An Elephant in the Garden

  With the snow gone, early signs of spring were all around us by now, the trees budding, the meadows and hedgerows dotted with flowers. And the birds sang. But there was rain, and often at night too. We trudged on, through fields and forests, fording streams where we had to, following Peter, following his compass. But from those last weeks of our long journey into the night, I do not remember so much the tiredness, nor the cold and the wet, nor the aching hunger we were all living with the whole time now. What I remember best was the children singing. I think it probably started as one of Mutti’s ideas to keep them happy, to keep their minds occupied. And once they began singing they did not seem to want to stop. They sang, as we marched along, lightening the darkness for all of us. They sang, crammed together in some shepherd’s hut, in some forester’s shed, huddling together for warmth. And when they sang, sooner or later we joined in. We loved that, loved being part of their music making. We were singing away our fears, and doing it together.

  We must have been a strange sight for those who caught sight of us: Peter and I, stomping along together ahead, an elephant behind us with two or three children aboard, and, following them, Mutti and her cavalcade of singing children. Karli was getting on so well with the other children by now, that often he would get down off Marlene and walk along with them, singing with them. I think he did not want to be left out, he wanted to feel he was one of them. It would not be true to say that all this singing meant we could entirely forget our discomforts, our hunger and our anxieties, but it most certainly helped us to put one foot in front of the other.

  As the days and nights passed, there was something else that lifted our spirits, and gave us new hope. We were no longer hearing the sound of guns behind us. They were ahead of us now, lighting the western horizon every night—American artillery, Peter told us. That put a real spring in our step, but at the same time we knew that no guns were friendly guns, even if they were American. We were still in grave danger.

  More often than not now, we found ourselves sharing whatever shelter we could find with other refugees, and often with dozens of retreating German soldiers too, which made us all very nervous. But we need not have worried. They were all far too exhausted, and too depressed, to ask questions. They all loved to make a fuss of Marlene, and I think it helped also to have the children with us. Even the soldiers seemed happy to share what little food they had. It is true also that once or twice, someone did steal our food while we were sleeping—but then it would be fair to say that Peter had stolen it in the first place, I suppose.

  Peter made himself very popular with everyone because whenever he came back from one of his successful scrounging quests, he would share out all he could. The soldiers we encountered came with their stories like everyone else, and all their stories told one tale, that Americans were very close now, that they were breaking through everywhere, that their armies could be just over the next hill.

  But it still came as a surprise to us on that day we first met up with the Americans. We were late finding our shelter that morning, but Peter was not too worried because there was a thick mist all around us, and we were well enough hidden. But of course that made it all the more difficult to spot a likely barn or shed where we could lie up for the day.

  I remember we were making our way up a hillside, the early morning mists thinner now and wispier than before. All the children were singing, Karli too, walking along with them. I was leading Marlene by the ear, talking to her, as I often did, when she suddenly stopped, and lifted her head. Ahead of us, Peter had stopped too, and was holding up his hand. For just a moment or two, I thought he had found us a shelter, but I couldn’t see it. There was no barn, no shed, only trunkless trees rising strangely out of the mist. The children had fallen silent. We all stood there, bewildered at the terrifying crescendo of sound we were now hearing. It seemed to be coming from all around us, roaring, rattling, creaking, clanking, and it was coming closer all the time. The ground itself was shaking under our feet.

  Then out through the mist they came. Tanks! Twenty or thirty of them, and they kept on coming. “Americans!” Peter shouted. “They are Americans!” And he began waving at them frantically, and running towards them. That was when Marlene took fright. She pulled away from me, and fled. I went after her, calling and calling for her to come back. But her run became a charging stampede. Trumpeting in her terror, her ears flapping wildly, her trunk flailing, she simply disappeared into the mist.

  By the time the lead tank reached us, they had all lurched to a stop. A soldier’s head came up out of the turret. He pulled off his headphones, and stared at us in disbelief. I shall never forget the first words he said to us. “Holy cow! What in hell’s name was that? Was that an elephant?”

  “It was,” Peter told him. “We sure are glad to see you.”

  “You American?” the soldier asked.

  “Canadian,” Peter replied. “RAF. Flight Sergeant Peter Kamm. Navigator. Shot down over Dresden a few weeks back.”

  “You walked all the way from Dresden?” the soldier asked, still incredulous. “With an elephant, and all those kids?”

  “Yep,” said Peter.

  “Holy cow!” the soldier said. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “We have to find that elephant,” Peter told him. “We have to go after her. She has been with us all the way.”

  “Don’t you worry,” the soldier assured us cheerily. “We will find her for you. Nowhere much an elephant can go without being noticed, I’d say. But right now you guys have got to get out of here. There is a war going on, you know.”

