An Elephant In The Garden Part 1

An Elephant in the Garden.

Michael Morpurgo.

For Bella, Freddie and Max.

Part One.

Ring of Truth.

One.

To tell the truth, I don't think Lizzie would ever have told us her elephant story at all, if Karl had not been called Karl.

Maybe I'd better explain.

I'm a nurse. I was working part-time in an old people's nursing home just down the road from where we live. It was part-time because I wanted to be home for Karl, my nine-year-old son. There were just the two of us, so I needed to be there to see him off to school, and be there for him when he got back. But sometimes, on weekends, they asked me to do overtime. I couldn't always say no-we had to take our turn to do weekend duties-and if I'm honest, the money helped. So on weekends, if Karl hadn't got anywhere else to go, or anyone else to look after him, they let me bring him into work with me.

I was a bit worried about it at first-whether anyone would mind, how he'd get on with all the old folks-but he loved it, and as it turned out, so did they. For a start, he had the whole park to play around in. Sometimes he'd bring a few friends. They could climb the trees, kick a football about, whizz around on their mountain bikes. As for the old folks, the children's visits became quite a feature of their weekends, something for them to look forward to. They would gather around the sitting room windows to watch them, often for hours on end. And when it was raining, Karl and his friends used to come inside and play chess with them, or watch a film on the television.

Then, just a couple of weeks ago, on the Friday night, it snowed, and snowed hard. I had to go to work at the nursing home the next day-I was on morning s.h.i.+fts that weekend-and so Karl had to come too. But he didn't mind, not one bit. He brought half a dozen of his friends along with him. They were going tobogganing in the park, they said. They didn't have a toboggan between them. They simply brought along anything that would slide-plastic sacks, surfboards, even a rubber ring. As it turned out, bottoms worked just as well as anything else. The nursing home was loud with laughter that morning as the old folks watched them gallivanting out there in the snow. In time, the tobogganing degenerated into a s...o...b..ll fight, which the old folks seemed to be enjoying as much as Karl and his friends were. I was busy most of the morning, but the last time I looked out of the window I saw that, much to everyone's delight, Karl and his friends were busy building a giant snowman right outside the sitting room window.

So I was taken completely by surprise when I walked into Lizzie's room a few minutes later and found Karl sitting there at her bedside in his hat and his coat, the two of them chatting away like old friends.

"Ah, so there you are," Lizzie said, beckoning me in. "You did not tell me you had a son. And he is called Karl! I can hardly believe it. And he looks like him too. The likeness, it is extraordinary, amazing. I have told him also about the elephant in the garden, and he believes me." She wagged her finger at me. "You do not believe me. I know this. No one in this place believes me, but Karl does."

I hustled Karl out of the room, and away down the corridor, chewing him out soundly for wandering into Lizzie's room like that, uninvited. Thinking back, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. Karl was always wandering off. What did surprise me, though, was how furious he was with me.

"She was just going to tell me about her elephant," he protested loudly, tugging at my hand, trying to break away from me.

"There isn't any elephant, Karl," I told him. "She imagines things. Old people often do that. They get a bit mixed-up in the head sometimes, that's all. Now come along, for goodness' sake."

It wasn't until we were back home that afternoon that I had a chance to sit Karl down and explain all about Lizzie, and her elephant story. I told him I knew from her records that Lizzie was eighty-two years old. She had been in the nursing home for nearly a month, so we had gotten to know one another's little ways quite well already. She could be a little p.r.i.c.kly, and even cantankerous with the other nurses sometimes. But with me, I said, she was considerate and polite, and quite cooperative-well, mostly. Even with me, though, she could become rather obstinate from time to time, especially when it came to eating the food that I put in front of her. She wouldn't drink enough either, no matter how much I tried to encourage her.

Karl kept asking me more and more questions about her. "How long has she been in the nursing home?" "What's the matter with her?" "Why's she in bed in her room, and not with the others?" He wanted to know everything, so I told him everything...

...how she and I had taken a particular s.h.i.+ne to one another, how she was very direct, to the point of bluntness sometimes, and how I liked that. She'd told me once, on the very first day she came into the nursing home, "I might as well be honest with you. I do not like being in here, not one bit. But since I am, and since we shall be seeing rather a lot of one another, then you may call me Lizzie."

