The Elephant Vanishes (31 page)

The dwarf danced at this tavern for close to half a year. The place overflowed with customers who wanted to see him dance.
And as they watched him, they would steep themselves in boundless happiness or be overcome with boundless grief. Soon, the dwarf had the power to manipulate people’s emotions with a mere choice of dance step.

Talk of the dancing dwarf eventually reached the ears of the chief of the council of nobles, a man who had deep ties with the elephant factory and whose fief lay nearby. From this nobleman—who, as it turned out, would be captured by the revolutionary guard and flung, still living, into a boiling pot of glue—word of the dwarf reached the young king. A lover of music, the king was determined to see the dwarf dance. He dispatched the vertical-induction ship with the royal crest to the tavern, and the royal guards carried the dwarf to the palace with the utmost respect. The owner of the tavern was compensated for his loss, almost too generously. The customers grumbled over
their
loss, but they knew better than to grumble to the king. Resigned, they drank their beer and Mecatol and went back to watching the dances of young girls.

Meanwhile, the dwarf was given a room in the palace, where the ladies-in-waiting washed him and dressed him in silk and taught him the proper etiquette for appearing before the king. The next night, he was taken to the great hall, where the king’s orchestra, upon cue, performed a polka that the king had composed. The dwarf danced to the polka, sedately at first, as if allowing his body to absorb the music, then gradually increasing the speed of his dance until he was whirling with the force of a tornado. People watched him, breathless. No one could speak. Several of the noble ladies fainted to the floor, and from the king’s own hand fell a crystal goblet containing gold-dust wine, but not a single person noticed the sound of it shattering.

A
T THIS POINT
in his story, the old man set his glass on the table and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then reached out for the elephant-shaped lamp and began to fiddle with it. I waited for him to continue, but he remained silent for several minutes. I called to the bartender and ordered more beer
and Mecatol. The tavern was slowly filling up, and onstage a young woman singer was tuning her guitar.

“Then what happened?” I asked.

“Then?” he said. “Then the revolution started. The king was killed, and the dwarf ran away.”

I set my elbows on the table and, cradling my mug, took a long swallow of beer. I looked at the old man and asked, “You mean the revolution occurred just after the dwarf entered the palace?”

“Not long after. ‘Bout a year, I’d say.” The old man let out a huge burp.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Before, you said that you weren’t supposed to talk about the dwarf. Why is that? Is there some connection between the dwarf and the revolution?”

“Ya got me there. One thing’s sure, though. The revolutionary guard wanted to bring that dwarf in somethin’ terrible. Still do. The revolution’s an old story already, but they’re still lookin’ for the dancing dwarf. Even so, I don’t know what the connection is between the dwarf and the revolution. All you hear is rumors.”

“What kind of rumors?”

I could see that he was having trouble deciding whether to tell me any more. “Rumors are just rumors,” he said finally. “You never know what’s true. But some folks say the dwarf used a kind of evil power on the palace, and that’s what caused the revolution. Anyhow, that’s all I know about the dwarf. Nothin’ else.”

The old man let out one long hiss of a sigh, and then he drained his glass in a single gulp. The pink liquid oozed out at the corners of his mouth, dripping down into the sagging collar of his undershirt.

I
DIDN’T DREAM
about the dwarf again. I went to the elephant factory every day as usual and continued making ears, first softening an ear with steam, then flattening it with a press hammer, cutting out five ear shapes, adding the ingredients to
make five full-size ears, drying them, and finally, adding wrinkles. At noon, my partner and I would break to eat our pack lunches and talk about the new girl in Stage 8.

There were lots of girls working at the elephant factory, most of them assigned to splicing nervous systems or machine stitching or cleanup. We’d talk about them whenever we had free time. And whenever they had free time, they’d talk about us.

“Great-looking girl,” my partner said. “All the guys’ve got their eye on her. But nobody’s nailed her yet.”

“Can she really be that good-looking?” I asked. I had my doubts. Any number of times I had made a point of going to see the latest “knockout,” who turned out to be nothing much. This was one kind of rumor you could never trust.

