The Republic of Nothing Read Free Page A

jewellery. A war had broken out somewhere on the planet, but it wouldn’t reach us here. Pieces of the world’s crisis would wash ashore and remind us all of the turmoil elsewhere, but we would live long and free in the Republic of Nothing and when we died and our souls became light as feathers, we would dive straight into the sunrise and ride the backs of living elephants.

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    In reporting all of what follows, I confess that my memory is not as perfect as it appears. The vivid visual impressions persist but so much of the rest, the sense of this thing, was pieced together from later conversations withHants, with my father, with secondary versions from my mother and all those loose fragments of my own childhood memory. On top of that, I might have exaggerated my own role in this but I promise to be as faithful to the truth as is humanly possible. I was not quite five and as you must recall from your own memory, life is full of surprises and shocks at that age as you have not carved up the world into sensible categories. The only physical truth that remains of this event is the curious artifact that I still wear around my neck, dangling from a thin gold chain. It resembles little of what it once was.
    Aside from the crocodile, there was no precedent on the island for the disposal of exotic animals. Hants wanted the tusks and the bones, all right, but he didn’t think he was up to the job of major taxidermy on our sad friend and victim whose soul may have been light on the wind but whose flesh was beginning to stink.
    â€œHe shouldn’t go back into the sea,” my father said. “This is a land animal. Land animals want to rest beneath the earth.”
    â€œAll I want is the bones and tusks. You boys bury the rest, if you’d be so kind.” Hants said it like he was asking us if we would mind helping out with the dishes after dinner. The whole job didn’t look that easy to me.
    â€œThe main thing is the heart. We need to bury the heart,” my father said, revising his previous assessment. “As long as we bury the
heart
in the earth, I don’t think it matters much what we do with the rest.” But Hants had already gone into his shack and come out with a long machete and a sharpening stone.
    I guess you’d have to know Hants the way we did to realize that he wasn’t a perverse, unfeeling monster. He saw a task before him and was ready for it — the job of liberating the skeletal structure from the giant beast and then reassembling the parts with wire and concrete outside of his home. In another age and place, Hants might have assembled cathedrals orskyscrapers, but here he had to work with the materials available. He was a born museum man, somebody who wanted to reconstruct, preserve, show off and pester with what he had discovered of the natural world.
    As he made his first incision, skilled as a surgeon, straight up the belly of the poor bloated beast, my father made me turn away and follow him to the side of Hants’ work shed. From inside the window, the stuffed croc’ peered ominously out, its oversize cat’s-eye glass marbles looking strangely alien and maligned.
    Hants began to sing in a warbly voice an old sad song. With a pick axe and shovel over one shoulder, my father took my hand and led me off in search of some place with soil deep enough for an elephant burial. “The important thing is to bury the heart,” he reminded me. “I don’t know where we’re gonna find a decent grave site around here, though. Nothing but ribs of rock. Can’t chip away at bedrock. But we owe it to the creature to get the heart as deep as we can. Maybe the brain. Hearts and brains. The rest can go as carrion meat if it has to.”
    â€œHow did it find its way here?” I asked, inquisitive as ever. But what I was really wondering was how would Hants know what an elephant heart looked like and how would he go about hollowing out the skull and