by Peter Høeg
I point behind him and immediately he turns to look. The way 99.9 per cent of the world’s population would do in the same situation.
And then I kick the crate from under him.
I judge it to be about thirty centimetres high, and his centre of gravity is thus a metre and a half above the ground at the moment his fall begins. He lands flat on his back, his head snapping against the concrete a nanosecond later.
For a moment he’s unconscious, a few seconds perhaps. Long enough for me to snatch a garden fork from the wall and put its prongs to his throat.
We glare into each other’s eyes. I press the fork down lightly and see something begin to dawn on him, an insight of the kind that’s rather difficult to arrive at in any ordinary family idyll: the realisation that it’s not just everyone else who’s going to die, but oneself, too, and moreover that it’s likely to happen any second now.
But then Thit and Harald are standing there staring at us.
We’ve gone back into the house and are sitting down in the kitchen. The left side of my face is swollen, my eye partly closed. Thit has cleansed the wound at the back of Laban’s head and made a bandage out of a tea towel. He looks like an oil sheik on his last legs.
Our hands are shaking, his and mine.
‘We’ve never had a fight before,’ he says. ‘There’s never been any violence between us. It’s my fault entirely. It’ll never happen again.’
‘There are other kinds of violence, aside from the purely physical,’ Thit says. ‘Harald and I remember tensions between you all the way back to when we were in kindergarten. We’ve often talked about the way we had to gauge the mood when we came into the living room, whether it felt safe. Children are like small animals. You listen out for danger. Grown-ups think about the punch-ups, the arguments, perhaps. But not the tension. The tension is like poison. And you never managed to make it go away.’
We sit quite still. In the impotent understanding that she’s right.
‘I had an idea,’ says Laban. ‘A wish, if you like, or a dream. When your mother was pregnant with the two of you. It was the only thing I could think about. It had nothing to do with anything I could teach you, and nothing to do with music, either. It was something else: I wanted you never to be lonely. The way I was as a child.’
Laban has two brothers and a sister. He grew up in a loving family environment, with parents who were understanding. They wrapped him up in cotton wool. None of us ever thought of him as lonely before.
‘There can be something inside a child. Something very hard to see that’s looking for a kind of response, sympathy. The child can’t say so himself. And though he might be surrounded by well-meaning adults, there’s a part of him that’s overlooked. And until it’s seen and recognised, he won’t ever be able to thrive and grow.’
For the first time, I see inside Laban a little boy lost.
‘It went away when I met your mother. But there’s a price to be paid. If another person really perceives who you are, and if you feel yourself to be truly fathomed by a woman, it triggers a kind of madness. You crave to be recognised again and again. To feel completely understood. You want her to make up for all the years she wasn’t there. And what’s more: once you’ve opened up, you can get really, really scared of losing her.’
I’m standing up, at the sink, with my back to them.
‘When my father disappeared,’ I say, ‘the world split apart. Until then, I’d been living at the centre of a sphere. That was how it felt, like the universe was a sphere that surrounded me. The day he went away, it changed shape. From then on, I was living on a plane surface. With no protection above, and the constant fear of falling over the edge. My mother felt the same way. She’d had other men while they were still together, and she had other men afterwards, too. But she never got over it. There was a certain unity that came apart. After that, she and I lost our bearings. We were all over the place. Even if she did manage to keep the flat, to stay on at the theatre and carry on with her dancing, she was an itinerant from that day on. She was thirty years old, and a meanderer inside herself. So when I got pregnant with you, I had one thought only, the idea that we would share our meals together. I saw myself preparing food for you all. And to bring that idea into being meant embarking on a long-term project. I realise that now: I decided I was going to stay with Laban until the two of you could look after yourselves.’
I scald out the teapot. Measure out the tea leaves. Pour on the boiling water. And then I turn round and look at them.
‘We did our best,’ I say. ‘Laban and me. And very often it wasn’t good enough.’
We eat in silence. Eventually, Harald pushes his plate away.
‘The stories I told when I was little,’ he says. ‘They weren’t to do with you.’
Harald told fibs for years. At school, to us, to his friends. We felt guilt-ridden. We tried to talk to him. We talked to the school. We took him to counselling. Nothing helped.
We gave up when the other parents started calling us. Harald had convinced his classmates that our entire family came from a distant galaxy and that we’d hidden our spaceship in the Charlottenlund Slotspark.
After yet another phone conversation with yet another concerned mother, Laban and I looked at each other. Laban said what both of us were thinking:
‘Boys tell stories about the dog they haven’t got. The air rifle they’d love to have. The kiss they dream about from the girl of their fancy. They don’t go around telling everyone their family are aliens. This is a different category. And still one can’t help thinking it commands respect.’
One day it just stopped. There was never an explanation. Until now.
‘No matter what you might have done back then, it would never have been enough. I wanted the world to be bigger. I wanted to make it bigger. I realised this in Nepal when I tried to smuggle those antiquities over the border at Almoeda. I could have speeded up. I could have made it across. But I didn’t. It was like something inside me held me back. I realised then that the wish is okay. Only the method was wrong.’
