The Elephant Keepers' Children

by Peter Høeg

  “I am Professor Thorkild Thorlacius-Claptrap of Århus New Regional Hospital,” he announces.

  “A pleasure indeed,” says Finn Flatfoot. “And I am the metropolitan of the island of Finø.”

  Finn Flatfoot is a clever man, but his cleverness is more the shrewd kind than the sort of thing you learn at school. My guess is that he would not know what a metropolitan was if it weren’t for Tilte, who gave him the nickname because it’s so close to his real name, Metro Poltrop, and because Tilte says he has the looks and aura of a metropolitan, which is a kind of priest with authority in the Eastern Orthodox Church. And Finn is fond of Tilte and fond of the new word, so that’s at least part of the reason why it suddenly crops up here.

  “I can explain the entire matter,” says Thorkild. “We are conducting a psychiatric and theological appraisal of the rectory.”

  “Beginning by entering second-floor windows,” adds Finn.

  It is a detail the professor chooses to ignore.

  “I can explain everything,” he says. “And I can provide you with the necessary identification. My car is parked over there.”

  The professor steps out into the throng. Finn and John remain at his side. He makes a sweeping gesture with his hand in the direction of where his Mercedes is supposed to be and where only the wicker basket remains.

  The professor is flummoxed to discover that his car is gone. But the great scientists are never defeated, they seek new avenues.

  “We have transported the girl,” he says, “Dilde here. She has been visiting her brother, a substance abuser and criminal serving a term of mandatory treatment up there.”

  He points toward where he thinks Big Hill lies but has seemingly lost all sense of direction, so what he points toward is actually the cooperative supermarket and behind it the old people’s home. Finn and John consider him intently.

  “We have transported the girl and the reptile,” the professor continues. “The Finø monitor lizard.”

  He indicates the basket and, as though to provide final, impenetrable evidence, lifts the lid. He and Finn and John peer into the emptiness inside.

  And now Thorkild notices me.

  “The boy!” he exclaims. “The addict, passing himself off as a lizard!”

  John the Savior and Finn Flatfoot exchange glances.

  “There’s alcohol involved here, too,” says Finn Flatfoot. “Drugs and alcohol together. I’ve seen it before. It’s like injecting air into the brain.”

  The professor’s face changes color and becomes what technically would be referred to as purple. Finn Flatfoot grips his arm with one hand and reaches into his pocket for a pair of handcuffs with the other.

  Now again something happens that must prompt us all to revise our opinion of the Academical Boxing Club and revert to our initial theory that what goes on behind its doors must be at the highest level of competitive sport. Because Professor Thorlacius now delivers a punch to the stomach of Finn Flatfoot that no one could ever dig out and dust off unless in possession of some considerable years of training.

  Finn carries a lot of upholstery in his one hundred and fourteen kilos. But one hundred and twenty would have stood him in better stead given that the wind is now knocked right out of his lungs, forcing him down onto his knees.

  Then John the Savior is upon the professor. From the dire fate of Finn Flatfoot he has learned a valuable lesson and covers his more vulnerable parts accordingly, whereupon the professor is cuffed.

  “Always watch your back,” says Tilte.

  She says so because John has now straightened himself up as though after a successful rescue operation, but he has forgotten all about Minna Thorlacius-Claptrap, who now lends further weight to my experience that married couples are often so tightly knitted together as to comprise a commando unit, and now Minna strikes John from behind like a missile while expelling what sounds to me like a battle cry originating in some Japanese martial art.

  The last thing I see is that the bishop and Vera begin to run, cuffed hands behind backs, away from the scene of the crime. Hardly a wise strategy, but one can understand them. When the feeling arises that the world is going to the wall, all of us are bound to feel the impulse to leg it.

  And then Tilte’s hand touches my arm.

  “They’ll be put into custody in the new detention house,” she says. “That’s what Finn does with drunks. We’ve got twenty-four hours.”

  17

  There’s something scary about how quickly life can seep away from a house once it’s been abandoned.

  Of course, the rectory has not been abandoned, but it’s been a week since we left, and the place is already different. In the hall is what looks like a bill the postman has pushed under the door, and the envelope is already yellowed. The pendulum clock above the bench is still ticking and everything in my father’s study appears untouched. The light there is the same as ever, flooding in through the great windows and the patio door, and allowing Tilte and me, even now as the sun sets, to see everything clearly. From inside my mother’s study comes the hum that is always present in a room containing a grand piano, so in a way nothing is changed. And yet these rooms are already becoming lifeless.

  I remember sensing the same thing once when I returned from summer holiday, and it was there again another time when we had all been away visiting someone. And most of all it was there during the two months in which Mother and Father were held in custody and we were looked after by our great-grandmother, who had threatened Bodil Hippopotamus with her knuckle-duster when Bodil wanted to put us away in a children’s home in Grenå. When those two months had passed, the rectory was at death’s door, and it took most of a week to revive it. That’s what it feels like now.

  In this grave state of affairs, Tilte and I are seated, each on our own sofa, staring at each other without speaking, taking a deep breath before we search through the house in which we were born and have grown up, in the hope of finding a clue as to our parents’ whereabouts.

