An Elephant in the Garden Read online

It was mostly one-way traffic. But at dawn, more convoys of trucks filled with soldiers came roaring past on their way back into the city, motorcycle outriders waving us frantically to one side. They were the first to take any notice of Marlene, some of them pointing at us and staring, as they passed us by. As for our fellow refugees, maybe they had been too dazed, too traumatized, or just too tired to pay much attention to this young elephant that was wandering along with them. A few of the children were curious, but everyone, including the children, was subdued. There were no smiles of excitement among them, only a dull amazement.

  I have no idea how far we walked that first day of our long march—probably only a few kilometers, but it felt like a hundred. We had no food, no water, only the snow by the roadside to eat. And progress was still painfully slow. We were simply a part of a long wretched trail of refugees that was filling the road ahead of us and behind us as far as the eye could see. Sometimes the road became so jammed we could scarcely move at all. That was the worst of it. We seemed to be getting nowhere. Arguments were breaking out. Tempers were fraying.

  Karli, though, seemed quite happy to be tramping alongside Marlene, holding her trunk and talking to her all the time. He did not once complain, about his leg, about his wheezing, about the cold. I wish I could say the same for myself. My feet were in agony, my ears ached, and I was longing for something to eat, anything. When I mentioned any of this to Mutti, which I did, often, she would just put her arm around me, and say with a gently reproving smile and a shrug, “Me too, Elizabeth, me too.” It did not help, it did not make me feel any better.

  Sometime in the afternoon of that same day—we were walking along a road through a pine forest, I remember, and were making even slower progress than ever—Mutti suddenly took Marlene by the ear, and without any warning, led us off down a forest track away from the road. The walking was at once more difficult here, the going more arduous, the snow deeper, but at least we weren’t dragging along with hundreds of others, being endlessly held up. Karli kept asking her why we were going this way. I did too, but Mutti wouldn’t answer.

  “Just keep walking,” she told us. Some of the other refugees back down on the main road were shouting out after us, telling us we would get lost in the forest. Mutti paid them no attention, but just walked on without answering, without even looking back. “I don’t want any of them following us.” she said. “We’re better off on our own.”

  After a while, once we were well out of sight of everyone on the road, she stopped and told us what she had in mind. “Papi and me, children, when we were young, when we were first married, before you two came along, we used to cycle all the way from the city out to Uncle Manfred’s farm. On the main road it was a very long way ’round. Papi was good with maps, and he discovered this shortcut. So after that we always came this way. On our bicycles it was a whole day’s hard ride. On foot I think maybe we could do it in two, but we must not stop. We shall get too cold if we stop. Best of all, children, there is a stream only a couple of hours ahead, where Papi and I used to sit and have a picnic. We may not have the picnic, but we can drink all the water we like, can’t we? We will just have to imagine the picnic, that’s all. And maybe we shall find a house somewhere, and can beg some food, you never know. One thing is for certain, we were never going to find either food or water back down on that road. And traveling that slowly, it was going to take us forever to get to the farm. We may have a bit of a hard slog ahead of us, children, but we shall manage. We have got to, haven’t we? And once we get to the farm, we will be warm as toast, and we shall have all the food we can eat. You remember how Aunt Lotti piles the plates? And there’ll be hay in the barn for Marlene. All our troubles will be over, you will see.”

  The thought of a drink of water, and the hope of food, must have given new strength to my aching legs. I strode on ahead up the snow-covered track. I heard the stream before I saw it, a great rushing torrent tumbling down off the hillside and into a pool of bright water. I could see it was iced over in places. The water was freezing, of course, but we didn’t mind one bit. Marlene stood in the pool and drank there right with us, sloshing her trunk about in the water, loving every moment of it, as we were too.

  Here, for the first time, we could forget for a few moments everything that had happened. But once we were walking on again through the forest we soon fell silent and thoughtful. None of us, I think, could forget the burning city we had left behind us, the suffering we had witnessed on that long march. And we could still smell the smoke—it seemed to be clinging to the trees all around us, drifting about us like a yellow mist.

