Kate DiCamillo: The Magician's Elephant

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 nodded.

“You will take care of her?”

Peter nodded again.

“Can you promise me, Peter?”

“Yes,” he 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, 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 broken-hearted.

There were too many things that she did not understand.

Where were her brothers and sisters? Her mother?

Where were 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 laboured 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 greatcoat and gestured for him to come close.

“Wait a moment,” 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.