The Elephant Keepers' Children (19 page)

Outside, fellow humans await our return. And yet Polly makes no motions to leave. There is something she wants to say.

“Are your parents enjoying La Gomera?”

“They're having a wonderful time,” I tell her. “Plenty of sunshine, refreshing margaritas, and toes wiggling in the sand.”

“How lovely for them. To get away. We all have so much to attend to, your parents included.”

We have known Polly Pigonia all our lives, but we have never seen her like this before. The moment is quiet and unobtrusive. But unobtrusiveness should never be underestimated.

“What with the bank, and the ashram, and a family to look after.” She sighs. “It's no easy life.”

Polly Pigonia's three sons score goals like they breathe in the air. But yellow cards and two-minute suspensions rain down on them like confetti. They play handball as though it were armed conflict, and I have never understood why, because all three have been brought up on yoga and bowel irrigation and images of gods with elephant trunks. But at this moment, as we stand here in the bank, something I have never seen before is emerging: the elephant that lives inside Polly. I get the feeling that perhaps elephant keepers are able to recognize one another, and that Polly perhaps has seen something in Mother and Father that she finds familiar.

She wants to say more, but something stops her. She closes the box.

We drive south
, out of Nordhavn and across the Northern Sands, which is a huge expanse of overgrown dunes with such steep drops to the sea that you would hardly believe you were in Denmark at all, and in a way we are not, because this is Finø.

I don't know if you have ever been in a car with leaders belonging to different religions. It's such an unlikely state of affairs that I feel sure you have not, because normally such luminaries would go a long way to avoid one another, and I can assure you the experience is not something you would care to write home about. Sinbad and Polly Pigonia and Svend-Holger and their various entourages have yet to exchange a single word between them, and each one of them carries an expression that says the others do not exist, and this does nothing to improve the mood inside Bermuda's car.

But then Tilte has an idea to relieve this rather cheerless atmosphere. At the place where the road hugs the coastline, and where there is an almost vertical fifty-meter drop to our right with waves washing onto the beach far below us, Tilte leans toward Bermuda and wrenches the steering wheel to the right, causing the hearse to career toward the crash barrier and beyond it the open air.

The crash barrier is so low it looks like it's there only for a laugh, and we graze it just as Tilte jerks the wheel again and the car is returned to the tarmac.

In the course of our comparative theological studies at Finø Town Library and on the Internet, Tilte and I have derived pleasure from the extent to which the great spiritual figures
agree on the idea that the individual's deeper awareness of his or her own mortality is highly beneficial to his or her joie de vivre and general outlook on life.

This is clearly demonstrated now, because following Tilte's little prank, the mood is no longer as before.

Bermuda pulls into the side and turns off the engine, and the faces inside the car are so pale they glow oddly in the dark.

I don't know if you're familiar with the expression
silent as the grave
, but Tilte and I know the phenomenon it describes only too well from a time when she borrowed a coffin from Bermuda Seagull Jansson. Bermuda buys them wholesale from Anholt Coffin Makers, who can supply twelve different models, all spray-lacquered and exquisitely finished, and Tilte borrowed a white one, which Hans and I on account of its tremendous weight were required to help her lug up the stairs to her room. We put it inside what she calls her walk-in wardrobe, which is to say the rear of her room, where she has erected clothes racks made to specification by our mother. Tilte's plan, which she then proceeded to carry out, was that whenever her friends were visiting and they had finished trying on clothes and giving each other face masks and drinking tea on Tilte's balcony and watching episodes of
Sex and the City
, she would encourage them to lie down in the coffin and try to gain an idea of what it must feel like to be dead, and when they did so she closed the lid.

Tilte was extremely satisfied with the project and maintained that her relationships with her friends were the more profound for it. By
profound
she was referring to what occurred
when her friends had lain in the coffin and listened to the silence of the grave, and Tilte then walked them home and talked to them about the fact that even though they were only fourteen or fifteen years old they would soon, in the greater scheme of things, be dead. After their little talk, and once Tilte delivered them safely to their garden gates, their relationship had often become profound.

