The Elephant Keepers' Children

by Peter Høeg

  “It’s the little blue men,” he explains. “They live under the patio. I’m calling them closer.”

  Now comes a sudden and unexpected occasion to recall the old adage that even if there is no door one should keep on knocking. Because it transpires that opportunities still remain for Anaflabia Borderrud in showbiz. And that’s because the prospect of little blue men running around between her toes prompts her to make a sudden and surprisingly athletic leap into the air.

  Thorkild remains standing. He scrutinizes the count intensely and one can sense that his wildest expectations as to the gene for addiction and its attendant brain damage are about to be surpassed.

  It is in this situation of acute chaos in front of the goal that Tilte strikes.

  “I need to take some luggage with me,” she says. “It’s rather heavy, I’m afraid. Perhaps the professor would care to help me?”

  In other circumstances, this mention of heavy luggage would most likely have aroused Thorkild’s and the bishop’s suspicion. But at this moment, both are distracted. The only thing Thorkild has understood is that a young woman has asked if he would care to help her carry something heavy. He straightens his back.

  “You are addressing a long-standing member of the Academical Boxing Club,” he says.

  He seems imminently close to removing his jacket and rolling up his shirtsleeves to display his biceps. But then Tilte raises her hand to stop him.

  “How sweet of you, Professor. Would you come to my room in ten minutes?”

  13

  When Tilte closes the door of our room behind us, I fold my arms over my chest. I’m not the type who lets the sun set on his anger, and in the space of the last half hour Tilte has tarnished my otherwise spotless public image and made motions to leaving me.

  But the reason I don’t complain is that Tilte presses her finger to her lips.

  “Lars and Katinka,” she whispers. “Did you sense it, too? The cupids are at play.”

  In case you don’t know what cupids are, I can tell you that they’re these chubby little angels they used to put on greeting cards in the olden days, and at this moment Tilte is holding two of those cards in her hand.

  Many people on Finø believe that Tilte lost all interest in worldly love when she was abandoned by Jakob Aquinas Bordurio Madsen, who received a calling and went to Copenhagen to become a Catholic priest and spend the rest of his life in prayer and abstinence. But we who know Tilte in private realize that in spite of all adversity and disappointment she remains a romantic at heart and is so very fond of films in which love prevails and the couple sails off into the sunset in a pink gondola to music as gooey as dual-component epoxy. Sometimes I think that what Tilte has against all that happily-ever-after stuff is basically that she thinks the perspective is too short and that love that lasts only fifty or sixty years is a joke, because what really counts is eternity. As devoted as she is to helping people get over being abandoned, she’s equally enthusiastic about spotting love affairs before even the prospective lovers themselves know what’s going on, and then giving them a nudge to get them started, and that’s why she always carries a stack of those greeting cards that she’s waving about in front of me now.

  Before my incredulous eyes, she draws a heart on each of the two cards.

  “I’ll give this one to Lars,” she says, “and tell him that Katinka wants to meet him under the big acacia tree in the park. You give us two minutes, and then give this one to Katinka. And tell her the same thing. With all the boyish credibility for which you’re known.”

  “We’ve got seven minutes,” I say, “before the professor’s here.”

  “Some people have changed the course of their lives in seven minutes,” Tilte replies.

  If we’d had more time, and if I’d been less shaken, I would have asked her for concrete examples of who exactly had ever changed the course of their lives in seven minutes, but now Tilte takes me by the arm and draws me over to the open window.

  “There’s another thing,” she says.

  The windows of the rooms on either side of our own are open to let in the delightful spring air. From inside comes a gentle clicking sound. Tilte pulls me away from the window and closes it.

  “They’re at their computers,” I say. “Writing a report. About us.”

  Tilte nods.

  “Petrus,” she says, “if we could get them out of their rooms in such a hurry they forgot to switch off their computers, would we not be giving young love between officers of the law a well-deserved boost? And would we not be able, in so doing, to take a peek at what the archives say about us, and about Mother and Father, too?”

