The Elephant Keepers' Children (31 page)

“Nice try, Brother,” he says softly, and I can tell from his voice that I at least managed to disturb his breathing.

Then he opens the door of the car beside which we are standing, bundles us into the backseat, slips behind the wheel, and whisks us away.

Although we have only glimpsed
Hans's face, it's obvious that something about it has changed, and the resolute manner in which he is now acting seems only to confirm the impression. Part of the explanation is immediately apparent, because sitting beside us on the backseat is a person wearing a familiar sweater and running shoes, and that person is the gorgeous singer of Blågårds Plads.

“You've met Ashanti, of course,” says Hans.

I'll be frank and say that the moment he utters those words I feel a sudden jolt in my heart. Though there ought to be plenty of other things to think about as we move along Langelinie quayside, and a great many questions need to be addressed, for a brief moment something else becomes salient. Because when Hans utters her name, Ashanti, he speaks it in the same way that Conny, who now is gone with the wind, spoke my own name, and it is a way of speaking a name that cannot be faked and may only occur when a person is genuinely in love with another.

For that reason, it's as sure as fate that in the short time that has passed, something has taken place between the singer and our brother, which has completely rearranged his furniture and pulled a major part of him down from the stars and back to earth and moreover has turned him into a person who is deliriously in love. And though this is exactly what Tilte and
I have always wanted for him, the realization that it has now happened feels almost devastating. Because now I realize that I never really thought it would happen at all. Deep down, I always thought Hans would be there to look after me right to the very end, and now the end is suddenly nigh, now everything hurts and there's a knot in the pit of my stomach.

The car in which we are seated is a Mercedes, a make Tilte and I are beginning to take for granted. We turn toward the Langelinie bridge, but then Hans crosses the cycle lane, pulls up on the grass verge, and turns off the engine. Tilte and I cower in the depths of the car, peeping cautiously out of the windows. We see taxis passing by, and behind them the limousines that have picked up Polly, Lama Svend-Holger, and Sinbad Al-Blablab, a hearse containing Maria's coffin, two police cars, and a black van with bars across the windows, and inside we catch a glimpse of Alexander Flounderblood staring straight ahead with a look that suggests he might be thinking of biting his way through the steel plating and throwing himself upon innocent passersby.

“We need to go to Toldbodgade, Hansel,” says Tilte. “If that's part of any galaxy you can find without the aid of astronomical navigation?”

This is but good-natured banter, most people would say. Yet beneath the seeming innocence of it I hear something else, and what I hear is that Tilte feels the same way as I do about Hans and the Gorgeous One. We want so much for him to be happy. And I hear, too, that we now have another job to do if that happy childhood is ever to be brought back home to take its place alongside all those other trophies.

We drive on along Esplanaden
. Tilte makes a sign. We stop and she gets out, goes into a kiosk, and comes back with a SIM card. This is an action replete with timeless wisdom, because although Katinka has already had a full morning, a mind such as hers is bound to discover that she's lost her phone and then have it blocked.

Tilte gets back into the car. As Hans prepares to pull away from the curb, she and I catch sight of something that prompts us to say, “Wait!”

Esplanaden is a very fine boulevard and an obvious choice for excursions and walks organized by the Society for the Improvement of the Capital. On such occasions the society's members most likely dwell upon the building that is now diagonally behind us and exudes such character as to make even us, who are so familiar with architectural distinction from our rectory home, feel like the Little Match Girl, despite our being seated inside a Mercedes.

The main entrance of the building is a glass door as wide as a carriageway, and on the wall next to the door is a marble plaque, and this is what has attracted Tilte's attention and mine, because engraved on the plaque are the words
Bellerad Shipping
.

It's hard to fully explain why Tilte and I now leap into action like two members of a synchronized swimming team, and all I can say is that we are driven by a sense of being at one with a higher purpose and with our own extensive experience at elbowing our way into even the most inaccessible places in order to shift lottery tickets for the benefit of Finø FC.

