The Elephant Keepers' Children

by Peter Høeg

  But he has never done it at home. On such occasions as we have seen Father weep, it has always been in church and on account of him saying something especially beautiful that makes him cry because he is moved and grateful for the Lord having provided Finø with such a magnificent pastor as himself. Or else he cries at a funeral in sympathy with the bereaved, and one must reluctantly admit that Father’s sympathy is almost as great as his satisfaction at putting it on display.

  But though his complacency and sympathy both may be great, they have never been so great as what we now witness in the kitchen of our rectory home. What we see is something that has always been contained inside our father, but that is released only now, and to begin with we have no words for it. Father leaves the kitchen and Mother goes after him, and Tilte and Hans and Basker and I remain behind and look at each other. We sit for a moment in silence, and then Tilte suddenly says, “They’re elephant keepers. That’s Mother’s and Father’s problem. They’re elephant keepers without knowing it.”

  We all know what she means. She means that Mother and Father have something inside them that is much bigger than themselves and over which they have no control, and for the first time we children are able to see what it is: they want to know what God really is; they want to meet God, and that is why it is so important to be sure that He is in the sacraments. And it’s not only Father, it’s Mother as well. This is what they live for above all else, and it is this yearning that has given them that sorrowful look around the eyes, and it is a yearning as big as an elephant, and we can see that it will never properly be fulfilled.

  Naturally, we leave Mother and Father alone for the rest of the evening, because we are neither sadists nor murderers. But we have seen something we shall never forget. We have seen their private elephants in actual size.

  Most likely Mother and Father have always had their elephants inside them. Perhaps they were born with them. But until this evening in the kitchen of the rectory there was always a lid on top. Somehow, Father’s and Tilte’s little exchange made the lid fall off. It means that what we and the world see happen in the coming weeks and months is that the elephants break through their cocoons and unfold their wings and begin to flap about, if you can understand an image not wholly in accordance with any biology textbook, but that nevertheless is fairly appropriate in respect of what actually happens.

  But since this element of my past is painful to me and fraught with details both agonizing and sensational, I should like to let it rest for a moment and return to the here and now in which Tilte and I have left the rectory and gone to see Leonora Ticklepalate.

  23

  Leonora Ticklepalate is seated on the floor with her legs crossed, and though she must be able to see the Finø Old People’s Home looming up on the horizon—Leonora is at least fifty—even I, who am otherwise known for my reticence when it comes to passing comment on women’s appearances, even I must say that she is a feast for the eye. And the reason for this is partly what she is wearing, which is a red Tibetan nun’s habit, and partly the fact that she is tanned and bald and looks like Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3. She is on the telephone and beckons us in, and Tilte and I sit down while she finishes her call.

  “You are passing through the Court of the Lions at Alhambra,” Leonora says into the phone. “You are stark naked. And your bottom is naughty and pink.”

  The receiver is on the table with the loudspeaker switched on, and the voice of the woman at the other end is irritable and rather inflamed.

  “I haven’t got a naughty bottom. I’ve an ass as big as a spare tire.”

  “Size is unimportant,” says Leonora. “What matters is the expression. I have clients whose backsides are like the rear wheels of a tractor. And yet men fall for them in hordes. In that respect, the rear wheel of a tractor may be a potent weapon indeed.”

  We are seated in a room that looks like it was conceived in Tibet sometime in the Middle Ages, yet the house was designed by an architect and built less than a year ago at a cost of five million kroner for the building alone, which is equipped with a Jacuzzi and a Finnish sauna and situated on top of the highest dune at Østerbjerg with an unspoiled view across the Sea of Opportunity. This modest dwelling is Leonora’s private cloister, and alongside everything else she might be, Leonora is the head nun of Finø’s Buddhist community, which this year has surpassed eleven members, and at present she is in retreat for three years. Which is to say that she has made a vow to remain within her little shack here and not leave Østerbjerg, and to exist on rice and vegetables and otherwise to meditate and not commune with another living soul.

