The Elephant Keepers' Children

by Peter Høeg

  “Alexander,” Tilte says, “I don’t know if you realize that my younger brother, Peter, suffers from minor cerebral damage on account of his having water on the brain, the regrettable result of an accident at birth.”

  Alexander says he had no idea, and he speaks in the lackluster, rather mechanical way of many men who find themselves in a one-on-one with my sister Tilte.

  “That’s the first reason,” she continues, “for my now suggesting that you refrain from taking him with you to the office. The second, and more important reason, is that your so doing would serve only to tarnish your own teaching practice, which in every other way is known to spellbind the pupils of this school.”

  Alexander makes an attempt at a counterattack, stammering something along the lines of me still polluting the learning environment. But Tilte thwarts his effort even before he reaches midfield.

  “Peter will soon undergo surgery,” she says. “A tap will be inserted so that the fluid may be drained each morning before he goes to school.”

  This information is apparently sufficient for Alexander to back down. I dart away from the door just before he appears and looks at me with something resembling compassion, and I realize immediately that his encounter here with Tilte has been profound, even if he hasn’t been put in her famous coffin. We return to the classroom, and everyone stares at me as if I were a zombie that quite plainly is animate but cannot possibly be alive.

  Further into the lesson, I manage to heave my gaze from the floor and venture to cast my eye on Conny. She is enshrouded in a haze of pensive thought.

  And the next afternoon, Conny sends Sonja to ask if I want to be her boyfriend.

  You need to know all this in order to understand what happens in the saloon of the White Lady of Finø. It should now be clear why Alexander Flounderblood thinks I have water on the brain and that Tilte’s deed was indeed heroic. At the same time, it’s an example of how karma actually works, because what started life as a little white lie now returns to slam us in the back of the neck.

  Peeping under the counter from our hiding place, we can see Lars and Katinka holding hands underneath the table.

  “We accompanied the children from Copenhagen,” says Katinka. “They didn’t seem like obvious criminals to me.”

  The air freezes around her.

  “I’ve been observing them for two years,” says Alexander Flounderblood presently. “Not to mention their dog, which attempted, not once but on several occasions, to mate with Baroness, my Afghan hound. And not in the manner of any normal dog. This inclined more toward rape.”

  Though Lars and Katinka have their backs to Tilte and me, we nonetheless sense their mild surprise.

  “I quite agree,” says Thorkild. “In my professional capacity of physician and psychiatrist. One only has to consider the manner in which the boy pretended he was a reptile. I suspect they may even be on board this ship. As representatives of a religious sect.”

  Lars and Katinka’s surprise increases, Tilte and I both sense it, and their confidence in Alexander and Thorkild seems at once to be waning.

  Now Alexander Flounderblood rises.

  “Champagne!” he announces. “And as soon as the children are taken into care, I shall personally destroy the hound.”

  It’s probably meant as a joke, but Lars and Katinka don’t appear to get it. Their gaze follows Alexander as he goes off to fetch the champagne.

  We give Rickardt a sign. He backs out into the cold store and lets the door close behind him. Tilte and I duck behind the piles of napkins and tablecloths.

  A moment passes and Alexander emerges. He has the champagne in his hands. But now his face is the same color as the vacuum-packed sheep’s brains.

  He walks around the counter and up to the table, where he remains standing.

  “There’s a carcass in the cold store,” he says.

  His voice is loud and firm. The hymn makers would call it sepulchral.

  Bullimilla has heard, and now she approaches the table with a look that makes you relieved for Alexander Flounderblood’s sake that she hasn’t got one of those big meat cleavers in her hand.

  “I should hope so, too,” she says. “There’s over three tons of the finest organic meat in there.”

  “Human meat,” says Alexander.

  The rather peculiar silence of before now builds. Tilte and I sense Katinka and Lars thinking that Alexander perhaps might not be the kind of person who ought to be walking around freely. And Bullimilla glares at him as though considering whether human meat in the cold store might not be a good idea for the future, starting with Alexander Flounderblood.