That night, I can’t sleep. In my mind I gaze out over the twins’ childhood. Trying to understand it. To understand them.
They slept with me, sometimes with Laban, until all of a sudden, at the age of eight or nine, over a period of little more than a few weeks, they began to sleep in their own rooms. But before that, I watched them wake up a thousand times.
Until they were seven they smiled as soon as they opened their eyes. Those eyes in the early morning would for a few seconds be without comprehension of what universe they were in. And then they would recognise the bed, each other, and the grown-up next to whom they lay. That was when they smiled. As if out of the deepest confidence and trust in life.
It came to an end when they were seven. Within a few short months there was a shift in their waking eyes. It was as if some new materiality had begun to peer out from inside. A new administration that had begun to realise there was a price to pay for growing up.
I think about Laban. I’ve always thought he woke up like a citizen of the world, a Renaissance man. Now I look at him differently. As if what he said at the table has thrown a new interpretation backwards in time. As if the present could change the past.
4
I WAKE UP at five in the morning. I can only see out of one eye. The other throbs. I go outside. Laban is sitting on his haunches on the decking, singing softly. Less than a metre away, two young hares have paused to listen. As I stand quietly in the doorway, he reaches out and strokes the one nearest, running his hand gently down its back. It sits motionless. Then it notices me and both hares scatter in fright.
Laban looks up and sees my eye. He flinches.
‘Animals react to the animal within us,’ he says. ‘To our aggression and fear. A person singing and making music enters a different state of consciousness. That must be what Francis of Assisi discovered.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘And the Pied Piper of Hamelin.’
T
he sun tinges the clouds with dark purple from below. It hasn’t reached the horizon yet.
‘Thit has confirmed my estimations,’ I tell him. ‘From her riding trips. The area’s a square, ten by ten kilometres. The perimeter fence is equipped with sensors all the way round, and from whatever way you approach, a guard will always appear. They’ve got us in a high-security prison.’
He says nothing.
‘The farm’s a gene bank for cereal varieties. The orchards contain hundreds of different kinds of apple trees. Oskar does grafting experiments with tropical and subtropical plants. There are bees there, of a kind no one’s ever seen in Denmark. Oskar’s a soldier. What is this place?’
The hares, which had gradually approached again, turn and scurry away at the sudden volume of my exasperation.
‘There’s an investigation going on, Susan. As long as that’s the case, we’re safe here. We’ve got everything we need. Thit’s got horses, Harald’s got books. We’re managing. Everything’s going to be all right.’
The sun appears.
‘I was shut away from when I was twelve until I was sixteen,’ I say. ‘When they moved me away from Holmgangen I promised myself it wouldn’t happen again. And if it did I would make sure that situation changed. I didn’t want to be kept prisoner ever again.’
He says nothing.
‘There’s a kind of muzak, Laban. Not just here, but everywhere else in Denmark, too. I’ve always been able to hear it. It’s a song that says everything’s all right, we can relax and take things easy, we’ve got everything we need. We’re being looked after, the splendours of life are without end, all we have to do is lean back and enjoy. But it’s a siren song, Laban. It makes us forget we occupy the smallest window of time, open only for the briefest of moments. It makes us forget a deeper-lying hunger. But not me, Laban. I’m forever hungry. Do you understand?’
‘You’ve tasted everything, Susan. And none of it satisfies you.’
Later that morning I see Thit ride off into the forest and decide to follow her. I find her sitting by a small lake. The water is clear as glass. From the bottom, springs issue forth, cylindrical curls rising to the surface.
We amble back to the house together. The mare follows her like a dog. Thit has always talked about animals as if they were people. She had her first menstruation whilst out riding. She was twelve years old, we’d bought a summer house in north Jutland that spring and couldn’t make the payments. It was sold off by court order that same autumn. In between, we managed to spend a marvellous summer in anticipation of future grants. Nearby was a farm where there were horses. Thit rode a black stallion every day. It was as big as an elephant. The day it happened, she came riding up to tell me, beaming with pride as she patted her horse.
‘He knew,’ she said. ‘He knew even before it came.’
Animals react to our trust by acting like they are people. The mare tags along behind us like a respectful member of the family.
‘Mum, you know those bedtime stories I never wanted to hear?’
I keep walking, albeit on autopilot. We’re touching on another family enigma, another pain spot.
I always tried to tell the children a story when I put them to bed. It was for the same reason I took them to kindergarten in the mornings, and later to school, accompanying them on their way towards adulthood, to soften the blow of having to let go and allow them to get on with things themselves. In the same way, I tried to usher them into sleep with a story.
When I was a child myself, I was frightened whenever sleep approached. I would lie in the dark, waiting to succumb, but then fear would come instead. And though I lay still, I travelled. The darkness grew, and there eventually, at journey’s end, was sleep.
The fear stopped when I grasped the periodic system. There’s no more to say. I looked at the table of the elements and understood it immediately. It was a guarantee. A map of a higher order.
That was what I tried to pass on to the twins. At first I read from a children’s book, with the two of them at my sides. Then I turned off the light. And in the darkness I would tell them one last story before they slept.
