The Magician's Elephant Read online

  And he had.

  That night at the opera house, before the whole world exploded into screams and sirens and accusations, the magician stood next to the enormous beast and gloried in the smell of her — dried apples, moldy paper, dung. He reached out and placed a hand, one hand, on her chest and felt, for a moment, the solemn beating of her heart.

  This, he thought. I did this.

  And when he was commanded, later that night, by every authority imaginable (the mayor, a duke, a princess, the captain of police) to send the elephant back, to make her go away, to, in essence, disappear her, the magician had dutifully spoken the spell, as well as the words themselves, backward, as the magic required, but nothing happened. The elephant remained absolutely, emphatically, undeniably there, her very presence serving as some indisputable evidence of his powers.

  He had intended lilies; yes, perhaps.

  But he had also wanted to perform true magic.

  He had succeeded.

  And so, no matter what words he may have spoken to the star that occasionally appeared above him, the magician could summon no true regret for what he had done.

  The star, it should be noted, was not a star at all.

  It was the planet Venus.

  Records indicate that it shone particularly bright that year.

  The captain of the police of the city of Baltese was a man who believed most firmly in the letter of the law. However, despite repeated and increasingly flustered consultations of the police handbook, he could not find one word, one syllable, one letter that pertained to the correct method of dealing with a beast that has appeared out of nowhere, destroying the roof of an opera house and crippling a noblewoman.

  And so, with great reluctance, the captain of police solicited the opinions of his subordinates about what should be done with the elephant.

  “Sir!” said one of the young lieutenants. “She appeared. Perhaps, if we are patient, she will disappear.”

  “Does the elephant appear as if she would disappear?” said the captain of police.

  “Sir?” said the young lieutenant. “I am afraid I don’t understand the question, sir.”

  “I am quite aware of your lack of understanding,” said the captain. “Your lack of understanding is as apparent as the elephant and is even more unlikely to disappear.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the lieutenant. He furrowed his brow. He thought for a moment. “Thank you, sir. I’m sure.”

  This exchange was followed by a long and painful silence. The gathered policemen shuffled their feet.

  “It is simple,” said another policeman, finally. “The elephant is a criminal. Therefore, she must be tried as a criminal and punished as a criminal.”

  “But why is the elephant a criminal?” said a small policeman with a very large mustache.

  “Why is the elephant a criminal?” said the captain of police.

  “Yes,” said the small policeman, whose name was Leo Matienne, “why? If the magician threw a rock at a window, would you then blame the rock for the window breaking?”

  “What kind of magician throws rocks?” said the captain of police. “What kind of sorry excuse for magic is that, the throwing of rocks?”

  “You misunderstand me, sir,” said Leo Matienne. “I meant only to say that the elephant did not ask to come crashing through the roof of the opera house. Would any sensible elephant wish for such a thing? And if she did not wish for it, then how can she be guilty of it?”

  “I ask you for possible solutions,” said the captain of police. He put his hands on top of his head.

  “Yes,” said Leo Matienne.

  “I ask what action should be taken,” said the captain. He pulled at his hair with both his hands.

  “Yes,” said Leo Matienne again.

  “And you talk to me about sensible elephants and what they wish for?” shouted the captain.

  “I think it is pertinent, sir,” said Leo Matienne.

  “He thinks it is pertinent,” said the captain. “He thinks it is pertinent.” He pulled at his hair. His face became very red.

  “Sir,” said another policeman, “what if we found the elephant a home, sir?”

  “Yes,” said the captain of police. He turned around and faced the policeman who had just spoken. “Why did I not think of it? Let us dispatch the elephant immediately to the Home for Wayward Elephants Who Engage in Objectionable Pursuits Against Their Will. It is right down the street, is it not?”

  “Is it?” said the policeman. “Truly? I had not known. There are so many worthy charitable institutions in this enlightened age; why, it’s become nearly impossible to keep track of them all.”

  The captain pulled very hard at his hair. “Leave me,” he said softly. “All of you. I will solve this without your help.”

  One by one, the policemen left the police station.

  The small policeman was the last to go. He lifted his hat to the captain.

  “I wish you a good evening, sir,” he said, “and I beg that you consider the idea that the elephant is guilty of nothing except being an elephant.”

  “Leave me,” said the captain of police, “please.”

  “Good evening, sir,” said Leo Matienne again. “Good evening.”

  The small policeman walked home in the gloom of early evening. As he walked, he whistled a sad song and considered the fate of the elephant.

  To his mind, the captain was asking the wrong questions.

  The questions that mattered, the questions that needed to be asked, were these: Where did the elephant come from? And what did it mean that she had come to the city of Baltese?

  What if she was just the first in a series of elephants? What if, one by one, all the mammals and reptiles of Africa were to be summoned to the stages of opera houses all across Europe?

  What if, next, crocodiles and giraffes and rhinoceroses came crashing through roofs?

  Leo Matienne had the soul of a poet, and because of this, he liked very much to consider questions that had no answers.

  He liked to ask “What if?” and “Why not?” and “Could it possibly be?”