  “It may be the woman from the carriage,” says Thorkild all of a sudden. “An elderly woman was sitting beside me. She was at death’s door. Professional viewpoint.”

  “And then,” Katinka says in a kind voice, “she went into the cold store to lie down and expire?”

  “To sit down, actually,” says Alexander. “The woman is seated in a wheelchair.”

  Katinka rises slowly.

  “Let’s go and have a look, shall we?” she says.

  She nods at Alexander. “You, me, and our hostess.”

  At once, Tilte and I pounce to the door of the cold store like a pair of cats. And before the others are even on their feet, we’ve waved the count and Maria out, wheeled the chair behind the table with all the napkins on it, pulled a tablecloth over the two of them, and ducked back into hiding again.

  Alexander, Katinka, and Bullimilla enter the cold store. The door closes behind them. A minute passes. The door opens and they emerge. Now Alexander resembles the meat that’s hanging from the hooks and waiting to be made into meals. They return to the table without so much as a glance in our direction.

  “It was a mistake,” says Katinka. “Perhaps Mr. Flounderblood was hallucinating.”

  The mood for champagne has passed. The bottles and crystal glasses stand untouched and abandoned. The party breaks up. Only Katinka and Lars remain seated.

  People have begun to enter the saloon. But Lars and Katinka pay them no heed. It’s obvious they’re shaken. Lars opens a bottle and pours two glasses of champagne.

  “We should have listened to that policeman on the island,” he says. “The one with the dog that looks like a rug. This lot shouldn’t have been let out again. Not even the bishop. This is a job for forensic psychiatry, not us.”

  “He’s a brain specialist,” says Katinka. “The bald one with the killer look in his eyes.”

  They sigh.

  “We could apply to the fraud squad instead,” says Lars. “It’d be cushy. Cardboard boxes full of documents, instead of these lunatics. People who deceive others are often quite charming. But those who deceive themselves …”

  They stare into each other’s eyes and raise their glasses.

  “The children,” says Lars. “You’d hardly wish they were your own kids, but they’re not exactly criminals, are they? In a way, you could say they brought us together. Is the phone tap still not turning anything up?”

  If like Tilte and I you happen to have delved deep into religious mysteries in the course of your studies on the Internet and at the Finø Town Library, you may be aware that a majority of the true greats, and allow me merely to name Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha, have stated that one has no need to change one’s personality at all, and that a person can easily attain the highest levels of insight even when equipped with a temper as fiery as Einar Flogginfellow’s.

  This is an aspect of mysticism I personally appreciate. For although many members of Finø FC believe that the Pastor’s Peter has come a long way with his personality, some pockets of what could be termed rage do still linger, and this is what now flares up behind the stacks of cloth napkins when I hear that the Police Intelligence Service has tapped our phones.

  At this moment, my gaze falls upon Katinka’s handbag, a slim, elegant thing of shiny black leather deposited at her feet. Many women would have preferred to hang it over the back of the c
hair. But Katinka is a detective constable attached to police intelligence, so hers is under the table where it cannot be seen unless one happens to have concealed oneself at floor level, and where she is able to maintain contact with it by means of her foot, thereby to ensure that none of its contents are stolen.

  Under normal circumstances it would be rather difficult to get one’s hands on that bag. But at this moment I am positioned favorably, less than an arm’s length away from it. And Katinka is absorbed by Lars’s presence. She has removed her foot from the bag in order to wrap her leg around Lars’s under cover of the tablecloth.

  So I reach out, open the bag, and investigate its contents with my hand. I find keys, something that could be a notebook or a diary, and in a separate pocket what must be cosmetics, a mirror, a nail file. And then my fingers encounter something cold, a rather pleasant grip surface, only then I feel the hair rise on the nape of my neck, because it is most surely the butt of a pistol. I move on and discover two mobile phones, a hairbrush, and a flat piece of plastic.

