by Peter Høeg
“Imagine if the Finø Gazette were to catch wind of this,” she says. “Minors forcibly removed from their home and put away with the dregs of society.”
It’s hard to imagine that Great-Grandma would really go to the papers. But what becomes clear is that the path she treads is not the narrow path of truth, the one Father talks about when instructing his confirmation candidates, but rather a military thoroughfare used to bring armored troops quickly into position.
This is clearly what Anaflabia and Thorkild and Bodil are beginning to sense too, because at first they looked at Great-Grandma like she was something colorful and exotic out of the tourist brochure, and now their expressions are changing.
“Of course, none of us in this family would ever let anything leak on purpose,” says Great-Grandma. “But I’m over ninety years old and people my age can have difficulty holding their water. Not that I’ve ever been afflicted myself. I’ve never had trouble staying tight.”
Great-Grandma snips the air like she were cutting a hedge with a pair of shears.
“Oh, I can shut off the flow all right. Would the bishop be able to do as well, I wonder?”
She fixes her gaze on Anaflabia Borderrud, whose face has now taken on a distinct pallor.
“But words,” Great-Grandma goes on, “words run away with me. It may be Alzheimer’s. An early stage, perhaps. Some days I can’t remember half of what I’ve said or to whom. Imagine if I had one of those days and let it all come out. About children being taken away and miracles in the church. Imagine if a journalist from the Finø Gazette happened to be there.”
And so it is that good karma turns the situation our way. Thorkild and Bodil and Anaflabia beat a hasty retreat, and Great-Grandma follows them all the way to the door with a stream of advice about pelvic exercises designed to lead to that pinnacle of success whereby flow from the bladder may be terminated so effectively one would think it had been severed by a razor.
It is left to Finn Flatfoot to fill us in on the details in the days that follow. What happened is that Mother and Father were giving a service for the Association of Danish Investment Companies, on which occasion they were intending to perform a miracle. They were going to burn money, which would then appear again from out of the ashes. The burning part was a success. But the twenty-six million kroner of various denominations had yet to materialize.
The thing that puzzles us is not that Mother and Father should have been playing with fire, because they have done that so many times before. It is well known on Finø that Mother is highly skilled in the field of pyrotechnics, and in recent years she has been in charge of much of the firework display for Finø Town’s New Year celebrations. And when Finø Heath is burned off every other year on account of it being a designated preservation area, Mother, aided by John the Savior and Finn Flatfoot, is the mainstay in keeping the heath in its scorched state of natural beauty.
So none of us is surprised by the actual burning, even if currency does burn rather poorly, a fact we know because Tilte once burned a hundred-kroner note that Maria from Maribo owed her in wages after Tilte substituted for her in the kiosk during the summer holiday. When eventually Maria coughed up after two months of trying to consign the matter to oblivion, Tilte declared that it was merely a matter of principle and now she was going to show Maria what she really thought about money, for which purpose she then held the hundred-kroner note against the flame of the candle on the counter that was supposed to make buying ice cream such a cozy experience, and the money burned so very slowly, though was eventually consumed. So there is absolutely no doubt in our minds that Mother could send twenty-six million kroner up in smoke. What puzzles us is that she and Father should have been unable to bring it all back again.
An explanation, however, transpires. It is not pleasant, and it does not arrive until six months later. To begin with, we learn from Finn Flatfoot that Mother and Father have been charged with fraud, and then that charges have been dropped due to lack of evidence. There follow proceedings in the ecclesiastical court and mental examination by forensic psychiatrists, and when these authorities declare Mother and Father to be of sound mind and innocent of any matter demanding disciplinary measures, they return to Finø.
Perhaps you know the feeling from your own family that the only thing in the world to be happy about is that your parents have been released from jail on account of the prosecutor being unable to find sufficient evidence to bring charges, and that their latest escapade has not yet reached the front page of the national newspapers because the people who were the victims of their fraud have been keeping it secret due to fear of ridicule?
