The Elephant Keepers' Children

by Peter Høeg

  It’s one of Mother’s favorites. She treasures Bach and Schubert, but what really moves her is “Monday in the Rain,” so for us it’s the most natural thing in the world to hear this old Danish evergreen. The risk is that you take it for granted. And for that reason the whole family is given a little jolt when Tilte suddenly says, “Mother, does that song have special significance for you and Father?”

  Silence descends upon the kitchen. Mother clears her throat.

  “When I was nineteen,” she says, “my friend Bermuda, whom you all know, encouraged me to enter the annual talent competition at the Finø Hotel. I practiced for three months, and when the big day arrived Bermuda and I went along together. I took the stage wearing a raincoat and a pill-box hat, and sang ‘Monday in the Rain on Lonely Avenue.’ I’d even choreographed a little dance to go with it. The lights were rather glaring, so it was only in the middle of the last verse I got the feeling that I wasn’t in a talent competition at all. After I finished, I discovered it was the annual meeting of the North Jutland Clergymen’s Association.”

  For two whole minutes, we remain respectfully silent. And then Tilte speaks.

  “I hope you got your own back on Bermuda.”

  “I was about to take my revenge at that very moment,” Mother replied. “But then something happened. Your father came up to me. It was the first time I ever saw him.”

  “What did he say?” Tilte asks.

  Mother returns the soldering iron to its holder. She puts the reel of tin solder down in front of her. And then she moves aside the magnifying glass.

  “He told me how happy I would be. How wonderful my life was going to be with him.”

  We sit with that for a moment. We know it’s true, because that’s the way Father is. He believes he is exhibiting the most heartfelt Christian sympathy by telling people that the experience of their lives is in store for them, if only they get to know him a little better.

  Now Mother rises to her feet and approaches Father. To his credit, he blushes, and despite what one might think, and what many of us believe, he thereby demonstrates that he possesses humility. He looks into Mother’s eyes, and the jellied pigs’ feet are consigned to oblivion.

  “And do you know what, Konstantin?” my mother says. “You were right.”

  Then she kisses him, and in one way it’s deeply embarrassing for all of us, and in another we can be glad no one else is here to witness it.

  Until that moment, everything that has happened has been rather commonplace and under control, and within the range of what you could observe in any number of Finø families on a good day. But at the very moment Mother releases Father and is about to step back to the table, Tilte speaks.

  “Listen.”

  What then occurs is hard to describe, though it does involve all six of us listening for a moment. Not to things being said or done but to what is at the core of it all. And for a few sensational seconds, everything begins to float: the rectory, the storks on the roof, the larder, even the jellied pigs’ feet have become weightless, and inside that weightlessness the door is opening.

  And then we can keep it up no longer. Intensity of that kind is like training for a run. You must build up your form slowly. So Mother sits down, Father sticks his head back into his duck rillettes, Hans turns his gaze to the stars, and Basker has a renewed attack of asthma. The spell is broken.

  But once you’ve realized what happens if you lean into love, you will never forget it, ever again.

  And that is what returns to me in the courtyard of Hans’s student residence when I sense how good it is to have a brother and a sister, and Tilte looks me in the eye.

  Then we hear an engine.

  It is a minibus with tinted windows, and even before it turns into the courtyard we duck.

  It parks behind us.

  “They’ll be looking for a taxi,” Tilte whispers, “not a horse-drawn carriage.”

  She’s right. The three individuals who climb out of the vehicle give the carriage and the horses only cursory glances, and then they go inside the building.

  The two in front, a man and a woman, are plainclothes police officers.

  Every other Friday in the summer season, the Finø ferry, besides the usual six hundred tourists, deposits two plainclothes police officers onto the island to reinforce the local constabulary, and among six hundred tourists those two police officers stick out, in their own inconspicuous way, like two tree frogs on a fish rissole. So we are in no doubt, even now, as to what is afoot, and all of it is basically as we had expected. The real surprise is that the woman who follows them in is Bodil Hippopotamus.

  We abandon the carriage and reach the black minibus in an instant. That’s another good thing about brothers and sisters: when you really need them, you find you can play together as a team and everyone knows their position.

  We pull open the door. There’s room inside for seven, and in the back is a cage for dogs, and five of the seats have bottled mineral water in the holders.

  “They’ll be taking Peter and Basker and me,” says Tilte. “We can be sure of that. So you’ll have to go now, Hans. Stay with a friend and keep your head down. Petrus and I aren’t really rated in their book, we’re still childen to them, so we’ll stand a better chance of finding out what’s going on.”

  All four of us can see there’s no alternative. Hans climbs onto the box of the carriage. His teeth are clenched and he’s on the verge of despair. He looks back at us one last time, then clicks his tongue and the carriage is away.

  5

  The corridor of the student residence is empty and on the door of his room Hans has affixed a map of Finø and an even bigger one of the firmament. The door is closed.

  Tilte opens it and we step into a combined cloakroom and kitchen from where a door leads into the bathroom and another into the living room. We open that one with caution.

