The Elephant Keepers' Children (21 page)

An explanation, however, transpires. It is not pleasant, and it does not arrive until six months later. To begin with, we learn from Finn Flatfoot that Mother and Father have been charged with fraud, and then that charges have been dropped due to lack of evidence. There follow proceedings in the ecclesiastical court and mental examination by forensic psychiatrists, and when these authorities declare Mother and Father to be of sound mind and innocent of any matter demanding disciplinary measures, they return to Finø.

Perhaps you know the feeling from your own family that the only thing in the world to be happy about is that your parents have been released from jail on account of the prosecutor being unable to find sufficient evidence to bring charges, and that their latest escapade has not yet reached the front page of the national newspapers because the people who were the victims of their fraud have been keeping it secret due to fear of ridicule?

In case you don't know what that feels like, I can tell you that it means you proceed with caution and speak in a hushed voice so that the crystal in the cabinet doesn't suddenly shatter, and it is a time in which you sit pale and silent at the dinner table and prod at your food, even if it happens to be Father's fish rissoles.

No one on Finø or at Finø Town School knows anything for certain, but many have an inkling, even though Tilte's lips and mine are sealed. Most are too polite to say a word, and those who are not hold their lives too dear, so all this time we are hemmed in by a wall of unasked questions.

But time is the healer of all wounds, as indeed is the conclusion of forensic psychiatry to the effect that Mother and Father are normal, though at the time of their crime presumably of unsound mind due to pressures of work.

When Father again takes his place in the pulpit, and Mother hers behind the organ, everything seems to level out, and though both are paler and thinner than before, and sometimes have the same look in their eyes as the pigs in the altarpiece, they remain more or less composed.

And before long, the everyday disasters and triumphs of ordinary life have consigned Mother's and Father's misdemeanors to the background, and it's at this point that Hans enters the Mr. Finø competition and wins, whereas I am duped by Karl Marauder Lander into climbing onto the stage in the belief that I am to receive Finø FC's Player of the Year award, after which I lay my hands on an iron bar and begin to hunt down Karl, who flees into the great woods, there to live as an outlaw and only to return three days and nights later, by which time charity hath melted the cold ice of wrath, as the hymn makers might once have put it, and against all this I'm sure you understand how the general public of Finø might quickly relegate Mother's and Father's sins to oblivion.

Their children, however, do not. We hardly speak to our parents at all, weighed down as we are by their misdeeds, and eventually it becomes unbearable to them.

Father is tampering with his ice machine in the kitchen, the only tangible remnant in economic terms of their recent adventure, the Maserati and the mink coat having been swallowed up in the court settlement, and Mother is working on a new device for voice recognition that looks like a cuckoo clock.

Father clears his throat.

“What happened,” he says, “was that the miracle your mother and I were channeling somehow became displaced in time. Meaning that the money disappeared like it was supposed to but failed to turn up again. It caused much ado, but the investment companies and the authorities are settling things between them. I have been able to draw matters to a
close to everyone's satisfaction and we are all in agreement that the case will be pursued no further. The funny thing was that the money suddenly appeared again a week later. From a theological perspective, your mother and I consider that this may be explained in terms of the miracle possessing temporal duration, rather than being of the more usual instantaneous kind. But before we had the chance to take stock of this new state of affairs we were regrettably contacted by the police, who in every conceivable way proved to lack the spiritual depth required to grasp the full significance of the situation.”

“Where did the police contact you?” Hans asks.

“At the counter of a firm called Danish Diamond and Precious Metal Investment, and they came at the very moment we were investing the money in gold and platinum in order that your futures might be secured.”

The kitchen descends into silence. If you think this silence is filled with sorrow over our parents turning out to be swindlers, and with respect for their having managed against all odds to convince investment companies, the Ministry of Church Affairs, the Danish police, and an investigative committee of forensic psychiatrists that we are all best served by the matter being held so close to our chests that no one else will ever be able to see it, then you will have hit the nail firmly on the head.

But something else is in the silence, too, and the nature of it is so much harder to explain, because in a way Father actually believes that the reason he and Mother got away with it is that they were helped by the Almighty, and that what they
did was done to sweeten our childhoods and our futures with gold and platinum bars, so what this tells us is that we must be prepared, because love can sometimes appear in such disguise that one might hardly recognize it at all.

At that moment, Mother and Father have our forgiveness. Nothing more is said, and the matter is dismissed, perhaps only to return in our parents' deserved nightmares. But at the same time, Tilte and Basker and Hans and I realize that if ever you should hold ambitions of being indulgent toward others, then you must also be able to forgive their elephants.

When you've planted
a four-kilometer avenue of lime trees leading to the place in which you live, and have made that avenue half as wide again as the main road, you have inevitably raised the expectations of anyone who cares to pay you a visit. Few buildings can live up to such expectation, but the manor house called Finøholm is one of them, and tonight it does so twice over.

