Elefant

There was a man standing a little further along the path. He wasn’t moving and seemed to be waiting for Schoch.

As Schoch came closer he could see that the man was from the Far East. Short and weedy-looking, but perhaps he had fighting skills.

Schoch made to go past him, but the man walked beside him and asked something Schoch didn’t understand. He kept going.

‘Where is cave?’

I see, Schoch thought, someone after our caves. ‘There aren’t any caves here,’ he replied.

But the man wouldn’t give up. ‘You sure?’

‘Piss off,’ Schoch snarled. Now the man kept his distance.

At the whirlpool stood an elderly man that Schoch knew by sight. He had one of the nearby allotments. ‘They pulled one out of here today,’ he said.

‘A dog?’ Schoch said.

‘A man. With a bag around his neck. Empty.’

The river tugged at some plastic tape that was tied to the trunk of a willow. It had red and white stripes like the tape the police used to seal off a crime scene.

‘I wonder what was in it?’ the elderly man muttered.

Schoch didn’t reply.

‘It’ll turn up at some point. The whirlpool doesn’t keep anything for ever.’

Schoch was about to mention the two men he’d seen early that morning, prodding around in the eddy with the rescue pole. But he had second thoughts. He didn’t want to have anything to do with the police and, besides, there was nothing anybody could do for the drowned man now. So he continued on his way.

The gap in the clouds to the west had closed again, and the twilight blurred the contours of the landscape. Schoch had to pay close attention to the cracks and holes in the asphalt.

After about five hundred metres he’d reached the spot directly above his cave. As ever, he walked on past, in case anybody was watching. And, as ever, he peed up against a nearby poplar and looked around cautiously. When he was sure there were no witnesses he clambered down the steep embankment.

The ground was slippery. Even for a younger, more sober man it wouldn’t have been easy to come to a stop with the bulky holdall at the right place, then climb back up the two metres to the cave entrance. He slipped and caught a projecting root that had saved him more than once before. The entrance was now three metres above him.

Cursing, and on all fours, he waited until he’d got his breath back.

From here the entrance to his cave seemed to have changed. The bushes that partially concealed it in summer looked ragged. A result of the storm, perhaps.

His pause now over, he started scrambling up the slope on muddy hands and knees. When he got to the bushes he saw that they’d been mangled: leaves and twigs ripped off. That couldn’t have been the wind.

Schoch pushed the bag past the bushes into his cave and then crept into the dim light.

There it was again, fluorescent pink and its ears cocked – the phantom from last night!

Schoch held his breath and didn’t move.

The mini elephant stood there motionless too. So still that Schoch breathed out. It had to be a toy after all.

He crept completely into the cave and made a grasp for the elephant. But before he could touch it, it moved. It lowered its head and thrust its trunk into the air with a swing of its head.

Turning around, the creature moved right to the very back and narrowest part of the hollow. Where Schoch’s hand couldn’t reach it.

‘I’m going mad!’ he exclaimed.

And again: ‘I’m going mad!’

Then, more softly: ‘Or I am already.’

In the middle of the cave lay some leaves and stripped branches from the bushes by the entrance. Schoch picked some up and crawled as far back as he possibly could. He held out some leaves to the tiny creature, but it wouldn’t be enticed. It just stood there, occasionally fanning its ears or raising its trunk menacingly.

Schoch clicked his tongue and spoke softly, ‘Come on … come on … come on … tchick-tchick-tchick.’

The little animal put its ears back and started feeling the sandy ground with its trunk. Sometimes it curled the end of its trunk and sometimes it gracefully lifted a leg and let the foot hang there loosely. But it wouldn’t come a single step closer.

15

Zürich

14 June 2016

At some point Schoch woke up, freezing. It took him quite a while to remember why he was lying like this. The elephant was nowhere to be seen and he was just about to put the whole thing down to a hallucination when he discovered the dung. The same crumbly mounds he remembered from the zoo visits of his past life, only much, much smaller, lay in the part of the cave where the ceiling was at its lowest.

He crawled backwards until he could just about sit up, and looked around. Apart from a few leftover leaves and twigs he didn’t see anything unusual.

He took the sleeping mat from his bag, rolled it out, laid the sleeping bag on top, removed his shoes and got in. Now he heard a rustling by the entrance to the cave, saw movement in the bushes and finally the pink glow of his hallucination.

Schoch kept still and waited. And fell asleep.

He dreamed of a tiny pink elephant glowing in the dark. Someone he didn’t know said, ‘This is no dream, this is real.’ When he looked again the elephant had turned into a little dog. Schoch wanted to stroke it, but the dog ran away. He wanted to follow it, but he couldn’t run.

Suddenly he was beside the whirlpool of death, where Giorgio and Bolle were fishing with long poles. ‘Has someone drowned?’ he called out.

‘You!’ they replied.

Something warm, damp and soft enveloped his thumb.

He felt the dream departing, distancing itself rapidly and inexorably, and leaving him alone.

But the thing enveloping his thumb was still there. It moved, sucking and slurping.

Schoch opened his eyes. The dawn gave his cave a touch of light. The little elephant was beside his hand. It was standing on its hind legs, kneeling on its front ones and suckling his thumb.

Carefully Schoch lifted his other hand and brought it down gently. The pink skin felt warm and as soft as pigskin.

The creature flinched and scurried back to its hiding place. But not as far back as before. Stopping where Schoch could still have reached it, the elephant wiggled its trunk and looked at him expectantly.

Schoch crept out of his sleeping bag, squatted then knelt, and tried to breathe deeply and in a controlled manner to calm the pounding of his heart. What he could see wasn’t a hallucination. You couldn’t touch hallucinations.