The Elephant Keepers' Children (14 page)

And at the same time we reach inward toward the beholder, toward the place inside the self where we interpret the messages of perception, and there we try to let go of each and every preconceived notion in our minds, so that we may make room for what we see and cannot yet imagine. This is what all mystics recommend.

We see it at once. Not one thing, but a pattern. The topmost and bottommost shelves and the row of brackets between them form a closed rectangle. Like a door.

Tilte runs her fingers along the joins. They are seamless. Mother loves joins. She will never drive a screw into a piece of wood without plugging the hole afterward. I once sat with
a center bit and made fifteen hundred plugs for her when she laid the floorboards of Douglas fir in Father's study. So naturally the joins are seamless, and the join of the trapdoor leading down to the larder in which we are standing can be discerned only in bright light.

“There could be a door,” says Tilte.

We tap on the walls, but they don't sound hollow. And there is no handle.

“It would be controlled by a voice,” I say. “And it would only react to their own voices. The code would be something they shared.”

We gaze at each other and call to mind our mother and father. We try to sense the presence of their beings. It sounds strange, but it can be done. And not only in the case of one's parents. It is as though we hold the imprints of all other people inside ourselves.

We realize together. A light goes on in Tilte's eyes. And she sees a light go on in mine. Neither of us needs to say a word.

It's one thing for two people in unison to form an idea of which both are certain. But what happens now surpasses that. It is as though our two consciousnesses are the same for a stretch. As on those three monumental occasions in the season when Jakob Aquinas and I found each other amid a defense as compact and impenetrable as a black, moonless night shrouded in fog, and Jakob delivered the ball to my left foot as when Basker delivers the
Finø Gazette
to Mother's and Father's pillow, and I sent the ball soaring into the top left corner of the goal with the same meticulous composure as
when returning a stamp to its place in the album. Until Jakob received his calling.

In the living room I dismantle the music system and carry the CD player into the cellar. Tilte carries the speakers. We both lift the amplifier, which is heavy, as if one of the forensic officers climbed inside and fell asleep and the others forgot him. Tilte finds the CD in the rack. And then comes the big moment.

The CD we insert into the player came out last year in support of Finø FC and may be purchased in all leading record shops and department stores, and it contains such musical highlights as Finø FC's official song, with the chorus “Only a fool never fears Finø FC,” which was a significant success for our family, because Tilte wrote the lyrics, Mother composed the melody, and Father, Hans, Tilte, and I sing the chorus, and if you listen carefully enough you can hear Basker grizzling along in the background.

For this reason I feel able to concede, without risk of betraying any person or animal, that the record also contains boundless musical disasters, from which the hapless listener may never completely recover, and which, as Tilte would say, that unfortunate person most likely will carry with him to his deathbed, at which time he might even hasten the process of expiry. To give you an impression of how cautious you must be if this CD should ever fall into your hands, I will draw attention to the fact that it contains a song in which Rickardt Three Lions seeks to pay homage to the women and appetizing young men of Finø. Regrettably one happens to be aware that he has in mind one's sister and older brother, and perhaps even one's
mother and father, too. Moreover, it includes a track on which Einar Flogginfellow performs excerpts from the
Elder Edda
set to his own compositions and on which he is accompanied by Asa-Thor's giant sacrificial drum, the recording being made only a short time after his dismissal as headmaster, and as far as I recall the title is “Yearning for Vehement Debate.” And as a final, shocking extremity, the disc features a recording of my brother Hans reciting one of his own poems beginning, “Here stands my darling rose and grows.”

So it is a record that spans the most vile and horrendous, but also the occasional blessing, and the track we select and turn up the volume on now is probably somewhere in between, because the singer is our mother, and if there is one thing any boy or girl of sound mind over the age of five will do anything to avoid hearing, it is the sound of his or her own mother singing. But at the same time one has to admit, if pressed, that there are singers worse than my mother, and on the track in question she accompanies herself on the piano and what she sings is, of course, “Monday in the Rain on Lonely Avenue.”

To the best of my knowledge, I have never personally been down Lonely Avenue, and for that reason I would surely fail to recognize it. But the lower section of Mother's new shelving in the larder does. Two bars into the music, the lower part of the wall slides ten centimeters back, taking two hundred bottles and jam jars with it, and is raised up to reveal a dark opening.

Tilte whistles and the light in the cellar goes out. The opening in front of us is no longer dark. Now we can see that it opens out into a room where a faint light glows.

We duck through the opening and step inside. The space is small and whitewashed, and the light is the light of the moon. At first we think it comes from a window, but now we can see it comes from a mirror. At the base of the exterior wall in the west end of the rectory are small arched windows covered with wire mesh. We have always thought them to be ventilation openings leading into a crawlspace. Now we see there must have been a proper cellar once. The walls of the room are of natural stone, the light comes from one of the openings in the base and has been drawn inside by means of three angled mirrors and in that way cannot be seen from above.

Inside the room is a desk with a lamp and a chair, and nothing else. I switch on the lamp, and the room is bare. Not a cupboard, not a shelf, and nothing on the table. And yet we remain standing for some time. There is something rather disconcerting about having lived all your life in one place like the rectory, thinking you know it inside out, only to discover a new room.

And though there is little point, we run our fingers over the wall in search of entrances to further rooms, but there are none. The only thing we find is a corkboard put up at the opening into the larder. It has been used as a notice board and its surface is perforated with hundreds of tiny pinholes. My mother, especially, is fond of notice boards, and above her own workstations are always diagrams and instructions for use and rough designs. But the board here has been cleared.

