by Peter Høeg
I am sure that later, much later, Carl Laurids must have wondered what his father was doing on these nights with his superior’s correspondence, but in those days he looked upon it merely as a natural expression of his father’s omnipotent superintendence of life and death at Mørkhøj. So, at this early stage and with the benefit of hindsight, only you and I realize that the steward wrote to prevent the Mørkhøj house of cards from coming tumbling down.
* * *
Before the steward and his wife adopted Carl Laurids, their lives were totally bound up with Mørkhøj. Before that time they could not be said to have done anything other than fulfill their function in the service of the Count, apart, that is, from the small but essential detail of the rewritten letters, and even that constituted an act of obedience. But now here they were, adopting Carl Laurids, who may have been one of the smallholders’ children. That in itself is odd—that a steward should adopt a smallholder’s child—although it can perhaps be explained by the fact that it is hard to tell by looking at a baby how it is going to turn out. But that they did not, subsequently, stop Carl Laurids is something for which I have been unable to come up with any decent explanation.
It turns out that when he adopted Carl Laurids, the steward committed a crime, in that he persuaded Jacoby to record the child’s name in the manor chronicle and keep an account of its age, which was an unheard-of and dangerous breach of the estate’s one-year chronology. This breach made it possible, later on, to determine that Carl Laurids is seven years old when the steward draws up in the manor house yard one morning on a horse now so low-slung that his legs drag along the ground. And there he stays, stock-still, as the day wears on and the horse droops in the midday sun that rises clear of the wall, just for a little while, to cast the fuzzy shadows of the rusty iron spikes across the solitary rider in the tricorn hat and the gauntlets. When he is still there, rooted to that selfsame spot, the next morning, Jacoby makes his way over to him, to discover that he is as dead as a doornail and that rigor mortis is all that keeps him and his horse—which is wedged between his legs—upright.
On the day prior to his death the steward had taken his foster son—Carl Laurids, that is—out of Mørkhøj for the first time. They had driven in a little open carriage to the railroad station in the nearest town, which was Rudkøbing (although I would not have thought it had a railroad station). While Carl Laurids drank in his surroundings with eyes like saucers, the steward stared straight ahead, rigid and impervious to the shouts of the boys who ran along the road behind the carriage, and to the crowd that gathered around them while they waited at the railroad station, and to the town that struck him as being some demented magnification of the handful of low-roofed houses he remembered from his youth, 170 years before.
So there they stand, man and boy, with the little horses—dressed in the clothes of the previous century and utterly alone. And yet only the steward’s hands are shaking; Carl Laurids is quite cool. Then the train pulls in and the horses nearly go berserk. Miss Clarizza has subsequently described how—just as she stepped down onto the platform with her hatboxes and suitcases and trunks and looked, aghast, at the steward in his wig and high-heeled buckled shoes struggling to force the muzzles of the little horses groundward—her eyes met those of Carl Laurids, which were fearless and brimming with a curiosity that knew no bounds.
From the train, besides Miss Clarizza, they collected a grand piano and a royal court photographer complete with his long-legged black instrument. It was Carl Laurids’s foster father who had talked the Count into these acquisitions, by dint of which he believed they could more easily turn their backs on the outside world. By introducing photography to Mørkhøj he believed that it would be easier to prove that time stood still, because now, he said, even though the manor’s resident painter is dead, we can produce a family portrait that can be placed alongside the paintings lining the stairway up to the banqueting hall, since pictures demonstrate, better than anything else, how everything is as it has always been. With the grand piano, which had been ordered from Switzerland, it would finally be possible to drown out the sound of the mechanical mowers and manure spreaders, which filtered across the wall ever more frequently and had been disturbing the Count’s research work ever since the last of the palace musicians, whose playing had always accompanied his work, had collapsed over his instrument. Nevertheless, talking the Count into the photographer and the piano had taken some doing, and both concessions had weighed heavily upon him. And the only reason that he also permitted his steward to advertise for a governess—in newspapers he had heard of but never read—was that, one day, an airplane landed in the grounds of Mørkhøj.