  I withdraw to our room as Tilte knocks on Lars’s door and hands him the greeting card of the cupids with the heart on it, and I can honestly say that until this moment I have always had my doubts about Tilte’s theory of falling in love. Such doubts are now firmly put to shame. Because at the very instant Tilte returns, we hear Lars in his bathroom, and through the wall the finer details are lost to our ear, but it is clear to us, nevertheless, that he is simultaneously doing something along the lines of blow-drying his hair, brushing his teeth, and applying eau de cologne to his armpits, all in less than thirty seconds, and then he is out of the room and on his way down the corridor as if he was about to retake his entrance exam for police college.

  So with the other card in my hand, I knock on Katinka’s door.

  From Leonora Ticklepalate, who is a close friend of our family and a member of Finø’s Buddhist community, and who moreover runs her own business offering services in the field of sexual-cultural coaching, I am aware that many men may be deeply moved by the sight of a woman in uniform. Here, in private, and between the two of us, I would like to admit that I am one of them.

  I once brought the subject up with Conny and asked if she felt the same way, only with boys, and she pursed her lips pensively and said that to find out she would have to ask me to put on the uniform her older sister wears in her capacity as junior assistant in the reception area of the Finø Brewery. Regrettably, we were unable to clear up the matter to any satisfaction, because no sooner had I put on the uniform, which consisted of a red jacket, red skirt, and high-heeled shoes, and switched on all the lights in the room so that Conny might form a clear impression, than her parents walked in through the door, and though I endeavored to explain the situation, I fear that some nagging doubt lingered on in their minds that I never wholly succeeded in exorcising before Conny went away.

  So when Katinka opens the door in plain clothes I feel rather disappointed.

  Jeans and a sweater aren’t enough on their own to make Katinka look like a civilian or even resemble an ordinary woman. She still reminds you of someone who can drive a forklift and step in to lead a team of roadworkers at a moment’s notice. But when I hand her the cupids and tell her that Lars is waiting for her under the acacia tree, the look on her face makes me afraid she’s about to hit the deck, and I feel sure that training in the antiterror corps is the only thing that keeps her upright. Then her cheeks begin to flush and I think about blood clots and strokes, and a moment later she’s hell for leather off down the corridor.

  She leaves the door wide open. Tilte and I can see her computer. It’s on.

  And not only is it on, but the document it displays, itemizing what Tilte and Basker and I have been doing until this moment, is wide open for anyone who might care to look.

  On the screen are the words: Contact established with Bishop Anaflabia Borderrud and Professor Thorkild Thorlacius-Claptrap. Both persons informed by Police via Ministry of Church Affairs as to KF’s and CF’s whereabouts being unknown, though have received no further information.

  KF and CF are obviously Konstantin Finø and Clara Finø, our father and mother respectively. The words on the screen confirm what we have already guessed, namely, that the police and Bodil Hippopotamus are in possession of knowledge so confidential that they are unwilling even to reveal it to such old and intimate friends as Th
orkild and Anaflabia.

  Besides that, we note two things.

  The document is curiously titled The Floaters. It is a name neither of us is able to connect in any immediate way with our family.

  Then there’s the signature. The signature is interesting. Katinka has written her name. And beneath it she has added the words: Police Intelligence Service.

  Obviously, it’s flattering in a way to learn that the authorities have deployed their very best officers to look after us. Yet at the same time it’s hard not to find it rather disturbing. Babysitting normal, well-functioning kids like Tilte and me can hardly be in the job descriptions of the nation’s intelligence services.

  Footsteps sound on the stairs above us, cautious and stealthy. We open the door and Rickardt Three Lions hands us a pair of kitchen shears.

  The moment we snip the blue wristbands, more footsteps appear, not cautious or stealthy this time but athletic and spritely, presumably the result of time spent skipping in the gym of the Academical Boxing Club. But before Thorkild Thorlacius gets as far as knocking on the door, we are already back in our room.