We return to the larder and remain for a moment admiring the technical aspects of Mother's arrangement. Then I run
my finger across the place where the shelves on the movable part of the wall will return flush with those that were already there. It is here that my mother produced one final wood shaving with her plane before leaving, in order to safeguard herself completely against discovery.

We play the music. Mother's voice begins to sing “Monday in the Rain on Lonely Avenue,” the wall descends and slides back into place, and nothing can be seen. The joins in the walls of white-painted plywood are hidden from sight behind shelves and brackets, and we are filled with devout respect.

But still something bothers me, what in finer circles is referred to as intuition. Intuition is an inkling that comes from without. Investigations have prompted Tilte and me to consider that it comes through the crack when the big door stands slightly ajar. Our experience tells us that most instances of intuition unfortunately must be regarded as rubbish, and the way you can tell if there's any substance to your intuition is to test it against reality.

So I switch on the CD again, the rain drums and Mother croons, and the door slides open without even the slightest hiss from the hydraulics.

The idea that has come to me from outer space is that tidying up so not a single piece of evidence remained is beyond the scope of what my mother and father could ever manage.

When on Thursdays I have completed my round of housework in the rectory kitchen, a team of laboratory technicians with a fine-tooth comb would be hard-pressed to find as much as a grain of rice. Even Tilte, who is not generous with her
encouragement, has been heard to comment that when eventually they let me out on parole I'll always be able to find work as a cleaner.

But in the case of Mother and Father there would be results. Not a barrowload, but something would have turned up. Proper cleaning is a skill mastered only by a select few. And Mother and Father are not among that happy band.

I'm back inside the room.

“Close the door,” I say.

Tilte's not with me, but she does as I tell her. The wall slides into place, and I am alone in the moonlight.

No further search is necessary, because I see it immediately. And I know how it happened. They were in a hurry. They brought out the luggage they had left packed and ready in here. They cleared the notice board and cleaned up after themselves. And all the while they had the door open into the larder. Eventually, they took a final look to make sure everything had been removed, and then they went out and closed the door behind them. Missing one thing. They missed the oblong of notice board that is covered by the moving wall when the wall is raised in the upright position.

That oblong is in front of me now, silver in the light of the reflected moon. And on it is a piece of paper.

We're seated at the kitchen table
with the sheet of paper in front of us.

It seems to have been torn off a company notepad, because the words
Voice Security
are printed in blue lettering at the top. Beneath are three lines of writing, the first two in pencil in my mother's hand, and the last in pen in handwriting we are as yet unable to identify.

The first line says:
Pay P. Pig
.

P. Pig
is without doubt Polly Pigonia, a friend of the family who heads the Hindu community out on Finø Point and moreover runs the main branch of Finø Bank in Nordhavn.

The next line consists of one word only, which is
Dion
, followed by eight digits that could be a mobile phone number, and the abbreviation
A.W
.

The note in pen is an email address:
[email protected]
.

Tilte gets her phone out. She turns toward me. On the display is the name
A. Winehappy
and the phone number Bodil called when she and Katinka and Lars picked us up and we were driven off to suffer incarceration and torture and execution at Big Hill. The number on Tilte's display
and the number on the sheet of paper in front of us are identical.

“A. Winehappy,” says Tilte, “is a name we must remember.”

We are on our way out
and remain standing in the hall for a moment to say goodbye to our house. My gaze picks out the board on which we hang our keys.

I point to the key of the letter box on its red tag. Tilte doesn't get me.

“It's shiny,” I say. “Brand-new.”

Now Tilte can see it, too. The key of a letter box is used almost every day, and ours was yellow and worn. Now it has been replaced by a new one.

We open the letter box, the key fits, but all we find is a card reminding us to read the water meter. We take it inside with us and sit down again at the table we have just left and at which we have always consumed our childhood's daily bread and duck rillettes.

“The police,” I say. “They copied the key and put the wrong one back on the board. Most likely they copied others, too.”

“What for?”

“Lars and Katinka probably empty the letter box every day and read what's inside. To see if there's anything about Mother and Father.”

“Why don't they just collect it at the post office? You can do anything when you're in the police.”

“That would require a warrant issued by the court,” I
explain. “Perhaps they don't have one. And then the rumor would spread. You know what Paprika's like.”

Paprika Postmistress is a sprinkler. A steady flow of information on every resident of Finø passes into the post office each day to be disseminated onto the thirsty fields by Paprika.

Tilte nods.

“That explains why the letter box is empty. There ought to have been a whole week's mail.”

I pick up the letter that has been pushed under the door. It's from Finø Bank and has no postage. I tear it open. The envelope is the bank's, but inside is a card showing a god with an elephant's trunk seated upon a throne of rose petals, and the message is handwritten and says thanks for a lovely evening. The lemon soufflé will live on immortally in the recollection of the sender, who moreover has to say that the bank has more than a hundred on the waiting list now, for which reason they'll be needing a reply soon, and lots of love is from Polly P.

We would love to know what Polly was wanting a reply to, but we have no way of investigating the matter, because it's the Easter weekend, Finø Bank is closed, and when it opens on Tuesday we will either be long gone or else back in chains and behind locked doors in the charge of the social services.

Then Tilte returns to the first note and puts her finger to the email address. The handwriting is of the kind that with some benevolence might be described as individual, though more exactly as almost illegible.

“It looks like Danish written in Chinese,” she says. “It's Leonora's.”

I would like to cautiously approach
some of the events leading up to my mother and father's first disappearance, which occurred two years ago. But to begin with I ought to outline their outward characteristics in order that you may recognize them and hide away in a stairwell or in some other way remove yourself from their vicinity should you happen to bump into them in the street.