The Elephant Keepers' Children (16 page)

It started quietly enough with her providing phone sex and working as a gardener to help pay for her studies. Leonora has always maintained that one must specialize in order to find professional challenges, and as a gardener she specialized in churchyards. At one point she was in charge of the maintenance of all three of Finø's churchyards, and in the field of phone sex she specialized in people who need to be surrounded by culture in order to feel comfortable. That was when she began asking Tilte and me for advice, because she's
not from what you could call a cultivated family such as ours, so whenever she had a customer who, for instance, wanted to imagine doing it beneath Brunelleschi's Dome, she would pay Tilte and me a symbolic sum to go to the library or search the Internet and find out where in the world that dome was situated, and we would provide her with pictures and help her describe what the space looked like.

As our collaboration developed and Leonora's clientele expanded, Tilte had an idea. She had been wondering why the men never wanted their wives to be part of the stories Leonora told them over the phone. Often they wanted a host of individuals involved, both men and women, and pigs and cows and hens, and it all had to take place in the Whispering Gallery of St. Paul's Cathedral or in the Uffizi Gallery, but their wives were never in on it, and when we asked Leonora why, she said because that was too dull. So Tilte proposed that Leonora sneak their wives into the story by saying things like, “We're on St. Mark's Square and I'm smacking your bottom with my riding crop, and now I'm handing it to your wife and she's giving you six of the best with your pants down.”

After some protest, Leonora began to follow her advice, and once certain teething troubles had been overcome the venture was an enormous success and Tilte was ready for the next stage.

The next stage was that she asked Leonora how come the men never got their wives to give them phone sex, and Leonora immediately forgot all about her meditative inner balance and went through the roof. She was halfway through
her first three-year retreat at the time, and I was present, and she yelled at Tilte and asked her what she thought she was playing at and couldn't she see it would destroy her business if all the wives began performing her own professional services. But Tilte said the wives would never be able to do it without Leonora's help, and that it would be Leonora's job to get the men to persuade their wives to call her so that she might teach them how to say naughty things on the phone. Again, there were some teething troubles, and again it was an unparalleled success. Now Leonora feels eternally grateful to us, especially to Tilte, and she says that Tilte helped her solve an age-old problem, which is how monks and nuns in the great religions may earn their daily bread. In the olden days they received money from benefactors or else went about begging, but on Finø no one would ever be likely to cough up for Leonora or Anders from Randers to enter into a three-year retreat.

So for that reason a light always goes on in Leonora's eyes whenever she sees Tilte and me, and therefore we must be wary of the shadow that falls upon the proceedings at the moment Leonora sees her own handwriting on the paper in front of her.

“That's not my writing at all,” she says again.

We say nothing.

“What do you want to know for?”

“Mother and Father have disappeared,” says Tilte.

Leonora once told Tilte and me something Buddha is supposed to have said, which is that if you're trapped inside the reality of ordinary life and have yet to find the door and
escape, then it matters not one bit how comfortable you might find that life, because troubles are just around the corner, and Leonora is at this moment a fine example. When we arrived, she was in the pink with her rice and beans and her mantras and her view out over the Sea of Opportunity, and now she looks like something the cat dragged in.

I sit down beside her and stroke her arm. People who live for three years on a diet of rice and beans can easily long for another person to touch them, even if they are able to derive some gratification from their vows and the Jacuzzi. And again, it's to do with the division of labor, because where Tilte reaches for the big bottle washer, I go with the feather duster.

“I helped them gain access to a site,” says Leonora.

“What site is that?”

Leonora says nothing. It's a very delicate situation. Leonora is what I would not hesitate to describe as a friend of the family. And yet she resists. But there is no time for resistance. We must assume that Katinka and Lars are on our heels, and neither Tilte nor I will allow ourselves to be taken in by their romance, no matter how deep it may be, and no matter that it may already be directing them toward real love and a police wedding. Their love will not prevent them from doing their duty, which is to return Tilte and me to indefinite detention with blue bands attached to our wrists. In this situation we are compelled, regardless of how much it hurts, to reach for some heavier tools.

“Leonora,” I begin. “We consider you to be a friend of the family. So for your protection, I must warn you against Tilte.
You know her from her nice side. The side of her that is imaginative and helpful. But as her brother I know that Tilte has another side. It appears when she is under pressure. And she is under pressure now. We must find our parents. Tilte is thinking especially of me in this respect. I'm only fourteen, Leonora. How can a boy of fourteen get by without his mother?”

Leonora sends me a feverish look, and I believe I know what she's thinking. She's thinking about whether to ask Tilte and me if we've considered the possibility that with parents as deranged as ours we might be better off as orphans.

It would be deceptive of me not to admit that the thought had indeed struck me, now, as well as on numerous occasions in the past. But this just doesn't feel like the right moment to enter into that discussion.

“Somewhere belonging to Bellerad Shipping,” says Leonora.

“And what would they be wanting there?” I ask.

Leonora says nothing.

“I'm afraid Tilte may soon be so far gone as to report you, Leonora,” I go on, “for computer hacking on behalf of our parents. She may even stoop so low as to propose that the inland revenue cast an eye over your bookkeeping procedures. And to be honest, Leonora, I would hate to see Finn Flatfoot come and remove you from your retreat. My father meets the pastor of GrenÃ¥ Prison once a year on the Theological Education Institute's wine-tasting trip to the monastery kitchens of Tuscany. From what he's told Father, there's so much noise inside a prison you can hardly hear your own prayers. What prospects would there be for meditation, Leonora?”

