Elephant Winter Read online

  Praise for Elephant Winter

  “This is fine and brave writing . . .”—Saturday Night

  “Stylistically assured, entirely captivating . . . Kim Echlin’s Elephant Winter is an original, emotionally resonant novel . . . Echlin draws her characters with realistic, unsentimentalized strokes, and in the process evokes their poignant humanness with honesty and grace.”

  —Books in Canada

  “What is so powerful about Elephant Winter is the reconciliation of life with death, of joy with pain . . . we are swept briefly into the lives of these characters and exposed to a beauty rarely seen in individuals, both animal and human. Elephant Winter is as refreshing as it is thought-provoking, offering a prescription for balance in a shaken world.”

  —The Readers Showcase

  “Echlin has managed to convey the beauty and grace of living and dying, with elephants and people, all from a seedy tourist farm in southern Ontario. This is no small achievement . . . This is wonderful writing.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “Echlin has a gift of capturing the essence of a character, of the sweep of her tale, simply and elegantly . . . Echlin’s novel is achingly beautiful, at once sad and uplifting. It is a story for the heart, the mind and the soul.”

  —The Evening Telegram

  “A captivating tale about listening to the language of love and having the faith to fill in the gaps.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  “The story is a rich, powerful exploration of intimacy on many levels, through the language of art, music, poetry and the language of silence. It is to be hoped there will be many more novels from this gifted storyteller.”

  —Star Phoenix

  “Echlin’s love of learning, literature and high culture makes this not just an emotionally powerful debut but a smart one as well.”

  —NOW Magazine

  “Echlin’s wonderful first novel explores the language of intimacy in all relationships and explores the vitality of words.”

  —Why Magazine

  “A well-written book, full of fine and rich literary description. When the author of Elephant Winter writes a second novel, I want to read it.”

  —Leader Post

  “Anyone who reads Kim Echlin’s debut Elephant Winter will savour it for a long time. The story is painful and triumphant in turns, a pleasing, optimistic first novel.”

  —The Daily Press

  “Elephant Winter is enormously engaging, unusual enough to catch the popular imagination, and well and wisely enough to endure . . . The end comes too soon.”

  —Quill & Quire

  PENGUIN CANADA

  ELEPHANT WINTER

  KIM ECHLIN has been a documentary filmmaker, editor, and teacher. She has worked and travelled in Europe, China, the Marshall Islands, Africa, and Cambodia, and has completed a doctoral thesis on Ojibway storytelling. She currently writes and teaches in Toronto. Her first novel, Elephant Winter, won the Torgi Talking Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her most recent novel is The Disappeared, a love story set against the backdrop of the Pol Pot era.

  ALSO BY KIM ECHLIN

  Dagmar’s Daughter

  Inanna: From the Myths of Ancient Sumer

  The Disappeared

  ELEPHANT

  WINTER

  KIM ECHLIN

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1997

  Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1998

  Published in this edition, 2009

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Kim Echlin, 1997

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The acknowledgments on page 203 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  ISBN: 978-0-14-317058-7

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request to the publisher.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

  for Ross who showed me

  the marvels of Lake Kariba

  &

  for my mother who always says

  follow your heart

  Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?

  That is to say, My God, my God,

  why hast thou forsaken me?

  –The Passion of St. Matthew

  CONTENTS

  Batter My Heart

  Singing a Magnificat, Conception of an Elephant

  ELEPHANT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY: PART ONE

  Preparation

  Kyrie, Eleison

  ELEPHANT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY: PART TWO

  Breaking an Elephant

  Alecto

  ELEPHANT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY: PART THREE

  A Slice of Elephant

  Quid Petis?

  ELEPHANT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY: PART FOUR

  Kezia

  Passio

  ELEPHANT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY: PART FIVE

  The Birth of Omega, or Breeding in Captivity

  ELEPHANT

  WINTER

  BATTER MY HEART

  Iam called the Elephant-Keeper, which suits me. My name is Sophie Walker. When I am not at the elephant barns, I live in a crowded house near a tacky commercial tourist farm in southern Ontario. I have a daughter and I take care of the elephants.