Unfortunately, Tilte was forced to return the coffin after only a short time, because after their relationships with Tilte had become profound, so many of her friends—girls and boys alike—had been unable to sleep except in their parents' beds, and they refused to go to school for a week afterward, all of which prompted their parents to have words with ours, and Father was obliged to have one of those talks with Tilte from which he always emerges with great patches of perspiration underneath his arms and a look on his face that would make you think Tilte had put him in the coffin, and moreover there occurred one final and decisive episode concerning Karl Marauder Lander to which I shall presently return, and after that Tilte was required to give the coffin back to Bermuda.

But before she did, Hans and I tried it out for size. Hans was too tall and his legs stuck out of the end, but I had the lid put on and lay in the dark and followed Tilte's instructions as she explained that I was to imagine I was dead and that worms were eating me, and she had learned from the Internet that such worms were actually larder beetles, and she described to me what they looked like. I can tell you that silence was inside the coffin, and that as I lay there I understood that expression,
and that is why it comes back to me as that phenomenon now occurs inside Bermuda's armored wagon.

Then Tilte speaks.

“Peter is only fourteen,” she begins, “and yet he already has a history of substance abuse and lack of proper parental care. His personality is brittle and will break at the wrong word. And right now he feels the mood among us to be weighing him down. Therefore, he and I would like to ask if you might not at least say hello to each other, because if you do there might just be a chance that Peter will avoid succumbing to psychosis on the journey, and any hopes we may have of reaching our destination in one piece will be considerably heightened.”

Our fellow passengers have not yet come around, but now they exchange glances at least and mumble words that with the aid of electric amplification and some benevolence on the part of the listener might be interpreted as greetings.

This is not to be confused with what one might call spontaneous, heartfelt compliance, but rather an expression of their being so afraid of Tilte as to be rendered almost incontinent. But it's a start.

Tilte has made an effort and delivered the goods, and this is beyond dispute, so now I allow her to drift back into midfield and pick up the ball myself.

“There's another thing,” I say. “Our Mother and Father have disappeared and are wanted by the police. We should like to find them first, and to that end we need to sail on the
White Lady
to Copenhagen. We need your support. You all
know Svend Sewerman. No one who might risk costing him as much as five kroner will be allowed on board before their business and identity have been checked back through three generations. Would there be any chance of our being able to say we were with you?”

The faces surrounding me are closed. After a moment, Svend-Holger speaks.

“If your parents are wanted by the police and you've done a bunk, then our helping you would be a criminal offense,” he says.

Silence descends again, and the only sounds are of the waves against the shore. Then Sinbad says something.

“I made note of you,” he says, “when we played
Treasure Island
and my wife found a grass snake in her wig, on stage and in front of four hunded people. I recall that you, Peter, once entered the Mr. Finø contest. And I thought about you when the Association of Danish Insurance Companies sent two private investigators and an appraiser over here on account of so many windows being broken and so many dried fish being stolen from people's gardens.”

Silence again. And then I speak. Not to appeal for their help, because I've given up on that. But in order to explain.

“It's not for our sake,” I tell them. “We will get by. It's worst for Mother and Father.”

I scramble for words that might adequately describe our parents. Are they lost souls, or more like children? Have they mistakenly wandered off the path, or are they on course but going about it the wrong way? The language resists.

“It's not because we need them to come home and take care of us,” I continue. “Tilte and I will be fine. We are inspired by mendicant monks and barefooted Carmelites. We can borrow orange robes from Leonora and strike out onto the roads of Finø with our begging bowls.”

Whether I am able to subscribe completely to this declaration, and whether Tilte and Basker are wholly in agreement as to the part about the begging bowls, I am rather unsure. But sometimes you must head for goal, even if your teammates aren't there to help you out.

“The fact is—and this may perhaps surprise those of you who know Mother and Father well—the fact is that we love them. And this is all about love.”

