The Elephant Keepers' Children (25 page)

“Break the code,” says Tilte.

“It'll take three days. We'll be there in nine hours.”

Tilte shakes her head.

“Apart from speech recognition, Mother and Father haven't a clue when it comes to computers. It's all they can do to get
onto the school's website to see when there's a parents' meeting. The code will be as easy as pie.”

“Even standard codes may be labyrinths,” Leonora replies.

Tilte and Basker and I say nothing. But our silence is a mild exertion of pressure.

On many occasions, whenever she has grown tired of all her vegetarian food, Leonora has cut off her retreat to come sneaking down to the rectory, where Father has served veal cordon bleu and pork brawn and duck rillettes and a couple of the big 75 cl bottles of Finø Brewery's Special Brew.

So there's no getting around us, and Leonora knows it. And besides her capitulation in the face of the inevitable, something appears in her gaze that you often see in adults who've known you for a long time, perhaps some kind of astonishment at their standing still while the rest of us are racing ahead at full speed.

“When you were little,” Leonora says, “you were both so mild and gentle.”

She opens the cabin's minibar and produces a bottle of chilled white wine.

“This is my
tsok
,” she says. “A Tibetan way of paying gratitude for all that one has gained from being in retreat. And
tsok
may be accompanied by alcohol.”

Tilte and I allow this to pass without comment. There is only one thing more far-fetched than the grounds given for religious rules, and that's the grounds given for breaking them again.

“We are still mild and gentle,” says Tilte. “Only now more insistently so.”

We are standing on the quarterdeck
watching Finø sink into the sea. You need a breath of fresh air when you've just found out your parents have got their minds set on nicking crucifixes to the tune of two hundred million dollars, plus whatever else they can lay their hands on in the process. The moon has ventured out, and the island is a dark, elongated ridge, dotted here and there with lights and with the beam of the Northern Lighthouse sweeping out across the sea at intervals, and there on the deck I suddenly become aware that Tilte and I will never return, and that this has something to do with our being almost grown up.

Now you'll most likely say, oh, do me a favor, the boy's only fourteen and his sister sixteen, and does he think he's going to live on the streets or something? But allow me to explain: a great many people never get to say goodbye to their childhood homes. A great many of those born on Finø move back there again sooner or later, or else they join a branch of the Society of Finømen in Grenå or Århus or Copenhagen, and go to meetings every Thursday in local costume and dance to the tunes of the Finø Fiddlers in wooden shoes lined with straw. And it's not only Finø. Wherever you go, there are people who
yearn for the place in which they were born, and in fact it might not be the actual place they yearn for at all, because it's said that over the past two hundred years of history even people born in Amager have longed to go back there.

I suspect my feeling has to do with something else entirely, which is Mother and Father. The Danish family has a reverse side, and the reverse side is sticky. This becomes especially evident when playing football. I've often seen first-team players eighteen or nineteen years old whose mums and dads have stood on the sidelines yelling out their encouragement while their little Frigast runs around like a headless chicken and you find yourself thinking:
Do his parents go to the toilet with him, too?

The interesting thing for me and Tilte as we stand here on the quarterdeck is that we sense freedom. It comes of us in a way having lost our parents, and seen from one point of view that's a terrible thing. Just imagine, a fourteen-year-old boy left on his own. It's like someone pulled the rug from under us. But the interesting aspect, seldom mentioned, is that once the rug is gone you have the chance of finding out what it feels like to stand on the bare soil, and actually it feels rather nice, apart from the fact that we are obviously not standing on soil at all, but on the deck of the
White Lady of Finø
.

This feels like a golden moment in our unceasing spiritual training, because all of a sudden we're no longer someone's son or daughter or little dog, but are drifting alone upon the Sea of Opportunity, and I can tell you it's a terrifying experience, but rather intoxicating, too.

Unfortunately, there are two quarterdecks on the ship, and as we look down on the other, we catch a glimpse of Alexander Flounderblood, who has also stepped out into the air to look back on Finø and most likely forward to the day he sails away never to return, so at this moment we pensively retreat with the question of what on earth Alexander Flounderblood might be doing on board the
White Lady of Finø
.

In order to explain
Tilte's unease and mine toward our headmaster, I must now say that regrettably there is much to indicate that Alexander Flounderblood has gained a rather poor impression of my family, and even of me personally.

The afternoon on which he had his first run-in with Tilte about the full meaning of the proper noun
Kattegat
, Basker and I were on our way to visit some friends who previously had coerced me into taking part in the theft of dried flounder, and the purpose of my visiting them now was to inform them that I wished to embark upon a new, decriminalized life.

On our way, Basker and I bump into Alexander Flounderblood, who was out walking Baroness, and when Basker and Baroness discover each other's presence they feel an immediate desire to express their emotions, if you understand what I mean. This state of affairs so angered Alexander Flounderblood that he began to hit out at Basker, at which point I attempted to calm him down by saying that we might look forward to beautiful puppies. Indeed, if Basker's speed and intelligence and fine heart were combined with Baroness's
long legs we might even establish a whole new Finø breed, which in time could become further refined and have its picture in the tourist brochure, and perhaps we ought even to fetch a stool for Basker on account of Baroness being a meter and a half tall and Basker having difficulty reaching.

