the hill to her target.
The others followed, running now, keeping pace with her, their matriarch.