by Peter Høeg
The office is practically wallpapered with photographs, meticulously framed and hung: Harald Lander, Erik Bruhn, Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Suzanne Farrell, Peter Martins, Peter Schaufuss, Margot Fonteyn. All signed with fluttering kisses of dedication. My mother gets to her feet and steps up to a photo hung at eye level.
It’s bigger than the others and shows a young man and a young woman on horseback. Both are tanned, captured in a gallop, radiant with life, and though the photograph itself is black and white and more than forty years old, one has the distinct feeling it could have been taken yesterday. You can smell the woods and the wind, the sun on their skin.
And the money. The picture reeks of money.
It’s a photograph of my father and mother. At one of his hunting lodges, seemingly the one at Rold Skov.
My mother likes to dwell on that picture. Especially when I’m here. That’s how it is with the great traumas. We keep returning to them. To remind ourselves of how irrevocably too late it is to do anything about them. And yet also to continue looking for some way out.
Preferably, we would like to have witnesses to our tragedies. Especially my mother. If she could, she would sell tickets and gather an audience for everything she did, including going to the bathroom.
‘What do you want with that witch Magrethe?’
‘There’s something I need to ask her. If she can answer me it’ll buy us out of the charges.’
‘You’ll get nothing from her. She’s like a clam. It’s twenty years since I last had anything to do with her. She was living by the city lakes then, but she’s moved now. No one seems to know where. She worked for the Defence Command. Still does, I shouldn’t wonder. Never let on about what exactly she did, but whatever it was it was secret. She had an office at the Svanemøllen Barracks. I found out quite by chance. The army had their physical education school there. They ran obligatory courses in ballroom dancing. Only the best teachers were good enough. I used to substitute there for a couple of years, the pay was quite respectable. One day I saw her going into one of the buildings. After that, we met up there a few times, on Friday afternoons when I wasn’t rehearsing, and walked into town together.’
‘How do I get hold of her?’
She dips into a drawer and retrieves a card bearing her steel-plate-printed initials. A broad-edged pen for that very particular calligraphy when signing photographs or programmes. And then she draws.
‘This is the bridge over the railway cutting, leading to the former barracks area. Unless you’re authorised there’s no entry now, after they built all those company headquarters it’s all closed off with a barrier and security. You’ll have to get past, one way or another. The building she works in is in the far corner. The sports ground that belonged to the PE school is still there, backing onto it all.’
She draws the swoop of an elliptical running track. Behind it a rectangle. At the rectangle’s north-western corner she draws an X.
‘She was always quite libidinous about sticking to routines. Precise as clockwork. Up at the crack of dawn to start work at four. Then at eleven she’d be here. Every day, Christmas and birthdays included.’
She hands me the card.
‘Am I to be concerned about you, dear?’
Ninety-nine per cent of parents feel guilty about their children’s downturns. Their grandchildren’s, too. But not my mother.
Nonetheless, I seem to trace a hint of sympathy. It would be sensational.
I put my hands to her cheeks by way of farewell. Her eyes, as ever, contain elements of train wrecks and maritime disasters. And some smidgeon of religious ecstasy.
She looks at Harald. If it makes sense to say my mother has a favourite person besides herself, then he is it. At unguarded moments I have seen her looking at him the way the wolf looked at Little Red Riding Hood. Wishing he were a few years older and that she wasn’t his grandmother.
‘You’ve grown, diddums, since I saw you last. And it’s not just the year that’s gone in the meantime either.’
Harald gives her a toothy smile.
‘I’m staring at a four-year sentence, Gran. It’s kind of a coming-of-age thing. If you know what I mean.’
We back our way out. She stares as we leave, and I blow her a finger kiss. Then shut the door behind us.
8
A BRIGHT SUN shines over Kongens Nytorv. I pause before starting the car.
The car is the only chance a parent gets for communing with the kids. Only when the twins were buckled in and unable to make a jump for it in traffic was there ever any chance of talking to them about life and death.
That came to an end when they got to be nine years old and insisted on taking buses and trains all on their own. Since then I’ve had to make do with occasional, exceedingly rare moments such as this on Kongens Nytorv. That’s why I hesitate to turn the ignition.
‘Mum, how exactly do you feel about Gran?’
He’s never asked me that before. Nobody has, not even myself.
I start the car regardless, and pull out into the traffic. To ease some of the pressure inside.
The opposite lane has been blocked by a protest. Thousands of people, presumably marching on Christiansborg, seat of the Danish parliament, the Folketing. The traffic is at a standstill and we’re stuck in the tailback.
‘She was away touring a lot,’ I say. ‘I never saw her that much.’
He says nothing. And yet he’s not letting me off the hook. Eventually, I proffer this:
‘I stood waiting for her outside school one day. She’d promised to collect me, I hadn’t seen her for two months. She never turned up. I stood there by the gate, waiting while the school gradually emptied. After three-quarters of an hour I knew she wasn’t coming. I began to walk. I walked all the way home to Havnegade, where we lived in one of the theatre’s apartments. Along the way I realised something. I realised I still loved her. No matter what.’