So that's what I did. To all the other nurses she was Elizabeth, but to me she was Lizzie. She slept a lot, listened to the radio, and she read books, lots of books. She didn't like to be interrupted when she was reading, even when I had to give her some medication. She especially loved detective stories. She told me once, rather proudly, that she had read every book that Agatha Christie had ever written.

The doctor, I told Karl, thought she couldn't have eaten properly for weeks, maybe months, before she came in. And that's certainly what she looked like when I first saw her, so shriveled and weak and vulnerable, her skin pale and paper-thin over her cheekbones, her hair creamy white against the pillows. Yet even then I could see there was something very unusual, very spirited about her-the steely look in her eye, the sudden smile that lit up her whole face. I knew nothing of her life-no relatives came to see her. She seemed to be entirely alone in the world.

"She's a bit like Gran," I told Karl, trying to explain her state of mind to him as best I could. "You know, like a lot of old people, a bit muddled and forgetful-like when she starts up about her elephant. She's goes on about it all the time, not just to me, to everyone. 'There was an elephant in the garden, you know,' she says. It's all nonsense, Karl, I promise you."

"You don't know," Karl said, still angry at me. "And anyway, I don't care what you say. I think it's true what she told me about the elephant. She's not fibbing, she's not making it up, I know she isn't. I can tell."

"How can you tell?" I asked him.

"Because I tell fibs sometimes, so I can always tell when someone else is, and she's not. And she's not muddled either, like Gran is. If she says she had an elephant in her garden, then she did."

I didn't want to argue, didn't want to make him any more cross with me than he already was, so I said nothing. But I lay awake that night wondering if Karl could possibly be right. The more I thought about it, the more I began to think that maybe there was a ring of truth about Lizzie's elephant.

The next morning at work, with Karl and his friends cavorting about in the snow, I was sorely tempted to go in and ask Lizzie about her elephant, but it never seemed to be the right moment. It was best not to probe, not to intrude, I thought. She always seemed to me to be a very private person, happy enough in her own silence. We had gotten used to one another, and I think both of us felt comfortable together. I didn't want to spoil that. As I went into her room I decided that if she brought up the elephant again, then I would ask her. But she never did. She asked about Karl though. She wanted to know all about him. She particularly wanted to know when he would be coming in again to see her. She said she had something very unusual, very special to show him. She seemed very excited about it, but told me not to tell him. She wanted it to be a surprise, she said.

I noticed then she hadn't drunk anything again from her gla.s.s of water, and scolded her gently, which she was quite used to by now. I walked past the end of the bed to close her window, tutting at her reproachfully. "Lizzie, you are so naughty about your water," I told her. But I could tell she wasn't listening to me at all.

"Do you mind leaving the window open, dear?" she said. "I like the cold. I like to feel the fresh air on my face. It cools me. This place is rather overheated. I think it is a dreadful waste of money." I did as she asked, and she thanked me-her manners were always meticulous. She was gazing out of the window now at the children. "Your little Karl, he loves the snow, I think. I look at him out there, and I see my brother. It was snowing that day too..." She paused, then went on. "On the radio this morning, dear, I thought I heard them say that it is February the thirteenth today. Did I hear right?"

I checked my mobile phone to confirm it.

"Will your little Karl come in to see me today, do you think?" she asked again. She seemed to be quite anxious about it. "I do hope so. I should like to show him...I think he would be interested."

"I'm sure he will," I told her. But I wasn't sure at all. I knew full well Karl wanted to find out more about her elephant story, but it looked to me as if he was having far too much fun in the snow outside. Lizzie said nothing more about it, as I washed her, and then arranged her pillows and made her comfortable again. She loved me to take my time brus.h.i.+ng her hair. It was while I was doing this that there was a knock on the door. To my great relief, and to her obvious delight, it was Karl. He came in breathless, and sat down at once beside her, his face glowing, snow all over his coat, still in his hair. She reached out, brus.h.i.+ng it away, then touching his cheek with the tips of her fingers. "Cold," she said. "It was cold on February the thirteenth, February the thirteenth..." Her mind seemed to be wandering.