It was always about physics. About Zajonc’s box of invisible light, and Faraday’s blindly intuitive genius. About the whole world lined up for the confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity at the meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society at Burlington House in November 1919.
I wanted to provide them with a bridge of order and regularity across which they might pass into sleep, a diagram of the only things in which we can truly believe. I wanted to show them you can take a grown-up by the hand and proceed along a shining path to the very place where sleep embraces us.
It didn’t work.
Or rather, with Harald it did. His eyes would be turned towards my face in the dark while he lay there motionless. As I spoke, I could sense his attentiveness, and the increasing relaxation of his body. And eventually, when I stopped, a few seconds would pass and he would give in to sleep.
It was different with Thit. She didn’t make a protest. But whenever I got up to turn off the light and she realised I was going to tell a story, she always climbed up into her own bed.
I tried asking her why, but she never told me. Without a word, she would turn away and leave me and Harald on our own in the dark, retreating into her domain to fall asleep.
It always pained me. To see a little child, three years old, let go of your hand and withdraw alone to a place to which a mother might have led her.
Occasionally, in the years that have passed, I’ve ventured to ask her about it. She’s never replied.
But now she stops. The horse draws to a halt. The world likewise. The forest holds its breath.
‘When you told us those stories, you were trying to build a room for Harald and me. I could hear that, and not just from the words. You were trying to build a room that was full of light. A perfect room. Physics tries to build perfect rooms, you told us that. Perfect lightproofed rooms, airproofed rooms, weightless rooms, sterile rooms. You and Dad, you tried to build that kind of room around Harald and me. And that was always clearest to me when you were telling us those stories. You were good, and almost succeeded. But I didn’t want to go into that room. Because if I did it would have been very hard to leave it again. That’s the problem, you see. If a person can build a place where no suffering exists, the world outside becomes that much more dangerous. Because you want to stay in that place for ever.’
I hear what she’s saying, and at the same time it’s like I’m plummeting. As if the bottom has fallen out of the forest.
‘You wanted to alter the world, Mum. The way you alter a physics report.’
We go back to the house.
I serve dinner. Harald puts down his knife and fork.
‘In nineteen sixty, the United States and the Soviet Union together possessed a total nuclear explosive force equivalent to three thousand kilos of TNT for every man, woman and child on earth.’
I close my eyes and hope he’s going to leave it at that. But he doesn’t, he carries on.
‘Magrethe Spliid describes how powers very close to the American president applied pressure to implement a surprise nuclear attack. When permission remained unforthcoming, they bypassed the president and the American government and carried out a number of provocations towards the Russians to force them into war. In one article she goes through every single one of the local wars in which the superpowers have been involved since the Second World War. Not one ended in clear victory. The Korean War is a case in point. Millions dead, the entire North Korean society in ruins and that close to escalating into nuclear war. And yet the whole thing ends in stalemate. She sums up the research into the decision-making processes of the Cold War. The massive increases in atomic capabilities that occurred weren’t occasioned by any strategic or foreign-policy imperative. Instead, they were pressured into being by the weapons industry and more aggressive elements within the military and administrative sectors. Both in the S
oviet Union and in the US. And Denmark was involved all the way: a small, hesitant, yet nonetheless unequivocal pillar of support within NATO.’
I realise he’s pointing the finger at Laban and me.
‘Laban and I weren’t even born then,’ I tell him. ‘Besides, your dinner’s getting cold.’
He holds his tongue and begins to eat. I glance across at him, my appetite gone.
Again he puts down his knife and fork.
‘She states that research indicates that anger builds up collectively, and very slowly. It’s like there’s a reservoir of rage, a toxic waste dump, and when it’s filled up and starts to run over, war breaks out. She considers that waste dump to consist of the sum of the anger generated by each and every one of us. She believes it to be measurable. Not mechanically, not with a measuring rod or weighing scales. But some people, she writes, will be able to sense the dump filling up. And they’ll know when it’s about to run over. By predicting that, by pointing out that we’re now on the verge, and by being seen to be right, they’ll encourage societies to turn the other cheek, to look away from perceived enemies in the external world and instead focus on their own internal anger. And when they do, things will start to change.’
A silence ensues. Eventually, it’s broken by Thit. Her voice is soft and gentle.
‘That’s a very beautiful thought. But it’s naive, Harald. You only have to look at the four of us.’
All at once we notice Laban. He’s staring into space as if he’s seen something.
‘The Future Commission,’ he says. ‘That’s what she wanted it for. She and Spliid. That’s what they envisaged, right from the start. They thought that if they produced correct predictions, of wars and other widescale acts of violence, people would become aware of the deeper underlying mechanisms.’
He gets to his feet, all eyes upon him. He circles the table. We’ve seen him do this before, at times of creative inspiration. His eyes gaze into something far away.
‘It is beautiful in a way. Very humanistic. And yet there’s something not quite right about it. It’s the conspiratorial side of it, the secrecy, that bothers me. The wish to exercise power, however benignly. It’s like they were wanting to creep up and spring a miracle on us.’