  I used to read about women who live with animals, women who have followed orangutans and gorillas through sodden rain forests and misty mountains. They talk about looking into the eyes of their animals and seeing the face of God. But I cannot mere
ly observe my elephants, because I feed them, fill their water troughs, shovel their dung, take them for walks and train them to safely carry small children. They dip their knees so that I can climb up their sides to ride on their shoulders. Swaying up there, I hang between heaven and earth. In short, I live with the elephants and they have allowed me into their community.

  The elephants have taught me their language. Much of it I cannot hear but I’ve filled in the spaces with invention, which is how most people listen to language anyway. The longer I am with them the less invention we need. Wittgenstein said that to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life. But I’m not imagining the elephants. They are really there.

  If you choose to live with elephants you’ve chosen to live enthralled. I allow myself to be ravished by them. I risk their force, to break and blow, to untie and overthrow. I am imprisoned with them and our bonds free us. We have little language for this sort of thing.

  The story I am about to tell you is how I came to live with elephants in captivity.

  Batter my heart.

  SINGING a MAGNIFICAT, CONCEPTION of an ELEPHANT

  The place was closed for the season. My mother’s house backed on the maple forest at the far end of the Ontario Safari. While she slept each afternoon I watched the elephant-keeper take the elephants on walks through the woods. They rubbed their sides on the trees and scuffed in the fresh snow.

  The keeper was a young man who wore his thick grey jacket open to the freezing winds and only a baseball cap pulled down over his long hair. He had high cheekbones and a strong jaw and his blue eyes were wrinkled at the corners from squinting against wind and sun. His jeans were tucked into barn boots but his step was light and his body lithe. He moved with the attractive, loose carriage of men who choose not to submit to offices and desks.

  He thought himself unobserved as he rolled up snowballs and tossed them playfully, talking and lightly swaying, at ease in the elephants’ company. One of them touched a trunk to his face and he kissed the end and took its tip right inside his own mouth. That was when he glanced up and spotted me looking at him through the window. I lifted my hand to wave but he turned away and stamped his feet and pulled his meagre hat down over the whitening edges of his ears. He reminded me of young men I had met in Africa, easier out in the bush than anywhere else. He moved away as if to go, and all the elephants moved with him, but then he paused, looked back for me through the glass and beckoned me to come out with his hand. I shook my head, no.

  The light over those snowy Ontario fields was short and grey and bleak. We were just past winter solstice and though I’d been home some weeks, I still found it odd to look through the kitchen window and see the curious face of a giraffe above the snowy maple trees. But my mother had always found unusual places to live, and soon enough I was inured even to the swaying grey silhouettes of elephants at play in the snowy fields.

  I came home because she was dying. Her breasts were gone, her hair was gone, but nothing they did stopped the cancer. Each morning, after she took her morphine tablet, I arranged her bed table with her sketch pad, some charcoal pencils, and a pitcher of iced tea. She rested most of the day, and when she wasn’t dozing she moved stiffly around the house. At forty-nine she had work she still wanted to do. She was impatient with herself and churlish with me.

  “Put that carnation in the morphine bottle will you, Sophie, I’m going to draw that after my nap . . . aren’t they awful flowers? Leave my pad close. Can’t you remember to get some grapes? Now get out of here, what do you want hanging around a dying woman. I won’t need you until evening. And get this damn budgie off my bed, off you go Henry.”

  My mother kept twelve budgies and two African Gray parrots. She let all of them fly free in the house. The oldest was Moore, a hand-raised but otherwise ordinary green and yellow budgie. She got him after I left home. She clipped his wings and trained him to land on her bottom lip and peck at her teeth. Slowly his flight feathers grew in again but by then he liked being near her, on her head, her shoulder, her fork. She talked to him all the time but he never learned to speak words back. He clung stubbornly to his squawky budgie locutions, especially when we ran water or closed the back door on its rusting hinges. Now that she was sick, Moore perched on the curtain rod in my mother’s bedroom most of the day, and flew at my head whenever I came into the room.

