by Peter Høeg
“Rickardt,” says Tilte, “we know that Basker is a lively dog. And Petrus is a troubled child. But would you say that two plainclothes police officers plus electronic tagging plus Big Hill, which is guarded like a prison camp, were necessary measures to provide for their care?”
The count says he was thinking the same thing himself.
Tilte pauses rhetorically, as they would say in Finø’s Amateur Dramatic Society.
“Imagine the headlines, Rickardt.”
That’s something Tilte learned from our great-grandmother on an occasion to which I shall later return, and you can tell she’s becoming more practiced because it sounds more ominous and more inevitable than it did in Hans’s student accommodation.
“Count aids police in illegal detention of clergyman’s children. How does that sound, Rickardt?”
The count doesn’t think it sounds good at all. Substance abusers who have got clean and own hereditary titles and a castle and two manor farms and five hundred million kroner tend to be rather sensitive about their good name and reputation.
So now we’re at the crux of the matter.
“We need your help,” says Tilte. “We need to get out of here for a while. We need to find out if Mother and Father have left something behind in the rectory.”
At this moment, the count’s existence is in the balance. His voice is a hoarse whisper.
“Visitor to see you,” he says.
We stride across the patio of Big Hill. Residents are lounging in the sun wearing swimming hats with wires sticking out, and we nod and smile at them and are far too polite to point out that with headgear like that they look like they weren’t blessed with brains to take readings off in the first place.
To be exact, only Basker and I stride. The count tries to see if he can propel himself forward and wring his hands together and fall down on his knees in front of Tilte all at once.
“It’s out of the question,” he says. “Don’t even ask. I can’t help. I’d lose everything.”
Now I step in between them. It’s a technique Tilte and I have been developing. She’s the tormentor, whereas I’m more like a nurse.
“You could fetch a pair of sharp scissors,” I suggest. “So we can lose the blue wristbands.”
The count is mute. Tilte takes his hand. I take the other.
“You’ll never get through the gate,” he says.
We look down toward it. At the lowered barrier, the keen guard, the closed-circuit cameras, the wire fence. It’s enough to make Houdini despair.
“Rickardt,” says Tilte, “what do the Knights of the Blue Beam say? About that door.”
“There’s no door,” replies the count. “Keep on knocking.”
Rickardt Three Lions is the leader and founder of the Knights of the Blue Beam, which is a lodge of spiritual seekers meeting every Tuesday at the manor house called Finøholm, where they while away the time with tarot cards and numerology and trying to get in touch with the dead by means of Rickardt’s song and dance, and all of them clad in costumes that make the swimming hats of neural research pale in comparison. But whoever thinks that such an assembly under the leadership of the count must surely be a matter for the secure psychiatric ward of Finø Hospital would be wise to keep their lips sealed and their heads down when Tilte and I happen to be around, because Rickardt is our friend and, like I said, as good as family.
“That’s very beautiful,” says Tilte. “No door, but keep on knocking.”
We help each other to keep the count moving along and to exude optimism in his direction. And in that mood we step from the patio into the main hall, only to stop dead in our tracks. Because seated at the table in front of us is one of the greatest obstructions to any hope one might ever entertain of a brighter future for humanity: Anaflabia Borderrud, bishop of Grenå.
10
Many people in our situation would have seized up and been rooted to the spot, able only to stare into the face of capitulation. But not us. No more than an instant passes before communication between brain and body is reestablished and we approach the table with long, gliding steps.
“Ms. Borderrud,” says Tilte. “How nice to see you!”
Anaflabia Borderrud is one of the very few people we know who make an imperative of standing on ceremony. So Tilte is off to a good start. And yet we are aware that in this situation a good start is so very far from sufficient.
Physically, Anaflabia is as tall as our brother Hans. But her gaze is not fastened on the stars; it is fixed on whomever she happens to be speaking to, and it is a gaze that could easily be put to use at the Finø Sawmill to split open hardwood logs. And besides that, she gives the general impression of being utterly unwilling to listen to any more nonsense.
But listening to more nonsense is inevitable, especially once you’ve become acquainted with our family.
Anaflabia it was who presided over proceedings in the ecclesiastical court initiated by the Ministry of Church Affairs to investigate my father, and its complete acquittal of him was tarnished only by Anaflabia’s own dissent.
So when Tilte says how nice it is to see her, we can be certain that the pleasure is entirely our own.
“I am here by chance,” says Anaflabia. “With my secretary, Vera.”
I don’t know if the Bishops’ Association stages a Christmas revue, but if it does they should refrain from casting Anaflabia Borderrud as the lead of anything they might wish to put on for their seasonal amusement. Tilte and Basker and I have never witnessed a poorer performance than her attempt to convince us that she’s at Big Hill quite coincidentally—and that includes the annual Landlubber Revue in Finø Town’s community hall the last Sunday in June, which otherwise has the reputation of being as dire as anything ever gets in the world of amateur dramatics.
“I understand they’re looking for your parents,” Anaflabia says. “I’m so sorry.”