  Tilte and I have driven here in Thorkild Thorlacius’s Mercedes, a matter some would refer to as theft, though Tilte and I would not be among them. We believe it should rather be called borrowing, because what need would Thorkild have of his car now that he is locked up in the new detention center? And besides, it’s no good for a car to stand idle too long without the engine and the battery being taken for a run.

  Now Tilte places the torn-off paper from the pad in front of Leonora and points to the note that is written in pen.

  “That’s your handwriting, Leonora.”

  Leonora’s expression changes. A shadow falls upon her face and blots out the innocent pleasure of our visit.

  “Not me,” she says. “That’s not my writing at all.”

  Leonora Ticklepalate is a computer scientist and an expert in information technology, and the rectory is so crammed with computers and MP3 players and docking stations and mobile phones that we live in a constant state of electronic breakdown, which we survive only because Leonora is a friend of the family and our own IT guru. She has done programming for just about everyone on Finø, and when she developed risk-evaluation programs for Finø Bank’s investment department, which operates on the islands of Læsø, Anholt, and Samsø, the rest of the country discovered her, too. Many have since tried to headhunt her, but she has always turned them down so that she might devote herself to the concept she has developed with Tilte, which she calls sexual-cultural coaching.

  It started quietly enough with her providing phone sex and working as a gardener to help pay for her studies. Leonora has always maintained that one must specialize in order to find professional challenges, and as a gardener she specialized in churchyards. At one point she was in charge of the maintenance of all three of Finø’s churchyards, and in the field of phone sex she specialized in people who need to be surrounded by culture in order to feel comfortable. That was when she began asking Tilte and me for advice, because she’s not from what you could call a cultivated family such as ours, so whenever she had a customer who, for instance, wanted to imagine doing it beneath Brunelleschi’s Dome, she would pay Tilte and me a symbolic sum to go to the library or search the Internet and find out where in the world that dome was situated, and we would provide her with pictures and help her describe what the space looked like.

  As our collaboration developed and Leonora’s clientele expanded, Tilte had an idea. She had been wondering why the men never wanted their wives to be part of the stories Leonora told them over the phone. Often they wanted a host of individuals involved, both men and women, and pigs and cows and hens, and it all had to take place in the Whispering Gallery of St. Paul’s Cathedral or in the Uffizi Gallery, but their wives were never in on it, and when we asked Leonora why, she said because that was too dull. So Tilte proposed that Leonora sneak their wives into the story by saying things like, “We’re on St. Mark’s Square and I’m smacking your bottom with my riding crop, and now I’m handing it to your wife and she’s giving you six of the best with your pants down.”

  After some protest, Leonora began to follow her advice, and once certain teething troubles had been overcome the venture was an enormous success and Tilte was ready for the next stage.

  The next stage was that she asked Leonora how come the men never got their wives to give them phone sex, and Leonora immediately forgot all about her meditative inner balance a
nd went through the roof. She was halfway through her first three-year retreat at the time, and I was present, and she yelled at Tilte and asked her what she thought she was playing at and couldn’t she see it would destroy her business if all the wives began performing her own professional services. But Tilte said the wives would never be able to do it without Leonora’s help, and that it would be Leonora’s job to get the men to persuade their wives to call her so that she might teach them how to say naughty things on the phone. Again, there were some teething troubles, and again it was an unparalleled success. Now Leonora feels eternally grateful to us, especially to Tilte, and she says that Tilte helped her solve an age-old problem, which is how monks and nuns in the great religions may earn their daily bread. In the olden days they received money from benefactors or else went about begging, but on Finø no one would ever be likely to cough up for Leonora or Anders from Randers to enter into a three-year retreat.

  So for that reason a light always goes on in Leonora’s eyes whenever she sees Tilte and me, and therefore we must be wary of the shadow that falls upon the proceedings at the moment Leonora sees her own handwriting on the paper in front of her.

  “That’s not my writing at all,” she says again.

  We say nothing.

  “What do you want to know for?”

  “Mother and Father have disappeared,” says Tilte.