The Count looked at this frail and rickety contraption and recalled, from his youth at the court of Versailles, a similar ungodly experiment involving a large bell filled with hot air. “I remember,” he said out of nowhere, to the person standing next to him—who just happened to be Carl Laurids—“how the sinner was smashed to death on the cobblestones of Paris before he could get close enough to the sun for his craft to burst into flames.” Carl Laurids made no reply. He just kept his eyes on the supernatural insect that had come over Mørkhøj’s wall in a fog of noise, trembled like a bird with a broken wing, given a little dip, and then plummeted earthward like a stone. The pilot survived because the machine fell into the murky lake in the grounds. Under other circumstances he would have been beheaded on the spot, especially after the discovery, the following day, of several catfish floating belly up in the moat—these proud fish having been done to death by the shock wave from the crash. Now, however, the Count looked upon the airplane crash as a natural consequence of all the forces emanating from the Philosopher’s Stone and the center of the world, and thus a divine pat on the back for him and his quest. So he had quarters organized for the pilot and had his leg fractures and internal injuries treated with leeches and by bloodletting and various diuretic agents while he attempted to question him, wanting to find out exactly what his position was when he was pulled downward. He was not able to discover anything, however, since the pilot turned out to be English. The Count himself spoke no English, and Jacoby had forgotten his native tongue two hundred years earlier. After a series of powerful purgatives the pilot’s soul took off and flew back to where it had come from without him and his host, the Count, ever managing to understand each other.
After this episode, the Count gave permission to advertise for a governess who could teach his children modern languages.
On the day of Miss Clarizza’s arrival, the first photograph ever was taken at Mørkhøj. In this picture, which is still in existence, the Count, the Countess, and their three children can be seen standing at the top of the Mørkhøj steps. There is no one on the next step, no one on the one below that, but on the next again stand Jacoby and the steward and his family. Where all the other faces have grown stiff in the knowledge that they are now being captured for eternity, there stands the boy Carl Laurids staring impassively straight into the lens.
The steward died the next day.
* * *
The Mørkhøj tenants had always buried their own dead. So, since the Count was busy calculating and Jacoby had long since lost the knack for anything of a practical nature, there was no one to do the needful for the steward’s body. In his initial panic, Jacoby had the rigid rider pulled into the shadows, then tried to enter the death in the manor history. This, however, he had to abandon. The chronology would not allow it, it looked all wrong—the steward standing there in the full flower of his manhood, and then dying the same year. So Jacoby deferred this dilemma. As time went on, the air and the sparse light dried out the steward and his horse and the skin stretched over their skulls, making the animal look ever more intelligent and endowing the steward with an increasingly youthful and alert appearance. Both Jacoby and the Count stuck to their old habit of coming out onto the manor house steps at some point in the course of each day to address a couple of remarks to the steward. This was just as it should b
e, and that he remained silent was of no matter. They had both long since lost any interest in answers: the Count because, on that day two hundred years ago when his guests left him in front of the gilded railings, he had realized that he had all the answers; Jacoby because writing history had shown him that the truth always takes the form of a question. Besides, the steward had always been a man of few words, and even now, when the only sound he uttered came from the faint whistling of the wind in the shafts of bone sticking out, here and there, through the skin, the common folk still bowed respectfully to the motionless figure in the shadow of the main building every morning on their way to work. And they went on with their work knowing that those sandy-gray eyes were upon them.
On the day that the steward was moved into the shadows, Miss Clarizza saw Carl Laurids walk up to his father and take a long, hard look at him. After that, she did not see the boy again until, one morning, there he was, sitting at the back of the schoolroom.
I have been unable to discover how and when Carl Laurids caught the Count’s eye or why the latter gave orders for him to take lessons in music and foreign languages from Miss Clarizza, along with his own children. Nevertheless, one day he was there, sitting at the back of the music room, which also did service as a schoolroom and was furnished with little desks fitted with sunken inkwells. Where Miss Clarizza and the three highborn children wore buckled shoes or button boots and frilled shirtfronts or cravats, Carl Laurids was attired in long oiled-leather boots and a shirtfront with a white collar—apparel never previously seen at Mørkhøj. He had walked across the cobbles of the manor house yard from the steward’s quarters in this outfit, and the eyes of the workers had followed him all the way. When he disappeared up the steps of the main building, one of the footmen who still had the power of speech spat on the floor. “Ass-licking little Count!” he said.