“Reverse back three meters,” Tilte says to Hans. “Then get out and hold the door for Peter and me. Salute us when we get out. And then open the glass door for us.”

As noted, everything indicates that Hans has been through a remarkable phase in his development. But he has yet to reach that advanced stage at which one might venture to contradict Tilte. So he reverses, gets out of the car, opens the door, and salutes. And then he holds the glass entrance door open for us.

We enter a large reception area. Behind a desk sits a middle-aged woman in her early thirties, one of the kind familiar from the great religions, who guard something valuable with a Gurkha knife or a flaming sword.

But right now, her guard is down, and the reason for this is the Mercedes, Hans standing to attention and saluting, and Svend Sewerman's curtains draped in the manner of the Supreme Vedanta.

In situations such as this, Tilte and I divide our labor. I break through the defense, while Tilte lurks to pick up the rebounds.

I look around me for inspiration. The walls are adorned with photographs of the company's ships. The first thing one notes is that these are not Optimist dinghies but container
ships and supertankers from upward of one hundred thousand gross register tons. The next thing to catch one's attention is the names. The ships have names like
Aunt Lalandia Bellerad, Cousin Intrepid Bellerad
, and
Uncle Umbrage Bellerad
.

On the basis of this information I deduce two things: the vessels of Bellerad Shipping sail not with coconuts and tourists on Jutland's Gudenå but with fuel oil and heavy cargo in the Persian Gulf; and Bellerad is a man who is proud and extremely fond of his family.

I lean forward toward the guardian of the threshold.

“I'm from the Saudi embassy,” I tell her. “With me I have Her Royal Highness Princess Til-te Aziz. We are here to inform Mr. Bellerad that he has been awarded the Order of King Abdul Aziz.”

Next to the woman stand three men, who have been studying a map of the world on the wall. Now they turn slowly toward Tilte and me.

Two of the men are bald and thickset, and equipped with the kind of aura that for a moment makes me think that perhaps Tilte and I ought not to have acted on that higher impulse at all but remained outside in the car.

But it's the man in the middle who now commands most of our attention. We know that this is Mr. Bellerad himself, and if you ask me how we could possibly know I would only be able to say that if one day you should find yourself standing in front of Hannibal or Anaflabia Borderrud or Napoleon, which is to say any of the great generals of history, then you wouldn't be in any doubt either.

The good thing about the situation is that we have the initiative. Bellerad and the two baldies and the woman with the flaming sword are quite nonplussed. So Tilte and I have the chance to digest these first, bare impressions of the ship owner's psychology.

There are three things we notice. The first is that Bellerad is a man who resembles most others insofar as he starts to quiver inside when he hears that an award is being bestowed upon him, a medal he will be able to show Aunt Lalandia, Cousin Intrepid, and Uncle Umbrage.

The second is that he is a man whose life has taught him that when a person bestows something upon another, it's because the bestower is aware that everything will be returned to him twice over, and now the immediate question is what might be engraved upon the reverse side of this particular medal.

The third piece of information Tilte and I tap directly from our bare impressions is that Bellerad is a man who has something to hide. Not your usual medium-sized secret of the kind all of us have lying around somewhere. Bellerad's secret is big and angry. Tilte and I feel like we're standing in front of an old male elephant excluded from the herd on account of bad behavior and now feigning repentance while he awaits a chance to strike back.

“The medal will be awarded during the Grand Synod,” I say. “By His Majesty the King himself. And Her Royal Highness the Princess.”

Tilte and I retreat toward the glass entrance door. Bellerad and his two henchmen are not the kind one cares to turn one's
back on. Hans opens the glass door for us, then the car door. He salutes, climbs behind the wheel, and pulls away into the flow of traffic.

I venture to glance back over my shoulder. All four have spilled out onto the pavement, where they now stand gaping in our direction.

