The Elephant Keepers' Children Read Online Free PDF Page B

impression that Hans and his girls were just what they were looking for. But at the very moment they launch their attack, something occurs inside my older brother. The bashful, warmhearted young man we all know and love disappears and instead a natural disaster takes his place, and before you know it two of the young men are swimming around in their own blood, another is groveling on the ground among the parked bicycles, and the fourth makes a getaway in a cloud of dust.
    That’s the side of Hans that appears now. But Tilte shakes her head.
    â€œWe’ll be needing you on the outside,” she says.
    And then comes a pause, and in the pause is silence. All four of us know that we are now to be separated, and that life is about to get hard. We say nothing, yet in the silence I sense something about Tilte and Hans.
    Parents are okay, of course, even ours. But if there were an exam that adults needed to pass before being allowed to have children, how many would actually succeed, if we’re to be honest about it? And the ones who did, would they not merely scrape through? Even though Tilte claims that there is nothing about my upbringing that cannot be rectified by two years in a reformatory and five years of therapy, I would nevertheless venture to suggest that if my mother and father were ever to have passed that exam, someone would have to have taken pity on them first.
    But with brothers and sisters it’s different sometimes. It may be hard to explain, but there in the carriage I sense something very clearly. So of course Tilte looks me straight in the eye at that same moment.
    You have to be careful with the word
love
. It’s a word that so easily can slow you down, and it can make a botch of that curling shot with the inside of the foot. Nonetheless, I must use it now, because it’s the only word that fits, and that being the case means the door is opening and there’s a chance of catching just a glimpse of freedom.
    In order to make it perfectly clear what I mean, I’d like to insert a comment about how we discovered that love and the door are connected. In actual fact, it was Tilte who discovered it, and it happened in the kitchen of the rectory.
    I don’t know what your own family is like, but in our house we all have to get up so early, and there are so many lunches to pack, and so many lessons at school, and so much homework, and so much football afterward, and so many people paying visits to the rectory, not least because my mother and father service all three of Finø’s churches by turn, that in the day-today run of things you can get the feeling that Hurricane Lulu is wreaking havoc in the Kattegat and has moved into the rectory with us for good.
    But then what can happen is that the wind dies down, usually on a Friday or Saturday, and at once the waters are calm and a brief opportunity arises for us to realize that our being a family is not merely theoretical fancy, and when such a moment occurs it tends to do so in the kitchen, and it was at just such a moment that we made the discovery.
    Father was preparing food. He says that’s the way he relaxes, though when he’s doing it you’d be forgiven for thinking he was a butcher on piecework. He says, and even believes,that the food he makes is the same he enjoyed in his childhood home in Nordhavn, in the northern part of Finø, of which he speaks as though it were drenched in sunlight and tears of happiness, even though we actually met his mother, our grandmother, before she died, presumably of pent-up gall. We stayed with her and are therefore able to completely rule out the possibility that she had ever been capable of preparing food.
    Nonetheless, my father does on occasion succeed in contriving delicacies of a sort with his old meat press and recipes for dishes from medieval Finø, and at this moment, as what I am telling you about is happening, he is preparing duck rillettes, and pigs’ feet in jelly