by Peter Høeg
Carl Laurids began by reading backwards through the history of Mørkhøj, back to the erection of the wall and beyond, further back than anyone had ever read before, back to the great Paracelsus’ visit, and to the founding of the estate, to that year when one of the Count’s distant forefathers had kicked a rock out of the wall in the prison in which he had been incarcerated for lese majesty and had then fulfilled the sacred oath he had taken by walking in the direction of Rome for three days with the rock under his arm and, on the spot where he halted, laying the foundations for the church around which his new manor would be built. During his reading, Carl Laurids had registered so many changes, so many events that had taken place and were now, irrevocably, past, that he felt confident that time was a fact. It was from this point that he began his reconstruction of Mørkhøj’s history. In dazzling flashes of clarity he understood what was hidden behind all those inky deletions with which Jacoby had masked Mørkhøj’s original chronology. He re-created those moments at which the Count had resigned from all official posts and honorary political duties in order to devote himself wholeheartedly to proving that Mørkhøj stood at the center of a timeless world. He calculated his way to the date of the party at which the Count had presented his discovery to the world and had been let down. And after months of hollow-cheeked industry he drew up the chronology of Mørkhøj since the day the clocks were stopped. With this accomplished, Carl Laurids felt that the future had planted, on his forehead, the kiss that would awaken him fully from Mørkhøj’s sleep of yesteryear, which he now knew to have lasted for exactly two hundred years. He was, at this time, eighteen years old and had been the Count’s secretary for three years. He also knew that for the rest of the world the year was 1918.
It was at this point that the Count summoned Carl Laurids. The old man had been weakened by his work and thwarted expectations. In order to restore his vigor he had had himself bled six times in quick succession. Initially, these tapping operations had no effect, but shortly thereafter he was struck by a serious case of blood poisoning and septic fever, which led to a paralysis that spread upward from his abdomen. This is the usual direction taken by such things in Denmark—always upward from the abdomen, especially with elderly men suffering face-to-face with young men like Carl Laurids. Granted, he is not the Count’s son, but still the situation strikes me as symbolic: the Count lying on his sickbed paralyzed below the waist, and Carl Laurids sitting on the edge of his bed—man of the new era. And what is he doing? He is reading aloud. The paralysis has also weakened the Count’s sight, and when this occurs he is gripped by mistrust of his own memory. So he sends for Carl Laurids, to read the history of Mørkhøj to him and refresh his memory on certain points, such as what the great Paracelsus had said.
The bed in which the Count lay while Carl Laurids read to him had been set up in the laboratory under the big hole in the roof through which the Count’s machines were directed toward the celestial equator. Now Carl Laurids began to read backwards, from the day when the Count’s guests took their leave of him. But instead of reading exactly what was there on the page, he read with his own discovery of the law of change constantly in mind. During the readings, which went on week after week, he and the Count became closer to each other than they had ever been. What brought them together was the one crucial question—one that is also of interest to the rest of us—of whether time really does exist, and it was with a sense of fellowship not normally found between master and servant that they made their way together through the distances that had erased the great Paracelsus’ words when he was carried up from the cellars where he had whiled away the time with tokay and three whores from Copenhagen, and had lifted his head from the stretcher and said damned if this wasn’t the center of the world.
By the time they had got to this point, the Count was confined to bed and there was nothing left to stop Carl Laurids as he worked his way toward the present, reading of the inbreeding of the cows and the horses and the people and the death of the musicians and the cattle plague and the fungus against which Mørkhøj’s medieval agricultural techniques were powerless and about such an incredible number of other events that he read right into the winter, even though he began in the autumn. On Christmas Eve, Miss Clarizza climbed up to the laboratory to call them down to the dinner table where the children and the Countess waited in fearful silence around the gold plate for Papa, who happened to be the Count and who had now been in the laboratory for so long that they barely remembered what he looked like.
She found them in the gloaming, with Carl Laurids reading by the glow from the luminous liquids in the alembics. When they became aware of her they sent her away again, saying that they wanted their food sent up; there could be no thought of breaking off just as they had got to a particularly exciting part: Carl Laurids recounted the dwindling of the Mørkhøj linen stocks, the steward’s rewriting of the Count’s mail, and Jacoby’s registration of his, Carl Laurids’s, birth, and if tiredness occasionally caused him to flag, he was immediately prompted by the Count, who never said a word during the reading but saved his protests and grew ever more convinced—even though the paralysis had now spread to most parts of his body—that he had never been closer to immortality. Carl Laurids recounted his education and his father’s death, and all the times he had left Mørkhøj without permission, and his eyes never left the book, not even when the Count ordered the steward’s mummified body to be brought up, horse and all, so that he could assure himself that it was in fact death that had endowed the steward with the sharp gaze under which life at Mørkhøj continued unchanged. While the paralysis was making it difficult for the Count to breathe, Carl Laurids read of his affair with Miss Clarizza, pausing only for a brief moment to draw closer to the Count and drown out the weak wheeze of his breath.
