by Peter Høeg
“These things don’t belong to you, Father,” he said.
Ramses raised his hand as though to hit him, but was held back by the feeling that some higher form of justice does exist, a feeling he had acquired from living outside the laws of man. Instead the outrage he felt in his heart found its way to his lips. “You young whippersnapper,” he hissed, “you’d see your own parents lying in the streets with their bones picked clean before you’d spare them a crust.” The sound of his voice carried to Katarina, who woke up and fired her pistol at the door, believing that her husband or her mother-in-law, or more likely both of them, were trying to take her by surprise. Then Ramses and Adonis made a run for it. Ramses was so shaken that he crashed into tables and chairs and stools. He became separated from his son and was unable to regain his bat-like sense for finding his way in the dark. At one point a door yielded to his weight and sent him into the arms of a police chief who had spent his whole life chasing him. This police chief arrested Ramses personally, even though he was befuddled by rumors that the King wanted to pardon him, and by all the tall stories about his magnanimity.
During the two months of his imprisonment, Ramses never uttered a single word but remained as silent as in his youth. He was transferred to Copenhagen and placed in the same cell as the Princess. She had turned herself in to be close to her husband and to show her contempt for the authorities, who were now trying to make this stay in prison as pleasant as possible for these two celebrated criminals by decorating their cell like a bridal suite, fearing, as they did, the couple’s influential sponsors, who were, of course, their sons. Three times daily they were served meals from a fine restaurant, and they were visited by pastors and journalists and lawyers whom Ramses detested.
In this elegantly appointed cell, at one point, they were also visited by their children, and even Ramses could no longer fail to see how well things had gone for them. They had become mathematicians and doctors and lawyers and prophets of doom and inventors. They had tried to forget their upbringing by shoring up their wavering times with morality or with brilliant machines or with legislation that Ramses had never respected or understood. Moreover, he could never quite understand how they had managed to secure his pardon. Nor, when it came right down to it, did he show any sign of recognizing these tall, self-assured men wearing the clothes and symbols of power. He accepted that they were his sons only because the Princess said so, and all her life she had been right. One after another they approached him in the cell to receive his thanks for a favor he had never asked of them. He looked in wonder at these penguins, whose strides had grown short, stiff, and measured from their regular visits to ministries and courts of law, and at his only daughter, who, like her brothers, wanted to change the world. In her the Princess’s courage and urge to scandalize her contemporaries had developed into an urge to change the world by improving the status of women, as she explained proudly to Ramses. And while she was speaking, he was shaking his head and wondering if he was losing his mind. He refused to understand the woman who now stood before him dressed provocatively in loose-fitting clothing; who was not only an agricultural consultant but also a horse trader and member of the jockey club and smoked cigars, not only here in front of her parents but out in the streets, too—to shock people.
Ramses shut himself out from the world (if, indeed, one is prepared to accept the possibility of putting oneself even further out of touch than he already was). He forbade the Princess to read aloud from the newspapers delivered to their cell in the days before their pardon was granted. In these they could read their own story, illustrated with etchings that portrayed them in a transfigured, mythological light, dressed as some royal couple from a distant and legendary age à la Regnar Lodbrog, against a backdrop of misty mountains and dusky blue fjords. Only once did he speak to anyone in that stream of visitors—when he recognized Meldahl, the oldest of his sons, now architect to the Danish court and a Knight Commander of the Order of Dannebrog. He had also, as it happens, designed the out-of-the-way house in which Adonis was conceived, and had succeeded in creating for himself a totally watertight past, to the extent that no one now knew that he was Ramses and the Princess’s son. Ramses saw the Dannebrog Cross on the breast of his tailcoat, and in his eyes he glimpsed the reflection of all the villas and churches and lunatic asylums and prisons and palaces that he had designed, and whose building he had supervised; all the buildings in which, in granite and slate and sandstone and plaster and stucco, he had endeavored to express his desire to forget his childhood. And yet here it was, facing him, in the shape of his own father, who was imprisoned in a prison he himself had built, with a façade camouflaged to resemble a Swiss chalet. Ramses turned away from him in anger, and the architect extended his hands in a helpless gesture, unable to understand what was happening. “You have built walls,” Ramses said tonelessly. Meldahl left without saying anything, and they only ever saw him on one other occasion. That was when he returned with Adonis, who had given himself up and tried to claim responsibility for his father’s break-ins, and now the authorities were at a loss as to what to do with him.
