elephant and boy

There is nothing sadder than an elephant boy without his elephant.

“There is nothing sadder than an elephant boy without his elephant,” writes the benevolent foreign lady.

“There is nothing sadder than an elephant boy without his elephant,” the benevolent foreign lady reads aloud.

“There is nothing sadder than . . . Wouldn’t that make a perfect epigraph for my book!” she says. “Oh, dear . . . Do you think elephant boy should be hyphenated?”

“There is nothing sadder than an elephant without his boy.” She reads and writes simultaneously, huffing as she bends over the notebook pressed to her thigh. “That sounds better, doesn’t it? It has more of a . . . a poemic flow.” She rereads it, frowning. “Though it’s not exactly true, is it? I’m not sure I believe all this balderdash about elephants having feelings. Long memories and all that.”

She resumes her strolling. “Or,” she bursts out, stooping and scribbling, “what about . . . nothing more melancholy than an elephant boy without his elephant? Nothing more desolate? More dreary? More darkling?” The man trailing her and fanning her with an enormous palm-leaf fan rolls his eyes and does not reply. She does not expect him to—she knows he cannot understand her language—but she persists in speaking to him nevertheless; she wants to assure him that despite his dark skin she considers him a human being, not a piece of furniture. An equal.

In truth, the man with the fan understands English perfectly well; he does not respond because he’s afraid that if he opens his mouth he might vomit. He has read enough poetry to find hers inexcusable. If he knew she considered him an equal, he would be deeply insulted.

“I’m afraid that’s not it. Let’s go back to the way it was before. There is nothing sadder than an elephant boy without his elephant. There is nothing sadder than an elephant boy without his elephant.”

The elephant boy weeps, inconsolable.

The benevolent foreign lady picks her way across the road and stands over the elephant boy. He doesn’t acknowledge her. His shoulders heave with sobs. She angles her parasol to shield him from the sun. Within seconds she feels her hair start to wilt. She returns the sunshade to her own shoulder.

He squats on a rock, knees drawn up to his armpits. His cheeks are swollen and dusty where he has slapped himself.

He weeps. “My black pearl, my queen of Sheba,” he cries.

“Here, dear, have a hankie,” she says.

He glares at her shoes, hands poised to slap himself again.

“What was her name?” she asks kindly.

“Black Pearl, Queen of Sheba!” he says impatiently. “You met her yourself.”

“Perhaps she just went for a walk. I do that myself sometimes. You may find her yet.”

“I found her collar. And the piece of her ear where her name was tattooed. Only poachers do that. So the elephant can’t be identified when they sell her . . . parts.”

“Goodness!” she says. “Such a fuss over an elephant. One would think you had lost your mother.”

She stands over him but is at a loss for what to say as he continues to weep. She has chosen the elephant boy to be her Special Project, but he is making things difficult. She walks back to the hotel, thinking, What that boy needs is some schooling. A good bath. Some friends to play with. A shirt and some shoes. She remembers the gift she ordered for him. It should be arriving soon.

He presses his chin between his knees and remembers her smile. She had the most beautiful smile. A slight upward shift of the skin around her right eye, a twitch of her lashes. Not ostentatious, not like the others. Subtle. Just for him.

The benevolent foreign lady walks back and forth in the cool of the hotel gallery. Every few steps she jumps and says “My,” or “Exactly,” or “Yes, that’s good” and writes down a few words. A watching mosquito hopes she is doing something constructive, like composing a shopping list or revising a nice poem. But no, she is making a list of ways to improve the world, initiate change for the better, light up the uncivilized corners, et cetera, et cetera. Her husband, the beneficent dead industrialist, has instructed her thus in his will. Only so long as she is administering his charitable funds will she continue to receive a personal income.

She has already written malaria, cholera, leprosy, oral hygiene. “Of course!” she exclaims and adds dark glasses for all the blind. “Of course it’s no help to them,” she reflects, “but with those eyes they are so unpleasant to look at for those around them.”

He and Queen of Sheba were both orphans. They chose each other on the first day of school (she bashful and shy, shuffling her feet, he spotting her across the yard and instantly smitten), and they had been together every day for seven years. He handled her feeding, her grooming, her living quarters, her checkups and tusk trimmings. They were meticulously attuned to each other; she responded promptly to the slightest pressure of his knees or a tap on the head, and he in turn could read the shifts of her shoulders, the curves of her trunk, her dreamboat eyes.