  Leonora once told Tilte and me something Buddha is supposed to have said, which is that if you’re trapped inside the reality of ordinary life and have yet to find the door and escape, then it matters not one bit how comfortable you might find that life, because troubles are just around the corner, and Leonora is at this moment a fine example. When we arrived, she was in the pink with her rice and beans and her mantras and her view out over the Sea of Opportunity, and now she looks like something the cat dragged in.

  I sit down beside her and stroke her arm. People who live for three years on a diet of rice and beans can easily long for another person to touch them, even if they are able to derive some gratification from their vows and the Jacuzzi. And again, it’s to do with the division of labor, because where Tilte reaches for the big bottle washer, I go with the feather duster.

  “I helped them gain access to a site,” says Leonora.

  “What site is that?”

  Leonora says nothing. It’s a very delicate situation. Leonora is what I would not hesitate to describe as a friend of the family. And yet she resists. But there is no time for resistance. We must assume that Katinka and Lars are on our heels, and neither Tilte nor I will allow ourselves to be taken in by their romance, no matter how deep it may be, and no matter that it may already be directing them toward real love and a police wedding. Their love will not prevent them from doing their duty, which is to return Tilte and me to indefinite detention with blue bands attached to our wrists. In this situation we are compelled, regardless of how much it hurts, to reach for some heavier tools.

  “Leonora,” I begin. “We consider you to be a friend of the family. So for your protection, I must warn you against Tilte. You know her from her nice side. The side of her that is imaginative and helpful. But as her brother I know that Tilte has another side. It appears when she is under pressure. And she is under pressure now. We must find our parents. Tilte is thinking especially of me in this respect. I’m only fourteen, Leonora. How can a boy of fourteen get by without his mother?”

  Leonora sends me a feverish look, and I believe I know what she’s thinking. She’s thinking about whether to ask Tilte and me if we’ve considered the possibility that with parents as deranged as ours we might be better off as orphans.

  It would be deceptive of me not to admit that the thought had indeed struck me, now, as well as on numerous occasions in the past. But this just doesn’t feel like the right moment to enter into that discussion.

  “Somewhere belonging to Bellerad Shipping,” says Leonora.

  “And what would they be wanting there?” I ask.

  Leonora says nothing.

  “I’m afraid Tilte may soon be so far gone as to report you, Leonora,” I go on, “for computer hacking on behalf of our parents. She may even stoop so low as to propose that the inland revenue cast an eye over your bookkeeping procedures. And to be honest, Leonora, I would hate to see Finn Flatfoot come and remove you from your retreat. My father meets the pastor of Grenå Prison once a year on the Theological Education Institute’s wine-tasting trip to the monastery kitchens of Tuscany. From what he’s told Father, there’s so much noise inside a prison you can hardly hear your own prayers. What prospects would there be for meditation, Leonora?”

  “They didn’t tell me.”

  I stroke her arm patiently.

  “Leonora,” I persist, “you mustn’t lie to children.”

  “They were looking for correspondence. I had to get by two passwords. And the documents were encrypted. Triple DES, a complex system of encryption of the kind used by the banks. It took me two days to discover the algorithm. I had to use the Finø Bank’s server; it’s the only one on the island that’s powerful enough.”

  Tilte has been standing at the window with her back to us. Now she turns.

  “What was it about?”

  “There were several people involved, all signing themselves with initials, apart from one. Poul Bellerad. There was an abbreviation, too. I looked up the name and the abbreviation. Poul Bellerad is a shipowner with two pages to his name in Who’s Who for all the decorations he’s been given abroad, and all the boards of directors he’s on. The abbreviation was for a kind of explosive. Perhaps your parents are planning to landscape the rectory garden. Finø’s situated on bedrock, so maybe they’ve been thinking about a new well.”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “There was something about guns as well. Perhaps your mother’s doing some work for the armed forces. Helping them out with some technical improvements.”

  “It’s not unlikely,” I say.

  Silence descends upon the little temple. All four of us are now reflective, and what we are contemplating is the feeling that if there were anything one would never wish to see in the hands of two such people as my mother and father, it would be guns and explosives.

