“Come away from the window,” Vilna Lutz called to Peter.
Peter held very still. He found that it was hard now for him to look at Vilna Lutz’s face.
“Private Duchene,” said Vilna Lutz.
“Sir?” said Peter without turning.
“A battle is being waged,” said Vilna Lutz,“a battle between good and evil! Whose side will you do battle on? Private Duchene!”
Peter turned and faced the old man.
“What is this? Are you crying?”
“No,” said Peter. “I am not.” But when he put a hand to his face, he was surprised to discover that his cheek was wet.
“That is good,” said Vilna Lutz, “soldiers do not weep; at least, they should not weep. It is not to be borne, the weeping of soldiers. Something is amiss in the universe when a soldier cries. Hark! Do you hear the rattle of muskets?”
“I do not,” said Peter.
“Oh, it is cold,” said the old soldier. “Still, we must practice maneuvers. The marching must begin. Yes, the marching must begin.”
Peter did not move.
“Private Duchene! You will march! Armies must move. Soldiers must march.”
Peter sighed. His heart was so heavy inside of him that he did not, in truth, think that he had it in him to move at all. He lifted one foot and then the other.
“Higher,” said Vilna Lutz. “March with purpose; march like a man. March as your father would have marched.”
What difference does it make if an elephant has come? Peter thought as he stood in the same place and marched without going anywhere at all. It is just some grand and terrible joke that the fortuneteller has told me. My sister is not alive. There is no reason to hope.
The longer he marched, the more convinced Peter became that things were indeed hopeless and that an elephant was a ridiculous answer to any question — but a particularly ridiculous answer to a question posed by the human heart.
The people of the city of Baltese became obsessed with the elephant.
In the market square and in the ballrooms, in the stables and in the gaming houses, in the churches and in the squares, it was “the elephant,” “the elephant that came through the roof,” “the elephant conjured by the magician,” “the elephant that crippled the noblewoman.”
The bakers of the city concocted a flat, oversize pastry and filled it with cream and sprinkled it with cinnamon and sugar and called the confection an elephant ear, and the people could not get enough of it.
The street vendors sold, for exorbitant prices, chunks of plaster that had fallen onto the stage when the elephant made her dramatic appearance. “Cataclysm!” the vendors shouted. “Mayhem! Possess the plaster of disaster!”
The puppet shows in the public gardens featured elephants that came crashing onto the stage, crushing the other puppets beneath them, making the young children laugh and clap in delight and recognition.
From the pulpits of the churches, the preachers spoke about divine intervention, the surprises of fate, the wages of sin, and the dire consequences of magic gone afoul.
The elephant’s dramatic and unexpected appearance changed the way the people of the city of Baltese spoke. If, for instance, a person was deeply surprised or moved, he or she would say, “I was, you understand, in the presence of the elephant.”
As for the fortunetellers of the city, they were kept particularly busy. They gazed into their teacups and crystal balls. They read the palms of thousands of hands. They studied their cards and cleared their throats and predicted that amazing things were yet to come. If elephants could arrive without warning, then a dramatic shift had certainly occurred in the universe. The stars were aligning themselves for something even more spectacular; rest assured, rest assured.
Meanwhile, in the dance halls and in the ballrooms, the men and the women of the city, the low and the high, danced the same dance: a swaying, lumbering two-step called, of course, the Elephant.
Everywhere, always, it was “the elephant, the elephant, the magician’s elephant.”
“It is absolutely ruining the social season,” said the countess Quintet to her husband. “It is all people will speak of. Why, it is as bad as a war. Actually, it is worse. At least with a war, there are well-dressed heroes capable of making interesting conversation. But what do we have here? Nothing, nothing but a smelly, loathsome beast, and yet people will insist on speaking of nothing else. I truly feel, I am quite certain, I am absolutely convinced, that I will lose my mind if I hear the word elephant one more time.
“Elephant,” muttered the count.
“What did you say?” said the countess. She whirled around and stared at her husband.
“Nothing,” said the count.
“Something must be done,” said the countess.
“Indeed,” said Count Quintet, “and who will do it?”
“I beg your pardon?”
The count cleared his throat. “I only wanted to say, my dear, that you must admit that what occurred was, indeed, truly extraordinary.”
“Why must I admit it? What was extraordinary about it?”
The countess had not been present at the opera house that fateful evening, and so she had missed the cataclysmic event, and the countess was the kind of person who hated, most horribly, to miss cataclysmic events.
“Well, you see —” began Count Quintet.
“I do not see,” said the countess. “And you will not make me see.”
“Yes,” said her husband, “I suppose that much is true.”
Unlike his wife, the count had been in attendance at the theater that night. He had been seated so close to the stage that he had felt the rush of displaced air that presaged the elephant’s appearance.
“There must be a way to wrest control of the situation,” said the countess Quintet. She paced back and forth. “There must be some way to regain the social season.”