"Your elephant, the elephant in the garden. You were going to tell me about your elephant, remember?" Karl said.

That was when I noticed that Lizzie was becoming quite tearful and upset. I thought perhaps Karl should go. "He can come back later, another time," I told her.

"No." She was very insistent that we stayed, that she wanted us to stay, that she had something she needed to tell us.

So I pulled up another chair, and sat down beside them. "What is it, Lizzie? Is there something about February the thirteenth that's especially important to you?" I asked her.

She turned her head away from me, unable to control or disguise the tremor in her voice. "It was this day that changed my life forever," she said. I reached out and took her hand in mine. Her grip was weak, but it was enough to let me know that she really did want us to stay. She was looking out of the window, and pointing now.

"Look, do you see? Do you hear? The wind is blowing through the trees. The branches, they are shaking. Are they frightened of the wind, do you think? Little Karli said it that day, that the trees were frightened of the wind, that they wanted to run away, but they couldn't. We could, he said, but they couldn't. He was very sad about it." She smiled at Karl. "Karli was my little brother, and you remind me so much of him. And this makes me happy, that you are here, I mean; and on this day too, so that I can tell you my story, our story, Karli's story and mine. But it makes me sad also. On February the thirteenth I am always sad. The wind in the trees, it makes me remember."

I had noticed before that she spoke English in a strange way, p.r.o.nouncing her words carefully, too correctly, and in proper sentences. Her name might have been English, but I had always thought she might be Dutch, or Scandinavian, or German perhaps. "It was a hot wind, a scalding wind," she went on. "I do not believe in h.e.l.l, nor heaven come to that. But if you can imagine it, it was like a wind from the fires of h.e.l.l. I thought we would burn alive, all of us."

"But you said it was in February," Karl interrupted. I frowned at him, but Lizzie didn't seem to mind at all. "That's in wintertime, isn't it?" Karl went on. "I mean, where were you living? Africa or somewhere?"

"No. It wasn't in Africa. Didn't I tell you this before? I think I did." She was suddenly looking a little unsure of herself. "There was an elephant in the garden, you see. No, honestly there was. And she liked potatoes, lots of potatoes." I think my wry smile must have betrayed me. "You still do not believe me, do you? Well, I cannot say that I blame you. I expect you and all the other nurses think I am just a dotty old bat, a bit loopy, off my rocker, as you say. It is quite true that my bits and pieces do not work so well anymore-which, I suppose, is why I am in here, isn't it? My legs will not do what I tell them sometimes, and even my heart does not beat like it should. It skips and flutters. It makes up its own rhythm as it goes along, which makes me feel dizzy, and this is not at all convenient for me. But I can tell you for certain and for sure, that my mind is as sound as a bell, sharp as a razor. So when I say there was an elephant in the garden, there really was. There is nothing wrong with my memory, nothing at all."

"I don't think you're batty at all," said Karl. "Or loopy."

"That is very kind of you to say so, Karl. You and I shall be good friends. But I have to admit that when I come to think of it, I cannot remember much about yesterday, nor even what I had for breakfast this morning. But I promise you I can remember just how it was when I was young. I remember the important things, the things that matter. It is as if I wrote them down in my mind, so that I should not forget. So I remember very well-it was on the evening of my sixteenth birthday-that I looked out of the window, and saw her. At first she just looked like a big dark shadow, but then the shadow moved, and I looked again. There was no doubt about it. She was an elephant, quite definitely an elephant. I did not know it at the time, of course, but this elephant in our garden was going to change my life forever, change all our lives in my family. And you might say she was going to save all our lives also."

Two.

Lizzie paused for a moment or two, then smiled across at me sympathetically, knowingly. "No, no, you are too busy for this, dear, I can see that," she said. "You have to get on. You have other patients to look after. I know this. I was a sort of nurse once. Nurses are always busy. But I can talk to Karl. I can tell him my elephant story."

There was no way I was going to miss her story now. If Karl was going to hear it, then I was too. And the truth was that I had already sensed from the tone in her voice that she was making nothing up, that Karl had been right about her. "You certainly can't stop now," I told her. "I'm off duty at twelve, and that's just about now. So I'm on my own time."

