Elefant
What would you do if you woke up to see a living, breathing, tiny, glowing, pink elephant? If you’re anything like Schoch, who lives on the streets of Zürich and is decidedly down on his luck, you might well think it’s time to put away the bottle before your hallucinations get any stranger, and go back to sleep.But what if the tiny pink elephant is still there when you wake up? And clearly needs someone to take care of it? And what if you discover that it’s been created through genetic engineering, by a group of scientists who just want to use it to get rich and don’t care about the elephant’s welfare? And that they’re in cahoots with a circus and will stop at nothing to get it back?What if this little elephant is about to change your life?
Читать Elefant онлайн беплатно
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018
Copyright © 2017 by Diogenes Verlag AG Zurich
English translation copyright © Jamie Bulloch 2018
Cover design by Heike Schüssler
Martin Suter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008264314
Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008264291
Version: 2018-05-03
For Ana and Margrith
Contents
It couldn’t be withdrawal syndrome as he’d had plenty to drink.
Schoch tried to focus on the object. A child’s toy, a tiny elephant as pink as a marzipan piglet, but more intense in colour. And glowing like a pink firefly, right at the back of the hollow, where the ceiling of the cave met the sandy ground.
People sometimes stumbled across Schoch’s cave, a hollow eroded from beneath the riverside path, and he might find the occasional junkie’s gear, condoms or fast-food packaging. But he’d never seen evidence of a child’s visit before.
He closed his eyes and tried to get something like sleep.
But then he had a ‘merry-go-round’, which was what he called those states of inebriation when everything started spinning the moment he crawled into his sleeping bag. In all these years he’d never managed to put his finger on what caused drunkenness to become a merry-go-round. Sometimes he was certain it was the volume consumed, while on other occasions he suspected it was down to the mixture of drinks. And then there were days like today when – so far as he could recall – he hadn’t drunk more than yesterday, or anything different, and yet everything was still spinning.
Maybe it was something to do with the weather. On the way home the Föhn wind had chased the thick clouds over the river, intermittently tearing them apart to reveal a full moon. Full moon and the Föhn: maybe that was the reason for his merry-go-rounds, at least a few of them.
He’d never found out whether it was better to keep his eyes open or closed either.
Schoch opened them. The toy elephant was still there, but it appeared to be a little further to the right.
He closed his eyes again. For a moment the little elephant spun beneath his eyelids, leaving a streak of pink.
He immediately wrenched his eyes open.
There it was, flapping its ears and lifting its trunk into an S-shape.
Schoch turned over onto the other side and tried to stop the spinning.
He fell asleep.
2
13 June 2016
Schoch had been drinking for too long for this to be a hangover worth mentioning. But also too long to recollect every detail from the previous evening. He woke later than usual, with a dry mouth, gluey eyes and his pulse racing, but no headache.
The heavy raindrops were making the twigs of the bushes at the entrance to his cave bounce up and down. Beyond these, in the dawn light, Schoch could make out the grey curtain of rain and hear its even drone. The Föhn had abated and it felt unusually cold for June.
Schoch wriggled out of his sleeping bag, stood up as far as his low-ceilinged billet would allow and rolled up his bed tightly. He tucked his shirt into his trousers and reached for his shoes.
He always took them off by the opening to the cave – far enough inside so they wouldn’t get drenched by a sudden downpour – but now he could only find one. After a while he located the other shoe outside the cave, lying in a puddle beside one of the dripping bushes. Schoch couldn’t recall this ever happening before, no matter how hammered he’d been. Perhaps he ought to slow down a bit.
Cursing, he fished out the blue and white striped trainer, took the tatty Nivea towel from his holdall and tried to pat the shoe dry.
It was hopeless. Schoch slipped his foot into the cold, damp trainer.
A vague thought flitted through his brain, something from last night. Something strange. But what? An object? An experience? Like a forgotten word or name that’s on the tip of your tongue.
He couldn’t hold on to it, and meanwhile he was starting to freeze as the cold from the shoe crept up his leg. He needed to move and get some warm coffee in his belly.
Schoch put on a yellow raincoat that he’d pinched one day from a construction site. It had once borne the logo of the construction firm, but now it was flecked with tar and only the word ‘Building’ was still visible. He stuffed his sleeping bag into the stained holdall that contained a few more of his belongings. Pants, socks, T-shirt, shirt, wash bag and a wallet with his papers. The rest of his things were stored in the Salvation Army hostel; Schoch was on good terms with the man who ran it.
