The Elephant Keepers' Children (3 page)

BOOK: The Elephant Keepers' Children
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That's something Tilte and I read once in the library, and I always loved that sentence. But don't think about it. If you think, you'll come to a halt. And then you'll say it doesn't make sense, because your childhood has already gone, and what's gone was like it was, and nothing can change that now.

Instead, you should let the words remain inside you: it's never too late to gain a happy childhood.

I think that's true. But sometimes it can be a problem.

Still, Tilte says there's no such thing as problems, only interesting challenges.

So I'll say that one of the interesting challenges of gaining a happy childhood began on Good Friday, on the square called Blågårds Plads, in Copenhagen, Denmark.

2

We're waiting on Blågårds
Plads in Copenhagen, we being Basker, Tilte, me, and our older brother, Hans, and we're waiting in a black-lacquered carriage drawn by four horses, and for that we can thank Hans. Assuming, that is, that we would wish to thank him at all.

Most of the population of Denmark, or at least the tourists of Finø, think my brother Hans looks like a prince in a Danish fairy tale. This they base on his being one meter and ninety centimeters tall and having blond curly hair and blue eyes, and being strong enough to unhitch one of the horses from the carriage, turn it on its back, lay it down on a table, and tickle its tummy.

But because Tilte and Basker and I know Hans, we think he looks like a grown-up baby, too.

The strategic midfield of the Finø AllStars may never have had a more formidable general. But off the pitch, with no ball to occupy his attention, his gaze is permanently fixed toward the stars, and anyone in that state will show a tendency to fall over the furniture.

Now he has moved to Copenhagen to study astrophysics, which also has to do with stars, and here he has taken on a
part-time job driving a horse-drawn carriage, and Tilte and Basker and I have come to visit him for Easter while Finø Town Church is in the hands of a visiting pastor on account of Mother and Father making their annual trip to La Gomera, a wannabe Finø in the Canary Islands.

I don't know if you're familiar with Blågårds Plads. Personally, this is my first time here, and to begin with the square seems rather ordinary. It's warm in the sun and cold in the shade. There are still some piles of snow left over from winter, and there's a church with a number of people in front of it. As a clergyman's son one is always pleased to see customers in the shop. Sitting on a bench in the sun are three men in their prime of life, which they spend drinking Carlsberg Elephant beer. Behind our carriage, a greengrocer is standing outside his shop staring at a crate of lemons that have survived the winter thanks to the five daily prayers he directs toward Mecca, and in front of us is an old lady on her way across the street with a case of cat food balanced on her Zimmer. So the only unusual thing is the question of why a tourist wealthy enough to pay five thousand kroner online in advance for an hour and a quarter's carriage ride through the city's historical center should have chosen to depart from Blågårds Plads, and besides that there's the issue of where he might be, since he should have been here ten minutes ago and has not yet turned up.

Then Hans's mobile phone rings, some sentences are exchanged, and after that our lives are completely different.

“It's Bodil,” says the voice at the other end. “Are Peter and Tilte with you?”

Bodil Fisker, known to all as Bodil Hippopotamus, though short and slight of stature, requires no introduction. She is the municipal director of Grenå Kommune, which includes Finø and the islands of Anholt and Læsø, and everyone knows her. Hans has no need to put her on speaker phone, not that she's loud, she keeps within a normal range, but her voice is the penetrating kind that can reach out into the farthest corners of the globe. And it's not only her voice, it's the entire way she is, and all that stuff about the spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters could have been written about Bodil Hippopotamus.

But what truly moves upon the face of everything is Bodil's attention, not her actual self. A municipal director is not a person one meets in the flesh but someone with people below her, who in turn have people below them, and they're the ones you speak to on the phone. I have seen Bodil only once, on an occasion I would prefer not to dwell upon, but which nevertheless I must tell you about presently. Bodil calling us in person is a sign that something is terribly wrong.

“Tilte, Peter, and Basker are here,” says Hans.

“Did your mother and father leave an address?”

“Mother left her mobile number, that's all.”