  Tilte closes the door soundlessly behind us. She takes the wicker basket containing extra bedding, empties it, and stuffs the duvets and the pillows under the bed. And then she gestures for me to get inside.

  I don’t believe it. I want to die standing up, not to expire and be discovered in a picnic basket.

  “Petrus,” Tilte whispers, “we’re getting out of here, all three of us, and the only way we can do it is by them taking me out because they think I’m a visitor, and taking you out because they don’t know you’re there.”

  There is a knock on the door, and Tilte gets this imploring look in her eye.

  From our studies of spiritual and religious literature on the Internet and at the Finø Town Library, Tilte and I have learned that all the great religious figures recommend turning down the warrior’s pride and turning up the will to cooperate. So all I can do is jump into the basket and curl up in a ball at the bottom. Tilte puts on the lid, the door opens, and Professor Thorkild Thorlacius says, “Is that all? Leave it to me!”

  And then he lifts me up and carries me away.

  The basket softens all sounds. But I can tell from the professor’s breathing that the honorable members of the Academical Boxing Club possibly spend more time drinking cognac and smoking cigars than skipping and beating the daylights out of punchballs. And then to my consternation I hear that we have now encountered the bishop, because her voice comes through loud and clear, and if there had been room in the basket the hairs would have stood up on the back of my neck.

  “We should check what’s inside,” she says. “Leaving a place like this.”

  But then comes Tilte’s voice. Utterly cool, yet cautioning.

  “I would advise you not to, Ms. Borderrud. It’s a Finø monitor lizard.”

  For you to understand what happens now, I must provide you with some brief information concerning the animal and bird life of Finø.

  Before Tilte and I came to the aid of Dorada Rasmussen, who is in charge of the local tourist office, providing her with much-needed assistance in order to improve the tourist brochure the office puts out every year, Finø could boast of a comparatively rich fauna without necessarily being in the same league as Mato Grosso.

  We approached the job by first securing the photographs that were taken when a killer whale drifted past Finø in a state of confusion and later beached in Randers Fjord. Then we found the photographs Hans had taken seven years before during a particularly severe winter when the Finø Rescue Station and the Forestry Commission were deployed to capture a polar bear that had drifted south on an ice floe from Svalbard. By the time we got that far, Dorada had grasped the full scope of our vision and unearthed the film that had been shot when her Amazon parrot escaped its cage and settled in the copper beech in the tourist office garden with the national flag of Denmark, the Dannebrog, waving in the background. We edited out the next sequence, in which the parrot was torpedoed and filleted by a local goshawk, and made color prints of the stills, putting together a whole new brochure that made no direct reference to Finø being Scandinavia’s own New Zealand with a polar climate and a tropical paradise on one and the same island, but the photographs spoke for themselves. In the middle of it all, Tilte borrowed a traditional costume from the Finø Local History Museum and split the seams so Hans could squeeze into it, and then we took a picture of him in short trousers and long stockings and shoes with silver buckles and hair blowing in the wind, and underneath we wrote: A resident of Finø on his way to church in typical local costume worn to this day.

  We rounded things off with a picture of my giant python, Belladonna, taken in the Tropical Zoo at Randers, because we had given Belladonna away when she reached two and a half meters and no longer wished to make do with rabbits, preferring live pigs, which Mother wouldn’t have in the rectory garden.

  The brochure was a huge success. It reversed a declining market and since then people have been coming in droves.

  The most immediate consequence was that Tilte and I were compelled to mete out corporal punishment in the playground of Finø Town School, since a number of myopic individuals insisted that our brother Hans looked like a village idiot in that photograph of him wearing local costume. Furthermore, our brochure seems to have given rise to some uncertainty among the wider population as to the exact nature of Finø’s flora and fauna.

