The Exploding Elephant
'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 was published by Bards and Sages in 2018, chosen to be one of their Society of Misfits stories.
It is no longer available as a stand-alone story, but can be found in print 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.
I have the rights to it, and hope to find a publisher who will put it out as a reprint - or I may selfie it. Right now (April 2024) it's not a great priority, though I'm proud of it and want to see it out there once more. It is also, in a loose way, part of a trilogy incorporating my 2022 novel Cleopatra's Script, and another as yet unpublished book.
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 was published by Bards and Sages in 2018, chosen to be one of their Society of Misfits stories.
It is no longer available as a stand-alone story, but can be found in print 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.
I have the rights to it, and hope to find a publisher who will put it out as a reprint - or I may selfie it. Right now (April 2024) it's not a great priority, though I'm proud of it and want to see it out there once more. It is also, in a loose way, part of a trilogy incorporating my 2022 novel Cleopatra's Script, and another as yet unpublished book.
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.
3
“Is it just a beautiful idea, to leave?” It was Dorota, hair in neat lines on her head like a ploughed field of flax, bad skin, prominent facial bones that heightened a mad intensity in her expression. An optimist, despite the verge of doom that Anton sensed in her. “One that chases us through the whole year?” She was a psychiatric nurse, her working hours spent regulating people’s synapses. Her downtime was often spent disjointing her own and those of her friends with the kosher uppers and downers that found their way into her pockets, gorgeously branded by big pharma.
She was a possible heir to one of those kids who had watched the horse in the Kłodnica, of course. Anybody Anton met in Gliwice fitted this bill. He had to refrain from asking them whether any of their older family members recounted the story of the exploding elephant. Sometimes he forgot to refrain. He had asked them all at least once, then again when drunk. And again, recounting those children’s conversations, and watching his friends’ faces, patient but amused, a little, concerned about him, just a little, and regretful about not being able to answer.
Dorota sensed summer, Anton guessed. He had no idea how. Winter in Gliwice seemed to last forever, interrupted by a day or two of spring. The equinox was celebrated desperately, Anton thought, a tradition of kids wagging off school and spending the day shivering on various corners of the city. Win-win for the teachers, paid to do nothing for a day. The summer sun was the only thing to despatch the snow. Anton almost believed the city would be frozen in its micro-climate for the year, a snow scene in a glass globe. The summer opened up that winter city, stripped away the ice to reveal it as a circle of tents in the desert around it made by the coalmines, the steel mills, the railways, the petrified trees that only became green-leafed as they clustered towards the mountains, hungry for the moisture from their low-lying clouds. Citizens may have longed for summer but in fact they hated the all-engulfing heat, the melting tarmac pavements marked by women’s high heels and even, faintly, the feet of large birds, hated the smell from the sewage system that was impossible to fix. They knew that the time for leaving would soon be upon them, or at least the time to think about it.
Anton got stuck on a memory of summer in Gliwice. He was sitting under an arch in the main square outside a café, contemplating the ice cream that sat before him in a bowl. He had never liked ice cream but every once in a while somebody urged him to try the ice cream in such-and-such a place with the promise that it was unbelievable, like no ice cream ever before made. Every once in a while something chimed in his brain and he fell for it. The square looked like a painting by de Chirico, a still mid-morning and already in the low thirties, the fragile soundless coincidence descending on it of nobody in sight and no cars. Anton half-expected a sinister-looking child to cross the picture, spinning a hoop. He took a spoonful of his ice cream and immediately hated it. A car horn sounded. A window clanged open in an upper-story across the square and a woman appeared and called to somebody out of Anton’s field of vision. A boy broke away from his parent, walked up to Anton’s table and snatched the ice cream off the plate. He stuffed some of it into his mouth but in fact lost most of it on the table, the pavement, on his shoes, his socks, on his clothes. “Hey,” Anton started to say, but just for the form of it. He glared at the boy and his parent.
A lorry roared in and thundered to a halt. It was illegal for lorries to even enter the square, with its delicate Renaissance-style brickwork. Two men jumped down from the cab. They took a cautious look around then opened the back to reveal a huddled mass of living statues on frames that made it look as though they were levitating. Covered in paint of all shades and trapped into fantastical costumes and hats, they looked like bizarre prisoners of some intergalactic Inquisition. Anton’s attention did not go unnoticed. The statues leered at him, called to him, pointed at him. Anton understood at once what was happening. He had read only the week before that times were hard for living statues. They rocked up to city centres hoping to make a bit of money from having their photos taken but apparently people did not cough up if they saw them in situ getting ready. Citizens just could not believe that the statues were levitating if they saw them putting the frame together and fixing themselves into it. No, people wanted to believe that the living statues were really levitating before they handed their coins over.
They reminded Anton of beggars back from medieval wars with disfigurements, showing their afflictions to gain sympathy and small change.
