Our fellow passengers have not yet come around, but now they exchange glances at least and mumble words that with the aid of electric amplification and some benevolence on the part of the listener might be interpreted as greetings.
This is not to be confused with what one might call spontaneous, heartfelt compliance, but rather an expression of their being so afraid of Tilte as to be rendered almost incontinent. But it’s a start.
Tilte has made an effort and delivered the goods, and this is beyond dispute, so now I allow her to drift back into midfield and pick up the ball myself.
“There’s another thing,” I say. “Our Mother and Father have disappeared and are wanted by the police. We should like to find them first, and to that end we need to sail on the White Lady to Copenhagen. We need your support. You all know Svend Sewerman. No one who might risk costing him as much as five kroner will be allowed on board before their business and identity have been checked back through three generations. Would there be any chance of our being able to say we were with you?”
The faces surrounding me are closed. After a moment, Svend-Holger speaks.
“If your parents are wanted by the police and you’ve done a bunk, then our helping you would be a criminal offense,” he says.
Silence descends again, and the only sounds are of the waves against the shore. Then Sinbad says something.
“I made note of you,” he says, “when we played Treasure Island and my wife found a grass snake in her wig, on stage and in front of four hunded people. I recall that you, Peter, once entered the Mr. Finø contest. And I thought about you when the Association of Danish Insurance Companies sent two private investigators and an appraiser over here on account of so many windows being broken and so many dried fish being stolen from people’s gardens.”
Silence again. And then I speak. Not to appeal for their help, because I’ve given up on that. But in order to explain.
“It’s not for our sake,” I tell them. “We will get by. It’s worst for Mother and Father.”
I scramble for words that might adequately describe our parents. Are they lost souls, or more like children? Have they mistakenly wandered off the path, or are they on course but going about it the wrong way? The language resists.
“It’s not because we need them to come home and take care of us,” I continue. “Tilte and I will be fine. We are inspired by mendicant monks and barefooted Carmelites. We can borrow orange robes from Leonora and strike out onto the roads of Finø with our begging bowls.”
Whether I am able to subscribe completely to this declaration, and whether Tilte and Basker are wholly in agreement as to the part about the begging bowls, I am rather unsure. But sometimes you must head for goal, even if your teammates aren’t there to help you out.
“The fact is—and this may perhaps surprise those of you who know Mother and Father well—the fact is that we love them. And this is all about love.”
And now something changes in the faces around me. Sympathy is a strong word, not least in an assembly such as the one in question. But it would not be too much to say that a softening has taken place.
“There is a verse of the Koran,” says Sinbad. “It says that small devils are often the worst. And yet they require the greatest mercy.”
29
Now that the mood is tainted with at least some understanding of Tilte’s and Basker’s and my own situation, and Bermuda’s hearse plows on through the fateful Finø night, as I referred to it in our tourist brochure, I should like to conclude my report of events surrounding Mother’s and Father’s first disappearance.
In the following months, my parents proceed with caution. There may be, for instance, a slight rush of wind at the very moment in Father’s sermon when he speaks of the angels on the cusp of blowing their trumpets somewhere in Revelation, though outside the church there is not a breath of wind at all. Or else a pair of organ pipes begin to whisper just as Father quotes, “What is whispered in your ear, shout from the rooftops,” though Mother is seated not at the instrument but among the congregation. Or on the occasion of a funeral, when Father concludes the graveside ceremony with “from earth thou shalt again arise,” a little puff of white steam may be expelled from the grave, just a mite, like the finest plume of smoke, and disappear as quickly as it materialized, though almost causing the mourners to fall to their knees. And no one suspects the slightest thing, all of it being executed with such elegance, without joins, and one senses so clearly Mother’s love of her smoothing plane.
The occasion on which we come closest to catching them in the act is when Finø Town Church is given a new roof in May. A small team of plumbers is casting the lead outside the church, and for that purpose they are equipped with a tray of sand that they hold at an angle, and onto it they pour the molten lead, which hardens immediately. At one point, we notice Mother speak to them and when she sees us she sends us a look that is utterly devoid of the unconditional love with which a mother always looks upon her children, and though we turn our backs and pretend not to have noticed, we have seen that she has given the plumbers something whose use she now explains to them. So when two Sundays later Father once more has ascended into the pulpit and again taken up Revelation, and this time it has something to do with a city tumbling to the ground, at which point a section of lead releases itself from the roof with an almighty clatter, and when the same thing happens a minute later, Tilte and Hans and I resolve not to speak to our parents again for an indefinite period of time.
Unfortunately, Mother and Father fail to notice that we have ceased communication, and our resolve is therefore to no avail. As May progresses, Sunday services are packed, though to begin with this gives rise to little concern insofar as my mother and father have always been known to attract an audience. But later, as the month wanes, we find that parishioners now queue out into the churchyard, and people begin to flock in droves from Anholt and Læsø, and then even from Grenå.
