by Peter Høeg
As a kindness to a sympathetic jailer they stayed in their cells for two days, the longest they had ever been apart. On the third day they vanished without trace.
* * *
Ramses never made any effort to arrive at a final tally of his children. Once the Princess had given birth to their eleventh son he stopped keeping count of them or trying to tell them apart. He had never had a head for figures or any sense for the diversity of the human race, so, from then on, the only two of his children whom he ever remembered were his one daughter and Adonis.
Adonis was an afterthought. He was born some years after the last of their children had left them to their own devices after a succession of years that Ramses recalled as being endless and full of children, thanks to the fact that, by being constantly on the move, he and the Princess not only stayed clear of other people but also outdistanced consumption and cholera and the English sweating sickness and all the other epidemics that ravaged Denmark during the second half of the last century. All they had to worry about, therefore, was food and an ever-changing series of roofs over their heads, to sustain both their children and their own joyful passion. Their love burned brightly in haystacks and barns and out-of-the-way inns. It was grand and intense and quite at odds with a life that was in all other respects very, very modest; an existence at all times hand-to-mouth.
Whenever the children reached the age of twelve, Ramses would force a pastor to confirm them. It never worried him that this act, having taken place under duress, would subsequently be declared invalid. Likewise he never, despite his pensive streak, thought twice about the fact that he—who had turned his back on his father’s bogus piety and who had never said a prayer and who had broken one of the Ten Commandments on an almost daily basis, often out of mere curiosity—should, even so, now risk hunting up a man of the cloth to bestow an invalid blessing on his unbaptized children.
Nor did Ramses understand his children. He tried to teach them his craft, but they showed no interest in locks and hasps and forged keys, just as all his attempts to teach them his stealth were in vain. After that, he regarded them just as he regarded everyone else: with wary reserve. If we reproach him for this, then we stop short of the truth and our sight is blurred by the sentimental wish that parents should love their children. And then we lose sight of Ramses, because, introspective though he may be, his personality is devoid of sentimentality. So we cannot blame him, either, because many years later, on once more coming across his eldest son, he did not reveal who he was. Indeed, he did not even realize that this was the eldest until the Princess told him. It happened in Rudkøbing, where, later, he was to break in to the Teander Rabow family home, and where the fates of so many of those whose history we are narrating cross. And this tells us something about the association, in real life, between chaos and order; something that Ramses also read in the eyes of this man who was his son but who bore an appalling likeness to his father, Caesar Jensen. Ramses’ sons (and his daughter) had long since erased every trace of their past, changed their names, and purported to come from law-abiding families of many generations’ standing. Sooner or later, all of them succeeded in becoming wealthy or at any rate famous, although only we realize that they were the offspring of the Princess and Ramses. The boy in the square at Rudkøbing, holding forth to a large crowd from the back of a cart, called himself Pio and—even though the Princess was sure that it was not so many years since he had still been in diapers—Ramses realized, as his speech was coming to a close, that his son was talking about the ideas behind socialism.
During this speech, Ramses was so busy emptying the pockets of his son’s audience that he barely caught what his son was saying: there would be no more putting new patches on old clothes. And that was why he was now appealing to all those who were listening, to all of you who sway like reeds in the wind, he said, while, from their pockets, their watches and cigar cases and hip flasks seemed to vanish into thin air. The man on the back of the cart described the hard roads they would have to take, roads which would at first be strewn with thorns and thistles rather than roses, but which would soon grow easier. For, said Pio, from all sides, the cry of the awakening masses rises to greet us, like the dull roar of the sea before a storm.