  Katinka’s foot is returning. I go for one of the phones. Admittedly, it’s all very Old Testament: a phone for a phone. But the thing is we are no better than we are, and as the great spiritual figures have pointed out, there’s no reason for any of us to change.

  Tilte gives a sign to say we can wait no longer. Two romantic police officers can dwell over two bottles of champagne for a very long time indeed, and the saloon is filling up. We pull three black tablecloths over Maria, snatch a handful of canapés that we wrap up in a napkin, wait until Bullimilla is distracted at the other end of the room, and then push the covered wheelchair away through the restaurant.

  We are followed by the inquiring gaze of Lars and Katinka, and so penetrating is that gaze that it may even have been capable of revealing Maria underneath her tablecloths. But to Tilte’s surprise and mine, Rickardt smooths out the wrinkles.

  “I’m going to be singing,” he explains to the officers. “An accompaniment to dinner. This is my little portable stage.”

  We’re across the room and at the exit when a person steps into the saloon and must give way to our little procession, and that person turns out to be Jakob Aquinas Bordurio Madsen. He says nothing. But to give you a sense of what might be happening inside him at this moment, a crisp clatter of beads is heard as he drops his rosary on the floor.

  The last thing I hear as we edge the wheelchair out into the corridor is a loud whisper from Katinka.

  “Lars,” she says, “we could try a different profession altogether. Gardening, perhaps.”

  We’re out and away before I can hear his reply.

  39

  When it comes to certain issues, Tilte and I have been prompted to say to the major world religions that we encounter difficulty providing our support, and one such issue is the question of whether justice exists.

  We rush back to Rickardt’s cabin, and as we turn the corner of the corridor, his door opens from inside and out come Lama Svend-Holger, Polly Pigonia, and Sinbad Al-Blablab.

  Obviously, it should please anyone to see Polly and Sinbad and Svend-Holger ambling together through life, shoulder to shoulder in the manner of best friends, indicating that the good mood Tilte and I established during our drive in Bermuda’s hearse prevails and that there is every reason to hope that the personal goodwill we have worked hard to attain still holds. However, the fate of such goodwill is in question, because in a moment they’re going to discover us to be little more than body snatchers.

  Count Rickardt is stricken by fearful paralysis, and one senses that Tilte has yet to fully recover from her latest chance encounter with Jakob Bordurio. So all responsibility now rests upon my shoulders, and this is where one might come to doubt the notion of cosmic justice, because we have entered choppy waters and the wind is beginning to howl.

  One of the secrets of playing on the wing is to lurk on the edge of offside like a cat reclining in the sun, and then be away after a quick, deep pass almost before the ball has left the grass, and this is exactly what happens now. Before Svend-Holger and Polly and Sinbad close the door behind them and discover our presence, I pull Tilte and Rickardt and Maria back around the corner and tumble through the nearest door.

  It’s important when relating such ill-starred events as these not to awaken suspicion of wishing merely to entertain, and it is for this reason I have taken every opportunity to refer to the research Tilte and I have conducted in the source texts of high mysticism. Now, such opportunity arises again. The room in which we stand is pitch-dark, and to begin with I can’t find the light switch. It is a situation that cannot fail to remind me of the fact that a majority of spiritual heavyweights whose lifetimes have spanned the invention of electric light have said that truly escaping the prison feels like having a personal light switch installed. Whereas before one fumbled around in the dark, one can now turn on the light and have a whale of a time.

  I have been frank about the fact that Tilte and I have yet to arrive at that place. Nevertheless, we feel we are on our way, and this is confirmed to us now as I find the switch and turn on the light, because after that everything is suddenly so much clearer in so many different ways.

