The Elephant Keepers' Children

by Peter Høeg

  So everyone on Finø can drive a carriage, but none like Hans. Hans drives like he was aboard a sulky on the trotting track at Århus. Perhaps it has something to do with the horses always knowing that if they don’t cooperate they’ll be turned over onto their backs to have their tummies tickled.

  He never uses the whip, not even now, but simply clicks his tongue and flicks the reins so our four horses leap into motion like wild rabbits and Blågårds Plads nearly vanishes into the horizon behind us.

  Now the two men in suits make a mistake. They veer off toward a big black BMW with diplomatic plates that is parked in front of the library, and at once they are inside and accelerating away from the square.

  Under normal circumstances they would catch up with us in an instant. But these are not normal circumstances, because Blågårdsgade is a pedestrian street, closed to motor vehicles.

  Strictly speaking, it is closed to horse-drawn carriages, too. But in every Dane there resides a yearning for the days when Denmark was still a land of agriculture and the king rode through the streets of Copenhagen on horseback and everyone kept livestock and slept with the pigs in the kitchen to keep warm and because it was so nice and cozy. So as we come toward them at full trot, people step aside and send us friendly smiles, even though Hans is urging on the horses as if we were part of a rodeo.

  But when the black BMW appears, popular sentiment turns. I’m familiar with it from Finø Town, because when all the streets are pedestrianized as they are in the summer, something nasty rises up inside people when they see a car that’s not supposed to be there. It doesn’t help that the BMW displays the mark of the diplomatic corps—in fact, it only makes things worse—and what happens then is that people begin to close in on the car and prevent it from moving.

  Now Hans looks back over his shoulder, and then comes the stroke of genius that proves quite exceptionally that my brother can retain an eye for the ball even off the pitch, because now he careers off to the left down a side street.

  It’s a one-way street and we’re going the wrong way, there are cars everywhere, and for a moment we appear to be heading for a catastrophe. But when people see us in our horse-drawn carriage, it’s as if all road traffic legislation is suddenly suspended. Perhaps it’s because horse-drawn carriages are so diverting, maybe people think we’re parading new high school graduates around as is the custom, even though it’s only April, but the school year does seem to be getting shorter all the time. Whatever the reason, cars and bicycles pull into the side, some pull up onto the pavement, not one of them blows its horn, and then the street is emptied and we have a clear passage.

  The BMW sweeps around the corner. The two men inside have escaped the adversity of Blågårdsgade, and now they smell blood.

  But it doesn’t last long. A carriage of new high school graduates moving against the traffic is one romantic exception, but a BMW is in obvious contravention of the law. So now it is swallowed up by other vehicles and bicycles and pedestrians, all of them cursing and blowing their horns with all their might.

  At that point, the only thing we know about the two men is that neither of them is likely to be our sprinting songbird’s father or uncle, for they are both as white in complexion as Finø asparagus. And we know that their two hundred-meter dash is deserving of respect.

  That respect is now enhanced, because they have abandoned their vehicle in the middle of the street, have battled their way free of the massive unpopularity that enveloped them before, and are once more in pursuit.

  If, like me, you have ever allowed yourself to be enticed into stealing pears or dried flounder in the gardens of Finø by friends of dubious character, then you will know that when people become old enough to buy a house and grow pears and dry fish in the garden, they have usually lost the ability to propel themselves faster than what at best might be called an energetic shuffle, and besides losing the ability, they have also lost interest. Especially when they happen to be wearing a suit, because personally I have never seen anything in a suit move faster than a brisk trot.

  But that doesn’t apply to the two men who are after us. They are what I would call older people, perhaps even forty, but their sprint is awesome. So all in all a rather gloomy picture begins to emerge of a future in which we are about to arrive at a major thoroughfare with a lot of traffic, which means we shall have to come to a halt, thereby giving the two men a chance to catch up with us, and I really don’t want to think any further than that.

  Tilte and I have drawn up a theory that your first impression of a person is crucial, before you find out how much he or she earns and whether they have children and a clean record with the police, before that there’s a first impression that’s kind of naked.

  If I’m to follow that instinct, then I’m glad that as far as I can see neither of the two men who are now approaching is Conny’s father, because they’re not at all what a prospective son-in-law such as myself would be aiming for. Though their hair is short and they’re both clean shaven and drive a BMW with diplomatic plates and are awesome over the short distance, they don’t resemble people who are out looking for reasonable conversation or a game of ludo. What they look like are people who want things their own way and who couldn’t care less if they left a couple of dead children and the corpse of a dog in their wake.

  In this rather bleak state of affairs, Tilte suddenly barks, “Stop here!”

  Hans makes a sound and the horses draw to a halt as if they just walked into a brick wall.

  We have stopped next to a small park with tables and benches in the sun. On them, people of all kinds are seated. Mothers with children, young people our own age playing basketball, pensioners, kids with shaved heads and safety pins stuck through their lower lips who are sitting around contemplating their future, perhaps thinking of joining the police. There are men and women who are suntanned and tattooed and who have arrived at that crucial point in their career planning where they must decide whether they should roll their next joint now or leave it for another fifteen minutes.

