The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

  It wasn’t until three years later that she actually saw her mother. At a family funeral, of all places. By then, the daughter was living on her own—she’d moved out in her sophomore year, when her parents divorced—and now she had graduated and was tutoring electric organ. Meanwhile, her mother was teaching English at a prep school.

  Her mother confessed that she hadn’t been able to talk to her own daughter because she hadn’t known what to say. “I myself couldn’t tell where things were going,” the mother said, “but the whole thing started over that pair of shorts.”

  “Shorts?” She’d been as startled as I was. She’d never wanted to speak to her mother ever again, but curiosity got the better of her. In their mourning dress, mother and daughter went into a nearby coffee shop and ordered iced tea. She had to hear this—pardon the expression—this short story.

  THE SHOP THAT SOLD the lederhosen was in a small town an hour away by train from Hamburg. Her mother’s sister looked it up for her.

  “All the Germans I know say if you’re going to buy lederhosen, this is the place. The craftsmanship is good, and the prices aren’t so expensive,” said her sister.

  So the mother boarded a train to buy her husband his souvenir lederhosen. In her train compartment sat a middle-aged German couple, who conversed with her in halting English. “I go now to buy lederhosen for souvenir,” the mother said. “Vat shop you go to?” the couple asked. The mother named the name of the shop, and the middle-aged German couple chimed in together, “Zat is ze place, jah. It is ze best.” Hearing this, the mother felt very confident.

  It was a delightful early-summer afternoon and a quaint old-fashioned town. Through the middle of the town flowed a babbling brook, its banks lush and green. Cobblestone streets led in all directions, and cats were everywhere. The mother stepped into a café for a bite of Käsekuchen and coffee.

  She was on her last sip of coffee and playing with the shop cat when the owner came over to ask what brought her to their little town. She said lederhosen, whereupon the owner pulled out a pad of paper and drew a map to the shop.

  “Thank you very much,” the mother said.

  How wonderful it was to travel by oneself, she thought as she walked along the cobblestones. In fact, this was the first time in her fifty-five years that she had traveled alone. During the whole trip, she had not once been lonely or afraid or bored. Every scene that met her eyes was fresh and new; everyone she met was friendly. Each experience called forth emotions that had been slumbering in her, untouched and unused. What she had held near and dear until then—husband and home and daughter—was on the other side of the earth. She felt no need to trouble herself over them.

  She found the lederhosen shop without problem. It was a tiny old guild shop. It didn’t have a big sign for tourists, but inside she could see scores of lederhosen. She opened the door and walked in.

  Two old men worked in the shop. They spoke in a whisper as they took down measurements and scribbled them into a notebook. Behind a curtain divider was a larger work space; the monotone of sewing machines could be heard.

  “Darf ich Ihnen helfen, Madame?” the larger of the two old men addressed the mother.

  “I want to buy lederhosen,” she responded in English.

  “Ziss make problem.” The old man chose his words with care. “Ve do not make article for customer who not exist.”

  “My husband exist,” the mother said with confidence.

  “Jah, jah, your husband exist, of course, of course,” the old man responded hastily. “Excuse my not good English. Vat I vant say, if your husband not exist here, ve cannot sell ze lederhosen.”

  “Why?” the mother asked, perplexed.

  “Is store policy. Ist unser Prinzip. Ve must see ze lederhosen how it fit customer, ve alter very nice, only zen ve sell. Over one hundred years ve are in business, ve build reputation on ziss policy.”

  “But I spend half day to come from Hamburg to buy your lederhosen.”

  “Very sorry, madame,” said the old man, looking very sorry indeed. “Ve make no exception. Ziss vorld is very uncertain vorld. Trust is difficult sink to earn but easy sink to lose.”

  The mother sighed and stood in the doorway. She racked her brain for some way to break the impasse. The larger old man explained the situation to the smaller old man, who nodded sadly, jah, jah. Despite their great difference in size, the two old men wore identical expressions.

