The Elephant Keepers' Children (18 page)

“Einar was going to fly them,” she says.

Bermuda is married to Einar Flogginfellow, who got his pilot's license so as to be able to fly himself to Norway and Sweden and Iceland, there to tighten bonds with other Nordic branches of Asa-Thor. And in order to accumulate flying hours, Einar shuttles Finø residents back and forth to the mainland if they pay for the fuel. He has flown our parents on many occasions, and they are also the best of friends.

“They were supposed to go to Billund,” says Bermuda. “But all of a sudden they wanted to go the day before. Einar couldn't take them because of football practice. But he spoke subsequently to the man who did. They put down at Jonstrup.”

Occasionally, air passengers coming from Finø are indeed flown to the disused airstrip outside Jonstrup. But that's not the way to La Gomera. If you want to go from Finø to the Canary Islands, you fly to Billund Airport in Jutland and get off there.

“I thought I ought to tell you,” says Bermuda. “Under the circumstances.”

Tilte pats her on the arm. She and Bermuda are close. Little can bring people closer together than helping each other put dead bodies in coffins.

Bermuda turns to face the front and starts the engine. We drive off into Finø's moonless night, as will be familiar from my tourist brochure description.

It is not pleasant
, but we must endure what must be endured. All the great men and women of wisdom have said that spiritual progress can never be made without unrelenting honesty, and so I must return to Mother and Father and to the next step on their decline, a step that is taken during Father's sermon the following Sunday, which is to say only a week after the meteorological disasters, and though at first it may seem of little consequence, I can assure you that it is a very big step indeed.

The Lesson is from the Acts and at the very moment Father relates the story of the Resurrection, a white dove comes flapping down from above, circles the model of the tea clipper
Spray Dolphin of Finø
that hangs suspended beneath the vaulted ceiling and was constructed by our own mother, and then decends toward the organ and Mother herself. At this moment I feel a chill run down my spine at the thought that the bird will now perch on her shoulder and rub its beak against her nose and begin to coo affectionately, but this does not happen, and though it indeed appears to swoop down toward the place where Mother is seated, it suddenly disappears into thin air and is gone.

It is but poor consolation that the dove would seem to be rather more intelligent than the owl in the tower, as well as several of my classmates, for now come further depressing details. The first of these is that the churchgoers, who on this day are perched on the very edges of their pews in anticipation of ascertaining whether what happened the previous Sunday was coincidental or the harbinger of a new era, almost shoot up into the air.

My father follows the dove with his gaze though appears not to be the slightest bit surprised. Rather, he looks upon it as though it were in its rightful place, and then he continues, and the effect of this is that the air inside the church almost quivers with tension and the congregation is astonished. Without batting an eyelid, Father concludes his sermon and Mother plays the organ, and hymns are sung, and the churchgoers file out of the church in a state of shock. Except we children are
not in shock; we are in a state of depression and we proceed through the door of the church and past Father in the porch without even glancing at him, apart from Tilte, who sends him the kind of look that would normally put a person into intensive care and then most likely in his or her grave, but Father is immune.

That day, we gather in Tilte's room, and Hans as always tries to figure out how the situation can be saved.

“In a way, it's beautiful,” he says. “Perhaps it might strengthen people's faith.”

“Hansel,” says Tilte, “telling people every Sunday that God exists and that life is meaningful is bad enough in itself if you're not one hundred percent certain, and Father isn't, he's even admitted it. But he and Mother producing white doves and passing it off as a miracle is meddling with people's trust in God, and whoever is guilty of that digs his own grave.”

We don't waste time considering where the dove came from. Any speculation is unnecessary, because twice a year we are made to polish the brass chandelier inside the church, and the mechanism by which it is hoisted up and lowered is based on speech recognition and is situated above the vaulted ceiling. There is a beam across which you can crawl to get to the mechanism and the light fittings, and on that beam is plenty of room to position a birdcage, which my mother could have made as easy as pie, with a trapdoor in the bottom that could be activated by means of a remote control, so one minute the dove would have been sitting peacefully on its perch listening to Father's sermon and the next it would
have found itself to its great astonishment in a free fall into the church.

