The Elephant Keepers' Children

by Peter Høeg

  The next moment, the flow of thought has carried you away with it, you’re taken by the splendor of Kongens Nytorv, by the red double-decker bus, by all the tourists, the pigeons, and the black van whose registration number begins with the letters TH.

  But then the chance comes around once more to haul yourself ashore into the present, into the car, and to look upon your own brother and sister and sense the pleasure of being present in the here and now.

  And at that moment, Ashanti begins to sing. She does so quietly, and the listener has no hope of picking out the words, but my assumption is that it’s some kind of voodoo song, hopefully not a hymn in praise of Haiti in which that island is portrayed as a baby cooing on the changing table of the Caribbean, but at any rate Ashanti’s voice now fills the car like some enchanting liquid.

  We try to join in on the chorus. The verses are many and we allow the final note to die away. A lot may be said about us, but we go to the gallows with a song on our lips.

  Hans grips the wheel. The future is now.

  And then Tilte leans forward.

  “We still have an hour left,” she says. “We agreed on two hours.”

  None of the rest of us recalls having entered into any agreement. What we recall is Tilte saying “two hours.” But then, the forces of nature may only seldom be resisted.

  “There’s something I need to do,” Tilte says. “We’ll meet back in the apartment on Toldbodgade. In an hour. Then the police can take over.”

  This sends the rest of us into a state of slight shock. But once again we manage to haul ourselves ashore and back into the present, where it is said there should be no worries. The first of us to crawl ashore is Hans.

  “Ashanti and I,” he says, “will spend that time putting her family in the picture. They’ve arrived now with the delegation from Haiti.”

  One senses the wisdom of the project. Mummy and Daddy from Port-au-Prince have doubtless envisaged marrying their little girl off to a man of good prospects, and then here she comes with a two-meter-tall stargazer as poor as a church mouse.

  Tilte is about to open the door. I cough discreetly.

  Everyone looks up at me. It’s like in the fairy tales: the youngest son’s a nobody. No one imagines anything other than that little Peter is going back to Toldbodgade to pass away the time and keep out of the way while Hans chats up the in-laws.

  But out of my pocket I now produce the colored band from Rickardt’s cigar.

  It’s a flash of gold, with a red line drawing of a woman in profile. On her head she wears an antique Greek helmet. Underneath are the words: Pallas Athene. Abakosh. And a phone number. And an address on Gammel Strand. I take out the sheet of paper from the concealed room at the rectory. I hold it up for the others to see what is written at the bottom in pen: pallasathene.abak@mail.dk.

  I extend my hand to Tilte.

  “Katinka’s phone,” I say.

  I dial the number from the cigar band and switch on the speaker.

  It’s hard to say exactly what’s going on inside me. But if you play football, I’m sure you recall that there comes a time when you find the guts to go for the goal all by yourself. For my own part, this occurred some time during my first season on the first team. It was one of those magical moments I’ve told you about. There was a long pass from behind, the midfield had pulled back into defense, there was no one with me, and yet I knew immediately I had to run forward to receive. It wasn’t a logical feeling, and there was no time to think about it. The only thing I felt was that the door was opening. I took the ball down like it was a little bird settling on my foot, then passed two defenders who had me marked as though they could swat me like a fly, rounded the keeper, and followed the ball all the way into the back of the net. Not until I was standing there did I truly understand that I had gone through the door. Not the real door, the one that leads out into freedom, but one that takes you into the hall, an anteroom of true emancipation.

  This is the kind of moment that now occurs inside the car. I sense that this is a thing I must do on my own.

  “Abakosh.”

  The voice is a woman’s and it spans at least two things: the first is a secret, and the second is a project that entices others to see what the secret might be.

  “This is Peter,” I say. “I need to speak to Pallas Athene.”

  “Have you got a password, dear?”

  I look down at Mother’s and Father’s note.

  “Brahmacharya,” I say.

  Silence. Then the voice appears again.

  “I’m very sorry, but Pallas Athene is busy at the moment. How about one of the other goddesses?”

  I’m dribbling the ball in the dark. But I feel I’m on the right track.

  “It has to be her,” I say. “I’ve got an appointment.”

  Silence again. But I hear her fingers on a keyboard.

  “Can you be here in fifteen minutes?”

  “I can be there in a jiffy.”

  “She’s only got twenty minutes, though.”

  “Twenty minutes with a goddess,” I say. “That’s as good as an eternity with a mere mortal, wouldn’t you say?”

  That gets me in and deflates her professional demeanor. She giggles.

  “I should say,” she says. “Would you like us to send a car?”

  “My driver’s just parked the Merc here on Kongens Nytorv.”

  “Should I open a bottle of bubbly?”

  The others in the car are agog. I can see the wonder in their eyes. And I’m sure they see the wonder in mine.

  “Of course,” I say. “But I’m strictly nonalcoholic myself. The outdoor season’s already under way, and I need to be at my peak in two weeks. And to stay there. I’m a monk at the moment.”

  “Looking forward to seeing you,” she says.

  We say our goodbyes. I open the car door.

  “We’re going with you,” says Hans.

  I shake my head.

