“Truly, I did not intend to harm you,” he said. “That was never my intention.”
Madam LaVaughn sniffed. She looked away.
“Please,” said Peter, “the elephant. It is so cold, and she needs to go home, where it is warm. Can you not do your magic now?”
“Very well,” said the magician. He bowed again to Madam LaVaughn. He turned to the elephant. “You must, all of you, step away, step back. Step back.”
Peter put his hand on the elephant. He let it rest there for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said to her. “And I thank you for what you did. Thank you and goodbye.” And then he stepped away from her too.
The magician walked, circling the elephant and muttering to himself. He thought about the star on view from his prison cell. He thought about the snow falling at last, and how what he had wanted more than anything was to show it to someone. He thought about Madam LaVaughn’s face looking up into his, questioning, hoping.
And then he began to speak the words of the spell. He said the words backwards, and he said the spell backwards too. He said it, all of it, under his breath, with the profound hope that it would well and truly work, and with the knowledge, too, that there was only so much, after all, that could be undone, even by magicians.
He spoke the words.
The snow stopped.
The sky became suddenly, miraculously clear, and for a moment the stars, too many of them to count, shone bright. The planet Venus sat among them, glowing solemnly.
It was Sister Marie who noticed. “Look there,” she said. “Look up.” She pointed at the sky. They all looked: Bartok Whynn, Tomas, Hans Ickman, Madam LaVaughn, Leo Matienne, Adele.
Even Iddo raised his head.
Only Peter kept his eyes on the elephant and the magician who was walking around and around her, muttering the backward words of a backward spell that would send her home.
And so Peter was the only one to see her leave. He was the only one to witness the greatest magic trick that the magician ever performed.
The elephant was there, and then she was not.
It was as simple as that.
As soon as she was gone, the clouds returned, the stars disappeared from view, and it began again to snow.
It is incredible that the elephant, who had arrived in the city of Baltese with so much noise, left it in such a profound silence. When she at last disappeared, there was no noise at all, only the
Iddo put his nose up in the air and sniffed. He let out a low, questioning bark.
“Yes,” Tomas said to him, “gone.”
“Ah, well,” said Leo Matienne.
Peter bent over and looked at the four circular footprints left in the snow. “She is truly gone,” he said. “I hope she is home.”
When he raised his head, Adele was looking at him, her eyes round and astonished.
He smiled at her. “Home,” he said.
And she smiled back at him, that same smile: disbelief, then belief, and finally joy.
The magician sank to his knees and put his head in his shaking hands. “I am done with it then, all of it. And I am sorry. Truly, I am.”
Leo Matienne took hold of the magician’s arm and pulled him to his feet.
“Are you going to put him back in prison?” said Adele.
“I must,” said Leo Matienne.
And then Madam LaVaughn spoke. “No, no. It is pointless, after all, is it not?”
“What?” said Hans Ickman. “What did you say?”
“I said that it is pointless to return him to prison. What has happened has happened. I release him. I will press no charges. I will sign any and all statements to that effect. Let him go. Let him go.”
Leo Matienne let go of the magician’s arm, and the magician turned to Madam LaVaughn and bowed. “madam,” he said.
“Sir,” she said back.
They let him walk away.
They watched his black cloak retreating slowly into the swirling snow. They watched, together, until it disappeared entirely from view.
And when he was gone, Madam LaVaughn felt some great weight suddenly flap its wings and break free of her. She laughed aloud. She put her arms around Adele and hugged her tight.
“The child is cold,” she said. “We must go inside.”
“Yes,” said Leo Matienne. “Let’s go inside.”
And that, after all, is how it ended.
Quietly.
In a world muffled by the gentle, forgiving hand of snow.
Chapter Nineteen
Iddo slept in front of the fire when he came to visit.
And Tomas sang.
They did not ever, the two of them, stay for long.
But they visited often enough that Leo and Gloria and Peter and Adele learned to sing along with Tomas his strange and beautiful songs of elephants and truth and wonderful news.
Often, when they were singing, there came from the attic apartment a knocking sound.
It was usually Adele who went up the stairs to ask Vilna Lutz what it was he wanted. He could never answer her properly. He could only say that he was cold and that he would like the window to be closed; sometimes, when he was in the grip of a particularly high fever, he would allow Adele to sit beside him and hold his hand.
“We must outflank the enemy!” he would shout. “Where, oh where, is my foot?”
And then, in despair, he would say, “I cannot take her. Truly, I cannot. She is too small.”
“Shh,” said Adele. “There, there.”
She would wait until the old soldier fell asleep, and then she would go back down the stairs to where Gloria and Leo and her brother were waiting for her.
And when she walked into the room, it was always, for Peter, as if she had been gone a very long time. His heart leaped up high inside him, astonished and overjoyed anew at the sight of her, and he remembered again the door from his dream and the golden field of wheat. All that light, and here was Adele before him: warm and safe and loved.
It was, after all, as he had once promised his mother it would be.
The magician became a goatherd and married a woman who had no teeth. She loved him, and he loved her, and they lived with their goats in a hut at the foot of a steep hill. Sometimes, on summer evenings, they climbed the hill and stood together and stared up at the constellations in the night sky.
The magician showed his wife the star that he had gazed upon so often in prison, the star that, he felt, had kept him alive.
“It is that one,” he said, pointing. “No, it is that one.”
“It makes no never mind which it was, Frederick,” his wife said gently. “All of them are beautiful.”
And they were.
The magician never again performed an act of magic.