On New Year’s Eve the paralysis reached the Count’s face, which stiffened into the expression of imperious arrogance that had only ever deserted it when he had been really drunk. And then Carl Laurids read about his discovery that even though the Count believed the opposite, time did in fact pass, and about how he had bashed in Jacoby’s skull with the wooden sole of one of his boots and thrown him into the moat. Prompted by an evil glint in the Count’s eye (this glimmer being now the only sign of life), he recounted how he had, just before he began to read, forged the manor accounts and stolen the last gold ducats from the cellars. It would be wrong to regard these admissions as calculated acts of malice against a dying man; the readings had long since elevated the Count and his secretary beyond the question of guilt and justice.
In the evening the children and the Countess and Miss Clarizza gathered at the sickbed, and then Carl Laurids reached the end of the last volume. The Count’s cheeks were a hectic red, but Carl Laurids’s were very pale and his voice remained intense and distinct as he read of the new law of succession which would come into effect on this night, New Year’s Eve 1918, and which meant that, if the Count died on the other side of midnight, those few assets remaining would fall to the state. Just then Miss Clarizza heard the Countess sobbing, and when she felt a chill draft at her neck and turned around she saw Jacoby standing between the open window and the steward’s corpse, which had been propped up against the wall. Apparently no one except herself had noticed the former secretary. As the Count’s eyes veiled over and began to roll back, Carl Laurids turned the last page of the folio and read about this New Year’s Eve and who was present and what had been served for dinner. Then the dying man opened his eyes for one last time and looked straight at his secretary. At that moment they heard the watchman singing down in the manor house yard. Carl Laurids stopped reading. As the singing faded away the Count’s eyes opened wide and grew misty and gray as the wall around Mørkhøj. Carl Laurids straightened up. And in that same moment, as the draft rustled the pages of the book, he turned his weary face toward the figure of the former secretary and said, “Shut the window, Jacoby!”
AMALIE TEANDER
The house in Rudkøbing
&nb
sp; Time that passes
1853–1909
IT IS A SUNDAY MORNING in Rudkøbing on Langeland. Amalie is four years old. At 11 a.m. precisely, on the dot, her grandmother has the big front door opened to admit the citizens of the town. They have been standing freezing in the street, which is a tribute, a mark of respect, a token of their humility in the face of Amalie’s grandmother, the Old Lady, whom they know they are not going to see anyway. Now they are being allowed inside, where it is warm, now they are filing past the dim splendor of room after room and the life-size bronze lamps in the shape of young, naked men, and the aviaries full of brightly colored birds. They walk along endless corridors, lit by hissing gas jets, that lead them past the open door. On a dais, reached by ascending steps of white Persian marble, sits the first water closet in Rudkøbing, in Langeland—possibly even the first in the whole of provincial Denmark. It is mounted upon four lion’s feet, and despite its weight the white bowl seems to float on a brilliant profusion of red painted flower petals executed with such skill that they seem, just now, at this very minute, to have been tossed into the air by a breeze. On the wall to the right of the closet hangs a clock, and beneath the clock, wearing a starched white dress, stands Amalie. Below the dress she is naked, a fact worth noting since the townspeople of Rudkøbing, whom it takes the entire day to file past, are all tightly buttoned up, every one of them, including the children.
Amalie stands with her back to the passersby. There is nothing strange in this. She is a little rich girl, there for decoration and to show the leading families in Rudkøbing that we, the Teander Rabow family, not only possess the finest privy ever seen but also have little cherubs who can turn their backs on your admiring glances. That is what the people passing by think, and that is what the Old Lady would have thought if she had been there, but that is not what Amalie is thinking. She stands with her back turned to observe the gently curved reflection of her audience in the faience of the toilet bowl. And here she makes a discovery. I might even go so far as to say: one of the greatest discoveries of her life. All at once she sees the reflected room collapse inward and fall into perspective, and behind the staggered amazement of the adults and the open-mouthed wonder of the children appears a grassy meadow with strange, orange-colored animals, and beyond this she can just make out a purple forest from which comes a whistling sound, and just then something happens to her. It is hard to say exactly what it is; to me it seems as though, from that moment on, Amalie starts searching for just this whistling and just this paradisiacal landscape, which she must have felt was meant for her and her alone, even though, a moment later, it had disappeared. She stood on that platform all day, until the footsteps of the last visitor had wandered off down distant corridors, immersed in the memory of that landscape and filled with the triumphant melancholy of the chosen.
