The Elephant Keepers' Children by Peter Høeg Read Free Book Online Page A

those films for the whole family, and because the girl who was supposed to play the bright and irresistible younger sister fell ill, Conny was brought in and ended up stealing the show and being offered a role in another film, and then three more, and now she has been in seven films in the space of two years.
    I know exactly what it is about Conny. She can condense her aura and her energy on command.
    All of us are able to condense our energy. But for most people it’s something of which they are unaware, and when it happens it catches them off guard, like an abrupt feeling of elation or annoyance, or the sudden awareness that the goalkeeper is off balance with his weight on the wrong foot, and if you put your entire soul into taking a long shot at the goal he won’t have a chance. Normally, it’s not something under your control. But with Conny it’s different, and that’s what she exploits on screen. In the first six of her films, she played a little girl with pigtails and a spark of vandalism in her eye. In the seventh, she played a young girl with a boyfriend. Whose name was Anton. In the film. And she spoke his name theway she used to speak mine. The way that’s so impossible to describe. But it was different from the way she spoke any other name. I used to save her phone messages and play them back just to hear the way she spoke my name.
    Until that film. When I saw it and heard that she had assumed control of that way of speaking a name, I knew that I had lost her. And then I stopped listening to all those old messages.
    After the second film, Conny’s mother moved her off to Copenhagen. Conny and I never really knew what hit us. The first film was fun. Then came the second, and suddenly she was gone. It’s been eighteen months now.
    Since then I’ve seen her only once. It was a day I came out of school and there she was waiting for me. We walked down to the harbor. Our usual walk. There’s a long jetty that extends out between the beach and the dock, and you can walk along it sheltered from the wind and stop to look back on the town. She had changed. She was carrying a shoulder bag like you only ever see in adverts, and wearing a pair of earrings you don’t even see there. We walked close together, but it felt like the whole harbor was between us and no bridge could ever be built. I could feel she had to be going, and I thought I was about to die. Eventually, she took hold of my shirt with both her hands and gripped it tight. “Peter,” she said. “This is something I have to do.”
    And then she was gone. I haven’t seen her since. Apart from in the cinema, on the screen. And now I can’t even seeher there anymore, because of that last film and the thing about Anton.
    Tilte knows all this. She knows what goes on inside a person when he encounters his lost love looking at him from a poster. That’s why Tilte gives my arm a squeeze. And then we’re in the air.

7
    I would like to explain
exactly where Finø is situated. Finø lies slap in the middle of the Sea of Opportunity.
    If you collected all the songs that have been written about Finø, for the purpose of dumping them all in the recycling bin, a very good idea indeed, you would need to hire a truck. A semi. Many of those songs can be found in the
Danish Book of Song
, and all of them may be divided into two groups.
    The first group contains all the songs in which Finø is depicted as a tiny pearl in a foaming ocean against which the brave little island battles to hold its own.
    The second group takes the opposite view, that Finø is an infant child sucking its toes in the arms of its mother, and the sea is the mother.
    These are songs that beg the question whether people who write patriotic songs take drugs before they put pen to paper. Because on Finø half the population makes its living fishing langoustines and turbot to sell to the tourists, or servicing the tourists’