Something about this torrent of words touched Ramses’ heart. It made him think of the piano playing of his own youth. And it kept him there, even when it started to rain, to hear his son yelling at the listening day laborers and shopkeepers and journalists from the local newspaper, and Christoffer Ludwig, as yet just a small child dressed like a grownup, listening through the open windows of his office. Now the workers were no longer going to drain the bitter draft, now the rich would no longer be able to cry, like the French court: “Après nous le déluge,” now there would be an end to religion and woolly-headed notions, shouted Pio, now reality was hammering on society’s doors. And though these were the doors whose locks Ramses had otherwise always picked, this speech moved him. So while his son bawled through the rain at the gathering that the workingman is nature’s firstborn, her stoutest son, Ramses put all the stolen combs and watch chains and clasp knives back into their rightful pockets.
When the rain stops and the police gallop into the midst of the gathering and disperse it, and then handcuff his son, it is a thoughtful Ramses who reluctantly makes his retreat. He has so much to think about: he has seen his son seized by what he himself considers to be some sort of religious frenzy; heard him talking exactly like some revivalist preacher. That his message is different, or at least to some extent different, is something that Ramses is unable to grasp. His own life, his own distrust have blinded him to the misery that feeds the dreams his son is now well under way with dreaming.
In one sense, all of Ramses’ children acquire the same way of looking at the world: even though they all end up at widely differing points on the social pyramid, they all still come to regard the world as a piece of wax in which one can set one’s seal. This faith in their own abilities derives from the kind of upbringing they have had as sons of a couple of exceptionally cunning and unpretentious petty criminals. From when they were very small, they have known the power and the wretchedness of being homeless. They have stopped believing that anything stands still forever, with the result that all of them, in their own ways, end up working to set in motion that weightiest of all things, namely society itself.
To Ramses this work is an outrage since, despite his lawless life, he has maintained an unshakable belief that society is now, and will always be, the best of all pyramids and that its stability will not be affected one whit by his forcing a door here and there on its upper stories. This is more or less how he was thinking that day, after the subversive meeting in Rudkøbing at which his son had spoken. Then he did as he had done so often before in his life: he pissed up against a bush and went on his way.
After this experience, Ramses stayed away from towns, which he was not sure he understood, anyway, and which now and again caused him to have a particular dream: a dreadful wish, which he never mentioned, that some monster, or one of the creatures that Caesar Jensen had boasted of having encountered, would obliterate these collections of houses. It so happened that the Princess had the selfsame dream—which they were never aware of, since the only thing they did not share with each other was their dreams. The writer Steen Steensen Blicher (who was by this time dead) dreamed the same dream, as did the writer Hans Christian Andersen (who was dying), and so do I, to this very day. It is a hopeless dream. There is no future in it, and yet it has to be spoken of.
Because of their isolation—in which they only ever met beggars and ragmen, and in which Ramses only ever heard his native tongue spoken in adjoining rooms, during his burglaries—he and the Princess lost touch with their own legends. It was as though they had broken free and finally disappeared, only to reappear early one May morning, when one of the Gypsies in their company, who could read, recognized Ramses from a portrait in a newspaper. “You’ve been pardoned,” said the Gypsy and h
eld the newspaper out to him. Ramses’ eyes never left the Gypsy’s face as he said, “It says you won undying glory in the war.” Ramses gripped his arm tightly. “Read it to me,” he ordered. It was a long article, in the Old Lady’s Rudkøbing newspaper. It stated that he, Ramses Jensen, had fought valiantly in the war and had then disappeared. That he had, in fact, always been on the side of freedom and that the King himself had decided to pardon him, at the request of a group of important personages who had publicly protested the erroneous impression the general public had been given of Ramses, thanks to Caesar Jensen’s misdeeds.
Ramses had not kept up with what had happened to his sons, but now it dawned on him that they had become important men, capable of arranging whatever was necessary, even such a falsification of history. From that day, and until Adonis was born, he and the Princess shunned all human society.
Adonis was born after a series of seemingly premeditated coincidences, which may have started with Ramses breaking into Mørkhøj.
