The Elephant Keepers' Children (13 page)

“Photographs,” says Tilte. “They took photographs. Then they pulled everything apart and used the photographs to put it all back again. But when?”

Because the garden adjoins the churchyard to the north, one can easily get the feeling that the rectory is like a little house in the woods. Only it isn't, because other houses surround it. There's the old bell ringer's cottage from which Bermuda Seagull runs her funeral home and midwifery clinic, and the tourist office, and the Fisher's House from which Leonora Ticklepalate runs her coaching business, and the Finø Local History Museum, and then the domicile of Finø Curtains and Drapes, which is the nursery of Karl Marauder Lander.
Indeed, Finø Town is a veritable anthill, and poking a stick in one place means we all come running out at once.

“In the night,” I say. And I say so with all the weight that comes of a murky past prowling around in innocent people's gardens. “They did it all in one night.”

My mother's and father's studies
are adjoining, and the door between them is always open, except when Father is in solemn discussion with his parishioners. Until the point when our parents disappeared for the first time, the sound from these two rooms in a way kept the rectory on an even keel while Hans and Tilte and I were blowing through it like tornadoes. From Father's study came the sound of his pencil moving across paper as he composed his Sunday sermon, or the sound of the computer keyboard when he typed his final draft, and from Mother's study came the sound of nippers clipping at electric wiring, or the faint hiss that issues from tin solder when it melts, or her singing to herself whenever she was working on her speech recognition program.

The first room one enters from the kitchen is Father's study, and from it there is a full view into Mother's. As always, they have tidied up and put things away before leaving, and their orderliness has been replicated by the forensic officers after they turned the place upside down, and theirs is the orderliness upon which we now gaze.

There's not much to see, because Father's study contains only a large desk, his computer, and a tall bookcase containing
the books he consults in his work as pastor, more than a thousand volumes, but nothing compared to what he has in the living room. So we look at none of it. Neither do we consider the pictures on the walls, which Tilte says are reproductions from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and which portray holy men and women struck by revelations, or naked women coming out of cockleshells. Regarding the latter, Tilte once told Father that to have such matter on display was unacceptable, because how did he think the young confirmation candidates would feel when they were invited into the rectory. When Father still did not remove them, Tilte went upstairs into the attic and found some underclothes from a Barbie doll and affixed them to one of the pictures in question, so that now it portrays the sea-born Venus in bra and knickers. Father left the underclothes where they were, and whenever people ask he says with solemnity, “My daughter Tilte has positioned these garments in order that nudity may be suppressed.”

He says this especially when Tilte is within earshot, and it's one of those little jokes that are a part of any family idyll.

Concealed behind the picture is the rectory's built-in safe in which the church records are kept, and as we lift the picture, everything at first seems normal. But it isn't normal, because when we turn the handle the safe opens. The church records are in their usual place, but where the lock should be, and the microphone and the electronics that open the door, there is nothing, because someone has removed the entire mechanism.

We hang the picture back up without speaking and then turn toward the great closet at the far end of the room.

In that closet are some of my father's clothes.

One should never underestimate my father. Although, unlike Tilte and my mother, he does not require a separate goods carriage to contain his wardrobe just because he is going away for a week to the Theological Education Institute of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark, he always knows exactly what he is wearing down to the minutest detail. My personal view is that what they ought to have put to the ecclesiastical court, and what certainly would have provided grounds for disciplinary measures, are the minuscule swimming trunks he wears in summer when parading along the beach at Sønderstrand with his arm around my mother, trying at one and the same time to look like a family man who happens to be a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark, married for nineteen years, and a beach bum on the lookout for some action.

So my father isn't just fussy about his clothes; he looks after them like they were religious relics, and for that reason a look inside his wardrobe will reveal to Tilte's and my own inquisitive gaze at least something about what he's up to.

At first it seems he is up to nothing at all, because all his clothes are there. Inside the vast closet, foremost and to the right, are the three dress forms on which hang his cassock, his dinner jacket, and his dress suit. Behind them, his lounge suit and his overcoat. To the left are shelves housing the ruffs that go with his cassock. The whole interior reeks of a cologne called Knize No. 9, which he orders from Vienna, and I feel like closing the door again immediately, because my personal
opinion is that if the ecclesiastical court couldn't nail him for those swimming trunks, they could surely have built a case on male perfume instead.

But Tilte won't let me close the door.

“Something's not right,” she says.

She pulls me inside. We proceed past several dress forms, through rows of shirts on hangers with loose mother-of-pearl cuff links in little pouches, and then we are at the back of my father's wardrobe, standing in front of two more dress forms, these ones bare.

“What are these for?” Tilte asks.

I activate my sense of order and my excellent memory for detail, and the answer comes to me. Not that I am accustomed to rummaging around at the back of my parents' wardrobes. But twice a year, everything is hung out to air in the sun and wind, and my mother says that doing so means never having to use mothballs, because the moths perish if they ever see the sun.

My own view is that if the vermin can survive the stench of Knize No. 9 and the sight of my father's silk shirts, then it will surely take more than a little sunshine and a sea breeze to kill them off, but the division of labor in our house deems Mother to be the expert on technical matters, so out everything comes twice a year, and that's how I know.

“His spare cassock,” I say. “And an old dinner jacket. They were on the dress forms.”

We embark upon the journey that will lead us out of the closet once more. On the way, we pass by the first of the dress
forms at the front. I allow my hand to brush against the black woolen garment.

“This is Father's old cassock,” I say. “He's taken the new one with him.”

Any pastor in Denmark would be thrilled to own a cassock like Father's old one, which is fortunate because the garment comes from the Ballenkop Uniform Tailors on the island of Samsø, who make cassocks for the entire Danish clergy. With the exception, that is, of the pastor of Finø. Father's cassock is of cashmere and tailored to order by Knize of Vienna at a price we are compelled to ensure remains a family secret in order to avert the risk of popular uprising.