  Leo came to the top of the hill and paused. Below him, the lamplighter was lighting the lamps that lined the wide avenue. Leo Matienne stood and watched as, one by one, the globes sprang to life.

  What if the elephant had come bearing a message of great importance?

  What if everything was to be irrevocably, undeniably changed by the elephant’s arrival?

  Leo stood at the top of the hill and waited for a long while, until the avenue below him was well and fully lit, and then he continued walking down the hill and onto the lighted path, toward his home.

  He whistled as he walked.

  What if? Why not? Could it be? sang the glowing, wondering heart of Leo Matienne.

  What if?

  Why not?

  Could it be?

  Peter stood at the window of the attic room of the Apartments Polonaise. He heard Leo Matienne before he saw him; always, because of the whistling, Peter heard Leo before he saw him.

  He waited until the policeman appeared, and then he threw open the window and stuck his head out. He shouted, “Leo Matienne, is it true that there is an elephant and that she came through the roof and that she is now with the police?”

  Leo stopped. He looked up.

  “Peter,” he said. He smiled. “Peter Augustus Duchene, fellow resident of the Apartments Polonaise, little cuckoo bird of the attic world. There is, indeed, an elephant. It is true. And it is true, also, that she is in the custody of the police. The elephant is imprisoned.”

  “Where?” said Peter.

  “I cannot say,” said Leo Matienne. “I cannot say because I am afraid that I do not know. They are keeping it the strictest possible secret, you see, what with elephants being such dangerous and provoking criminals.”

  “Close the window,” called Vilna Lutz from his bed. “It is winter, and it is cold.”

  It was winter, true.

  And tr
ue, also, it was quite cold.

  But even in the summertime, Vilna Lutz, when he was in the grips of his strange fever, would complain of the cold and demand that the window be shut.

  “Thank you,” said Peter to Leo Matienne. He closed the window and turned and faced the old man.

  “What were you speaking of?” said Vilna Lutz. “What manner of nonsense were you shouting from windows?”

  “An elephant, sir,” said Peter. “It is true. Leo Matienne says that it is true. An elephant has arrived. An elephant is here.”

  “Elephants,” said Vilna Lutz. “Pooh. Imaginary beasts, denizens of imaginary bestiaries, demons from who-knows-where.” He fell back against the pillow, exhausted by his diatribe, and then jerked suddenly upright again. “Hark! Do I hear the crack of muskets, the boom of cannons?”

  “No, sir,” said Peter. “You do not.”

  “Demons, elephants, imaginary beasts.”

  “Not imaginary,” said Peter. “Real. This elephant is real. Leo Matienne is an officer of the law, and he says that it is so.”

  “Pooh,” said Vilna Lutz. “I say ‘pooh’ to that mustachioed officer of the law and his imagined creature.” He lay back against the pillow. He turned his head first to one side and then to the other. “I hear it,” he said. “I hear the sounds of battle. The fight has begun.”

  “So,” said Peter softly to himself, “it must be true, mustn’t it? There is an elephant now, so the fortuneteller was right, and my sister lives.”

  “Your sister?” said Vilna Lutz. “Your sister is dead. How often must I tell you? She never drew breath. She did not breathe. They are all dead. Look out over the field and you will see: they are all dead, your father among them. Look, look! Your father lies dead.”

  “I see,” said Peter.

  “Where is my foot?” said Vilna Lutz. He cast a wild look around the room. “Where is it?”

  “On the nightstand.”

  “On the nightstand, sir,” corrected Vilna Lutz.

  “On the nightstand, sir,” said Peter.

  “There,” said the old soldier. He picked up the foot. “There, there, old friend.” He gave the wooden foot a loving pat and then let his head sink back on the pillow. He pulled the blankets up under his chin. “Soon,” he said, “soon, I will put on the foot, Private Duchene, and we will practice maneuvers, you and I. We will make a great soldier out of you yet. You will become a man like your father. You will become, like him, a soldier brave and true.”

  Peter turned away from Vilna Lutz and looked out the window at the darkening world. Downstairs, far below, a door slammed. And then another. He heard the muffled sound of laughter and knew that Leo Matienne was being welcomed home by his wife.

  What was it like, Peter wondered, to have someone who knew you would always return and who welcomed you with open arms?

  He remembered being in a garden at dusk. The sky was purple and the lamps had been lit, and Peter was small. His father picked him up and tossed him high and then caught him, over and over again. Peter’s mother was there, too; she was wearing a white dress that glowed bright in the purple dusk, and her stomach was large like a balloon.

  “Don’t drop him,” said Peter’s mother to his father. “Don’t you dare drop him.” She was laughing.

  “I will not,” said his father. “I could not. For he is Peter Augustus Duchene, and he will always return to me.”

  Again and again, Peter’s father threw him up in the air. Again and again, Peter felt himself suspended in nothingness for a moment, just a moment, and then he was pulled back, returned to the sweetness of the earth and the warmth of his father’s waiting arms.

  “See?” said his father to his mother. “Do you see how he always comes back to me?”

  It was full dark now in the attic room of the Apartments Polonaise. The old soldier tossed from side to side in the bed. “Close the window,” he said. “It is winter, and it is cold.”