* * *
Amalie had never seen her grandfather, but her aunt, Gumma, had once shown her his photograph. Gumma was a cripple, following a badly healed fractured hip, and she negotiated the house’s labyrinth of corridors and never-ending suites of rooms on a black-lacquered tricycle of complex construction. She had once given little Amalie a ride on this vehicle, and in one room—which they had entered by chance and which they never again succeeded in locating—she had pointed out to Amalie her grandfather, Frederik Ludwig Teander Rabow, in a series of daguerreotypes taken at intervals of several years from the time when, as a young man, he had won an old hand-operated printing press and some packs of yellowed paper in a nocturnal card game to when his muscular body began to blur at the edges and finally grew quite transparent. In the later pictures he can just be made out next to his wife, Amalie’s grandmother, as a powdery cloud shimmering in the light of the magnesium flash.
By this time, the free broadside that had been his first publishing venture—possessed, as he was, by the illiterate’s fascination with the printed word—had been transformed into a daily newspaper, and he had long been forgotten. As far as anyone remembered, Amalie’s grandmother—of whom it was said that her father had been a refuse collector and nightman: in other words, he earned his living carting away shit—had always been the editor. For her own part, she no longer set foot outside the family home. These days the public encountered her vast and legendary store of knowledge about the town and its environs only in the newspaper. In its pages she could predict births and deaths and suicides and bankruptcies long before they took place, convincing the people of the town that their fates were in the hands of a Providence with which the Old Lady obviously had dealings. And so the paper hung on to its subscribers, even when the Old Lady disappeared from view and the printers and journalists stepped between her and the paper, which had, by this time, grown into a dream of a newspaper: six loose sheets, its accounts of the previous day’s events scanned by more or less everyone in town, and the rest of Langeland, as they searched for their own futures.
It was at this time that the white house on the square was built. Barred, sheer and sharply gabled as a chalk cliff, this was the house into which the Old Lady withdrew, and the day on which the water closet was put on view was the first occasion in a generation that the house had been opened to the public. Only the oldest living residents of the town had retained a vague memory from the time when it was built, of a rectangular, unechoing courtyard, a covered well, and dim, hushed colonnaded galleries.
Somewhere among all those rooms and studies the Old Lady continued to dictate the newspaper’s editorial to her secretary every morning, without herself ever learning to read or write, and in these rooms her husband, Amalie’s grandfather—long since forgotten by the outside world—began to dissolve at the edges and, a few years later, disappeared completely. The Old Lady herself showed her face less and less often to her family, and through all her childhood Amalie saw her on only a handful of occasions. Scores of managers and secretaries—who had become necessary after the Old Lady bought up, first several other newspapers, and then printers and paper mills—received their dictated orders on slips of paper that they found on their desks in the offices and clerks’ rooms—more and more of which were being set up within the never-ending confines of the white house.
Even on that momentous open day, even on water-closet Sunday, the Old Lady did not put in an appearance. Nevertheless, despite her absence (or, who knows: perhaps precisely because of it), the visitors had a strong sense of her presence, a sense they shared with the servants and with the Old Lady’s own family, for whom the preparations for the great day had begun without any warning: the servants were taken by surprise, one day, by the sharp hack of chisels and the bitter smell of new wood. At the end of one of the corridors they had discovered six foreign workmen working intently and with great dexterity at a mysterious task and talking a language in which they sounded as though they were smacking their lips. At the end of two weeks they disappeared, leaving behind a locked room which, when it was opened the following Sunday, proved to contain this wonder, the water closet—at that time possibly Denmark’s grandest premises for shitting in, ordered and paid for by the Old Lady, who had, in her youth, cut and sold peat, and had lived on a smallholding no better than a dunghill until her husband—Frederik Ludwig, now vanished—had, in a drunken haze, won a hand-operated printing press and begun publishing the broadside that would lead him and his family straight into that dream we all share of money, lots and lots of money.
In her own way, Amalie is just an ordinary child: a little girl from a nouveau riche family, with parents and an upbringing and a life to which we will return a little later. But she is also something special; she is a person who has made a discovery or who, at any rate, feels that she is special. And for this reason she causes a chord to reverberate inside every one of us, or at least inside me, and the note she strikes is a reminder of the loneliness of a child growing up in the belief that it is different; a belief that prompted Amalie to gaze into every shining surface: into polished harnesses and shop windows; into the varnish of the school desk, while her teac
hers called out her name without her hearing, so engrossed was she in trying to find a deeper truth in the reflected extension of her inkwell. The other girls teased her, trying to break through her far-too-adult and incomprehensible isolation, wanting to drag her out of it, until the day when Amalie came out of it all by herself and thrashed the biggest of them, cut off their pigtails and burned their fair locks in the school playground, showing everyone, the teachers, too, that they had confused her distraction with mildness and that, although she was a child and, at this point, just nine years old, her character was fraught with calculated brutality. After that they left her alone, or at least most of them did, even the servants and her mother, who often had to spend hours searching for her, only to find her, eventually, in some far-off corner of the house on a chair that she had dragged in front of one of the corridor mirrors, to sit with her elbows propped up on the gilded console, staring at a point beyond her ringlets and freshly ironed white collar. And to those who tried to drag her away from there, even her mother, she gave curt, impertinent replies that were both impudent and dreamy.