  Tilte is standing up in the box. She waits for a moment until she has the attention of the entire park. Then she points directly back at the two men.

  “Honor killing!” she bellows.

  Tilte is only a tiny bit taller than me, and slightly built. But her hair is thick and curly, and the same color red as a letter box. She has extensions, too, and if you add to her hair what some would call her aura of military leadership, you will have some idea as to what happens now.

  Reality once again begins to change. It is suddenly obvious that we are driving a bridal carriage, that Hans and the girl are the newlyweds, Tilte is the bridesmaid, I am the page boy, and Basker is the bridal dog. It is also clear that the two men rapidly approaching are prospective murderers bent on preventing young love from prevailing.

  This abruptly brings Nørrebro’s history as a working-class district of the city into prominence. It’s a subject we have only touched upon in school, on a day when my intellectual curve was not at its apex, so its details aren’t particularly clear to me, and it’s hard to say how many of the people taking in the sun in the park one would justifiably call industrial workers, if one were to be exact about it. But we learned at school that if the Danish working class holds one image dear, it is that when love is true, young people must be permitted to follow their hearts, and that image rises to the surface now and becomes visible. Another thing is that the BMW and the suits cast an air of capitalism over the two men, a state of affairs that in Nørrebro may quickly prove detrimental to the health, and then there’s Tilte’s charisma. Everyone in the park can sense that she is a sovereign queen calling to arms, and deep, deep down the Danish people have always cherished their royal house.

  So what happens is that a barricade is extended across the road, consisting of mothers with prams, kids in baggy jeans and hoodies, and men and women who are not to be messed with. Their backs, which are turned toward us, exude warmth and protection, and their fronts, which ar
e facing the other way, say that one more step and the two gentlemen in suits will be afforded the opportunity of witnessing a historical event, namely, the reintroduction of the death penalty in the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen.

  Tilte sits down again, Hans flicks the reins, and the four jet-black horses leap forward like kangaroos. Far behind us I can see our pursuers once more picking up speed, but this time they are fleeing, away from us and their firing squad, back to whatever is left of their BMW.

  We cross a main road and continue along sun-drenched streets, and so powerful is the effect of what has happened and what Tilte has said, that for a moment we have forgotten all about what might have happened to Mother and Father. We are just happy on behalf of Hans and his divinely beautiful bride, and cars honk their horns in congratulation and we wave back.

  We pass a large square and follow a street lined with trees, and then our singer says, “This is where I get off.”

  From her bag she has produced a pair of running shoes, which she is now wearing, and a sweater she has put on over her green dress, and she has placed a scarf over her head and managed to dull some of her starry luster, though only slightly so, for it is forceful and enduring, and quite frankly I will still say, between you and me, that were it not for the fact that I had sworn eternal devotion to Conny and moreover firmly believe that an age difference of more than two years between lovers is tantamount to cradle snatching, then I, too, would be in immediate danger of falling in love with her.

  So now we all look at Hans.

  It makes no real sense to say that Hans had been bowled over by a woman, because every second of the day he is not merely bowled over but knocked for six by the very fact that women even exist. And yet I will say that even though I have seen him look quite ridiculous so many times and in so many different ways when confronted with a girl, this time completely demolishes all previous records. He is utterly dazed by that first, naked impression that Tilte and I have drawn up our theory about, so dazed that he is transformed into a cuddly teddy, helplessly gazing at this dark beauty with his big watery-blue eyes.

  Tilte takes charge.

  “What’s your name?” she asks the girl. “Ashanti.”

  And then she adds, “You’ve all been wonderful.”

  “We know,” says Tilte. “And now you can do one of two things. The first is that you can keep all that wonder and put it away inside your heart to treasure like a pearl and carry it with you until the day you lie upon your deathbed.”

  I don’t know why Tilte always has to bring death into everything, but that’s the way she is.

  “And the second?” asks the girl.

  “The second,” says Tilte, “is that we give you Hans’s phone number. With two admirers like yours, you could be needing help again in a hurry.”

  The girl whose name is Ashanti looks at Tilte.

  “They’re bodyguards,” she says.

  She gets out her mobile.

  “They looked like prison guards,” Tilte says.

  “That’s the problem,” says Ashanti. “When it gets hard to tell the difference.”

  You can hear that somewhere deep within her perfect Danish resides a foreign dialect, rather like if you were to bump into a coconut palm in the woods of Finø.

  Tilte gives her Hans’s number and she adds it to her contacts. When she looks up again we all think she’s going to climb down from the carriage. But first she gives Basker a kiss, me a kiss, Tilte a kiss, and finally she presses her lips to Hans’s lifeless body, a kiss that lasts just a moment longer than all the others. And then she climbs down and floats away.

  Some people take daylight away with them when they leave. After she has gone, everything seems that much darker, and then reality returns with the phone call from Bodil Hippopotamus and the certain knowledge that Mother and Father have disappeared.

