The Elephant Keepers' Children (15 page)

Both are of advanced years, my father being forty and my mother approaching the same figure, though with a year or perhaps two to go. My mother has blond hair and is so tanned in summer that whenever she has cause to bring Hans or Tilte or me to accident and emergency, and some summers we've been there more than twelve times in all, the substitute doctors of Finø Hospital feel prompted to ask if she speaks Danish.

Although in Tilte's words my mother may be halfway to the grave in terms of age, she nevertheless retains the appearance of a young girl, and since this is a place in which we strive to be honest, I am compelled to say that on several occasions I have sensed that some of my friends, even those I would have sworn to be mentally stable, are rather in love with my mother.

And as if that were not enough, as if it did not give rise to the feeling of being stricken by some curse of the kind that rains down on unfortunate souls in the Old Testament, the same or even worse applies to my father, only the other way around.

As their courses progress, it becomes clear that a great many of the young girls who attend confirmation classes at the rectory, except of course such utterly supreme and equable individuals as Conny, begin to look upon my father in the same way Belladonna eyed her rabbits before we passed her on to the Tropical Zoo at Randers. And in the gaze of many a young bride in the process of being joined in holy matrimony in Finø Town Church I have noted hesitation when my father says, for instance, “Do you, Feodora Hollowhead, take Frigast Gooseherd to be your lawful wedded husband?” And regrettably it seems clear that such hesitation comes of Feodora standing so close to my father as to suddenly form the idea that by marrying Frigast she may be missing a golden opportunity, and therefore the two little words
I do
remain momentarily in her throat before being expelled as though by the aid of a stomach pump.

Leonora Ticklepalate, she among us who almost certainly possesses most knowledge about men, and probably women, too, says it has to do with my father and mother sharing a sorrowful expression around the eyes, as though they have lost something but cannot discover what, and it is this expression that prompts innocent men and women, and even children and youngsters, to feel that they must go up and touch them and help them to search for whatever it is they have lost.

The evening Hans and Tilte and I discovered what lay behind that sorrow was the evening our mother and father, instead of keeping their usual erratic course, began to steer more directly toward the abyss.

In case you haven't been to church for a long time, or took a funny turn or were absent that day in religious studies at school, allow me to discreetly remind you that almost everything that goes on inside a church is holy, but the holiest of all in the Danish church are the sacraments, when you go up to the altar for Communion during the Eucharist, or to be baptized and blessed, and when my father recites the Lord's Prayer on everyone's behalf. That evening in the kitchen Tilte asked Father if God was present in the sacraments, and her asking seemed so innocuous, because Tilte will occasionally speak to Father about religious matters, in many cases without mishap.

This particular evening was of a kind I hope you will recognize from your own life, an evening on which one resolves to give the family a chance, because for some reason it feels like it may have a future after all, at least for the next fifteen minutes or so. Mother was centering axles in a watch she was making, and Father was preparing a veal stock, which is a kind of gravy he concocts from meat and bones and herbs that makes the whole rectory smell like a mortuary, and then it reduces down and congeals until it becomes so stiff you could stuff cushions with it if that were not such a marvelously messy thing to do. And because Father is at his stove, and the stock has congealed and spirits are high, he reaches out and plucks Tilte's question from the air as if it were a child's balloon and
tells her that God is everywhere, like a kind of clear broth made from the Holy Spirit, but in the sacraments He is present as veal stock in its thickest and most aromatic form.

After he tells her this, he radiates self-satisfaction as thick as his stock, and it's plain to see that he believes he has explained things in a manner that is at once pedagogical and theologically profound. But then Tilte comes back at him.

“How do you know?” she asks.

“Primarily from the New Testament,” says Father.

“But Father,” Tilte persists, “what about baptism? Nowhere in the Bible does it mention Jesus baptizing children. He baptizes adults, so where does the christening of infants come in, if it's not from the Bible?”