  “You’re going to talk to your in-laws, Hansel. That should be enough for anyone.”

  “But you’re only fourteen,” Hans says.

  I straighten my shoulders.

  “There comes a time,” I say, “when a man must find his own way.”

  52

  I’ve never understood the system behind Copenhagen street names. Where is the blue courtyard on the square called Blågårds Plads, if that’s what blå gård means? Where is the king of Kongens Nytorv, the King’s New Square, which isn’t even new? And if strand means “beach,” then what’s Gammel Strand all about? Gammel, as anyone knows, means “old,” and maybe the houses there were old once, but they’ve certainly been given a face-lift since then, and not only have their faces been lifted, they’ve also had their insides and all their vital parts replaced, so anyone would think they were built only yesterday and the owners had just been handed the keys.

  Those keys are most likely made of gold, for the brass plates next to the doors bear the names of stockbrokers and high-flying lawyers, and the gateways are all equipped with wrought-iron gates and security cameras. Where I now stand there are two closed-circuit television cameras looking at me.

  The nameplate says Abakosh, and twirled around the name are engraved vines, but there’s no button to press on the intercom. Instead, I position myself in front of the cameras, and as I wait I’m forced to concede that I may have bitten off more than I can chew.

  It’s a rare feeling. Ask anyone on Finø and they’ll tell you that Peter Finø never exceeds the bounds of his natural reticence.

  If anyone should mention the time I joined the Mr. Finø contest on the harbor promenade, I would once again stress that this was due to malicious conspiracy, and let me now sweep rumor aside once and for all and share with you the exact circumstances of this unfortunate event. It came about because Tilte invited Karl Marauder Lander, who is in the same class as her, into her walk-in wardrobe with the aim of letting him try out the coffin, and her doing so can only be explained with reference to her wish to he
lp people improve their characters, a wish that occasionally blurs her vision when it comes to some of the more hopeless individuals in our midst.

  Nevertheless, in order to help Tilte out and to enhance Karl Marauder’s chances of learning to search his conscience—if indeed he possesses such a thing—I had recorded a few sequences from The Tibetan Book of the Dead and transferred them onto an MP3 player at two-thirds normal speed and then concealed the device inside the lining of the coffin, later to play back the recording by means of a remote control when Karl Marauder had made himself comfy and the lid had been closed on top of him.

  It was a very expressive recording. And at two-thirds normal speed, my voice sounded like the Prince of Darkness suddenly coming right at you. I was certain it would have the desired effect.

  And indeed it seemed to do the job. Karl Marauder came out of the coffin like a rocket on New Year’s Eve, bathed in a cold sweat. But rather than exploiting the situation to delve into his soul and inquire of himself as to the source of his anxiety, this being the recommended procedure in all spiritual traditions, he instead ran back across the road and snitched to his parents, who turned up in unison at the rectory fifteen minutes later, which was to be the decisive factor in Tilte being instructed to return the coffin to Bermuda Jansson.

  Instead of recognizing my good intentions, Tilte was angry with me, so angry, in fact, that she entered into an alliance with Karl Marauder, and this must surely rank alongside the great treacheries of world history.

  Their spiteful conspiracy involved Karl enticing me onto the football field, promising to stand in the goal while I practiced bending free kicks with the outside of my right foot, just as the Mr. Finø finals commenced. All of a sudden, Tilte comes running to say that Einar Flogginfellow is looking for me on account of my being awarded the Finø FC Player of the Year trophy, and in order that I might receive the full honor I so deserve, Einar is planning to hand me the trophy on stage, for which reason he wants me in football shorts, football shoes, and preferably topless so as to provide a visualization of what such an award costs a player in terms of perspiration.

  I believe in the good of all people, and in that innocent belief I entered the stage completely unaware that the crowd of more than a thousand locals and tourists had just been entertained by Norwegian swimmers and Danish rowing champions weighing in at two hundred kilos, posing and flexing with olive oil rubbed into their glistening bodies.

  So basically that time doesn’t count. Normally, I feel my way along with my fingertips.

  “We don’t accept newspapers or door drops.”

  The woman’s voice from the telephone crackles on the intercom. The loudspeaker must be in the nameplate.

  “You’re in luck, then,” I tell her. “Because if there’s two things I haven’t got, it’s newspapers and door drops. But I do have an appointment with Pallas Athene. So I think you should let me in.”

  The gate opens. But I sensed hesitation.

  53

  I don’t know if the houses of Gammel Strand have always been half-timbered with sash windows on the outside and Greek temples on the inside, but that’s what this particular house looks like now.

  The stairway is as wide as a road and flanked by pillars, everything in marble. It leads up to a reception area with more marble. Behind a desk sits a woman with blond hair, clad in Greek sandals and a toga whose neckline is so plunging that it’s difficult to say whether she is naked or clothed.

  The walls are adorned with murals, though their style is quite different from those of Finø Town Church, because these depict naked men and women drinking wine from what look like soup bowls, or else having their bottoms birched, or just sitting around on benches and chairs with mournful expressions, perhaps because they think it ought to be their turn to drink wine or have their bottoms birched, or simply because they don’t know who has taken their clothes away from them.