In case you don’t know what that feels like, I can tell you that it means you proceed with caution and speak in a hushed voice so that the crystal in the cabinet doesn’t suddenly shatter, and it is a time in which you sit pale and silent at the dinner table and prod at your food, even if it happens to be Father’s fish rissoles.
No one on Finø or at Finø Town School knows anything for certain, but many have an inkling, even though Tilte’s lips and mine are sealed. Most are too polite to say a word, and those who are not hold their lives too dear, so all this time we are hemmed in by a wall of unasked questions.
But time is the healer of all wounds, as indeed is the conclusion of forensic psychiatry to the effect that Mother and Father are normal, though at the time of their crime presumably of unsound mind due to pressures of work.
When Father again takes his place in the pulpit, and Mother hers behind the organ, everything seems to level out, and though both are paler and thinner than before, and sometimes have the same look in their eyes as the pigs in the altarpiece, they remain more or less composed.
And before long, the everyday disasters and triumphs of ordinary life have consigned Mother’s and Father’s misdemeanors to the background, and it’s at this point that Hans enters the Mr. Finø competition and wins, whereas I am duped by Karl Marauder Lander into climbing onto the stage in the belief that I am to receive Finø FC’s Player of the Year award, after which I lay my hands on an iron bar and begin to hunt down Karl, who flees into the great woods, there to live as an outlaw and only to return three days and nights later, by which time charity hath melted the cold ice of wrath, as the hymn makers might once have put it, and against all this I’m sure you understand how the general public of Finø might quickly relegate Mother’s and Father’s sins to oblivion.
Their children, however, do not. We hardly speak to our parents at all, weighed down as we are by their misdeeds, and eventually it becomes unbearable to them.
Father is tampering with his ice machine in the kitchen, the only tangible remnant in economic terms of their recent adventure, the Maserati and the mink coat having been swallowed up in the court settlement, and Mother is working on a new device for voice recognition that looks like a cuckoo clock.
Father clears his throat.
“What happened,” he says, “was that the miracle your mother and I were channeling somehow became displaced in time. Meaning that the money disappeared like it was supposed to but failed to turn up again. It caused much ado, but the investment companies and the authorities are settling things between them. I have been able to draw matters to a close to everyone’s satisfaction and we are all in agreement that the case will be pursued no further. The funny thing was that the money suddenly appeared again a week later. From a theological perspective, your mother and I consider that this may be explained in terms of the miracle possessing temporal duration, rather than being of the more usual instantaneous kind. But before we had the chance to take stock of this new state of affairs we were regrettably contacted by the police, who in every conceivable way proved to lack the spiritual depth required to grasp the full significance of the situation.”
“Where did the police contact you?” Hans asks.
“At the counter of a firm called Danish Diamond and Precious Metal Investment, and they came at the very moment we were investing the money in gold and p
latinum in order that your futures might be secured.”
The kitchen descends into silence. If you think this silence is filled with sorrow over our parents turning out to be swindlers, and with respect for their having managed against all odds to convince investment companies, the Ministry of Church Affairs, the Danish police, and an investigative committee of forensic psychiatrists that we are all best served by the matter being held so close to our chests that no one else will ever be able to see it, then you will have hit the nail firmly on the head.
But something else is in the silence, too, and the nature of it is so much harder to explain, because in a way Father actually believes that the reason he and Mother got away with it is that they were helped by the Almighty, and that what they did was done to sweeten our childhoods and our futures with gold and platinum bars, so what this tells us is that we must be prepared, because love can sometimes appear in such disguise that one might hardly recognize it at all.
At that moment, Mother and Father have our forgiveness. Nothing more is said, and the matter is dismissed, perhaps only to return in our parents’ deserved nightmares. But at the same time, Tilte and Basker and Hans and I realize that if ever you should hold ambitions of being indulgent toward others, then you must also be able to forgive their elephants.
