The Elephant Keepers' Children

by Peter Høeg

  So the sea is no longer either a threat or a mother to Finø. The sea is a tombola from which we pull out a winning ticket every day all through the summer season. And it is also a gigantic playground and a sports facility for the children and young people of Finø, except for the two in every school year who are afraid of water.

  Alexander Flounderblood, the ministerial envoy to Finø, once coerced Tilte into putting up her hand in class, which is a thing Tilte has never been happy about. She finds it humiliating and believes that if a teacher wants to know if she knows the answer to a question, he or she ought simply to ask her straight out, so now they’ve given up asking altogether, Alexander included. Nevertheless, he tried his utmost all through his first year, and on this particular occasion he asked, “What is the sea called that surrounds Finø?” And he insisted that Tilte put up her hand so that he might ask her if she knew the answer.

  “It’s called the Cat’s Asshole,” Tilte told him.

  Alexander Flounderblood nearly fell off his chair and gave her a look that could depopulate vast areas of land, but Tilte had consulted the etymology of the Kattegat in the Dictionary of the Danish Language, and nothing he said could ever change it.

  But then Tilte told Alexander that the Cat’s Asshole was perhaps not the most suitable name and that the most appropriate would be the Sea of Opportunity.

  The people of Finø have turned it into a saying now. If anyone asks where Finø is, we tell them, “Slap in the middle of the Sea of Opportunity.”

  We descend now toward it from out of the clouds, its waves are trimmed with white foam, the wind is at fourteen meters per second, and our approach makes the blood run that much faster through the veins of Tilte and Basker and me, which is just as well, because now Bodil Hippopotamus says, “You’ll need to put on these little blue wristbands like last time.”

  There they are in her hand, three wristbands, each consisting of two nylon strips holding what looks like a watch face of blue plastic, and now the police officers, whom we have been told are called Katinka and Lars, snap the wristbands shut with a special tool that looks like a pair of tongs.

  The watch face contains no watch. What it contains instead is a small, though rather powerful, radio transmitter and two tiny batteries. At Big Hill there’s a large board on the wall, the same as they have at the police stations in Grenå and Århus. On the boards are tiny lamps, each with a number corresponding to a transmitter. In that way, the whereabouts of those proudly sporting blue wristbands will always be known by the social services and by the police.

  So blue wristbands are given to thugs on parole who are serving four-year sentences for knocking the life out of seven people all at once. And they give them, too, to women doing time for mistreating their husbands, and who have been told by the police to maintain a distance of one and a half kilometers from the place where their beaten husband and his new girlfriend now sit and cower.

  And they give them also to those residents of Big Hill who begin to let themselves into the houses of Finø Town by means of a crowbar.

  But blue wristbands are not what they give to ordinary kids accustomed to walking around at will.

  Bodil knows that, and so she speaks with what I would call false levity, as one might imagine she would do if, to pluck a couple of examples from the Bible, she were telling Job that all he’s got is a rash and it’ll be gone in the morning, or assuring Noah that it’s only a shower.

  “Remember,” she says, “that we are here to look after you, no matter what.”

  It’s obvious that Bodil belongs to that large group of adults who feel ever confident that children will understand subtlety. I now undermine that confidence.

  “This no matter what …” I say. “Tilte and Basker and I are not quite sure about it. Does it mean: Even if your parents never come back?”

  That puts the wind up her, but because she has her seat belt fastened for landing and cannot sneak away or step out onto the wing, the only thing she can do is look us straight in the eye.

  “Of course they’ll come back,” she says. “Of course they will.”

  And then, for the first time, hard pushed, and at the very last gasp, Bodil produces an utterance straight from her hippopotamus heart.

  “But we are worried,” she says.

  8

  The Big Hill rehab center lies above Finø Town, on the slopes of the hill known as Big Hill, whose peak, at one hundred and one meters above sea level, is Finø’s most elevated location.

  Tourists who chuckle at the name Big Hill and who intend to do so in the vicinity of Tilte or Basker or me are advised to ensure adequate dental protection and to pay any such installments as may be outstanding on their life insurance policies. We people of Finø are tender souls and rather sensitive as to how our home is perceived by others.

  But any chuckles that might be expelled soon die when you see the view from Big Hill. Once standing on the top, no one has ever been less than deeply moved. I’ve seen men in leather jackets bearing the insignia of motorcycle gangs, men with shaved heads and flames tattooed across their necks and throats, and with sawed-off shotguns holstered on their Harleys, who have burst into tears and wept on seeing the view from Big Hill.

  What people find so moving is the vastness of it all, and vastness is always so hard to explain. But from the top of Big Hill you can take in all of Finø, all twelve kilometers from Finø Town in the south to the lighthouse on the northern point, and surrounding it all as far as the eye can see is the Sea of Opportunity, which makes Finø look almost like it’s in suspension, green in a dark blue firmament of sea. Just to give you my take on what could be included alongside those patriotic tributes in the Danish Book of Song.

  It is this view Tilte and I now have in front of us as we stand on the patio of the rehab center called Big Hill.

  And now Tilte puts her arms around me from behind.