I do not know what made Ramses do it. Normally, he would have avoided a place such as Mørkhøj. It was, at one and the same time, too gloomy and too ostentatious for his taste. So he must have been prompted by something out of the ordinary. It may have been that he saw a faded WANTED poster, for himself, on the wall. Or it may have been out of curiosity, or long habit, or the challenge presented by the height of the wall. No one can be sure now. What we do know is that by this time Ramses was, by the standards of his own century, an old man. Even so, he effortlessly negotiated the iron spikes that had kept time out until that moment, even though they shattered at his touch, eaten away by rust. He glided across the dark green lawns of the manor grounds just at one of those rare moments when the golden light of the sun filtered through the tops of the oak trees to create a veil of light and shade that covered him, and left him free to witness, all unseen, the laborers singing in the fields, the cows in the meadows, and the fair hair of the young countesses, all of which could just be discerned in the shadow of the trees, and all of which were part of a wish that Ramses did not share and that therefore made no impression on him.
Ramses had never dreamed of manor-house idylls. So it would not have made any impression on him either if he had come within earshot and discovered that the working songs consisted not of words but of meaningless grunts and that the red cows were no bigger than badgers and that the countesses’ two-hundred-year-old reveries were but an empty ritual. What Ramses, who had no home, savored was the silence and the coolness of the secret pathways which had been forgotten for three centuries but which he found without any difficulty. These led him to the overgrown moat and through the cellars where the great Paracelsus had drunk with his whores and up narrow staircases in the thick walls of the main building. From there, through concealed spyholes in the canvases of extinct painters, he could watch the dumb footmen polishing the silver, and peep into the white-and-gilt room, and over Jacoby’s shoulder, at the ink drying on the already yellowed pages of the castle’s history. From here, too, he spent a long while watching the Count, who was working in his laboratory. Ramses may even have felt as though he knew this man, who had decreed, and later witnessed, the execution of one of Ramses’ forebears in the square outside Copenhagen Cathedral in a time before that with which we are here concerned. It was, as it happens, on that occasion—outside the cathedral and face-to-face with a criminal from the lowest rung of humanity, who just happened to be one of Ramses’ forefathers—that the Count had formed some of the ideas on the structure of the universe that now kept him tied to his work in the laboratory, surrounded by retorts and alembics, one of which Ramses now takes. It is the only thing he takes, before vanishing just as silently as Jacoby’s ghost will—in a not-too-distant future—make its return.
That Ramses should have picked up this particular alembic is yet another of those important coincidences. He takes it, on impulse, from a table behind where the Count is working. But even when being impulsive, he remains true to his principle of modesty and takes an alembic containing nothing but air beneath its stopper. Later, he and the Princess unstop the alembic in the bedroom of an isolated house into which they have forced their way for the night—just this one night. That it should be this particular house is yet another coincidence, and now they do, in fact, open the alembic. The air pent up inside it is so old that it smells of violets and prussic acid, and out of the bottle there rises the faint echo of the lonesome music played on a cello by the last of Mørkhøj’s dying race of musicians.
This situation comprises elements from so many different places. Once again, so many dreams come together here: the house is large and empty and far away from everything. Outside, the wind howls, reminding Ramses and the Princess of how awful it is to travel at night and what a burden it is always to be on the run. On the table before them there is a lit candle and the remains of a modest meal—possibly porridge and pork cracklings, but at any rate definitely something hot. The Princess never skimped where food was concerned; she and Ramses and the children had always eaten like regular folks. And then there is the alembic, and the scent of the past, and distant music. This last calls to mind for both of them the mazurkas and Hungarian folk dances that the drunken Belgian circus musicians had played in their youthful days on the hilltop. It causes them to slide down next to each other, and what happens next is that Adonis—son of two ragged-trousered proletarians—is conceived in this bed, which had been shown at the big exhibition of Scandinavian art and industry. What happens in this bed, apart from that, is none of our business. So instead let me just say that its upholstery and rosettes and heavy hangings heralded a new age. This bed represented a last attempt at camouflage on the part of a middle class that would never make the acquaintance of Ramses and the Princess. I should also mention that both the bed and the deserted house, with its medieval turrets and curved bronze window frames, had been designed by one of their own sons, an architect who had disowned his father and mother by taking the name of Meldahl and who would, in time, become both principal of the Academy of Fine Arts and a member of the Copenhagen municipal council—all of which indicates that the parents’ love and their children’s achievements are in some way connected.
