394
PARTISAN REVIEW
Today as I sit above the crowded beach, something definite is
starting to happen. An elephant is moving along the pavement in my
direction. Since an elephant here is as unlikely as it would be on a
large city street anywhere, a crowd is growing around it. A neat line
of red scarves, the Young Pioneer, had passed by earlier, advancing
on the "Palace of Culture" - a converted church across from the
beach. Spotting the elephant now, they break ranks and dart into the
crowd. A beggar, officially nonexi tent yet nodding on a bench near
me, lifts his crumpled-bag face toward the crowd, ri es, and sleep–
walks into it. There are gypsies, beggars, children, bathers, and an
elephant here. A model Soviet city has suddenly disintegrated. From
a third-story balcony of a stucco high-rise, a woman hurls insults
against the gathering confusion, her little body puffed up into a
perfect square, while below, people still wind toward the elephant,
through the knot of buses and tiny Volga cars stopped in the street.
A chorus of voices filters through my mind, organizing itself
into something like a chant. The word is
smert-death.
But as usual,
I do not trust my ears, so I study the elephant. Now I see that rusty
ropes of blood are oozing down one of its sides from a wound behind
one ear which its leader keeps poking with a sharp pole. But the
elephant's movements remain unvaried, hypnotic: the neck chains
hift in their bleached groove, the foot waits as the chains swing out
of the way, and as the pole moves toward the wound the elephant's
foot moves forward again as if the pole were part of its own
machinery. In this way the Oriental-eyed keeper is moving the ele–
phant across town and out of the way. It occurs to me that the old
animal with its splintered tusks and crumpled skin, its eyes buried
under layers of folds, mu t be dying. When it sags to the pavement
in the town's main intersection, the pole is withdrawn and the ele–
phant is doused with water so that it will move more easily through
the heat.
There is something else about this elephant. Vague uneasiness
has been settling in me for more than a week. Public offices have
been closed, mail deliveries are nonexistent, flights out have been
cancelled by an official pronouncement of bad weather, despite the
blue sky and warm air. The elephant is part of this unfolding drama
that seems to have moved no one but me-ships anchoring offshore
and not unloading, planes arriving empty, closings of the Georgian
and Ukrainian borders on either side of Sochi. Last week I found a
notice buried on the back page of
Pravda:
"Three unusual deaths in
Astrakhan, possibly cholera." Another day's edition mentioned a
