The History of Danish Dreams

by Peter Høeg

  The people of the town accepted this invitation with the same resigned wonder with which they would have observed an eclipse of the moon. Even those who found themselves, to their own surprise, on the list of speakers yielded to the weight of Fate and the Old Lady’s authority and started jotting down headings in line with the summaries provided in the invitation, and the three lawyers who saw that they were going to have their teeth knocked out and would be crawling home from the party made appointments with their dentists and put signs in their windows saying that they would be closed on the day after the wedding. The Old Lady was accorded such great respect that only the Reverend Mr. Cornelius offered any resistance. Into his sermon for the following Sunday he wove a reminder to everyone, in a passage declaring Woe to Ye that laugh at this bad joke and Woe to Ye that are rich, for it will be the worse for you. Then he dressed in black and walked across the square. He found the main door of the house locked, and no one answered when he tugged the bellpull, but it seemed to him that all the windows of the house stared blankly at him. Boiling with rage and primed for a fight, he arrived home to find his daughter in the act of trying on a wedding dress that had arrived from Copenhagen, though no one could say who had placed the order. It fitted her perfectly. It even had an intricate mesh of whalebone worked into it that straightened her crooked back and endowed her figure with a surprising, stately carriage. Similarly, a pad soaked in spirit of camphor had been fixed inside the stiffened bodice. This, together with the peppermint oil which came with the dress and with which the veil was to be sprayed, was intended to ensure that the wedding would not be spoiled by her coughing. Then the Reverend Mr. Cornelius—who had otherwise walked sedately throughout his life—ran to the church, only, on his arrival, to have his rage consolidate around his mouth in a foam that turned blue when he learned that word had been received about the time at which the coach and the other carriages would be arriving; just as the binding of the wreaths had begun, since the Old Lady, unlike other people, would not have fresh floral decorations, but wreaths of dried carnations and orchids that had arrived long before from Madeira; just as the organist had received a list of what was to be played, including not only the usual hymns but also a number of popular old ditties. But the dean was not yet beaten; he had God on his side in the battle against this woman, this horned monster who had never shown her face in church; whom he had never trusted; who, everyone knew, could not conceal her lack of breeding and who now went so far as to demand that improper songs be played in the church. Well, not if he could help it. Then he saw that among the papers pertaining to the wedding—which also contained, apart from the organist’s list, instructions for his, the dean’s, nuptial address; instructions into which had been inserted, within brackets, the points where he would clear his throat and the points where he would raise his head and look out over the congregation—there was a sheet of paper enjoining everyone to remember their umbrellas, since a light shower of rain would fall, as a sign of heaven’s blessing upon the bridal couple and the guests when they were leaving the church. As a final, panic-stricken protest, the dean grabbed the church register, imagining that by removing it he might prevent the wedding. It flew open in his hands, and his anger ebbed away, leaving behind a weary sense of despondency as he read of the wedding between Katarina Cornelius Bak and Christoffer Ludwig Teander Rabow as though it had already taken place. As he leafed farther away from the written pages toward the blank and unforeseeable pages, he found, in his own handwriting, the record of the birth and christening dates of the three daughters to whom Katarina—to her own astonishment and that of everyone around her—would give birth. Then he realized that the universe was against him. For the first time ever, he felt worn out, old, aged; for the first time ever, he felt his age creating a gap between him and the outside world. This feeling stayed with him as, later, he erased the words of criticism in his sermon, the tone of which softened further in the days prior to the wedding as he acknowledged the advantages of marrying his tubercular, weak-chested daughter to the crown prince of a dynasty, even if that prince was as much of a fool and a nincompoop, as much of a nonentity, as Christoffer Ludwig.

  The wedding went ahead according to the guidelines laid down in the invitation. At the church, the dean himself led his daughter to the altar where Christoffer stood waiting. He had been accompanied to the altar by Dr. Mahler because he had no family and because no one could trace any friends. He had, after all, grown up alone, among adults. At the altar the two young people look at each other without showing any sign of recognition, and to those standing nearest it looks as though Katarina, her sight possibly hampered by a veil saturated with peppermint oil, clutches at the doctor’s arm in the belief that he is the man she is to marry. No one will ever know for sure whether these two young people had ever laid eyes on each other before. The Reverend Mr. Cornelius sticks scrupulously to his written instructions and the two young faces remain expressionless, apart from during the coughing fits that rack Katarina’s body on several occasions, despite all the precautions, and the absentminded disquiet with which Christoffer’s eyes flicker forlornly several times around his room bereft of clocks. The rain that started to fall as the married couple left the church continued throughout the night with a mysterious energy that had, by morning, transformed the gutters into rivers that carried the drunk and bleeding lawyers away from the deserted square, so that everything could come to pass as it had been foretold.