“No lie,” he said. “Check her out yourself. If you don’t think she’s a beauty, go to Stage Six and get a new pair of eyes. Wish I didn’t have a wife. I’d get her. Or die tryin’.”

Lunch break was almost over, but as usual my section had almost no work left for the afternoon so I cooked up an excuse to go to Stage 8. To get there, you had to go through a long underground tunnel. There was a guard at the tunnel entrance, but he knew me from way back, so I had no trouble getting in.

The far end of the tunnel opened on a riverbank, and the Stage 8 building was a little ways downstream. Both the roof and the smokestack were pink. Stage 8 made elephant legs. Having worked there just four months earlier, I knew the layout well. The young guard at the entrance was a newcomer I had never seen before, though.

“What’s your business?” he demanded. In his crisp uniform, he looked like a typical new-broom type, determined to enforce the rules.

“We ran out of nerve cable,” I said, clearing my throat. “I’m here to borrow some.”

“That’s weird,” he said, glaring at my uniform. “You’re in the ear section. Cable from the ear and leg sections shouldn’t be interchangeable.”

“Well, let me try to make a long story short. I was originally planning to borrow cable from the trunk section, but they didn’t have any extra. And
they
were out of leg cable, so they said if I could get them a reel of that, they’d let me have a reel of the fine stuff. When I called here, they said they have extra leg cable, so that’s why I’m here.”

The guard flipped through the pages of his clipboard. “I haven’t heard anything about this,” he said. “These things are supposed to be arranged beforehand.”

“That’s strange. It has been. Somebody goofed. I’ll tell the guys inside to straighten it out.”

The guard just stood there whining. I warned him that he was slowing down production and that I would hold him responsible if somebody from upstairs got on my back. Finally, still grumbling, he let me in.

Stage 8—the leg shop—was housed in a low-set, spacious building, a long, narrow place with a partially sunken sandy floor. Inside, your eyes were at ground level, and narrow glass windows were the only source of illumination. Suspended from the ceiling were movable rails from which hung dozens of elephant legs. If you squinted up at them, it looked as if a huge herd of elephants was winging down from the sky.

The whole shop had no more than thirty workers altogether, both men and women. Everybody had on hats and masks and goggles, so in the gloom it was impossible to tell which one was the new girl. I recognized one guy I used to work with and asked him where I could find her.

“She’s the girl at Bench Fifteen attaching toenails,” he said. “But if you’re planning to put the make on her, forget it. She’s hard as nails. You haven’t got a chance.”

“Thanks for the advice,” I said.

The girl at Bench 15 was a slim little thing. She looked like a boy in a medieval painting.

“Excuse me,” I said. She looked at me, at my uniform, at my shoes, and then up again. Then she took her hat off, and her
goggles. She was incredibly beautiful. Her hair was long and curly; her eyes were as deep as the ocean.

“Yes?”

“I was wondering if you’d like to go out dancing with me tomorrow night. Saturday. If you’re free.”

“Well, I
am
free tomorrow night, and I
am
going to go dancing, but not with you.”

“Have you got a date with someone else?”

“Not at all,” she said. Then she put her goggles and hat back on, picked up an elephant toenail from her bench, and held it against a foot, checking the fit. The nail was just a little too wide, so she filed it down with a few quick strokes.

“C’mon,” I said. “If you haven’t got a date, go with me. It’s more fun than going alone. And I know a good restaurant we could go to.”

“That’s all right. I want to dance by myself. If you want to dance, too, there’s nothing stopping you from coming.”

“I will,” I said.

“It’s up to you,” she said.

Ignoring me, she continued to work. Now she pressed the filed nail into the hollow at the front of the foot. This time, it fit perfectly.

“Pretty good for a beginner,” I said.

She didn’t answer me.

T
HAT NIGHT
, the dwarf came into my dream again, and again I knew it was a dream. He was sitting on a log in the middle of the clearing in the forest, smoking a cigarette. This time he had neither record player nor records. There were signs of weariness in his face that made him look a little more advanced in years than he had when I first saw him—though in no way could he be taken for someone who had been born before the revolution. He looked perhaps two or three years older than me, but it was hard to tell. That’s the way it is with dwarfs.