  It is this uncertainty Tilte now turns to our advantage by saying that what is in the basket is a Finø monitor lizard.

  And what happens now is that the bishop pulls back her hand and performs another one of those leaps that could win her a place in the Århus Ballet if ever she should tire of being a bishop.

  “My younger brother brought it with him,” Tilte explains. “But Rickardt says it’s too dangerous to have on the loose.”

  I hear the count gargling his mouthwash again, and then the basket is lifted, more respectfully this time, carried downstairs and along corridors and eventually placed in what must be the boot of Thorkild Thorlacius’s Mercedes. People get in, and all I can do is hope that everyone is present: the professor, his wife, the bishop, Vera the Secretary, Tilte, and Basker. The engine starts and the car rolls forward. Words are exchanged with the guard at the gate. And on this, one of the darkest days of our lives, Tilte, Basker, and I are suddenly on our way out into freedom again—though I must hasten to stress that it is a kind of freedom that is highly restricted and almost totally inside the building and wholly unfree in respect of the infinitely greater freedom all this is actually about.

  14

  The rectory is situated directly opposite the church, only a kilometer or so from Big Hill, a trip that takes ten minutes in a horse-drawn carriage, fifteen minutes on foot, and a couple of minutes at most in a Mercedes. Yet these two minutes are entirely full of what I can only refer to as drama.

  The first thing that happens is that I feel a sneeze coming on.

  I don’t know what kind of treatment Thorkild’s New Regional Hospital offers those unfortunate enough to suffer from asthma and dust mite allergy, but I would certainly hope they warn against curling up in a ball at the bottom of a wicker basket.

  At this point, as I struggle to hold in a sneeze, Anaflabia Borderrud says, “It would be best if we could explain this in terms of mental breakdown on the part of your parents. Last time, we were able to pull through. But many of us bear wounds that have yet to heal, wounds that continue to bleed and that mustn’t be picked at.”

  To which Tilte replies by expressing her complete agreement, because, as their children, we feel that way, too.

  “The police seem to believe that something criminal is afoot,” says the bishop. “We would look very dismally upon it in the diocese and in the Ministry of Church Affairs.”

  Tilte says that we children couldn’t agree more and declares us to be fully in line with the ministry.

  “But if the matter were to b
e explained as the result of breakdown,” Anaflabia goes on, “or depression, something requiring hospitalization … That’s why I should like to inspect the rectory. Thorkild will assess the situation, drawing on his professional expertise. His words will weigh heavily in the final outcome. But we must locate your parents before the police do likewise. The professor and I will take it from there. What was your impression of your parents, prior to their disappearance?”

  “It’s very hard for a daughter to concede,” says Tilte. “But I think the word unbalanced would be the most appropriate.”

  If Tilte hadn’t said that, I’m fairly certain I would have been able to hold back my sneeze. And I would have done so simply by adhering to the profound guidelines for attaining freedom that one may find in all spiritual systems and that invariably involve trying to listen inward as one asks oneself: Who is the individual who feels he must sneeze? Or: From which source within the consciousness would the sneeze be perceived, if it should transpire?

  But one must face the fact that consciousness training is a phenomenon that requires mental acuity, at least to begin with, and at this moment, when I hear what Tilte is saying, I am utterly lacking in it, and with those words she thereby joins the long line of candidates for greatest traitor in world history, along with Judas, Brutus, and Karl Marauder Lander, who besides those gulls’ eggs has cleared several of my chanterelle locations in Finø Woods, and I haven’t even mentioned yet how one time, together with Jakob Aquinas Bordurio Madsen, he duped me into getting up on stage to join the Mr. Finø contest.

  You could never get me to subscribe to the view that our mother and father are unbalanced. Certainly not. Firstly, the inherent lunacy of one’s parents is a matter that belongs in the department of well-guarded family secrets that ought never to be divulged to anyone. And secondly, at the time of their departure, Mother and Father had in no way exceeded their average level of madness.