The Elephant Keepers' Children

by Peter Høeg

  The last moment I’ll tell you about is also the most low-key. I’m a small child, three years old maybe, because we had just got Basker II and he’s climbed up into my parents’ bed where I’ve been sleeping too. I slide down onto the floor and push open the French windows and go outside into the garden. I think it must be early autumn, the sun’s low in the sky and the grass is cold as ice and biting at my feet. Between the trees are big spiders’ webs, and their threads are hung with dewdrops like a million tiny diamonds all glittering at once. It’s very early and the morning is fresh and new and impossible to reproduce, as though there’s never been a morning like it before and there doesn’t have to be a copy because this one will last forever.

  At that moment the world is completely perfect. Nothing needs to be fixed, and there’d be no one to do it anyway, because there are no people, not even me, there’s nothing else but the joy. It’s all so very brief, and then it’s over.

  I know there are moments like that in your own life. Perhaps not the same, but similar.

  I’m trying to make you aware of the seconds just before you realize how special the situation is and then begin to think.

  Because the moment the thoughts come, you’re back in the cage again.

  That’s part of what’s so depressing about the prison. It’s not just made of stone and concrete with bars in front of the windows.

  If it were, it would all have been so much easier. If we were confined in the ordinary way we would surely have found a way out, even two such timid souls as you and me. From Grenå or Århus we would have got hold of a couple hundred grams of that pink powder they put in the jet motors of the model planes when Finø holds its Grand Kite and Glider Day. And we would have found a rust-free pipe with a bung at each end, and we would have drilled a little hole in the pipe and put the powder inside and inserted a fuse from a New Year’s firework into the hole, and we would have blown a great big exit in the wall, and they wouldn’t ever have seen us for the smoke.

  But that wouldn’t be enough. Because the prison, which is the life of every single one of us and the way we live it, this prison is not simply built of stone, it’s also made of words and thoughts. And we are all of us involved in building and maintaining it, and that’s the worst part of the whole thing.

  Like that time Conny asked me out via Sonja. Right after the first second passed, right after the shock of it had turned the world around, it all snapped back again, and it snapped back because I thought: Can this be true? She means me and not some other Peter? Why me? And supposing it is true, am I at all good enough for her? How long will it last? And if it does last, as I hope and pray it will, it’s still got to end sometime, surely?

  “And they lived happily ever after.”

  I never liked that ending.

  Father was the one who read to us in the evenings, to Tilte and me and Basker. Whenever the fairy tale ended with “And they lived happily ever after” it always gave me a sense of discomfort I felt unable to account for.

  Tilte found the right words for me. One day, she can’t have been more than seven years old and I would have been five, she said, “What does ‘ever after’ mean?”

  “It means until the end of their days, until they died,” Father said.

  Then Tilte said: “Were their deaths dignified?”

  Father went quiet. Then after a while he said, “It doesn’t say.”

  Then Tilte said, “What happened next?”

  I know where Tilte got it from, that thing about the deaths and whether they were dignified. She got it from Bermuda Seagull Jansson, Finø’s midwife and undertaker rolled into one. That’s the way it is—with the island being so small, a lot of people need to be two or three things at once, like Mother, who is the organist and churchwarden and adviser to the agricultural machinery rental firm all at the same time.

  Tilte often talked with Bermuda and had even helped her put bodies in coffins. So that’s where she got it from.

  But that still doesn’t explain everything. Try to imagine: you’re sitting there with a seven-year-old girl and you’ve just read a fairy tale, and the idea behind them living happily ever after is for the story to have a happy ending and for the children to now be in the mood for going to sleep and to look at their family and feel secure in the belief that their mother and father and themselves and the dog are going to live happily ever after too, even if it is such a very long time indeed. And then there’s this girl aged seven, Tilte, who asks if their deaths were dignified.

  When Tilte said that, I understood why I had never really felt comfortable about those endings. I hadn’t ever been able to think like Tilte, I didn’t even have the guts. But there was something I’d sensed. That even if they did live happily ever after, what happened when they got to the end of their days?

  That may be where the fun stops.

  Now I’ll tell you what happened to us. Not so much because I want to talk about us, but to help me remember when the door was open so I can show it to you.

  I can’t help you out through the door, because I haven’t really gone through it myself yet. But if we can find it and stand in front of it often enough, you and me together, I know that one day we’ll be able to walk through it and out into freedom.

  It’s never too late to gain a happy childhood.

  That’s something Tilte and I read once in the library, and I always loved that sentence. But don’t think about it. If you think, you’ll come to a halt. And then you’ll say it doesn’t make sense, because your childhood has already gone, and what’s gone was like it was, and nothing can change that now.

  Instead, you should let the words remain inside you: it’s never too late to gain a happy childhood.

  I think that’s true. But sometimes it can be a problem.

  Still, Tilte says there’s no such thing as problems, only interesting challenges.

  So I’ll say that one of the interesting challenges of gaining a happy childhood began on Good Friday, on the square called Blågårds Plads, in Copenhagen, Denmark.

