The Elephant Vanishes (30 page)

“You’re a great dancer,” I cried out to him. “You’re music itself.”

“Thank you,” he answered with a hint of affectation.

“Do you always go at it like this?”

“Pretty much,” he said.

Then the dwarf did a beautiful twirl on tiptoe, his soft, wavy hair flowing in the wind. I applauded. I had never seen such accomplished dancing in my life. The dwarf gave a respectful bow as the song ended. He stopped dancing and toweled himself down. The needle was clicking in the inner groove of the record. I lifted the tonearm and turned the player off. I put the record into the first empty jacket that came to hand.

“I guess you haven’t got time to hear my story,” said the dwarf, glancing at me. “It’s a long one.”

Unsure how to answer, I took another grape. Time was no problem for me, but I wasn’t that eager to hear the long life story of a dwarf. And besides, this was a dream. It could evaporate at any moment.

Rather than wait for me to answer, the dwarf snapped his fingers and started to speak. “I’m from the north country,” he said. “Up north, they don’t dance. Nobody knows how. They don’t even realize that it’s something you can do. But I wanted to dance. I wanted to stamp my feet and wave my arms, shake my head and spin around. Like this.”

The dwarf stamped his feet, waved his arms, shook his head,
and spun around. Each movement was simple enough in itself, but in combination the four produced an almost incredible beauty of motion, erupting from the dwarf’s body all at once, as when a globe of light bursts open.

“I wanted to dance like this. And so I came south. I danced in the taverns. I became famous, and danced in the presence of the king. That was before the revolution, of course. Once the revolution broke out, the king passed away, as you know, and I was banished from the town to live in the forest.”

The dwarf went to the middle of the clearing and began to dance again. I put a record on. It was an old Frank Sinatra record. The dwarf danced, singing “Night and Day” along with Sinatra. I pictured him dancing before the throne. Glittering chandeliers and beautiful ladies-in-waiting, exotic fruits and the long spears of the royal guard, portly eunuchs, the young king in jewel-bedecked robes, the dwarf drenched in sweat but dancing with unbroken concentration: As I imagined the gorgeous scene, I felt that at any moment the roar of the revolution’s cannon would echo from the distance.

The dwarf went on dancing, and I ate my grapes. The sun set, covering the earth in the shadows of the forest. A huge black butterfly the size of a bird cut across the clearing and vanished into the depths of the forest. I felt the chill of the evening air. It was time for my dream to melt away, I knew.

“I guess I have to go now,” I said to the dwarf.

He stopped dancing and nodded in silence.

“I enjoyed watching you dance,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

“Anytime,” said the dwarf.

“We may never meet again,” I said. “Take care of yourself.”

“Don’t worry,” said the dwarf. “We will meet again.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes. You’ll be coming back here,” he said with a snap of his fingers. “You’ll live in the forest. And every day you’ll dance with me. You’ll become a really good dancer yourself before long.”

“How do you know?” I asked, taken aback.

“It’s been decided,” he answered. “No one has the power to change what has been decided. I know that you and I will meet again soon enough.”

The dwarf looked right up at me as he spoke. The deepening darkness had turned him the deep blue of water at night.

“Well, then,” he said. “Be seeing you.”

He turned his back to me and began dancing again, alone.

I
WOKE UP ALONE
. Facedown in bed, I was drenched in sweat. There was a bird outside my window. It seemed different from the bird I was used to seeing there.

I washed my face with great care, shaved, put some bread in the toaster, and boiled water for coffee. I fed the cat, changed its litter, put on a necktie, and tied my shoes. Then I took a bus to the elephant factory.

Needless to say, the manufacture of elephants is no easy matter. They’re big, first of all, and very complex. It’s not like making hairpins or colored pencils. The factory covers a huge area, and it consists of several buildings. Each building is big, too, and the sections are color-coded. Assigned to the ear section that month, I worked in the building with the yellow ceiling and posts. My helmet and pants were also yellow. All I did there was make ears. The month before, I had been assigned to the green building, where I wore a green helmet and pants and made heads. We moved from section to section each month, like Gypsies. It was company policy. That way, we could all form a complete picture of what an elephant looked like. No one was permitted to spend his whole life making just ears, say, or just toenails. The executives put together the chart that controlled our movements, and we followed the chart.

