The Magician's Elephant

by Kate DiCamillo

  “Transparent?” said Leo.

  “Yes,” said Gloria, “exactly that. Transparent. Does that old man not feed you? In addition to no love, is there no food in that attic room?”

  “There is bread,” said Peter. “And also fish, but they are very small fish, exceedingly small.”

  “You must come inside,” said Gloria. “That is the thing which you must immediately do. You must come inside.”

  “But —” said Peter.

  “Come inside,” said Leo. “We will talk.”

  “Come inside,” said Gloria Matienne. “First we will eat, and then we will talk.”

  There was, in the apartment of Leo and Gloria Matienne, a wonderful fire blazing, and the kitchen table was pulled up close to the hearth.

  “Sit,” said Leo.

  Peter sat. His legs were shaking and his heart was beating fast, as if he were still running. “I do not think that there is much time,” he said. “I do not think that there is enough time, truly, to dine.”

  Gloria put a bowl of stew in Peter’s hands. “Eat,” she said.

  Peter raised the spoon to his lips. He chewed. He swallowed.

  It had been a long time since he had eaten anything besides tiny fish and old bread.

  And so when Peter had his first bite of stew, it overwhelmed him. The warmth of it, the richness of it, knocked him backward; it was as if a gentle hand had pushed him when he was not expecting it. Everything he had lost came flooding back: the garden, his father, his mother, his sister, the promises that he had made and could not keep.

  “What’s this?” said Gloria Matienne. “The boy is crying.”

  “Shhh,” said Leo. He put his hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Shhh. Don’t worry, Peter. Everything will be good. All will be well. We will do together whatever it is that needs to be done. But for now, you must eat.”

  Peter nodded. He raised his spoon. Again he chewed and swallowed, and again he was overcome. He could not help it. He could not stop the tears; they flowed down his cheeks and into the bowl. “It is very good stew, Madam Matienne,” he managed to say. “Truly, it is excellent stew.”

  His hands shook; the spoon rattled against the bowl.

  “Here, now,” said Gloria Matienne, “don’t spill it.”

  It is gone, thought Peter. All of it is gone! And there is no way to get it back.

  “Eat,” said Leo Matienne again, very gently.

  Peter looked the truth of what he had lost full in the face.

  And then he ate.

  When Peter was done, Leo Matienne sat down in the chair beside him and said, “Now you must tell us everything.”

  “Everything?” said Peter.

  “Yes, everything,” said Leo Matienne. He leaned back in his chair. “Begin at the beginning.”

  Peter started in the garden. He began his story with his father throwing him up high in the air and catching him. He began with his mother dressed all in white, laughing, her stomach round like a balloon. “The sky was purple,” said Peter. “The lamps were lit.”

  “Yes,” said Leo Matienne. “I can see it all very well. And where is your father now?”

  “He was a soldier,” said Peter, “and he died on the battlefield. Vilna Lutz served with him and fought beside him. He was his friend. He came to our house to deliver the news of my father’s death.”

  “Vilna Lutz,” said Gloria Matienne, and it was as if she were uttering a curse.

  “When my mother heard the news, the baby started to come: my sister, Adele.” Peter stopped. He took a deep breath. “My sister was born, and my mother died. Before she died, I promised her that I would always watch out for the baby. But then I could not, because the midwife took the baby away and Vilna Lutz took me with him, to teach me how to be a soldier.”

  Gloria Matienne stood. “Vilna Lutz!” she shouted. She shook a fist at the ceiling. “I will have a word with him.”

  “Sit, please,” said Leo Matienne.

  Gloria sat.

  “And what became of your sister?” said Leo to Peter.

  “Vilna Lutz told me that she died. He said that she was born dead, stillborn.”

  Gloria Matienne gasped.

  “He said that. But he lied. He lied. He has admitted that he lied. She is not dead.”

  “Vilna Lutz!” said Gloria Matienne. Again, she leaped to her feet and shook her fist at the ceiling.

  “First the fortuneteller told me that she lives, and then my own dream told me the same. And the fortuneteller told me, also, that the elephant — an elephant — would lead me to her. But today, this afternoon, I saw the elephant, Leo Matienne, and I know that she will die if she cannot go home. She must go home. The magician must return her there.”

  Leo crossed his arms and tipped his chair back on two legs.

  “Don’t do that,” said Gloria. She sat down again. “It is very bad for the chair.”

  Leo Matienne came slowly forward until all four chair legs were again resting on the floor. He smiled. “What if?” he said.

  “Oh, don’t start,” said his wife. “Please, don’t start.”

  “Why not?”

  From somewhere high above them, there came a muffled thump, the sound of Vilna Lutz beating his wooden foot on the floor, demanding something.

  “Could it be?” said Leo.

  “Yes,” said Peter. He did not look up at the ceiling. He kept his eyes on Leo Matienne. “What if?” he said to the policeman.

  “Why not?” said Leo back to him. He smiled.

  “Enough,” said Gloria.

  “No,” said Leo Matienne, “not enough. Never enough. We must ask ourselves these questions as often as we dare. How will the world change if we do not question it?”

  “The world cannot be changed,” said Gloria. “The world is what the world is and has forever been.”