  2

  We’re waiting on Blågårds Plads in Copenhagen, we being Basker, Tilte, me, and our older brother, Hans, and we’re waiting in a black-lacquered carriage drawn by four horses, and for that we can thank Hans. Assuming, that is, that we would wish to thank him at all.

  Most of the population of Denmark, or at least the tourists of Finø, think my brother Hans looks like a prince in a Danish fairy tale. This they base on his being one meter and ninety centimeters tall and having blond curly hair and blue eyes, and being strong enough to unhitch one of the horses from the carriage, turn it on its back, lay it down on a table, and tickle its tummy.

  But because Tilte and Basker and I know Hans, we think he looks like a grown-up baby, too.

  The strategic midfield of the Finø AllStars may never have had a more formidable general. But off the pitch, with no ball to occupy his attention, his gaze is permanently fixed toward the stars, and anyone in that state will show a tendency to fall over the furniture.

  Now he has moved to Copenhagen to study astrophysics, which also has to do with stars, and here he has taken on a part-time job driving a horse-drawn carriage, and Tilte and Basker and I have come to visit him for Easter while Finø Town Church is in the hands of a visiting pastor on account of Mother and Father making their annual trip to La Gomera, a wannabe Finø in the Canary Islands.

  I don’t know if you’re familiar with Blågårds Plads. Personally, this is my first time here, and to begin with the square seems rather ordinary. It’s warm in the sun and cold in the shade. There are still some piles of snow left over from winter, and there’s a church with a number of people in front of it. As a clergyman’s son one is always pleased to see customers in the shop. Sitting on a bench in the sun are three men in their prime of life, which they spend drinking Carlsberg Elephant beer. Behind our carriage, a greengrocer is standing outside his shop staring at a crate of lemons that have survived the winter thanks to the five daily prayers
he directs toward Mecca, and in front of us is an old lady on her way across the street with a case of cat food balanced on her Zimmer. So the only unusual thing is the question of why a tourist wealthy enough to pay five thousand kroner online in advance for an hour and a quarter’s carriage ride through the city’s historical center should have chosen to depart from Blågårds Plads, and besides that there’s the issue of where he might be, since he should have been here ten minutes ago and has not yet turned up.

  Then Hans’s mobile phone rings, some sentences are exchanged, and after that our lives are completely different.

  “It’s Bodil,” says the voice at the other end. “Are Peter and Tilte with you?”

  Bodil Fisker, known to all as Bodil Hippopotamus, though short and slight of stature, requires no introduction. She is the municipal director of Grenå Kommune, which includes Finø and the islands of Anholt and Læsø, and everyone knows her. Hans has no need to put her on speaker phone, not that she’s loud, she keeps within a normal range, but her voice is the penetrating kind that can reach out into the farthest corners of the globe. And it’s not only her voice, it’s the entire way she is, and all that stuff about the spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters could have been written about Bodil Hippopotamus.

  But what truly moves upon the face of everything is Bodil’s attention, not her actual self. A municipal director is not a person one meets in the flesh but someone with people below her, who in turn have people below them, and they’re the ones you speak to on the phone. I have seen Bodil only once, on an occasion I would prefer not to dwell upon, but which nevertheless I must tell you about presently. Bodil calling us in person is a sign that something is terribly wrong.

  “Tilte, Peter, and Basker are here,” says Hans.

  “Did your mother and father leave an address?”

  “Mother left her mobile number, that’s all.”

  “When are you due back?”

  “We have one trip to make before I return the carriage.”

  “Call me when you’re on your way home. On this number.”

  Then she hangs up.

  Tilte turns her head and looks me straight in the eye. And I know why. She wants to remind me of something. That at this moment there is still a chance.

  I have hesitated to tell you this. But now I’ll say it straight out.

  Tilte and I have discovered that the door is open not only in happy moments. It is open, too, in moments of dread. Exactly as you learn that someone is dead or has got cancer or has disappeared, or that Karl Marauder Lander—known by all on Finø as the eighth of the seven plagues of Egypt—has got up at four in the morning to be the first at the gull colonies where we gather eggs in May, which is okay because the gulls, the herring gulls and the lesser black-backed gulls begin to sit on their eggs only when there are three, so the nests that contain three we leave well alone. But at the very moment you discover that Karl has emptied the nests and the world is about to collapse around you, at that moment the door is open.

  And now I shall tell you what Tilte and I have discovered one must do: one must reach inside and feel. The moment the shock kicks in there’s this very unusual, very special feeling inside and all around you, and that is what you must reach into and feel. It is there just before the tears come, and the despair, and the customary depression, and the giving up, and the decision that if Karl can get up at four in the morning, then you can get up at three or two, or even not go to bed at all so as to be sure of getting there first. During that brief moment when your normal instincts are gone and new ones have yet to appear, at that moment there is an entry.

  This I remember on Blågårds Plads, and I listen inside and sense that the shock has caused the door to open.

  After that, things happen so quickly it’s all we can do to keep our snorkels above water, and this is even true of Tilte.

  The first thing is that Tilte says what all of us are thinking.

  “Mother and Father have disappeared!”

  The next is that Blågårds Plads begins to change.