But no one ever mentioned the boy’s clothes to his face. To begin with, everyone expected the steward to bend down from his horse and punish the offending party with his riding crop. Later on, however, they stopped being surprised and only Miss Clarizza never forgot the boy’s behavior. It had dawned on her that, in order to come by these clothes, Carl Laurids must have left Mørkhøj—which had always been strictly forbidden to everyone except the steward. That he had done so seemed a sure sign of a peculiarly blind faith in his own worth.
Carl Laurids could now observe these highborn children—who had, until then, shone for him in the glow of untouchable aloofness—at close quarters. From his seat at the back of the schoolroom he discovered that the two countesses, despite several lifetimes of teaching, still could not speak properly, and that the young count, a boy of his own age, guided his slate pencil with both hands. It was then that Carl Laurids perceived his own worth in the light of the obscurantism of these aristocratic offspring. Miss Clarizza would later maintain that it must have been in the music room, during her classes, that Carl Laurids made the observation which was to determine the course of his life: that life was not arranged like the Mørkhøj steps, with set levels; that it ought instead to be regarded more as a slippery social slope; that an unfortunate combination of coincidences had conspired to set him at its midpoint, and that it was, in fact, possible to hang on and climb upward.
It was Carl Laurids’s job, during classes—which were held in the mornings—to close and open the windows and keep the fire going in the big, open grate. For three years he carried out these duties, and in three years he learned, without any effort, to read and write in English, German, and French and to play the piano. He was the most linguistically gifted child Miss Clarizza had ever taught. Initially, she treated him with firmness and condescension, but she soon had to capitulate. In the course of those three years he became the one person at Mørkhøj around whom all her thoughts and hopes revolved, and behind the authoritative mien her face would glow with a quiet joy when she looked across the vacant faces of the Count’s children and into Carl Laurids’s knowing brown eyes and said, “Shut the window, Charlie!”
One day Carl Laurids stayed behind after class to tell her, calmly and politely, that he would no longer be attending to the fire or the ventilation and that in the future, therefore, she was not to mention either the weather or the room temperature when he was present in the class. This was an outrageous request. Had the Count got to hear of it, Carl Laurids’s head would, in all probability, have been forfeit, and Miss Clarizza did indeed stare at him, stunned. Her mouth opened and closed in an attempt to come up with a sufficiently scathing rebuff. Just then Carl Laurids’s hands shot up and carefully adjusted the black velvet ribbon she wore around her neck. At this touch she was overwhelmed by the loneliness of her life at Mørkhøj and by a previously unacknowledged tenderness and by the air of resolve about Carl Laurids, and she threw her arms around him. The schoolroom contained no furniture other than the desks and, not wanting to dirty his trouser knees, Carl Laurids lifted his governess up onto the white grand piano, swept off the open music books in a single gesture, and raised his pitch to hers.
From then on, Miss Clarizza never mentioned the windows or the fire; Carl Laurids considered himself released from his duties. And from then on, the classes were held, according to the seasons, in baking heat or freezing cold.
Carl Laurids’s feelings for Miss Clarizza are not known, but there is no doubt that no record of their romance survived. Whenever he left her he forgot all about her, and whenever, urgent with lust, he caught sight of her he was seeing her for the first time. With the result that his advances to her, in the years when he was her lover, retained the furtive, brutal nature of that first time. Miss Clarizza never understood him. It was as though, every time he reached out for her, he posed her the same insoluble riddle and this, together with her loneliness, was what bound her to him. Later, when Carl Laurids had been made the Count’s secretary, he and the governess often met at the noble family’s dinner table, and, more often than not, she was so terrified of his courteous indifference that she could not eat a bite. By this time she had given up making any demands on him, as she had done in the beginning. Then her tearful reproaches had induced a slight puckering around Carl Laurids’s mouth. This had, over the years, hardened into a tiny, permanent line in one corner of his mouth; a little facial tic that he was later to conceal with the waxed mustache he was sporting by the time the world made his acquaintance. From that time onward, Miss Clarizza had grown so afraid of his calmness that she put up, unprotestingly, with his unpredictability.