  “You look young.”

  There’s a school of philosophy that has established itself on Finø and elsewhere in Denmark that believes blondes with plunging necklines to be warm-hearted, though empty-headed. The woman in front of me dispels that theory at once. She’s as cool as a refrigerator and her aura suggests she is continually processing information at high speed.

  “Most of those who said that,” I tell her, “are now pushing up daisies.”

  She giggles and yet is obviously in a dilemma, the specifics of which remain unclear to me, so I’m still dribbling the ball in the dark.

  “Andrik will show you in,” she says.

  The man behind me has appeared so silently I failed to hear him approach. He too is wearing a toga, and his hair is done in the way of Greek statues. I’m not sure which of the deities he’s supposed to be, as I was absent the day we did Greek mythology in school, but the god of murderers would certainly be a decent guess if there is one. He has the build of a decathlete and baby-blue eyes, and reminds me of the most lethal individuals you can encounter on the football field, people with no end of fine talents, all of which they’ve placed at the disposal of malice.

  He opens a door for me and we enter a room that erases all hopes of the house bearing any relation to historical Copenhagen. It’s a space of some two hundred square meters with a glass ceiling through which one may observe the blue sky, and all around are enough green plants to fill up the great greenhouses of the botanical gardens at Århus.

  But apart from that, all resemblance to those gardens is purely coincidental, because the plants here are arranged so as to form enclosures, each of which contains a marble bath in which men lie outstretched while being washed behind the ears by women who could be, but most probably are not, twin sisters of the woman in reception. In the middle of the room is a table on which bottles of champagne have been placed in coolers. There’s no time to find out which one might be nonalcoholic, and anyway I’m not thirsty. There’s also a thing that looks like a refrigerator, only with lamps and a humidity gauge and a glass door, behind which can be seen boxes of Havana cigars, and I bet that if you could see the bands around them they’d be the same as the one on Count Rickardt’s cigar.

  Andrik opens another door, this one leading into a changing room done out in marble.

  “Take off your clothes here,” he says. “Then go straight through.”

  On a bench is a white bath towel the size and thickness of a polar bear skin. As soon as Andrik has gone, I drape it around my shoulders and go through into the next room.

  This is where the marble stops. Instead, everything’s golden and red, and there are two raised areas. On one is a double bed, on the other a bidet.

  On a small table, someone has placed a steaming cup of coffee, and next to it are a pair of reading glasses and an address book bound in brown leather.

  I sidle over to the table. From an adjoining room I hear the sound of a person brushing her hair. I flick through the address book to H for Home. Everybody’s got a mobile phone now, and none of us can remember our landline numbers anymore, at least we can’t at the rectory.

  And neither, it seems, can Pallas Athene. Under Home are eight digits that I enter into my mobile in the hope that police intelligence haven’t accessed my list of contacts. There’s no address. I close the book. I don’t know what motivated me, but maybe it was to see if goddesses, too, have private addresses.

  I sit down on a chair, nervously on the edge.

  Pallas Athene enters.

  I’d make her about one meter eighty-eight in her stockinged feet. Which means that if she’s any good with a ball she could step right in as a guard on Finø FC’s women’s basketball team.

  But she’s not in her stockinged feet; she’s in red stilettos that add about fifteen centimeters to her height. And besides that, she’s wearing a red wig, and on top of the wig is the kind of Greek helmet now familiar to me from the house’s own Havana cigars.

  But apart from that, all she’s wearing is a pair of skimpy red panties, a liberal quantity of lipstick, and a broad sm
ile that turns out to be of only limited durability, because as soon as she sets eyes on me it disappears completely.

  I should like to draw attention to the fact that I would never normally describe a naked woman in any detail to anyone, not even to myself. The reason I now endeavor to do so is purely pedagogical, the intention being to enlighten you as to the exact nature of what I am faced with.

  I shall therefore mention to you that the woman’s breasts are not merely large, they are the size of basketballs and so well inflated one could put them on a string and sell them as helium balloons to the kids at a theme park.

  She towers above me, picks up a kimono from the bed, and puts it on. And then she sits down, removes her helmet, and places it on the table.

  Her expression tells me we’re no longer frolicking in the Mediterranean sun but have relocated north of the Arctic Circle.

  “At your age,” she says, “we need a signature from your parents.”

  “That’ll be a tall order,” I tell her. “They’ve gone missing, you see. That’s why I’m here. They left the name of this place behind them.”

  I hand her the piece of paper with my mother’s note on it. She picks the reading glasses up off the table and puts them on, casts a glance at what’s written, and hands it back to me.

  “What are your parents’ names?”

  I tell her. She shakes her head, her gaze not releasing me for a moment.

  “Never heard of them. Where did you get the address?”

  Not wishing to give the count away, I say nothing.

  “And then there’s the password,” she muses. “Where’s that from?”

  I can’t answer her without telling her about Mother’s and Father’s misdemeanors. So I remain silent.

  “It’s very important to us, that password,” she says.

  There’s something menacing about her voice that would make anyone forget all about the outfit and the red lips. Now one senses oneself to be sitting in front of a person who not only possesses a great deal of willpower but also knows how to use it.