Peter Augustus Duchene
Peter is the protagonist of the story. He is being trained to become a soldier, brave and true. This is true even though Peter does not really have any great desire to become a soldier. Circumstances have conspired to take this choice away from him in the form of being orphaned. Peter’s father was a soldier and his father’ friend, Vilna Lutz, was also a soldier. In the wake of his being orphaned, Vilna has taken over the role of Peter’ official guardian and since Vilna is a soldier brave and true through and through, he has decided there is no better future for the boy than soldiering.
Upon her death, Peter’s mother placed the responsibility of his younger sister fully into the ten-year-old boy’s hands. This has proven impossible since the siblings were separated following their mother’s death. Adding to the difficulty of Peter carrying out his mother’s wish is that Vilna Lutz has lied to Peter, telling him his sister is dead.
The future looks unremittingly bleak for Peter until the fateful day a fortune teller informs him that his sister is actually alive. Even more importantly, she also tells him that an elephant will lead him to her. Despite receiving what may well be the worst psychic reading in the history of fortune telling, Peter’s spirits are lifted, and he becomes a boy on a mission. A mission that seems impractical and impossible and surely destined to lead to disappointment, true, but it beats soldiering.
Adele
Adele is Peter’s six-year-old sister. Their mother dies shortly after her birth, and she is handed over to the Orphanage of Perpetual Light. There she occupies the very last bed in a very large and very drafty dormitory. She proceeds to grow up there without even knowing she has a brother.
After an incident involving a magician and the inexplicable appearance of a large elephant following a trick at the Opera House, Adele suddenly is visited in her dreams every night by that elephant. These perpetual nighttime visitations are unusually ritualistic. The elephant always announces her arrival by politely knocking on the door of the orphanage. Always answering that knock on the door is Sister Marie. In her dream, the elephant specifically tells the Sister of the Door that she has come to collect the little person who is called Adele. That very same little person also hears the elephant tell the nun that “she is belonging elsewhere besides.”
The elephant in the dream is not the only strange visitor that Adele comes to know. There is also a beggar and a dog who show up, both looking so hungry that they make the little girl cry even though herself knows the pains of hunger. But this is the essence of this remarkable young girl. She is the personification of empathy, selflessness, and love for everyone. She will even find space in her heart for the cruel Vilna Lutz.
The Magician and the Elephant
Peter is enthralled by an amazing story he hears about a magician who was able to make an elephant suddenly appear from the ceiling. Unfortunately, the weight of the beast caused it to fall and when it landed it was upon a woman named Madame LaVaughn. The magician is sentenced to prison as a result of the elephant breaking both the Madame’s legs. As he sits in his cell, looking longingly toward a star through the bars of his window, he contemplates how different his life would be if only he had caused lilies to appear from the ceiling as he had intended.
The elephant just wants to return home after a life of misery in which she becomes the instrument of an unjust punishment of a magician and an object of curiosity to be put on display. Only one person is capable of understanding her loneliness and desire to go home. A young boy who has made a promise to take care of her by getting her back home. A young boy who
Although the path is not an easy one and both undergo their own trials and tribulations, ultimately both the magician and the elephant are able to find contentment in having played a part in the reunion of a brother and sister. The magician gives up magic—and elephants—to herd goats and marry a toothless woman. The elephant lives a long life, but her contentment with helping Peter and Adele find each other is surprisingly short-lived as it turns out that to be a myth that elephants never forget