Making elephant heads is tremendously rewarding work. It requires enormous attention to detail, and at the end of the day you’re so tired you don’t want to talk to anybody. I’ve lost as much as six pounds working there for a month, but it does give me a great sense of accomplishment. By comparison, making ears is a breeze. You just make these big, flat, thin things, put a
few wrinkles in them, and you’re done. We call working in the ear section “taking an ear break.” After a monthlong ear break, I go to the trunk section, where the work is again very demanding. A trunk has to be flexible, and its nostrils must be unobstructed for its entire length. Otherwise, the finished elephant will go on a rampage. Which is why making the trunk is nerve-racking work from beginning to end.

We don’t make elephants from nothing, of course. Properly speaking, we reconstitute them. First we saw a single elephant into six distinct parts: ears, trunk, head, abdomen, legs, and tail. These we then recombine to make five elephants, which means that each new elephant is in fact only one-fifth genuine and four-fifths imitation. This is not obvious to the naked eye, nor is the elephant itself aware of it. We’re that good.

Why must we artificially manufacture—or, should I say, reconstitute—elephants? It is because we are far less patient than they are. Left to their own devices, elephants would give birth to no more than one baby in four or five years. And because we love elephants, of course, it makes us terribly impatient to see this custom—or habitual behavior—of theirs. This is what led us to begin reconstituting them ourselves.

To protect the newly reconstituted elephants against improper use, they are initially purchased by the Elephant Supply Corporation, a publicly owned monopoly, which keeps them for two weeks and subjects them to a battery of highly exacting tests, after which the sole of one foot is stamped with the corporation’s logo before the elephant is released into the jungle. We make fifteen elephants in a normal week. Though in the pre-Christmas season we can increase that to as many as twenty-five by running the machinery at full speed, I think that fifteen is just about right.

As I mentioned earlier, the ear section is the easiest single phase in the elephant-manufacturing process. It demands little physical exertion on the part of workers, it requires no close concentration, and it employs no complex machinery. The number of actual operations involved is limited, as well. Workers
can either work at a relaxed pace all day or exert themselves to meet their quota in the morning so as to have the afternoon free.

My partner and I in the ear shop liked the second approach. We’d finish up in the morning and spend the afternoon talking or reading or amusing ourselves separately. The afternoon following my dream of the dancing dwarf, all we had to do was hang ten freshly wrinkled ears on the wall, after which we sat on the floor enjoying the sunshine.

I told my partner about the dwarf. I remembered the dream in vivid detail and described everything about it to him, no matter how trivial. Where description was difficult, I demonstrated by shaking my head or swinging my arms or stamping my feet. He listened with frequent grunts of interest, sipping his tea. He was five years my senior, a strongly built fellow with a dark beard and a penchant for silence. He had this habit of thinking with his arms folded. Judging by the expression on his face, you would guess that he was a serious thinker, looking at things from all angles, but usually he’d just come up straight after a while and say, “That’s a tough one.” Nothing more.

He sat there thinking for a long time after I told him about my dream—so long that I started polishing the control panel of the electric bellows to kill time. Finally, he came up straight, as always, and said, “That’s a tough one. Hmmm. A dancing dwarf. That’s a tough one.”

This came as no great disappointment to me. I hadn’t been expecting him to say any more than he usually did. I had just wanted to tell someone about it. I put the electric bellows back and drank my now-lukewarm tea.

He went on thinking, though, for a much longer time than he normally devoted to such matters.

“What gives?” I asked.

“I’m pretty sure I once heard about that dwarf.”

This caught me off guard.

“I just can’t remember who told me.”

“Please try,” I urged him.

“Sure,” he said, and gave it another go.

He finally managed to recall what he knew about the dwarf three hours later, as the sun was going down near quitting time.

“That’s it!” he exclaimed. “The old guy in Stage Six! You know, the one who plants hairs. C’mon, you know: long white hair down to his shoulders, hardly any teeth. Been working here since before the revolution.”

“Oh,” I said. “Him.” I had seen him in the tavern any number of times.

“Yeah. He told me about the dwarf way back when. Said it was a good dancer. I didn’t pay much attention to him, figured he was senile. But now I don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t crazy after all.”

