The Elephant Keepers' Children

by Peter Høeg

  “There’s no ferry until Wednesday,” says Tilte. “How are you getting over to the mainland?”

  “We’re sailing,” says Leonora. “All the way to Copenhagen. On the White Lady of Finø.”

  I won’t say what Tilte and Basker and I are thinking. When you’re presented with a great opportunity, however complicated and fraught with danger, thinking will never get you anywhere. Instead, you must reach inside to the place from which great ideas come, and feel. This is what we do now, all three of us.

  “Why the White Lady?” Tilte asks.

  The White Lady of Finø is a ship not quite as tall as the Finø ferry but rather longer. She was built at the Grenå Shipyard for an Arab oil sheikh and his harem, and for this reason contains forty-two separate cabins with gold fittings and a pool, and a gynecological clinic at the bow end, and she is as white as whipped cream and crammed with more electronics than the rectory and twelve F-16 jet fighters put together, and the reason Tilte and Basker and I are in possession of all this knowledge is that my mother has been summoned seven times to help the specialists from the shipyard sort out the stabilizers, and on two of those occasions we went with her.

  “Svend Sewerman is a conference sponsor,” Leonora says.

  Inside Tilte and Basker and me, a major decision has now been taken, simultaneously and without our exchanging so much as a glance. What we have decided is that the White Lady will now be sailing three more passengers. Firstly, it provides us with a unique opportunity to slip away to the mainland. But there’s another thing, too. Although we have yet to secure incontrovertible evidence, it seems unlikely that our parents’ disappearance should be unrelated to the conference in Copenhagen, and the combination of important persons of international standing who also wish to meet God and our mother and father and their private elephants signals to us a dire and explosive cocktail we must endeavor to disarm as quickly as possible.

  And at this moment we hear the sound of an engine, we see lights in the night, and a vehicle that looks like it was built to take care of funerals on the moon pulls up in front of the temple.

  25

  Technically, the car now parked outside Leonora’s cloister is a hearse, which is to say that it is black and equipped with long windows at the rear and room for a coffin with wreaths on top, and it possesses just the right aura for Bermuda Seagull Jansson to pull slowly away and leave mourners with the feeling that the vehicle might just as easily ascend to the heavens.

  The aura possessed by this particular hearse is more powerful than that of regular vehicles of the same nature, not just because the white number plates indicate that it is privately registered, but also due to it being four-wheel drive and half a meter taller and one and a half meters longer than its competitors. Besides space for the coffin, it contains seven extra seats on account of Bermuda occasionally filling in as school bus driver, as well as having to run her own four children around, and the extra traction allows her to get out to home births in distant corners of the island through snowdrifts the height of a man. So if you know what circumstances are like on Finø, you will never bat an eyelid at the sight of Bermuda in her hearse.

  What does seem odd, though, is that at this moment there is a white coffin inside.

  “It’s Maria from Maribo,” says Bermuda. “She’s going to Copenhagen to receive a blessing. From Da Sweet Love Ananda.”

  Basker sniffs at the casket with obvious skepticism.

  “Hasn’t she been dead for a while?” Tilte asks.

  “Ten days. But she’s refrigerated. There’s a cooling element in the coffin.”

  Da Sweet Love Ananda is Polly Pigonia’s Indian guru. I send him a compassionate thought. For as long as we can remember, Maria from Maribo ran the ice-cream kiosk at the harbor, and in all that time she was renowned for fobbing the children off with hollow scoops so as to make her stocks last on particularly hot days with a risk of running out. May God have mercy upon her soul.

  We pile into the car. So far, no one is asking why we’re coming along. It wouldn’t be too much to say that in many areas of Finø, Tilte and Basker and I are hailed almost in the way of mascots, and the general opinion is that wherever we turn up, projects succeed and pieces fall into place, and a hearty atmosphere always ensues.

  Then the car pulls away from the drive, through the lyme grass, and out onto the road. I squeeze Tilte’s hand and give Basker a pat, and all three of us have the feeling that despite the gravity of the situation we are headed in the right direction.

  In order to make use of our peaceful transport in this four-wheel drive as it forges its way across Finø’s Great Heath, which covers the eastern part of the island and extends all the way to the woods, I must furnish you with some details as to what my father and mother set in motion following that evening in the kitchen when Tilte asked about the sacraments.

  The following Sunday, which is the sixth Sunday after Epiphany, my father is delivering a sermon in Finø Town Church on the subject of the Transfiguration.

  As I have explained to you, it is a text my father finds rather slippery. As long as he is describing the journey of Christ up the mountain in the company of the disciples, he remains on firm ground. On that stretch of the course he sounds like a cross between an Alpine guide and a Boy Scout pack leader, but as soon as he reaches the part where the cloud descends upon the expedition and God speaks from within it, he begins to lose his grip and to rattle things off from memory. One understands him only too well, because that is the point at which a veritable flood of questions begins to manifest itself, such as: if God can speak to Jesus and to the disciples, is He then a kind of man, and what, in such case, does that man look like, and what can you do if you wish to hear the voice of God address you personally, and how does the Savior converse with deceased prophets? And to all these questions Father possesses so few answers that he hasn’t the courage even to pose them. He is keenly aware of this, and afraid to admit it, and at the same time he is upset that he should be so afraid, all of which contrives to make him sound, at this juncture in the proceedings, like his mouth is full of porridge, and we three children sit with Basker and curl our toes and feel sorry for him and have absolutely no idea what we might do.