Where the dove might originate from is likewise a matter upon which we have no need to speculate, our family having for some years enjoyed close business relations with the Grenå Pet Shop, whose proprietors put us in touch with the kennel from which Basker I, II, and III all were purchased, these stylish suppliers furthermore having provided us with live animals to feed to Belladonna and Martin Luther, as well as fresh fish for the sand tiger sharks.

Hans makes a final valiant attempt to come to our parents' defense.

“What about your extensions?” he says.

Whenever we venture to help Tilte toward an improved state of financial security by drawing attention to her shocking expenditure on having hair extensions done in Århus, this money being earned working for Bermuda Seagull at Finø Undertaking and advising Leonora Ticklepalate's
sexual-cultural coaching
, Tilte always ripostes that the reason for her doing so is purely spiritual and that she is helping God by improving such small details as He never got around to finishing during the Creation. So what Hans means is that helping God by jazzing up the service might be acceptable in the same way.

But now Tilte shifts into another gear, now she becomes menacing in a way that might prompt weaker individuals such as Hans and myself to take cover.

“The question of whether God exists is the most crucial in any person's life. Whether we believe, whether we know, or
whether we remain in doubt, each one of us seeks to bring to light the meaning of our own existence. Each one of us strives to discover whether there is something outside the prison, something that made the world come into existence and to assume the form it has assumed. All of us want to know what happens when we die, and whether we were anywhere else before we were born, and for that reason no one should ever meddle with that place inside us all.”

After this rigmarole, all avenues are closed. So we sit around without speaking, though by no means in total agreement, and that's one of the interesting things about us siblings, because we can disagree so much as to be on the point of committing manslaughter, but while it's going on there's always something there that I would not hesitate to call mutual respect and appreciation.

Eventually, Tilte says something.

“They're digging their own grave,” she says. “Not with a shovel, but with an excavator.”

And for then, no more was said.

We have now pulled up outside
a presentable former farmhouse that is the seat of Finø's largest firm of solicitors and home to the island's own Buddhist Sangha, and into the car climbs Lama Svend-Holger, who looks like a heavyweight boxer, which is exactly what he was before he began to read law and went to Tibet and became a lama, and he is, as mentioned, a friend of the family and moreover Mother's and Father's solicitor, and yet he fails to acknowledge us, the reason obviously being that Bermuda's presence weighs upon him, and in a moment it will be clear to you why.

We are now in the vicinity of populated areas, and as we turn toward Finø Point we can just see the lights of Nordhavn in the distance. We draw to a halt in front of Pigslurry Farm, now Finø Puri Ashram, and out comes Polly Pigonia and two of her female pupils, all three of them dressed in white.

Polly nods in the direction of Tilte and me, though not to Lama Svend-Holger, whereupon she and her friends pile inside and we drive off into the dark of night, through the outskirts and into Nordhavn, where we stop outside Bullybluff House, which is a block in the center of town and home to the Islamic mosque, and out comes the Grand Mufti Sinbad Al-Blablab.

Sinbad isn't actually a grand mufti at all, he is only an imam. But the look in his eye and the full beard he sports were sufficient to win him the part of Long John Silver in the Finø Amateur Dramatic Society's production of
Treasure Island
, and his performance in that role won him many friends and admirers among Finø's inhabitants.

His popularity was further enhanced when he entered into marriage with Ingeborg Bluebuttock of Bluebuttock Farm, who now has converted to Islam and wears the burka, and who talked her friend Anne Sofie Mikkelsen into doing likewise, all of which many consider to be a major improvement for the island. My own personal view is that the burka may be rather becoming, and I would encourage others to take it up, for instance Karl Marauder Lander, though in his case there need be no slit for the eyes.