The count closed his eyes. He felt, again, the breeze of the elephant’s arrival. The whole thing had happened in an instant, but it had also occurred so slowly. He, who never cried, had cried that night, because it was as if the elephant had spoken to him and said, “Things are not at all what they seem to be; oh, no, not at all.”
To be in the presence of such a thing, to feel such a feeling!
Count Quintet opened his eyes.
“My dear,” he said, “I have the solution.”
“You do?” said the countess.
“Yes.”
“And what, exactly, would the solution be?”
“If everyone speaks of nothing but the elephant and if you desire to be the center, the heart, of the social season, then you must be the one with the thing that everyone speaks of.”
“But what can you mean?” said the countess. Her lower lip quivered. “Whatever can you mean?”
“What I mean, my dear, is that you must bring the magician’s elephant here.”
When the countess demanded of the universe that it move in a certain way, the universe, trembling and eager to please, did as she bade it do.
And so, in the matter of the elephant and the countess, this is how it happened — this is how it unfolded: there was not, at her home, as lavish and well-appointed a home as it was, a door large enough for an elephant to walk through. The countess Quintet hired a dozen craftsmen. The men worked around the clock, and within a day’s time, a wall was knocked down and an enormous, brightly painted, handsomely decorated door was installed.
The elephant was summoned and arrived under cover of night, escorted by the captain of police, who ushered her through the door that had been constructed expressly for her; then, relieved beyond all measure to have done with the affair, he tipped his hat to the countess and left.
The door was closed and locked behind him, and the elephant became the property of the countess Quintet, who had paid the owner of the opera house money sufficient to repair and retile the whole of his roof a dozen times over.
The elephant belonged entirely to the countess Quintet
, who had written to Madam LaVaughn and expressed at great length and with the utmost eloquence her sorrow over the unspeakable and inexplicable tragedy that had befallen the noblewoman; she offered Madam LaVaughn her full and enthusiastic support in the further prosecution and punishment of the magician.
The fate of the elephant rested absolutely in the hands of the countess Quintet, who had made a very generous contribution indeed to the policemen’s fund.
The elephant, you will now understand, belonged, lock, stock, and barrel, to the countess.
The beast was installed in the ballroom, and the ladies and gentlemen, dukes and duchesses, princes and princesses, counts and countesses flocked to her.
They gathered around her.
The elephant became, quite literally, the center of the social season.
Peter dreamed.
Vilna Lutz was ahead of him in a field, and he, Peter, was running to catch up.
“Hurry!” shouted Vilna Lutz. “You must run like a soldier.”
The field was a field of wheat, and as Peter ran, the wheat grew taller and taller, and soon it was so tall that Vilna Lutz disappeared entirely from view and Peter could only hear his voice shouting, “Hurry, hurry! Run like a man; run like a soldier!”
“It is no good,” said Peter. “No good at all. I have lost him. I will never catch him, and it is pointless to run.”
He sat down and looked up at the blue sky. Around him, the wheat continued to grow, forming a golden wall, sealing him in, protecting him. It is almost like being buried, he thought. I will stay here forever, for all time. No one will ever find me.
“Yes,” he said, “I will stay here.”
And it was then that he noticed that there was a door in the wall of wheat.
Peter stood and went to the wooden door and knocked on it, and the door swung open.
“Hello?” called Peter.
No one answered him.
“Hello?” he called again.
And when there was still no answer, he pushed the door open farther and stepped over the threshold and entered the apartment he had once shared with his mother and father.
Someone was crying.
He went into the bedroom, and there on the bed, wrapped in a blanket, alone and wailing, was a baby.
“Whose baby is this?” Peter said. “Please, whose baby is this?”
The baby continued to cry, and the sound of it was heartbreaking to him, so he bent and picked her up.
“Oh,” he said. “Shhh. There, there.”
He held the baby and rocked her back and forth. After a time, she stopped crying and fell asleep. Peter could not get over how small she was, how easy it was to hold her, how comfortably she fit in his arms.
The door to the apartment stood open, and he could hear the music of the wind moving through the grain. He looked out the window and saw the evening sun hanging golden over the field.
For as far as his eye could see, there was nothing but light.
And he knew, suddenly and absolutely, that the baby he held in his arms was his sister, Adele.
When he woke from this dream, Peter sat up straight and looked around the dark room and said, “But that is how it was. She did cry. I remember. I held her. And she cried. So she could not, after all, have been born dead and without ever drawing breath, as Vilna Lutz has said time and time again. She cried. You must live to cry.”
He lay back down and imagined the weight of his sister in his arms.
Yes, he thought. She cried. I held her. I told my mother that I would watch out for her always. That is how it happened. I know it to be true.
He closed his eyes, and again he saw the door from his dream and felt what it was like to be inside that apartment and to hold his sister and look out at the field of light.
The dream was too beautiful to doubt.
The fortuneteller had not lied.
And if she had not lied about his sister, then perhaps she had told the truth about the elephant, too.
“The elephant,” said Peter.