The man deposited on the pavement near Anton was dressed as a kind of Renaissance clown, vaguely Italian, partly Punch-and-Judy show. The man stuck a hand out and said, “Photo?” Anton had shaken his head and handed the man a few coins, but no sympathy, his face blank. He had walked on and, having forgotten to pay for his ice cream, was pursued by an amused waiter.
He told the tale to his Gliwice friends. Most had heard it before. They liked it again anyway, laughed wryly or hooted.
Perhaps it was the memory of an Italian clown, even a vague one, but in his head Anton began to recite Italian, rattling it out like a song. It was sort of his party-piece and he was, sort of, proud of it. He had never learned the language very well though had got by at Rome’s Sapienza University for a year before having to leave suddenly, a familiar fog of questions behind him.
Dorota smiled, glad, Anton suspected, to be rescued from her melancholy sketch of summer and of a journey that would probably not be taken. She pointed and said, “Dante!” He knew then that the recitation was not in his head at all, but out there. His friends often urged him to recite Italian when they were drunk. “Ah, poetry,” one of them breathed. “No.” Another snapped fingers, a gotcha look on her face. “A speech by Mussolini.” Arek said, “No, it’s the Futurist Manifesto.” They were all wrong, but they liked the game. It was actually a lengthy passage from a presentation one of Anton’s student colleagues had given on the reduction of harmful gas emissions during the process of dismantling power plants. Anton had helped him with the English version – aimed at an EU grant, he recalled – and had in the process fallen in with the rhythm of the Italian, not all of which he actually understood. Why on earth he had memorised it, he had no clue.
They looked at him with unease, then, at a word, as if he could be their oldest friend, with kindly scorn for his showing off, then, with a memory cutting through the room, with awe. They acknowledged that he had been out in the world beyond their surroundings, not just as a visitor and not just in curiosity; he had lived in that world. They could afford to laugh, though. They knew that for him getting back out there would be no simple matter of getting on a train. Their Anton was a fly on a window, busy, moving, but going nowhere.
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.
3
“Is it just a beautiful idea, to leave?” It was Dorota, hair in neat lines on her head like a ploughed field of flax, bad skin, prominent facial bones that heightened a mad intensity in her expression. An optimist, despite the verge of doom that Anton sensed in her. “One that chases us through the whole year?” She was a psychiatric nurse, her working hours spent regulating people’s synapses. Her downtime was often spent disjointing her own and those of her friends with the kosher uppers and downers that found their way into her pockets, gorgeously branded by big pharma.
She was a possible heir to one of those kids who had watched the horse in the Kłodnica, of course. Anybody Anton met in Gliwice fitted this bill. He had to refrain from asking them whether any of their older family members recounted the story of the exploding elephant. Sometimes he forgot to refrain. He had asked them all at least once, then again when drunk. And again, recounting those children’s conversations, and watching his friends’ faces, patient but amused, a little, concerned about him, just a little, and regretful about not being able to answer.
Dorota sensed summer, Anton guessed. He had no idea how. Winter in Gliwice seemed to last forever, interrupted by a day or two of spring. The equinox was celebrated desperately, Anton thought, a tradition of kids wagging off school and spending the day shivering on various corners of the city. Win-win for the teachers, paid to do nothing for a day. The summer sun was the only thing to despatch the snow. Anton almost believed the city would be frozen in its micro-climate for the year, a snow scene in a glass globe. The summer opened up that winter city, stripped away the ice to reveal it as a circle of tents in the desert around it made by the coalmines, the steel mills, the railways, the petrified trees that only became green-leafed as they clustered towards the mountains, hungry for the moisture from their low-lying clouds. Citizens may have longed for summer but in fact they hated the all-engulfing heat, the melting tarmac pavements marked by women’s high heels and even, faintly, the feet of large birds, hated the smell from the sewage system that was impossible to fix. They knew that the time for leaving would soon be upon them, or at least the time to think about it.
Anton got stuck on a memory of summer in Gliwice. He was sitting under an arch in the main square outside a café, contemplating the ice cream that sat before him in a bowl. He had never liked ice cream but every once in a while somebody urged him to try the ice cream in such-and-such a place with the promise that it was unbelievable, like no ice cream ever before made. Every once in a while something chimed in his brain and he fell for it. The square looked like a painting by de Chirico, a still mid-morning and already in the low thirties, the fragile soundless coincidence descending on it of nobody in sight and no cars. Anton half-expected a sinister-looking child to cross the picture, spinning a hoop. He took a spoonful of his ice cream and immediately hated it. A car horn sounded. A window clanged open in an upper-story across the square and a woman appeared and called to somebody out of Anton’s field of vision. A boy broke away from his parent, walked up to Anton’s table and snatched the ice cream off the plate. He stuffed some of it into his mouth but in fact lost most of it on the table, the pavement, on his shoes, his socks, on his clothes. “Hey,” Anton started to say, but just for the form of it. He glared at the boy and his parent.