People from the mainland, particularly those from the capital, have always wanted to get married on Finø. Perhaps it has to do with the inherent difficulty of standing on Blågårds Plads or in Virum and vowing to remain together forever when all you can see around you is evidence to the effect that one should be lucky indeed if all the things people promise each other last until Wednesday. But it is so much easier on Finø, surrounded by half-timbered cottages from the eighteenth century, and the medieval Finø Monastery and hordes of faithful storks, and where the tourist brochure will tell you that Finø’s primeval landscape remains untouched with its mulberry trees and polar bears, and Hans in local costume, and Dorada Rasmussen’s colorful parrot. And for this reason the parish council has long since drawn up a waiting list in order to avoid the burden of four weddings a week. But now the list begins to swell ominously, and letters of application arrive from throughout the land, from soon-to-be parents and the parents of the newborn who want their infants to be christened in the church, and from the families of people who have died, who would like to know if the deceased might be buried in the earth of Finø, even though the person in question never set foot on the island in the time he was alive. And an elegant letter arrives from an elderly lady, which we children read, because at that point we have become so concerned that we on occasion permit ourselves to open our parents’ mail. The lady asks if she might be cremated on Finø and then have her ashes rolled into treat balls, to be blessed by Father and thereupon delivered to the Finø parrots of whose presence in abundance on the island she has heard tell, and in this way she is sure to be evacuated all over the natural beauty of the island, on which she has learned that the Holy Spirit has now taken up residence.
That letter would have signaled to most people that besides addressing the everyday credulous, Mother and Father were now beginning to attract proper weirdos, and yet my parents remain oblivious and inhabit a rather tiny section of reality.
At the beginning of June, calls are sent out to them from the mainland. The callers are to begin with the v
arious communities of the Free Church, who are always in the market for new clergy who can speak in tongues, or endure ordeal by fire, or walk on water, or who in some other way possess that extra panache which the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark is so lacking. But soon, the business community, too, would like to hear about Christianity and ethics and money, and preferably in the form of a talk and a service of the kind in which they have heard that Father excels, so when July comes around Mother and Father depart on their first tour, and you could say that whereas until this point they have been paddling at the water’s edge, now they are about to take the plunge with all their clothes on.
No one on the parish council or outside it declares in as many words that they believe the Holy Spirit to have descended and taken up residence in Mother and Father and in Finø Town Church. But that certainly seems to be in the air. Therefore, arrangements are made without dissent for a replacement pastor from Århus and a substitute organist from Viborg to be dispatched to Finø, and for Great-Grandma to come and look after us while Mother and Father travel the country on a month-long tour in the middle of Finø’s main tourist season.
Despite its unprecedented nature, this occurs seamlessly and without friction, and an airy, elevated mood descends upon Finø’s ecclesiastical circles at the thought of how in this unprecedented way the island is confirming its natural position on the map of the world.
Father and Mother are, of course, also touched by this mood as they pack their luggage into their new estate car, a purchase that may be construed as the first, though by no means final, indication that whatever all this is about, it is also, regrettably, about money. And then before we know it, Mother and Father have waved goodbye, the ferry has sailed, and they are gone.
The airy and elevated mood that prevails across the island does not encroach upon their children, nor upon Basker and Great-Grandma. On the contrary, we are weighed down by bleak and brooding premonitions.
These become more oppressive as the weeks pass and rumor and newspaper articles reach back to Finø, telling of audiences and Free Church congregations and major business figures all tumbling down like bowling pins on account of the quite extraordinary mood that arises when Father begins to preach. Indeed, rumor has it that God now appears as a tangible vibration during the Eucharist, and when we hear of this we look up at each other in concern.
Though the door leading into Mother’s and Father’s studies remains closed for a month prior to their departure, we are nonetheless able to secure an occasional glimpse of the portable altarpiece Mother has been constructing. We recall immediately how some years ago she made a little platform incorporating a metal plate on which we would stand whenever we had been skating on Finø Leech Pond. It sent vibrations all the way through the body in a pleasant manner to which we all looked forward without ever realizing that the contraption would later become a building block in a confidence trick.
At least once a week, Mother and Father send us a postcard with a message that is always a variation on the theme They love us! And in the envelope is a check and the suggestion that we treat ourselves to a six-course dinner at the Nincompoop’s gourmet restaurant. Each time, we read the card and put the check away in the housekeeping wallet, and the only one who says anything is Tilte, and this she does only once, waving the check in her hand and exclaiming, “Blood money!”
When Mother and Father return home, they are delirious and hand out presents we refuse to accept: football shoes, hair extensions made with real hair, and a camera that can be attached to an astronomer’s telescope. Two weeks later they take off again, the replacement pastor and the substitute organist are kept on, and Great-Grandma returns.
This time they leave not in the estate car but in a nine-seater minibus with tinted windows into which they load their luggage one night after Mother has worked for seven days in a row without emerging from her study, and when they have gone we all of us fear the worst.
