The Magician's Elephant

  “Who are you talking to?” said an older girl named Lisette.

  She and Adele were in the orphanage kitchen together, bent over a bucket, working at peeling potatoes.

  “No one,” said Adele.

  “But your lips were moving,” said Lisette. “I saw them move. You were saying something.”

  “I was saying the elephant’s words,” said Adele.

  “The elephant’s words?”

  “The elephant from my dreams. She speaks to me.”

  “Oh, of course, silly me, the speaking elephant from your dreams,” said Lisette. She snorted.

  “The elephant knocks at the door and asks for me,” said Adele. She lowered her voice. “I believe that she has come to take me away from here.”

  “To take you away?” said Lisette. Her eyes narrowed. “And where would she take you?”

  “Home,” said Adele.

  “Ha! Listen to her!” said Lisette. “Home.” She snorted again. “How old are you?”

  “Six,” said Adele. “Almost seven.”

  “Yes, well, you are very exceptionally, amazingly stupid for almost seven years old,” said Lisette.

  There came a knock at the kitchen door.

  “Hark!” said Lisette. “Someone knocks! Maybe it is an elephant.” She got up and went to the door and threw it wide. “Look, Adele,” she said, turning back with a terrible smile on her face. “Look who is here. It is an elephant come to take you home.”

  There was not, of course, an elephant at the door. Instead, there stood the neighborhood beggar and his dog.

  “We have nothing to give you,” said Lisette in a loud voice. “We’re orphans. This is an orphanage.” She stamped her foot.

  “We have nothing to give,” sang the beggar, “but look, Adele, an elephant, and this is wonderful news.”

  Adele looked at the beggar’s face and saw that he was truly, terribly hungry.

  “Look, Adele, an elephant,” he sang, “but you must know that the truth is always changing.”

  “Don’t sing,” said Lisette. She slammed the door shut and came and sat down next to Adele. “You see, now, who comes and knocks at the door here? Blind dogs. And beggars who sing meaningless songs. Do you think that they have come to take us home?”

  “He was hungry,” said Adele. She felt an unsolicited tear roll down her cheek. It was followed by another and then another.

  “So what?” said Lisette. “Who do you know who isn’t hungry?”

  “No one,” answered Adele truthfully. She, herself, was always hungry.

  “Yes,” said Lisette, “we are all hungry. So what?”

  Adele could think of nothing to say in reply.

  All she had were the words of a dream elephant. They were not much, but they were hers, and she began again to say them to herself: It is the one you are calling Adele I am coming for to keep; it is the one you are calling Adele I am coming for to keep; it is the one you are calling Adele —

  “Quit moving your lips,” said Lisette. “Can’t you see that no one intends to come for us?”

  On the first Saturday of the month, the city of Baltese turned out to see the elephant. The line snaked from the home of the countess Quintet out into the street and down the hill as far as the eye could see. There were young men with waxed mustaches and pomaded hair and old ladies dressed in borrowed finery, their wrinkled faces scrubbed clean. There were candle makers who smelled of warm beeswax, washerwomen with roughened hands and hopeful faces, babies still at their mothers’ breasts, and old men who leaned heavily on canes.

  Milliners stood with their heads held high, their latest creations displayed proudly on their heads. Lamplighters, their eyes heavy from lack of sleep, stood next to street sweepers, who held their brooms before them as if they were swords. Priests and fortunetellers stood side by side and eyed each other with distaste and wariness.

  Everyone, it seemed, was there: the whole city of Baltese stood in line to see the elephant.

  And everyone, each person, had hopes and dreams, wishes for revenge, and desires for love.

  They stood together.

  They waited.

  And secretly, deep within their hearts, even though they knew it could not truly be so, they each expected that the mere sight of the elephant would somehow deliver them, would make their wishes and hopes and desires come true.

