The Elephant Keepers' Children (20 page)

That letter would have signaled to most people that besides addressing the everyday credulous, Mother and Father were now beginning to attract proper weirdos, and yet my parents remain oblivious and inhabit a rather tiny section of reality.

At the beginning of June, calls are sent out to them from the mainland. The callers are to begin with the various communities of the Free Church, who are always in the market for new clergy who can speak in tongues, or endure ordeal by fire, or walk on water, or who in some other way possess that extra panache which the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark is so lacking. But soon, the business community, too, would like to hear about Christianity and ethics and money, and preferably in the form of a talk and a service of the kind in which they have heard that Father excels, so when July comes around Mother and Father depart on their first tour, and you could say that whereas until this point they have been paddling at the water's edge, now they are about to take the plunge with all their clothes on.

No one on the parish council or outside it declares in as many words that they believe the Holy Spirit to have descended and taken up residence in Mother and Father and in Finø Town Church. But that certainly seems to be in the air. Therefore, arrangements are made without dissent for a replacement pastor from Århus and a substitute organist from Viborg to be dispatched to Finø, and for Great-Grandma to come and look
after us while Mother and Father travel the country on a month-long tour in the middle of Finø's main tourist season.

Despite its unprecedented nature, this occurs seamlessly and without friction, and an airy, elevated mood descends upon Finø's ecclesiastical circles at the thought of how in this unprecedented way the island is confirming its natural position on the map of the world.

Father and Mother are, of course, also touched by this mood as they pack their luggage into their new estate car, a purchase that may be construed as the first, though by no means final, indication that whatever all this is about, it is also, regrettably, about money. And then before we know it, Mother and Father have waved goodbye, the ferry has sailed, and they are gone.

The airy and elevated mood that prevails across the island does not encroach upon their children, nor upon Basker and Great-Grandma. On the contrary, we are weighed down by bleak and brooding premonitions.

These become more oppressive as the weeks pass and rumor and newspaper articles reach back to Finø, telling of audiences and Free Church congregations and major business figures all tumbling down like bowling pins on account of the quite extraordinary mood that arises when Father begins to preach. Indeed, rumor has it that God now appears as a tangible vibration during the Eucharist, and when we hear of this we look up at each other in concern.

Though the door leading into Mother's and Father's studies remains closed for a month prior to their departure, we
are nonetheless able to secure an occasional glimpse of the portable altarpiece Mother has been constructing. We recall immediately how some years ago she made a little platform incorporating a metal plate on which we would stand whenever we had been skating on Finø Leech Pond. It sent vibrations all the way through the body in a pleasant manner to which we all looked forward without ever realizing that the contraption would later become a building block in a confidence trick.

At least once a week, Mother and Father send us a postcard with a message that is always a variation on the theme
They love us!
And in the envelope is a check and the suggestion that we treat ourselves to a six-course dinner at the Nincompoop's gourmet restaurant. Each time, we read the card and put the check away in the housekeeping wallet, and the only one who says anything is Tilte, and this she does only once, waving the check in her hand and exclaiming, “Blood money!”

When Mother and Father return home, they are delirious and hand out presents we refuse to accept: football shoes, hair extensions made with real hair, and a camera that can be attached to an astronomer's telescope. Two weeks later they take off again, the replacement pastor and the substitute organist are kept on, and Great-Grandma returns.

This time they leave not in the estate car but in a nine-seater minibus with tinted windows into which they load their luggage one night after Mother has worked for seven days in a row without emerging from her study, and when they have gone we all of us fear the worst.

We are given an inkling that our fears may be justified when our attention is captured by an advert in the
Finø Gazette
, which it turns out Mother and Father have placed in all the major newspapers and by which they offer their services in the field of financial advice, forcing us to conclude that our parents, who have never been able to make their own money stretch, are now going about telling people what to do with their savings.

The mood plummets to a depressive low when the
Finø Gazette
quotes a feature from Denmark's great business newspaper
Børsen
reporting on a combined religious service and talk on the subject of Christianity and money, followed by one-on-one financial advising, which Mother and Father have given to the Association of Danish Banks. It is an event that has taken place at a manor house near Fakse, and the journalist reports that during the service wild animals gathered outside the house, deer and badgers and hedgehogs, and great flocks of birds, and during the financial advisory session shifting patterns of light and fog appeared mysteriously in the room.

How Mother and Father technically were able to pull off the wild animals stunt is a matter of some conjecture, but one must bear in mind that from the time of Belladonna our family is not without experience in the field of zoology, and the rectory garden has been home variously to bird-eating spiders, sharks, hens and, for feeding purposes, rabbits. But what is obvious to us is that Mother and Father are beyond the pale and have now ventured out into the field of miracles.

They come home the following week, but not in the minibus in which they left, because they have hired a driver to return that to us the following week. Instead they drive a Maserati, and when they roll ashore from the ferry, rumor of it has preceded them and Finø residents line the road all the way from the harbor to the town square.

I don't know if you have ever seen a Maserati, so in case you haven't I can tell you that it is a car designed for people who are exhibitionists by nature but who nevertheless wish to demonstrate that they are modest enough to not simply open their raincoats and flash their wares. It is a motor vehicle under permanent threat of exploding from the pressure of having to remain unexhibited. When it pulls up in the driveway of the rectory and Mother climbs out, the assembled masses, which unfortunately also number Hans and Tilte and Basker and myself, are presented with the sight of her in a mink coat that reaches all the way down to the ground and that makes everyone, apart from the eight hundred mink that have sacrified themselves for the garment, catch their breath.

During the two weeks that follow, we consider whether some compassionate, Christian way exists by which to return Mother and Father to the real world. Must we really knock them unconscious in order to get them to the psychiatric wing of the Finø Hospital and plead that they be placed in straitjackets?

