The Exploding Elephant
'Nothing Anton's babcia saw there made her want to stay.' Gliwice, 1945
'There was a coughing dog with dust-damaged lungs, unable to bark, going round in circles, his eyes wide in his discomfort, tongue forced out of his mouth, frustrated that nobody would pay him attention. Anton’s babcia had watched him. He was bugging people to put him out of the misery brought by his clogged, contracting alveoli, she had realised, amazed that nobody would. Back in Ukraine, they would have eaten him by now. There was a bad-tempered-looking militia man nearby with a Home Army armband, and a rifle on a strap slung casually over his shoulder, and she willed the dog to bite him. The poor dog was too kind, though, or too stupid. His coughs followed her, startled her one day ten years later in her White City living room, the coughing dog from Gliwice outside her west London door, and she left her chair and her book and her BBC Home Service and went out, to comfort him, then to kill him. She stood outside her door a long time, willing him to come back, embrace the peace of his destruction.'
A young man winds up in Gliwice, in Poland's industrial heartland, a place his Polish granny had once spoken about - though her words were not exactly full of recommendations. He has no sentimental reasons for going there, but stole a Berlin policewoman's supply of speed, and thought it might be good idea to get out to anywhere. There was another young woman involved in drawing him to Gliwice with the promise of a bed and more, and her rich father in the background... but she turned out to be unsuitable in any number of ways. He will just have to persuade the real love of his life to leave with him, along with her priceless violin. The ghosts that inhabit his squat have other ideas, however.
The Exploding Elephant is what tends to be called a novelette - too short to be a novella, and too long, at 19000 words, to be a short story. Evolving from a short story I wrote a few years after leaving Gliwice, it was a long time in the making. It is out with Bards and Sages, chosen to be one of their Society of Misfits stories.
It costs $0.99, and is available now in the Society of Misfits Anthology Volume 3.
As I expect that many readers will not buy into a massive anthology, I'm going to put some parts of it below on this page.
A young man winds up in Gliwice, in Poland's industrial heartland, a place his Polish granny had once spoken about - though her words were not exactly full of recommendations. He has no sentimental reasons for going there, but stole a Berlin policewoman's supply of speed, and thought it might be good idea to get out to anywhere. There was another young woman involved in drawing him to Gliwice with the promise of a bed and more, and her rich father in the background... but she turned out to be unsuitable in any number of ways. He will just have to persuade the real love of his life to leave with him, along with her priceless violin. The ghosts that inhabit his squat have other ideas, however.
The Exploding Elephant is what tends to be called a novelette - too short to be a novella, and too long, at 19000 words, to be a short story. Evolving from a short story I wrote a few years after leaving Gliwice, it was a long time in the making. It is out with Bards and Sages, chosen to be one of their Society of Misfits stories.
It costs $0.99, and is available now in the Society of Misfits Anthology Volume 3.
As I expect that many readers will not buy into a massive anthology, I'm going to put some parts of it below on this page.
Gliwice, 1945
The industrial Śląsk (pron /shlonsk/) region of Poland, is usually known by its German name, Silesia. Gliwice is one of the towns in what is known as the Katowice Conurbation, after its biggest town. It was part of Germany until after the Second World War, and has an interesting history. You can find out more about it here.
I lived there for about six months in 1993. Plans at home in London fell through, so I needed a job – any job – to tide me over for a short while, and also needed to get away from London. I didn’t know Poland very well, though I’d visited Kraków and Warsaw the year before.
In Gliwice, it snowed from January to April that year, which made the pavements dangerous most of the time, and the whole town very quiet. It was still ‘recognisably Communist’, for want of a better expression, as the reforms of 1989 didn’t happen overnight in all of the one-time Communist Bloc countries.
I moaned about it a bit… but I enjoyed most of my time there, saw some great places, and met some lovely people, and I’ve tried to encapsulate both its gloom and joy in The Exploding Elephant. I hope I’ve done it justice.
I lived there for about six months in 1993. Plans at home in London fell through, so I needed a job – any job – to tide me over for a short while, and also needed to get away from London. I didn’t know Poland very well, though I’d visited Kraków and Warsaw the year before.
In Gliwice, it snowed from January to April that year, which made the pavements dangerous most of the time, and the whole town very quiet. It was still ‘recognisably Communist’, for want of a better expression, as the reforms of 1989 didn’t happen overnight in all of the one-time Communist Bloc countries.
