The Elephant Keepers' Children

by Peter Høeg

And then they closeted themselves away to speak in private.

  When they emerged, Pallas Athene looked like a person who is fatally wounded just as the sun comes up. She bid us goodbye rather incoherently, climbed back into her Jaguar and drove away.

  I stood at the kitchen window and watched her go. Tilte came up behind me. She put her arms around me, but Peter Finø is not for sale, at least not for false displays of affection. I kept my shoulders straight and remained unapproachable.

  “That thing she does, putting her heart away in that box,” said Tilte. “It’s no good. Even if it’s together with a photo of the kids. I explained it to her.”

  Tilte’s voice was full of what the Christian mystics call repentance and the desire to placate me. So I condescended to reply. One should never turn a repentant sinner away.

  “You want to reschool her,” I said. “Turn her into a therapist.”

  Tilte remained silent. She didn’t need to speak. It was obvious I’d hit bull’s-eye.

  “We’ve sold that once already,” I said. “To Leonora.”

  “This’ll be the next stage up,” said Tilte.

  “You want her to get her clients to bring their partners with them. To Abakosh. Where she and Andrik will give them therapy.”

  Tilte leaned her head against mine.

  “I gave her a couple of sound bites to be getting on with,” she said. “The two main principles of love. One: always take your husband with you when visiting a brothel. And two: leave your heart where nature put it.”

  Tilte has been back only twice since she moved away, and the first time was when we had Svend Sewerman admitted into the aristocracy. Tilte had received a letter from the Palace with a coat of arms on the back, and one from the Association of the Danish Nobility, and together we cycled across to Finøholm. There, we sat in the kitchen with Svend and Bullimilla, and the first thing we did was to give them back their curtains. We had washed and ironed them and folded them neatly. When you’re involved with profound personal development, it’s important, as far as possible, to return the material world in the state in which you found it. Then Tilte placed the letter from the palace on the table with the coat of arms facing upward.

  “Peter and I,” she said, “are protectors of Finø Football Club. I should like to mention in passing that the club is in desperate need of a new indoor facility, the old one being rather run-down and overbooked.”

  Svend Sewerman moistened his lips. And I have to concede that I didn’t know quite where to look either, so I chose to stare at the floor in embarrassment.

  Then Svend asked what a new indoor facility would cost. His voice was dry, and Tilte replied that the going rate was upward of six million. Whereupon Bullimilla inquired if the six million included a cafeteria, and Tilte said no, that was just for the basics.

  “Svend,” said Bullimilla, “we need a cafeteria. Think of all the growing youngsters in need of sustenance, and a kitchen’s the heart of any building, so don’t make this one too small, will you?”

  “For seven million,” Tilte said, “we can do you something that’ll last for generations to come.”

  Then she placed a document on the table in front of Svend. Mustering all my willpower, I lifted my gaze from the floor. The document was a deed of gift from Svend Sewerman to Finø Football Club. Tilte had drawn it up at home in accordance with all the conventions. It was for the sum of seven million kroner.

  When Svend signed it with a look on his face that suggested giving money away ran against his deepest convictions, Tilte opened the letter from the queen and the one from the Association of the Danish Nobility, both of which confirmed that subsequent to studies of church records as presented by the Parish of Finø Town, the association found it proved without doubt that Svend Sewerman was a direct descendant of the Ahlefeldt-Laurvig Finø family and as such was entitled to bear that family’s name, and congratulations were in order, and the queen had signed it all herself.

  Svend fainted. This is the only time I have ever seen a grown man faint. His eyes turned to the sky and he slid slowly to the floor.

  Tilte and I did nothing, mostly because we didn’t think there was anything we could do. Svend Sewerman is shaped like a barrel and, like I said, used to work digging holes in the ground. He is not a man that can be moved easily without the aid of a trolley. Bullimilla, however, drew him up in her arms as if he were a child. Then she stood there for a moment, holding him upright while looking at Tilte and me.