Tilte and I look at each other. We are thinking the same thing, which Tilte now utters. Bodil must be right.

“They're not in La Gomera at all.”

Our father will go to great lengths in order to attract attention to himself, and this is no less true at times when he is in the Canary Islands. But those lengths do not include appearing poolside in full vestments.

We step into mother's study
. Tilte whistles the first bars of Mignon's “Let Me Shine” from Schubert's
Goethe-Lieder
and the room is immediately illuminated. All electrical functions in the house have switches but may also be activated by various excerpts from the songs of Schubert. The music system is activated by the beginning of Mignon's “Teach me not to speak, but make me silent.” The toaster is turned on and off by “The gaze of your eyes in mine,” and the guest toilet in the hall flushes on “Only he who knoweth longing can know how much I suffer.”

Mother's study is not so much a study as a workshop, and in fact it is not one but four workshops, because in each corner is a different workstation. Beneath the window are the computers, facing the living room is a corner devoted to radio electronics, diagonally opposite a long table with vises and a small lathe for precision mechanics, and on the other side of the door a carpenter's bench.

Above each workstation, appropriate tools hang with their outlines on plywood boards, meaning that we can see at a glance if everything is in place.

We stand in the middle of the room and look around. How should we be able to find something the police's own crack housework unit has missed?

I open the door of the broom cupboard and take out the vacuum cleaner. If you vacuum a house containing women, very often irreplaceable items of value such as earrings or necklaces or Tilte's hair extensions will be sucked up into the dust bag. So I am rather practiced in the investigation of dust bags, and my experience has taught me that they can be a mine of information.

Unfortunately, there is much to indicate that the police are equally practiced in the field, because the dust bag is gone, replaced by one that is new and utterly empty.

Yet now, standing here with the vacuum cleaner in my hand, I upend the extension and notice that caught in the brushes of the floor tool is a wood shaving. I pick it up.

On its own, there is little that may be considered remarkable about a wood shaving, especially in a room containing a carpenter's bench and three planes plus one electric.

“It's three months since Mother last worked with wood,” I say.

I turn the shaving in my hand. The life of wood shavings is brief, albeit replete with beauty. When fresh, they are as elastic as corkscrew curls, fragrant, and almost transparent. But within a week they dry out and may break and become sawdust. The specimen I hold in my hand is still fresh. On its way toward old age, as indeed we all of us are, but fresh nonetheless.

Tilte and I think the same thought: we cannot rule out the possibility that the flying squad took the opportunity of indulging in handicrafts, that they perhaps spent time at the carpenter's bench, working with the fretsaw and the smoothing plane. Perhaps they wanted to take a present home with them for the children. It's not impossible. But then again, it's not exactly likely, either. What is likely is that Mother used the plane on something just before she left. And that the police overlooked that little shaving in the floor tool of the vacuum cleaner.

The wood from which the shaving originates is dark brown with white markings. No one can ever inhabit a rectory that contains a wood-burning stove and a mother who dabbles in furniture making without becoming familiar with wood. This is a hardwood. Tropical. Without being mahogany or teak.

We remember at once. And again, there is no need to speak. It's like with me and Jakob Aquinas Bordurio Madsen: from kickoff to final whistle, Jakob and I were in telepathic contact with each other. Tilte and I head straight for the kitchen, and Tilte lifts her voice and sings, “Alas, his kiss!”

The excerpt is from “Gretel at the Spinning Wheel” and is a choice we children have learned to live with, because family life is all about compromise. The reward in this case is that no one could do anything but marvel at what now occurs before our eyes. The trapdoor of the larder is raised, the ladder unfolds, and from out of the floor appears a guardrail for the safety of small children and dogs who might otherwise fall into the depths. And then the light goes on.

What we call the larder consists of two rooms, one of which is the boiler room containing the boiler, a washing machine, and a tumble dryer. And then there's the actual larder itself, which is where we are going.

It is a large room, which is just as well considering Father's love of food.

None of us knows exactly where he found his role models, though his primary source, as mentioned, would seem not to be his mother, and neither can it possibly be Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, because he made do, as everyone knows, with five loaves and two fishes, or possibly vice versa, and then all that stuff about “Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor labor over duck rillettes, yet your heavenly Father feeds them.” My father's style is quite another and is more about liaising with delicatessens and selected butcher's shops on the mainland, as well as endless hours spent in our kitchen in a mood of delirious exaltation. It is also about what is now in front of us, which is to say a very considerable collection of chutneys and relishes and compotes and syrups and jams of the seasonal fruits.

So we are standing in a room whose wall space is utilized to the full. But not a room in which things may be hidden. There is but the bare floor, a wine rack taking up an entire wall, and then meter upon meter of shelves crammed with bottles and jars.

The shelves are of merbau and Mother made the last of them to use up the final bare wall space six months ago. That's what Tilte and I have recalled.

And that's the wall we're looking at now.

It's entirely in keeping with Mother's spirit and style to go on improving upon something she made six months ago. Or seven years ago. But it is not Mother's style to spend time planing shelves two hours before leaving for La Gomera, or wherever it was she happened to be going.

Tilte and I do not speak, but inside our minds we do the same thing. What we are looking for, and whose specific characteristics as yet are unrevealed to us, cannot be found by thought alone. Thoughts always move according to familiar patterns, and what we are looking for is outside the box. We consider the area of wall that is host to Mother's most recent shelves. We consider the rows of jars, the raspberries, the rose hip and plums, the blackcurrant syrup, the lemons from Amalfi and the tamarind chutney. We consider the brown wood of the shelves. The brackets. The whiteness of the wall.