"And we want to know all about the elephant, don't we, Mum?" said Karl.

"Then you shall, Karli. I think from now on I shall call you Karli, like my little brother. So it will be as if you are inside the story." She lay her head back on her pillows. "I have had quite a long life, and quite a lot has happened, so it may take a little while. You are going to have to be patient. I think, to begin with, you have to know names and places. I was called Elizabeth then, or Lisbeth some people called me-I became Lizzie much later. Mother, we always called Mutti. And I had a little brother, as I have told you, about eight years younger than me, little Karli. He was always full of questions, endless questions, and when we answered, there'd always be another question, about the answer we'd just given. 'Yes, but why?' he would ask. 'How come? What for?' In the end we would often become impatient with him, and just tell him it was 'for a blue reason.' He seemed happy with that-I do not know why.

"Karli was born with one leg shorter than the other, so we had to carry him a lot, but he was always cheerful. In fact he was the clown in the family, kept us all laughing. He loved to juggle-he could do it with his eyes closed too! The elephant loved to watch him. It was as if she were hypnotized. The elephant was called Marlene. Mutti got to name her because she was working with the elephants in the zoo. She named her after a singer she loved, that many people loved in those days. Marlene Dietrich. I wonder if you might have heard of her-no, I don't suppose you have. She's been dead a long time now. She was very slim and elegant, and blond too, not at all like an elephant, but that did not seem to matter to Mutti. She called the elephant Marlene, and that was that.

"We had a gramophone at home, a windup one with a big trumpet-you do not see them like this anymore, only in antique shops-and so Marlene Dietrich's voice was always in the house. We grew up with that voice. She had a voice like dark red velvet. When she sang it was as if she were singing only for me. I tried to sing just like her, mostly in the bath, because my singing sounded better in the bath. I remember Mutti would sometimes hum along with her songs when we were listening to them. It was like a kind of duet."

"But what about the elephant?" Karl interrupted again, not troubling much to hide his impatience. "I mean, how come this elephant was in your garden in the first place? Where were you living? I don't understand."

"Yes, you are right, dear," she said. "I was getting ahead of myself, rus.h.i.+ng on too quickly." She thought long and hard, collecting her thoughts, before beginning again.

"It would be better perhaps if I start again, I think.

A story should always begin at the beginning. No? My own beginning would be a good start, I suppose...

So, I was born on the ninth of February, 1929, in Dresden, in Germany. We lived in quite a big house, a walled garden at the back, with a sandpit and a swing. And we had a woodshed where there lived the biggest spiders in the whole world, I promise you! There were many high trees, beech trees, where the pigeons cooed in summer, right outside my bedroom window. At the end of the garden was a rusty iron gate with huge squeaking hinges. This gate led out into a big park. So, in a way, we had two gardens you might say, a little one that was ours, and a big one we had to share with everyone else in Dresden.

Dresden was a wonderful city then, so beautiful, you cannot imagine. I have only to close my eyes and I can see it again, just as it was. Papi-this is what we all called our father-Papi worked in the city art gallery restoring paintings. And he wrote books about paintings too, about Rembrandt in particular. He loved Rembrandt above all other artists. Like Mutti he loved listening to the gramophone, but he preferred Bach to Marlene Dietrich. He loved boating best of all, though, and fis.h.i.+ng too, even more than Rembrandt or Bach. On weekends we would often go boating on the lake in the park, and in summer we would take a picnic and the gramophone with us, and we would have a picnic by the sh.o.r.e, a musical picnic! Papi loved musical picnics. Well, we all did.

Every holiday, we would take a bus into the countryside, to stay with Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti on their farm-Aunt Lotti was Mutti's sister, you understand. We would feed the animals and have more picnics. Papi built a tree house for us on an island out in the middle of the lake-which was more like a large pond than a lake, when I come to think about it-and it was fringed all around with reeds, I remember, and there were always ducks and moorhens and frogs and tadpoles and little darting fish. We had a small rowboat to get across to the island, and plenty of trout to fish for in the stream that ran down into the little lake-so Papi was happy.

Sometimes when the harvesting was done, we'd all be out there in the field of stubble long into the evenings, gathering the last grains of golden corn. And whenever we could on summer nights, Karli and I would sleep up in the tree house on the island. We would lie awake listening to the gramophone playing far away in the farmhouse, to the owls calling one another. We would watch the moon sailing through the clouds.