  “When we open the new facility,” she said, “you can leave the food to me.”

  That was the first time Tilte came back.

  The wording is intentional. Before the Grand Synod and Mother’s and Father’s disappearance, I would have said that Tilte had not been home. But I no longer refer to the rectory or Finø as home.

  It has to do with the rectory’s unexpected guest.

  I’ll say this slowly, because it’s important: Tilte moving out was a greater shock to me than I had anticipated.

  I don’t know if there are clinics like Big Hill where you can be treated for sister dependency. But that was certainly what I needed. We had returned home from Copenhagen, and Tilte and I insisted on each of us having our own Portakabin in the rectory garden, and that was where we were going to live. We were given what we wanted without delay. That’s one of the differences between then and now: since we came back there have been a number of occasions when we have needed to explain to Mother and Father how things are going to be, and now they do as we say.

  It’s all so as not to be trampled to death by the elephants. We realize that. Mother’s and Father’s elephants are not the Indian variety that can be taught to sit on your lap and do the crossword puzzle and stand on their front legs and wag their tails. Mother’s and Father’s elephants are the African species that wander great distances without warning and that you can be on reasonable terms with but never be certain of. So that was the reason we wanted to live in Portakabins, so as to keep our distance should they begin to wander.

  I must have imagined things would continue like that, with Tilte and me in our own separate Portakabins in the garden, but close to each other nonetheless. Even though I’d known for years that she would leave one day. So when it happened, it was worse than I ever thought it would be.

  I found out what loneliness is really like.

  I’m sorry to have to mention something as somber as this, now that we’re approaching the end. But it’s important.

  Of course, I had been familiar with loneliness for a long time, perhaps even always. It feels like it’s been with me as far back as I can remember.

  I don’t know how it feels to you. Perhaps we all experience loneliness differently, in our own ways. My mother once told me that for her loneliness is “Monday in the Rain” playing in the background when she feels like she’s all on her own, even though that song also has to do with love and Father. To me, loneliness is a person. It has no face, but when it appears it’s as if it comes to sit down beside me, or behind me, and it can happen any time, even when I’m with others, and even when I’m with Conny.

  I’m seeing Conny again. Sometimes I visit her in Copenhagen, where her friends stare at me as if I were a puzzle that cannot be solved, and the puzzle is what on earth Conny sees in me. Sometimes she comes to Finø. Very often, being together with her makes me feel extremely happy.

  I don’t know if you’re in love with someone. If you’re not, there’s something I would like to say to you, and that is that love comes to everyone. All fifteen years of my experience in life tell me that the world is organized in such a way that all of us find someone to love. Unless we work against it. So if you’re not in love with anyone but would like to be, you should try to discover which part of you is working against it. And this is founded on in-depth studies conducted by myself and Tilte.

  But even with Conny here, loneliness sometimes appeared and sat down behind me, more conspicuous than ever before, and I couldn’t understand why. Until one ev
ening in the rectory kitchen.

  It was October, the half-term holiday, and Great-Grandma had come to stay with us. Tilte was here, too, and she had brought Jakob Bordurio with her. Hans and Ashanti had come from Copenhagen. They live together now in a small flat, blessed with their love, as the hymn makers might say, and not even the neighbors are any bother, even though Ashanti beats the drums and trance dances and occasionally carries out the ritual slaughter of a black rooster on the balcony.

  Conny was sitting beside me and Father had just presented his roasted whole turbot on a flatbed trolley when Ashanti said, “I’m pregnant. Hans and I are expecting a baby.”

  Thereupon descended the silence of the grave of which I have previously spoken at length, and with it plenty of opportunity to reach inside if one only had the presence of mind to do so. It was a silence that remained unbroken until Ashanti added that she felt certain it was going to be a girl, and that she had already decided on a name. The baby, she said, would be named after our mother, Clara, and would bear the middle name Nebuchadnezzar, familiar from the Old Testament and hot stuff in Haiti. Then there were two family names, Duplaisir and Finø, and furthermore Ashanti had felt her baby kicking inside for the very first time on board the little Cessna during the flight to Finø, and for this reason, and because she wished to modernize the age-old Haitian tradition of giving children names that were far too long, their little treasure would quite simply be called Clara Nebuchadnezzar Flyvia Propella Duplaisir Finø.