She writes: Must stop them swimming in that filthy river.

He is bowlegged as any gunslinger from straddling her great neck. At his cleanest, he smells distinctly of elephant. When he is alone, people avoid him. When he was with Queen of Sheba, people didn’t see him, they saw only Queen in all her magnificence; he was merely a part of her, a bump behind her head, a small extension of her brain.

She decides she must have inspiration; she puts on her outdoor things and paces the dusty street in front of the hotel. A porter from the hotel accompanies her; his job is to slap the beggars away from her skirts.

She writes: All these cows wandering around.

He seeks out the other elephant boys, hoping for sympathy. But they regard him with suspicion. He’s jealous. They are afraid he will try to seduce their elephants away from them; they eye his pockets for treats.

He would never do such a thing as steal another boy’s elephant. Even if he wanted to, it would be impossible. Mature elephants cannot bond properly with secondhand boys. Everyone knows that. With elephants the first love is the only love. For every elephant there can be only one boy. His training was specific. Without his partner, he’s obsolete.

She writes: Must do something about this heat.

In his heart of hearts he dreamed of them growing old together, lying in the sun, splashing water on each other’s faces, Queen with her ears gone ragged and her tusks gone blunt, him with a potbelly and perhaps a long beard; Queen liked to play with hair. Look at my wrinkles, he’d say, and she would snort derisively: How dare you talk to me about wrinkles.

A sentimental dream, he knew. But he treasured it. It was the only future he desired, the only one he could imagine. Now it is gone.

The biggest problem, she writes, is that these people have no imagination. She doesn’t understand it, the way they cling to their old ways of doing things. Their lives could be a hundred times more pleasant if they would just shut their mouths and open their ears.

The two fingers at the end of her trunk were more sensitive than his. He closes his eyes and remembers the touch of them on his cheek.

The fever-bearing mosquito has been following her; he senses the hot self-righteous blood rising to the benevolent foreign lady’s cheek. He circles and dives. With any luck, he thinks, he will sink his proboscis into her and end this foolishness. But try as he might he can find no point of entry. She is dressed like a battleship from top to toe: high-laced shoes with extra-thick soles to carry her over the muck, stockings that fasten to her knickers with a row of buttons, lisle gloves that button to her elbows, three petticoats beneath her dress, a dense double-layered beekeeper’s veil to keep everything out, a corset with whalebone stays to keep all of her in, the whole topped by a wide-brimmed hat trimmed with dried flowers, wax cherries, and a small stuffed songbird.

The mosquito, with unusual determination, lingers about her, dive-bombing and searching. If he could speak, he would issue this warning: Mend your prideful ways, or you will come back in your next life like me. He follows her to her hotel room and continues to wait for his chance, the slightest baring of skin, but exhausts his brief life span without success.

Vigilance. It is the elephant boy’s fundamental responsibility. When an elephant disappears in this city, she does not return. She is too conspicuous to hide or to wander off without causing a furor. When an elephant disappears, it is because someone made her disappear. Ivory hunters have no scruples, and they are magicians who specialize in making large objects vanish. She’s been taken. She won’t be back.

The elephant boy is a disgrace to his profession.

The foreign lady had been watching him for weeks. He and the elephant were always together, strolling through the deserted streets or heading down to the river. Sometimes the elephant had an elaborate saddle and canopy on her back for passengers. She wore no halter or restraint of any kind. When they had clients the boy was formal, shouting commands and using a light stick to direct her. When they were off duty they strolled side by side, the elephant’s trunk draped over his shoulder.

One day they were passing the hotel with the elephant decked out in sequins and bells and jingling anklets and tassels on her tusks and meticulous designs painted on her sides and around her eyes. The benevolent foreign lady was enchanted. “Ask him what the occasion is,” she called to the doorman.

“A wedding,” the boy called down, before the doorman could translate.

“An elephant wedding?” she cried. The doorman snickered.

“A people wedding,” the elephant boy replied politely.

“Would you mind”—she couldn’t help shouting, he seemed so high and far away perching behind the elephant’s elaborate headdress—“if I asked you a few questions? For my book.”