But while Sinbad is a jovial sort, something occurs inside him at the moment he sees Svend-Holger and Polly Pigonia. He doesn't so much as deign to look at them, and neither does he acknowledge Tilte and me, despite our somehow being charged, along with Bermuda, with lugging his suitcases, which are so numerous we have to pile them around the coffin on the assumption that Maria from Maribo doesn't mind. Though she may not have been willing to put up with much in her lifetime, as things stand now we are expecting few protests.

Tilte and I have this spiritual exercise we sometimes perform, which we found in our studies of Advaita Vedanta at the Finø Town Library. Advaita Vedanta is about as supreme as you
can get in Hinduism, its first eleven and the equivalent of Finø FC's AllStars, if you get what I mean. The exercise involves asking yourself who exactly you are. And when you get an answer out of yourself, for instance that I am Peter Finø, one meter and fifty-five centimeters tall, forty-seven kilograms in weight, and size thirty-nine in football shoes, you must consider your answer and ask yourself if it embraces your inner being, and if it does not, then you must delve further inside, gradually dispensing with words and simply listening, and doing so without expectation of what you might encounter once you are all the way in, and the whole time prepared for the worst.

It is a game Tilte and I often play when we have a job to do together. It begins by silent agreement, and no one can tell by looking at us, not even now. But as we pile Sinbad's suitcases impassively into the hearse, we are asking ourselves who exactly are these two persons doing the piling, and when we have finished we pause, this being a vital part of the exercise highly recommended by Ramana Maharshi, whom general opinion on Finø holds to be a spiritual superheavyweight, and the reason one should pause is because the moment you are standing there getting your breath back and resting on your laurels, normal reality is said to be very thin and the door is supposed to be close by.

So Tilte and I are standing there with perspiration on our brows and our backs to Bermuda's spacecraft, and we are reaching inward and at the same time looking out over Nordhavn Town Square. On the other side of the square we see that major player on the global financial markets, the Finø Bank.

The idea occurs to us at once. As I have already said, it is quite normal for people embarking upon the great spiritual journey inward to encounter an idea. Preferably, one is supposed to release the idea and investigate where it came from. But this particular idea is so good and our situation so tight that I stick my head inside the car.

“Polly,” I say, “we promised Mother and Father to pay a debt of theirs.”

“That'll be the fee for the box,” says Polly. “Their safe-deposit box. But it's Easter weekend.”

Polly is a rather determined woman. When you think that she runs Finø Bank and an ashram, and is married and has three sons on the first team of Finø FC's handball section, all of whom play and behave like they were Neanderthals, then it might not seem at all adequate to call her determined. In that case, I would say that Polly is a woman who at such time as the present, when she refuses to move an inch on account of it being the Easter weekend, can be budged only by means of a crane.

The crane appears now, in the form of Tilte.

“Polly,” my sister says, “there are two things in the world I thought would always be there when a person needed them. One is cosmic empathy. And the other is the Finø Bank.”

The door of the bank
requires two keys to open it, and moreover Polly must turn off the alarm, because the bank is, of course, hooked up to Finø Security, which is reassuring. In the case of robbery, customers and staff may breathe easily in the knowledge that John the Savior will be there within forty-five minutes in his neon-colored safety boots accompanied by Count Dracula.

The safe-deposit boxes are located in a special vault the size of a hospital lift, and its door opens silently as though on a cushion of air. Polly has not switched on the lights, perhaps so as not to alarm the neighbors. The residents of Nordhavn, unlike those of Finø Town, have the reputation of scaring easily, but the streetlamps outside are sufficient to light up the interior of the bank.

Safe-deposit boxes, it seems, come in a variety of sizes. Some would be big enough to conceal your mother-in-law, whereas others have just enough room for a pair of engagement rings in a matchbox. The one Polly now opens is the size of an illustrated Bible. I reach inside and my hand encounters something oblong and hard, wrapped up in a plastic bag with an elastic band around it.