We loved the animals, of course. Little Karli loved the pigs especially, and Uncle Manfred's horse-Tomi, he was called. Karli would go riding on Tomi with Uncle Manfred every day out around the farm, and I would go bicycling on my own. I went off for hours on end. I loved freewheeling down a hill, the wind in my face. It was our dreamtime, full of suns.h.i.+ne and laughter. But dreams do not last, do they? And sometimes they turn into nightmares.

I was born before the war, of course. But when I say that, it sounds as if I knew there was going to be a war all the time I was growing up. It was not like that, not at all, not for me. Yes, there was talk of it, and there were many uniforms and flags in the streets, lots of bands marching up and down. Karli loved all that. He loved to march along with them, even if the other boys used to taunt him. He was so small and frail, and suffered greatly from asthma. They'd call him "Pegleg," because of his limp, and I hated them for that. I would shout at them, whenever I felt brave enough, that is. It was not only the mockery in their faces and the cruelty of their words that I hated so much, it was the injustice. It was not Karli's fault he had been born like that. But Karli did not want me to stand up for him. He used to get quite angry at me for making a fuss. I do not think he minded them nearly as much as I did.

I think I have always had a strong sense of justice, of fair play, of what is right and what is wrong. Maybe it is just natural for children to be born like this. Maybe I got it from Mutti. Who knows? Anyway, I always recognized injustice when I saw it, and I felt it deeply. And believe you me, there was plenty of it about in those days. I saw the Jews in the streets, with their yellow stars sewn onto their coats. I saw their shops with the star of David daubed in paint all over the windows. Several times I saw them beaten up by n.a.z.i stormtroopers, and left to lie in the gutter.

At home, Papi did not like us to talk about any of this, about anything political-he was very strict about that. We all knew about the terrible things the n.a.z.is were doing, but Papi always told me that our home should be an oasis of peace and harmony for us in a troubled world, that it only made Mutti angry or sad or both to talk about it, and that little Karli was far too young anyway to understand about such things. Besides, Papi would say, you never know who's listening. But down on the farm on our holidays one summer-the summer of 1938 it was-Mutti and Papi, Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti, got into a long and heated argument. It was late at night, and Karli and I were already upstairs in bed. We heard every word of it.

Uncle Manfred was banging the table, and I could hear the tears of anger in his voice. "Germany needs strong leaders.h.i.+p," he was saying. "Without our Fuhrer, without Adolf Hitler, the country will go to the dogs. Like Hitler himself, I fought in the trenches. We were comrades in arms. My only brother was killed in the war, and most of my friends. Is all that sacrifice to be for nothing? I remember the humiliation of defeat, and how people starved in the streets after the war. I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. Make no mistake, it was the government in Berlin, and the Jews, who betrayed the Fatherland and the army. And now Hitler is restoring our pride, putting things right."

I had never in my life imagined Uncle Manfred could be this angry. Mutti was furious too, and called him ein Dummkopf-in English this means a fool, or a fathead. She was saying that Hitler was a madman, that the n.a.z.i regime was the worst thing that had ever happened to Germany, that we had many dear friends who were Jews, and that if Hitler went on the way he was going, he would lead us all into another war.

Uncle Manfred, who was ranting now, and quite beside himself, replied that he hoped there would be a war, so that this time we could show the world that Germany had to be respected. Then, to my utter surprise, mild-mannered Aunt Lotti joined in, calling Mutti "nothing but a coward and a lousy Jew-loving pacifist." Mutti told her in no uncertain terms that she was proud to be a pacifist, that she would be a pacifist till the day she died. Through all this, Papi was doing his best to try to calm things down, and said that we were all ent.i.tled to our own opinion, but that we were all family, all German, and that we should stick together, whatever our views. No one was listening to him.