  “No,” said Leo Matienne softly, “I will not believe that. For here is Peter standing before us, asking us to make it something different.”

  Thump, thump, thump went Vilna Lutz’s foot above them.

  Gloria looked up at the ceiling. She looked over at Peter.

  She shook her head. She nodded her head. And then, slowly, she nodded it again.

  “Yes,” said Leo Matienne, “yes, that is what I thought, too.” He stood and took the napkin from his neck. “It is time for us to go to the prison.”

  He put his arms around his wife and pulled her close. She rested her cheek against his for a moment, and then she pulled away from Leo and turned to Peter.

  “You,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Peter. He stood straight before her, like a soldier awaiting inspection, and so he was not prepared at all when she grabbed him and pulled him close, enveloping him in the smell of mutton stew and starch and green grass.

  Oh, to be held!

  He had forgotten entirely what it meant. He wrapped his arms around Gloria Matienne and began, again, to cry.

  “There,” she said. She rocked him back and forth. “There, you foolish, beautiful boy who wants to change the world. There, there. And who could keep from loving you? Who could keep from loving a boy so brave and true?”

  In the house of the countess, in the dark and empty ballroom, the elephant slept. She dreamed she was walking across a wide savanna. The sky above her was a brilliant blue. She could feel the warmth of the sun on her back. In her dream, the boy appeared a long way ahead of her and stood waiting.

  When she at last drew close to him, he looked at her as he had done that afternoon. But he said nothing. He simply fell into step beside her.

  They walked together through the tall grass, and the elephant, in her dream, thought that this was a wonderful thing, to walk beside the boy. She felt that things were exactly as they should be, and she was happy.

  The sun was so warm!

  In the prison, the magician lay upon his cloak, staring up at the window, hoping for the clouds to break and the bright star to appear.

  He could no longer sleep.
/>   Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the elephant crashing through the ceiling of the opera house and landing on top of Madam LaVaughn. The image bedeviled him to the point where he could get no rest, no respite. All he could think of was the elephant and the amazing, stupendous magic he had performed to call her forth.

  At the same time, he was achingly, devastatingly lonely, and he wished, with the whole of his heart, to see a face, any human face. He would have been delighted, pleased beyond measure, to gaze upon even the accusatory, pleading countenance of the crippled Madam LaVaughn. If she appeared beside him right now, he would show her the star that was sometimes visible through his window. He would say to her, “Have you, in truth, ever seen something so heartbreakingly lovely? What are we to make of a world where stars shine bright in the midst of so much darkness and gloom?”

  All of which is to say that the magician was awake that night when the outer door of the prison clanged open and two sets of footsteps sounded down the long hallway.

  He stood.

  He put on his cloak.

  He looked out through the bars of his cell and saw the light of a lantern shining in the darkened hallway. His heart leaped inside him. He called out to the approaching light.

  And what did the magician say?

  You know full well the words he spoke.

  “I intended only lilies!” shouted the magician. “Please, I intended only a bouquet of lilies.”

  In the light from the lantern that Leo Matienne held aloft, Peter could see the magician all too clearly. His beard was long and wild, his fingernails ragged and torn, his cloak covered in a patina of mold. His eyes burned bright, but they were the eyes of a cornered animal: desperate and pleading and angry all at once.

  Peter’s heart sank. This man did not look as if he could perform any magic at all, much less the huge magic, the tremendous magic, of sending an elephant home.

  “Who are you?” said the magician. “Who has sent you?”

  “My name is Leo Matienne,” said Leo, “and this is Peter Augustus Duchene, and we have come to speak to you about the elephant.”

  “Of course, of course,” said the magician. “What else would you speak to me of but the elephant?”

  “We want you to do the magic that will send her home,” said Peter.

  The magician laughed; it was not a pleasant sound. “Send her home, you say? And why would I do that?”

  “Because she will die if you do not,” said Peter.

  “And why would she die?”

  “She is homesick,” said Peter. “I think that her heart is broken.”

  “A homesick, brokenhearted magic trick,” said the magician. He laughed again. He shook his head. “It was all so magnificent when it happened; it was all so wondrous when it occurred, you would not believe it; truly you would not. And look what it has come to.”

  Somewhere in the prison, someone was crying. It was the kind of strangled weeping that Vilna Lutz sometimes gave himself over to when he thought that Peter was asleep.

  The world is broken, thought Peter, and it cannot be fixed.

  The magician kept still, his head pressed against the bars. The sound of the prisoner weeping rose and fell, rose and fell. And then Peter saw that the magician was crying, too; great, lonely tears rolled down his face and disappeared into his beard.

  Maybe it was not too late after all.

  “I believe,” said Peter very quietly.

  “What do you believe?” said the magician without moving.

  “I believe that things can still be set right. I believe that you can perform the necessary magic.”

  The magician shook his head. “No.” He said the word quietly, as if he were speaking it to himself. “No.”

  There was a long silence.

  Leo Matienne cleared his throat, once, and then again. He opened his mouth, and spoke two simple words. He said, “What if?”

  The magician raised his head then and looked at the policeman. “What if?” he said. “‘What if?’ is a question that belongs to magic.”