  We are, as you know, rather hardened to unusual names on Finø, and yet I would say that Ashanti’s announcement was followed by a somewhat prolonged pause, during which the only sound to be heard was Basker’s wheezing, and even that seemed to be approaching hyperventilation. But then Tilte pulled Ashanti into a corner and told her it was a beautiful name, though a little on the ornamental side, a matter that might make the child the object of unwanted attention from dark forces and the black magic that slumbers beneath the outward Christian appearance of Finø’s inhabitants and that very easily becomes jealous of small children with fancy names, so why not make do with Clara Duplaisir Finø, and that was what they eventually decided on.

  I have on several occasions drawn your attention to how dramatic events often seem to come in clusters, and this was true of this particular evening, too, because no sooner had Tilte and Ashanti returned to their seats than Great-Grandma cleared her throat and announced that she had something to say to us, which was that she had decided how she wanted to die.

  At this point we became concerned. On the most recent occasions Great-Grandma had stayed with us, she had allowed me to stir the buttermilk soup while she herself ran the show from her wheelchair, so when we heard her say what she said we all feared the worst.

  “I have decided to die with a chuckle,” Great-Grandma said. “A hearty chuckle. I’ve always thought that would be the most splendid way to go. But why, you might ask, am I telling you this now? And the answer is that I don’t anticipate any of you being there to witness it. And why not? Because I intend to survive you all, including little Flyvia Propella. And why would I intend to do such a thing? The answer to that is that I have taken a young and athletic lover. And now I should like to present him to the family.”

  The door opens and in strides Rickardt Three Lions clutching his archlute, and he walks up and seats himself on Great-Grandma’s lap.

  None of us saw this coming. Not even Tilte. And I must say quite frankly that a moment passes before we regain our composure and natural politeness and are able to tuck away under the table the questions that crop up in such a situation, primarily, of course, the issue of whether Great-Grandma is now of the nobility.

  While everything hangs in the air, I glance across at Tilte and can tell that she needs to swallow this, because Great-Grandma’s lap has been Tilte’s for as long as anyone can remember.

  Many, including myself, would be inclined to believe that we have now exceeded the number of revelations a family can cope with in a single evening. But no sooner have we gathered ourselves than Father makes an announcement.

  “I’m resigning from the church. Mother will no longer be playing the organ. We’re going on a pilgrimage. Starting in Vienna, at Knize’s, and taking in the great cafés. And when we come home your mother is going to start a small factory. For my part, I shall be writing a cookery book. On spiritual cuisine.”

  At this point, Tilte and Father exchange glances. Neither she nor the rest of us are taken in by Father’s jovial tone. This is deadly serious.

  “I promise you,” Father says with emphasis, “that my cookbook will contain not a word about the Holy Spirit materializing in the duck rillettes.”

  We exhale collectively. I intentionally say we exhale rather than heave a sigh of relief. Because with African elephants in mind, you will understand that when you have parents like ours no guarantee is ever going to accord complete coverage.

  And then Father says, “How about a beer?”

  Meticulously he places a half-liter bottle of the Finø Brewery’s Special Brew in front of each and every one of us.

  I don’t know about your own family. Perhaps you were given blackcurrant rum in your baby bottle and served 150-proof moonshine at your confirmation. But in our house, Mother and Father have never once offered me or Tilte or Basker alcohol. This is the first time, and one can well understand why. It’s because every time grown-ups crack open a bottle, they hear the roar from the abyss inside them and choose to think that the sound comes from their children. So this is profound indeed. We fill our glasses and say cheers, and all of us know that at this moment we are taking part in a religious rite of quite the same solemnity as the Eucharist at Finø Town Church.