For lack of anything better to do, I strolled around the
dwarf, looked up at the sky, and finally sat down beside him. The sky was gray and overcast, and black clouds were drifting westward. It might have begun to rain at any time. The dwarf had probably put away the records and player to keep them from being rained on.

“Hi,” I said to the dwarf.

“Hi,” he answered.

“Not dancing today?” I asked.

“No, not today,” he said.

When he wasn’t dancing, the dwarf was a feeble, sad-looking creature. You would never guess that he had once been a proud figure of authority in the royal palace.

“You look a little sick,” I said.

“I am,” he replied. “It can be very cold in the forest. When you live alone for a long time, different things start to affect your health.”

“That’s terrible,” I said.

“I need energy. I need a new source of energy flowing in my veins—energy that will enable me to dance and dance, to get wet in the rain without catching cold, to run through the fields and hills. That’s what I need.”

“Gosh,” I said.

We sat on the log for a long time, saying nothing. From far overhead, I heard the wind in the branches. Flitting among the trunks of the trees, a huge butterfly would appear and disappear.

“Anyhow,” he said, “you wanted me to do something for you.”

“I did?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

The dwarf picked up a branch and drew a star on the ground. “The girl,” he said. “You want the girl, don’t you?”

He meant the pretty new girl in Stage 8. I was amazed that he knew so much. Of course, this was a dream, so anything could happen.

“Sure, I want her. But I can’t ask you to help me get her. I’ll have to do it myself.”

“You can’t.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I know,” he said. “Go ahead and get angry, but the fact is you can’t do it yourself.”

He might be right, I thought. I was so ordinary. I had nothing to be proud of—no money, no good looks, no special way with words, even—nothing special at all. True, I wasn’t a bad guy, and I worked hard. The people at the factory liked me. I was strong and healthy. But I wasn’t the type that girls go crazy over at first sight. How could a guy like me ever hope to get his hands on a beauty like that?

“You know,” the dwarf whispered, “if you let me help you, it just might work out.”

“Help me? How?” He had aroused my curiosity.

“By dancing. She likes dancing. Show her you’re a good dancer and she’s yours. Then you just stand beneath the tree and wait for the fruit to fall into your hands.”

“You mean you’ll teach me to dance?”

“I don’t mind,” he said. “But a day or two of practice won’t do you any good. It takes six months at least, and then only if you work at it all day, every day. That’s what it takes to capture someone’s heart by dancing.”

I shook my head. “It’s no use, then,” I said. “If I have to wait six months, some other guy will get her for sure.”

“When do you go dancing?”

“Tomorrow night. Saturday. She’ll be going to the dance hall, and I will, too. I’ll ask her to dance with me.”

The dwarf used the branch to draw a number of vertical lines in the dirt. Then he bridged them with a horizontal line to make a strange diagram. Silent, I followed the movement of his hand. The dwarf spit the butt of his cigarette on the ground and crushed it with his foot.

“There’s a way to do it—if you really want her,” he said. “You want her, don’t you?”

“Sure I do.”

“Want me to tell you how it can be done?”

“Please. I’d like to know.”

“It’s simple, really. I just get inside you. I use your body to dance. You’re healthy and strong: You should be able to manage a little dancing.”

“I
am
in good shape. Nobody better,” I said. “But can you really do such a thing—get inside me and dance?”

“Absolutely. And then she’s yours. I guarantee it. And not just her. You can have any girl.”

I licked my lips. It sounded too good to be true. If I let the dwarf get inside me, he might never come out. My body could be taken over by this dwarf. As much as I wanted the girl, I was not willing to let that happen.

“You’re scared,” he said, as if reading my mind. “You think I’ll take possession of your body.”

“I’ve heard things about you,” I said.

“Bad things, I suppose.”

“Yes, bad things.”

He gave me a sly smile. “Don’t worry. I may have power, but I can’t just take over a person’s body once and for all. An agreement is required for that. I can’t do it unless both parties agree.
You
don’t want your body permanently taken over, do you?”