  My mother built a large aviary into a wall in the sunroom off the kitchen and added a pretty white and blue budgie called Miranda. The young bird tried to fly at first but she kept bumping into windows and falling stunned to the floor. So Miranda made her world the large cage whose doors were always open and managed to breed with Moore. Her babies learned to fly around the house and each late afternoon when I fed them, Miranda squawked to the others to come back and sat chatting all evening with whoever stayed. My mother regularly visited the bird barns at the Safari during the off season. She liked trading bird talk with the trainers who specialized in parrots and hawks and kestrels. She charmed them with her stories of Moore and Miranda, and when they had a space problem one winter they asked her if she’d board a couple of African Grays along with her budgies.

  The Grays were the colour of clean wood smoke with crimson tails and yellow-rimmed pupils. My mother’s pair hung upside down from the living room curtains or spent hours grooming each other on a perch she’d constructed for them in front of the couch. They never responded to their names so my mother called them any paired names she thought of. When she wrote me letters and referred to Abelard and Heloise, or Jesus and Mary, I knew she was talking about the Grays. They were friendly with her and let her scratch between the rows of feathers on the backs of their necks, but they were suspicious and skittish with me. They’d already torn holes in all the curtains and I pushed them off the kitchen counters where they scratched the cupboards foraging for sweet cereals. They stood staring at me defiantly with those intelligent, uncanny eyes and fretted when I sent them scrambling away. One of my endless small chores since coming home was to gather and wash fresh maple and alder twigs for their wooden stand in the living room.

  When my mother finally called to tell me about her illness she said, “Soph, they said I’m going to die. I don’t know who’s going to take care of the birds. Do you think you could come home for a while?”

  I said I’d be on the next plane and she said, “Oh, I won’t die today,” and laughed, and I knew she was relieved. But she wasn’t ready to die and it was taking longer than we both had thought it would. We hadn’t lived under the same roof for years, and after the initial shock, we had to settle into the daily business of waiting. The afternoons when she slept were endlessly long and the wakeful nights longer. I was thirty years old and I still felt as though everything was ahead of me. It was the first time in my life that I’d ever been tied down.

  I took aimless walks along Safari Road, staring at the fields and the horse farms buried in snow. Sometimes, during those brief blue twilights, too cold to stay out and too reluctant to go in, I walked around the outside of my mother’s house, trying to absorb a bit of warmth from the bricks. I’d stand until I was chilled straight through, unable to give in to or fend off her unwilling dying.

  Day after day I watched the elephant-keeper walk his elephants out back behind the maples. I stood in the shadows at the side of the window and I noted how he looked up and searched the reflections in the glass for me. So one day I slipped through the Safari gates, behind a delivery truck stacked with crates of chicks for the big cats. The little birds were mostly frozen and suffocated but a few terrible peeps still escaped the boxes. I ducked behind the trees near the fences, cut through the side field and went straight to the elephant barns. There he was, leading the elephants back from their afternoon walk. His fair hair fell over his forehead and his skin was clear with the rosy dryness of someone who lives outside in the cold. There were white frost patches along the ridges of his cheekbones and he frowned at me. I ignored that, sliding through the fence. I liked him, eyes and bo
nes, so I decided to wait.

  The smallest elephant squeezed under the bottom rail like a curious child, and she raised her trunk to scent me. The keeper followed her, reached his hand into her mouth to rub her jaw, and stood between the two of us.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Not really.”

  “There’s no visitors back here. Who let you in?”

  “No one. I didn’t ask. That’s the house where I live.” I pointed with my chin, hands wrapped inside the sleeves of my layered sweaters. “I wanted to see the elephants.”

  He glanced back through the maples at the dark window sockets in my mother’s house. He stared at me, skin flushed, eyes inspiriting me, and said, “I’ve seen her here before. She used to come to the bird barns. Why didn’t you come out?”

  “I’m her daughter. She’s sick.” The words hung cold in the air, untended feelings and questions already between us as if we’d spoken to each other all our lives. “I’ve just come back from Africa. I used to go see elephants on safari there.”

  “These elephants are Asian,” he said, pulling his hand out of the little one’s jaw and rubbing its side. “First time I saw an elephant was the Fort Lauderdale zoo. I stood in front of it all day until my brother came back to get me.”