And now something changes in the faces around me.
Sympathy
is a strong word, not least in an assembly such as the one in question. But it would not be too much to say that a softening has taken place.

“There is a verse of the Koran,” says Sinbad. “It says that small devils are often the worst. And yet they require the greatest mercy.”

Now that the mood is tainted
with at least some understanding of Tilte's and Basker's and my own situation, and Bermuda's hearse plows on through the fateful Finø night, as I referred to it in our tourist brochure, I should like to conclude my report of events surrounding Mother's and Father's first disappearance.

In the following months, my parents proceed with caution. There may be, for instance, a slight rush of wind at the very moment in Father's sermon when he speaks of the angels on the cusp of blowing their trumpets somewhere in Revelation, though outside the church there is not a breath of wind at all. Or else a pair of organ pipes begin to whisper just as Father quotes, “What is whispered in your ear, shout from the rooftops,” though Mother is seated not at the instrument but among the congregation. Or on the occasion of a funeral, when Father concludes the graveside ceremony with “from earth thou shalt again arise,” a little puff of white steam may be expelled from the grave, just a mite, like the finest plume of smoke, and disappear as quickly as it materialized, though almost causing the mourners to fall to their knees. And no one suspects the slightest thing, all of it being executed with such
elegance, without joins, and one senses so clearly Mother's love of her smoothing plane.

The occasion on which we come closest to catching them in the act is when Finø Town Church is given a new roof in May. A small team of plumbers is casting the lead outside the church, and for that purpose they are equipped with a tray of sand that they hold at an angle, and onto it they pour the molten lead, which hardens immediately. At one point, we notice Mother speak to them and when she sees us she sends us a look that is utterly devoid of the unconditional love with which a mother always looks upon her children, and though we turn our backs and pretend not to have noticed, we have seen that she has given the plumbers something whose use she now explains to them. So when two Sundays later Father once more has ascended into the pulpit and again taken up Revelation, and this time it has something to do with a city tumbling to the ground, at which point a section of lead releases itself from the roof with an almighty clatter, and when the same thing happens a minute later, Tilte and Hans and I resolve not to speak to our parents again for an indefinite period of time.

Unfortunately, Mother and Father fail to notice that we have ceased communication, and our resolve is therefore to no avail. As May progresses, Sunday services are packed, though to begin with this gives rise to little concern insofar as my mother and father have always been known to attract an audience. But later, as the month wanes, we find that parishioners now queue out into the churchyard, and people begin to flock in droves from Anholt and Læsø, and then even from Grenå.

People from the mainland, particularly those from the capital, have always wanted to get married on Finø. Perhaps it has to do with the inherent difficulty of standing on Blågårds Plads or in Virum and vowing to remain together forever when all you can see around you is evidence to the effect that one should be lucky indeed if all the things people promise each other last until Wednesday. But it is so much easier on Finø, surrounded by half-timbered cottages from the eighteenth century, and the medieval Finø Monastery and hordes of faithful storks, and where the tourist brochure will tell you that Finø's primeval landscape remains untouched with its mulberry trees and polar bears, and Hans in local costume, and Dorada Rasmussen's colorful parrot. And for this reason the parish council has long since drawn up a waiting list in order to avoid the burden of four weddings a week. But now the list begins to swell ominously, and letters of application arrive from throughout the land, from soon-to-be parents and the parents of the newborn who want their infants to be christened in the church, and from the families of people who have died, who would like to know if the deceased might be buried in the earth of Finø, even though the person in question never set foot on the island in the time he was alive. And an elegant letter arrives from an elderly lady, which we children read, because at that point we have become so concerned that we on occasion permit ourselves to open our parents' mail. The lady asks if she might be cremated on Finø and then have her ashes rolled into treat balls, to be blessed by Father and thereupon delivered to the Finø parrots of whose presence in abundance on the island she
has heard tell, and in this way she is sure to be evacuated all over the natural beauty of the island, on which she has learned that the Holy Spirit has now taken up residence.