Sadly, we find no solution before they strike out into the world once again, and we heave a sigh of relief because with their departure the pressure finally subsides from those of our
friends who keep hoping either for a ride in the Maserati at 200 kilometers an hour on the bends and 260 on the straight down to the landing strip, or a glimpse of my mother nude underneath her mink coat.

The hammer comes down a week later when Tilte and I return home from school to find our brother Hans, who is supposed to be away boarding and bent over his math homework at Grenå High School, seated on the sofa next to Bodil Hippopotamus and flanked by three individuals of foreboding countenance, who turn out to be Professor Thorkild Thorlacius-Claptrap with spouse, and the bishop of Grenå, Anaflabia Borderrud.

I have already made mention of the fact that in my early youth, which is to say the period spanning from five years of age to twelve, I may on occasion have been pressured into taking part in the theft of fruit and perhaps a fish or two from the odd drying rack, but that such activity is now firmly a thing of the past. Be that as it may, for much of my life I have often found myself to be the victim of unfair accusation, for which reason we at the rectory have on occasion received individuals demanding not merely swift justice but prompt execution.

And yet I am bound to say that the mood issuing from Bodil and her hit squad is much more ominous.

“Your parents will not be returning home for some time,” she announces. “We have found room for you at the GrenÃ¥ Children's Home, and there you shall stay during the coming weeks.”

Tilte and I have always taken the view that what you need in a tight spot is some good karma.

To our surprise, this is now delivered to us in the shape of our great-grandmother, who suddenly appears in the doorway, and when she addresses Bodil she does so in a tone I have never heard her use before, hushed and ingratiating, just as one might imagine a nun would address an abbess during Mass to ask if there was any chance of borrowing fifty kroner until next Friday, and this humility blindsides Bodil.

“To what do we owe the honor?” Great-Grandma asks.

“It's an emergency,” says Bodil. “The pastor and his wife have been remanded in custody. While their case remains pending, the children will be placed in care at an institution in GrenÃ¥. Starting this evening.”

“They'd be better off here with me,” Great-Grandma says.

“We've spoken to the school,” Bodil goes on. “The headmaster believes the children will benefit from more definite boundaries, and indeed from monitoring the state of their mental health.”

“The thing that worries me,” Great-Grandma says, “is the media.”

This is a twist that takes all of us by surprise. We were unaware that Great-Grandma even knew the media existed. She does not watch television, neither does she read the papers, and she has never so much as glanced at our computers or mobile phones, as though in her own childhood information circulated on runic stones and she has no reason to believe that things might have changed.

“Imagine if the
Finø Gazette
were to catch wind of this,” she says.
“Minors forcibly removed from their home and put away with the dregs of society.”

It's hard to imagine that Great-Grandma would really go to the papers. But what becomes clear is that the path she treads is not the narrow path of truth, the one Father talks about when instructing his confirmation candidates, but rather a military thoroughfare used to bring armored troops quickly into position.

This is clearly what Anaflabia and Thorkild and Bodil are beginning to sense too, because at first they looked at Great-Grandma like she was something colorful and exotic out of the tourist brochure, and now their expressions are changing.

“Of course, none of us in this family would ever let anything leak on purpose,” says Great-Grandma. “But I'm over ninety years old and people my age can have difficulty holding their water. Not that I've ever been afflicted myself. I've never had trouble staying tight.”

Great-Grandma snips the air like she were cutting a hedge with a pair of shears.

“Oh, I can shut off the flow all right. Would the bishop be able to do as well, I wonder?”

She fixes her gaze on Anaflabia Borderrud, whose face has now taken on a distinct pallor.

“But words,” Great-Grandma goes on, “words run away with me. It may be Alzheimer's. An early stage, perhaps. Some days I can't remember half of what I've said or to whom. Imagine if I had one of those days and let it all come out. About
children being taken away and miracles in the church. Imagine if a journalist from the
Finø Gazette
happened to be there.”

And so it is that good karma turns the situation our way. Thorkild and Bodil and Anaflabia beat a hasty retreat, and Great-Grandma follows them all the way to the door with a stream of advice about pelvic exercises designed to lead to that pinnacle of success whereby flow from the bladder may be terminated so effectively one would think it had been severed by a razor.

It is left to Finn Flatfoot
to fill us in on the details in the days that follow. What happened is that Mother and Father were giving a service for the Association of Danish Investment Companies, on which occasion they were intending to perform a miracle. They were going to burn money, which would then appear again from out of the ashes. The burning part was a success. But the twenty-six million kroner of various denominations had yet to materialize.

The thing that puzzles us is not that Mother and Father should have been playing with fire, because they have done that so many times before. It is well known on Finø that Mother is highly skilled in the field of pyrotechnics, and in recent years she has been in charge of much of the firework display for Finø Town's New Year celebrations. And when Finø Heath is burned off every other year on account of it being a designated preservation area, Mother, aided by John the Savior and Finn
Flatfoot, is the mainstay in keeping the heath in its scorched state of natural beauty.

So none of us is surprised by the actual burning, even if currency does burn rather poorly, a fact we know because Tilte once burned a hundred-kroner note that Maria from Maribo owed her in wages after Tilte substituted for her in the kiosk during the summer holiday. When eventually Maria coughed up after two months of trying to consign the matter to oblivion, Tilte declared that it was merely a matter of principle and now she was going to show Maria what she really thought about money, for which purpose she then held the hundred-kroner note against the flame of the candle on the counter that was supposed to make buying ice cream such a cozy experience, and the money burned so very slowly, though was eventually consumed. So there is absolutely no doubt in our minds that Mother could send twenty-six million kroner up in smoke. What puzzles us is that she and Father should have been unable to bring it all back again.