The History of Danish Dreams

by Peter Høeg

  Caesar Jensen recognized his son without surprise, and when Ramses pointed the revolver at him he looked fearlessly down its barrel. Ramses had never been much of a talker and in prison he had grown practically dumb, but his question was written all over a face now covered by an incipient beard like a cloud of dark memories.

  “I had to teach you to be on your guard,” said his father and turned back wearily to the table, where the picklocks and skeleton keys and lead strips were arrayed on a piece of cloth. He picked up a stolen fob watch and said, “That’s the only way to survive. Don’t trust anyone, not even your father.”

  Ramses cocked the revolver. His father adjusted his stock, wanting to die looking his best, and added, “Oh, by the way, there’s a price on your head, of fifty rigsdalers.”

  Ramses lowered the revolver, foiled by this argument, and because he realized that he would have done the same thing. Besides, he could not stand the thought that he might be the one to dispatch Caesar Jensen to the immortality of which he dreamed. He turned on his heel, having laid eyes on his father for the last time, and disappeared into another of our pictures—that of the lone fugitive —and into a world which from then on he regarded as a prison. In this world he viewed everyone as either a judge, a guard, a policeman, or, at the very least, an informer; and he was always on the move while still, in every sound, seeming to hear the cell door slamming behind him.

  In the years that followed, Ramses traveled and worked alone, supporting himself in his forlorn state with his pictures of his forebears. His father he dismissed as an aberration, while himself conscientiously avoiding every form of excess, to the extent that the entries in the court records from those occasions when charges were brought against him—if they had contained the facts—would have amounted to infinitely lengthy but nonetheless humble lists of cheese, cheap linen, used brushes, plain tobacco pouches, pawned shoes, old iron, new-laid eggs, and cows milked in the fields, because these, and only these, were the things that Ramses stole.

  Now and again, in Copenhagen or one of the larger provincial towns, he would break into some large villa or manor farm. Then, however, he was not after the silver drinking vessels or the West Indian coffee sets or the pear-shaped earrings given to a young girl in the family, once upon a time, by one of the Emperor Napoleon’s exiled generals. Ramses skirted all of these and, instead, lit a stump of candle. In its light he would hunker down in front of the massive escritoire and dream. The drop leaf of the escritoire was decorated with a motif, inlaid in wood, depicting the view through a door, which led to a garden, which ran up to a house, which lay bathed in a moonlight such as Ramses believed he remembered from his childhood. This light fell through the fine curtains of a villa that was almost transparent with domestic bliss. And it was this bliss that Ramses sought during these break-ins, when he took nothing, stealing only the opportunity to linger close to people living within his and their own and our picture of domestic bliss. On nights such as these, Ramses could spend hours in a darkened room, listening to the laughter from the adjoining rooms without being any more certain than we are whether what he was hearing was only what he longed to hear, or whether there really were young girls accompanying themselves on their little pianos as they sang of the lonesome young men of the windswept highways. By the light of a candle or a match, Ramses was also able to admire the paintings on the walls. It was as though he saw himself there, in a cloak he had never laid eyes on before, wearing a tall hat he had never owned, staring out across a plain that ended in a forest that opened onto a lake whose farthest shore was lost in a mist of promises. And these paintings represented the middle-class picture of just the sort of life that Ramses led.

  Even while being attracted by the domestic idylls into which he steals, Ramses is also repelled by them. He will never acquire the gift of the gab, will never really master the spoken word, so he will never be able to provide a coherent description of the middle-class homes he beheld. Which is a pity, since he beholds more than most. Nevertheless, by piecing together his sparse observations, we can see that he must have entertained a certain suspicion of the Bourgeois Danish Family: his sharp ears caught the hysterical undertone in the young girls’ laughter, and his sensitive fingers discovered that furniture which was meant to look genuine and solid was veneered inside and out, and that those pictures, supposedly of inlaid wood, which depicted a father reading to his wife and children were nothing but pasted-on pieces of industrial speculation. There are so many such details that do not stand up well to closer inspection. And always he experiences a sense of quiet satisfaction, as though he has evaded some danger, some risk, when at last he urinates onto the embers in the hearth or into the drowsing spinets, before gliding off, under a white moon, across the flowery carpets of the villa gardens, back to the solitude he endures because he cannot picture anything else.

  During these years, Ramses developed the Pride of the Danish Artisan. He explained this to himself by saying that he was practicing an age-old craft, one for which his forefathers—whom he gradually imbued with a life not even his father could have faulted—had been convicted according to laws still based on the Ten Commandments, and then executed as martyrs of a sort. Furthermore, he told himself, in practicing my trade I am demonstrating the same moderation and the same Christian humility as everyone else—apart from my father. Ramses might even have forgotten Caesar Jensen were it not for the fact that his own Christian name, taken from a book his father had once appropriated, stood as a constant reminder of how Caesar Jensen would steal anything whatsoever from anyone whomsoever.