30
When you’ve planted a four-kilometer avenue of lime trees leading to the place in which you live, and have made that avenue half as wide again as the main road, you have inevitably raised the expectations of anyone who cares to pay you a visit. Few buildings can live up to such expectation, but the manor house called Finøholm is one of them, and tonight it does so twice over.
Finøholm is by the shore, which means that the approach to the main house slopes gently from more elevated ground. After the final bend, the visitor pulls up between two circular glass pavilions housing tropical trees and ponds full of water lilies, each with room to accommodate shooting parties of up to eighty people at a time. And on top of these are the gilded figures of three seals balancing on three wild boar, a detail that may give the general impression of a circus act but that in actual fact is taken from the coat of arms Svend Sewerman commissioned for himself when he became Finøholm’s owner.
Svend Sewerman went to school with our father at Finø Town School until moving to Frederikshavn on the mainland, where he became a building contractor and made a billion kroner, which is one thousand million, by digging holes and renovating most of the sewers of mid-Jutland, after which he was voted into Denmark’s parliament, the Folketing. My father has told us of how, even when they were at school together, Svend dreamed of becoming an estate owner and would always try to instigate games in which the other children were to be peasants and serfs, while he would be lord of the manor and bailiff and be carried around in a sedan chair. So when he returned from Frederikshavn, he bought Finøholm from the count of Finø, who was advanced in age and so impoverished he could afford to heat up only one room at a time and that was the staff kitchen. And it was at this time he changed his name from Svend Sewerman to Charles de Finø and rebuilt the manor and took on twelve woodsmen and two gamekeepers and two cooks and twenty laborers and two estate managers and maids and cleaners and a man who specializes in how things are done in the great manor houses of the mainland, and uniforms were made for the staff so that whenever Svend Sewerman hosts a shooting party followed by dinner they can flit ab out and look like footmen in the Tivoli Boys Guard. Another thing Svend bought was the White Lady of Finø when she was still called something in Arabic meaning the Will of Allah, but Svend changed that.
The manor house itself is arranged over three floors. It has a tower, and wide steps leading up to the main door, and behind the house is the pathway to the quay where the White Lady of Finø lies decorated with flags for the occasion. The whole scene is brightly illuminated, and Svend Sewerman’s staff are in uniform, and from a distance they look like a period piece put on by the Finø Amateur Dramatic Society.
Tilte has had much to say during the drive, so it falls to me to voice what Lama Svend-Holger and Sinbad Al-Blablab and Polly and the rest of us are thinking.
“Why would Svend Sewerman sponsor a religious meeting in Copenhagen?”
It is an obvious question in light of Svend Sewerman having demonstrated on countless public occasions that as far as miserliness goes he compares more than favorably with Scrooge McDuck, one example being that Finø FC received not a penny from his hand when in desperate need of sponsorship, and when Tilte and I tried to sell tickets for the club’s annual lottery and forced our way past his staff and all the way in to Svend Sewerman himself, he told us he had just run out of change, but instead we could take these two delicious pears from the garden, they were worth their weight in gold, and then he sent us packing.
And yet no one is prepared to answer my question, a fact that might seem rather peculiar when you think of how much wisdom and knowledge of local affairs happens to be gathered together at this moment in Bermuda’s hearse. So Tilte provides the answer.
“He wants to be a minister in the government,” she says. “He wants to start with the Ministry of Church Affairs and go on from there.”
We pull into the parking area, which is covered with the finest gravel and is half the size of a football pitch. Then Lama Svend-Holger clears his throat.
“As a solicitor, I am of course bound to professional secrecy,” he says.
Tilte and I nod earnestly. We all understand the importance of professional secrecy.
“Three weeks ago I dined with your parents at the rectory. I have not seen them since. They asked that I bring along with me Karnov’s Compendium of Danish Law.”