  “Well, perhaps, can we do this?” the mother proposed. “I find man just like my husband and bring him here. That man puts on lederhosen, you alter very nice, you sell lederhosen to me.”

  The first old man looked her in the face, aghast.

  “But, madame, zat is against rule. Is not same man who tries ze lederhosen on, your husband. And ve know ziss. Ve cannot do ziss.”

  “Pretend you do not know. You sell lederhosen to that man and that man sell lederhosen to me. That way, there is no shame to your policy. Please, I beg you. I may never come back to Germany. If I do not buy lederhosen now, I will never buy lederhosen.”

  “Hmph,” the old man pouted. He thought for a few seconds, then turned to the other old man and spoke a stream of German. They spoke back and forth several times. Then, finally, the large man turned back to the mother and said, “Very well, madame. As exception—very exception, you please understand—ve vill know nossink of ziss matter. Not so many come from Yapan to buy lederhosen, and ve Germans not so slow in ze head. Please find man very like your husband. My brother he says ziss.”

  “Thank you,” she said. Then she managed to thank the other brother in German: “Das ist so nett von Ihnen.”

  SHE — THE DAUGHTER who’s telling me this story—folds her hands on the table and sighs. I drink the last of my coffee, long since cold. The rain keeps coming down. Still no sign of my wife. Who’d have ever thought the conversation would take this turn?

  “So then?” I interject, eager to hear the conclusion. “Did your mother end up finding someone with the same build as your father?”

  “Yes,” she says, utterly without expression. “Mother sat on a bench looking for someone who matched Father’s size. And along came a man who fit the part. Without asking his permission—it seems the man couldn’t speak a word of English—she dragged him to the lederhosen shop.”

  “The hands-on approach,” I joke.

  “I don’t know. At home, Mother was always a normal sensible-shoes woman,” she said with another sigh. “The shopkeepers explained the situation to the man, and the man gladly consented to stand in for Father. He puts the lederhosen on, and they’re pulling here and tucking there, the three of them chortling away in German. In thirty minutes the job was done, during which time Mother made up her mind to divorce Father.”

  “Wait,” I say, “I don’t get it! Did something happen during those thirty minutes?”

  “Nothing at all. Only those three German men ha-ha-ha-ing like bellows.”

  “But what made your mother do it?”

  “That’s something even Mother herself didn’t understand at the time. It made her defensive and confused. All she knew was, looking at that man in the lederhosen, she felt an unbearable disgust rising in her. Directed toward Father. And she could not hold it back. Mother’s lederhosen man, apart from the color of his skin, was exactly like Father, the shape of the legs, the belly, the thinning hair. The way he was so happy trying on those new lederhosen, all prancy and cocky like a little boy. As Mother stood there looking at this man, so many things she’d been uncertain of about herself slowly shifted together into something very clear. That’s when she realized she hated Father.”

  MY WIFE GETS HOME from shopping, and the two of them commence their woman talk, but I’m still thinking about the lederhosen. The three of us eat an early dinner and have a few drinks; I keep turning the story over in my mind.

  “So, you don’t hate your mother anymore?” I ask when my wife leaves the room.

  “No, not really. We’re not close at all, but I
don’t hold anything against her.”

  “Because she told you about the lederhosen?”

  “I think so. After she explained things to me, I couldn’t go on hating her. I can’t say why it makes any difference, I certainly don’t know how to explain it, but it may have something to do with us being women.”

  “Still, if you leave the lederhosen out of it, supposing it was just the story of a woman taking a trip and finding herself, would you have been able to forgive her?”

  “Of course not,” she says without hesitation. “The whole point is the lederhosen, right?”

  A proxy pair of lederhosen, I’m thinking, that her father never even received.