  Then a small disaster occurs. Finø Town Church is abruptly engulfed by fog, and this happens at the very moment Father recites the passage in which Jesus disappears into a cloud.

  It is by no means uncommon for the church, and all of Finø Town for that matter, to find itself enshrouded in this manner, the reason being that we are in the middle of the Sea of Opportunity, as well as something about warm and cold airstreams that my brother Hans would be able to explain in great detail and to the point of tedium. So the phenomenon is nothing less or more than natural. When Father begins to recite the verse, the sky is blue and the sun is shining, as though Finø were the pearl of the Mediterranean, and as he comes to the end a fog has descended and the church has been wrapped up in wadding. We’ve seen it before, we’ll see it again, and that’s all there is to it. But the moment Father reaches the part where the voice issues from the cloud, the great bell in the church tower strikes.

  This, too, has its own perfectly natural explanation, as Tilte and Mother and I discover after the service when we ascend the tower and find one of the owls that lives there has flown directly into the bell. We think it’s dead, until Mother picks it up and strokes its forehead, whereupon it opens its eyes and stares at her as though it were in love, and at this point I begin to perspire, but thankfully common sense prevails and the owl recalls that it is not the juvenile lead in some old-fashioned film and flaps its wings with a screech before disappearing farther up into the tower.

  However, this is not until afterward. There in the church, no one is thinking of natural explanations, because it is so astonishing and so completely unnerving for the bell to strike right at that very moment.

  Perhaps the situation could have been normalized at this point, and perhaps afterward we might have been a
ble to pull Mother and Father back down to earth where the rest of us are. But now things really go wrong.

  Far be it from me to exclude the possibility that weather might be determined by something other than natural forces, but if on this particular Sunday morning something more is at play than mere meteorology, whatever it is must surely be dark and demonic, because as Father is about to conclude his sermon something happens to the fog that until now has been snuggled around the church like cotton wool in a children’s nativity scene. All at once, a hole appears in it, and through that hole a Mediterranean sun shines down in just such a way as to send a shaft of light in through the upper section of the church window to illuminate the altarpiece.

  The altarpiece of Finø Town Church dates from prehistoric times and is as famous as a film star. Volumes have been written about it, coachloads of tourists come to see it, and it features in a full-color double spread in the tourist brochure.

  As far as I can see, it must have been painted by one of the forefathers of the nitwits who wrote those patriotic songs about Finø being a baby in the blue carry cot of the Kattegat, and constitutes clear evidence that being completely round the bend isn’t something that’s over and done with in one generation. Just because the descendant is a poet with no grasp whatsoever on reality doesn’t mean the ancestor can’t have been a painter whose brain fate injected with air.

  The altarpiece of course depicts a maritime scene with fishing boats, and the sea looks like Slush Ice from the fair at Århus, while the fishing boats resemble floating bathtubs. But what fills the picture is the Savior, who is seated in the company of some poor soul whose demons he has exorcised, and the demons have been put into pigs that look like grizzly bears. The Savior himself doesn’t look like anyone who could be bothered even getting started on any of the things he is supposed to have achieved in only three years. In fact, he looks like the kind of person any one of the depicted pigs could do away with in one swoop.

  And yet something remarkable happens within the congregation when the sunlight touches the Savior’s face. It would not be any exaggeration to say that the churchgoers this Sunday morning are spellbound, not simply on account of that sudden burst of light, but because of the expression on my father’s face. I would refer to it as a telling expression, and what it tells is that this occurrence, far from being accidental, is in some way under his control.

  We children gaze up at him and try to attract his attention. But Father is not looking. Instead, he prepares to descend from the pulpit, and then the worst happens, the worst being that a sudden gust of wind causes the door of the porch, and then the door of the church itself, to burst open.

  The explanation of course has to do with the fact that the doors don’t shut properly, and sudden gusts of wind are not a matter to which we people of Finø pay much attention at all until they become violent enough to send thatched roofs sailing toward the heavens and mobile sausage stands hurtling into the harbor, but this particular gust wasn’t even close. What puts it into a class of its own, however, is its timing, and this is what my father cannot resist the temptation to exploit, so when Finn Flatfoot and John the Savior rise to their feet to close the doors, Father holds up his hands and says, “Halt! Let them remain open. We have received a visitor.”

  And while he omits to mention the specific identity of this visitor, explanation is superfluous because everyone inside the church knows that the visitor is the Holy Spirit, and the audience is completely in Father’s hands.

