The Elephant Keepers' Children

  I raise my hands to the sky. And then I begin to dance.

  It’s a slow dance. Nothing that would make the grade at Ifigenia Bruhn’s Dancing School. It comes from within and demands my full concentration. Which must be why it takes a while before I notice Karl Marauder.

  He’s standing in the gateway of their house. I pause. We stare at each other.

  “I’m dancing the Finø Waltz,” I tell him. “By which I express my gratitude for being alive.”

  A great many things may be said about Karl Marauder Lander, and many people, myself included, would not hesitate to say them. Nonetheless, he is widely admired for his ability to cope with stress. And that’s what he’s doing now. His face is expressionless.

  “Would that be a private dance?” he asks. “Or can anyone join in?”

  Grace is one of those words that should only ever be handled while wearing velvet gloves, and only when nothing less will do. And yet I must say that I believe it to be the only word capable of adequately describing the fact that life is organized in such a way that even the likes of Karl Marauder may nurture the hope that the natural downward spiral of their lives will one day be halted, and that at the end of the new pathway that appears before them, opportunity lies, delicate, hazardous, and refined.

  “Just follow me,” I say.

  He raises his arms. The rain begins to pour. And slowly, beneath the glittering night sky, Peter Finø and Karl Marauder Lander dance the Finø Waltz.

  Acknowledgments

  With thanks to Lisbeth Lawaetz Clausen for the heart piece in the puzzle.

  With thanks to the staff of my Danish publishers, Rosinante&Co, and especially to my editor, Jakob Malling Lambert, for insightful, inventive, and insistent help in wielding both propelling pencil and scalpel.