  Ramses succeeded in hanging on to his honorable outlook on life only because he was extremely wary and extremely obstinate. He ran, but his reputation was always one step ahead of him, at first boosted by his father’s reputation but later growing of its own accord. It was at this time, too, that he had to give up keeping count of his crimes. From then on, he only ever found them added up and enumerated on the WANTED posters that, complete with his portrait, grinned down at him in dusty provincial towns. The portrait had been drawn by one of his prison cell mates, since, despite his size, Ramses had become as supple and silent as a cat and no decent citizen had ever seen his face. Thus the portrait preserved a childishness quite at odds with the robberies and, eventually, murders, too, for which he was wanted and which he knew he could not have committed, but which did explain a reward so generous that it would have tempted most of those with whom Ramses ever came into contact. It even tempted him to turn himself in. This he only stopped himself from doing because he realized that the size of the reward proved that the authorities were mystified and that they had been taken in by the baroque exaggerations of his crimes and charity in the broadside ballads—packs of lies, the lot of them—that he heard sung on street corners on the rare occasions when he ventured into any good-sized town.

  The only human society Ramses sought was that of vagabonds, ragmen, and Gypsies, in whom he seemed to recognize his own restlessness and wariness. They, for their part, always treated him with respect. They were convinced that he was possessed by gods, because he always slept with his eyes open and his hand over his mouth—although, in actual fact, this was because his wariness had grown so deep-rooted that he did not even trust himself, but feared that he would confide in someone in his sleep, thereby dispelling the veil of invisibility his anonymity accorded him.

  It was thanks to this penchant for seeking company, despite his pride and his taciturnity, that he one day fell in with three horse-drawn covered carts driven by dark-skinned men of the same race as those who would, sometime in the future, build the Old Lady’s water closet. The ragtag appearance of this procession made him feel so safe that he fell asleep that afternoon on the roof of one of the carts; and slept on, his open eyes and the hand over his mouth notwithstanding, while the carts crawled through resin-scented pine forests and small, suspicious villages where the washing was taken in as the carts trundled past like some traveling exhibition of the dingy squalor of
the wayfaring life.

  Ramses awoke to the fleeting notion that he had landed in paradise. Before him the Pearly Gates lit up the night, with glittering letters spelling out the words “National Theater” and “Art Exhibition”; words that he could not read because he had never been to school. He thought he was entering the sunlit glades of Pison when he slipped, unseen, past a German ticket lady dressed up as the Roman goddess Minerva. Only then did he realize that he had entered our dream—and his, and that of his time—of the circus. He was encircled by a black sea of people, all of them facing a ring in which horses pranced on their hind legs like men, and submissive cattle allowed themselves to be twisted into unnatural shapes; while donkeys, walking upright, sold autographed copies of scenes in which scantily clad women posed as Polynesian queens.

  Despite all the temptations, Ramses would have fled from the light and the noise and the crowds if the bust of a woman, suspended from the infinitely distant tent roof by thin steel wires, had not screeched at him that happiness awaited him here, in this very place—happiness. And so Ramses Jensen stayed where he was, in this circus, somewhere in North Jutland, somewhere around the middle of the last century. There he stands amid the crystallized dreams of Exotica and Erotica and Freedom and Paradise, all of which must have unfurled from the flaking unpretentiousness of the carts.

  In the circus there are two levels of seating, for the two different levels of audience to be found in Denmark at this time: the run-of-the-mill spectators, who have paid the standard price, and the quality, who paid whatever they felt was appropriate—all of them having stumped up knowing full well that this world into which they have stepped is not without its risks. It is a world in which—apart from those things I have mentioned, and the music—they might be exposed to insults of the kind now being hurled by a quick-change artist, a man who appeared at first to be attired in some sort of evening dress gilded by the lights of the circus ring. He said he had the honor to welcome them to this acrobatic pantomime, this zoological extravaganza which was about to get under way, weather permitting, and which would include the launching of what was in all respects the most perfect aerial sphere. This thirty-thousand-cubic-foot aerostatic balloon, as empty on the inside as the heads of the most esteemed members of this audience, would rise far beyond the understanding of the honorable members of the public, all the way up to the roof. Beneath this balloon would be his daughter, a twelve-year-old maiden, hanging by her teeth and one of her perfectly formed fingers. And, he promised them—while changing first into the costume of a maharaja, then that of Harlequin—from this position she would execute—might he shrivel up and rot on the spot, together with this esteemed audience, if he were lying—a triple somersault. Then his daughter appeared.

  The sight of the girl slipped around Ramses’ silence and his pride, past his penchant for introspection, and broke the lock on his heart. As she stood there in the ring, and then when she started to dance, he recognized the same skepticism and contempt that he had heard in her father’s, the quick-change artist’s, outlandish accent and hissing sibilants. When the audience did not applaud, when she did not receive the required ovation, off she waded into the midst of all the booing men and hissing women and howling children, fired off two pistols, and then began to let fly with her fists at all those in her immediate vicinity. After that, terror-stricken and led by the claque, everyone applauded and Ramses had to stay, having been gripped by what he had seen and by the dream of circus-ring passion and flying-trapeze love affairs which we all nurture, and which Ramses Jensen’s contemporaries endeavored to keep within the bounds of the circus arena.

