The Elephant Keepers' Children

by Peter Høeg

  So it is a record that spans the most vile and horrendous, but also the occasional blessing, and the track we select and turn up the volume on now is probably somewhere in between, because the singer is our mother, and if there is one thing any boy or girl of sound mind over the age of five will do anything to avoid hearing, it is the sound of his or her own mother singing. But at the same time one has to admit, if pressed, that there are singers worse than my mother, and on the track in question she accompanies herself on the piano and what she sings is, of course, “Monday in the Rain on Lonely Avenue.”

  To the best of my knowledge, I have never personally been down Lonely Avenue, and for that reason I would surely fail to recognize it. But the lower section of Mother’s new shelving in the larder does. Two bars into the music, the lower part of the wall slides ten centimeters back, taking two hundred bottles and jam jars with it, and is raised up to reveal a dark opening.

  Tilte whistles and the light in the cellar goes out. The opening in front of us is no longer dark. Now we can see that it opens out into a room where a faint light glows.

  We duck through the opening and step inside. The space is small and whitewashed, and the light is the light of the moon. At first we think it comes from a window, but now we can see it comes from a mirror. At the base of the exterior wall in the west end of the rectory are small arched windows covered with wire mesh. We have always thought them to be ventilation openings leading into a crawlspace. Now we see there must have been a proper cellar once. The walls of the room are of natural stone, the light comes from one of the openings in the base and has been drawn inside by means of three angled mirrors and in that way cannot be seen from above.

  Inside the room is a desk with a lamp and a chair, and nothing else. I switch on the lamp, and the room is bare. Not a cupboard, not a shelf, and nothing on the table. And yet we remain standing for some time. There is something rather disconcerting about having lived all your life in one place like the rectory, thinking you know it inside out, only to discover a new room.

  And though there is little point, we run our fingers over the wall in search of entrances to further rooms, but there are none. The only thing we find is a corkboard put up at the opening into the larder. It has been used as a notice board and its surface is perforated with hundreds of tiny pinholes. My mother, especially, is fond of notice boards, and above her own workstations are always diagrams and instructions for use and rough designs. But the board here has been cleared.

  We return to the larder and remain for a moment admiring the technical aspects of Mother’s arrangement. Then I run my finger across the place where the shelves on the movable part of the wall will return flush with those that were already there. It is here that my mother produced one final wood shaving with her plane before leaving, in order to safeguard herself completely against discovery.

  We play the music. Mother’s voice begins to sing “Monday in the Rain on Lonely Avenue,” the wall descends and slides back into place, and nothing can be seen. The joins in the walls of white-painted plywood are hidden from sight behind shelves and brackets, and we are filled with devout respect.

  But still something bothers me, what in finer circles is referred to as intuition. Intuition is an inkling that comes from without. Investigations have prompted Tilte and me to consider that it comes through the crack when the big door stands slightly ajar. Our experience tells us that most instances of intuition unfortunately must be regarded as rubbish, and the way you can tell if there’s any substance to your intuition is to test it against reality.

  So I switch on the CD again, the rain drums and Mother croons, and the door slides open without even the slightest hiss from the hydraulics.

  The idea that has come to me from outer space is that tidying up so not a single piece of evidence remained is beyond the scope of what my mother and father could ever manage.

  When on Thursdays I have completed my round of housework in the rectory kitchen, a team of laboratory technicians with a fine-tooth comb would be hard-pressed to find as much as a grain of rice. Even Tilte, who is not generous with her encouragement, has been heard to comment that when eventually they let me out on parole I’ll always be able to find work as a cleaner.

  But in the case of Mother and Father there would be results. Not a barrowload, but something would have turned up. Proper cleaning is a skill mastered only by a select few. And Mother and Father are not among that happy band.

  I’m back inside the room.

  “Close the door,” I say.

  Tilte’s not with me, but she does as I tell her. The wall slides into place, and I am alone in the moonlight.

  No further search is necessary, because I see it immediately. And I know how it happened. They were in a hurry. They brought out the luggage they had left packed and ready in here. They cleared the notice board and cleaned up after themselves. And all the while they had the door open into the larder. Eventually, they took a final look to make sure everything had been removed, and then they went out and closed the door behind them. Missing one thing. They missed the oblong of notice board that is covered by the moving wall when the wall is raised in the upright position.

  That oblong is in front of me now, silver in the light of the reflected moon. And on it is a piece of paper.

  21

  We’re seated at the kitchen table with the sheet of paper in front of us.

  It seems to have been torn off a company notepad, because the words Voice Security are printed in blue lettering at the top. Beneath are three lines of writing, the first two in pencil in my mother’s hand, and the last in pen in handwriting we are as yet unable to identify.

  The first line says: Pay P. Pig.

  P. Pig is without doubt Polly Pigonia, a friend of the family who heads the Hindu community out on Finø Point and moreover runs the main branch of Finø Bank in Nordhavn.