A lorry roared in and thundered to a halt. It was illegal for lorries to even enter the square, with its delicate Renaissance-style brickwork. Two men jumped down from the cab. They took a cautious look around then opened the back to reveal a huddled mass of living statues on frames that made it look as though they were levitating. Covered in paint of all shades and trapped into fantastical costumes and hats, they looked like bizarre prisoners of some intergalactic Inquisition. Anton’s attention did not go unnoticed. The statues leered at him, called to him, pointed at him. Anton understood at once what was happening. He had read only the week before that times were hard for living statues. They rocked up to city centres hoping to make a bit of money from having their photos taken but apparently people did not cough up if they saw them in situ getting ready. Citizens just could not believe that the statues were levitating if they saw them putting the frame together and fixing themselves into it. No, people wanted to believe that the living statues were really levitating before they handed their coins over.
They reminded Anton of beggars back from medieval wars with disfigurements, showing their afflictions to gain sympathy and small change.
The man deposited on the pavement near Anton was dressed as a kind of Renaissance clown, vaguely Italian, partly Punch-and-Judy show. The man stuck a hand out and said, “Photo?” Anton had shaken his head and handed the man a few coins, but no sympathy, his face blank. He had walked on and, having forgotten to pay for his ice cream, was pursued by an amused waiter.
He told the tale to his Gliwice friends. Most had heard it before. They liked it again anyway, laughed wryly or hooted.
Perhaps it was the memory of an Italian clown, even a vague one, but in his head Anton began to recite Italian, rattling it out like a song. It was sort of his party-piece and he was, sort of, proud of it. He had never learned the language very well though had got by at Rome’s Sapienza University for a year before having to leave suddenly, a familiar fog of questions behind him.
Dorota smiled, glad, Anton suspected, to be rescued from her melancholy sketch of summer and of a journey that would probably not be taken. She pointed and said, “Dante!” He knew then that the recitation was not in his head at all, but out there. His friends often urged him to recite Italian when they were drunk. “Ah, poetry,” one of them breathed. “No.” Another snapped fingers, a gotcha look on her face. “A speech by Mussolini.” Arek said, “No, it’s the Futurist Manifesto.” They were all wrong, but they liked the game. It was actually a lengthy passage from a presentation one of Anton’s student colleagues had given on the reduction of harmful gas emissions during the process of dismantling power plants. Anton had helped him with the English version – aimed at an EU grant, he recalled – and had in the process fallen in with the rhythm of the Italian, not all of which he actually understood. Why on earth he had memorised it, he had no clue.
They looked at him with unease, then, at a word, as if he could be their oldest friend, with kindly scorn for his showing off, then, with a memory cutting through the room, with awe. They acknowledged that he had been out in the world beyond their surroundings, not just as a visitor and not just in curiosity; he had lived in that world. They could afford to laugh, though. They knew that for him getting back out there would be no simple matter of getting on a train. Their Anton was a fly on a window, busy, moving, but going nowhere.
'That year it snowed from January till April...'
A reader's review
I am well behind with my reading aims having been involved with a complicated long standing project of my own. But I finally got to finishing 'Exploding Elephant' and am moving on to a Blue Coast Mystery almost Solved. --- Exploding Elephant --- Mr. Sweeney paints a picture of a place I have never been to. Some of us might think we have been there once, but in reality we have only been there when looking deep into stark, black and white photographs that may even make one shiver and yet, with all the air of a town taking a very long time to recover from a troubled past, (though my understanding here may be deeply flawed.) Not satisfied with pushing our imagination so far, the story adds dark little alleys of images of an earlier time making one almost want to turn and run from that town. I am pretty much a ‘chicken’ when it comes to books that require me do some thinking, my intellect is not ‘up to the challenge’ but, mercifully the author does not leave you alone, he guides you through unfamiliar surroundings, even unfamiliar feelings, and that is the true genius of his writing. He does not simply abandon you to stand shivering and cold on a street corner in Gliwice. He is all too aware that he can easily scare the life out of you if he wanted to. Then there are the characters. Each one seeming to want to tell their own quite complex story. Then just when you least expect it Mr. Sweeney slaps a wonderful custard pie of humour in your face, like ‘Mrs Ostrowska’s own liver pâtè - “Your own liver?” says Anton, “I… That’s a sacrifice indeed.” ---- p15 a bittersweet ending of mixed emotions, something that I am totally incapable of conjuring when I try to write, and make me run for the comfort of my bizzare fantasy, every time I try to explore emotions this deeply, I find myself unable to do it, but Exploding Elephant faces it head on in a way that made me unsure whether to laugh or cry, at times, but still satisfies the reader, and explains the elephant unexpectedly at the end. (Mike Middleton)