by Peter Høeg
Apparently, Henrik Kornelius has his own flat. Again, I’m struck by the superior choice of materials. The bathroom is done out in marble. The utility room likewise. If the brewery business is financing this, there must be some major production facilities hidden away that I haven’t seen yet. Thirty-odd vats in a gym wouldn’t do it.
I find the switch and turn on the light. Through the glass door of the washing machine, Henrik Kornelius’s face stares out at me.
Even though I’ve never met him, I know it’s him. His face is partially submerged in the grimy water that reaches halfway up the glass of the front loader’s door.
Time comes to an abrupt halt. My thoughts become rational, calm, oddly exact. And completely beyond my control.
I realise what sort of strength was required to stuff a full-grown man inside a washing machine. The opening is no more than forty centimetres in diameter. They must have smashed his hipbone and his ribcage in the process. I sense the kind of rage it must have taken to start the machine after it was done.
That’s as far as I get before real time intercedes. And my real-time thoughts are about one thing only: how to get away.
By the time my smiling monk returns, I’m back on the sofa.
He’s slightly perplexed. Yet serene. I suppose that’s how you get from silence and circular prayer, a view of the Furesø and limitless supplies of beer.
It’s a serenity that before long will be tested.
‘We’re looking for him. He may be outside somewhere.’
‘I’ll come back another day.’
He doesn’t ask me to wait. It wouldn’t have helped any.
He follows me out. I have to control myself so as not to run.
‘Can I give Father Kornelius a message?’
I look him in the eye.
‘Wish him a happy journey.’
He balks.
‘I didn’t know he was going anywhere.’
‘Nevertheless.’
I get on my bike and set off. Only once do I turn my head and glance back. He lingers pensively, watching as I pedal away.
27
TROPICAL COPENHAGEN IS situated on the Marshland of Amager Fælled and consists of eight structures in steel and glass, each tall enough to house thirty-metre palm trees and above them still have enough clearance for a highline system of polypropylene rope bridges from which visitors can look down on them.
The most positive thing that can be said about this establishment is that it’s made up of eight regular polyhedra with pentagonal faces, prompting any mathematician to think of Euclid’s strikingly elegant demonstration of the dodecahedron’s status as the fifth Platonic solid.
Apart from that, the place gives me the willies. You pay three hundred kroner for the privilege of filing through a central African steam bath populated by parrots as noisy as any construction site, constantly having to duck so as not to be upended by flying insects the size of coconuts, and needing an eye on every finger in order to avoid the resident monkeys half-inching your credit cards and lipsticks from your bag. And in the middle of all that, you’ve got your work cut out trying not to think of the fact that modern technology, underwritten by modern physics – which is to say me – is clearing 1,200 square kilometres of rainforest every day, a tiny speck of which we’ve got transplanted here on Amager Fælled. Which is another area of natural beauty no one ever got round to slapping a preservation order on, for which reason it, too, is in imminent danger of being wiped out. Then, when finally you reach the in-house restaurant, it’s called The Blue Okapi and reminds you once again of something we’ll soon only be able to enjoy thanks to the work of taxidermists.
Still, none of this can be helped, because it’s here Laban and the twins have decided we should meet. They love the place.
Laban’s got a thing about the tropics. He recorded the noise of the parrots here and composed a piece of music around it that he then sold to be used in television commercials advertising the place. And of course Thit is mad about the animals.
They’re sitting waiting for me and have already ordered, and the food has even arrived: Ghanaian fufu, a doughy porridge made from plantain and cassava, with a garish red sauce of coconut oil. Normally I find it delish, but today I can’t touch a bite. The sight of Henrik Kornelius’s face in the scummy hot water of that washing machine keeps swimming about in the air, right in front of my eyes.
‘We’ve been to see Kirsten Klaussen,’ says Harald in a voice like the grave. ‘She’s bought Bagsværd Church!’
They look at me expectantly. As if waiting for me to share their indignation.
‘So what?’
As of 2016, the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs started selling off empty churches as part of the kind of income-generating scheme to which we all must resort when there are no more customers left in the shop. Usually I cycle the long way home from the Department of Experimental Physics, via Bispebjerg, and on that route I’ve had to endure the Grundtvigskirken being put on the market, snapped up and turned into a five-floor cut-price department store. So why should I cry over Bagsværd Church?
‘It was designed by Utzon,’ says Laban. ‘It has the most magnificent organ.’
Harald grips the edge of the table as if to pull it out of its wall mounting.
‘She’s hung rocket parts up on the walls! The walls of a church! And a machine gun!’
Religion is one of many issues on which our family have yet to reach consensus.
I believe in the laws of physics, which isn’t faith, but experimentally verified, rock-solid knowledge. Laban believes in anything that can provide him with inspiration, be it Buddhism, Kabbalah or the philosophical concept of Music of the Spheres, as long as there’s a new twist to it every six months.
Unable to establish a common ground, we’ve therefore agreed to touch upon this delicate subject as seldom as possible in the presence of the children, who for the same reason have never been christened and whose viewpoints on the world have always been allowed to emerge naturally and spontaneously.