The argument raged on for most of the night. To be honest, at the time I didn't understand much of what they were talking about-only enough to know that I was on Mutti's side. Karli understood even less, but we were both so upset and surprised to hear them being angry with one another, and shouting like that. When I think about it now, I realize I should have been more knowledgeable about what they were saying. But I wasn't, not then. I was just a teenage girl growing up, I suppose. Yes, I hated all the dreadful things I'd seen the stormtroopers doing in the streets, but the truth is-and I am ashamed of this now-that I was far more interested in boys and bicycles, than in politics-and more in bicycles than boys, I have to say.

I do not think I understood just how serious the argument had really been, till the next morning. When Karli and I came downstairs into the kitchen for breakfast, Mutti had all the cases packed. She was in tears, and Papi announced grim-faced to Karli and me that we were going home. He said that Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti had decided we were no longer welcome in their house, and that we wouldn't be seeing them or speaking to them ever again. Uncle Manfred and Aunt Lotti were nowhere to be seen. I shall never forget walking away down the road from the farm, knowing we'd never be coming back. Karli started crying, and very soon I found myself doing the same. It felt like the end of a wonderful dream. And that is exactly what it turned out to be. Only a year or so later, Papi came home one day in his gray army uniform, and told us they were sending him to France. It came as a total surprise to me. That was how the war began for us, the beginning of our nightmare, of everyone's nightmare.

Three.

"Maybe I will have that drink of water now," Lizzie said, reaching for her gla.s.s. I was only too pleased to hand it to her.

"I think you're tiring yourself," I told her.

"I am fine," she replied firmly. "Quite fine. Just a dry throat, that is all."

"What about the elephant?" Karl asked her. "You haven't told us about the elephant yet."

"Patience, patience," Lizzie said, laughing. "You are just like Karli, just like him. Questions, always questions. The likeness between you is-how is it you say it?-uncanny. I was just coming to that part of the story." She took a deep breath, and closed her eyes before she went on.

This was about the time Mutti went to work in the zoo, with the elephants. With so many men away at the war, the women were doing more and more of the men's work these days. And anyway, now that Papi was gone, I suppose we must have needed the money. Papi came home every few months on leave, but each time he seemed to me to be more and more changed, a different man almost. He was thinner in the face, with dark rings under his sunken eyes. He would be sitting in his chair, Karli on his knee, and hardly saying a word. We never went boating together. Papi didn't go fis.h.i.+ng. He did not even listen to his beloved Bach on the gramophone. And he never laughed, not even at Karli's tricks and antics.

Then, as the war dragged on, year after year, Papi came home less and less. We heard he was in Russia somewhere, but we never knew exactly where. We had letters, of course, but not that often. Whenever a new one did come, Mutti would read it out loud to Karli and me every evening before bedtime. We would have then what Mutti always called a "family moment" together, holding hands around the kitchen table and closing our eyes to think of Papi. Then she would put the letter up with all the others on the mantelpiece, behind the photo of Papi in his uniform. The mantelpiece became like an altar to his memory.

Karli would often ask us if Papi was dead in the war. Of course not, we told him. Papi was fine. He would be home soon, we told him. We told him anything to keep him happy, that it would all be over before we knew it, and everything would be back to the way it had been. But as the war went on, hiding the truth was becoming impossible. The news worsened with every pa.s.sing week. Food became scarce. More and more cities were being bombed all over Germany. We had more and more days off school because there was not enough coal any more to heat the cla.s.srooms. The Russian Army, the Red Army we called it, was closing in on us from the east. Refugees were flooding into Dresden. And the Allies, the Americans and the British, were already marching into Germany from the west. More and more husbands and sons and brothers were being reported dead or missing. It was common now, every week, for one of our school friends to learn the dreadful news that a father or a brother was not coming home. So of course Mutti and I began to fear the worst for Papi. We both feared it, I know we did, but did not dare speak of it.

We used to listen to the radio every evening, Mutti and I. All through the war we had done this, listening for news from the particular battlefront where we thought Papi was fighting. They still tried to make bad news sound like good news-they were very good at that. But no matter what they told us, we knew, as everyone did by now, that the war was lost-that it was only a question of how quickly it would end, and of who would get to us first, the Red Army from the east, or the Allies from the west. We all hoped it might be the Allies-from the refugees we had heard such terrible things about the Red Army. In the end it was just too painful to listen anymore to the radio, so we didn't. We listened to the gramophone instead, and longed every day for the war to be over, for Papi to be home again with us. Every night before we went up to bed, Mutti would make sure that Karli and I said good night to Papi's photo. Karli liked to touch it with his fingertips. I had to lift him up because he was still too small to reach it himself.