  Mutti tried to argue with him, to let her go after Marlene. Karli and I begged him too. Mutti told him and told him that Marlene would just keep on running, that she would be terrified, that no one would be able to catch her, except one of us. She knew only us, she trusted only us. But the soldier would not listen. We were all led away, still protesting, by an escort of soldiers. Mutti was inconsolable. I think she knew then that she would never see Marlene again. So at the moment of our greatest triumph, we had lost Marlene. For days, for weeks, we never stopped looking for her, asking after her. But no one had seen her. It was as if she had simply disappeared off the face of the earth.

  At this point in the story Lizzie stopped, and looked at us as if to say: That’s it, that’s the end.

  “And? And? What happened?” Karl was echoing my thoughts exactly. “What happened after that? To Marlene, to all of you? Did you find her in the end? And Papi, did Papi come home?”

  “What happened afterwards?” Lizzie replied. “Oh, a lot happened, a whole lifetime of happenings. But I think I shall keep it short. I am suddenly rather tired. And you must be too. Well, here is how the story ends…”

  Within a day or two of meeting the Americans, we found ourselves—Mutti, Karli, me and the choir schoolchildren—in a camp, a sort of refugee camp, for “displaced persons,” that was what they called us. Peter did all he could to stop them from taking us away. He told them how Mutti had helped him to escape, told them the whole story. But rules were rules, they said, and that was that. All displaced Germans were being gathered up into camps.

  Before we were loaded up and driven away in an army truck, they gave us a few moments to say goodbye to him. That was when he pressed this compass into my hand, and told us that he promised he would go on looking for Marlene. Mutti was there, so was Karli, but I remember I could not help myself. When it came to my turn to say good-bye, I clung to him and cried. He whispered in my ear that he would write, that he would come back for me and find me. The last I saw of him as we were driven away, he was standing there in the rain, in his uniform again now, waving us off. I thought my heart would break.

  We all lived for six months or more in that camp. When I think about it now, it was not so bad, I suppose. There was no privacy, none, that was the worst of it. And I hated living behind barbed wire, unable to go where I wanted, do what I wanted. The huts were overcrowded, but they were warm and dry at night. Defeat was a b
itter blow to many of the soldiers and refugees, but for our family I have to say that the end of the war and the death of Hitler came as a great relief. We learned that life goes on.

  Among the thousands of prisoners there were many musicians and actors and poets. They produced plays, gave concerts. It broke the tedium of captivity. For an hour or two we could simply forget everything. The best concert for me, without any doubt, was when the choir schoolchildren gave a performance for everyone. They sang mostly the folk songs we had sung together through those long nights tramping through the dark. They knew our family favorite was “I Walked Through a Green Forest.” I was quite sure, and so was Mutti and Karli, that they sang it specially for us.

  Mutti decided after a while that what was needed in the camp was a school for all the children, including the choir schoolchildren, and she needed my help, she said, to look after die Kleine, the little ones. It kept us both busy, and feeling useful too, and that was so important. Most important of all though to me in my time in the camp were the letters I got from Peter. I always wrote back the same day, to some address in London. He was always full of good news, and great plans, about how once things had settled down, and he could get leave, he would come back and fetch me. We were going to get married, and then live in Canada together. We would go canoeing and fishing. He could not wait to show me the salmon and the black bears, and everything in the Canadian wilderness that he had told me so much about.

  When we were all at last released from the camp, we had to say good-bye to the choir schoolchildren. It was a tearful parting. They had become almost like family to us. The authorities only let us out because we had an address to go to. Mutti took us to live with a cousin of hers in Heidelberg. We had one room overlooking the river, where we could see the sun setting over the town. Renate was Mutti’s oldest cousin, a schoolteacher and a bit strict and prim. She did her best to be kind to us, and tolerant, but she was used to living alone, and sometimes, I think, she found it difficult to hide her irritation with us.

  Even though we were now free, and life was returning to some kind of normality, this was the worst time of all for me because Peter’s letters just stopped coming. I had sent him our new address, but he never wrote again. And Mutti too was as unhappy as I had ever seen her. Every day she went to ask the authorities for news of Papi. There was none. Both the men we loved had disappeared. I am sure this was why I became closer during these days to Mutti than ever before.

  And Karli? Poor Karli cried every night for Papi and Marlene, but he got on much better than either Mutti or me with Renate, and would tell her again and again all his stories about Marlene and our miraculous escape across Germany. In the end we managed to find ourselves a little apartment nearby. Renate arranged for Mutti to teach at her school, and found places there too for Karli and me. So we went back to school. It seemed strange to be back at school again after so much had happened. I was so full of sadness by now that I found studying impossible.

  But then came the glad, glad news that Papi was alive. He had been taken prisoner by the Russians over a year before. We did not know when he would be home, but he was alive and that was all that mattered. We cried for joy when we heard, and Mutti sat us ’round the table for a family moment. Now I knew that Papi was safe, I prayed only for Peter. Every time the postman came, I would run out to meet him and ask if there was a letter. I kept writing, kept begging him to write back. But no letter came. I began to give up all hope of seeing him again.