  Bodil Hippopotamus is sitting in an armchair. The two police officers are searching for something and it’s not something they’ve simply mislaid, because they’ve removed Hans’s books from the shelves and most of the contents from his cupboards and now they look like they’re about to pull apart his bed.

  Tilte gets out her mobile and snaps a couple of photos of the police at work, and then the phone is back in her pocket.

  Bodil sees us first and beckons us over to the armchair, because that’s the kind of person Bodil is, seated on top of her throne, and people have to go to her.

  “How nice to see you,” she says. “Where’s your brother?”

  She opens her palms so you can put your little hand in hers.

  “He’s in the basement putting his bike away,” says Tilte.

  “We’re unable to contact your parents. We’ve no reason to believe they’re anything but safe and well, but we can’t find them. So now I shall have to ask you something. They told the parish council they would be in Spain, on an island called La Gomera. Is that what they told you as well?”

  “We’d very much like to answer your question,” says Tilte. “But before we do, we need to know why you should think they aren’t where they say they are.”

  I know nothing about hippopotami. But I think that in the great mud bath of all things, the hippopotamus is one of the animals that is boss. This would be true of Bodil, too. She tightens her grip on Tilte’s hand.

  “I’ll ask the questions to begin with,” she says. “Have you arranged with your parents that they should phone you?”

  “We’d very much like to answer that,” says Tilte.

  As she speaks, she slips her phone into my pocket.

  “But first,” she goes on, “we need to ask you about something that concerns us, and that is whether you’re in possession of the proper documentation.”

  Bodil frowns.

  “We have the documents required by the social services to take you into our custody,” she says. “Under what we call Paragraph Fifty.”

  “That’s not what I was getting at,” says Tilte. “I was
thinking of the warrant required to enter my brother’s room and search through his belongings.”

  Now a silence descends. And the police officers realize they’re up against something here.

  “What we’re afraid of,” says Tilte, “on your behalf, is that this should get into the papers. That it should become a story, substantiated by the photographs I’ve just taken.”

  Bodil and the female officer lunge at Tilte and grab hold of her all at once. But the telephone is with me and I’m nearly through the door.

  “Petrus has the phone with the pictures on it,” says Tilte.

  The male officer has a look in his eye.

  “I play a lightning right-wing,” I caution him. “Before you reach me, I’ll be away as if I’d dissolved in front of you.”

  The three adults have ground to a halt. I sense their indecision. And I sense something else as well, which is that they are under pressure and are afraid of something.

  “You’ll never catch Petrus,” says Tilte. “He’ll go to the papers and you’ll be on the front page. Police and municipal director remove children from rectory home without requisite authorization.”

  Bodil gathers herself magnificently. You don’t get to be municipal director without what Tilte calls strategic intelligence.

  “We’re doing this for your own good.”

  “And we’re grateful,” Tilte replies. “But we need more transparency. Why do you think Mother and Father aren’t in La Gomera?”

  Bodil is on her feet now.

  “They never left the country,” she says.

  “Do the police keep an eye on all Denmark’s clergy?” asks Tilte.

  “They’ve been keeping an eye on your parents.”

  6

  They’re nice to us in the minibus.

  Bodil asks why Hans is taking so long putting his bike away and nearly has a stroke when Tilte tells her that was just a fib and that we have no idea where he is now. Bodil then tries to call his number, but he doesn’t reply. After that, she calls another number and tells someone that we’re with her but that Hans is gone, and the voice on the other end says something that calms her down, and then I delete the incriminating photos on Tilte’s mobile and everyone breathes a sigh of relief.

  It’s a peaceful ride. They let me sit with Basker in my lap. He’s more a person than a dog and won’t sit in the cage. They stop at a service station and buy us sandwiches and sweets, and the mood is bearable until we get there.

  And where we get is the landing strip at Tune, near Roskilde. They run flights here to Finø with several daily departures in the tourist season.

  Most people get to Finø by ferry from Grenå, which first puts into Anholt to send a handful of bewildered tourists ashore. They have no idea what could have been in store for them if only they had remained on board. After Anholt, the ferry sails on to Finø, and the final hour of the crossing affords the passenger the clear sense that he is now on his way out of the Kattegat and sailing toward the North Atlantic, so anyone prone to seasickness and whose finances so allow will tend to go by air.

  The landing strip at Tune is situated in a woodland clearing and comprises a shed with large panes of glass inserted into it, and a strip of tarmac extending seven hundred and fifty meters. On days without scheduled flights it’s lent out to the local youth club, whose custom-built skateboard ramps can be rolled away if air traffic should wish to land. For this reason, aircraft servicing Finø are small single-engined Cessnas requiring only short distances for takeoff and landing.

  But that’s not the kind of plane that’s waiting for us, because this is a military Gulfstream, camouflaged, with twin engines and two pilots, and the only occasion on which an aircraft like this ever comes to Finø is when a member of the royal family is on it and wants to visit.

  We climb out of the minibus and stand looking at the plane. Bodil seems to sense from our posture that we are politely curious.

  “Grenå Kommune,” she says, “will do everything in its power to provide the best of care for children and young people in difficulty.”