The benevolent foreign lady is hovering over him again. Like a vulture, he thinks, crouching over an animal not quite dead. “You should try to see this in a positive light,” she begins, her voice careful and rehearsed. “You’ve been liberated. No longer bound to a lifetime of servitude. You are now free to do whatever you want with your life. You can go to school, have a family. You should think about the future.” He stares at her as if he has not understood a word. She squats, trying to meet his eyes, and puts on her young-children voice. “Now, instead of one path, you have many paths in front of you to choose from.”

Many paths, he thinks. He can see only one. Or two. Neither is very long. One path leads to him bashing his head in with a rock. The other leads to him bashing her head in with a rock.

To her credit, the benevolent foreign lady is no dilettante, dabbling in charities to soothe the nudgings of her conscience. She cares. She believes. In her student days she was a suffragette, a crusader: She marched in the streets, served soup in the poorhouses, taught calisthenics in the orphanages, and read poetry to prison inmates. She married a hard-nosed businessman forty years her senior because, she says, she was seduced by his power, his position, his potential. She was dazzled, she says, by the vision of the good they could do the world if they joined forces. She will not admit, even to herself, that she did it for the money.

He married her, as he freely admitted, for her nice plump calves. After several whiskeys, he would pull her onto his lap and tell his cronies, “First time I saw her, I wanted to take a bite. I said, give me some of that, served up medium rare with gravy and roast potatoes, and you won’t see a happier man.”

When sober he was as relentlessly stern and glowering as the portrait that hung in the front hall. And like the portrait’s eyes, which followed one around the room, his eyes seemed always upon her. He liked to indulge her with gifts, then frown upon her frivolity. He was a man who always gave the impression of wearing a top hat, even when he was not.

His new wife threw away her soup kitchen apron and talked brightly of reform on a grander scale, but the truth was that long before she met her husband, the life of a female crusader had lost its glamour; it was no longer an adventure, a charade. It felt too real—she had spent all her inheritance and was beginning to look as haggard as the factory workers and fallen women she was trying so hard to help. She’d been trying to raise them up to her level, but it seemed she had sunk to theirs.

The elephant boy squats on the bank of the river, tossing in stones. The bones of his back stand out like beads on a string. His skin is golden brown; it looks like it would have the texture of suede. In a week he has gone from thin to bony, his face caved in with grief.

The first time she saw him he was in the river, his back arched, his arms windmilling as he and the elephant splashed each other. His ragged white pants had gone translucent and clung soddenly to his legs. Each muscle stood out in sharp relief like an anatomy lesson. His mouth hung wide open as if he were perpetually on the verge of a laugh, making him look both blissful and foolish. The elephant stretched out her trunk and gently fondled his hair. Then, without warning, she knocked him off his feet. He sank underwater for a few seconds, then bounced back up with a whoop.

The benevolent foreign lady watched him pulling the elephant close, lifting up the massive flapping ear to whisper behind it. And the saddest thing about it, she wrote, is that he doesn’t even realize what he’s missing.

The most charitable act of her charitable career? Without a doubt, the answer would be those taxing and trying nights spent with her husband. She dreaded nothing more than the rare summons to leave her room and join him in his. She was resigned to the gasping and grasping and clutching, the sticky suffocations, the smell of his feet beneath the covers; what she could not bear were his strange prying questions and his perplexing deep disappointment at her answers. What did he expect from her, properly brought-up girl that she was? What on earth did he want her to say?

The benevolent foreign lady visits a local school. They say it is the best primary school in the neighborhood. She wants to use her husband’s money to subsidize a whole network of schools in the most impoverished areas of the city, and she has been advised to model them on this one.

The students rise and greet her in unison. She tries to smile politely but is horrified by what she sees. This is a model school? Seventy students are crowded into one room, all ages mixed together. They sit on the floor. There is one book and it belongs to the teacher. The walls are bare. The children fidget and slap at flies. They are not punished when they make mistakes; they are simply ignored.

