The Elephant Keepers' Children (2 page)

Nonetheless, no one should underestimate our great-grandma. You don't get to be ninety-three and survive several of your own children and a six-time spinal collapse and the Second World War, as well as being able to remember the end of the first one, without something special keeping you going. I'll put it this way and say that if Great-Grandma were a car, the chassis has been falling apart for as long as anyone can remember, but the engine purrs as if it were straight from the factory.

When it comes to words, though, I'd call her reserved. She hands them out like they're boiled sweets and there aren't many left, and maybe there aren't when you're ninety-three.

So when all of a sudden, without turning her head, she says, “There's something I want to say,” we all fall silent.

“We” being my mother and father, my older brother Hans, Tilte and me, and our dog, Basker III, a fox terrier named after the book about the hound of the Baskervilles. He's called “III” because he's the third of his kind since Tilte's been around, and she's insisted that every time a dog dies and we get a new one we give it the same name, just one number on. Every time
Tilte tells people who've not enjoyed the pleasure of meeting us before what the dog is called, she always says the number, too. They're usually lost for words, maybe because it makes them think of the dogs that died before Basker, and I think that's actually why Tilte insisted on the name, because she's always been more preoccupied with death than kids normally are.

Now, as Great-Grandma seats herself in her wheelchair and prepares to speak, Tilte leans over the kitchen counter and lifts her legs off the floor, and Great-Grandma wheels up beneath her. Tilte always wants to sit on Great-Grandma's lap when there's something she has to say, but Great-Grandma's become frailer, and Tilte's heavier, so now they do things this way, Tilte lifting herself up and the world arranging itself beneath her so she can curl up in the lap of her great-grandmother, who at this point is already smaller than her.

“My mother and father,” Great-Grandma says, “your great-great-grandparents, weren't exactly young when they married, they were in their late thirties. And yet they had seven children. Just after the seventh was born, my mother's brother and his wife, my uncle and aunt, died, smitten by the same influenza, the Spanish flu. They died almost together, leaving behind them twelve children. My father went to the funeral in Nordhavn. After the ceremony there was to be a council at which the family were going to divide the twelve children between them. That's the way it was done back then; it was ninety years ago and it was all about survival. It took two hours by horse-drawn carriage to get from Finø Town to
Nordhavn, and my father didn't arrive back until evening. He came into the kitchen, where my mother was standing at the stove, and said, “I took them all.”

My mother looked up at him, full of joy, and then she said, “Thank you for your confidence, Anders.”

When Great-Grandma finished telling us this, the room fell silent again. I don't know how long that silence lasted, because time had stopped. There was too much to absorb for anyone to think. It was like everyone had given up. We needed to grasp what had occurred inside Great-Grandma's father when he saw those twelve children at the funeral and felt himself unable to tear them apart. And most of all we needed to understand his wife at the moment her husband arrives home and says, “I took them all.” There's no hesitation there, no going to pieces and wailing at the thought that we have seven children of our own, which can seem bad enough by itself if you think of the three of us in the rectory with our two bathrooms and one for guests, but all of a sudden they've got nineteen children.

At some point, when everything's been quiet for I'm not sure how long, but definitely a long time, Tilte says, “That's how I want to be too!”

We all thought we knew what she meant, and in a way we did. We thought she wanted to be like the father, or like the mother, or like them both, and be willing to take on nineteen children if it ever became necessary.

And she did mean that. But she meant something else, too.

Before she said it, during the long silence, I think Tilte discovered the door. Or became certain of its existence.

Before I start
, I'm going to ask you something. I'm going to ask if you can recall a moment of your life at which you were happy. Not just in a good mood. Not just content. But so happy that everything was totally one hundred percent perfect.

If you can't recall a single moment like that, then obviously you're in a bad way. Which makes it all the more important I reach you with this.

But if you can recall only one, or better still several, such moments, then I'd ask you to think about them. It's important. Because that's when the door begins to open.

I'll tell you about a couple of mine. There's nothing special about them. I'm telling you to make it easier for you to identify them in your own life.

One such moment was the first time I got picked for the Finø AllStars, who play against teams from the mainland in July. The list was read out by the first team coach, whom we call Fakir on account of him being bald and built like a pipe cleaner, and because his mood all year-round is like he just got up after sleeping on a bed of broken glass.

No one under the age of fifteen had ever been picked before, so it came out of nowhere. He read the list out loud and my name was on it.

For a brief moment I couldn't tell where I was. Was I outside or inside my body? Or maybe both places at once?

Another moment was when Conny asked if I wanted to be her boyfriend. She didn't ask me herself but sent along one of
her ladies-in-waiting called Sonja. I was on my way home from school and Sonja came up beside me and was like, “Conny told me to ask if you wanted to be her boyfriend.”

For a moment there it's like someone pulled the plug out: are you floating or standing on the ground? You don't really know. And that sense of floating isn't something you imagine, the whole world as you know it is completely changed.

There's another situation with Conny. This goes right back to when we were about six years old and in kindergarten together. In all of Finø Town there are maybe three hundred children and only one school and one kindergarten, so in a way we were all of us at school and in kindergarten together at some time or another.