  At no point during the celebrations did the Old Lady put in an appearance.

  * * *

  Amalie was born the youngest of Katarina and Christoffer Ludwig’s three daughters and grew up without ever doubting for one minute that her father was an automaton. The only change brought about in Christoffer’s way of life by his marriage was that every evening after dinner he was led into a sitting room, to his family, where previously he had sat alone in a smoking room where he did not smoke. But his face retained, unaltered, the expression of indifferent courtesy that it had borne since he was a child, and, as always, his eyes were riveted to one of the clocks in the room as though he were following the movements of the hands—which, in all probability, is what he was doing. Opposite him, on the sofa, sat his wife. Because of her infirmity, even embroidery—the only thing in which she had ever shown any interest—was beyond her. On only a handful of occasions did Amalie hear her parents speak to each other. From when they were very small, the three daughters were trained in silence and stillness. The housemaids—who toiled in vain, day and night, to rid the vast house of dust and the compromising smell of the stables that the brown soap and dried violets never quite succeeded in quelling—would often pass through the room, feather dusters in hand. On these occasions they would run a duster over the family group in the belief that they, just like the life-size copies of classical Greek figures, were part of the furniture; an illusion shattered now and again by Katarina’s feeble cough or one of the increasingly more pronounced fluctuations of Christoffer’s silhouette. Nevertheless, it is important that we steer clear of the idea that the Teander family residence was a dead house. Certainly the family are not particularly active; they seem, undeniably, dull as dishwater, but this may be because life in this family—as in the rest of middle-class Denmark at this time—has been shifted from the outer persona of individuals to their inner persona or to their surroundings and, in particular, to the clocks. Thus this waxwork-like couple and their three children exemplify the dream of uniting the unforeseeable in life with the mechanics of clockwork and standard time.

  From a very early age, Amalie had populated the silence surrounding her with deafening dreams in which she conquered the world, but not until her grandmother opened the doors of the house to let the people of the town admire the water closet did Amalie discover that her dreams were images of a reality residing within mirrors. It was then that she began her wanderings through the great house. To begin with, her mother tried to prevent it, but she was too weak. Her tuberculosis, already bad by the
time of her marriage, had been aggravated by the three times Christoffer had heard his mother’s voice. Like everyone else, he had stopped thinking about the Old Lady. There were those who believed that he had stopped thinking of anything whatsoever, other than time, which is, in itself, such an abstract concept that it dissolves at the thought. So it must have come as a shock when, one night, his mother spoke to him and forced him to get up in a darkness his eyes could not penetrate, and led him, naked, through the deserted house, through empty rooms lit by the moon where Christoffer could see that there was no sign of his mother other than the imperious voice that brooked no denial but led him to a white door, which he opened. Only when he reached the bed did he see that it was occupied by his wife. Christoffer felt the Old Lady’s breath on the back of his neck and obediently lay down on top of the sleeper.

  The third time this happened, Katarina committed a crime—for the first and the last time in her life. While paying a visit to her childhood home she stole an old, rusty revolver from her father’s closet, one that she remembered from her childhood but that her father had long forgotten about. After such an exertion she had to wait months before she was strong enough to assure herself that it was loaded, and not until just before she gave birth to Amalie did she release the safety catch and tuck the gun under her pillow, firmly determined, in the future, to shoot at anything that opened her bedroom door after she had retired for the night, even if it should be her mother-in-law’s ghost.

  This precaution proved to be unnecessary. Christoffer Teander heard his mother’s voice only once more after Amalie’s birth, and then it was almost unrecognizable.