She withholds her fury until the children have been dismissed. Then she explodes at the teacher, at the two obsequious local officials accompanying her, at anyone in the vicinity. How can children learn in this environment, she rants, with no discipline, no structure, no chairs? Where is the globe? Where is the plaque commemorating the beneficent dead industrialist? She accuses them of squandering all the money her husband had so generously provided. She insists that the school be shut down until she can arrange for proper desks, chalkboards, portraits of famous men for the walls, hair ribbons for the girls.

The officials and teacher try to placate her but she refuses to be placated until she sees the door barred, the sign posted announcing the school closed until further notice.

Hours later, she suddenly realizes her mistake. The school she’d visited had not been her school. Her schools have not yet been built, they exist only in her head. In the hot classroom her mind had made some sort of associative leap and forgotten to jump back. The school she’d seen had nothing to do with her husband’s money; she’d had no authority to close it.

She sits in the tub, rubbing at the pink marks her corset has left on her abdomen, wondering how to retract her mistake, to apologize. Where to begin? It’s too embarrassing. Of course! She’ll send them a gift. Reparation. Desks, books, a chalkboard, the newest educational games, all of it. They’ll be so dazzled by her generosity that they’ll forgive her outburst. The children will write her thank-you notes. They’ll rename the school after her. No, it should be an anonymous gift! A simple, tasteful note, signed: Your Anonymous Benefactor.

She wants to write all this down, the list of school supplies, the anonymous note, but she’s forbidden herself to take her notebook to the tub—she’s dropped it in the water far too many times. She resolves to remember, and retains the idea as far as toweling off and putting on her robe, but then she discovers a scorpion in her slipper and in the ensuing chaos the plan slips from her mind forever.

The confused teacher and the local officials keep the school closed, waiting for something, some signal, some sort of permission, perhaps a reappearance of the intimidating benevolent foreign lady who turns red and bares her teeth like a monkey about to bite. They will wait a month, and then another month, and then another.

His office door ajar. She heard a wet choking sound, a thud. An attack, a fit of some kind? So soon? She rushed forward to help, feeling a surge of something that might have been fear or joy.

And then she heard his voice. She almost didn’t recognize it, it was so mellow and full of tenderness and groaning. “Nadine,” he said. “Oh, Nadine.” She could see, through the cracked door, fingers digging deep into a dress as if groping for money hidden in a mattress.

Then a whisper. “Stop it, you awful man.”

She had suspected but never witnessed such a scene before. She knew she should open the door wide, put an end to it all right then, spare the girl any further misery.

But then it occurred to her: The more energy he expends on her, the less he’ll have for me. The thought made her pause for a long and selfish moment.

And in that silence she heard again, “You awful man,” the words riding on a low chortle, followed by eager complicit breaths. She saw small hands on top of the large ones, pressing them more firmly in place. She heard her husband saying thank you a dozen times.

She listened a long time, angry, relieved, envious, mystified.

“What do you want to do when you grow up?” she had asked the elephant boy.

“Do?”

“As a profession.”

“Do? This,” he said, with a gesture that took in his bare feet, the dusty ground, and the elephant pulling leaves off a nearly denuded tree. “I am her boy until she dies.”

“Hmmm,” she said, and thought: How terrible. “How long do elephants live?”

“They can live a very long time. Like people.”

Eternal servitude, she wrote. And he doesn’t even seem to mind. Because he doesn’t know anything different. “But don’t you want a wife? A family?”

He smiled. “Elephants get very jealous. I can never have a wife.”

“Surely someone else could care for your elephant. Surely it’s not so hard.”

“She would be very sad. I can never leave her. She would pine away and maybe die. Or she would turn wild, go on a rampage.”

Worse than slavery, she wrote. A slave to an animal.

“But wouldn’t you like to go to a real school?” she persisted. “Travel, learn about the rest of the world? Study history and science and music?”

“Music,” he mused. “I like music.”

“You could learn to play an instrument. How would you like to go to school back in my country?” She drew herself up importantly. “That could be arranged.”

“No, thank you,” he said. “I would not like that at all.”

Before he died, her husband summoned her to discuss the terms of his will. He was enthroned on his bed, sitting stiffly upright, and as she entered the bedroom she had the usual fleeting impression that he was wearing a top hat with his nightshirt.

He told her of his wish that his fortune be used to fund charitable institutions in distant parts of the world, particularly the parts that were “unenlightened,” “pre-industrial.” He was a firm believer in technology. He expressed his wish that she be the one to dispense this largesse.