I think I was often angry in those days-with the way the world was, I mean. And I am ashamed to say that sometimes I took it out on Mutti, blaming her for just about everything. I have no excuse for this, except that I was fifteen, and felt that day by day all my happiness was being taken from me. I felt hollow inside, empty, and angry. It is difficult to explain, but I felt as if I were all alone in the world, a world I used to love, and that I had come to hate. More and more I felt apart from everyone and everything, from my friends and family even, as if I no longer belonged. Like Papi, I could no longer even take pleasure in Karli's playfulness. He went on joking and juggling just the same, with the world falling apart about us. I became more and more irritated with him, and with Mutti too. Mutti could see this, I think, and became all the more maternal and attentive towards me, which only made things worse, of course.

We did not live far from the zoo where Mutti worked, so that in the dark of the evening, if I went out into the garden, I could hear the lions roaring, and the monkeys chattering and the wolves howling. I had taken to getting out of the house whenever I could. However cold it was, I would sit on the swing and listen to them. I would close my eyes, and try to imagine myself out in the jungle away from everything that was going on, far from the war and all this unhappiness. One evening Mutti came out to join me, bringing me my coat.

"You'll catch your death, Elizabeth," she said, wrapping the coat around my shoulders. She began to tell me all about the animals we were hearing, their names, the countries they had come from, their personalities, who was friends with who, all their funny habits. And then she started talking about Marlene again, the young elephant she had almost adopted by now. I just didn't want to hear about Marlene. Mutti was talking on and on about her with such deep affection, almost as if she really were part of her family. It occurred to me then, quite suddenly, that maybe this elephant was more precious to her than Karli and I.

It was some years now since Marlene had been born, four or five maybe. Mutti had been there at the birth, and she was so proud of that, and prouder still when the Herr Direktor at the zoo said that since she was the one who saw her come into the world, then she should be the one to name her. After that it was almost as if Marlene were her baby. And in the last few days in particular, she had been talking about her all the time because she was very worried about her.

Only a month or two before this, Marlene's mother had become sick, and had died quite suddenly. So Mutti would be home late each evening, spending even longer hours now at the zoo, just to be with Marlene, to comfort her. Elephants grieve just like we do-Mutti had often explained this to us. She told us that Marlene needed her to be there with her as much as possible, that she had been off her food and depressed ever since her mother had died. And now there was a photo on the mantelpiece of them both together, Mutti stroking Marlene's ear. It was right next to the photograph of Papi, and his letters, and I didn't like that at all.

Mutti had taken Karli and me with her into the zoo to see Marlene many times. It was true, she did seem sad and dejected. And Mutti was right, she was the sweetest elephant in the world, so gentle. She had such kind eyes. Her trunk seemed to have a life all of its own, and she rumbled and groaned almost as if she were talking, which always made Karli giggle. And whenever he giggled, that seemed to cheer Marlene up a lot. Karli and that elephant became the best of friends. It was the highlight of Karli's life when Mutti took us in to see Marlene. They were so alike, those two-Marlene and Karli, I mean. Naughty, inquisitive, funny. Karli would talk to her as he fed her, as he led her about by her trunk. Like the best of friends, the best of soul mates they were.

If I am honest I think I was a little jealous, and maybe this was why I was heartily sick of hearing Mutti going on and on about her confounded elephant. And here she was doing it again.

"Do you hear that, Elizabeth?" she said, grasping my arm. "It is Marlene! I am sure that is Marlene trumpeting again. She hates to hear the wolves howling. I've told her that they won't harm her, but she is all alone at night, when I am not there, and she gets frightened. Do you hear her?"

"For goodness' sake, Mutti!" Even as I was shouting at her, I knew I shouldn't be. But I couldn't stop myself. "There is a war on, Mutti, or hadn't you noticed? Papi is away fighting. He's probably lying there dead in the snow in Russia right now. In the city there are thousands of people starving in the streets. And all you can talk about is your precious Marlene. She is just an elephant, a stupid elephant!"