Now the mood in the kitchen shifts. Basker's breathing becomes more troubled, and Mother looks up from her watch-making. All of us are aware that Tilte is building up to what I would call a Genghis Khan in reverse. It's an expression that comes from thinking about the major villains in world history, the ones who really messed things up, like Hitler and Genghis Khan and Læsø FC's sweeper, who broke Hans's leg in a tackle from behind. When you think about them, you wish Tilte had been there at the same time, because she can repel anyone and force them back into the Siberian swamps whence they came, and that is exactly what she is building up to with Father now.

“Infant baptism,” Father begins, “arose in the Middle Ages, when many children died at a very young age. It was to save their souls.”

Tilte is on her feet and crossing the room to where Father is standing.

“But if it isn't mentioned in the Bible,” she says, “how can you be so sure the Holy Spirit is present? How can you be sure? On what authority do you have it?”

“I sense it,” Father says.

And shouldn't have. But he is retreating into the swamp, and in such a situation one will resort to every possible means to avoid being sucked down.

The problem is that we three children and Basker can tell that Father isn't being completely honest with us here.

In his sermons, Father has specialized in evoking the general mood in Palestine at the time of Jesus. He and Mother have twice been on trips to Israel with the Theological Education Institute, and from those trips Father has found much inspiration for his description of the sky and the sun and the throngs of people and donkeys, and let me assure you that my father can deliver a sermon that will almost make you feel the dust of Palestine crunch between your teeth and give you a case of sunstroke even on a cloudy Advent Sunday inside Finø Town Church.

But when he departs from that mood and ventures toward what actually happened, what took place when God in the Transfiguration appeared before Jesus in a cloud, and when he tries to explain what Jesus meant when he said “My kingdom is not of this world,” and whether he seriously walked on water, and what the resurrection of the flesh is actually all about—that stuff about getting your body back in Paradise
after you're dead, which would be quite a good thing, especially for the calf that has contributed itself to Father's stock—when he seeks to explain all these things, he stops sounding like himself and begins to sound like a person rattling off something he has learned by heart because deep down he doesn't understand a word of it.

If there's one thing Tilte and Hans and Basker and I cannot abide, it's when our parents stop sounding like themselves and begin to sound like someone else instead, and that's the reason Tilte now follows Father out into the swamp to pursue the matter further.

“How exactly do you sense it, Father?”

She isn't malicious in her asking, merely insistent, but then something surprising occurs. What occurs is that Father looks at Tilte, and then at the rest of us, and says, “I don't know.”

And then tears well in his eyes.

It's not like we have never seen my father cry before. When you're married to someone like my mother, who very often forgets everything around her, including her husband and her children and her dog, because she has become obsessed by the idea of making her own mechanical wristwatch and works twenty-four hours in one stretch to center the axles of the wheels while we children and our father go hungry—when you're married to a woman like that you will need to weep on the shoulders of close friends at least once a fortnight, which Father almost certainly has done in the company of Finn Flatfoot or John the Savior.

But he has never done it at home. On such occasions as we have seen Father weep, it has always been in church and on account of him saying something especially beautiful that makes him cry because he is moved and grateful for the Lord having provided Finø with such a magnificent pastor as himself. Or else he cries at a funeral in sympathy with the bereaved, and one must reluctantly admit that Father's sympathy is almost as great as his satisfaction at putting it on display.

But though his complacency and sympathy both may be great, they have never been so great as what we now witness in the kitchen of our rectory home. What we see is something that has always been contained inside our father, but that is released only now, and to begin with we have no words for it. Father leaves the kitchen and Mother goes after him, and Tilte and Hans and Basker and I remain behind and look at each other. We sit for a moment in silence, and then Tilte suddenly says, “They're elephant keepers. That's Mother's and Father's problem. They're elephant keepers without knowing it.”

We all know what she means. She means that Mother and Father have something inside them that is much bigger than themselves and over which they have no control, and for the first time we children are able to see what it is: they want to know what God really is; they want to meet God, and that is why it is so important to be sure that He is in the sacraments. And it's not only Father, it's Mother as well. This is what they live for above all else, and it is this yearning that has given them that sorrowful look around the eyes, and it is a yearning
as big as an elephant, and we can see that it will never properly be fulfilled.