  —translated by Alfred Birnbaum

  I MET HER AT the wedding party of an acquaintance and we got friendly. This was three years ago. We were nearly a whole generation apart in age—she twenty, myself thirty-one—but that hardly got in the way. I had plenty of other things to worry my head about at the time, and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t have a spare moment to think about age difference. And our ages never bothered her from the very beginning. I was married, but that didn’t matter, either. She seemed to consider things like age and family and income to be of the same a priori order as shoe size and vocal pitch and the shape of one’s fingernails. The sort of thing that thinking about won’t change one bit. And that much said, well, she had a point.

  She was working as an advertising model to earn a living while studying pantomime under somebody-or-other, a famous teacher, apparently. Though the work end of things was a drag and she was always turning down jobs her agent lined up, so her money situation was really rather precarious. But whatever she lacked in take-home pay she probably made up for on the goodwill of a number of boyfriends. Naturally, I don’t know this for certain; it’s just what I pieced together from snippets of her conversation.

  Still, I’m not suggesting there was even a glimmer of a hint that she was sleeping with guys for money. Though perhaps she did come close to that on occasion. Yet even if she did, that was not an essential issue; the essentials were surely far more simple. And the long and short of it was, this guileless simplicity is what attracted a particular kind of person. The kind of men who had only to set eyes on this simplicity of hers before they’d be dressing it up with whatever feelings they held inside. Not exactly the best explanation, but even she’d have to admit it was this simplicity that supported her.

  Of course, this sort of thing couldn’t go on forever. (If it could, we’d have to turn the entire workings of the universe upside down.) The possibility did exist, but only under specific circumstances, for a specific period. Just like with “peeling mandarin oranges.”

  “Peeling mandarin oranges?” you say?

  When we first met, she told me she was studying pantomime.

  Oh, really, I’d said, not altogether surprised. Young women are all into something these days. Plus, she didn’t look like your die-cast polish-your-skills-in-dead-earnest type.

  Then she “peeled a mandarin orange.” Literally, that’s what she did: She had a glass bowl of oranges to her left and another bowl for the peels to her right—so went the setup—in fact, there was nothing there. She proceeded to pick up one imaginary orange, then slowly peel it, pop pieces into her mouth, and spit out the pulp one section at a time, finally disposing of the skin-wrapped residue into the right-hand bowl when she’d eaten the entire fruit. She repeated this maneuver again and again. In so many words, it doesn’t sound like much, but I swear, just watching her do this for ten or twenty minutes—she and I kept up a running conversation at the counter of this bar, her “peeling mandarin oranges” the whole while, almost without a second thought—I felt the reality of everything around me being siphoned away. Unnerving, to say the least. Back when Eichmann stood trial in Israel, there was talk that the most fitting sentence would be to lock him in a cell and gradually remove all the air. I don’t really know how he did meet his end, but that’s what came to mind.

  “Seems you’re quite talented,” I said.

  “Oh, this is nothing. Talent’s not involved. It’s not a question of making yourself believe there is an orange there, you have to forget there isn’t one. That’s all.”

  “Practically Zen.”

  That’s when I took a liking to her.

  We generally didn’t see all that much of each other. Maybe once a month, twice at the most. I’d ring her up and invite her out somewhere. We’d eat out or go to a bar. We talked intensely; she’d hear me out and I’d listen to whatever she had to say. We hardly had any common topics between us, but so what? We became, well, pals. Of course, I was the one who paid the bill for all the food and drinks. Sometimes she’d call me, typically when she was broke and needed a meal. And then it was unbelievable the amount of food she could put away.

  When the two of us were together, I could truly relax. I’d forget all about work I didn’t want to do and trivial things that’d never be settled anyway and the crazy mixed-up ideas that crazy mixed-up people had taken into their heads. It was some kind of power she had. Not that there was any great meaning to her words. And if I did catch myself interjecting polite nothings without really tuning in what she was saying, there still was something soothing to my ears about her voice, like watching clouds drift across the far horizon.