Thit turned out to be the born heathen. Once, in Year 7, as a way of kicking off confirmation classes, her school took them to one of the churches apparently yet to be sold off, where a priest introduced them to the tenets of Christianity. I sat in the car and waited for her outside, firstly because Thit has always been used to having her own private chauffeur, and secondly because I had the feeling it was going to be the kind of day on which she might need to express herself to someone.
She got in beside me and slammed the door. Any day now, those mapping the human genome are going to turn up the DNA strand carrying the genetic code for slamming doors, which Thit very obviously inherited from me.
We sat there quietly.
‘Mum,’ she said after a while, ‘it’s a load of rubbish!’
Ever since then – until today – she has refused to set foot in a church.
In brazen binary opposition to this standpoint we have Harald, who has always been passionately fond of the scriptures. If it makes sense at all to speak of Harald being passionate. He loves Jesus, loves churches, loves his biblical history.
When he was four years old and witnessed the christening of Laban’s sister’s infant child, an unsettling silence fell upon our house that evening. Silence is the worst thing for a mother. When the children are babies you’re scared their silence means they’ve died in their cot, and when they’re older you fear that silence forewarns of them doing something secretive that’s going to explode in their hands at any moment. That evening, I discovered them in the bathroom. Harald had found what to him, among all the furniture and fittings, most resembled a baptismal font, which is to say the toilet bowl, and was now well underway christening the latest litter of Thit’s homeless kittens. One by one he held them under the water, and while I stared in disbelief, he rattled off what snatches of the ceremony he could remember:
‘This creature,’ he said, ‘we baptise in the name of the Holy Spirit.’
F
rom then on, the kitten was called Holy Spirit, and no one could convince Harald otherwise, not even Thit.
So his outrage at the soiling of Bagsværd Church has a long history behind it.
‘How did you get in?’
Laban and the twins exchange glances.
‘We turned left,’ says Thit.
Laban and I are perfectly clear on the division of our labour with respect to Thit and Harald: I’ve done eighty-five per cent.
Which is fine by me and always has been. It means I’ve spent eighty-five per cent of our time together with them, so in a way the split has been reward in itself. What can get me riled, though, isn’t the raw division of man-hours, but the qualitative difference in their content.
Laban took weekends. And left the day-to-day running to me.
So I’m the one who made their packed lunches and did all that needed doing to get the twins to school on time or thereabouts. I’m the one who made sure their appearance was such that they at least would not bring shame upon the family after passing through the school gates. Whereas one day a week Laban might suddenly exclaim something like ‘I just finished a symphony’ or ‘I just finished a string quartet, so I’ll drive the kids today’. And very often on such a day, instead of driving to the kindergarten or school, they turned left.
Turning left is something Laban and the twins hit upon a good many years ago, and the game was all about them looking at each other in the car and bursting into giggles, and then saying, ‘Turn left!’ Whereupon Laban would make a hazardous U-turn, thereby rendering the entire world open to their every most fanciful whim.
The world lying open in this way meant two things: either they would go to the Tivoli Gardens or to a restaurant, or else they would buy toys or in some other way spend money we didn’t have. But only after they had finished what turning left was really all about: bluffing their way into some place where entrance otherwise was strictly prohibited.
‘We knew nothing in advance,’ says Laban, ‘but when we laid eyes on her two dogs, a pair of big black dragons like the hounds of Hades, and the way she’s rebuilt the church, the outdoor swimming pool she’s had put in that leads inside through the vestry, I felt I could sense some measure of her self-importance.’
‘She thinks she’s the queen,’ says Thit.
And Thit knows a queen when she sees one.
‘I introduced myself,’ says Laban, ‘but she’d already recognised me. I told her I’d always wanted to show the children Bagsværd Church. The fantastic light inside. As though the divine were on the very verge of manifesting itself. I told her I’d dreamed of letting them hear the organ play.’
‘Most of the interior’s taken up by her living space and workshop,’ says Harald. ‘She boasted about that. She’s got bits of a hydrogen bomb hung up on the wall!’
‘Fragments of the outer shell,’ Laban explains. ‘She told us she’d developed shell elements for the American nuclear-energy agency, as part of their maintenance programme. She said she was on the scientific panel that advised the US Department of Defense during the Vietnam War. A frosty lady, and rather full of herself, that was our impression. Only then she thaws and gives us a guided tour of the place. She must have spent a fortune on it. The nave’s all split-level now. Then there’s the pool coming in from outside, like it was the Alhambra. The mood suddenly becomes very convivial.’
‘Until we ask her about the Future Commission,’ says Thit. ‘Then the fun’s over.’
‘She wanted us out,’ says Harald.
He picks up his knife and tries to flex the blade.
‘I was obliged to use my charm,’ says Laban. ‘I reminded her about my dream that the children might listen to the organ. I told her they’d be traumatised if that promise were to remain unfulfilled. Reluctantly, she backed down. And then I played five-sixty-five.’