As a child, Adonis brought his father and mother much sorrow, through his compassion for mankind. Ramses and the Princess must have become aware of this compassion very early on because, as a baby on his mother’s back, if he saw his father walking off with a piece of canvas or a salami that did not belong to him, he would break into the infant howls that summoned the dogs and armed men whom Ramses had spent a lifetime avoiding but from whom he now had to run, just as he had done when he was young, by wading through streams, up to his waist in water, to cover his tracks. And all the while he struggled to understand how children could be so impossible by nature; why he had never succeeded in getting just one son to follow in his own, invisible, footsteps, which were, instead, now being followed by sheepdogs and men with hunting rifles because of whom he was forced to stay in the water for so long that he contracted pneumonia—an illness that was still plaguing him when they met the Princess’s father, the quick-change artist.
This meeting took place at a cattle market, when the puppets in one of the puppet theaters that had been set up started to shout after Ramses, who had just set foot in the streets for the first time in three weeks. Behind the gilded proscenium of the theater they found the old circus manager, who now spent his life behind puppets. In a voice hoarse from an entire life of bawling out insults, he congratulated Ramses on how well he looked and told them, with some feeling, how, in another part of the country, he had come across tales of his daughter, of whom it was said that she was a witch. Before setting off, on foot, with his theater folded up and strapped to his back, he gave the baby the name of Adonis. So full of authority were the furrows, thick with soot, that age had etched in his face that Ramses accepted the name, even though it reminded him of Caesar Jensen. Nevertheless, he made just one bid to persuade his father-in-law
to change his mind, shouting after the departing theater, “Every policeman will remember that name!”
The impresario waved his hat and answered him, without turning around, “It’s an artist’s name. Women will never forget it!”
And thus he left Ramses and the Princess to hopes and expectations that were kept alive when Adonis proved, as he grew, to be the obedient child of whom every parent dreams. He became as stealthy as Ramses and as nimble as the Princess. With his instinct for soothing all living things, he sweet-talked the cows in the fields while Ramses milked them, and then helped his father to carry home the milk, to the extent that Ramses was able to harbor a fragile hope, which he preserved by never really putting Adonis to the test. And so his hope remained unthwarted until the night when he broke into the Teander Rabow family home—which is where we began this chapter. For when Ramses tore his eyes away from the marble busts in the Old Lady’s house in Rudkøbing in Langeland, he discovered that his sack, which lay on the floor, was now so flat that it could only be full of emptiness and nothing but emptiness. Beside it, in the moonlight, stood Adonis. It was quite clear, there was no denying, that the boy—his own son—must have broken in after his father and crept through the house even more silently than Ramses himself; in fact, with such extraordinary stealth that the boy’s presence actually muffled the house’s own natural sounds. Thus, even Katarina dozed—although her finger did not leave the trigger. Thereafter, Adonis had put back everything; thereafter, he had stolen from his own father and put the worthless fabrics and brushes and shoes back where they came from, while his old father was staring at statues as old as himself, recalling that past in which he had supported a family so large that the precise number of children escaped him—though they had all let him down by becoming important and immoderate men with strange names and extravagant dreams of changing the world, and had left him and the Princess, his heart’s darling, alone with the fragile hope that now, before God, had been most decidedly shattered, now that Adonis had abused his gifts and dealt his father this blow. Even now Ramses, who, since his youth, had never spoken during a break-in, merely inclined his head silently toward the empty sack on the dark floor, lit by a white moon. And it was Adonis who broke the silence.