The line of cars begins to move. A placard held by one of the protesters says something about the price of milk.
‘What’s with the price of milk?’ I ask.
Harald is the only one in the family who reads newspapers.
‘It follows the price of energy. It’s gone up a hundred per cent while we’ve been away.’
We pass the laboratories of the national energy company on Gothersgade, the Department of Geology, the Department of Microbiology, the Panum Institute, the Rigshospital, the Copenhagen University Faculty Library of Natural and Health Sciences, the H.C. Ørsted Institute on Nørre Allé, the Natural History Museum, the Centre for Particle Physics on Jagtvej.
This is how I get my bearings in Copenhagen. The city is a relief map of natural science institutions. They can be trusted.
Never mind about the Folketing, never mind about the media and the arts. Never mind about the price of milk. If one day I should ever come back and find the Niels Bohr Institute abandoned and boarded up, civilisation will surely be on the brink of definitive collapse.
We pass Svanemøllen Station and I turn onto the bridge over the railway cutting. It ends at a barrier and a security cabin, out of which steps a young man wearing a grey uniform, not of the military but a security firm’s.
A forest of buildings has gone up since I was here last, vertically aspiring fifteen-storey office complexes that tell us it’s not only our family who is doing well, the entire economy is booming and on its way upwards to the infinite universe beyond.
On a little open space is a low cylindrical structure clad with plates of polished steel, one of eight points of service access to the Copenhagen Collider, which, when it gets finished in five years’ time, will be the biggest particle accelerator in the world, ten per cent longer and forty per cent more powerful than CERN’s Hadron Collider.
I produce my University of Copenhagen ID. Glancing up at the office fronts, I select the first name I recognise and hand him the card.
‘I’m due in a meeting about the collider. At COWI.’
He looks down at his c
lipboard.
‘I’m afraid you’re not on my list.’
He is a polite and correct young man, at most five years older than Harald. Standing there on the frozen concrete he’s as handsome as a prince in a ballet. There’s an open book tucked under his arm. Twisting my head I can see it’s the sonnets of William Shakespeare. A name that might be familiar to some, but not to me.
‘That’s a shame,’ I tell him. ‘Because you can pencil me onto your dance card any day. How about it?’
The bloom of his embarrassment begins beneath his eyes, extends down through his cheeks and vanishes underneath his collar at the knot of his tie. Some women might have been interested in following its anatomical journey to conclusion.
The barrier goes up. We’re in.
I can sense Harald looking at me in a way he never has before. And I know exactly what he’s doing. He’s trying – possibly for the first time ever – to see his mother through the eyes of another man.
‘You made him blush, Mum. He was embarrassed.’
‘It’s only a flesh wound,’ I tell him. ‘Underneath, he was flattered as hell.’
9
THE BUILDING MARKED on my mother’s drawing as Magrethe Spliid’s workplace doesn’t look much like a college of anything. It looks like any other office building, thrown up with a bare minimum of budget and too little understanding of the fact that once a building is up the rest of us have to look at it until it falls down or gets dozed.
The car park, however, tells another story, of no expense spared. It’s as big as a football pitch. Perhaps the Royal Danish Defence College, Second Section, gets a lot of visitors.
As we cross through it, Harald gives my arm a little squeeze.
The gesture is profound. Harald is not wont to be profuse with his affections. Especially not with me.
Until he was eight he could hardly do without his mother. If we watched a film together or I read out loud to him, his hands would stroke my skin. One day when I picked him up from kindergarten he called the other kids together so they could feel how soft my cheeks were. I had to kneel down while thirty children put their hands on me one by one with Harald looking on, solemn and proud at being able to share out his mother’s warmth.
It all stopped when he was eight. One day I opened my arms to him the way I always did, but he wouldn’t come. He stood there, half a metre away, looking at me.
A process had been initiated, for which the psychologists doubtless will be able to provide any number of porous explanations, but whose brutal reality is that there will come a day when a mother will have held her child close for the last time, and when significant evidence will thereby be presented to indicate that love is never deep but merely a Darwinist illusion, made up to make sure parents and other animals take care of their young.
What remains between Harald and me is a very occasional and sudden physical intimacy such as this squeeze of my arm. I know the reason for it. The reason is the excavator.
Any other mother, and most fathers too, would call it a digger, as they would call the excavation it has made a hole, and most likely they wouldn’t notice one way or another. But we’re not like them. Harald grew up with a mother who knows the difference between a grab crusher and what we now pass by, which from a distance we have already identified as a thirty-five-ton Volvo excavator with a reach of some eight metres, meaning that I don’t need to peer into the excavation to satisfy myself that what they’re doing is laying sewage pipes with an internal diameter of ninety centimetres and a nominal life expectancy of a hundred and twenty years, and a minimum fall of twenty-five millimetres per running metre.
Harald’s squeeze of my arm is wordless acknowledgement of the fact that much may be said of his mother and the rest of his family, but when it comes to the outside world he’s been pretty much filled in on what’s what.