“When are you due back?”

“We have one trip to make before I return the carriage.”

“Call me when you're on your way home. On this number.”

Then she hangs up.

Tilte turns her head and looks me straight in the eye. And I know why. She wants to remind me of something. That at this moment there is still a chance.

I have hesitated to tell you this. But now I'll say it straight out.

Tilte and I have discovered that the door is open not only in happy moments. It is open, too, in moments of dread. Exactly as you learn that someone is dead or has got cancer or has disappeared, or that Karl Marauder Lander—known by all on Finø as the eighth of the seven plagues of Egypt—has got up at four in the morning to be the first at the gull colonies where we gather eggs in May, which is okay because the gulls, the herring gulls and the lesser black-backed gulls begin to sit on their eggs only when there are three, so the nests that contain three we leave well alone. But at the very moment you discover that Karl has emptied the nests and the world is about to collapse around you, at that moment the door is open.

And now I shall tell you what Tilte and I have discovered one must do: one must reach inside and feel. The moment the shock kicks in there's this very unusual, very special feeling inside and all around you, and that is what you must reach into and feel. It is there just before the tears come, and the despair, and the customary depression, and the giving up, and the decision that if Karl can get up at four in the morning, then you can get up at three or two, or even not go to bed at all so as to be sure of getting there first. During that brief moment when your normal instincts are gone and new ones have yet to appear, at that moment there is an entry.

This I remember on Blågårds Plads, and I listen inside and sense that the shock has caused the door to open.

After that, things happen so quickly it's all we can do to keep our snorkels above water, and this is even true of Tilte.

The first thing is that Tilte says what all of us are thinking.

“Mother and Father have disappeared!”

The next is that Blågårds Plads begins to change.

3

Do you know when
the way you're feeling sort of rubs off on those around you, like on the way they look? One minute Blågårds Plads is all okay, without necessarily being worthy of preservation by UNESCO and attracting five million tourists to Copenhagen. The next it looks like a place people come crawling to in order to die. The group in front of the church looks like a funeral procession. Once they've finished their beer, the three men on the bench will lie down and wait to expire, and they won't have to wait long. The greengrocer's lemons turn out to be composting, and the old lady with her Zimmer and her cat food looks at us as if we're driving a hearse and she's going to ask if she can see the deceased one last time.

Then I say, “Bodil's frightened.”

We all heard it, and in a way that's the scariest part. All of us heard something in Bodil's voice that can be understood only in one way: that she has run into something bigger than herself.

And then the singing begins.

It comes from inside the church, and the voice is female. She must be using a microphone, and Blågårds Plads is at the same time a funnel that amplifies sound. The song is a foreign hymn and swings gently like gospel music.

The words are inaudible, but it doesn't matter as long as the voice is there. It is a voice big enough for us to park our whole carriage inside, and it is so warm that we would not be cold for one second, not even on a winter's day, and so cozy that we would gladly run the risk of a parking ticket, because we would never want to leave ever again.

For a brief moment, it lights up Blågårds Plads. It puts the greengrocer's lemons back on the trees, it makes the men on the bench consider joining Alcoholics Anonymous, and it causes the old lady in front of us to let go of her Zimmer and prepare to dance the fandango.

It prompts Hans to get to his feet, Tilte to stand up on the seat, and me to move up close to Hans and elbow him in the side so that he will lift me up to see, the way he has done ever since I was small.

A procession emerges from the church. I can see several clergymen in chasubles, a lot of people dressed in black, and in front of them walks the lady who is singing.

At first one wonders how someone so small could possess such a large voice, and then one thinks that she is not a person at all, because it seems like a long green dress is floating of its own accord, and above it a green silk hat like a turban with nothing in it. Then the dress turns and a face becomes visible, her skin is light brown like the stone of which the church is built, and that is what makes her face disappear.