  The next line consists of one word only, which is Dion, followed by eight digits that could be a mobile phone number, and the abbreviation A.W.

  The note in pen is an email address: pallasathene.abak@mail.dk.

  Tilte gets her phone out. She turns toward me. On the display is the name A. Winehappy and the phone number Bodil called when she and Katinka and Lars picked us up and we were driven off to suffer incarceration and torture and execution at Big Hill. The number on Tilte’s display and the number on the sheet of paper in front of us are identical.

  “A. Winehappy,” says Tilte, “is a name we must remember.”

  We are on our way out and remain standing in the hall for a moment to say goodbye to our house. My gaze picks out the board on which we hang our keys.

  I point to the key of the letter box on its red tag. Tilte doesn’t get me.

  “It’s shiny,” I say. “Brand-new.”

  Now Tilte can see it, too. The key of a letter box is used almost every day, and ours was yellow and worn. Now it has been replaced by a new one.

  We open the letter box, the key fits, but all we find is a card reminding us to read the water meter. We take it inside with us and sit down again at the table we have just left and at which we have always consumed our childhood’s daily bread and duck rillettes.

  “The police,” I say. “They copied the key and put the wrong one back on the board. Most likely they copied others, too.”

  “What for?”

  “Lars and Katinka probably empty the letter box every day and read what’s inside. To see if there’s anything about Mother and Father.”

  “Why don’t they just collect it at the post office? You can do anything when you’re in the police.”

  “That would require a warrant issued by the court,” I explain. “Perhaps they don’t have one. And then the rumor would spread. You know what Paprika’s like.”

  Paprika Postmistress is a sprinkler. A steady flow of information on every resident of Finø passes into the post office each day to be disseminated onto the thirsty fields by Paprika.

  Tilte nods.

  “
That explains why the letter box is empty. There ought to have been a whole week’s mail.”

  I pick up the letter that has been pushed under the door. It’s from Finø Bank and has no postage. I tear it open. The envelope is the bank’s, but inside is a card showing a god with an elephant’s trunk seated upon a throne of rose petals, and the message is handwritten and says thanks for a lovely evening. The lemon soufflé will live on immortally in the recollection of the sender, who moreover has to say that the bank has more than a hundred on the waiting list now, for which reason they’ll be needing a reply soon, and lots of love is from Polly P.

  We would love to know what Polly was wanting a reply to, but we have no way of investigating the matter, because it’s the Easter weekend, Finø Bank is closed, and when it opens on Tuesday we will either be long gone or else back in chains and behind locked doors in the charge of the social services.

  Then Tilte returns to the first note and puts her finger to the email address. The handwriting is of the kind that with some benevolence might be described as individual, though more exactly as almost illegible.

  “It looks like Danish written in Chinese,” she says. “It’s Leonora’s.”

  22

  I would like to cautiously approach some of the events leading up to my mother and father’s first disappearance, which occurred two years ago. But to begin with I ought to outline their outward characteristics in order that you may recognize them and hide away in a stairwell or in some other way remove yourself from their vicinity should you happen to bump into them in the street.

  Both are of advanced years, my father being forty and my mother approaching the same figure, though with a year or perhaps two to go. My mother has blond hair and is so tanned in summer that whenever she has cause to bring Hans or Tilte or me to accident and emergency, and some summers we’ve been there more than twelve times in all, the substitute doctors of Finø Hospital feel prompted to ask if she speaks Danish.

  Although in Tilte’s words my mother may be halfway to the grave in terms of age, she nevertheless retains the appearance of a young girl, and since this is a place in which we strive to be honest, I am compelled to say that on several occasions I have sensed that some of my friends, even those I would have sworn to be mentally stable, are rather in love with my mother.

  And as if that were not enough, as if it did not give rise to the feeling of being stricken by some curse of the kind that rains down on unfortunate souls in the Old Testament, the same or even worse applies to my father, only the other way around.

  As their courses progress, it becomes clear that a great many of the young girls who attend confirmation classes at the rectory, except of course such utterly supreme and equable individuals as Conny, begin to look upon my father in the same way Belladonna eyed her rabbits before we passed her on to the Tropical Zoo at Randers. And in the gaze of many a young bride in the process of being joined in holy matrimony in Finø Town Church I have noted hesitation when my father says, for instance, “Do you, Feodora Hollowhead, take Frigast Gooseherd to be your lawful wedded husband?” And regrettably it seems clear that such hesitation comes of Feodora standing so close to my father as to suddenly form the idea that by marrying Frigast she may be missing a golden opportunity, and therefore the two little words I do remain momentarily in her throat before being expelled as though by the aid of a stomach pump.

  Leonora Ticklepalate, she among us who almost certainly possesses most knowledge about men, and probably women, too, says it has to do with my father and mother sharing a sorrowful expression around the eyes, as though they have lost something but cannot discover what, and it is this expression that prompts innocent men and women, and even children and youngsters, to feel that they must go up and touch them and help them to search for whatever it is they have lost.

