“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…”
Damira was there again, listening to uncle Timur read to her. This was the gift of the mammoth mind, the elephant mind: to be where she was and elsewhere as well. To be in this present and yet inhabit the past. Not as a reverie; not the fragmentary past that was all a human mind could conjure, like a minimalist set of a play where perhaps a single well-remembered staircase, a bedsheet, and a bookcase stood out against a void of forgetting. No—she was there. Timur sat at the edge of the bed and read from the book, its plain cloth cover saying nothing of the animal wonders inside. The bookcase was there, but also the carpet nailed to the wall next to her bed, with its angular, semi-floral patterns, its smell of dusty wool. The wallpaper of the room was a faded green, with leaves suggested by paler brushstrokes. It was a forest she would enter some nights as she drifted off to sleep.
She was half-asleep now inside the warm vibrations of Timur’s voice, inside the world he wove in the room. And if she concentrated she could hear the tap of snowflakes against the window, a staccato punctuation between the lines of Kipling’s Just So Stories.
“And she lived in Africa, and she filled all Africa with her ’satiable curiosities. She asked her tall aunt, the Ostrich, why her tail-feathers grew just so, and her tall aunt the Ostrich spanked her with her hard, hard claw. She asked her tall uncle, the Giraffe, what made his skin spotty, and her tall uncle, the Giraffe, spanked her with his hard, hard hoof. And still she was full of ’satiable curiosity! She asked her broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, why her eyes were red, and her broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, spanked her with her broad, broad hoof; and she asked her hairy uncle, the Baboon, why melons tasted just so, and her hairy uncle, the Baboon, spanked her with his hairy, hairy paw. And still she was full of ’satiable curiosity! She asked questions about everything that she saw, or heard, or felt, or smelt, or touched, and all her uncles and her aunts spanked her. And still she was full of ’satiable curiosity!”
In the High and Far-Off Times. In the times when Timur had been alive, and her mother had been alive. In the times when, in winter, the snow piled so high that the narrow track to school became a white, winding canyon. In the times when her identity was still a cloud of possibilities that could begin to coalesce around any clump of dust introduced into it. When a single action—an elephant toy given as a gift—could create such gravity that the shape of her personality would begin to wrap itself around it, until it was dense enough to ignite. To become a star. To light a lifetime.
Sitting on the floor of her room, which now ran from the dark bar of rug out into a red-dust plain, Wamugunda pushed an ember back into the fire. “Well, Damira—I think there are people who come from somewhere, like me. And there are people who come from nowhere, like you. And there is power in both.”
There with him by the fire that night she had been hurt by his comment, though he had not meant it as hurtful. She had felt the fragility of her position, there. He was of this place. She was not. She had gone to school, endless school, and then university, learning of elephants and, through them, biology and ecology, and the details of an elephant world that had once been something weightless and vague. Like Kipling’s colonial Africa, which was just a fantasy-place for white Europeans to conjure with, and had nothing to do with the complexities of the real countries and peoples and ecologies of the continent it named.
But over the years, the elephant had become flesh and blood. The elephant, beginning in her life as a stuffed toy, as a story, as pictures in books, and then an anatomy to be studied, had finally become an animal she could touch. The elephant had become real. Once she had placed a hand on the skin of an elephant, under the watchful eyes of the elephant’s mahout, there was no turning away. Once she touched them, she knew she would stay with them. With the reality of them, not the fantasy. First in the forests of Myanmar, weighing them and deworming them. Then here, along the Ewaso Ng’iro, in Kenya, driving transects and taking samples of blood and dung.
And then—though she tried to push those memories down—fighting alongside her friends until all her friends were dead.
Until she was dead, as well.
Because that was the truth of it: Damira was dead. This being, called Damira, remembering this room, where a child Damira was half-asleep and drowsily listening to her uncle Timur read, was not the same being as that child. This being remembering the Damira by the fire, worried she would never have a place with the friend she loved. This being was not Damira at all. Damira had been murdered at a camp ten kilometers from the red-earth patch of ground lit by the flames of that remembered fire. Damira had been hacked to pieces with machetes, and Damira’s head had been sent to Kenya’s president in a cheap plastic sack manufactured for holding rice.