  I did my share of talking, too. Everything from personal matters to sweeping generalities, I told her my honest thoughts. I guess she also let some of my verbiage go by, likewise with minimum comment. Which was fine by me. It was a mood I was after, not understanding or sympathy.

  Then two years ago in the spring, her father died of a heart ailment, and she came into a small sum of money. At least, that’s how she described it. With the money, she said, she wanted to travel to North Africa. Why North Africa, I didn’t know, but I happened to know someone working at the Algerian embassy, so I introduced her. Thus she decided to go to Algeria. And as things took their course, I ended up seeing her off at the airport. All she carried was a ratty old Boston bag stuffed with a couple of changes of clothes. By the look of her as she went through the baggage check, you’d almost think she was returning from North Africa, not going there.

  “You really going to come back to Japan in one piece?” I joked.

  “Sure thing. ‘I shall return,’”she mocked.

  Three months later, she did. Three kilos lighter than when she left and tanned about six shades darker. With her was her new guy, whom she presented as someone she met at a restaurant in Algiers. Japanese in Algeria were all too few, so the two of them easily fell in together and eventually became intimate. As far I know, this guy was her first real regular lover.

  He was in his late twenties, tall, with a decent build, and rather polite in his speech. A little lean on looks, perhaps, though I suppose you could put him in the handsome category. Anyway, he struck me as nice enough; he had big hands and long fingers.

  The reason I know so much about the guy is that I went to meet her when she arrived. A sudden telegram from Beirut had given a date and a flight number. Nothing else. Seemed she wanted me to come to the airport. When the plane got in—actually, it was four hours late due to bad weather, during which time I read three magazines cover to cover in a coffee lounge—the two of them came through the gate arm in arm. They looked like a happy young married couple. When she introduced us, he shook my hand, virtually in reflex. The healthy handshake of those who’ve been living a long time overseas. After that, we went into a restaurant. She was dying to have a bowl of tempura and rice, she said; meanwhile, he and I both had beer.

  He told me he worked in trading but didn’t offer any more details. I couldn’t tell whether he simply didn’t want to talk business or was thoughtfully sparing me a boring exposition. Nor, in truth, did I especially want to hear about trading, so I didn’t press him. With little else to discuss, the conversation meandered between safety on the streets of Beirut and water supplies in Tunis. He proved to be quite well informed about affa
irs over the whole of North Africa and the Middle East.

  By now she’d finished her tempura and announced with a big yawn that she was feeling sleepy. I half expected her to doze off on the spot. She was precisely the type who could fall asleep anywhere. The guy said he’d see her home by taxi, and I said I’d take the train as it was faster. Just why she had me come all the way out to the airport was beyond me.

  “Glad I got to meet you,” he told me, as if to acknowledge the inconvenience.

  “Same here,” I said.

  THEREAFTER I met up with the guy a number of times. Whenever I ran into her, he was always by her side. I’d make a date with her, and he’d drive up in a spotless silver-gray German sports car to let her off. I know next to nothing about automobiles, but it reminded me of those jaunty coupes you see in old black-and-white Fellini films. Definitely not the sort of car your ordinary salaryman owns.

  “The guy’s got to be loaded,” I ventured to comment to her once.

  “Yeah,” she said without much interest, “I guess.”

  “Can you really make that much in trading?”

  “Trading?”

  “That’s what he said. He works in trading.”

  “Okay, then, I imagine so…. But hey, what do I know? He doesn’t seem to do much work at all, as far as I can see. He does his share of seeing people and talking on the phone, I’ll say that, though.”

  The young man and his money remained a mystery.

  THEN ONE SUNDAY afternoon in October, she rang up. My wife had gone off to see some relatives that morning and left me alone at home. A pleasant day, bright and clear, it found me idly gazing at the camphor tree outside and enjoying the new autumn apples. I must have eaten a good seven of them that day—it was either a pathological craving or some kind of premonition.

  “Listen,” she said right off, “just happened to be heading in your direction. Would it be all right if we popped over?”