  “I know,” I say. “But isn’t this a bit over the top?”

  A look of weariness spreads across Bodil’s face. That’s the moment Tilte chooses to borrow Bodil’s mobile.

  “I want to call my brother,” she explains. “Only there’s no battery left on mine.” Bodil hands her the phone and I’m the only one to notice that Tilte accesses the list of recent calls and takes a long look at it, notes something down in her phenomenal memory, and then presses a number that predictably fails to answer, whereupon Bodil’s phone is returned to her and we all climb on board the plane.

  Access to the runway is through an empty waiting area, and on a large noticeboard some flyers have been put up, one of which makes me stop.

  It is a poster advertising a series of concerts to mark something that is surely of importance, but which I fail to notice because the picture accompanying the text reaches out and grabs me by the throat. It’s Conny’s face, and she’s smiling at me.

  Tilte touches my arm, and I return to the world.

  As we take off, my dear sister leans toward me.

  “Do we know anyone called Winehappy?”

  I shake my head.

  “That was who Bodil called,” she whispers. “I got the number from her phone.”

  Then she gives my arm a squeeze, and I feel I know you well enough now for me to be quite frank and tell you why. It’s because the person I love has left me.

  Now you might say so what, and perhaps add that a third of the world’s population is in the same boat. Indeed, the world’s population consists of one third yearning for the person who left them, one third yearning for the person they have yet to meet, and one third who are with someone they never fully appreciate until all at once that person leaves them and they find themselves consigned to group one.

  But that’s not exactly how it is with Conny and me. In a way, Conny hasn’t left me at all. She has been sucked away. By fame.

  Two years ago, a film was being shot on Finø. It was one of those films for the whole family, and because the girl who was supposed to play the bright and irresistible younger sister fell ill, Conny was brought in and ended up stealing the show and being offered a role in another film, and then three more, and now she has been in seven films in the space of two years.

  I know exactly what it is about Conny. She can condense her aura and her energy on command.

  All of us are able to condense our energy. But for most people it’s something of which they are unaware, and when it happens it catches them off guard, like an abrupt feeling of elation or annoyance, or the sudden awareness that the goalkeeper is off balance with his weight on the wrong foot, and if you put your entire soul into taking a long shot at the goal he won’t have a chance. Normally, it’s not something under your control. But with Conny it’s different, and that’s what she exploits on screen. In the first six of her films, she played a little girl with pigtails and a spark of vandalism in her eye. In the seventh, she played a young girl with a boyfriend. Whose name was Anton. In the film. And she spoke his name the way she used to speak mine. The way that’s so impossible to describe. But it was different from the way she spoke any other name. I used to save her phone messages and play them back just to hear the way she spoke my name.

  Until that film. When I saw it and heard that she had assumed control of that way of speaking a name, I knew that I had lost her. And then I stopped listening to all those old messages.

  After the second film, Conny’s mother moved her off to Copenhagen. Conny and I never really knew what hit us. The first film was fun. Then came the second, and suddenly she was gone. It’s been eighteen months now.

  Since then I’ve seen her only once. It was a day I came out of school and there she was waiting for me. We walked down to the harbor. Our usual walk. There’s a long jetty that extends out between the beach and the dock, and you can walk along it sheltered from the wind and stop to look bac
k on the town. She had changed. She was carrying a shoulder bag like you only ever see in adverts, and wearing a pair of earrings you don’t even see there. We walked close together, but it felt like the whole harbor was between us and no bridge could ever be built. I could feel she had to be going, and I thought I was about to die. Eventually, she took hold of my shirt with both her hands and gripped it tight. “Peter,” she said. “This is something I have to do.”

  And then she was gone. I haven’t seen her since. Apart from in the cinema, on the screen. And now I can’t even see her there anymore, because of that last film and the thing about Anton.

  Tilte knows all this. She knows what goes on inside a person when he encounters his lost love looking at him from a poster. That’s why Tilte gives my arm a squeeze. And then we’re in the air.

  7

  I would like to explain exactly where Finø is situated. Finø lies slap in the middle of the Sea of Opportunity.

  If you collected all the songs that have been written about Finø, for the purpose of dumping them all in the recycling bin, a very good idea indeed, you would need to hire a truck. A semi. Many of those songs can be found in the Danish Book of Song, and all of them may be divided into two groups.

  The first group contains all the songs in which Finø is depicted as a tiny pearl in a foaming ocean against which the brave little island battles to hold its own.

  The second group takes the opposite view, that Finø is an infant child sucking its toes in the arms of its mother, and the sea is the mother.

  These are songs that beg the question whether people who write patriotic songs take drugs before they put pen to paper. Because on Finø half the population makes its living fishing langoustines and turbot to sell to the tourists, or servicing the tourists’ boats at the Finø Boatyard, or sailing the tourists out to the colonies of seals on the Bothersome Islets, or selling suntan lotion and beachwear and café au lait at forty kroner a mug from the Nincompoop’s decking on the beach by the harbor. And the rest of Finø’s population makes a living out of doing the hair and fixing the teeth and changing the nappies and intravenous drips of the half who service the tourists.