  He remained there for the rest of the evening while his beloved rose into the air under the balloon, illuminated by fireworks representing Mount Vesuvius, with the red-hot lava from the volcano’s eruption igniting the royal monogram. As the twelve-year-old dangled beneath the balloon, so high above the floor of the ring that her body was barely visible—although her acrobatic feats and reckless, death-defying somersaults could clearly be seen—more than one member of the audience wept from fear. But not Ramses Jensen, who was, just then, filled with the sort of serenity which corroborates the myth of love at first sight and of love’s utter contempt for death, and which endowed him with enough presence of mind to sneak away before the pantomime, the climax to the festivities, in which all the performers appeared, dressed up and painted with cocoa and soot mixed with grease, to resemble the Danes’ picture of the southern Europeans they in fact happened to be. This they did in the subtle knowledge that neither in the circus ring nor, for that matter, in this account of actual events do our wishes ever appear in their totally scrubbed and natural state. Then they left the ring, not in their shabby carts, but floating on a flying carpet, pursued by officers dressed in the gaudy uniforms of Cromwell’s time and ushered out by the triumphant laughter of an audience which had, to its complete and utter satisfaction, witnessed the ousting of everything conjured up by the evening’s performance.

  Ramses awaited his circus artiste in one of the collapsible wooden caravans that had sprung up around the circus tent, surrounded by imitation flowers and ripped tights and the scent of eau de cologne and many another thing he did not notice because his heart had risen into the air with the balloon. When the girl opened the door, Ramses saw that the light had distorted her proportions. She was now very small and just as broad as she was long.

  “I shall be the first and the last man in your life,” he said, without knowing how he came, suddenly, to be so eloquent.

  The girl regarded him fearlessly and laughed quietly at finding herself face-to-face with such naïveté.

  “You’re too late to be the first,” she said, “and too early to be the last.”

  “But you’re only twelve,” said Ramses.

  The girl gave him a thoughtful look. “I’m thirty,” she said. Then her head arched backwards and her body grew soft as india rubber. When her head emerged between her legs, she had a lit cigar between her lips and a glass of wine in a hand attached to an arm that she had wrapped twice around her neck.

  “Are you a man,” she asked him, “or are you a butterfly?”

  Ramses stood up. In one single movement he shook himself free of a momentary giddiness, and of his loneliness and his introspection and the smell of sawdust. Then he bent down and kissed the girl’s mouth. When she disentangled herself and put her muscular arms around his neck, and when they slid down onto the four-poster bed, with its canopy embroidered like some distant circus dome, he thought: This may be the only thing in life that can’t be stolen.

  They spent three days in the caravan, behind closed shutters, and when they opened the door on the third day they discovered that their vehicle was standing in solitary state on a hillside from which, in the distance, they could see the sun rising over great forests. On this hillside, with our—and to some extent their own—longing for uninhabited countryside spread at their feet, Ramses asked the circus princess about her life. But she did not answer him, neither on that occasion nor later, although it was evident that she, too, listened for the slamming of doors in the song of the larks and the murmur of the wind through the wheat; and that, even at a distance, she dreaded the very forest boundaries because they reminded her of walls. And even then Ramses accepted that she was to constitute the lock in his life for which no skeleton key existed. From that day on he journeyed with her without knowing her name.

  She was as nimble as he. The only time they were arrested it came about because, while hanging from a fifth-floor balcony, high above a crowd of onlookers and police officers, she had suddenly been overwhelmed by circus fever and by her father’s, the quick-change artist’s, love of mocking his audience and hearing them gasp, while teetering on the brink of death. And so—suspended between heaven and earth, and even though she was, by that time, getting on in years—she re-created the vaults and somersaults of her youth. By the time the fifty policemen reached her she had wound herself around the railings so many t
imes that they had to be cut away and taken into custody along with her and Ramses, whom the police had been able to pluck like ripe fruit, so absorbed was he by the Princess’s death-defying aerobatics. These had left him feeling as passionate and yet quiescent as they had done when he had witnessed them for the first time as a young man. He felt as though he could just as easily have dropped dead on the spot as gone on living, since at that moment he wanted for nothing. Instead, he was totally taken up by the Princess, who had long since become his wife. They had stolen the marriage documents and kidnapped a pastor to fill them in and enter their names in the parish register.

  Following their arrest, they were charged with eleven hundred offenses in ten countries, even though these charges were the result of the chamberlains and recorders from the courts of inquiry having listened—amid all the hubbub that followed Caesar Jensen’s boasting and all the hush that followed the Princess and Ramses—to tall stories and superstition. Thus, even these charges for crimes they had not committed contained a modicum of truth, inasmuch as Ramses and the Princess had, together, covered great distances and crossed more borders than they could count, all in an effort to escape from their own reputation—a reputation that nevertheless traveled ahead of them—and to keep up with their yearning for a love as free as air, a yearning that was theirs and is now ours. But we must not forget that, like all professional criminals, they spent every minute of their lives on the move, for three reasons: fear of hunger; a vague, directionless anger; and that yearning which brought them the life we are able to use, here, as an example.