He spoke the word aloud to the ever-present dark, to the snoring Vilna Lutz, to the whole of the sleeping and indifferent city of Baltese. “The elephant is what matters. She is with the countess. I must find some way to see her. I will ask Leo Matienne. He is an officer of the law, and he will know what to do. Surely there is some way to get inside, to get to the countess and then to the elephant so that it can all be undone, so that it can at last be put right, because Adele does live. She lives.”
Less than five blocks from the Apartments Polonaise stood a grim, dark building that bore the somewhat improbable name of the Orphanage of the Sisters of Perpetual Light, and on the top floor of that building was an austere dormitory outfitted with a series of small iron beds lined up side by side, one right after the other like metal soldiers. In each of these beds slept an orphan, and the last of the beds in the drafty, overlarge dormitory was occupied by a small girl named Adele, who, soon after the incident at the opera house, began to dream of the magician’s elephant.
In Adele’s dreams, the elephant came and knocked at the door of the orphanage. Sister Marie (the Sister of the Door, the nun who admitted unwanted children to the orphanage and the only person ever allowed to open and close the front door of the Orphanage of the Sisters of Perpetual Light) was, of course, the one who answered the elephant’s knock.
“Good of the evening to you,” said the elephant, inclining her head toward Sister Marie. “I have come for the collection of the little person that you are calling by the name Adele.”
“Pardon?” said Sister Marie.
“Adele,” said the elephant. “I have come for the collection of her. She is belonging elsewhere besides.”
“You must speak up,” said Sister Marie. “I am old, and I do not hear well.”
“It is the one you are calling Adele,” said the elephant in a slightly louder voice. “I am coming for to keep her and for taking her to where she is, after all, belonged.”
“I am truly sorry,” said Sister Marie, and her face did look sad. “I cannot understand a word you are saying. Perhaps it is because you are an elephant? Could that be it? Could that be the cause of the hindrance in our communications? Understand, I have nothing against elephants. You, yourself, are an exceptionally elegant elephant and obviously well mannered; there is no doubt. But the fact remains that I can make no sense of your words, and so I must bid you good night.”
And with this, Sister Marie closed the door.
From a window in the dorm room, Adele watched the elephant walk away.
“Madam Elephant!” she shouted, banging on the window. “Here I am. Here! I am Adele. I am the one you are looking for.”
But the elephant continued to walk away from her. She went down the street and became smaller and then smaller still, until, in the peculiar and frustrating sleight of hand that often occurs in dreams, the elephant was transformed into a mouse that then scurried into the gutter and disappeared entirely from Adele’s view. And then, it began to snow.
The cobblestones of the streets and the tiles of the roofs became coated in white. It snowed and snowed until everything disappeared. The world itself soon seemed to cease to exist, erased, bit by bit, by the white of the falling snow.
In the end, there was nothing and no one in the world except for Adele, who stood alone at the window of her dream, waiting.
The city of Baltese felt as if it were under siege — not by a foreign army, but by the weather.
No one could recall a winter so thoroughly, uniformly gray.
Where was the sun?
Would it never shine again?
And if the sun was not going to shine, then could it not at least snow?
Something, anything!
And truly, in the grip of a winter so foul and dark, was it fair to keep a creature as strange and lovely and promising as the elephant locked away from the great majority of the city’s people?
It was not fair.
It was not fa
ir at all.
More than a few of the ordinary citizens of Baltese took it upon themselves to knock at the elephant door. When no one answered the knock, they went as far as to try to open the door themselves, but it was locked tight, bolted firm.
You stay out there, the door seemed to say.
And what is inside here will stay inside here.
And this, in a world so cold and gray, seemed terribly unfair.
Longing is not always a reciprocal thing; while the citizens of Baltese may have longed for the elephant, she did not at all long for them, and finding herself in the ballroom of the countess was, for her, a terrible turn of events.
The glitter of the chandeliers, the thrum of the orchestra, the loud laughter, the smells of roasted meat and cigar smoke and face powder all provoked in her an agony of disbelief.
She tried to will it away. She closed her eyes and kept them closed for as long as she was able, but it made no difference, for whenever she opened them again, it was all as it had been. Nothing had changed.
The elephant felt a terrible pain in her chest.
It was hard for her to breathe; the world seemed too small.
The countess Quintet, after considerable and extremely careful consultation with her worried advisers, decided that the people of the city (that is, those people who were not invited to her balls and dinners and soirees) could, for their edification and entertainment (and as a way to appreciate the countess’s finely tuned sense of social justice), view the elephant for free, absolutely for free, on the first Saturday of the month.
The countess had posters and leaflets printed up and distributed throughout the city, and Leo Matienne, walking home from the police station, stopped to read how he, too, thanks to the largesse of the countess, could see the amazing wonder that was her elephant.
“Ah, thank you very much, Countess,” said Leo to the poster. “This is wonderful news, wonderful news indeed.”
A beggar stood in the doorway, a black dog at his side, and as soon as Leo Matienne spoke the words, the beggar took them and turned them into a song.
The Magician's Elephant Page 3