Elefant

Kaung managed to flee, making his way across Laos to Thailand, where in Bangkok he signed up on a freighter under the Liberian flag.

It wasn’t until summer 1990 that he dared go ashore. Kaung jumped ship in Rotterdam and applied for asylum, which he was granted on account of the situation in Myanmar.

More difficult was finding work. He had to draw a veil over his dream of continuing his studies and becoming a teacher. Eventually he managed to get a job as an assistant in a circus, where they found out how good he was with elephants and from then on employed him as an elephant keeper.

After two years the Dutch circus sold two of its elephants to Paolo Pellegrini. Kaung accompanied the animals on the journey and was scheduled to spend the first two weeks with them, but Paolo Pellegrini immediately recognised the skill the oozie had with elephants and made him an offer. Although it was scarcely more generous than his Dutch wages, the food was better, the accommodation more decent and he was treated with respect. Kaung accepted.

He’d been looking after the Circus Pellegrini elephants ever since. And since the sudden death of Paolo Pellegrini, he’d also been responsible for training them behind the scenes.

19

Romania

29 October 2013

Ashok stood serenely in the area in front of the elephant pens. His right hind leg and left front leg were tied with rope.

Ashok’s mahout held the bull’s trunk and comforted him with some words. Beside the animal an assistant was waiting with a fishing net on a pole. The net was covered with a plastic bag.

The young man behind the elephant was standing on a solid platform. He wore a plastic apron, arm-length surgical gloves and was removing dung from the animal’s rectum. When it was empty an attendant handed him a hose with which he flushed out the rectum. Then he inserted his arm up to the elbow and started kneading and massaging the prostate.

Ashok patiently allowed all this to happen. It wasn’t his first time; he was a trained sperm donor – the pride of a small zoo in provincial Romania.

The grey penis slowly grew from the wrinkly foreskin. The young man on the platform doubled his efforts and the S-shaped penis became erect to its full length of two metres. ‘Get ready to receive!’ the man gasped.

The assistant held the collection bag on the long pole at the end of the penis and caught the sperm that came flowing out soon afterwards.

A lab technician poured it into a glass specimen jar, added the nutrient solution and a little glycerine, to protect the cells against the sharp ice crystals. He labelled the jar ‘Roux/Gentecsa’ and placed it in a freezer that gently chilled the contents down to minus 196 degrees. Twenty minutes later he put it in the steam of a liquid nitrogen container.

20

Zürich

4 November 2013

Twenty days before, Roux had finally received the good news that Asha’s LH test was positive. This meant that the egg cells would be ready in twenty-five days; with elephants it was possible to predict this accurately.

To ensure that the cells developed into blastocysts at the right stage at exactly the right time, they had to be fertilised precisely five days before transfer. Which meant now.

Roux’s hand was never steady enough for this job. He’d wired a monitor up to the microscope where his assistant, Vera, was doing the work, and he was following the process volubly.

‘That one, yes, that one! No! Not that one, the other one. Yes, that one!’

Vera was staring concentratedly into the eyepiece, her right forearm resting on a small cushion to allow her to manoeuvre the wafer-thin glass needle with greater accuracy.

On the monitor you could see the sperm in the petri dish, swimming in a viscous liquid that was meant to reduce their speed slightly. Vera’s glass needle was following them. She aimed for the sperm Roux was talking about.

‘Yes, yes!’ he cried. ‘That’s the chap! Get ’im.’

Vera tried to place the needle on the sperm’s tiny tail, but it got away.

‘My God, is it really that difficult?’ Roux groaned.

Vera had worked long enough for Roux not to feel nervous in his presence. Another three failed attempts followed, but on the fifth try she got it. The sperm was kept in place for a moment by the glass needle before it went on swimming with a kink in its tail. But slowly enough that Vera had little trouble sucking it up in her pipette.

‘Finally,’ Roux grumbled.

Vera took the petri dish containing the sperm from the stage of the microscope and Roux fetched the first dish with the now fertile egg cell from the incubator.

He carried it over to the table with the microscope with great solemnity, for in his hands was the result of many years’ work, the reason why he was up to his eyeballs in debt and why he’d had to sell half of Gentecsa to a silent partner whose name was a secret only he knew.

Roux had genetically modified the egg cells he hoped would liberate him from this hopeless situation. As with Rosie, the glowing pink skinny pig, he’d inserted the pigment from the noses of mandrills and the luciferin from the Lampyris noctiluca species of firefly.

He – or more accurately Vera, under his instruction – had prepared six egg cells in this way in case the highly complicated implant of the ovum in the elephant cow went wrong. Those that weren’t used would be frozen for future opportunities.

Vera placed the petri dish into the specimen jar and Roux sat back down in front of the monitor.

‘Now concentrate!’ he ordered.

She looked up from the eyepiece and shot him a weary look. Then, taking a deep breath, Vera got on with her work.

The glass needle appeared on the screen, gently pushed the egg cell to the end of the holding needle then vanished from the picture.

Vera’s respiring penetrated the silence of the room before she held her breath.

Now the razor-thin tip of the micropipette appeared in the picture. It moved closer to the egg cell, touching it in the very middle. There was a slight indentation as the cell wall offered some resistance before giving way and the pipette entered.

The two of them were still holding their breath.

Vera carefully began the injection.

Roux could clearly see the sperm being pushed down the thin channel and leaving the tip.

As gently as she could, Vera removed the pipette from the cell.

Only then did they exhale and take another deep breath.

‘Yes!’ Roux cried, clapping Vera on the shoulder. Then he stood up and fetched the next egg cell.

21

St Gallen, Switzerland

8 November 2013

Dr Horàk was one of the foremost experts in the artificial insemination of elephants. And one of the few who, together with his team, had succeeded in implanting a fertilised egg cell.

Although he didn’t know Roux, the latter’s lengthy collaboration with Professor Gebstein, a leading researcher in gene marking, was an excellent reference. And the project of immunising elephants against herpes sounded interesting. Horàk didn’t think it would work, but he didn’t want to let slip the opportunity of practising his team’s blastocyst transfer techniques – flights, hotel, expenses and fee included.