  Peter stood in line directly behind a man who was dressed entirely in black and who had atop his head a black hat with an exceptionally wide brim. The man rocked from heel to toe, muttering, “The dimensions of an elephant are most impressive. The dimensions of an elephant are impressive in the extreme. I will now detail for you the dimensions of an elephant.”

  Peter listened carefully, because he would have liked very much to know the actual dimensions of an elephant. It seemed like good information to have, but the man in the black hat never arrived at the point of announcing the figures. Instead, after insisting that he would detail the dimensions, he paused dramatically, took a deep breath, and then began again, rocking from heel to toe and saying, “The dimensions of an elephant are most impressive. The dimensions of an elephant are impressive in the extreme. . . .”

  The line inched slowly forward, and mercifully, late in the afternoon, the black-hatted man’s mutterings were eclipsed by the music of a beggar who stood, singing, his hand outstretched, a black dog at his side.

  The beggar’s voice was sweet and gentle and full of hope. Peter closed his eyes and listened. The song placed a steady hand on his heart. It comforted him.

  “Look, Adele,” sang the beggar. “Here is your elephant.”

  Adele.

  Peter turned his head and looked directly at the beggar, and the man, incredibly, sang her name again.

  Adele.

  “Let him hold her,” his mother had said to the midwife the night that the baby was born, the night that his mother died.

  “I do not think I should,” said the midwife. “He is too young himself.”

  “No, let him hold her,” his mother said.

  And so the midwife gave him the crying baby. And he held her.

  “This is what you must remember,” said his mother. “She is your sister, and her name is Adele. She belongs to you, and you belong to her. That is what you must remember. Can you do that?”

  Peter had nodded.

  “You will take care of her?”

  Peter had nodded again.

  “Can you promise me, Peter?”

  “Yes,” he had said, and then he said that terrible, wonderful word once more, in case his mother had not heard him: “Yes.”

  And Adele, as if she had heard and understood him, too, had stopped crying.

  Peter opened his eyes. The beggar was gone, and from ahead of him in line came the now achingly familiar words, “The dimensions of an elephant . . .”

  Peter took off his hat and put it back on again and then took it off, working hard at keeping the tears inside.

  He had promised.

  He had promised.

  He received a shove from behind.

  “Are you juggling your hat, or are you waiting in line?” said a gruff voice.

  “Waiting in line,” said Peter.

  “Well, then, move forward, why don’t you?”

  Peter put his hat on his head and stepped forward smartly, like the soldier, the very good soldier, he had once trained to become.

  In the home of the count and countess Quintet, inside the ballroom, as the people filed by her, touching her, pulling at her, leaning against her, spitting, laughing, weeping, praying, and singing, the elephant stood brokenhearted.

  There were too many things that she did not understand.

  Where were her brothers and sisters? Her mother?

  Where was the long grass and the bright sun? Where were the hot days and the dark pools of shade and the cool nights?

  The world had become too cold and confusing and chaotic to bear.

  She stopped reminding herself of
her name.

  She decided that she would like to die.

  The countess Quintet had discovered that it was a somewhat messy affair to have an elephant in one’s ballroom, and so, for matters of delicacy and cleanliness, she engaged the services of a small, extremely unobtrusive man whose job it was to stand behind the elephant, ever at the ready with a bucket and a shovel. The little man’s back was bent and twisted, and because of this, it was almost impossible for him to lift his face and look directly at anyone or anything.

  He viewed everything sideways.

  His name was Bartok Whynn, and before he came to stand perpetually and forever at the rear of the elephant, he had been a stonecutter who labored high atop the city’s largest and most magnificent cathedral, working at coaxing gargoyles from stone. Bartok Whynn’s gargoyles were well and truly frightening, each different from the others and each more horrifying than the one that had preceded it.

  On a day in late summer, the summer before the winter the elephant arrived in Baltese, Bartok Whynn was engaged in the task of bringing to life the most gruesome gargoyle he had yet conceived when he lost his footing and fell. Because he was so high atop the cathedral, it took him quite a long time to reach the ground. The stonecutter had time to think.