She felt her stomach fall. She had been formulating her own plans for years. It’s not that she was looking forward to his death, of course not. But when one had an elderly husband and was set to inherit a vast amount of money, who could resist a little speculation now and then?

“Why can’t I stay here?” she said. “Plenty of nice labor reform to be done right here.” She didn’t say: Right here in your own factories. “The shorter workday issue. Decent ventilation. Give those sweatshop girls some face powder, get those children out of the coal mines, save the canaries. That sort of thing.”

“It’s too late,” said her husband thoughtfully. “We’ve made a bit of a mess of things here. Best to get out now. Move on to fresh territory. Take the money and go where it will be appreciated. Dazzle them with new technologies. Cure diseases. Enlighten the masses. Work from the bottom up. If they don’t like it, cut your losses, get out. Move on. Someone will eventually pick up the pieces.”

When he started in on the generalities he was liable to go on for hours; she wasn’t listening. She had already decided to use her share of the inheritance to pursue her own dreams while paying someone else to save the world in her stead. He had not told her about the conditions of the will.

She wondered, then and afterward, what had sparked his late-blooming philanthropy. During his lifetime he was dutifully generous, purely for the sake of appearances. He took no interest. “That’s your department,” he used to tell her. He had never been a beneficent living industrialist, only a dead one. Perhaps after a lifetime of atheism, he began to fear for his soul and wanted to make amends. In one of his factories a man had been sliced clean in half. Others had been burnt, mutilated, poisoned, crushed, electrocuted. He had plenty to atone for.

She’s beginning to feel the slightest twinge of guilt. She didn’t expect the elephant boy to be quite so miserable; children’s memories, she’d thought, were fleeting.

Then the boy’s present arrives and her guilt evaporates. “It’s perfect,” she says, waltzing around it. If anything can cheer up a moping elephant boy, this will. “There’s nothing gladder than an elephant boy. . . . Oh, but I do think elephant boy should be hyphenated, don’t you?”

He blames her for Queen’s disappearance. He should blame himself. It is easier to blame her.

She had been asking more of her questions. The slightest thing he said provoked a grand reaction: “Really?” “No! Yes?” “Goodness!” He was flattered, despite himself. No one had ever taken an interest in him before, never someone as strange and important as the benevolent foreign lady who was rumored to be richer than ten rich men put together. Most people had eyes only for Queen of Sheba.

Her attention flagged; he was running out of things to say. He had to give her something precious, something to make her eyes go big again and her voice breathy. “I know where the elephant graveyard is,” he said. “It’s not a myth. I can show you.” This was a deep dark secret. Only the elephants knew of it. Queen had taken him there. He had never told a soul.

“Really? Oh!”

He felt a gust lift his hair. Queen had shuffled up behind him and was eyeing him reproachfully. “That sounds fascinating,” the benevolent foreign lady said. “Would you show me? Would you?”

“I don’t know,” he said, Queen breathing down his neck.

“Oh, please,” she said, and pressed his hand with her white fat lace-gloved one.

Queen’s attention had shifted; now she was stretching her trunk toward the intriguing and possibly edible salad of objects decorating the lady’s hat. At Queen’s touch, the lady snatched her hand from his and screamed theatrically. “My gracious,” she gasped, panting, and unbuttoned three buttons on her dress. “She gave me a scare.” He saw the flushed base of her throat and, farther down her chest, the beginning of a crease. Something stirred in him he had never felt before.

This was the part he regretted the most. He scolded Queen, scolded her for the first time in years, since she was a calf, and sent her to stand at a distance.

“Do you think we could go somewhere private to talk?” she said. “Your elephant—she stares so.”

He shouted at Queen, and she obediently turned her back to them. A moment later she lifted her tail and released a substantial pile.

“Why don’t you come inside the hotel?” the lady said. “Have you ever been inside?”

He hadn’t. He’d always wanted to. “I can’t leave her.”

“It’s just across the road.”

He could hardly bear to look at Queen’s drooping head. He told himself she was just sulking childishly, but deep down he knew that she was grieving. Elephants are sensitive.

