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

boats at the Finø Boatyard, or sailing the tourists out to the colonies of seals on the Bothersome Islets, or selling suntan lotion and beachwear and café au lait at forty kronera mug from the Nincompoop’s decking on the beach by the harbor. And the rest of Finø’s population makes a living out of doing the hair and fixing the teeth and changing the nappies and intravenous drips of the half who service the tourists.
    So the sea is no longer either a threat or a mother to Finø. The sea is a tombola from which we pull out a winning ticket every day all through the summer season. And it is also a gigantic playground and a sports facility for the children and young people of Finø, except for the two in every school year who are afraid of water.
    Alexander Flounderblood, the ministerial envoy to Finø, once coerced Tilte into putting up her hand in class, which is a thing Tilte has never been happy about. She finds it humiliating and believes that if a teacher wants to know if she knows the answer to a question, he or she ought simply to ask her straight out, so now they’ve given up asking altogether, Alexander included. Nevertheless, he tried his utmost all through his first year, and on this particular occasion he asked, “What is the sea called that surrounds Finø?” And he insisted that Tilte put up her hand so that he might ask her if she knew the answer.
    â€œIt’s called the Cat’s Asshole,” Tilte told him.
    Alexander Flounderblood nearly fell off his chair and gave her a look that could depopulate vast areas of land, but Tilte had consulted the etymology of the Kattegat in the
Dictionary of the Danish Language
, and nothing he said could ever change it.
    But then Tilte told Alexander that the Cat’s Asshole was perhaps not the most suitable name and that the most appropriate would be the Sea of Opportunity.
    The people of Finø have turned it into a saying now. If anyone asks where Finø is, we tell them, “Slap in the middle of the Sea of Opportunity.”
    We descend now toward it from out of the clouds, its waves are trimmed with white foam, the wind is at fourteen meters per second, and our approach makes the blood run that much faster through the veins of Tilte and Basker and me, which is just as well, because now Bodil Hippopotamus says, “You’ll need to put on these little blue wristbands like last time.”
    There they are in her hand, three wristbands, each consisting of two nylon strips holding what looks like a watch face of blue plastic, and now the police officers, whom we have been told are called Katinka and Lars, snap the wristbands shut with a special tool that looks like a pair of tongs.
    The watch face contains no watch. What it contains instead is a small, though rather powerful, radio transmitter and two tiny batteries. At Big Hill there’s a large board on the wall, the same as they have at the police stations in GrenÃ¥ and Århus. On the boards are tiny lamps, each with a number corresponding to a transmitter. In that way, the whereabouts of those proudly sporting blue wristbands will always be known by the social services and by the police.
    So blue wristbands are given to thugs on parole who are serving four-year sentences for knocking the life out of sevenpeople all at once. And they give them, too, to women doing time for mistreating their husbands, and who have been told by the police to maintain a distance of one and a half kilometers from the place where their beaten husband and his new girlfriend now sit and cower.
    And they give them also to those residents of Big Hill who begin to let themselves into the houses of Finø Town by means of a crowbar.
    But blue wristbands are not what they give to ordinary kids accustomed to walking around at will.
    Bodil knows that, and so she speaks with what I would call false levity, as one might imagine she would do if, to pluck a couple of examples from the Bible,