  It happened at the celebration held for the Old Lady’s business anniversary. Word of this event had not been announced in advance. Instead it manifested itself in the minds of the fifty-two guests, all of them men, as fifty-two simultaneous and identical feelings of conviction that they had been invited and that all they had to do was to turn up. They gathered, on time, at the Rabow family home in a large oval dining room lit solely by candles. The room’s large oval table was spread with a black velvet cloth edged with Valenciennes lace. This interplay of black and white was echoed by the identical white-tie-and-tails outfits worn by the fifty-two guests. Once they were there, the thought struck all of them, simultaneously, that they did not know which anniversary they were celebrating today—because the dates of all the Rabow family triumphs had been forgotten—and that this oval room filled with candles appeared to be decked out for a wake. Only then did they notice the Old Lady. She was sitting at the head of the table with her body, which was bigger and more shapeless than they remembered, squeezed into a dark, carved oak armchair. It looked for all the world as though she were sitting in her own upright coffin, awaiting her burial—an impression reinforced by her having placed, against one wall, her own tombstone on display. This ceiling-high slab of Swedish granite bore as yet—in all modesty—nothing but her name, a detailed list of all the personal and official victories of her life, a salute in verse from a famous Copenhagen poet, and three crosses and a dove inlaid in marble—all burnished to a gleaming, preternaturally dazzling sheen.

  Not a single word was spoken during the serving of refreshments, which followed, with unerring accuracy, the program with which all the guests were somehow familiar and which made every word superfluous. These refreshments consisted of a sweet, heavy vintage Madeira and small slices of dry cake.

  Nothing was said until the moment for the judging of the competition arrived. This competition had been the only public intimation of the Old Lady’s anniversary. It had been announced on the front page of the newspaper along with two lines of verse:

  This newspaper’s praises are easily sung,

  But if fault with it we must find

  and all the guests had known beforehand that they were supposed to bring with them a suggestion for the completion of this poem. The entries were now read out one by one by Christoffer’s father-in-law, who kept going until all fifty-two had been read. Then it became clear to everyone, at one and the same time, that Dr. Mahler’s suggestion was splendid, the best, the winner, and the two golden lines were recited in chorus:

  It has to be said, when all’s said and done,

  That nothing springs to mind.

  After this, everyone fell silent as the room shook with the simultaneous striking of all the clocks in the house. A last round of refreshments was then offered, and the fifty-two guests all looked, as one, at the Old Lady—who had not uttered one word, nor would, according to the program—and everyone knew that this would be the last time they would ever see her. For a brief moment, of previously determined length, their thoughts left the room and they recalled how they had known her in their capacities as judges and department heads and doctors and lawyers and chartered surveyors and town councilors and pastors and magistrates and company directors and landowners and captains, and then they reached for their glasses to toast the woman who had, like some great clockmaker, set in motion a mechanism which did not need to be wound up but which could continue to run for all time.

  Then two things occurred that one can never completely guard against. The first was that Amalie opened the door. The second was that Christoffer got to his feet and, as one, the other fifty-one guests put down their glasses. Each in his own way, they understood that, for the first time since his wedding-day “Yes” in the church, Christoffer Ludwig was going to say something in company and that, for the first time ever, he was himself going to make a speech. This had not been foreseen in the Old Lady’s schedule.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” says Christoffer—and everyone remarks upon how surprisingly clear his voice is—”I would like to submit another possible solution, outside of the competition. My poem goes like this:

  “This newspaper’s praises are easily sung,

  But if fault with it we must find,

  Then of all that is writ in the Danish tongue

  Know that ne’er was a rag so lacking in spine—

  Please, glue it and bind.”

  After which he sits down and the party’s schedule vanishes in a fog of chatter and murmuring and voicing of opinions. Just at that moment the house clocks start to chime, far too early and all slightly out of step with one another, as though Christoffer’s breach of time in the oval room has spread to the rest of the building. Everyone talks even louder to drown out the grating dissonance of all these timepieces, and, amid this din, only the Old Lady and Amalie were silent: Amalie because, for the first time ever, she was thinking that perhaps, at heart, her father was not, after all, constructed out of weights and pulleys and springs and soulless machinery, as the mechanical chess player she had seen demonstrated in one of the markets of her childhood had been; the Old Lady because she was in danger of bursting with indignation. Not until much later, when the last of the Madeira had been drunk and the guests had taken themselves off, singing (because the Old Lady had been so confident about the way in which the evening would be conducted that she had not hired the bouncers), and after the last candle had burned down in its holder and the room lay in darkness apart from the faint glow of the tombstone—which the Old Lady did not notice because she had long since gone blind—did she say, out into the emptiness inhabited now only by herself and Amalie, “That abominable racket, it sounded like Christoffer!”