One day Jacoby disappeared, and when the moat was dragged they found his bones, picked white and clean by the catfish. Nevertheless it was possible to identify them as being his with some degree of certainty, because of the extraordinary joints that had enabled him to produce such incredible flourishes in his handwriting and caused three cardinals, who had been personally acquainted with Ludovici Vicentino, to swear on the Bible that even the master’s script had not been more beautiful. The skeleton’s skull had been crushed, and it was deduced that Jacoby had been murdered.
Not long after this, the Count appointed Carl Laurids as his personal secretary in Jacoby’s place. This appointment seemed only natural and reasonable, since by that time Miss Clarizza had given up trying to teach Carl Laurids anything. He had taught himself Italian and Spanish, and for the past six months Jacoby had been teaching him Latin and calligraphy. And yet there was something not quite right about this appointment. Even in the fossilized numbskulls of Mørkhøj, suspicion of Carl Laurids smoldered. From then on, Miss Clarizza and the noble family and Carl Laurids’s mother were the only ones who did not turn their backs when they saw him. Everyone else sneaked off as he approached, even the red cows with their udders dragging along the ground, and the decrepit horses, and the bald chickens that laid black, inedible eggs; and even the catfish, normally so motionless, slipped down into the mud when he walked across the drawbridge.
Carl Laurids sent Jacoby’s bones to England because the Count had the idea that the English court would raise
a monument over the great penman’s earthly remains. But in the winter following the summer of Carl Laurids’s appointment, Jacoby returned to Mørkhøj. Miss Clarizza saw him arrive. He left no tracks in the snow of the driveway and stepped straight through the locked main door. That same evening she saw him sitting opposite Carl Laurids in the office that had once been his own, and after that she often saw them together, although she was never able to ascertain whether Carl Laurids was aware of the phantom’s presence.
It was at this time that Carl Laurids learned about the course of history. Until then, time had meant nothing at Mørkhøj, or to Carl Laurids. All that the watchmen’s song had conveyed was the rhythm of days and nights, which were sort of inside one another, if you see what I mean: before Carl Laurids was made secretary the days at Mørkhøj were not piled on top of one another. It was as though it were, in fact, the same day, or at any rate the same year, that kept coming around again, and so time led nowhere. But now Carl Laurids gained access to the one hundred folios containing the history of Mørkhøj, and there he unearthed the first clues to something that sent him delving into these books with their interminable record of recurrence. That something was transience. He discovered that in the midst of all this apparent regularity there were little things that sank and disappeared, never to return. There is no way of telling what first aroused his suspicions, but when it happened he had some kind of attack of total concentration. Night and day he sat reading in his office, and since, just at this moment, the Count himself was thinking that he was about to hit the bull’s-eye, that he was now standing before the gates of truth, and was therefore seized by a rapturous, unrelenting lust for work, there was no one to disturb Carl Laurids, except for Miss Clarizza. Now and then she tiptoed into his office—although he may not even have noticed—to put fresh candles in the candlesticks and stand for a moment watching him. Now and again, when driven out of their chairs by their zeal, the Count and Carl Laurids would meet on the stairways and in the corridors of the manor amid the suits of armor and faded tapestries, and Miss Clarizza would see them pass each other without lifting their heads—the Count in a black robe and garters with rosettes, Carl Laurids in shirtsleeves and oiled-leather boots. On these occasions Jacoby was usually walking behind Carl Laurids with a somewhat mournful expression on his face and his elegant hands clasped behind his back. As they walked there, it was hard to tell whether they were alive or dead, and hence they resembled our own impression—and that of their contemporaries—that even then, at the beginning of this century, there was a ghostly air about the Danish aristocracy.