Then she looks toward us, and as she holds the final note she takes off her golden high-heeled shoes, removes her green turban, allows it to fall to the ground, and grabs a bag from
a person standing next to her. In her hand she is holding a wireless microphone that she places on the ground, and then she lifts up the hem of her dress and begins to run. She runs toward us on her bare feet, over the snow and past the men on the bench. And before she is halfway across the square I can tell that she is the same age as Tilte or slightly older, and that she can do the four hundred meters in under a minute.

As she reaches the carriage, she leaps like a grasshopper onto the box next to Hans, and even as she is still suspended in the air, she yells, “Drive! Now! I'm the one who booked you!”

The procession is in disarray outside the church, people are shoved aside, two men in suits break out of the crowd and start running toward us. We know, all four of us, that they are after the singer. And we know, too, that we are on her side. I'll tell you straight out why. She could have been a child pornographer or an abuser of animals, but with that voice I would have tried to save her anyway, and I know that Tilte and Basker feel the same way.

But we need Hans, and for a brief moment we have no idea if he is up to the job.

Regrettably, Hans has yet to discover women.

Which is all the more embarrassing given that women have long since discovered him. When he stands in for Finø's harbormaster in June and July and finishes cleaning the toilets at about eight o'clock every night and is done collecting mooring fees from all the boats, at least three of the sweetest girls of summer will be waiting to take him for a walk. But taking Hans for a walk is easier said than done, because no
sooner have they begun to amble than Hans begins to swirl around them as though he's on the lookout for something from which to protect them, or a big puddle he can lie down in so they can cross without getting their feet wet.

The trouble is my older brother was born eight hundred years too late. He belongs to a chivalrous medieval age and considers all women to be princesses who may be approached only gradually by means of slaying dragons, for instance, or lying facedown in puddles.

But the girls of Finø attend tae kwon do lessons and move to Århus when they are sixteen and take a year out as exchange students in America when they are seventeen, and if they should ever meet a dragon they would want it to be their boyfriend, or else they would pull it apart and write a biology report about all the pieces. So Hans has never had a girlfriend, and now he's nineteen, and his future prospects are less than bright, to say the least. Now, too, he stands gawping like some creature on which Finø's nature warden is about to perform taxidermy, until Tilte yells at him, “Drive, Hans, you dolt!”

That wakes him up. Tilte yelling and two men halfway across the square in a full sprint definitely ticks all the boxes, and perhaps it seems to him like he really is saving the princess.

Now that I have spoken disparagingly of my older brother, even if only between the two of us, I need to add that he has a way with horses. Every year from April to September, Finø Town is closed for traffic with the exception of ambulances and delivery vehicles, and instead we drive the tourists around
in horse-drawn carriages and small electric golf buggies. We charge two hundred and fifty kroner for the trip from the harbor to Finø Town Square, and Finø Town looks even more like a postcard, and the island, if we are to be honest and forthright, is transformed into a one-armed bandit in the middle of the blue Kattegat.

So everyone on Finø can drive a carriage, but none like Hans. Hans drives like he was aboard a sulky on the trotting track at Århus. Perhaps it has something to do with the horses always knowing that if they don't cooperate they'll be turned over onto their backs to have their tummies tickled.

He never uses the whip, not even now, but simply clicks his tongue and flicks the reins so our four horses leap into motion like wild rabbits and Blågårds Plads nearly vanishes into the horizon behind us.

Now the two men in suits make a mistake. They veer off toward a big black BMW with diplomatic plates that is parked in front of the library, and at once they are inside and accelerating away from the square.

Under normal circumstances they would catch up with us in an instant. But these are not normal circumstances, because Blågårdsgade is a pedestrian street, closed to motor vehicles.

Strictly speaking, it is closed to horse-drawn carriages, too. But in every Dane there resides a yearning for the days when Denmark was still a land of agriculture and the king rode through the streets of Copenhagen on horseback and everyone kept livestock and slept with the pigs in the kitchen
to keep warm and because it was so nice and cozy. So as we come toward them at full trot, people step aside and send us friendly smiles, even though Hans is urging on the horses as if we were part of a rodeo.

BOOK: The Elephant Keepers' Children
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