Basker growls from underneath the table. What he senses is that it may well be true that the bishop is sorry our parents are missing, but what she is more sorry about is that the matter has necessitated her crossing to Finø, which she in no way considers to be Denmark’s Gran Canaria, but more like a cross between Alcatraz and Papua New Guinea, an outland populated by convicts, headhunters, and their offspring. That’s what Basker senses and it makes him growl.
“But why are you all here?” asks the bishop.
You can’t tell by looking at us, but it’s a question that makes a profound impression on Tilte and me and Basker.
It’s not because Anaflabia Borderrud would find it inappropriate for us to be incarcerated at Big Hill. In fact, if it were up to her, there would be patrolling rottweilers and bars at all the windows. Rather, it’s because she so obviously has no idea what we’re doing here. And that indicates to us there’s something Bodil and the police haven’t been telling her.
Now Tilte leans across the table toward the bishop and her secretary, Vera, who is only barely old, which is to say about thirty, though as hard as an unshelled walnut. Tilte lowers her voice to a whisper.
“I’m here to visit Peter.”
“Is he a substance abuser?” the bishop whispers back.
At least she thinks she whispers. But her voice cannot disguise its years of training in the vaulted interiors of cold stone churches, and even when, as now, her voice is lowered, one is made to wonder if her technique was ever employed by characters of the New Testament in cases where there were dead who needed to be wakened.
Tilte nods. Her face is solemn.
“And forced into crime, too,” she says.
Anaflabia and her secretary seem not to be surprised. For them, this is information only to be expected. I, however, am astonished and temporarily out of order.
“But isn’t he too young to be a resident here?” Anaflabia asks.
Tilte lowers her voice still more.
“In particularly acute instances,” she whispers, “where addiction is considered to be particularly serious, and where the acts
of crime that are committed …”
The bishop nods. “Looking back, it’s no wonder,” she muses.
Vera the Secretary nods as though she were looking back, too.
“I was thinking,” says Anaflabia, “that while I was here I should take the opportunity of paying a short visit to the rectory. But it seems the police have sealed it off and locked the doors.”
She lowers her voice to a volume that would still be audible in a football stadium.
“I was going to see if your parents had left any clues as to their whereabouts, something that might be useful in tracking them down and getting in touch with them again. So that we might deal with this without the police being involved.”
For people who think deeply about existence, it strikes me that big surprises always seem to arrive in clusters. If clusters can arrive at all.
Even before I have begun to digest the pack of lies Tilte has just delivered concerning my person, the shock of it all is at once superseded by a sense of honor at being seated here with two of the truly great female strategists. It’s clear that what the bishop wants is what she succeeded in achieving the last time she was here: she wants to avoid a scandal. And in order to find inspiration for her project she wishes to tear the rectory apart in search of evidence.
It’s what Tilte wants, too, though for entirely different reasons.
Bishop Anaflabia Borderrud casts a glance at her watch with a movement she tries to conceal. At that moment, the door of the room opens and a voice booms out, “Well, I never! What a fascinating coincidence!”
11
I don’t know if you’ve heard of the philosopher Nietzsche. I have to say that he has yet to appear on the curriculum for the seventh class of Finø Town School, and perhaps one should be thankful. At least if the photograph on the front cover of the book of his that Tilte and I found at the library is anything to go by. It shows Nietzsche with a mustache like a broom and a look in his eyes that suggests the man may well be a genius but he’d need to run into an exceptionally good day just to be able to button his own trousers.
The man now standing in the door is the spitting image of Nietzsche except that his mustache is white and he’s as bald as an egg, which makes you think that God didn’t have a single hair left by the time he’d finished doing the mustache.
“Well, indeed,” he reiterates. “What spieth my little eye? Familiar faces.”
Tilte and Basker and I rise. Tilte curtsies, I bow, and Basker begins to growl, compelling me to give him a kick with an outstretched foot like a ballet dancer’s.
By outrageous coincidence—so outrageous that we cannot for a moment assume it to be coincidence at all—we find ourselves standing before one of the very few people with whom you are guaranteed to get very far indeed by calling him sir. And who is he? This is a man renowned well beyond the borders of Denmark. This man is Professor Thorkild Thorlacius-Claptrap, consultant physician and head of the Department of Neural Research at Århus New Regional Hospital.
Like the bishop of Grenå, Thorkild Thorlacius-Claptrap is a family acquaintance. He headed up the small group of forensic psychiatrists who conducted the extensive mental examinations of Father and Mother that resulted in both of them being declared more or less normal, an outcome that was a clear precondition of Father being able to resume his position of pastor following what had happened, which I am awaiting the opportunity to tell you about as soon as the events with which we are concerned begin to level out.
Next to Thorkild stands his wife, whom we also remember from that same occasion, she being his secretary, and, I might add, one of his warmest female admirers.
Anaflabia Borderrud claps her hands together in glee, thereby once and for all consigning any remaining hopes of an acting career to the grave.
“Thorkild,” she exclaims. “Fancy seeing you here!”