Finøholm is by the shore, which means that the approach to the main house slopes gently from more elevated ground. After the final bend, the visitor pulls up between two circular glass pavilions housing tropical trees and ponds full of water lilies, each with room to accommodate shooting parties of up to eighty people at a time. And on top of these are the gilded figures of three seals balancing on three wild boar, a detail that may give the general impression of a circus act but that in actual fact is taken from the coat of arms Svend Sewerman commissioned for himself when he became Finøholm's owner.

Svend Sewerman went to school with our father at Finø Town School until moving to Frederikshavn on the mainland, where he became a building contractor and made a billion
kroner, which is one thousand million, by digging holes and renovating most of the sewers of mid-Jutland, after which he was voted into Denmark's parliament, the Folketing. My father has told us of how, even when they were at school together, Svend dreamed of becoming an estate owner and would always try to instigate games in which the other children were to be peasants and serfs, while he would be lord of the manor and bailiff and be carried around in a sedan chair. So when he returned from Frederikshavn, he bought Finøholm from the count of Finø, who was advanced in age and so impoverished he could afford to heat up only one room at a time and that was the staff kitchen. And it was at this time he changed his name from Svend Sewerman to Charles de Finø and rebuilt the manor and took on twelve woodsmen and two gamekeepers and two cooks and twenty laborers and two estate managers and maids and cleaners and a man who specializes in how things are done in the great manor houses of the mainland, and uniforms were made for the staff so that whenever Svend Sewerman hosts a shooting party followed by dinner they can flit ab out and look like footmen in the Tivoli Boys Guard. Another thing Svend bought was the
White Lady of Finø
when she was still called something in Arabic meaning the
Will of Allah
, but Svend changed that.

The manor house itself is arranged over three floors. It has a tower, and wide steps leading up to the main door, and behind the house is the pathway to the quay where the
White Lady of Finø
lies decorated with flags for the occasion. The whole scene is brightly illuminated, and Svend Sewerman's
staff are in uniform, and from a distance they look like a period piece put on by the Finø Amateur Dramatic Society.

Tilte has had much to say during the drive, so it falls to me to voice what Lama Svend-Holger and Sinbad Al-Blablab and Polly and the rest of us are thinking.

“Why would Svend Sewerman sponsor a religious meeting in Copenhagen?”

It is an obvious question in light of Svend Sewerman having demonstrated on countless public occasions that as far as miserliness goes he compares more than favorably with Scrooge McDuck, one example being that Finø FC received not a penny from his hand when in desperate need of sponsorship, and when Tilte and I tried to sell tickets for the club's annual lottery and forced our way past his staff and all the way in to Svend Sewerman himself, he told us he had just run out of change, but instead we could take these two delicious pears from the garden, they were worth their weight in gold, and then he sent us packing.

And yet no one is prepared to answer my question, a fact that might seem rather peculiar when you think of how much wisdom and knowledge of local affairs happens to be gathered together at this moment in Bermuda's hearse. So Tilte provides the answer.

“He wants to be a minister in the government,” she says. “He wants to start with the Ministry of Church Affairs and go on from there.”

We pull into the parking area
, which is covered with the finest gravel and is half the size of a football pitch. Then Lama Svend-Holger clears his throat.

“As a solicitor, I am of course bound to professional secrecy,” he says.

Tilte and I nod earnestly. We all understand the importance of professional secrecy.

“Three weeks ago I dined with your parents at the rectory. I have not seen them since. They asked that I bring along with me Karnov's
Compendium of Danish Law
.”

We remember the evening well. Father had prepared whole roasted turbot. The turbot that are caught in the waters around Finø are extremely difficult to roast whole on account of their being as fat as bricks and boasting a diameter comparable to that of a manhole cover. Indeed, stories abound even in distant lands of my father's talent for roasting them whole, and on this particular evening he once more demonstrated their legitimacy, a matter that gave cause for celebration in the usual manner, whereby he and Lama Svend-Holger polished off a crate of Finø Brewery's Special Brew and thereupon sought to bring order to a number of theological quibbles such as the questions of whether God exists and what part of us exactly is reincarnated if, as the Buddhists claim, we possess no individual soul, then proceeding on to such weighty issues as why have we run out of beer and can't we send some children up to the petrol station to get some more.

And we remember Karnov's
Compendium of Danish Law
and that it was yellow and heavy as a baptismal font.

“I recall that it was late in the evening. I went out to the lavatory and opened the wrong door by mistake, a rather regrettable effect, I'm sure, of intense meditational practice during the course of the meal. At first I was bewildered, but soon realized I had stumbled into your father's study. On his desk was a little copy machine still switched on, and next to it a volume of the
Compendium
with a bookmark inserted into it. Purely from habit, I cast a glance at the entry and was rather puzzled to find that the section in question concerned somewhat obscure statutory instruments relating to the police. Then my gaze fell upon the pile of copies that had been run off, and I saw that they were from the Lost Property Act. Not merely section 15 and Circular no. 76, but the entire legislation and all the judgment examples to boot. More than fifty pages. When subsequently I returned to the kitchen, my intention was to ask what on earth they wanted with it all. Unfortunately, my attention became distracted by matters of my practice. And the fish. The beurre blanc. The new potatoes. So I'm afraid I never got around to it. But now that your parents have gone missing, I begin to wonder if they might have lost something.”