This Damira, this being that was remembering, was nothing but a map of a woman long dead—a map folded into a new shape to fit in the mind and sinews, the massive skeleton and the sensory apparatus, of a mammoth. This Damira …
No, she thought. Whoever can remember is real. A being that remembers is alive, and authentic. I am here. That is enough. I am here, on the steppe. And I am here, in this room, where I was present as a child. And here, by this fire with Wamugunda, whose stories of Hong Kong I still preserve. He lives, in some way, in me.
I am changed, it is true. And even these memories are changed by what I have become. But I am here.
And Wamugunda was wrong: no one comes from nowhere. We come from our own pasts. We rise up out of our memories, and once there are enough of those memories to stand upon, we move forward with their support beneath us, drawn toward the future they allow us to conceive. We are continually shaped by our past, and we continually reshape it.
Because now, when she remembered the gift of the elephant, she remembered something strange. The gift had been a clumsy thing, sewn most likely in some factory not far from the Tomsk where she grew up, designed by people who had never seen, in their lives, many of the animals they were imitating. It was formed of cheap plush, with dark eyes of plastic imitating glass, and clumsy curves of white tusks that began to lose shape as the stuffing inside compressed.
But it had not been gray: it had been brown. She had dismissed the color, barely noticed it—after all, there were pink elephant toys and purple elephant toys and elephant toys of an acid green, so why should brown be strange?
But now she saw the loop. It was not an elephant Timur had given her, at all. That first object around which her ideas for the future had begun to wrap themselves was a mammoth.
And it was a mammoth she had become.
In that remembered room, Damira got out of bed and walked to the window. She could hear the crackling of the fire, far off, and Wamugunda’s soft voice telling of Hong Kong. Further in the darkness, she knew, Musa patrolled and was not yet dead.
She came to the window and placed a hand against the pane.
Outside, the snow fell through the streetlamps in vertical streams. The herd of mammoths there in the street below were speckled with it. A newborn calf, not yet a month old, ran back and forth from mother to aunt, sweeping snow from the pavement with his trunk and tossing it into the air.
They were there, too. They had always been there. Even in the High and Far-Off Times.
“They are still there.”
The boy, Svyatoslav, stood next to her. He had the visor on, and his hands were slightly outstretched, controlling his drone with small movements of wrist and fingers.
“They haven’t left yet. They saw the two overturned Burlaks, and the bodies of the drivers. The one called Vladimir has been telling them they have to leave, but the one called Dr. Aslanov seems … I don’t know. He hasn’t said a word for the last hour. And the one with the rifle—his name is Anthony—he’s climbed up onto the roof of the Burlak we left standing. He’s keeping some kind of guard.”
Temene was dragging Konstantin’s jacket through the grass, back and forth, and then lifting it and slapping it onto her back, as if testing how efficient it would be at waving off flies. A calf named Borongot kept tapping Konstantin’s rifle with his trunk and then loping away, turning fear into a game.
The boy, Svyatoslav, made a motion with his hand, and took the headset off. In his lap he held the Alexander, and the dropped earbud retrieved from the steppe grass.
The man had not tried to run. He had fired his rifle into the air, and waited. Had he thought she would stop? He, too, had said her name. Just like Svyatoslav had, the night before. But this time she had not stopped, even when he threw the rifle away and put up his hands. She never even slackened her pace.
Svyatoslav tried not to look at what was left of the man. The jacket he had been lying on in the grass, the rifle he had held, the Alexander knocked from his temples—these were all intact. But the human being that had been there minutes before was nothing, anymore.
The earbud had been dropped by one of the others, while they were running away. It was one of the calves that brought it to Svyatoslav, coiled in its trunk. The same one now exploring the fallen rifle, just meters from where the dead man lay. It must have smelled the earbud, there in the grass. Svyatoslav would never have found it.
He turned it over in his hand. A shiny black seashell, curved to the human ear canal. Damira ran her trunk over it, and he looked up at her.
He almost asked the question, but did not:
Why have you let me live?