Thorlacius takes a seat, the count hovering behind his chair. Rickardt Three Lions is blessed with an open face of the kind that can be read by anyone exactly as though it were a children’s book. At this moment it says that he is afraid of what Tilte and I are up to, that he is rather self-conscious to find himself occupying the same room as such major players as these, and that more generally he has absolutely no idea what any of this is about.
“This young man …” says the bishop to Thorlacius.
Her voice drifts away as though she is searching through her memory for my name, only to find it has been erased by the time that heals all wounds.
“This young man has been admitted here to be treated for addiction. His sister …”
Again she searches, and this time her memory comes up with something, perhaps because a couple of years is hardly sufficient to suppress the recollection that is Tilte.
“… Dilde,” says the bishop. “His sister Dilde is here to pay him a visit.”
The count emits a sound as though he were gargling mouthwash. Thorlacius sends him a look replete with professional psychiatric interest. Tilte and I send him a look replete with the threat of extensive physical harm. It’s enough to keep him quiet.
Everyone is speaking in what they think are quiet voices, obviously out of consideration for me. It’s like they all assume my substance abuse has made me deaf, or at least hard of hearing.
Thorlacius fixes his gaze upon me. It is the gaze of Nietzsche. I remember that he’s also a hypnotist and has had Mother and Father in hypnotherapy a few times. I should also mention now that of the group of three psychiatrists who conducted my parents’ examinations, it was the two others who declared them normal. Thorkild was in dissent.
“Indeed,” he says. “Things are clearly amiss. Can you see it, too, Minna?”
“Goodness, Thorkild,” his wife exclaims. “You’re right, it’s so very clear!”
I find it romantic when married couples stay together for years and years. For instance, I’m very fond of the pair of storks on the roof of the rectory, the same pair that keep coming back. I think, too, that my mother and father have done well to stick it out for twenty years in each other’s company, especially when you know them and are their children and have to put up with them and therefore know how much it takes.
But to stand by a man like Thorkild Thorlacius for any period of time must surely involve miracles of the same caliber as those in the New Testament. And not only does she stand by him, she kneels and considers him a demigod and a gift to humanity.
“Personality disorder,” says Thorlacius. “Inevitable. Family background like that. The girl’s stronger. Tough as boots.”
Tilte sends him a look that bodes ill for his future.
“I’m intending to pay a visit to the rectory,” says Anaflabia. “Perhaps it might interest you to come along, Thorkild? Cast a professional eye over the place.”
There’s always a little pull inside when finally you get over the dunes and find yourself looking out across the sea. And only now does this entire conspiracy reveal itself to Basker, Tilte, and me in all its artfulness.
Anaflabia Borderrud has traveled to Finø to hush up what she fears may turn into a new scandal involving our family in a prominent role. And with her she has brought Thorkild Thorlacius, just as she did the last time, so that he may illuminate the psychological aspects. Together, they hope to sweep Father and Mother and Hans and Tilte and Basker and me under the carpet, and after that they will sit on it until they are certain no one is left breathing, which will take very little time indeed, since both are on the portly side of ninety kilos. I recognize two masters at work and feel almost reverential.
Anaflabia clears her throat.
“Unfortunately,” she announces, “the rectory has been sealed off by the police.”
And then I give a start, because now I understand why she has come to Big Hill. Not to see us. But because she needs help entering the rectory.
Tilte nods.
“I know a way in,” she says. “But it’s impossible to explain. I’ll need to go with you …”
12
If, for once, I may begin with myself, then I would say quite frankly that I am panicking at the thought of Tilte leaving me and Basker on our own in this place. For the count’s part, I can tell that he is at a complete loss for words, and that his aura prompts Thorlacius to scrutinize him closely and with some expectation, as though he feels certain that the count’s swimming hat may be about to register a genuine result.
The bishop seems stricken by doubt. Not religious doubt, or the kind of everyday hesitation that might preceed breaking into a rectory, because in both cases it’s clear she feels certain that the Lord is on her side. What she doubts is presumably the wisdom of taking Tilte along with them in the car. Can anyone be sure that whatever is wrong with our family isn’t catching?
Vera the Secretary moves keenly and with great agility, as if she were the batman of some legendary field commander making his way through hostile, uncharted territory. And Minna Thorlacius-Claptrap proceeds with a gaze of adoration fixed upon her husband.
Now the professor throws out his arm in a sweeping gesture toward the swimming hats and turns to the bishop.
“I have taken the opportunity of conducting an experiment. We are very close to localizing a gene for substance abuse. It gives rise to a minor defect in the brain.”
To claim that the bishop exudes profound interest would be inaccurate. What she does exude is that she already has plenty of brain-damaged individuals from Finø to be getting along with.
But from two years ago we know Thorlacius to be both a great orator and a great scientist, relentless in his quest for new insight. So now he turns to the count.
“What’s the prognosis for the boy?” he asks, gesturing in my direction. “Can he be cured? Shouldn’t we run him through the scanner for you?”
Count Rickardt’s predicament is a difficult one. Insurmountable, even. He gazes beyond the professor’s shoulder and waves his hand about.