To the west, the area is penned in by a five-metre-high fence of wire mesh topped by two tiers of barbed wire, an announcement to the effect that the defence college sports ground isn’t for just anyone to kick a ball about in.
Even if it is rather inviting. The pitches are mown and rollered, and despite the frosty weather they seem to be bursting with health and chlorophyll.
Five metres behind the fence is a small circle of gravel, and in the centre of that circle stands Magrethe Spliid.
She looks like her photograph. Her body, however, is surprising. She is the most rectangular person I’ve ever seen. Her shoulders are right angles, her torso could have been constructed out of cubes. And yet, quite unfathomably, it is feminine.
She is wearing a tracksuit, is standing side on and hasn’t seen us. She leans forward, begins to rotate about her own axis, and only then do we see what she holds in her hand. A discus.
Her spiralling acceleration is so fast I’ve only ever seen the like in animals and machines. Moreover, it is so perfectly centred one can almost perceive a physical, unwavering plumb line descending through the middle of the motion.
She releases the heavy disc by allowing it to slip from the crook of her index finger, lending to it a lateral spin that makes it draw a flat parabola in the air.
It remains there for so long she is able to interrupt her movement, straighten her back into the dignified upright, lift her hand to shield her eyes from the sun, and still have time to savour the final phase of its arching flight.
She strides the long way to the point of impact and her gait is elastic and ground-gaining as a riding horse’s. As she picks up the discus, she sees us.
She comes slowly towards the fence, stopping a couple of metres away from it.
‘Susan Svendsen,’ I say. ‘University of Copenhagen, Department of Experimental Physics. I was hoping you could help me with a couple of questions.’
‘And what might they be?’
‘What was the outcome of the Future Commission’s final meeting?’
It transpires that the fence between us isn’t merely physical. It’s inside her, too. She has locked the doors and barred the windows, and now she peers out at us through the slot of a letterbox. After a moment, she turns away and starts walking.
‘I’m in trouble,’ I say. ‘I’ve got a prison sentence hanging over me. If I can get my hands on the minutes of that meeting they’ll drop all charges.’
Behind me, Harald shuffles impatiently. He prefers the sophisticated approach to life and has been hoping I would tiptoe into this encounter wearing ballet shoes and velvet gloves.
‘I’m Lana’s daughter,’ I say. ‘Lana Levinsen.’
She stops and comes back, all the way up to the fence, where she stands and studies me, then Harald.
A flicker passes over her face. The letterbox snaps shut.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Can’t help.’
And there she is, on her way again.
‘My son Harald here will go to jail!’
I’m talking to the back of her head. It becomes ever more distant with each stride.
‘A phone number,’ I shout. ‘A way of getting in touch! You’re our only chance!’
She vanishes into the low, black sheds that edge the running track.
Harald looks at me, mute with unspoken reproach.
10
WE GO BACK to the car.
I stop at the excavation. The excavator’s cab was empty before. Now there’s a man in it.
Andrea Fink once said to me she thought there should be a workman in every woman’s life.
I disagree with her about that. One can never be enough. I believe there should be at least half a dozen workmen in any woman’s life.
I love to watch them do what they do. Men at labour. The way their energy can be so expertly focused and directed towards the job at hand, at the same time as they are unaware, or perhaps have a very slight inkling, that you’re standing there watching them, relishing their bodies in their meticulous procedures, their complete and utter oblivious immersion.
Even now I pause and try to make eye contact with the man in
the cab. Or perhaps especially now, for I’ve never believed a woman needs to be done up to relish a man, needs to present herself in a certain kind of packaging, at a certain time of day, with immaculate hair and her heart in the right place. Personally, I can drool over a man anytime. And when one day they whisk me off, I hope the porters at my psychiatric rest home will look just like workmen.
But the man in the excavator isn’t looking.
Some people are always searching for signs. As if life were tea leaves in which fortunes could be told. I don’t belong to that category. Nevertheless, there’s something about his looking the other way that I don’t like.
And it’s not just my female vanity that’s bothered, either. It’s my common sense.
I’m three metres from the excavator. At that kind of distance, the Effect can be very intense.
Candour is a scalar phenomenon. From the massive suppressions of truth all of us live with to the extremes of unguardedness that, if allowed to occur, leave behind them a reality in which nothing ever again is the same. Somewhere in between, a few notches along the scale, is the high voltage that exists between man and woman.
That tension is one of the first things to become apparent whenever a woman, however briefly, moves into the vicinity of a man.
It’s not that I’m waiting for him to leap down from his Volvo, throw himself in the mud and propose marriage. But he ought at least to turn his head and thereby acknowledge what he and I both know: a woman with an open mind is standing looking at him.
But he doesn’t, and the fact makes me pensive. And in that frame of mind I go back to the car with Harald.
It’s not on its own any more. On one side of it a lorry has parked, on the other a van.
Both are empty.
Their drivers had the entire car park at their disposal. And yet they parked here, smack up against us. And after that they went away.
We get inside. At that same instant, the excavator starts its engine.
In experimental physics, structure and repetition are closely linked. You hardly ever see the pattern at first blush. It’s only at the second or third repetition you realise something systematic is going on.