We remember the evening well. Father had prepared whole roasted turbot. The turbot that are caught in the waters around Finø are extremely difficult to roast whole on account of their being as fat as bricks and boasting a diameter comparable to that of a manhole cover. Indeed, stories abound even in distant lands of my father’s talent for roasting them whole, and on this particular evening he once more demonstrated their legitimacy, a matter that gave cause for celebration in the usual manner, whereby he and Lama Svend-Holger polished off a crate of Finø Brewery’s Special Brew and thereupon sought to bring order to a number of theological quibbles such as the questions of whether God exists and what part of us exactly is reincarnated if, as the Buddhists claim, we possess no individual soul, then proceeding on to such weighty issues as why have we run out of beer and can’t we send some children up to the petrol station to get some more.
And we remember Karnov’s Compendium of Danish Law and that it was yellow and heavy as a baptismal font.
“I recall that it was late in the evening. I went out to the lavatory and opened the wrong door by mistake, a rather regrettable effect, I’m sure, of intense meditational practice during the course of the meal. At first I was bewildered, but soon realized I had stumbled into your father’s study. On his desk was a little copy machine still switched on, and next to it a volume of the Compendium with a bookmark inserted into it. Purely from habit, I cast a glance at the entry and was rather puzzled to find that the section in question concerned somewhat obscure statutory instruments relating to the police. Then my gaze fell upon the pile of copies that had been run off, and I saw that they were from the Lost Property Act. Not merely section 15 and Circular no. 76, but the entire legislation and all the judgment examples to boot. More than fifty pages. When subsequently I returned to the kitchen, my intention was to ask what on earth they wanted with it all. Unfortunately, my attention became distracted by matters of my practice. And the fish. The beurre blanc. The new potatoes. So I’m afraid I never got around to it. But now that your parents have gone missing, I begin to wonder if they might have lost something.”
During the last twenty-four hours, Tilte and I have come into possession of several items of baffling information concerning our parents, which we have found difficult to digest. This is another.
“If they have
,” says Tilte, “it can’t have been worth much. The only thing of value our parents own is us.”
31
The main door of Finøholm opens into a hall big enough for four large families to inhabit for many years without ever having anything to do with each other. At the door is a man in a blue coat and a powdered wig whose job it is to receive guests warmly and make sure gate-crashers are given short shrift.
Tilte takes Sinbad Al-Blablab by the hand, I curl mine into Polly’s great fist, and at once we are past security and have entered the hall.
For the occasion, a cloakroom has been set up attended by servants who take one’s coat while perspiring beneath wigs and who all seem to be kicking themselves for not having read the small print when they signed their contracts of employment as woodsmen.
From the entry hall, a stairway wide enough to appear in the film of a Broadway musical leads to the first floor and the banqueting hall, which instead of suits of armor contains marble statues of naked women and men upon which Leonora Ticklepalate pensively dwells. Spread out in front of the statues is a buffet that serves as a reminder that the days when you could feed your guests on three loaves and five fishes, or vice versa, are long since gone, because this looks like something from a Roman orgy. Moreover, a notice says that all meat is halal. And in front of the buffet stands Svend Sewerman.
Anyone who has never seen Svend Sewerman might conjure up all sorts of interesting images as to the appearance of a man who voluntarily took on the name of Charles de Finø, but I can assure you that all of them would be inappropriate, because Svend Sewerman looks exactly like what he is: a man who runs a large and lucrative business. The only notable thing about him is the hunger that may be detected in his eyes. I have seen it before and it reminds me of something I am at present unable to place, but it must surely be that same hunger that prompted him to change his name and buy a manor house and commission someone to design him a coat of arms. Perhaps it is also the reason he looks so ravenously upon his interlocutor, as though he believes him to be a man who knows the score on everything. Because his interlocutor is none other than Count Rickardt Three Lions, resplendent in a dinner jacket of silver lamé, a cummerbund of rose-red silk around his waist, and a pair of pointed patent leather shoes that are so long and shiny as to consign the dinner jacket and the cummerbund to shadow.