  And in this brief pause, I would like to say a few words about Tilte.

  I don’t think you’d be able to find many tourists, and probably not a single resident of Finø, who would consider Tilte to belong to that large group of people normally referred to as mortals. By far the majority would think of her more as a minor deity.

  This is a theory that builds upon events such as a talk Tilte had with her teacher one parents’ evening when she was in the fifth class of Finø Town School, at which I was present because Father was tied up preparing candidates for confirmation and I was under constant supervision following an unfortunate incident involving Karl Marauder Lander. In the car I heard Tilte say, “Mother, this evening the teachers will complain about me, and it’s because they feel squeezed by the breadth of my personality.”

  This she said in earnest, meaning every word, and when we arrived at the meeting the teachers said that Tilte was an attention seeker, no matter that she had an important role to play in class and was always helpful to her fellow pupils, and they said that her absenteeism was becoming a serious problem, even by the school’s own comfortably loose standards, this being before the authorities launched their insidious attack on Einar Flogginfellow Fakir. And when the teachers had finished, they looked at Tilte, expecting her to apologize for being absent all the time and perhaps even to admit that we had spent the entire spring term collecting gulls’ eggs. But the only thing Tilte said was, “You can never get too much of a good thing.”

  She said this without smiling and with complete dignity. And it is episodes of this nature, however small, that have made the people of Finø think so highly—too highly, perhaps—of my sister Tilte.

  It is extremely important that you consider the world in a clearer light. Because if you do not, you perhaps might not grasp that this thing about finding the places that conceal a way out into freedom from more constrained reality is a matter not only for the godlike or the similarly exceptional. It is a matter also for likable and engaging individu
als, and for ordinary sorts like you and me.

  So now I will tell you about Tilte’s grief so that you might better understand her and realize that she is in part just like the rest of us.

  Eighteen months ago Tilte and Jakob Aquinas Bordurio Madsen became a couple.

  I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that of all the stupid names you have ever heard in your life and that fill the hearer with an overwhelming sense of pity for the poor individual whose parents named him such when he was but a defenseless infant, among all those names Aquinas Bordurio Madsen takes the biscuit. And yet there is a perfectly natural explanation: Finø has always faced the world. In days gone by, its two shipyards constructed some of the nineteenth century’s fastest schooners and tea clippers, and in general the people of Finø are accustomed to their men striking out as Vikings and ordinary seamen, ship’s captains and stowaways, and women likewise have ventured out as shield maidens and stewardesses, cooks and missionaries, as well as occasionally in more Mata Hari–like capacities. Returning from these journeys, the people of Finø have often been accompanied by men and women of diverse ethnic origins, and in that manner the island has been enriched by a variety of odd-sounding names, of which Aquinas Bordurio Madsen is but one example, that regrettably and yet so inevitably leave one no choice but to lie in the dark, tossing and turning and unable to fall asleep if one has heard them uttered even a single time.

  And many different religions found their way to Finø in the same way. Jakob’s family are Catholics and Jakob always carries a rosary around with him, which he turns and twirls between his fingers while saying his Hail Marys inside, and he prays without interruption and is famed for his fingers never pausing with that rosary of his, not even when he won the ballroom dancing final at Ifigenia Bruhn’s Dancing School, which is situated on Finø Town Square.

  This, of course, is a detail one should bear in mind when assessing the state of Jakob’s mental health, i.e., that he is a competitive ballroom dancer who says his Hail Marys, and that he has taken part in at least a couple of major crimes against humanity, such as when he and Karl Marauder secretly ushered three classes onto the gallery of the parish community center at a point in time when Simon the Stylite and I had taken off our clothes and were in the process of investigating the inherent spiritual possibilities of soft soap, a matter to which I shall presently return. However, it will not explain what happened between him and Tilte, because Jakob is a person who, in all the years we knew him and watched him grow up, despite certain flaws in his character, also was able to demonstrate many human qualities. At one point, for instance, he formed part of Finø FC’s first-team attack, playing on my left side, and some of his finishes were of such quality that I and a great many others have been willing to turn a blind eye to his six national championship titles in ballroom dancing, a form of movement we members of Finø FC look upon with the same kind of pity with which a mother looks upon her sick and bedridden child.

  In spite of all this, he suddenly received a calling.

  I shall now explain exactly what a calling involves. But first I must relate to you the extent of Tilte’s and Jakob’s feelings for one another in order that you may comprehend the full scope of the disaster: Jakob and Tilte were happy.

  Tilte had been happy before, with previous boyfriends, but in a different way, because those boyfriends were manageable. With them, she was happy in the way Basker is happy with his doggy friends, and that is by being on top of the hierarchy. Even the most bloodthirsty hound on Finø, which is to say John the Savior’s Greenland husky called Count Dracula, whose face will remind you of a white teddy bear but who carries around with him two court orders for his destruction and wears two muzzles all at once when John takes him for a walk on his chain, even Count Dracula would wet himself if Basker one day should feel a splitting headache coming on, so with that kind of standing it’s an easy matter indeed to love all other dogs, if we are to be frank and even if it does reflect poorly on Basker.