“So, what did he tell you?”

“Gee, I’m not so sure. It was a long time ago.” He folded his arms and fell to thinking again. But it was hopeless. After a while, he straightened up and said, “Can’t remember. Go ask him yourself.”

A
S SOON AS
the bell rang at quitting time, I went to the Stage 6 area, but there was no sign of the old man. I found only two young girls sweeping the floor. The thin girl told me he had probably gone to the tavern, “the older one.” Which is exactly where I found him, sitting very erect at the bar, drinking, with his lunch box beside him.

The tavern was an old, old place. It had been there since long before I was born, before the revolution. For generations now, the elephant craftsmen had been coming here to drink, play cards, and sing. The walls were lined with photographs of the old days at the elephant factory. There was a picture of the first president of the company inspecting a tusk, a photo of an old-time movie queen visiting the factory, shots taken at summer dances, that kind of thing. The revolutionary guards had burned all pictures of the king and the royal family and anything else that was deemed to be royalist. There were pictures of the revolution, of course: the revolutionary guards occupying the
factory and the revolutionary guards stringing up the plant superintendent.

I found the old fellow drinking Mecatol beneath an old, discolored photo labeled
THREE FACTORY BOYS POLISHING TUSKS.
When I took the stool next to him, the old man pointed to the photo and said, “This one is me.”

I squinted hard at the photo. The young boy on the right, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, did appear to be this old man in his youth. You would never notice the resemblance on your own, but once it had been pointed out to you, you could see that both had the same sharp nose and flat lips. Apparently, the old guy always sat here, and whenever he noticed an unfamiliar customer come in he’d say, “This one is me.”

“Looks like a real old picture,” I said, hoping to draw him out.

“’Fore the revolution,” he said matter-of-factly. “Even an old guy like me was still a kid back then. We all get old, though. You’ll look like me before too long. Just you wait, sonny boy!”

He let out a great cackle, spraying spit from a wide-open mouth missing half its teeth.

Then he launched into stories about the revolution. Obviously, he hated both the king and the revolutionary guards. I let him talk all he wanted, bought him another glass of Mecatol, and when the time was right asked him if, by any chance, he happened to know about a dancing dwarf.

“Dancing dwarf?” he said. “You wanna hear about the dancing dwarf?”

“I’d like to.”

His eyes glared into mine. “What the hell for?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I lied. “Somebody told me about him. Sounded interesting.”

He continued to look hard at me until his eyes reverted to the special mushy look that drunks have. “Awright,” he said. “Why not? Ya bought me a drink. But just one thing,” he said, holding a finger in my face, “don’t tell anybody. The revolution was a hell of a long time ago, but you’re still not supposed to
talk about the dancing dwarf. So, whatever I tell you, keep it to yourself. And don’t mention my name. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now, order me another drink and let’s go to a booth.”

I ordered two Mecatols and brought them to the booth, away from the bartender. The table had a green lamp in the shape of an elephant.

“It was before the revolution,” said the old man. “The dwarf came from the north country. What a great dancer he was! Nah, he wasn’t just great
at
dancing. He
was
dancing. Nob’dy could touch ‘im. Wind and light and fragrance and shadow: It was all there bursting inside him. That dwarf could do that, y’know. It was somethin’ to see.”

He clicked his glass against his few remaining teeth.

“Did you actually see him dance?” I asked.

“Did I see him?” The old fellow stared at me, spreading the fingers of both hands out atop the table. “Of
course
I saw him. Every day. Right here.”

“Here?”

“You heard me. Right here. He used to dance here every day. Before the revolution.”

T
HE OLD MAN WENT ON
to tell me how the dwarf had arrived from the north country without a penny in his pocket. He holed up in this tavern, where the elephant-factory workers gathered, doing odd jobs until the manager realized what a good dancer he was and hired him to dance full-time. At first, the workers grumbled because they wanted to have a dancing girl, but that didn’t last long. With their drinks in their hands, they were practically hypnotized watching him dance. And he danced like nobody else. He could draw feelings out of his audience, feelings they hardly ever used or didn’t even know they had. He’d bare these feelings to the light of day the way you’d pull out a fish’s guts.