  Leonora points a finger at her note in pen.

  “That email address was a document all on its own,” she says. “Along with the word Brahmacharya. It’s Sanskrit, meaning ‘abstention,’ particularly in the sense of sexual abstention. I wonder what it was doing among a shipowner’s correspondence?”

  “Abstention is something all of us can benefit from,” says Tilte. “Including shipowners.”

  We gaze out across the sea. The last remnants of sunset can still be perceived, though not as color, more as the last light of day. I imagine the scene. Leonora sitting beside Mother and Father in the rectory, in front of the computer. Tilte once said that the main reason Leonora rejected wealth and fame when all those companies tried to headhunt her was that she is so interested in what goes on deep inside human beings. Sex and the encryption of digital information are two paths that lead into those depths.

  24

  How siblings who have been brought up in exactly the same way can turn out so different is one of the great mysteries of life. Take me and Tilte and Basker, for instance.

  Many fond acquaintances on Finø say of me that the pastor’s son Peter is such a polite and respectful young man, and if he should fail to play for Aston Villa, he will undoubtedly end up opening a school of etiquette.

  One of the rules to which I always adhere is that looking through people’s private things is not done, and that includes Leonora’s temple in the dunes. But Tilte and Basker have never heard of that rule. They poke their noses in, wherever they go. When you’re visiting strangers and Tilte and Basker are with you, Tilte wanders about while conversing, and she opens their drawers and looks in their diaries and address books and asks them what they’re doing later on in the day and who that person is whose number is written there. And people put up
with it, they sit and watch as Tilte turns their lives inside out and has a look to see what clothes they like to wear, perhaps because they sense there is no malice in it and that it’s simply a sign of a curiosity so overwhelming they haven’t the strength to confront it.

  And so it is now. As we speak with Leonora, Tilte wanders about opening drawers and taking things out and looking at them and putting them back again, and then she draws a curtain aside and behind the curtain is a suitcase packed and ready to go.

  “I didn’t think you were allowed to leave a retreat,” says Tilte.

  “His Holiness the Dalai Lama is coming to Copenhagen tomorrow,” Leonora explains. “Every Buddhist in Denmark will be there.”

  “What might His Holiness be doing in Copenhagen?” asks Tilte.

  “There’s a big conference on. A meeting of all the major world religions. The first of its kind. Ever. It’s about religious experience. For scientists and religious leaders and ordinary believers. They call it the Grand Synod.”

  Had we been in the rectory, I would have said that at that moment an angel walks through the room, meaning that we all fall silent at once. But Leonora is a Buddhist, and studies Tilte and I have conducted at the Finø Town Library and on the Internet have revealed to us that in Buddhism the heavenly beings are called devas, so technically it would be more correct to say that a deva walks through the room.

  “How are you making the journey, I wonder?” says Tilte.

  “Laksmi’s picking me up,” Leonora replies. “In the hearse. And then we’re going on to collect Lama Svend-Holger, Polly Pigonia, and Sinbad Al-Blablab.”

  Laksmi is actually Bermuda Seagull Jansson, midwife and undertaker, and a member of the Hindu ashram on Finø Point, the same ashram led by Polly Pigonia, who bears the spiritual name Antamouna Ma, meaning Mother of Stillness. Polly and her husband inherited a pig farm on the outskirts of Finø Town, only for the council to close it down because even on Finø, whose inhabitants are hardy folk, there are limits to the kind of pong we’re willing to put up with from the neighbors, and besides that there was a din from the farm like a lion’s cage at feeding time, so perhaps that was why Polly was renamed something to do with silence. After the farm was closed, she took a sabbatical from the Finø Bank and went off to India for a couple of years, and when she returned it was with a new name and dressed in white robes with a little golden crown to go with them when she wasn’t at work. And she began to teach yoga and meditation and attracted more and more pupils who also began to dress in white robes and be given new names. So a couple of years ago they bought Finø Point, and they’re very nice people who are well liked and respected in the local community if only you can get used to all those new names.