  “Yes,” said Leo, “to magic and also to the world in which we live every day. So: what if? What if you merely tried?”

  “I tried already,” said the magician. “I tried and failed to send her back.” The tears continued to roll down his face. “You must understand: I did not want to send her back; she was the finest magic I have ever performed.”

  “To return her to where she belongs would be a fine magic, too,” said Leo Matienne.

  “So you say,” said the magician. He looked at Leo Matienne and then at Peter and then back again at Leo Matienne.

  “Please,” said Peter.

  The light from the lantern in Leo’s outstretched arm flickered, and the magician’s shadow, cast on the wall behind him, reared back suddenly and then grew larger. The shadow stood apart from him as if it were another creature entirely, watching over him, waiting anxiously, along with Peter, for the magician to decide what seemed to be the fate of the entire universe.

  “Very well,” said the magician at last. “I will try. But I will need two things. I will need the elephant, for I cannot make her disappear without her being present. And I will need Madam LaVaughn. You must bring both the elephant and the noblewoman here to me.”

  “But that is impossible,” said Peter.

  “Magic is always impossible,” said the magician. “It begins with the impossible and ends with the impossible and is impossible in between. That is why it is magic.”

  Madam LaVaughn was often kept awake at night by shooting pains in her legs. And because she was awake, she insisted that the whole household stay awake with her.

  Further, she insisted that they listen again to the story of how she had dressed for the theater that night, how she had walked into the building (Walked! On her own two legs!) entirely and absolutely innocent of the fate that awaited her inside. She insisted that the gardener and the cook, the serving maids and the chambermaids, pretend to be interested as she spoke again of how the magician had selected her from among the sea of hopefuls.

  “‘Who, then, will come before me and receive my magic?’ Those were his exact words,” said Madam LaVaughn.

  The assembled servants listened (or pretended to) as the noblewoman spoke of the elephant falling from nowhere, of how one minute the notion of an elephant was inconceivable and the next the elephant was an irrefutable fact in her lap.

  “Crippled,” said Madam LaVaughn in conclusion, “crippled by an elephant that came through the roof!”

  The servants knew these last words so well, so intimately, that they mouthed them along with her, whispering the phrases together as if they were participating in some odd and arcane religious ceremony.

  This, then, is what was taking place in the house of Madam LaVaughn that evening when there came a knock at the door, and the butler appeared beside Hans Ickman to announce that there was a policeman waiting outside and that this policeman absolutely insisted on speaking to Madam LaVaughn.

  “At this hour?” said Hans Ickman.

  But he followed the butler to the door, and there, indeed, stood a policeman, a short man with a ridiculously large mustache. The policeman stepped forward and bowed and said, “Good evening. I am Leo Matienne. I serve with Her Majesty’s police force. I am not, however, here on official business. I have come, instead, with a most unusual personal request for Madam LaVaughn.”

  “Madam LaVaughn cannot be disturbed,” said Hans Ickman. “The hour is late, and she is in pain.”

  “Please,” said a small voice. Hans Ickman saw, then, that there was a boy standing behind the policeman and that he held a soldier’s hat in his hand. “It is important,” said the boy.

  The manservant looked into the boy’s eyes and saw himself, young again and still capable of believing in miracles, standing on the bank of the river with his brothers, the white dog suspended in midair.

  “Please,” said the boy.

  And suddenly it came to Hans Ickman, the na
me of the little white dog. Rose. She was called Rose. And remembering it was like fitting a piece of a puzzle into place. He felt a wonderful certainty. The impossible, he thought, the impossible is about to happen again.

  He looked past the policeman and the boy and into the darkness beyond them. He saw something swirl through the air. A snowflake. And then another. And another.

  “Come in,” said Hans Ickman. He swung the door wide. “You must come inside now. The snow has begun.”

  It had indeed begun to snow. It was snowing over the whole of the city of Baltese.

  The snow fell in the darkened alleys and on the newly repaired tiles of the opera house. It settled atop the turrets of the prison and on the roof of the Apartments Polonaise. At the home of the countess Quintet, the snow worked to outline the graceful curve of the handle on the elephant door, and at the cathedral, it formed fanciful and slightly ridiculous caps for the heads of the gargoyles, who crouched together, gazing down at the city in disgust and envy.

  The snow danced around the circles of light that pulsed from the lamps lining the wide boulevards of the city of Baltese. The snow fell in a curtain of white all around the bleak and unprepossessing building that was the Orphanage of the Sisters of Perpetual Light, as if it were working very hard to hide the place from view.

  The snow, at last, fell.

  And as it snowed, Bartok Whynn dreamed.

  He dreamed of carving. He dreamed of doing the work he knew and loved: coaxing figures from stone. Only, in his dream, he did not carve gargoyles, but humans. One was a boy wearing a hat; another, a man with a mustache; and another, a woman sitting, with a man standing at attention behind her.

  And each time a new person appeared beneath his hand, Bartok Whynn was astonished and deeply moved.

  “You,” he said as he worked, “and you and you. And you.”

  He smiled.

  And because it was a dream, the people he had fashioned from stone smiled back at him.