I moaned about it a bit… but I enjoyed most of my time there, saw some great places, and met some lovely people, and I’ve tried to encapsulate both its gloom and joy in The Exploding Elephant. I hope I’ve done it justice.
The Exploding Elephant - a novelette
1
Without thinking about it, he had always admired eloquence, despite not being eloquent himself. He found out that, in a foreign language, he could be both spare and eloquent, seeking out the exact words needed, and no more. There was also a beauty in cases. He had given up saying this to English speakers, who thought he was talking about Louis Vuitton. The cases determining the endings of nouns had perplexed him through his early teens, invading his dreams and daydreams, ruining team sports and social and sexual interactions, till one day he had that pleasurable feeling of knowing, without having to think, that they were part of the equipment of his brain, gleaming, well-maintained, an ever-steadfast aid.
The friends he was making in Gliwice spoke too much English for his liking, and he was finding out that eloquence, when studied, and performed, could be as grating as the grunts of cavemen. The vodka did not help, for sure, nor the beer, in its dark, implacable bottles going back to the Hapsburgs. His friends drank, and pontificated, drank more, and babbled, and burped, and all they said made some kind of sense, but none of it had much appeal. He wanted to get up, sweep everything off his table, and shout at them, “You’re all talk. Go – leave me in peace.”
But then he would have been alone. Being with people who grated could sometimes be worse than being alone, even if, because of his circumstances, he was never truly alone. And he had invited those friends up, after all, because – sometimes – silence held only a sinister underlay in the ether, its comforts out of reach.
“None of you have ever done the things you’ve said you’ve done.”
The words echoed, even though he had not uttered them. His friends looked at him. The movement of his getting up had made some of them nervous. They talked on, but darted wary glances at him. He wagged a finger. He asked something banal.
They looked the question back at him, bounced it hesitantly around one another. He forgot it. He nodded himself back into the talk, and gathered that, at one time, his friends’ parents, grandparents, great uncles and aunts, all in shabby, smoke-damaged clothes, had come to Gliwice’s museum-piece of a city to heal themselves from the scavenger’s daughter into which totalitarian angst had forced them, to adopt hope, and raise future generations. It struck him to wonder why they had bothered; there had been more totalitarians waiting for them, after all, the wrong side of iron curtains.
They looked more questions at him, diffidently, in the mood, he knew, for the stories he sometimes told. He had no desire for them. His life was turning into a series of long stories, and he had the sense that he would never get to the end of them; they would remain enmeshed in parts of his mind he could no longer access.
A girl made an impossible touch on his shoulder, and he started a little, and shivered, made himself stay perfectly still, resisted the temptation to turn around. He kept his eyes on those friends of his. He felt grateful for them all over again. He put on a face that appreciated their eloquence, demanded more.
One of them said, “It takes guts to leave.” He knew she was thinking of the trains that, if they all shut up and listened, they would hear, just about, passing into the landscape around them.
“But sometimes,” another said, “leaving isn’t what’s required, is it? Changing is what’s required, or, maybe, staying the same. Those things take guts too. And are we talking about some archaic idea of bravery?”
Mouths formed vodka-driven answers.
He said, “I thought we were talking about trains?”
His friends often ended up spiked on the idea of crossing the black river that bisected the city centre, the Kłodnica, heading up the road to the station, and leaving winter Gliwice. One, Arek, said, “When I was in Iraq…” – Arek, in Iraq, his stress on the words a clash of ugly but somehow satisfying syllables making an aide-memoire that it was Arek who had signed up for an engineering job in that unlikely place. He watched Arek, a mixture of geek and thug with his cropped hair and his pebbly spectacles, his delicate spatulate fingers becoming fists as he went on about the thing that had happened. They had all heard the tale before, and yet still did not know it. It involved the borrowing or hiring of a camel that got wounded, or a Humvee that got damaged, and had to be hidden from its owner, and a diverted consignment of army tents and medicines, plus a crazed warlord or general. The story was a tale of leaving, of course, but had an air not of wistfulness but of slapstick, of Laurel and Hardy in the Foreign Legion. It had not ended in comedy for Arek, who told it in a self-effacing tone. At least he had left, though, and a part of him was still out in the world; Arek had been sent home minus a month’s pay and one testicle.