At the same time he was embarrassed by her behavior; there is nothing more shameful than a spoilt elephant. A spoilt elephant means an indulgent, undisciplined boy. No one wants to hire a sulky elephant. And in spite of himself he was tempted by the hotel, full of rich and bizarre foreigners. He’d often tried to get a peek. The doorman usually chased him away from the steps and made a great show of sweeping away his footprints.

“Will I be able to keep an eye on her from the window?”

“Certainly.”

Of course he couldn’t. The windows were too thickly swathed in lace to see anything but dark vague shapes.

The next hour was excruciating. He was too wracked with anxiety to take in his surroundings. The benevolent foreign lady took him to her room and thrust books and pictures at him, but he could not bring his eyes to focus. She handed him objects whose function he could not begin to comprehend and did not try. He interrupted her monologue to blurt his good-byes and blundered into the vast and mystifying bathroom before escaping.

The hotel doorman gave him a mocking bow as he sped past, but he did not notice. Queen had disappeared. She was gone. Gone. And his last words to her had been a scolding.

She sets out a white shirt, trousers, shoes, a belt. More gifts for the boy. A silver-plated brush-and-comb set. A necktie. She will have to teach him how to knot it. She imagines brushing his thick black hair. She will teach him how to dance.

The beneficent dead industrialist glares at her from the photograph beside the bed. “Oh, shut up, you,” she says, turning the picture around. “I’m only carrying out your wishes. Lifting up the downtrodden and all that.” Who is he to glare at her anyway? Him and his string of factory girls: red-haired Filing, plump Shipping, dimpled Clamping Station No. 3, eagle-eyed Quality Inspector 12, shy pigtailed Second-floor Sweep-up, broad-beamed Sorting Table 16.

“He’s a boy, half my age,” she tells the reversed picture, imagining golden velvety skin. “It’s absurd.”

An aside: The factory girls speak up and request that their proper names be given. They are: Anna, Susie, Carrie, Janey, Mary, and Nadine. Susie, Carrie, and Nadine have children with incongruously somber, jowly faces; Nadine’s baby son in particular looks like a supreme court justice in diapers. The strangest thing, Nadine says, is if you glance at him, sitting sternly in his high chair, clenching his spoon and glaring at his strained peas, if you just happen to glance at him out of the corner of your eye, you’d swear he was wearing a top hat.

One of the bellhops from the hotel comes looking for him. “That idiotic foreign woman wants you again. She says she has something to give you,” the bellhop says, then makes an obscene gesture with his hand.

The elephant boy goes, reluctantly. He hesitates at her doorway, expecting the room to trigger painful memories of his act of betrayal.

But he barely recognizes the room. He’s not sure it is the same room. He had been oblivious, nearly blind with worry the last time. He looks around. And then he hears it. He must be imagining it. But no, there it is again, faint but distinct: the voice of an elephant.

The benevolent foreign lady totters over to take his arm. “Done sullening, I hope?” Her touch gives him chills. Her hands are bare and cool, fat and white. She is wearing a rustling green dress that drapes loosely around her shoulders and squeezes her so tightly around the middle that he can see her breathe. A thick band of jewels hugs the base of her throat.

She notices him looking. “Do you like it?”

He thinks it is very ugly.

“Come and see your present.” She pulls him to a large piece of furniture with three legs and a sort of wooden sail on the top. He touches the varnished wood. The voice of the elephant returns. It is very strong here. He peers inside and sees hundreds of wires drawn taut. He presses his cheek to the wood and listens. He can’t tell if the voice is greeting him or talking to itself; the language of elephants is fundamentally rhetorical.

Look at him, thinks the benevolent foreign lady. Fascinated. Absolutely entranced. Finally, she thinks. A breakthrough. In her notebook she will write: His eyes have been opened. His mind takes its first free breath. She can’t restrain herself any longer: “Voilà!” she cries, and with a sweeping gesture lifts the lid to reveal the white expanse of the keyboard.

The elephant boy lets out a scream. The phantom voice is suddenly overwhelming, deafening. The keyboard grins hideously at him. He feels a jolt of recognition; he knows with horrible certainty what it is. “Go on, don’t be afraid. You can touch it.” She presses a key. Plink. But he can’t. The mere thought makes his hands shake; it would be blasphemous, like juggling the bones of dead relatives.