  The garden that held Peter’s father and mother seemed far away, so far that he could almost believe that the memory, the garden, had existed in another world entirely.

  But if the fortuneteller was to be believed (and she must be believed; she must), the elephant knew the way to that garden. She could lead him there.

  “Please,” said Vilna Lutz, “the window must be closed. It is so cold; it is so very, very cold.”

  That winter, the winter of the elephant, was, for the city of Baltese, a particularly miserable season. The skies were filled with thick, lowering clouds that obscured the sun and condemned the city to a series of days that resembled nothing so much as a single, unending dusk.

  It was unimaginably, unbelievably cold.

  Darkness prevailed.

  The crippled Madam LaVaughn, sunk deep in a gloom of her own, took to visiting the prison.

  She came in the late afternoon.

  The magician could hear the accusing creak of the wheels of her chair as it was pushed down the long corridor. Yet, when the noblewoman appeared before him, her eyes wide and pleading, a blanket thrown over her useless legs and her servant standing at attention behind her, the magician managed, somehow, each time, to be astonished at her presence.

  Madam LaVaughn spoke to the magician. She said, “But perhaps you do not understand. I was crippled, crippled by an elephant that came through the roof!”

  The magician responded. He said, “Madam LaVaughn, I assure you, I intended lilies. I intended only a bouquet of lilies.”

  Every day the magician and the noblewoman spoke to each other with an urgency that belied the fact that they had spoken the same words the day before and the day before that.

  Every afternoon, the magician and Madam LaVaughn faced each other in the gloom of the prison and said exactly the same thing.

  The noblewoman’s manservant was named Hans Ickman, and he had been in the service of Madam LaVaughn since she was a child. He was her adviser and confidant, and she trusted him in all things.

  Before he came to serve Madam LaVaughn, however, Hans Ickman had lived in a small town in the mountains, and he had there a family: brothers, a mother and a father, and a dog who was famous for being able to leap across the river that ran through the woods beyond the town.

  The river was too wide for Hans Ickman and his brothers to leap across. It was too wide even for a grown man to leap. But the dog would take a running jump and sail effortlessly across the water. She was a white dog and small, and other than her ability to jump the river, she was in no way extraordinary.

  Hans Ickman, as he aged, had forgotten about the dog entirely; her miraculous ability had receded to the back of his mind. But the night that the elephant came crashing through the ceiling of the opera house, the manservant remembered again, for the first time in a long time, the little white dog.

  Standing in the prison, listening to the endless and unvarying exchange between Madam LaVaughn and the magician, Hans Ickman thought about being a boy, waiting on the bank of the river with his brothers, and watching the dog run and then fling herself into the air. He remembered how, in mid-leap, she would always twist her body, a small unnecessary gesture, a fillip of joy, to show that this impossible thing was easy for her.

  Madam LaVaughn said, “But perhaps you do not understand.”

  The magician said, “I intended only lilies.”

  Hans Ickman closed his eyes and remembered the dog suspended in the air above the river, her white body set afire by the light of the sun.

  But what was the dog’s name? He could not recall. She was gone and her name was gone with her. Life was so short; so many beautiful things slipped away. Where, for instance, were his brothers now? He did not know; he could not say.

  Madam LaVaughn said, “I was crushed, crushed by an elephant.”

  The magician said, “I intended only —”

  “Please,” said Hans Ickman. He opened his eyes. “It is important that you say what you mean to say. Time is too short. You must speak words that matter.”

&nbs
p; The magician and the noblewoman were silent for a moment.

  And then Madam LaVaughn opened her mouth. She said, “Perhaps you do not understand. . . .”

  The magician said, “I intended only lilies.”

  “Enough,” said Hans Ickman. He took hold of Madam LaVaughn’s chair and turned it around. “That is enough. I cannot bear to hear it anymore. I truly cannot.”

  He wheeled her away, down the long corridor and out of the prison and into the cold, dark Baltesian afternoon.

  “Perhaps you do not understand. I was crippled. . . .”

  “No,” said Hans Ickman, “no.”

  Madam LaVaughn fell silent.

  And it was in this manner that she paid her last official visit to the magician in prison.

  Peter could, from the window of the attic room in the Apartments Polonaise, see the turrets of the prison. He could see, too, the spire of the city’s largest cathedral and the gargoyles crouched there, glowering, on its ledges. If he looked out into the distance, he could see the great, grand homes of the nobility high atop the hill. Below him were the twisting, turning cobblestoned streets, the small shops with their crooked tiled roofs, and the pigeons who forever perched atop them, singing sad songs that did not quite begin and never truly ended.

  It was a terrible thing to gaze upon it all and know that somewhere, beneath one of those roofs, hidden, perhaps, in some dark alley, was the very thing that he needed, wanted, and could not have.

  How could it be that against all odds, all expectations, all reason, an elephant could miraculously appear in the city of Baltese and then just as quickly disappear, and that he, Peter Augustus Duchene, who needed desperately to find her, did not know, could not even begin to imagine, the how or where of searching for her?

  Looking out over the city, Peter decided that it was a terrible and complicated thing to hope, and that it might be easier, instead, to despair.