  4

  We’re waiting in the courtyard of Hans’s student residence facing the Fælledparken. The street outside is all sunshine and traffic and church bells pealing and people going to buy milk and newspapers at the twenty-four-hour store, an abundance of life. But in our own immediate space everything is bleak.

  “They’ll be here in a minute,” says Tilte.

  “No one’s going to take you away,” says Hans.

  Perhaps all of us have other people inside us, but I do know that inside my older brother lives someone who wants to protect us. It’s not often that person appears, but when he does, all readings go off the scale and things begin to tumble. The best restaurant in Finø Town is down by the harbor and is called the Nincompoop, and on several occasions Hans has passed by the place, swirling around some girls who are taking him for a walk, and from out of the Nincompoop three or four young men have appeared who have taken it into their heads that the perfect conclusion to a hearty five-course meal with a selection of fine wines during an idyllic holiday break in surroundings of natural beauty and historical significance would be to beat the living daylights out of some of the locals, and they have been under the impression that Hans and his girls were just what they were looking for. But at the very moment they launch their attack, something occurs inside my older brother. The bashful, warmhearted young man we all know and love disappears and instead a natural disaster takes his place, and before you know it two of the young men are swimming around in their own blood, another is groveling on the ground among the parked bicycles, and the fourth makes a getaway in a cloud of dust.

  That’s the side of Hans that appears now. But Tilte shakes her head.

  “We’ll be needing you on the outside,” she says.

  And then comes a pause, and in the pause is silence. All four of us know that we are now to be separated, and that life is about to get hard. We say nothing, yet in the silence I sense something about Tilte and Hans.

  Parents are okay, of course, even ours. But if there were an exam that adults needed to pass before being allowed to have children, how many would actually succeed, if we’re to be honest about it? And the ones who did, would they not merely scrape through? Even though Tilte claims that there is nothing about my upbringing that cannot be rectified by two years in a reformatory and five years of therapy, I would nevertheless venture to suggest that if my mother and father were ever to have passed that exam, someone would have to have taken pity on them first.

  But with brothers and sisters it’s different sometimes. It may be hard to explain, but there in the carriage I sense something very clearly. So of course Tilte looks me straight in the eye at that same moment.

  You have to be careful with the word love. It’s a word that so easily can slow you down, and it can make a botch of that curling shot with the inside of the foot. Nonetheless, I must use it now, because it’s the only word that fits, and that being the case means the door is opening and there’s a chance of catching just a glimpse of freedom.

  In order to make it perfectly clear what I mean, I’d like to insert a comment about how we discovered that love and the door are connected. In actual fact, it was Tilte who discovered it, and it happened in the kitchen of the rectory.

  I don’t know what your own family is like, but in our house we all have to get up so early, and there are so many lunches to pack, and so many lessons at school, and so much homework, and so much football afterward, and so many people paying visits to the rectory, not least because my mother and father service all three of Finø’s churches by turn, that in the day-today run of things you can get the feeling that Hurricane Lulu is wreaking havoc in the Kattegat and has moved into the rectory with us for good.

  But then what can happen is that the wind dies down, usually on a Friday or Saturday, and at once the waters are calm and a brief opportunity arises for us to realize that our being a family is not merely theoretical fancy, and when such a moment occurs it tends to do so in the kitchen, and it was at just such a moment that we made the discovery.

  Father was preparing food. He says that’s the way he relaxes, though when he’s doing it you�
�d be forgiven for thinking he was a butcher on piecework. He says, and even believes, that the food he makes is the same he enjoyed in his childhood home in Nordhavn, in the northern part of Finø, of which he speaks as though it were drenched in sunlight and tears of happiness, even though we actually met his mother, our grandmother, before she died, presumably of pent-up gall. We stayed with her and are therefore able to completely rule out the possibility that she had ever been capable of preparing food.

  Nonetheless, my father does on occasion succeed in contriving delicacies of a sort with his old meat press and recipes for dishes from medieval Finø, and at this moment, as what I am telling you about is happening, he is preparing duck rillettes, and pigs’ feet in jelly as stiff as a brick.

  Mother is sitting at the table with a pair of nippers and a soldering iron, a watchmaker’s magnifying glass, a computer, microphones, and an oscillograph, and she is constructing an opening mechanism for the larder that is to work by means of speech recognition. Seated on the bench beside her is Hans with his star map. Next to him, keeping an eye on everything, is Tilte. Beneath the table, Basker lies wheezing as though he has asthma, which he hasn’t, but he has the oxygen intake of a greyhound, and he likes to listen to the sound it makes when he breathes.

  And seated in the good chair is me, if you can imagine me as I was then, a small boy, rather delicate and refined, though at that moment simply immersed in being a part of all the nice things going on around me.

  It’s one of those moments at which you might venture to believe that you belong to a family.

  Then something happens that at first seems quite innocuous.

  Mother is setting the computer to recognize our voices, and while she is doing so, she is also humming the first verses of “Monday in the Rain on Lonely Avenue.”