“I’ll show you, then.” She sits on the bench, fluffs her skirts, and begins to play. She longs to be a virtuoso but lacks the talent. “My ears are bigger than my stomach,” she likes to say. She tilts her head, undulates her arms, lifts her wrists daintily. Her playing is solidly mediocre. But, she thinks, certainly far beyond anything the elephant boy has ever been exposed to. When she finishes, she folds her hands at her breast and looks up at him searchingly. He looks shaken, devastated. She wants to weep with joy. “Did you hear it?” she whispers. “Really, really hear it, not just with your ears but with your heart?”

“I did,” he says, “before you started making all that racket.”

The elephant boy flees; he cannot bear the piano. And yet in his idle hours it is all he can think about. He goes back and scratches at her door. She has ink on her face, curling papers in her hair, but she drags him inside. The voice of the elephant swirls around him; if he concentrates he can shut out the incessant twitter of the benevolent foreign lady.

She tries to teach him the rudiments: notes, scales. He says he wants to learn in his own way. His own way involves staring at the keys for hours without so much as touching them.

He comes to her room every day. She convinces him to try on the shirt and trousers and shoes, though when he sees himself in the mirror he grunts and immediately takes them off again. He lets her trim his hair.

She reads to him, hugs him, strokes his shoulders. He does not seem to mind. He does not seem to mind anything, as long as he is within sight of the piano. Physical contact, she writes in her notebook. Likely the first he’s ever had.

The voice from the piano is like an old senile woman talking to herself in the marketplace. It recalls the best feeding places, the best trees for shade, the best wallows in the river, the faces of other elephants, a string of children. And then it runs through the list again.

He wonders if the voice can hear him. The conversation is one-sided, the voice not at all like Queen’s, yet it is comforting.

He cannot understand it. Elephant boys can communicate with no elephants but their own. And yet now it seems he can hear dead elephants.

He wonders if this is some kind of gift, a small comfort granted to grieving elephant boys like himself. Perhaps Queen’s death has opened some kind of channel of communication. He decides to test the theory.

He doesn’t know why he brought her. She has to stop and examine and exclaim over everything. She wheezes and chatters. He wants silence. He wants solitude. They are going to a holy place.

Perhaps he brought her because he is a little afraid of what he might find.

Hidden in a cleft between two high rock plateaus lies the elephant dying ground. As he leads the benevolent foreign lady down the final passage, he can already hear the murmur of voices. They reach the entrance and he catches his breath. The sight is frightening, humbling. The massive weathered bones lie everywhere. The giant skulls lie in attitudes of rest and contentment. Elephants come here when they know their time has come and stand until they gently kneel and fall. The voices here are calm, not assaulting him, simply soothing him like the gentle embrace of a familiar trunk.

The benevolent foreign lady is stunned to silence momentarily. “Just look at it all!” she breathes. “There must be a fortune in ivory here! What Captain Henderson Henshaw wouldn’t give to get his hands on this!”

She stops suddenly. She has just blurted out the name of the most notorious of ivory poachers. He looks at her, into her small frightened eyes, and knows. He has suspected it all along. She stares back and knows that he knows.

“I did it for your own good! Your own good!” she screams.

Her voice rebounds against the stone walls: own good . . . good . . . good.

He recalls how she kept him ensnared in her hotel room while Queen of Sheba waited outside, alone and vulnerable, conspicuous and contrite. He remembers her relentless chatter, the way she kept tugging him back to his chair every time he tried to leave. It had all been a diversion, it had all been arranged. Henshaw is famous for making elephants disappear as if by magic. He thinks of the piano. Perhaps it had been as simple as that: a trade, this for that.

“You ruined my life,” he says, more wonder than anger in his voice.

“I gave you a life!” she screams. The way she’s cowering makes him want to hurt her. He stares at her hat, the same gaudy treat that had piqued Queen’s curiosity. The two females in his life have the same taste.

His hand gropes instinctively for a weapon and falls on a good heavy club. He raises it and aims for her head. He’s been wanting to do this for so long. Then he sees that it’s an elephant bone in his hand. Blasphemy, he thinks, and lowers his arm. There is nothing in the ravine but bones, bones, not a stick of wood or loose stone. He raises his arm again.