We are given an inkling that our fears may be justified when our attention is captured by an advert in the Finø Gazette, which it turns out Mother and Father have placed in all the major newspapers and by which they offer their services in the field of financial advice, forcing us to conclude that our parents, who have never been able to make their own money stretch, are now going about telling people what to do with their savings.
The mood plummets to a depressive low when the Finø Gazette quotes a feature from Denmark’s great business newspaper Børsen reporting on a combined religious service and talk on the subject of Christianity and money, followed by one-on-one financial advising, which Mother and Father have given to the Association of Danish Banks. It is an event that has taken place at a manor house near Fakse, and the journalist reports that during the service wild animals gathered outside the house, deer and badgers and hedgehogs, and great flocks of birds, and during the financial advisory session shifting patterns of light and fog appeared mysteriously in the room.
How Mother and Father technically were able to pull off the wild animals stunt is a matter of some conjecture, but one must bear in mind that from the time of Belladonna our family is not without experience in the field of zoology, and the rectory garden has been home variously to bird-eating spiders, sharks, hens and, for feeding purposes, rabbits. But what is obvious to us is that Mother and Father are beyond the pale and have now ventured out into the field of miracles.
They come home the following week, but not in the minibus in which they left, because they have hired a driver to return that to us the following week. Instead they drive a Maserati, and when they roll ashore from the ferry, rumor of it has preceded them and Finø residents line the road all the way from the harbor to the town square.
I don’t know if you have ever seen a Maserati, so in case you haven’t I can tell you that it is a car designed for people who are exhibitionists by nature but who nevertheless wish to demonstrate that they are modest enough to not simply open their raincoats and flash their wares. It is a motor vehicle under permanent threat of exploding from the pressure of having to remain unexhibited. When it pulls up in the driveway of the rectory and Mother climbs out, the assembled masses, which unfortunately also number Hans and Tilte and Basker and myself, are presented with the sight of her in a mink coat that reaches all the way down to the ground and that makes everyone, apart from the eight hundred mink that have sacrified themselves for the garment, catch their breath.
During the two weeks that follow, we consider whether some compassionate, Christian way exists by which to return Mother and Father to the real world. Must we really knock them unconscious in order to get them to the psychiatric wing of the Finø Hospital and plead that they be placed in straitjackets?
Sadly, we find no solution before they strike out into the world once again, and we heave a sigh of relief because with their departure the pressure finally subsides from those of our friends who keep hoping either for a ride in the Maserati at 200 kilometers an hour on the bends and 260 on the straight down to the landing strip, or a glimpse of my mother nude underneath her mink coat.
The hammer comes down a week later when Tilte and I return home from school to find our brother Hans, who is supposed to be away boarding and bent over his math homework at Grenå High School, seated on the sofa next to Bodil Hippopotamus and flanked by three individuals of foreboding countenance, who turn out to be Professor Thorkild Thorlacius-Claptrap with spouse, and the bishop of Grenå, Anaflabia Borderrud.
I have already made mention of the fact that in my early youth, which is to say the period spanning from five years of age to twelve, I may on occasion have been pressured into taking part in the theft of fruit and perhaps a fish or two from the odd drying rack, but that such activity is now firmly a thing of the past. Be that as it may, for much of my life I have often found myself to be the victim of unfair accusation, for which reason we at the rectory have on occasion received individuals demanding not merely swift justice but prompt execution.
And yet I am bound t
o say that the mood issuing from Bodil and her hit squad is much more ominous.
“Your parents will not be returning home for some time,” she announces. “We have found room for you at the Grenå Children’s Home, and there you shall stay during the coming weeks.”
Tilte and I have always taken the view that what you need in a tight spot is some good karma.
To our surprise, this is now delivered to us in the shape of our great-grandmother, who suddenly appears in the doorway, and when she addresses Bodil she does so in a tone I have never heard her use before, hushed and ingratiating, just as one might imagine a nun would address an abbess during Mass to ask if there was any chance of borrowing fifty kroner until next Friday, and this humility blindsides Bodil.
“To what do we owe the honor?” Great-Grandma asks.
“It’s an emergency,” says Bodil. “The pastor and his wife have been remanded in custody. While their case remains pending, the children will be placed in care at an institution in Grenå. Starting this evening.”
“They’d be better off here with me,” Great-Grandma says.
“We’ve spoken to the school,” Bodil goes on. “The headmaster believes the children will benefit from more definite boundaries, and indeed from monitoring the state of their mental health.”
“The thing that worries me,” Great-Grandma says, “is the media.”
This is a twist that takes all of us by surprise. We were unaware that Great-Grandma even knew the media existed. She does not watch television, neither does she read the papers, and she has never so much as glanced at our computers or mobile phones, as though in her own childhood information circulated on runic stones and she has no reason to believe that things might have changed.