Laban has always spoken of Johann Sebastian Bach as if the two of them had grown up masturbating together and been inseparable since nursery school. He talks about Bach’s works as if he’d co-composed them, and assumes everyone knows that five-sixty-five is the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, work No. 565 in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis.
‘And as I play, I’m talking to her.’
Laban has this trick of playing something hypnotic to the accompaniment of his own voice-over. It works like a siren song: all human defences, including the immune system and the faculties of common sense and scepticism, shut down immediately and one is left abandoned to his despicable devices.
‘I’m thinking to myself: The woman’s seventy and famous all over the globe. Her self-esteem extends like a great front bumper into outer space. What kind of thing would occupy a woman like that? Answer: her posthumous reputation. So while I play, I’m telling her I’m writing an opera commissioned by the University of Copenhagen. About the great scientific discoveries of the last fifty years. How I’d been hoping to include the work of the Future Commission. I sense I’m getting through to her. She opens her mouth. Only then she shuts it again. Impossible, she says, but lets slip that all the information has been secured for posterity. So I tell her that as a composer I know how vain information can be, especially digitalised information. Compact discs deteriorate, computer memory degenerates with time. Then she gives me this sneaky look and tells me it’s not digital, it’s all on paper. Paper, I tell her, gets damp. It rots, and can burn. Ink will fade. Not in this case, she says. The notes are in ink, but everything’s stored in a temperature-regulated, humidity-controlled environment. You’re an expert in metals, I say, you know full well even a safe can burn at sufficiently high temperatures. It’s not a safe, she says, it’s a concrete vault. Eleven metres underground. No access to anyone. But when it’s all released, ninety years from now, heavy volumes will be written about it, and some people are going to be very surprised indeed. And that’s when we leave.’
Laban is incapable of keeping a secret. He’s forever giving me and the children our Christmas presents three weeks early.
‘Spit it out,’ I say.
‘As an important composer, I’m part of this country’s cultural heritage. I’ve got an arrangement with the Royal Danish Library. They get all my notes. And another with the National Archives. They get my letters.’
For a moment I’m at a loss for words. It’s the thought of all the things he and I have written to each other, and more particularly the fact that it hasn’t all been burned as would be fit and proper, but will instead find its way to the National Archives, where it will lie and simmer, its neutrons bubbling away, waiting for criticality.
‘Not your letters, of course,’ he says. ‘Nor indeed those of the other women I have known.’
‘I’m pleased,’ I say. ‘On behalf of the National Archives. It means they’ve saved themselves a packet on extra storage capacity.’
But he’s unruffled. He’s about to get one over on me.
‘As destiny would have it,’ he goes on, ‘I am thereby well informed as to declassification dates on restricted information in this country, and there is only one archive in the whole of Denmark whose contents may be withheld for ninety years. That place is the National Archives Annexe, located somewhere underneath the Folketing.’
I glance around the restaurant. At the tables, diners are enjoying aromatic dishes whose spices come from countries in which large parts of the population survive on less than a thousand calories a day. On the walls hang diplomas awarded to The Blue Okapi by the Glutton Club, and enlarged photocopies of restaurant reviews according the establishment six meat pies or six enema syringes or whatever unit of excellence the newspaper in question employs. Denmark is in many ways a remarkable country.
‘I found Henrik Kornelius,’ I say. ‘Someone stuffed him inside a washing machine and turned the dial to boil wash.’
Thit and Harald are only sixteen. I must have nurtured a dream once of protecting them and giving them a better life than my own.
That dream is an illusion now. If you’re dead lucky you might just be
able to shield your kids from assault and abuse. But you can’t shield them from the real problem. Because the real problem is life itself.
Maybe Laban and I kept them away from reality for too long. We – or at least I – have always had time for them. We selected their kindergarten with the most meticulous attention to detail. We picked out the best primary school. We gave them enough pocket money to defer their encounter with that most dreadful fact of life: work.
Here, at the restaurant called The Blue Okapi, I wonder if we might have done them an ill turn. Because sooner or later, the reality of life will become plain to them. And now, facing one particularly hideous aspect of that reality, the thought occurs to me that we may perhaps inadvertently have stunted their resiliance.
Laban can’t talk. His lips have gone white.
But Thit can.
‘How do you get a man inside a washing machine?’
I look her in the eye.
‘By exerting sufficient pressure per square centimetre.’
Slowly, she puts down her knife and fork. I’m glad I was able to put this off a bit. At least they could enjoy some of their meal.
28
IT’S AFTERNOON. OUTSIDE, the winter’s darkness has descended. The twins have gone off to Jægersborg Allé to buy the last of their Christmas presents and look for some duck for the dinner. Laban and I are sitting facing each other at the round table.
‘We need to get into that archive,’ he says. ‘It needs to be tonight.’
Denmark was once an open country. Where a dentist on Amager Torv, an admirer of Thorvald Stauning, the country’s first social democratic prime minister, decided he wanted to tell of his affection to the man himself, for which reason he stopped by the prime minister’s office on his way home from work and was asked in for coffee, after which he performed an extraction of one of the beloved statesman’s teeth, on the spot and without charge.