Naturally, we leave Mother and Father alone for the rest of the evening, because we are neither sadists nor murderers. But we have seen something we shall never forget. We have seen their private elephants in actual size.

Most likely Mother and Father have always had their elephants inside them. Perhaps they were born with them. But until this evening in the kitchen of the rectory there was always a lid on top. Somehow, Father's and Tilte's little exchange made the lid fall off. It means that what we and the world see happen in the coming weeks and months is that the elephants break through their cocoons and unfold their wings and begin to flap about, if you can understand an image not wholly in accordance with any biology textbook, but that nevertheless is fairly appropriate in respect of what actually happens.

But since this element of my past is painful to me and fraught with details both agonizing and sensational, I should like to let it rest for a moment and return to the here and now in which Tilte and I have left the rectory and gone to see Leonora Ticklepalate.

Leonora Ticklepalate is seated
on the floor with her legs crossed, and though she must be able to see the Finø Old People's Home looming up on the horizon—Leonora is at least fifty—even I, who am otherwise known for my reticence when it comes to passing comment on women's appearances, even I must say that she is a feast for the eye. And the reason for this is partly what she is wearing, which is a red Tibetan nun's habit, and partly the fact that she is tanned and bald and looks like Sigourney Weaver in
Alien 3
. She is on the telephone and beckons us in, and Tilte and I sit down while she finishes her call.

“You are passing through the Court of the Lions at Alhambra,” Leonora says into the phone. “You are stark naked. And your bottom is naughty and pink.”

The receiver is on the table with the loudspeaker switched on, and the voice of the woman at the other end is irritable and rather inflamed.

“I haven't got a naughty bottom. I've an ass as big as a spare tire.”

“Size is unimportant,” says Leonora. “What matters is the expression. I have clients whose backsides are like the
rear wheels of a tractor. And yet men fall for them in hordes. In that respect, the rear wheel of a tractor may be a potent weapon indeed.”

We are seated in a room that looks like it was conceived in Tibet sometime in the Middle Ages, yet the house was designed by an architect and built less than a year ago at a cost of five million kroner for the building alone, which is equipped with a Jacuzzi and a Finnish sauna and situated on top of the highest dune at Østerbjerg with an unspoiled view across the Sea of Opportunity. This modest dwelling is Leonora's private cloister, and alongside everything else she might be, Leonora is the head nun of Finø's Buddhist community, which this year has surpassed eleven members, and at present she is in retreat for three years. Which is to say that she has made a vow to remain within her little shack here and not leave Østerbjerg, and to exist on rice and vegetables and otherwise to meditate and not commune with another living soul.

Tilte and I have driven here in Thorkild Thorlacius's Mercedes, a matter some would refer to as theft, though Tilte and I would not be among them. We believe it should rather be called borrowing, because what need would Thorkild have of his car now that he is locked up in the new detention center? And besides, it's no good for a car to stand idle too long without the engine and the battery being taken for a run.

Now Tilte places the torn-off paper from the pad in front of Leonora and points to the note that is written in pen.

“That's your handwriting, Leonora.”

Leonora's expression changes. A shadow falls upon her face and blots out the innocent pleasure of our visit.

“Not me,” she says. “That's not my writing at all.”

Leonora Ticklepalate is a computer scientist
and an expert in information technology, and the rectory is so crammed with computers and MP3 players and docking stations and mobile phones that we live in a constant state of electronic breakdown, which we survive only because Leonora is a friend of the family and our own IT guru. She has done programming for just about everyone on Finø, and when she developed risk-evaluation programs for Finø Bank's investment department, which operates on the islands of Læsø, Anholt, and Samsø, the rest of the country discovered her, too. Many have since tried to headhunt her, but she has always turned them down so that she might devote herself to the concept she has developed with Tilte, which she calls
sexual-cultural coaching
.