  You should always be cautious when it comes to allowing others to touch you. To name one example, touching is history for me as far as my mother is concerned. I’m fourteen now, and in eighteen months I’ll be off to boarding school for a year, and when I come back I’ll be leaving home altogether.

  So my mother is rather mixed up when it comes to touching, and her confusion comes from her not being able to grasp that only a moment ago, in her terminology, you were her baby, and now you’re fourteen and have been left by a woman and are the first team’s top scorer and under suspicion of once having smoked a marijuana cigarette, though nothing was ever proved.

  So Mother doesn’t know if she is entitled to embrace me or whether she must send in an application, or else simply forget all about it and avoid the situation entirely, unless I take pity on her and put my arms around her like she were the child and I the adult.

  It’s different with Tilte; she knows inside her how much she is entitled to, which is quite a lot, and so now she puts her arms around me from behind.

  “Petrus,” she says.

  When Tilte addresses people like that she means something by it. Once, when Mother and Father had been arguing and visitors arrived, Tilte received the visitors outside before ushering them in and presenting Mother and Father with the words, “This is my father and my father’s wife of his first marriage.”

  Father has only ever been married once and that’s to Mother, so needless to say we were all rather taken aback. Later, when Mother and Father asked Tilte what she meant, Tilte told them that one could never be sure how long a marriage would last, especially when it had entered the violent phase.

  For that reason, a long time passed before Mother and Father argued again.

  When she calls me Petrus, I need to be all ears, because that’s what she often calls me when she wants to make me aware of the door.

  And then we stand completely silent for a moment. We listen to the silence, even though it makes no sound. It’s like that happy childhood I was talking about. You must never let your mind dwell on it, because if you do it’ll be gone for good.
All you should do is listen. Listen to what makes no sound.

  The silence lasts only for a moment and is broken by someone’s cheery voice.

  “Tilte, my little bluebell! And Peter, scrumptious little Peter! You look marvelous!”

  We turn toward the voice.

  “Rickardt,” says Tilte. “You look like a rent boy from Milan.”

  Which is the count to a tee.

  9

  Count Rickardt Three Lions is sporting high-heeled cowboy boots of genuine snakeskin and yellow leather trousers that cling to him like the skin of a banana. He is wearing a snow-white shirt, which is open to the navel to allow the beholder a full look at his gold chains, as well as to note that he is so skinny it looks like he lost his appetite years ago and never got it back again.

  Which is actually what happened. The first time we met Rickardt, he was being treated for a heroin addiction that had taken away his appetite, as it does with most everyone. Finding something as good as heroin is a bit like falling in love, because it means you’ve got no time to attend to such trifling needs as hunger.

  Now he’s clean and a qualified addiction therapist. What’s more, he’s bought up the whole rehab center and put himself on the board of directors. He could do that because all rehab centers in Denmark are privately owned and because he really is a count and has inherited more money than would ever normally be healthy for a former heroin addict to be anywhere near.

  His inheritance has also allowed him to indulge his passion for clothes and thereby to develop his tastes from the bizarre to the outrageous. Today, for instance, he is wearing something on his head that could only be described as over the top, even for him. It is a swimming hat with holes cut in it, and tufts of his hair protrude from the holes, and in between the tufts are electrodes flashing green and red.

  “There’s a neural scientist with us today,” he tells us. “We’re in the middle of an experiment. My brain has caused something of a stir.”

  The first time we met the count was just after Mother and Father came home with the Maserati and the mink coat.

  From having been a home in which we were given porridge to eat one day a week and fish, which is basically free on Finø, on two of the other days, we had entered a period in which the rectory overflowed with milk and honey. On my birthday I was given five crisp one-thousand-kroner notes, as were Tilte and Hans in case they should feel overlooked, and that morning we all went out and drank hot chocolate on the decking of the Nincompoop, and when we got home our money was gone.

  All the doors and windows were locked, there were no signs of a break-in, and yet our money was gone.

  We’re all different when it comes to being tidy. My brother Hans, for instance, trusts in cosmic disorder, so his room looks like the big bang just went off and everything is still chaos. Tilte’s room is rather more orderly, but since her style is extravagant and she owns enough clothes to start a theatrical wardrobe, and over fifty pairs of shoes and two dressers full of cosmetics and earrings, plus a walk-in wardrobe with rails suspended on wires from the ceiling and crammed with her dresses and feather boas, one still gets the feeling of having suddenly landed in the bazaar in Arabian Nights.

  I’m tidy. If you’re born into a family like mine, in which, no offense intended, you’re the only one besides Basker who’s normal, then tidiness is the only option. It’s for your own good.

  So I like things to be in their proper places, and one such proper place is my windowsill where all my medium-sized trophies, like Player of the Year and the Kattegat Championships, are kept on permanent display. But on that particular day the trophy for Finø FC’s annual summer tournament wasn’t quite where it was supposed to be and there were fingerprints on it, which are always going to show up clearly on polished brass. And in the garden below the window lay a small rectangular piece of green plastic. We showed it to Mother, who explained to us that it was an adjustment wedge for the double glazing, and she took the wooden frame that holds the pane in place and it came away in her hands and revealed to us that someone had done some very neat work with a crowbar.