  Karli was breathless now, stumbling ever more often, wheezing and coughing almost constantly. We were becoming more and more worried about him. I told Karli I would carry him, so did Mutti, but Karli would have none of it. He insisted on staying with Marlene, on walking alongside her, holding her trunk, and there was no arguing with him. But walking side by side behind him now, Mutti and I could see that his wheezing was becoming worse all the time.

  It was my idea, and all these years later, I am still quite proud of it. “When I was little, before the war, Mutti,” I said, “I went on elephant rides in the zoo, didn’t I? You took me, didn’t you, before you worked there? So Karli could ride up on Marlene, couldn’t he? Why not?”

  “I thought of that, but it is no good,” Mutti replied. “It was only the older elephants that were used for rides, and they have to be properly trained. And besides, Marlene is still too young. She has never in her life had anyone on her back. I have no idea how she would take to it.”

  “It is worth a try, Mutti, surely,” I argued. “Karli cannot go on like he is.”

  “Maybe you’re right. And it is in Marlene’s blood, that is for sure,” Mutti conceded. “I mean, her mother used to give rides in the zoo for years, till she got sick.”

  Moments later—and, as you can imagine, we had no arguments from Karli about this—we were lifting him up, and sitting him there astride Marlene’s neck. Much to Mutti’s relief and mine, it did not seem to bother Marlene in the least. She just flapped her ears a little and groaned quite contentedly. With Karli riding now—and he was as happy as he could be about that, of course—he was very soon wheezing less. As for Marlene, she plodded on through the snow as if she had been giving rides all her life.

  Somehow, the water I had drunk at the stream had managed to satisfy my hunger as well as my thirst. By the time the dark of night came down around us, it was no longer hunger that bothered me so much, as the cold. I had by this time lost all feeling in my feet and hands, but now the intense cold seemed to be seeping into my whole body, and chilling me to the bone. Time and again I begged Mutti to stop. All I wanted to do was to curl up in the snow and go to sleep forever. It was only Mutti that kept me moving that night. Time and again she had her arm around me, helping me on, and every so often she would whisper words of encouragement. “Every step you take, Elizabeth, you are nearer to the farm, nearer to food and a warm bed,” she would say. “Just remember that, and put one foot in front of the other. That is all you have got to do, and we shall get there.”

  To be honest I cannot remember a great deal about the rest of that long and terrible night. I do know that at one moment we seemed to come out of the trees and out onto the open hillside. Here we heard again that sound we all feared so much—the air-raid sirens, a distant rumbling and then the roar of approaching bombers. In no time they were right over our heads.

  “What are they bombing?” cried Mutti. “Can they not see there is no city left to bomb? All they are bombing is fire.”

  We stood there on that bleak hillside, quite unable to take our eyes off the huge fireball that was rising now over the city. No words could speak our horror, no tears could cry our sorrow. Even Karli had no more questions. We were some distance away from the city, but I could feel the warmth of that great fire on my face as I watched. I felt it shivering some of the cold out of me, and I have to admit they were shivers of pure pleasure.<
br />
  But I was at once overcome with guilt. I was thinking about what a terrible thing it was, that while I was basking in the heat of it, many thousands of people must still be trapped in the city, some of them my own friends from school. I thought of them down in their shelters, and wondered if any of them could possibly survive such a raging inferno as this. Mutti turned me away from it. “This is the last time we look back, Elizabeth,” she said. “From now on, we only look forward.” So we left the city to burn and went on our way.

  There was one more incident I do remember about that night, and it makes me ashamed to tell you about it. But I will tell you because I want you to know the story as it happened, not simply as I would have wished it to happen. No matter how often I begged Mutti to stop and give us a rest, Mutti would not listen. The more she refused, the nastier I became. In the end she lost her patience, and turned on me. “What do you want, Elizabeth?” she cried. “Do you want us to freeze to death out here? Do you? The farm is only a few hours away, twelve kilometers, maybe less. Now get a grip on yourself and just walk.”