We continue on past office buildings
and more destinations for excursions of the Society for the Improvement of the Capital. Tilte points and we take a left. We are silent and pensive, and what we're thinking about is that we hope Bellerad hasn't discovered that Mother and Father have hacked their way into his private correspondence, because he doesn't look like a man who would let that sort of thing pass. In fact, he looks rather like someone who would have a bazooka at the ready on his hat shelf for just such an occasion.

We catch a glimpse of what might once have been a warehouse but now has been given a loving hand and two hundred million kroner to become a place most people see only from the outside and from a distance, unless they happen to have won the pools. The Mercedes descends into an underground car park and comes to a halt in front of an iron gate equipped with a push-button panel. Tilte enters a code from Katinka's mobile and the gate opens into a basement of such caliber that the parking spaces could be rented out as hotel rooms if you put up a few partition walls and installed beds. We leave the car and ascend in a lift made of mirrors and tropical wood. It
projects us upward like a bullet and stops as gently as if in the down of a seagull. We step out onto a landing decorated with orchids in bowls of marble. Tilte produces a key from one of them and we step into the two-room apartment she has borrowed from an acquaintance.

It's true that the place has two rooms. But what Tilte has neglected to tell us is that each of them measures a hundred square meters. And if one should still feel one's style to be cramped, there's a balcony outside running the entire length of the place and looking out onto the blue waters of the harbor.

The furniture is of the kind you'd expect the designer to have signed personally and only yesterday, because everything is brand-new, and there aren't even any pictures on the walls yet.

At first I feel like asking Tilte who might own such a place, but a thought descends like a sudden blanket of cloud: what if Tilte has an admirer? If she has, then having an admirer with such impeccable taste might indicate this to be a serious matter indeed. It would mean that in a year's time Tilte would be all engaged and married and gone from home. Which is to say that the only thing we'd need then would be for Basker to find some cute little bitch to run away with and I would be all on my own, Mother and Father gone, siblings well on their way, and all forlorn in the vacuum would be me, myself, and I, Peter Finø, solo.

We all sit down in the designer chairs. But then Ashanti stands up ever so slowly and walks through the flat to the far end where the lounge becomes an open kitchen. Although she
says nothing, I sense why she has removed herself, and it's because she wants to allow the three of us to be alone, and it's such a fine gesture that one can only feel warmth for her, even if she is on the verge of kidnapping one's older brother.

And yet I can't help feeling a sadness inside. None of us says anything, and the feeling becomes all the more intense. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to call it grief, and the cause of it now begins to emerge. For some reason it becomes apparent that Tilte and Hans and I will not be together forever. Ashanti and Hans have sparked it off, but in a way it's not only the fact that they're now a couple. What I sense all of a sudden is that eventually we will arrive at the end of our days, whereupon one of us will be the first to die, to be followed inevitably by the others.

At this point you might say so what, everyone knows they're going to die, and this would indeed be true. But normally it's something we know only in our minds. Knowing you're going to die is never here and now, but something far away in the future, so distant you can hardly even see it, and for that reason alone it need never be taken seriously.

But at this moment it suddenly becomes here and now.

I know you're familiar
with that feeling, because it's something all of us have experienced at some time. I don't know where it comes from. But looking at Hans's hand as it rests there on the back of the chair, his large, square hand, which is always tanned, I suddenly understand that a day will
come when that hand will no longer be there to take hold of me and lift me up to see the world from above.

I glance at Tilte. Her face is tanned, even though it's still only April. It's a thing she's inherited from our mother. In Tilte's face, age is fleeting. When you look at her you often find yourself unable to tell if she's seven or sixteen or sixteen hundred years old, because her eyes seem always to look out across great spans of time. And besides that, there's a kind of inquisitiveness about Tilte, she always wants to know everything there is to know about people, and there's a kindness, too, and even if it's pointed and sharp, it's a kindness so immense that only Great-Grandma is ahead of her, and she's had ninety-three years of practice.