  What he thought was, I am going to die.

  This thought was followed by another thought: But I know something. I know something. What is it I know?

  It came to him then. Ah, yes, I know what I know. Life is funny. That is what I know.

  And falling through the air, he actually laughed aloud. The people on the street below heard him. They exclaimed over it among themselves: “Imagine a man falling to his death and laughing all the while!”

  Bartok Whynn hit the ground, and his broken, bleeding, and unconscious body was borne by his fellow stonecutters through the streets and home to his wife, who equivocated between sending for the funeral director and sending for the doctor.

  She settled, finally, upon the doctor.

  “His back is broken and he cannot survive,” the doctor told Bartok Whynn’s wife. “It is not possible for any man to survive such a fall. That he has lived this long is some miracle that we cannot understand and should only be grateful for. Surely it has some meaning beyond our understanding.”

  Bartok Whynn, who had, up to this point, been unconscious, made a small sound and took hold of the doctor’s great coat and gestured for him to come close.

  “Wait only,” said the doctor. “Attend, madam. Now he will deliver the words, the important words, the great message that he has been spared in order to speak. You may give those words to me, sir. Give them to me.” And with a flourish, the doctor flung his coat to the side and bent over Bartok’s broken body and offered him his ear.

  “Heeeeeeeeeeee,” whispered Bartok Whynn into the doctor’s ear, “heee, heee.”

  “What does he say?” said the wife.

  The doctor stood up. His face was very pale. “Your husband says nothing,” he said.

  “Nothing?” said the wife.

  Bartok tugged again at the doctor’s coat. Again, the doctor bent and offered his ear, but this time with markedly less enthusiasm.

  “Heeeeeeeeeeee,” laughed Bartok Whynn into the doctor’s ear, “heeeee, heee.”

  The doctor stood up. He straightened his coat.

  “He said nothing?” said the wife. She wrung her hands.

  “Madam,” said the doctor, “he laughs. He has lost his mind. His life is to follow. I tell you he will not, he cannot, live.”

  But the stonecutter’s broken back healed in its strange and crooked way, and he lived.

  Before the fall, Bartok Whynn was a dour man who measured five feet nine inches and who laughed, at most, once a fortnight. After the fall, he measured four feet eleven inches, and he laughed darkly, knowingly, daily, hourly, at everything and nothing at all. The whole of existence struck him as cause for hilarity.

  He went back to work high atop the cathedral. He held the chisel in his hand. He stood before the stone. But he could not stop laughing long enough to coax anything from it. He laughed and laughed, his hands shook, the stone remain untouched, the gargoyles did not appear, and Bartok Whynn was dismissed from his job.

  That is how he came, in the end, to stand behind the elephant with a bucket and a shovel. His new position in life did not at all, in any way, diminish his propensity for hilarity. If anything, if possible, he laughed more. He laughed harder.

  Bartok Whynn laughed.

  And so when Peter, late in the day, in the perpetual, unvarying gloom of the Baltesian winter afternoon, finally stepped through the elephant door and into the brightly lit ballroom of the countess Quintet, what he heard was laughter.

  The elephant, at first, was not visible to him.

  There were so many people gathered around her that she was obscured entirely. But then, as Peter got closer and closer still, she was finally, and at last, revealed. She was both larger and smaller than he had expected her to be. And the sight of her, her head hung low, her eyes closed, made his heart feel tight in his chest.

  “Move along — ha, ha, hee!” shouted a small man with a shovel. “Wheeeeee! You must move along so that everyone, everyone, may view the elephant.”

  Peter took his hat from his head. He held it over his heart. He inched close enough to put his hand on the rough, solid flank of the elephant. She was moving, swaying from side to side. The warmth of her astonished him. Peter shoved at the people surrounding him and managed to get his face up next to hers so that he could say what he had come to say, ask what he had come to ask.