  I was angry back at her, hysterical almost, saying all manner of things I should not have said, about Papi going off and leaving us, about how parents always ruin the lives of their children. She took me in her arms then, and hugged the anger out of me, telling me how much Papi loved me, and she loved me, and how we had to survive to be there for Papi when he came home. Karli, I remember, looked down on us, bewildered, from high up on Marlene.

  So as the bombs fell and Dresden was destroyed, we walked away, on and on, no strength left for arguing anymore, no strength left even for speaking. The next morning, a gray-pink dawn it was, the growing light soft on the snow, we came down from the hills into the valley, a valley we knew and loved so well. And there below us we could see the farm where Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti lived, the familiar farmhouse with the barns and sheds all around, and beyond them the lake, now frozen over, and the island in the middle, our island. We had known such despair and sorrow during the night, and found such joy in the morning.

  Marlene quickened her step noticeably, and, following along behind, so did we. She knew we were nearly there, and this was hardly surprising, I suppose, since Karli was whooping and waving up there on her back, and Mutti and I were laughing out loud in our relief. I noticed from some way off that there seemed to be no animals outside, but then I knew that was only natural. We had been there often enough in the winter, for Christmas a few times, and I remembered that Uncle Manfred kept his animals inside during the worst of the winter months. But all the same, the place did look strangely deserted.

  Mutti spoke my thoughts exactly. “There is something wrong, I think,” she said. “Aunt Lotti, she keeps that stove of hers going all the time, winter or summer, I know she does. There is no smoke coming out of the chimney.”

  As we came across the snow-covered fields, and past the frozen lake, flocks of crows lifted off, most of them from the poplar trees out on the island cawing at us, cackling at us, angry at our intrusion. But they were the only sign of life. I ran on ahead of the others and opened the farmyard gate. The snow had drifted up against the front door of the house. There were no footprints in the yard, not one. A quick look told me that all the sheds were empty. Tomi was not in his stable. No chickens warbled from inside the hen house. Mutti knocked at the door, and called out again and again. No one answered. No one came.

  I left them, and walked around the back of the farmhouse towards the hay barn, where Karli and I had played so often, leaping from the top of the stack to the bottom into piles of soft sweet hay. That was what I was thinking of, as I opened the barn door. It was dark inside, so I pushed it wide open to let the light in.

  There was a man lying stretched out in the hay, a man in a uniform, an unfamiliar blue uniform. He looked fast asleep, or dead—I was not sure which. Mutti was there beside me suddenly, and Karli too. Marlene came wandering in after them, and wasted no time at all, before reaching up with her trunk, tugging at the hay, and stuffing it into her mouth. The sound of her grinding jaws was loud in the silence. “Who is he?” Karli whispered.

  “That is the enemy, Karli,” Mutti said. “An airman. From one of the bombers that has destroyed our city. British. RAF.” She reached for a nearby pitchfork, gripped it tight in two hands, and advanced slowly towards him.

  Part Three

  Ring of Steel

  One

  Lizzie broke off from her story, and turned to look at us. “I’m so cross with myself. I meant to bring my photograph album with me,” she said. “But I left it at home in my little apartment when they brought me here. I miss it so much. I used to look at it almost every day, you know. The things I could have shown you. There is a photo of us all down on the farm, when I was a small girl, and Karli was even smaller, just a baby in Papi’s arms—in happier times. I love that photo. We are all outside that same hay barn, and I am sitting up on Tomi, with Mutti holding him, and I have long plaits and a big gappy smile—my two front teeth are missing. Uncle Manfred must have taken the picture because he is not in it, and Aunt Lotti is looking very serious as usual. When I look at this photo I can see it all so clearly. I can almost breathe in the air of the countryside. And I have a photo also of Marlene, only one, but mostly it is of her trunk because she was trying to eat the camera! It is enough though. Sometimes I worry that everything that happened might be some kind of a dream, or that maybe I have made the whole thing up. But I only have to look at those photographs to know I did not, that it really did happen. I wish I had brought them with me. I wish I could show you.”