  And then I sense that another guest is present, and that this person is seated behind me. The feeling is so very real it prompts me to turn around, only to discover that no one is there, and I realize that this is loneliness. In the midst of good friends, with Basker at my feet and Conny at my side, I still feel completely alone and deserted.

  I cannot remain in the kitchen. I stand up without drawing attention to myself and go outside. I walk slowly toward the place where the town comes to an end and the woods begin. The night is dark, the sky sparkling with stars. This is no longer the sky I once wrote about in the tourist brochure. It too has changed. There are more stars now. So many, it’s as if they’re seizing the firmament. As though the night sky is shifting its weight from the foot that is darkness to the one that is the light of the stars.

  Then I put my arm around my loneliness, and I become aware that she is a girl. And for the first time in my life, I stop trying to comfort myself and keep her at bay.

  I am looking straight into what I have always feared the most. I am losing them, losing everything. This is what I saw coming in Conny’s apartment on Toldbodgade. But now it’s stronger and real. Hans is gone, Tilte is gone, and Great-Grandma is gone. Soon the rectory will be depopulated. Mother and Father will be gone.

  And now you might say that Conny will surely remain. But at this moment in time, that thought is of little use. Because what I feel is that the loneliness I am now embracing is something not even the person you love can help you with.

  It is the loneliness of being enclosed within the room that is oneself. I understand this now for the first time in my life. That the self is a room inside the prison, a room that will always be different from other rooms. For this reason the self will in some way always be alone, and always inside the building of which it is a part.

  I can’t explain it any better than that. Yet it feels insurmountable.

  I walk with my arm around that insurmountability. I hold her tight and do not comfort myself. I can say that quite truthfully. I sense how fond I am of the others who are behind me in the night: Mother and Father, Tilte and Hans and Basker, Conny and Great-Grandma, Jakob and Ashanti, and Rickardt and Nebuchadnezzar Flyvia Propella. All my human rooms.

  And then something happens.

 
; In a way, it’s like when you’re on the football pitch. When the defense is coming at you it’s easy to be hypnotized. You see your opponents, the obstacle. You fail to see the opening, the gaps in between.

  That’s what happens now, all by itself. I shift my attention. From the blackness of the night to the light of the stars. It’s my consciousness doing the dustman’s trick. My attention is turned one way, toward loneliness, and I go the other. From the feeling of loneliness to what surrounds it. From being trapped within myself, inside the joys and sorrows that make up Peter Finø and that reside like tiny, floating islands adrift within us all, I shift my attention to what those islands are adrift upon.

  That’s all I do. It’s something anyone can do. I change nothing. I don’t try to make the loneliness go away. I just let go of it.

  It begins to remove itself. She begins to remove herself. And then she is gone.

  What remains in a way is me. But in another way, it’s just a very deep feeling of happiness.

  Behind me, I hear someone approach. Conny. She nuzzles up close.

  “We’re all rooms,” I say. “And as long as you’re a room, you’re imprisoned. But there’s a way out, and it’s not through a door, because no door exists. All you have to do is see the opening.”

  She takes my head in both her hands.

  “Some girls are fortunate enough to be in love with deep and intelligent boys,” she says. “And then there’s the rest of us, who have to make do.”

  And then she kisses me, turns, and walks back toward the rectory.

  I must admit to being rather in a muddle, with one thing and another. So I stay put. There are times when a man needs to be alone.

  It’s started to rain. Light drizzle. And with the rain comes a sense of gratitude, though I wouldn’t know what Denmark’s Meteorological Office would say about that. I am overwhelmed with joy, so intense it cannot be suppressed. Not by my family dissolving. Nor by the fact that when I shared my infinite wisdom with her, the girl I love simply gave me a kiss and one of those comments women make that cause men to lie sleepless in their beds until dawn. Whereupon she floated away, back to the turbot.