Counter to my expectations, this failed to calm Alexander at all, and instead he put Baroness in her harness and marched off with her. I felt it important at this point to try to reestablish the good mood between us, because for spiritual searchers like myself, paying heed to the heart is of crucial importance. So I went after him and said that I understood him completely, because what he was afraid of was most likely that the puppies should inherit the looks and intelligence of Baroness and the coat of Basker, in which case we might just as well feed them to Belladonna. Unfortunately, this, too, failed to make the correct impression, and Alexander began to lash out at me with the reins of Baroness's harness, and these lashes were dealt with the utmost precision. Perhaps the reason he was awarded his doctorate in education was on account of his thrashing children with the reins of dog harnesses, but in any case Basker and I were forced to beat a hasty retreat.

Now destiny dictated, for better or worse, that the friends I was visiting—I shall hesitate to refer to them as the Finø mafia, because both the Sicilian and the East European mafias, should they ever wish to settle on Finø, would find themselves to be little more than a girls' choir alongside our local capacities—somehow managed to talk me into stealing some dried fish one very last time. And the garden in which I
would later find myself atop a rack of drying fish in the light of the full moon happened to belong to the old lighthouse keeper's cottage owned by the ministry and in which they had installed Alexander Flounderblood and Baroness. The builders had only just finished doing the place up the day before, so we had no way at all of knowing that the house was now occupied. And as bad luck would have it, Alexander and Baroness stepped outside to take in the moon and immediately became aware of my presence. Thus it transpired that the only thing Alexander likes about Finø at all is dried flounder, and only on account of Basker and Baroness going at it again and my performing a Fosbury flop to clear the garden wall was I fortunate enough to escape.

All this might have been redeemed, I think, by my keenness and diligence at school and by my general awareness of the importance of making a good impression, had it not been for the fact that only a few days subsequent to these fateful events I was to fall foul of a sudden twist of fate. I was busy honing my skills in bending a free kick with the outside of my left foot, a detail that already then imparted terror into the opponents of the Finø AllStars at any set piece and that I more generally perform to such perfection that the people of Finø no longer refer to it as a banana kick but prefer instead to speak of Peter's Horseshoe, and this wholly without exaggeration and mentioned here only in all modesty.

I'm sure you know how much practice it takes to get such a thing off pat, and one essential element of training in this respect is a suitable wall. As it happens, our situation is so
unfortunate that the most suitable wall in Finø Town, which as you know is littered with half-timbered homes from the eighteenth century and medieval brickwork all as crooked as an accident, is the monumental and completely windowless gable end of the chemist's shop adjoining the old lighthouse keeper's cottage. And at this point in my continued prowess, by my striking the ball so cleanly that it curved like a billiard ball around the wall of the chemist's shop, my free kick dropped sharply and directly against the great panorama window of the lighthouse keeper's cottage, behind which Alexander Flounderblood and Baroness were enjoying their afternoon tea.

And since then, even though compensation has long since been paid, and despite my writing a letter of apology and including, just to make it clear what I meant that day, drawings of the puppies I believed Baroness in the most fortunate circumstances might produce in liaison with Basker, since then the mood between us has never been entirely peaceable. And this is at least part of the reason for Tilte's unease and mine at the sight of Alexander Flounderblood and Baroness on the quarterdeck of the
White Lady of Finø
.

I would like to add one final point before Tilte and I return belowdecks. At the risk of sounding deranged, I would like to say that at this moment in time I nourish warmer feelings for Mother and Father than ever before. Perhaps on account of their being such foolish appendices to their private elephants, and perhaps because it's easier to be fond of people once you've managed to dilute the sticky stuff on the reverse side and slacken the line somewhat between you and them.

We enter Leonora's cabin
. She turns to face us, and two things are immediately clear. One is that the white wine is almost finished, and the other is that we stand facing a woman who feels she has reason to be pleased with herself.

“In Buddhism we speak of the Five Poisons,” says Leonora. “Five harmful psychological states of mind. One of them is Pride. Therefore, you will not hear me say that I am proud. But what I will say is that I'm in.”

We pull up chairs and sit down next to her.

“There are seven files,” she says. “Sound and image files, one for each day of the week, and they're labeled from the seventh to the fourteenth of April.”

The speakers of the laptop hiss and an image appears on the screen. A dark gray square with a black circle inside.

Leonora's fingers flutter at the keys; the contrast changes and now we get the feeling of a room. But only the feeling. The camera must be positioned quite high up and must be equipped with a curved lens, giving the observer a distorted panoramic view of the whole room from halfway up the wall.

“CCTV,” I say.

I need say no more. These women trust me. In an age where increasing numbers of homes are equipped with private alarm systems, one cannot enjoy the reputation of being Finø's most foolhardy fruit thief without also being able to identify a security camera.

The room on the screen is empty apart from a dark circular mat on the floor by the far wall. The walls are bare, yet the room must be very large, because it counts no fewer than six windows on each side.

“Can we run through it?” asks Tilte.

Leonora's fingers dance. We jump twelve hours ahead, and now the image is just a gray surface.

“Eleven p.m.,” I say. “No daylight. Try speeding it up.”

“Two hundred times normal speed,” Leonora says. “An hour is less than seventeen seconds.”

We stare at the screen. Daybreak, and the room appears, suddenly filled with people who are then gone, only to return again. Leonora freezes the image.

The people are men in white work clothes. They could be painters and decorators, but it looks like they're assembling furniture. One of them has his back to the camera. Tilte picks him out.