Anton remembered this, and forgave Arek the repetition of the story, and forgave his in-your-face eloquence – almost like it was scripted – appreciated him all over again, held a hand out, shook Arek’s hand solemnly. All eyes watched this exchange, and then he led them into laughter that, in turn, showed their forgiveness of the absurd rituals of drunken young men who took themselves too seriously.
2
Anton’s grandmother had told him about the time she passed through Gliwice just after the Second World War, with the continent a quivering ruin around her: the lines of expelled German civilians, and the things they had left behind, the scorched paving stones, the belongings chucked from windows and left to fester on the streets, a man hanging from the railings of a balcony, a dressing gown cord buried in his neck.
There was a coughing dog with dust-damaged lungs, unable to bark, going round in circles, his eyes wide in his discomfort, tongue forced out of his mouth, frustrated that nobody would pay him attention. Anton’s babcia had watched him. He was bugging people to put him out of the misery brought by his clogged, contracting alveoli, she had realised, amazed that nobody would. Back in Ukraine, they would have eaten him by now. There was a bad-tempered-looking militia man nearby with a Home Army armband, and a rifle on a strap slung casually over his shoulder, and she willed the dog to bite him. The poor dog was too kind, though, or too stupid. His coughs followed her, startled her one day ten years later in her White City living room, the coughing dog from Gliwice outside her west London door, and she left her chair and her book and her BBC Home Service and went out, to comfort him, then to kill him. She stood outside her door a long time, willing him to come back, embrace the peace of his destruction.
In Gliwice that day she had joined the militia man, and everybody else, to view a horse’s body blocking the river, bloated with gas, the size of an elephant, the kids gathered to make sure they were there when it when it exploded. Anton had envied those kids. He had sat in rooms, learning their language, had taken their parts in conversations with himself, and with their vanished spirits, for years, about the exploding elephant, the hanging man, the broken belongings, the stones all burnt, the remnants of German lives, the disappearing columns of Germans.
Nothing Anton’s babcia saw in Gliwice had made her want to stay. The looming big-bad-wolf grin of Josef Stalin was visible in the low-lying clouds, she swore, and its spectre had sped her feet, away, away, a voice urging her to leave, warning that the elephant would not be the only thing to explode.
1
Without thinking about it, he had always admired eloquence, despite not being eloquent himself. He found out that, in a foreign language, he could be both spare and eloquent, seeking out the exact words needed, and no more. There was also a beauty in cases. He had given up saying this to English speakers, who thought he was talking about Louis Vuitton. The cases determining the endings of nouns had perplexed him through his early teens, invading his dreams and daydreams, ruining team sports and social and sexual interactions, till one day he had that pleasurable feeling of knowing, without having to think, that they were part of the equipment of his brain, gleaming, well-maintained, an ever-steadfast aid.
The friends he was making in Gliwice spoke too much English for his liking, and he was finding out that eloquence, when studied, and performed, could be as grating as the grunts of cavemen. The vodka did not help, for sure, nor the beer, in its dark, implacable bottles going back to the Hapsburgs. His friends drank, and pontificated, drank more, and babbled, and burped, and all they said made some kind of sense, but none of it had much appeal. He wanted to get up, sweep everything off his table, and shout at them, “You’re all talk. Go – leave me in peace.”
But then he would have been alone. Being with people who grated could sometimes be worse than being alone, even if, because of his circumstances, he was never truly alone. And he had invited those friends up, after all, because – sometimes – silence held only a sinister underlay in the ether, its comforts out of reach.
“None of you have ever done the things you’ve said you’ve done.”
The words echoed, even though he had not uttered them. His friends looked at him. The movement of his getting up had made some of them nervous. They talked on, but darted wary glances at him. He wagged a finger. He asked something banal.
They looked the question back at him, bounced it hesitantly around one another. He forgot it. He nodded himself back into the talk, and gathered that, at one time, his friends’ parents, grandparents, great uncles and aunts, all in shabby, smoke-damaged clothes, had come to Gliwice’s museum-piece of a city to heal themselves from the scavenger’s daughter into which totalitarian angst had forced them, to adopt hope, and raise future generations. It struck him to wonder why they had bothered; there had been more totalitarians waiting for them, after all, the wrong side of iron curtains.