The kindergarten had been given these enormous wooden beer barrels by the Finø Brewery, and they'd set them down and chocked them up and put floors in and little doors and windows so they could be used for playhouses. Inside one of those barrels I asked Conny if she would take her clothes off in front of me.

You might ask where I found the courage, since normally anyone would think I'd be too afraid even to ask the way to the bakery, and I'll admit that this really was one of the times I surprised myself the most.

But if at some point you happen to meet Conny, you'll understand that there are women who can bring out the most extraordinary things in a man, even if he is only just past his sixth birthday.

She didn't say anything in reply. Just began ever so slowly to undress. And then when she was completely naked, she
raised her arms and turned just as slowly to face me. I could see the down on her skin. The barrel enclosing us was round like a ship or a church, and it smelled of all the beer that had seeped into the wood over a hundred years. And I felt that what occurred between Conny and me was to do with the entire world that surrounded us.

The last moment I'll tell you about is also the most low-key. I'm a small child, three years old maybe, because we had just got Basker II and he's climbed up into my parents' bed where I've been sleeping too. I slide down onto the floor and push open the French windows and go outside into the garden. I think it must be early autumn, the sun's low in the sky and the grass is cold as ice and biting at my feet. Between the trees are big spiders' webs, and their threads are hung with dewdrops like a million tiny diamonds all glittering at once. It's very early and the morning is fresh and new and impossible to reproduce, as though there's never been a morning like it before and there doesn't have to be a copy because this one will last forever.

At that moment the world is completely perfect. Nothing needs to be fixed, and there'd be no one to do it anyway, because there are no people, not even me, there's nothing else but the joy. It's all so very brief, and then it's over.

I know there are moments like that in your own life. Perhaps not the same, but similar.

I'm trying to make you aware of the seconds just before you realize how special the situation is and then begin to think.

Because the moment the thoughts come, you're back in the cage again.

That's part of what's so depressing about the prison. It's not just made of stone and concrete with bars in front of the windows.

If it were, it would all have been so much easier. If we were confined in the ordinary way we would surely have found a way out, even two such timid souls as you and me. From Grenå or Århus we would have got hold of a couple hundred grams of that pink powder they put in the jet motors of the model planes when Finø holds its Grand Kite and Glider Day. And we would have found a rust-free pipe with a bung at each end, and we would have drilled a little hole in the pipe and put the powder inside and inserted a fuse from a New Year's firework into the hole, and we would have blown a great big exit in the wall, and they wouldn't ever have seen us for the smoke.

But that wouldn't be enough. Because the prison, which is the life of every single one of us and the way we live it, this prison is not simply built of stone, it's also made of words and thoughts. And we are all of us involved in building and maintaining it, and that's the worst part of the whole thing.

Like that time Conny asked me out via Sonja. Right after the first second passed, right after the shock of it had turned the world around, it all snapped back again, and it snapped back because I thought: Can this be true? She means me and not some other Peter? Why me? And supposing it is true, am I at all good enough for her? How long will it last? And if it does last, as I hope and pray it will, it's still got to end sometime, surely?

“And they lived happily ever after.”

I never liked that ending.

Father was the one who read to us in the evenings, to Tilte and me and Basker. Whenever the fairy tale ended with “And they lived happily ever after” it always gave me a sense of discomfort I felt unable to account for.

Tilte found the right words for me. One day, she can't have been more than seven years old and I would have been five, she said, “What does ‘ever after' mean?”

“It means until the end of their days, until they died,” Father said.

Then Tilte said: “Were their deaths dignified?”

Father went quiet. Then after a while he said, “It doesn't say.”

Then Tilte said, “What happened next?”

I know where Tilte got it from, that thing about the deaths and whether they were dignified. She got it from Bermuda Seagull Jansson, Finø's midwife and undertaker rolled into one. That's the way it is—with the island being so small, a lot of people need to be two or three things at once, like Mother, who is the organist and churchwarden and adviser to the agricultural machinery rental firm all at the same time.

Tilte often talked with Bermuda and had even helped her put bodies in coffins. So that's where she got it from.

But that still doesn't explain everything. Try to imagine: you're sitting there with a seven-year-old girl and you've just read a fairy tale, and the idea behind them living happily ever after is for the story to have a happy ending and for the children to now be in the mood for going to sleep and to look at
their family and feel secure in the belief that their mother and father and themselves and the dog are going to live happily ever after too, even if it is such a very long time indeed. And then there's this girl aged seven, Tilte, who asks if their deaths were dignified.

When Tilte said that, I understood why I had never really felt comfortable about those endings. I hadn't ever been able to think like Tilte, I didn't even have the guts. But there was something I'd sensed. That even if they did live happily ever after, what happened when they got to the end of their days?

That may be where the fun stops.

Now I'll tell you
what happened to us. Not so much because I want to talk about us, but to help me remember when the door was open so I can show it to you.

I can't help you out through the door, because I haven't really gone through it myself yet. But if we can find it and stand in front of it often enough, you and me together, I know that one day we'll be able to walk through it and out into freedom.

It's never too late
to gain a happy childhood.