A voice rises from the bone, saying, What are you doing?

He does not know how to explain. Revenge, he says, but elephants have no word for it, no conception of revenge.

What are you doing?

It is too hard to explain. He should be like the elephants, for whom violence is instinct, self-preservation, never a matter of malice or forethought. But he is not an elephant.

He places the bone carefully on the ground. He lifts the benevolent foreign lady from her knees. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she weeps. He can almost forgive her. “But it was for your own good,” she adds. No, he can’t.

Threatening a benevolent foreigner with an elephant bone, particularly a female, is a serious offense. She could make trouble for him but doesn’t. She apologizes profusely, offers to buy him an elephant or three, offers to lay out money for him to start his own elephant school.

But he wants none of it. He does not want just any elephant.

Victory, she thinks. He had been on the verge of giving in to his primitive uncultured instincts, and then he had changed his mind.

What had made him stop? Her civilizing influence, of course. Thus far it had been minimal, but it was enough to stay his hand.

Such progress! After a matter of weeks! Just think what she could do to him—for him, that is—if she could hang on to him for another six months, a year. Just think what it would mean. For him. For her. For the book.

For the first time, he depresses a key. A shiver runs through him. “Good, good,” cries the benevolent foreign lady. She takes hold of his fingers, matching each one to a key. “C, D, E, F,” she says jubilantly. He ignores her. He has the idea of playing every piano he can find, every piano in the world, until he finds the one with Queen of Sheba’s voice in it.

He lets her shampoo his hair, he wears the clothes she gave him. He shares her meals with him, her strange foreign food. He eats like an elephant. Elephants, given the opportunity, will strip every tree, pull up every blade of grass in sight. Within weeks he is positively portly. The new weight hangs on him awkwardly, he looks bloated, pop-eyed and ready to burst.

He sees her clearly now and pities her; she has never known the joy of being one half of a perfect whole. She is an unfinished piece of a person, crippled, blind, fundamentally deficient without even realizing it. All the groping, grasping, flailing—it is because she has never had an elephant of her own.

It would take an elephant the size of a mastodon, he thinks, to satisfy her.

She is a thing to be pitied. So when she comes to him, pressing up close, butting him with her head like an elephant calf begging for attention, he tells himself to be kind, to be charitable, to be generous of spirit.

She crushes him in her prickly embrace. She is so covered in jewels it is like being eaten by a geode. He thinks of Queen, only of Queen, and lets himself go.

It is utterly, utterly inappropriate. And yet—she has to, doesn’t she? The boy is wretched, clearly starved for affection, for a mother’s touch. The touch of a sister, a friend, anyone. How can she ignore it? The boy is abysmally lonely. She does not want to, heavens, no, but there is no one else to do it. She tells herself she must, it is her mission, to submit, and submit again, to the needs of others. To be charitable, after all.

“Oh, utterly,” she sighs, stretching her arms luxuriously. “Utterly, utterly!”

“Of course!” cries the benevolent foreign lady. She’s had an inspiration: a distraction for the elephant boy, a growth experience. A way to broaden the scope of her experiment.

She’s heard tales of them. The legendary wolf girls. Stolen from their beds in infancy by a wolf grieving the deaths of her own pups and seeking replacements. Raised by wolves, as wolves. People claim to have seen them flitting through the woods on all fours, peering through windows at night, their eyes shining. Rubbing themselves against trees. Absolutely wild.

Perfect cases. Blank slates. And she’ll have the elephant boy help her. They can be his special project. If he can control an animal fifty times larger than himself, surely he can handle two little girls.

She is already imagining taking the girls out to shop for dresses and ribbons, picturing the four of them sitting around a table, having dinner. A family. We owe our lives to you, the girls will say, weeping with gratitude into their embroidered lace handkerchiefs.

If they even exist. She’ll hire hunters, trackers, spare no expense.

And then, too, there are the stories about the South American Bird Boy. Heavens! She has to do something. A child should not be allowed to live in the treetops. A child should not be allowed to fly.

She writes: There is nothing gladder than an elephant boy without his elephant.

The other elephant boys pass him in the street. He calls out to them but they do not answer. He is invisible. He has no name.