  Then one afternoon—it was a few months later—we were on our way back from school, and had just turned the corner into our street, when we saw there was someone sitting on our front doorstep, with a suitcase beside him. He stood up and took off his hat. It was Peter. The trouble was I had to share the hugging with Mutti and Karli.

  “Why didn’t you write?” I cried, not that it mattered now. Peter told me later that when he had left England and gone back to Canada, they just had not sent my letters on. Then they had all turned up one day at his home address in Canada in one big parcel. That was how he knew where to find us.

  Maybe you have guessed the rest. We got married, in Heidelberg it was. You should have heard the bells ring out. A week or so later the two of us sailed for Canada. I hated to leave Mutti and Karli, but Mutti insisted.

  “We have very few chances for happiness in this life,” she said. “You take it. Go.” Karli told me, as he said good-bye, that he would come and live in Canada when he was older, and he did too. Sometimes all really is well that ends well.

  It took another four years though before Papi finally came home from Russia. Mutti wrote that he was thin, but that she was feeding him up, and that as soon as he was well enough they were going to apply for visas to come to Canada and join us in our little town not far from Toronto. So that is how we all came to live here in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Peter was acting in the theater here, and getting bigger parts all the time. And I became a nurse, like your mother, Karli. Life was good. Cold in winter, but good. Peaceful. Contented.

  But that is not quite the end of it. One summer evening—we would have been in our forties now, I suppose—Peter and I went to the circus in Toronto, a traveling circus from France. Peter always loved to watch clowning. He had a clown costume himself, and he would perform at children’s parties sometimes. But right away it was not the clowns that interested me. The star of the show was an elephant, and I knew as soon as I set eyes on her that it was Marlene. And the extraordinary thing was that she knew me. As she was led around the ring in the grand parade, she stopped right by me where I was sitting in the front row, and reached out her trunk towards me. I felt her breath on me. I looked into her weepy eye. It was her. There was no doubt about it.

  We went ’round the back afterwards, and talked to the circus people. They had bought her from another circus ten years before. They had no idea where she had come from before that. They said she was the best elephant they had ever had, that she had quite a sense of humor. I told them our whole story then. They cried, and we cried.

  We spent long hours with her for the whole of that weekend, just talking to her, telling her about our lives, how Mutti and Papi had passed away within months of each other a while ago now, and how Karli was making films, how he could still do his juggling. The morning the circus was packing up to leave town, we were there to wave her off. We cried again, of course we did, but at the same time, we were not sad at all, just happy that we had met up again, that she had survived as we had, and that all was well with her.

  I have been on my own for a while now, the only one left. Peter and I were married for almost sixty years. I cannot say we never had a cross word. We had our problems and our sadnesses too. Everyone does. No children. I should have liked children of my own. But we were as happy as anyone has the right to be happy. And this is Peter’s compass.

  Lizzie held the compass out to Karl. “Yours now, Karli,” she said.

  I tried to protest, but she put it in Karl’s hand and folded his fingers over it. “You keep it,” she said. “You look after it, and look after my story too. I should like people to know about it. Oh, and do not forget to bring me my photograph album tomorrow, will you?”

  I could see she was completely exhausted. I think she was asleep before we left her.

  When I came to work the next morning—school had been canceled because of the snow—Karl was with me. We had Lizzie’s photograph album with us. We sat on either side of her bed while she talked us through her photos, one or two of the family down on the farm, one of her wedding day in Heidelberg, some of Peter in theatrical costumes, several of them both, then in the new city of Dresden.

  “And look!” she said, turning triumphantly to the last page. “This is Marlene and me at the circus that day! Do you believe me now?”

  “I have always believed you,” Karl told her.

  “Always?”

  “Always,” said Karl.

  “And you?” Lizzie asked, looking at me knowingly.

  “Almo
st always,” I replied.

  Author’s Note

  An Elephant in the Garden, like most of my stories, sprang from historical truths, two in this case.

  In the middle of the night some two years ago, I was half awake, half asleep, listening to the radio. Someone was talking about a female zookeeper—she looked after the elephants in particular—in Belfast during World War II. This zookeeper was told one day, along with everyone else who worked there, that if the German bombers came to attack the city, all the large animals would have to be shot, in case the cages were burst open by the bombing, and the animals got out into the town.

  She was appalled. She went to her boss and begged him to make an exception of one young elephant she had raised herself, the mother having died. The elephant would be no harm to anyone, she said. Her boss was reluctant, but finally agreed, only because the zookeeper promised she would keep an eye on the elephant 24/7, and the only way she could do this was to take the elephant home each night after work, and keep him in the back garden!

  I woke up in the morning not sure whether I had dreamed this story or not. So I went on Google, put in “Belfast, Zoo, Elephant, WWII” and up came a newspaper story confirming the whole thing. And incredibly, there was a photograph too, of the lady and the little elephant in her back garden! (Try it and you’ll see.)