  The evening Hans and Tilte and I discovered what lay behind that sorrow was the evening our mother and father, instead of keeping their usual erratic course, began to steer more directly toward the abyss.

  In case you haven’t been to church for a long time, or took a funny turn or were absent that day in religious studies at school, allow me to discreetly remind you that almost everything that goes on inside a church is holy, but the holiest of all in the Danish church are the sacraments, when you go up to the altar for Communion during the Eucharist, or to be baptized and blessed, and when my father recites the Lord’s Prayer on everyone’s behalf. That evening in the kitchen Tilte asked Father if God was present in the sacraments, and her asking seemed so innocuous, because Tilte will occasionally speak to Father about religious matters, in many cases without mishap.

  This particular evening was of a kind I hope you will recognize from your own life, an evening on which one resolves to give the family a chance, because for some reason it feels like it may have a future after all, at least for the next fifteen minutes or so. Mother was centering axles in a watch she was making, and Father was preparing a veal stock, which is a kind of gravy he concocts from meat and bones and herbs that makes the whole rectory smell like a mortuary, and then it reduces down and congeals until it becomes so stiff you could stuff cushions with it if that were not such a marvelously messy thing to do. And because Father is at his stove, and the stock has congealed and spirits are high, he reaches out and plucks Tilte’s question from the air as if it were a child’s balloon and tells her that God is everywhere, like a kind of clear broth made from the Holy Spirit, but in the sacraments He is present as veal stock in its thickest and most aromatic form.

  After he tells her this, he radiates self-satisfaction as thick as his stock, and it’s plain to see that he believes he has explained things in a manner that is at once pedagogical and theologically profound. But then Tilte comes back at him.

  “How do you know?” she asks.

  “Primarily from the New Testament,” says Father.

  “But Father,” Tilte persists, “what about baptism? Nowhere in the Bible does it mention Jesus baptizing children. He baptizes adults, so where does the christening of infants come in, if it’s not from the Bible?”

  Now the mood in the kitchen shifts. Basker’s breathing becomes more troubled, and Mother looks up from her watch-making. All of us are aware that Tilte is building up to what I would call a Genghis Khan in reverse. It’s an expression that comes from thinking about the major villains in world history, the ones who really messed things up, like Hitler and Genghis Khan and Læsø FC’s sweeper, who broke Hans’s leg in a tackle from behind. When you think about them, you wish Tilte had been there at the same time, because she can repel anyone and force them back into the Siberian swamps whence they came, and that is exactly what she is building up to with Father now.

  “Infant baptism,” Father begins, “arose in the Middle Ages, when many children died at a very young age. It was to save their souls.”

  Tilte is on her feet and crossing the room to where Father is standing.

  “But if it isn’t mentioned in the Bible,” she says, “how can you be so sure the Holy Spirit is present? How can you be sure? On what authority do you have it?”

  “I sense it,” Father says.

  And shouldn’t have. But he is retreating into the swamp, and in such a situation one will resort to every possible means to avoid being sucked down.

  The problem is that we three children and Basker can tell that Father isn’t being completely honest with us here.

  In his sermons, Father has specialized in evoking the general mood in Palestine at the time of Jesus. He and Mother have twice been on trips to Israel with the Theological Education Institute, and from those trips Father has found much inspiration for his description of the sky and the sun and the throngs of people and donkeys, and let me assure you that my father can deliver a sermon that will almost make you feel the dust of Palestine crunch between your teeth and give you a case of sunstroke even on a cloudy Advent Sunday inside Finø Town Church.

  But when he departs from that mood and ventures toward what actua
lly happened, what took place when God in the Transfiguration appeared before Jesus in a cloud, and when he tries to explain what Jesus meant when he said “My kingdom is not of this world,” and whether he seriously walked on water, and what the resurrection of the flesh is actually all about—that stuff about getting your body back in Paradise after you’re dead, which would be quite a good thing, especially for the calf that has contributed itself to Father’s stock—when he seeks to explain all these things, he stops sounding like himself and begins to sound like a person rattling off something he has learned by heart because deep down he doesn’t understand a word of it.

  If there’s one thing Tilte and Hans and Basker and I cannot abide, it’s when our parents stop sounding like themselves and begin to sound like someone else instead, and that’s the reason Tilte now follows Father out into the swamp to pursue the matter further.

  “How exactly do you sense it, Father?”

  She isn’t malicious in her asking, merely insistent, but then something surprising occurs. What occurs is that Father looks at Tilte, and then at the rest of us, and says, “I don’t know.”

  And then tears well in his eyes.

  It’s not like we have never seen my father cry before. When you’re married to someone like my mother, who very often forgets everything around her, including her husband and her children and her dog, because she has become obsessed by the idea of making her own mechanical wristwatch and works twenty-four hours in one stretch to center the axles of the wheels while we children and our father go hungry—when you’re married to a woman like that you will need to weep on the shoulders of close friends at least once a fortnight, which Father almost certainly has done in the company of Finn Flatfoot or John the Savior.