  “We could always go and fetch them, if you like,” I said. “If you trust us with your key, that is.”

  “Of course I do, dear,” she replied. “After all, I am trusting you with my story, aren’t I? I have never told anyone else, you know. That would be kind, very kind. I have the key to my apartment here, in my drawer, Karli. You might have to wiggle the key in the lock a bit, but you will manage. You can find it easily enough. Just around the corner from Main Street, on George Avenue, the first house. You go up the steps. Number two.” She was reaching towards her bedside cupboard as she spoke, but hadn’t the strength to pull open the drawer. So Karl did it for her, searching around till he found them. There was an elephant on the key chain.

  “To remind me,” she said, smiling. Then she noticed something else in her drawer, and her eyes brightened suddenly. “Ah, now this I never leave behind, Karli. I never go anywhere without it. Can you pass it to me? This is what I wanted to show you.”

  I had no notion at first as to what it might be, and from the look of puzzlement on his face as he handed it over to her, neither did Karl. It was a small, round object, made of metal, black in color. “It’s very heavy, and cold too,” Karl said. “What is it?” By now I was beginning to think I recognized it for what it was.

  “A compass?” I said. “Is that what it is?”

  Lizzie was cradling it lovingly in her cupped hands, and for several moments seemed too overcome to speak.

  “You are quite right, dear,” she replied at last. “This is a compass, to help you find your way. But this is not just any old compass. It is the best compass in the whole wide world, I promise you. Because it has shown me the way all through my life.” She opened the lid, and touched the face of it with her fingertips. “I first saw this compass on that day,” she went on, “the day we found him lying there in the barn…”

  I think sometimes that perhaps I had two beginnings in my life: the moment of my birth, of course, and the moment I set eyes on this man, this airman who I knew had bombed my city, a bomber, a killer, who had caused so much suffering to so many. As Mutti had said, here was the enemy, close to, in the flesh.

  He was not the first I had seen. Several times I had watched columns of prisoners of war being marched along the streets in Dresden. To be honest, I had never taken that much notice. They looked much like our soldiers, only dirtier, sadder. Some people would scream obscen
ities at them, and spit at them, and throw things, so I would look away. It made me feel ashamed. I never thought people could be that angry, that vindictive. I could not imagine what would make them do such things. But for just a moment, looking down at him lying there in the hay in Uncle Manfred’s barn that morning, I understood it completely, and I hated him, and I hoped he was dead. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me, and I knew right away that he was no more of a killer than Papi was.

  I often wondered afterwards what it must have been like to wake up and see the four of us staring down at him, Mutti with the pitchfork pointing at his chest, and Marlene towering over us, her trunk reaching down towards him. His eyes were wide with alarm, as he sat up in the hay, and raised his hands in the air.

  “English?” Mutti said. Her voice was shaking, from anger, I thought, more than fear.

  “No…nein,” he replied. “Canadian. Canada. Canada.”

  “Bomber?” Mutti was holding the pitchfork at his throat now. “RAF?”

  The man nodded.

  “England, America, Canada, it does not matter where you come from. Do you know what you have done? Have you any idea?” Mutti was shouting at him now, and crying too in her fury. “Did you see the fire you made? Are you proud of that? Do you know how many you killed? Do you care? Do you have any idea how beautiful a city Dresden was before you came? Do you? I should kill you, kill you right now.”

  Mutti raised the pitchfork. I really thought she was going to do it.

  I grabbed her arm, and held it fast. “You cannot do it, Mutti!” I cried. “You must not! How often have I heard you say it? To Papi, to me, to Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti. All killing is wrong, no matter what. It is what you always told us. Remember?”

  It was many long moments before Mutti lowered the pitchfork. Then she stepped back, and handed it to me. “Maybe I cannot do it,” she said. “But I wanted to. That is what your bombs do. They make hate. I think at this moment I hate you more than I have ever hated anyone in my whole life.”