  3

  Do you know when the way you’re feeling sort of rubs off on those around you, like on the way they look? One minute Blågårds Plads is all okay, without necessarily being worthy of preservation by UNESCO and attracting five million tourists to Copenhagen. The next it looks like a place people come crawling to in order to die. The group in front of the church looks like a funeral procession. Once they’ve finished their beer, the three men on the bench will lie down and wait to expire, and they won’t have to wait long. The greengrocer’s lemons turn out to be composting, and the old lady with her Zimmer and her cat food looks at us as if we’re driving a hearse and she’s going to ask if she can see the deceased one last time.

  Then I say, “Bodil’s frightened.”

  We all heard it, and in a way that’s the scariest part. All of us heard something in Bodil’s voice that can be understood only in one way: that she has run into something bigger than herself.

  And then the singing begins.

  It comes from inside the church, and the voice is female. She must be using a microphone, and Blågårds Plads is at the same time a funnel that amplifies sound. The song is a foreign hymn and swings gently like gospel music.

  The words are inaudible, but it doesn’t matter as long as the voice is there. It is a voice big enough for us to park our whole carriage inside, and it is so warm that we would not be cold for one second, not even on a winter’s day, and so cozy that we would gladly run the risk of a parking ticket, because we would never want to leave ever again.

  For a brief moment, it lights up Blågårds Plads. It puts the greengrocer’s lemons back on the trees, it makes the men on the bench consider joining Alcoholics Anonymous, and it causes the old lady in front of us to let go of her Zimmer and prepare to dance the fandango.

  It prompts Hans to get to his feet, Tilte to stand up on the seat, and me to move up close to Hans and elbow him in the side so that he will lift me up to see, the way he has done ever since I was small.

  A procession emerges from the church. I can see several clergymen in chasubles, a lot of people dressed in black, and in front of them walks the lady who is singing.

  At first one wonders how someone so small could possess such a large voice, and then one thinks that she is not a person at all, because it seems like a long green dress is floating of its own accord, and above it a green silk hat like a turban with nothing in it. Then the dress turns and a face becomes visible, her skin is light brown like the stone of which the church is built, and that is what makes her face disappear.

  Then she looks toward us, and as she holds the final note she takes off her golden high-heeled shoes, removes her green turban, allows it to fall to the ground, and grabs a bag from a person standing next to her. In her hand she is holding a wireless microphone that she places on the ground, and then she lifts up the hem of her dress and begins to run. She runs toward us on her bare feet, over the snow and past the men on the bench. And before she is halfway across the square I can tell that she is the same age as Tilte or slightly older, and that she can do the four hundred meters in under a minute.

  As she reaches the carriage, she leaps like a grasshopper onto the box next to Hans, and even as she is still suspended in the air, she yells, “Drive! Now! I’m the one who booked you!”

  The procession is in disarray outside the church, people are shoved aside, two men in suits break out of the crowd and start running toward us. We know, all four of us, that they are after the singer. And we know, too, that we are on her side. I’ll tell you straight out why. She could have been a child pornographer or an abuser of animals, but with that voice I would have tried to save her anyway, and I know that Tilte and Basker feel the same way.

  But we need Hans, and for a brief moment we have no idea if he is up to the job.

  Regrettably, Hans has yet to discover women.

  Which is all the more embarrassing given that women have long since discove
red him. When he stands in for Finø’s harbormaster in June and July and finishes cleaning the toilets at about eight o’clock every night and is done collecting mooring fees from all the boats, at least three of the sweetest girls of summer will be waiting to take him for a walk. But taking Hans for a walk is easier said than done, because no sooner have they begun to amble than Hans begins to swirl around them as though he’s on the lookout for something from which to protect them, or a big puddle he can lie down in so they can cross without getting their feet wet.

  The trouble is my older brother was born eight hundred years too late. He belongs to a chivalrous medieval age and considers all women to be princesses who may be approached only gradually by means of slaying dragons, for instance, or lying facedown in puddles.

  But the girls of Finø attend tae kwon do lessons and move to Århus when they are sixteen and take a year out as exchange students in America when they are seventeen, and if they should ever meet a dragon they would want it to be their boyfriend, or else they would pull it apart and write a biology report about all the pieces. So Hans has never had a girlfriend, and now he’s nineteen, and his future prospects are less than bright, to say the least. Now, too, he stands gawping like some creature on which Finø’s nature warden is about to perform taxidermy, until Tilte yells at him, “Drive, Hans, you dolt!”

  That wakes him up. Tilte yelling and two men halfway across the square in a full sprint definitely ticks all the boxes, and perhaps it seems to him like he really is saving the princess.

  Now that I have spoken disparagingly of my older brother, even if only between the two of us, I need to add that he has a way with horses. Every year from April to September, Finø Town is closed for traffic with the exception of ambulances and delivery vehicles, and instead we drive the tourists around in horse-drawn carriages and small electric golf buggies. We charge two hundred and fifty kroner for the trip from the harbor to Finø Town Square, and Finø Town looks even more like a postcard, and the island, if we are to be honest and forthright, is transformed into a one-armed bandit in the middle of the blue Kattegat.