  So at twelve o’clock precisely, when we knew they would all be having lunch at the rehab center, Tilte and Hans and Basker and I walked over to Big Hill and went inside. That was before they began to keep the doors locked, and we had the trophy with us and let Basker have a good sniff, and then we began to go through all the rooms systematically. We found the money in the third room, or rather Basker did. It wasn’t even hidden away but lay in an unlocked drawer in a wardrobe containing two hundred ties on pull-out racks.

  So when the count returned from lunch we were sitting waiting for him in his room. He remained standing in the doorway, and then he said, “How nice to see you.” Whereupon Tilte replied, “Likewise. And nice to see our money again, too.”

  That was our first encounter with the count, and after some initial difficulties and minor misunderstandings of the kind that are bound to occur when you’ve just nailed your interlocutor for breaking into your house and stealing fifteen thousand kroner, it was very pleasant indeed. We told him about life on Finø, and the count told us about his childhood in a castle in northern Sjælland with a moat around it and room enough to sleep two hundred and fifty guests at once, and he told us about how his parents had given him his own flat when he finished boarding school at Herlufsholm, and about how he immediately sold it and spent the proceeds on ketamine, which he explained to us was a bit like LSD only more fun, and that you inject it and two minutes later you find you’ve been catapulted through the top of your skull and out into space.

  I sensed a tremor of excitement run through my brother Hans at the mention of being catapulted into space.

  Every day for a year, the count went tripping away on ketamine, and when all the money was spent he discovered he was homeless. Fortunately, this coincided with the start of the mushrooming season, which prompted him to move into a tent in the woods. And there, so he told us, lived tiny elves who gathered psilocybin, which is just as good as mescaline, for him, and then when the weather grew cold and he moved into a stairwell in Nørrebro, the elves brought him small portions of heroin, and chocolate milk and Valium, and so it was he was able to survive until finally he got arrested and was given a sentence and shipped out to Finø.

  By the time we left the count late that evening we had become friends and each of us had given him a thousand kroner, and as we walked off down the driveway he stood in the window and sang for us.

  He’s kept up the singing ever since. Every fortnight or so he appears on the lawn of the rectory wearing a pink suit, perhaps, with white polka dots on it, and brandishing an archlute, which is a musical instrument that looks and sounds exactly like it came from outer space, and there he will sing for us for half an hour or more. The count is bisexual, so of course he’s in love with Tilte and Hans like a rat is in love with two pieces of cheese, and to begin with I had some explaining to do whenever I had friends around and they heard the count with his archlute and noticed how every now and then he would lift one hand from the instrument so as to conduct the tiny blue people he says populate the space beneath our veranda and who always provide his accompaniment. But now we’re used to him, and Tilte says, in the quiet, unassuming manner for which she is celebrated, that having your own kingdom involves having to be nice to subjects of many different kinds, and gradually the count has become almost like a member of the family.

  Tilte now tests how far he has come in that process.

  “Rickardt,” she says, “isn’t this a wonderful view?”

  The count nods. He thinks the view from the patio of Big Hill is wonderful, too. Especially now that it’s been improved by Tilte’s presence.

  “I see there’s a guard on duty at the gate,” Tilte says. “That’s new since last time we were here. I’m sure it must give the residents and staff a sense of security.”

  The count nods.

  “And those white sensors,” says Tilte, “the ones on top of t
he garden wall. I suppose they register if anyone climbs over the wall, and that will give you a sense of security, too. Am I right?”

  The count nods.

  “Then there’s these blue wristbands we’ve been given,” says Tilte.

  The count rocks slightly on the balls of his feet.

  “Would you not say, Rickardt, that Petrus and I are locked up like a pair of pigs on a factory farm, even though we have yet to see a solicitor or a magistrate?”

  The count says nothing.

  “And there’s our room,” Tilte continues relentlessly. “Spacious and with such a view anyone would think we were at the finest of hotels. Not to mention being in the company of such good friends. On the one side we’ve got Lars, who was with us on the plane. And on the other we’ve got Katinka, who was also with us on the plane. Lars and Katinka. Wouldn’t you say, Rickardt, drawing on all your experience, that they look like police officers?”

  “They’re only staying for a couple of days,” says the count.

  A lot of people have been wondering why a multimillionaire like the count would buy up Big Hill and condescend himself to work. But for me and Tilte it’s plain. It’s because most of the residents have depth.

  Among Danes at large, even on Finø, a great many people, adults and youngsters alike, though perhaps especially the former, hold the opinion that of all the humiliations and insults to which they have ever been subjected, life is by far the worst. This doesn’t apply to the residents of Big Hill. Not one of them has escaped losing everything in the world, and for that reason they seem to recognize that once a year, at least, one perhaps ought to be slightly glad to be alive.

  It is this spirit that so attracted the count, and it is why he leans toward being on the side of the residents, and right now, standing here in front of Tilte, the side of the residents is a decidedly dodgy side on which to be.