They looked more questions at him, diffidently, in the mood, he knew, for the stories he sometimes told. He had no desire for them. His life was turning into a series of long stories, and he had the sense that he would never get to the end of them; they would remain enmeshed in parts of his mind he could no longer access.
A girl made an impossible touch on his shoulder, and he started a little, and shivered, made himself stay perfectly still, resisted the temptation to turn around. He kept his eyes on those friends of his. He felt grateful for them all over again. He put on a face that appreciated their eloquence, demanded more.
One of them said, “It takes guts to leave.” He knew she was thinking of the trains that, if they all shut up and listened, they would hear, just about, passing into the landscape around them.
“But sometimes,” another said, “leaving isn’t what’s required, is it? Changing is what’s required, or, maybe, staying the same. Those things take guts too. And are we talking about some archaic idea of bravery?”
Mouths formed vodka-driven answers.
He said, “I thought we were talking about trains?”
His friends often ended up spiked on the idea of crossing the black river that bisected the city centre, the Kłodnica, heading up the road to the station, and leaving winter Gliwice. One, Arek, said, “When I was in Iraq…” – Arek, in Iraq, his stress on the words a clash of ugly but somehow satisfying syllables making an aide-memoire that it was Arek who had signed up for an engineering job in that unlikely place. He watched Arek, a mixture of geek and thug with his cropped hair and his pebbly spectacles, his delicate spatulate fingers becoming fists as he went on about the thing that had happened. They had all heard the tale before, and yet still did not know it. It involved the borrowing or hiring of a camel that got wounded, or a Humvee that got damaged, and had to be hidden from its owner, and a diverted consignment of army tents and medicines, plus a crazed warlord or general. The story was a tale of leaving, of course, but had an air not of wistfulness but of slapstick, of Laurel and Hardy in the Foreign Legion. It had not ended in comedy for Arek, who told it in a self-effacing tone. At least he had left, though, and a part of him was still out in the world; Arek had been sent home minus a month’s pay and one testicle.
Anton remembered this, and forgave Arek the repetition of the story, and forgave his in-your-face eloquence – almost like it was scripted – appreciated him all over again, held a hand out, shook Arek’s hand solemnly. All eyes watched this exchange, and then he led them into laughter that, in turn, showed their forgiveness of the absurd rituals of drunken young men who took themselves too seriously.
2
Anton’s grandmother had told him about the time she passed through Gliwice just after the Second World War, with the continent a quivering ruin around her: the lines of expelled German civilians, and the things they had left behind, the scorched paving stones, the belongings chucked from windows and left to fester on the streets, a man hanging from the railings of a balcony, a dressing gown cord buried in his neck.
There was a coughing dog with dust-damaged lungs, unable to bark, going round in circles, his eyes wide in his discomfort, tongue forced out of his mouth, frustrated that nobody would pay him attention. Anton’s babcia had watched him. He was bugging people to put him out of the misery brought by his clogged, contracting alveoli, she had realised, amazed that nobody would. Back in Ukraine, they would have eaten him by now. There was a bad-tempered-looking militia man nearby with a Home Army armband, and a rifle on a strap slung casually over his shoulder, and she willed the dog to bite him. The poor dog was too kind, though, or too stupid. His coughs followed her, startled her one day ten years later in her White City living room, the coughing dog from Gliwice outside her west London door, and she left her chair and her book and her BBC Home Service and went out, to comfort him, then to kill him. She stood outside her door a long time, willing him to come back, embrace the peace of his destruction.
In Gliwice that day she had joined the militia man, and everybody else, to view a horse’s body blocking the river, bloated with gas, the size of an elephant, the kids gathered to make sure they were there when it when it exploded. Anton had envied those kids. He had sat in rooms, learning their language, had taken their parts in conversations with himself, and with their vanished spirits, for years, about the exploding elephant, the hanging man, the broken belongings, the stones all burnt, the remnants of German lives, the disappearing columns of Germans.
Nothing Anton’s babcia saw in Gliwice had made her want to stay. The looming big-bad-wolf grin of Josef Stalin was visible in the low-lying clouds, she swore, and its spectre had sped her feet, away, away, a voice urging her to leave, warning that the elephant would not be the only thing to explode.
'That year it snowed from January till April...'