“They didn't tell me.”

I stroke her arm patiently.

“Leonora,” I persist, “you mustn't lie to children.”

“They were looking for correspondence. I had to get by two passwords. And the documents were encrypted.
Triple DES
, a complex system of encryption of the kind used by the banks. It took me two days to discover the algorithm. I had to use the Finø Bank's server; it's the only one on the island that's powerful enough.”

Tilte has been standing at the window with her back to us. Now she turns.

“What was it about?”

“There were several people involved, all signing themselves with initials, apart from one. Poul Bellerad. There was an abbreviation, too. I looked up the name and the abbreviation. Poul Bellerad is a shipowner with two pages to his name in
Who's Who
for all the decorations he's been given abroad, and all the boards of directors he's on. The abbreviation was for a kind of explosive. Perhaps your parents are planning to landscape the rectory garden. Finø's situated on bedrock, so maybe they've been thinking about a new well.”

“Maybe,” I say.

“There was something about guns as well. Perhaps your mother's doing some work for the armed forces. Helping them out with some technical improvements.”

“It's not unlikely,” I say.

Silence descends upon the little temple. All four of us are now reflective, and what we are contemplating is the feeling
that if there were anything one would never wish to see in the hands of two such people as my mother and father, it would be guns and explosives.

Leonora points a finger at her note in pen.

“That email address was a document all on its own,” she says. “Along with the word
Brahmacharya
. It's Sanskrit, meaning ‘abstention,' particularly in the sense of sexual abstention. I wonder what it was doing among a shipowner's correspondence?”

“Abstention is something all of us can benefit from,” says Tilte. “Including shipowners.”

We gaze out across the sea. The last remnants of sunset can still be perceived, though not as color, more as the last light of day. I imagine the scene. Leonora sitting beside Mother and Father in the rectory, in front of the computer. Tilte once said that the main reason Leonora rejected wealth and fame when all those companies tried to headhunt her was that she is so interested in what goes on deep inside human beings. Sex and the encryption of digital information are two paths that lead into those depths.

How siblings who have been brought up
in exactly the same way can turn out so different is one of the great mysteries of life. Take me and Tilte and Basker, for instance.

Many fond acquaintances on Finø say of me that the pastor's son Peter is such a polite and respectful young man, and if he should fail to play for Aston Villa, he will undoubtedly end up opening a school of etiquette.

One of the rules to which I always adhere is that looking through people's private things is not done, and that includes Leonora's temple in the dunes. But Tilte and Basker have never heard of that rule. They poke their noses in, wherever they go. When you're visiting strangers and Tilte and Basker are with you, Tilte wanders about while conversing, and she opens their drawers and looks in their diaries and address books and asks them what they're doing later on in the day and who that person is whose number is written there. And people put up with it, they sit and watch as Tilte turns their lives inside out and has a look to see what clothes they like to wear, perhaps because they sense there is no malice in it and that it's simply a sign of a curiosity so overwhelming they haven't the strength to confront it.

And so it is now. As we speak with Leonora, Tilte wanders about opening drawers and taking things out and looking at them and putting them back again, and then she draws a curtain aside and behind the curtain is a suitcase packed and ready to go.

“I didn't think you were allowed to leave a retreat,” says Tilte.

“His Holiness the Dalai Lama is coming to Copenhagen tomorrow,” Leonora explains. “Every Buddhist in Denmark will be there.”

“What might His Holiness be doing in Copenhagen?” asks Tilte.

“There's a big conference on. A meeting of all the major world religions. The first of its kind. Ever. It's about religious experience. For scientists and religious leaders and ordinary believers. They call it the Grand Synod.”

Had we been in the rectory, I would have said that at that moment an angel walks through the room, meaning that we all fall silent at once. But Leonora is a Buddhist, and studies Tilte and I have conducted at the Finø Town Library and on the Internet have revealed to us that in Buddhism the heavenly beings are called
devas
, so technically it would be more correct to say that a
deva
walks through the room.

“How are you making the journey, I wonder?” says Tilte.

“Laksmi's picking me up,” Leonora replies. “In the hearse. And then we're going on to collect Lama Svend-Holger, Polly Pigonia, and Sinbad Al-Blablab.”

Laksmi is actually Bermuda Seagull Jansson, midwife and undertaker, and a member of the Hindu ashram on Finø Point, the same ashram led by Polly Pigonia, who bears the spiritual name Antamouna Ma, meaning Mother of Stillness. Polly and her husband inherited a pig farm on the outskirts of Finø Town, only for the council to close it down because even on Finø, whose inhabitants are hardy folk, there are limits to the kind of pong we're willing to put up with from the neighbors, and besides that there was a din from the farm like a lion's cage at feeding time, so perhaps that was why Polly was renamed something to do with silence. After the farm was closed, she took a sabbatical from the Finø Bank and went off to India for a couple of years, and when she returned it was with a new name and dressed in white robes with a little golden crown to go with them when she wasn't at work. And she began to teach yoga and meditation and attracted more and more pupils who also began to dress in white robes and be given new names. So a couple of years ago they bought Finø Point, and they're very nice people who are well liked and respected in the local community if only you can get used to all those new names.

“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.