  But with Tilte and Jakob it was different, and this was plain to anyone who saw them on the street. Of course, they were in love and went about gazing dreamily into each other’s eyes, giving you these dreadful flashbacks to some of the poems my older brother Hans composes. But at the same time, they were like best friends and on different sides all at once. Which is impossible to explain, but it was pure love.

  They were together for six months, until Jakob received his calling. One day when he was crossing the bridge from the swimming baths west of Finø Town where he had taken on a holiday job as a lifeguard, he heard a voice inside him telling him to leave Finø and travel to Copenhagen, there to take steps to become a Catholic priest, never marrying, and living the rest of his life alone.

  Two months later he was gone.

  I don’t know about your own neighborhood. But here on Finø people often receive callings by which God or Buddha or an avatar or four angels speak to them and give them orders or good advice. I have never personally had such an experience. But if it happens one day, then I shall do everything I can to make sure I know who the sender is. Take Count Rickardt Three Lions, for example. He turned up at the Finø Amateur Dramatic Society’s auditions for The Merry Widow with his eye firmly on the leading role of Count Danilo, and his inspiration for so doing had come in the form of a calling he believed issued directly from God.

  I witnessed those auditions, because Mother provided the musical accompaniment, and I must say that Rickardt’s calling cannot possibly have come from above but must have originated with much darker forces who yearned for Rickardt’s demise. His audition that day continued to crop up in nightmares for a long time afterward.

  So one should investigate one’s callings down to the detail. I have no idea if Jakob ever did. All I want to do here is to cautiously point out that Jakob received his calling immediately after he and Tilte had become engaged with rings and spent a week alone together in a holiday cabin. And without mentioning Conny and me, I will say that although I am only fourteen years old, I have had plenty of opportunity to note how remarkably often people are beckoned away to something bigger and better, such as fame or promotion, or being called up for the first team or a life in the service of God, all because they find themselves confronted with the prospect of a long sprint in the company of their loved one.

  And I would like at this point to quote our great-grandmother. She stood with her back to us in the kitchen brushing her teeth when Tilte told us of Jakob’s calling. It was all new, the wound was still fresh, and Tilte was unable to look any one of us in the eye when she spoke. Great-Grandma finished brushing her teeth. She is proud of them and still retains several of her own, and besides that she boasts of being able to split open marrowbones with her gums, because her gums are as hard as horn.

  When she was finished, she settled back down into her wheelchair and punted her way over to Tilte and looked her in the eye.

  “What’s wrong with most romantic relationships,” she said, “is that there isn’t enough. Though sometimes there’s too much.”

  Many believed that Tilte would soon find herself a new boyfriend, but Basker and Great-Grandma and Hans and I knew she would not, because we knew how bad it was. And now more than a year has passed and Tilte is still alone.

  When Jakob disappeared, showing people the door took on a new slant for Tilte. It became more missionary. I’m just telling you, that’s all. Partly so that you can keep an eye on me. When someone wants to show you something, especially something they say is of great importance, and you can sense how excited they are about it, you must always be on your toes. Because that’s when there’s a risk of things going wrong.

  Now I have told you about Tilte’s grief, and you will have understood that Tilte and I are joined together by having lost the only one we will ever truly love. We speak of it only seldom, hardly ever. And yet it is always there, and I sense it whenever Tilte is present. Even when she looks like the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro and is busy sav
ing the world by showing everyone the way to find greater depths within themselves, there is always, at the same time and far within, a grief that serves to remind us that she too is a human being like any other.

  18

  Tilte and I, then, are seated each on our own sofa in what we refer to as Father’s study. From these separate vantage points, and while I have informed you of how things stand with Tilte, we have allowed our gaze to pass around the room. Without having exchanged a single word on the matter, both of us know that someone has already been here and searched through the rectory. And we know that whoever it was has been careful to tidy up afterward. For we have noticed things only those who have lived their whole lives here and been made to do the housework twice a week, the small round on Mondays and the big one including washing the floors on Thursdays, could possibly ever notice. Mother’s piano has made impressions on the rug. This has been noticed by whoever was here, and the person in question has moved the piano ever so carefully back to its original position so that its wheels once again nestle in their impressions. They have put the square of cloth back on the lid of the piano, and on top of it Mother’s two violins, in the exact way they are always arranged. What they have failed to discover is that the cloth covers a scratch in the varnish that was made one time Mother and I were testing the remote controls of the Sopwith Camel we had constructed for the Grand Kite and Glider Day a few years ago. And now that tiny scratch twinkles at us in the last rays of the setting sun.

  They have returned the sharpened pencils to Father’s desk. There they lie ready for when he receives a revelation he can include in his next sermon and needs to write it down, standing motionless for a moment to make sure everyone has seen him, Father at work, Father brimming over with intelligence. But they have been laid out in the wrong order, because Father always has the hard leads foremost and the soft ones behind.

  The housekeeping wallet is where it belongs on the low shelf. I open it and find a roll of notes of the same thickness Mother and Father would always leave when going on holiday and leaving us behind for a week. I put the money in my pocket. Something tells me it’ll come in handy.