  “Please,” he said, “you know where my sister is. Can you tell me?”

  And then he felt terrible for saying anything at all. She seemed so tired and sad. Was she asleep?

  “Move along, move along — ha, ha, hee!” shouted the little man.

  “Please,” whispered Peter to the elephant, “could you — I need you to — could you — would it be possible for you to open your eyes? Could you look at me?”

  The elephant stopped swaying. She held very still. And then, after a long moment, she opened her eyes and looked directly at him. She delivered to him a single, great, despairing glance.

  And Peter forgot about Adele and his mother and the fortuneteller and the old soldier and his father and battlefields and lies and promises and predictions. He forgot about everything except for the terrible truth of what he saw, what he understood in the elephant’s eyes.

  She was heartbroken.

  She must go home.

  The elephant must go home or she would surely die.

  As for the elephant, when she opened her eyes and saw the boy, she felt a small shock go through her.

  He was looking at her as if he knew her.

  He was looking at her as if he understood.

  For the first time since she had come through the roof of the opera house, the elephant felt something akin to hope.

  “Don’t worry,” Peter whispered to her. “I will make sure that you get home.”

  She stared at him.

  “I promise,” said Peter.

  “Next!” shouted the little man with the shovel. “You must, you simply must, move along. Ha, ha, hee! There are others waiting to see the — ha, ha, hee! — elephant, too.”

  Peter stepped away.

  He turned. He walked without looking back, out of the ballroom of the countess Quintet, through the elephant door, and into the dark world.

  He had made a promise to the elephant, but what kind of promise was it?

  It was the worst kind of promise; it was yet another promise that he could not keep.

  How could he, Peter, make sure that an elephant got home? He did not even know where the elephant’s home was. Was it Africa? India? Where were those places, and how could he get an elephant there?

  He might just as well have promised the elephant that he would secure for her an enormous set of wings.

  It is horrible, what I have done, t
hought Peter. It is terrible. I should never have promised. Nor should I have asked the fortuneteller my question. I should not have, no. I should have left things as they were. And what the magician did was a terrible thing, too. He should never have brought the elephant here. I am glad that he is in prison. They should never, ever let him out. He is a terrible man to do such a thing.

  And then Peter was struck by a thought so wondrous that he stopped walking. He put his hat on his head. He took it off. He put it back on again.

  The magician.

  If the world held magic powerful enough to make the elephant appear, then there must exist, too, magic in equal measure, magic powerful enough to undo what had been done.

  There must be magic that could send the elephant home.

  “The magician,” said Peter out loud, and then he said, “Leo Matienne!”

  He put his hat on his head. He began to run.

  Leo Matienne opened the door of his apartment. He was barefoot. A napkin was tied around his neck, and a bit of carrot and a crumb of bread were caught in his mustache. The smell of mutton stew wafted out into the cold, dark street.

  “It is Peter Augustus Duchene!” said Leo Matienne. “And he has his hat on his head. And he is here, on the ground, instead of up there, acting like a cuckoo in a clock.”

  “I am very sorry to disturb you at your dinner,” said Peter, “but I must see the magician.”

  “You must do what?”

  “I need for you to take me to the prison so that I may see the magician. You are a policeman, an officer of the law; surely they will let you inside.”

  “Who is it?” said Gloria Matienne. She came to the door and stood beside her husband.

  “Good evening, Madam Matienne,” said Peter. He took off his hat and bowed to Gloria.

  “And a good evening to you,” said Gloria.

  “Yes, good evening,” said Peter. He put his hat back on his head. “I am sorry to disturb you at your dinner, but I need to go to the prison immediately.”

  “He needs to go to the prison?” said Gloria Matienne to her husband. “Is that what he said? Have mercy! What kind of request is that for a child to make? And look at him, please. He is so skinny that you can see right through him. He is . . . what is the word?”