Five Broken Elephants
By Lydia Commissaris
A family of glass elephants stands in a carefully arranged semicircle on the shelf in my childhood bedroom. While the individual elephants vary in size, the herd of five is small enough to be held in one adult hand. From a distance, the sea jade green reflects the late afternoon sun. Sea jade, a definite misnomer for the color of these land-loving giants, yet that is how they were made. White tusks protrude from the sides of their trunks. Their stance conveys the strength and power of their live counterparts.
As I draw closer, the flaws of this small arrangement become clear. Dust has coated the elephants’ backs. Several legs reveal small cracks. One elephant has a chip missing from its ear. Some tusks have broken off, leaving them at odd lengths. Their eyes, tiny black dots encircled with white, gaze at me, unmoving; their gentleness reaches deep within me.
I have been trying to remove these elephants from the shelf for 40 years. Many times, I have purged my doodads as adult practicality severed my emotional attachment. The elephants once stood between a cheesy souvenir hiking boot holding short colored pencils and a piece of coral, shaped like a fan, sent to me from a Caribbean pen pal. In an early purge, I threw out the boot. It had been an award honoring my bravery for climbing a mountain in Switzerland, but it became a mockery as my fear of heights worsened over the years. I discarded the unique coral fan when maturity taught me the betrayal of friendships based on requests for money. The elephants are among the remaining trinkets that hold strong enough meaning to remain. Today, I must decide their fate. Their home is being sold, and the bedroom will no longer be mine.
My mind wanders to an old stone house in a small town in East Germany. The chimney supported a skewed arrangement of straw. Storks built their nests to catch the warmth from the fires below. The backyard smelled of rotting apples that had fallen from crooked old trees along the surrounding wall. Furniture in the rooms with more scratches than paint had been there for many years. The stone floor was cool under my feet. This was what my 10-year-old brain imagined life to be like 100 years ago in North America.
Earlier that day, we departed from Erika’s home in West Germany, six of us squished into a car meant for five. I sat in the front on a pillow containing first aid items, straddling the stick shift. Dad sometimes let me change gears. Erika was my mother’s best friend and had helped as a nanny in our toddler years. She had arranged the papers for us to cross into East Germany to accompany her for a visit with her brother and his family. He was the pastor of an underground church behind the Iron Curtain.
We approached the border hut on the West German side with nervous anticipation. Rolls of barbed wire extended to the left and right as far as I could see. We easily cleared the officer’s questions. He directed us to drive straight down the road to the next border hut with a stern warning not to stop. I did not see any trees on this stretch of land. There were additional rows of barbed wire marking the line dissuading Germans on either side from crossing. Huge spotlights perched on evenly spaced metal poles marked the distance as we drove past.
We arrived at the East German border hut, our hearts thumping. Several soldiers in their green fatigues and laced black military boots surrounded our car, machine guns hanging down from straps across their chests. Three soldiers escorted Dad and Erika, who carried all our important papers, into the building. We sat without moving or speaking, staring straight ahead, hoping not to draw the attention of the soldiers guarding the car. After what seemed to be much longer than it was, Dad and Erika returned to the car, and we were on our way.
I met Erika’s niece Renate when we arrived at the house. She was a year older than me. Her frizzy hair, wrestled into braids, framed her round face. An air of melancholy sometimes betrayed her broad, warm smile. We became inseparable after a few moments of my 10-year-old awkwardness and figuring out how to communicate with little understanding of each other’s languages.
The lunch Renate’s mother served was meager by our family’s standards, and my mother later explained that it was fancier than Renate would usually eat. My sisters and I spent most of the sultry afternoon in the backyard, where we sat in a big tin washbasin while Renate and her sister poured water over us from a watering can. They called it swimming. All day, I marveled that I was experiencing what I had learned about the hard life under Communism in my short life.
When we were getting ready to leave, Renate handed me a little packet wrapped in an embroidered handkerchief. The glass pieces clinked against each other. The tusks poked my hand as I took it. I did not understand at the time why Renate gave me an imperfect gift. Nevertheless, I put the elephants on my bedroom shelf with other mementos from family trips and meaningful gifts from friends.
As I grew older, I understood that Renate had given me one of her most treasured possessions. The elephants, despite their cracked legs, broken tusks and chipped ears, emanated strength and beauty. A constant reminder of the privilege of living in a free country. The intent of the giver is greater than the gift. I feel such appreciation for a genuine friend who I never saw again. With the few letters received from her, and occasional updates from her aunt, I learned Renate suffered from depression complicated by inaccessibility to adequate treatment. Even with the fall of the Berlin Wall, life remained a struggle as those from East Germany had to adjust to the free world they had longed for.
Now, I wipe the dust off their backs and carefully wrap the five elephants in tissue paper. I am still not ready to discard them. They will stand in a semicircle on another shelf in my own home. People say that elephants have long memories and never forget. Even after forty years of freedom and privilege, I need the reminder of how life under restriction feels. I will never forget Renate. Most importantly, the elephants will continue to remind me of the timeless values of life, freedom and friendship that she gifted to me many years ago.
1st Place Essay
Read the piece in “Detroit Voices” featuring the 2025 DWR Award winners.
Lydia Commissaris is semi-retired and is finally acting on the encouragement of her family and friends to write a book. Her experience as a nurse/nurse practitioner and a missionary in West Africa has given her an extraordinary view through the windows of humanity. Lydia shares honest reflections of how ordinary people and circumstances have shaped her. She finds the writing style of Pulitzer Prize World War II journalist Ernie Pyle intriguing. She lives in Metro Detroit with her soulmate and their rescue dog, Moxie, an appropriately named Malinois Shepherd.