  When the service is over and we shuffle through the porch, where Father stands to shake the hands of his congregation, Hans and Tilte and I see a new and hitherto wholly unfamiliar expression on his face, and we know where it is from, because he has copied it from the depiction of the Savior on the altarpiece.

  And when our turn comes to shake our father’s hand, Tilte stops.

  “It was all coincidence,” she says.

  Father smiles at her. To the rest of the congregation standing in line behind us and spilling out in front of us, Father’s smile may seem benevolent, but to us it looks like someone injected air into his brain.

  “In coincidence lies Providence,” says Father.

  We gaze at him, and all three of us are aware of what is happening. Father’s private elephant is swelling inside him like a balloon being filled with helium.

  “Father,” says Tilte, “you are a despicable con man!”

  Sadly, this will prove to be the last occasion in a very long time on which a rational being comes close to reaching my father, and in fact Tilte doesn’t even get close, because Father’s smile simply grows wider and all the more forgiving.

  “Dearest Tilte,” he says. “Thou knowest not what thou sayest.”

  26

  I would like to ask for your understanding so that I might return for a moment to Bermuda Seagull Jansson’s moonmobile, because at this moment she suddenly pulls over, stops the engine, and switches off the lights, and I can tell you one thing: it’s dark out there.

  Finø is one of the last places in Denmark in which the night can be truly dark. Finø Town is far behind us, and Nordhavn lies as yet concealed beyond the great woods ahead. The houses in between the two towns are few and scattered, and the moon has hidden itself away, which on this night is perhaps the best policy of all.

  Around us we can sense the sheer space that is so peculiar to Finø. No one location on the island is less than fifty kilometers from the closest mainland, which is Sweden, which again is wilderness. Tilte and I have a theory that Finø provides special advantages for us as regards our search for the door, because thoughts are a hindrance that prolongs your captivity inside the prison, and here all thought is effectively sucked out of your head and expelled into the firmament, which, of course, must be rather a strain on persons such as Alexander Flounderblood and Karl Marauder Lander, who to begin with contain only small dashes of thought, all of poor quality. But for persons such as Tilte and me, whose minds are so replete with powerful ideas that we must live in constant fear of cranial fracture from within, for us the emptiness and open space of Finø is salubrious, as the hymn makers put it, and as I myself wrote in the tourist brochure. I am the author of the passage titled “Finø by Night” on account of Tilte and Dorada Rasmussen firmly believing that I am more experienced than most when it comes to being up and about at all hours.

  “Is something the matter?” Bermuda asks.

  You can’t be an undertaker and a midwife without a remarkable talent for interpreting the moods of others, and both Tilte and I carry heavy burdens upon our shoulders.

  “Mother and Father have gone missing,” I say.

  Bermuda maintains what I would call a straightforward, no-nonsense outlook on life, and this is something that presumably comes of continually helping new children into the world and putting the dead away into the ground. So we are unused to seeing her struggle to come to terms with a matter as she so clearly does now.

  “Einar was going to fly them,” she says.

  Bermuda is married to Einar Flogginfellow, who got his pilot’s license so as to be able to fly himself to Norway and Sweden and Iceland, there to tighten bonds with other Nordic branches of Asa-Thor. And in order to accumulate flying hours, Einar shuttles Finø residents back and forth to the mainland if they pay for the fuel. He has flown our parents on many occasions, and they are also the best of friends.

  “They were supposed to go to Billund,” says Bermuda. “But all of a sudden they wanted to go the day before. Einar couldn’t take them because of football practice. But he spoke subsequently to the man who did. They put down at Jonstrup.”

  Occasionally, air passengers coming from Finø are indeed flown to the disused airstrip outside Jonstrup. But that’s not the way to La Gomera. If you want to go from Finø to the Canary Islands, you fly to Billund Airport in Jutland and get off there.

  “I thought I ought to tell you,” says Bermuda. “Under the circumstances.”

  Tilte pats her on the arm.
She and Bermuda are close. Little can bring people closer together than helping each other put dead bodies in coffins.

  Bermuda turns to face the front and starts the engine. We drive off into Finø’s moonless night, as will be familiar from my tourist brochure description.

  It is not pleasant, but we must endure what must be endured. All the great men and women of wisdom have said that spiritual progress can never be made without unrelenting honesty, and so I must return to Mother and Father and to the next step on their decline, a step that is taken during Father’s sermon the following Sunday, which is to say only a week after the meteorological disasters, and though at first it may seem of little consequence, I can assure you that it is a very big step indeed.

  The Lesson is from the Acts and at the very moment Father relates the story of the Resurrection, a white dove comes flapping down from above, circles the model of the tea clipper Spray Dolphin of Finø that hangs suspended beneath the vaulted ceiling and was constructed by our own mother, and then decends toward the organ and Mother herself. At this moment I feel a chill run down my spine at the thought that the bird will now perch on her shoulder and rub its beak against her nose and begin to coo affectionately, but this does not happen, and though it indeed appears to swoop down toward the place where Mother is seated, it suddenly disappears into thin air and is gone.