  We are standing in the gynecological clinic, which as I have mentioned was formerly an appurtenance of the harem belonging to the White Lady’s previous owner. Before us are two couches of the kind seen in doctors’ surgeries. There are stainless-steel tables with sinks, the walls are white tiled, and on the ceiling is a large surgical lamp. In glass-fronted cupboards, shiny instruments are secured with black elastic straps so as to remain in place on the seas, and on a hanger is a white coat.

  The count and Tilte are still not quite in the game, and outside the door I hear footsteps approach. A person more certain of heavenly justice would perhaps remain standing and take in the atmosphere, but not I. I pull the white doctor’s coat from the hanger, noting with relief that it’s one of those that opens at the back. I put Maria in it, throwing her hat into a pedal bin and pushing her hair up under a little white cap that was also on the hanger. Then I snatch a surgical mask from a box and place it over Maria’s mouth. The finishing touch is the stethoscope I hang around her neck.

  The overall result is not bad at all, though of course you wouldn’t be interested in Maria wielding the knife during your scrotal hernia surgery, but at a glance she can pass.

  And a glance is in fact just what she receives, because now there’s a knock at the door. It opens, and Svend-Holger, Polly, and Sinbad enter.

  All three are intelligent individuals with deep personalities. Nonetheless, one can quite understand their surprise. It’s clear that none of them have met Count Rickardt Three Lions before, and the sight alone of his silver lamé dinner jacket and cummerbund could prompt anyone to doubt their own soundness of mind and powers of judgment. Moreover, it is clear that none of them recognizes Tilte and me in our disguises, although it seems equally obvious that they have the strange feeling of having seen us before.

  In this precarious situation, it seems only reasonable that they should now address the natural authority among those present.

  “Doctor,” says Polly to Maria, “I don’t suppose you would know who has the cabin around the corner?”

  Now Count Rickardt awakens.

  “It’s mine,” he says.

  Polly and Svend-Holger and Sinbad stare blankly at the count. Questions dance on the tips of their tongues. Polly asks the most obvious one.

  “What’s the coffin doing there?”

  Tilte has been catching her breath on the substitutes’ bench, and now she returns to the field.

  “On the advice of the ship’s doctor, Rickardt here has been playing ragas for the deceased. To provide her with solace in her postmortal state.”

  “Doctor,” Polly then says, “we are most grateful for your care, and I should like to take this opportunity to discuss with you the issue of life after death.”

  Tilte straightens her shoulders. She opens the do
or into the corridor.

  “The doctor is collecting herself to perform difficult surgery,” she says.

  Difficult surgery clears the deck. Sinbad and Sven-Holger turn and leave. Polly, however, is reluctant.

  “This, I assure you, is a unique opportunity to continue the dialogue between spirituality and the natural sciences. You are an unprejudiced person, Doctor. By no means uncritical, but driven by an open mind. I sense it so clearly.”

  Tilte bundles Polly through the door.

  “Later, perhaps,” she says. “The doctor won’t be going anywhere. And she’s always one for a good chat.”

  40

  Tilte, Basker, and I have collapsed on the heart-shaped harem bed in our cabin. We’ve agreed that we’re too tired to manhandle Maria back into place tonight and that Rickardt will sing for her in the clinic instead. We’ve said good night to Rickardt and polished off the canapés, and to say we’re tired is hardly the word, because the truth is we’re near fatally exhausted and ready for the last rites.

  But thought persists. That’s the problem. All research, mine and Tilte’s included, reveals that the great mystics have pointed out that we are each of us thought factories whose machinery never idles, and in all the noise you can never hear whether silence might contain even the bare beginnings of an answer to weightier questions such as why we are here in the world and why we must leave it again, and why someone is now knocking on our door.

  The door opens and in walks Count Rickardt Three Lions with his archlute.

  “I don’t like it on my own,” he says. “It’s as though she’s watching me. A message came in from my inner advisory level and told me I should sleep with you.”

  Basker is lying flat out between Tilte and me. We would never dream of having animals in our bed, but Basker’s not an animal, he’s a sort of person, and now we shove him aside to make room for the count.