That same night, not wanting to hear the result of the petition for mercy, Ramses and the Princess broke out of prison with that hopeless child—Adonis, that is. They did not, however, manage to slip out of town unseen. Around daybreak, a group of journalists, who had been waiting in the street for just such a turn of events, spotted them driving north. In the press the next day, their departure was presented as a triumphal procession: the grand old man and illustrious war hero making his dignified exit. The family had been captured for posterity in etchings that depicted them smiling and waving as they left the town by way of Søtorvet—a square designed by Meldahl along Parisian lines. In the background, barely discernible, were the churches and ministries and hospitals—also Meldahl’s work—frequented by the sons of Ramses and the Princess; those pillars of society who would, not long after this, be sending telegrams of homage and condolence to Rudkøbing, on the occasion of the Old Lady’s death. That event occurred just as the coachman lashed the horses with his whip and the coach trundled past the journalists’ faces. Ramses shook his fist at them until he could no longer see them.
For the first few months, Ramses and the Princess traveled southward. On their way through Europe they put one after another border behind them in an attempt to elude this modern age in which criminals were looked upon as heroes, where they ran the risk of at any moment finding their long and arduous lives screeching at them from cabarets and vaudeville shows in big cities, and where the Princess recognized her sons’ names on the works in bookshop windows—works of scientific research into the criminal physiognomy and the prison system and agriculture and the development of machines. The racket from these last, which she and Ramses abhorred, constituted one of their reasons for making a definite decision to keep to the country areas. They traveled south because they wanted to get away and because the Princess retained a vague memory, from the stories of her childhood, of shady countries like pleasant gardens. Instead, on foot and in uncomfortable stagecoaches, they passed through regions bathed in a dry and all-revealing sunlight in which garrulousness and the tendency to exaggerate, from which they had fled, seemed to flourish like a tropical flower. Here the dust still held the imprint of footsteps from the time when their sons had traveled through Europe on grand tours, paid for by the state they would later come to support or try to overthrow, but at any rate to change—by transplanting what they had seen on their travels into Danish soil. And this explains why Ramses felt as though, everywhere he looked, he saw prisons: because when he designed his prisons, Meldahl had drawn inspiration from the Italian villas and Greek temples and Turkish mosques in the towns through which his parents were now passing. And it was in such places that they met the hardy revolutionaries whose ideas had fallen upon the embers smoldering inside their son the Socialist, ideas that had transformed his nagging dissatisfaction into the gasoline blaze that would send him to prison and
then exile him to America. In fact, he was on the point of departure just as Ramses and the Princess were traveling past wretchedness the likes of which they had never seen and which they still did not see because, now and for the rest of their lives, they lived in the belief that the world around them was the best of possible worlds and that everyone ought to keep to the place allotted him—everyone except themselves, since they were under the singular obligation to remain eternally on the move.
Before giving up all hope of understanding Adonis, the only child left to them, Ramses tried to teach him, in various European capitals, the art of picking people’s pockets and of appropriating brass-bound leather suitcases in intolerable railroad stations. Adonis mastered every new trick so quickly that Ramses—who was looking for anything, the slightest hint, that his son might become a criminal, like his father—told himself that the boy picked up everything as if by some sort of intellectual theft, inasmuch as he could, with one swipe, appropriate foreign vocabularies and grammar and win the confidence of foreigners with his blue eyes—which could turn almost green with goodwill. Such skills, together with his carefree nature, make him seem, to us, like another Aladdin. And that is how he would have seemed to his parents if it had not been for his honesty, which was inclined to manifest itself in baroque fashion for as long as Ramses kept on trying to overcome it and make his son understand that the world had to be met with skepticism and distrust and a permananent state of readiness. Sometimes, because Ramses insists, Adonis complies with his wishes, as when, in the square in front of St. Peter’s in Rome, he slits open the coat pocket of a passing gentleman with a razor, grabs his fat wallet as it falls out, and then laughs, proudly and happily, at his father, who is hidden in the crowd, observing his son. Naturally, Ramses is proud, but his pleasure does not last for long. When they return to their pensione it becomes apparent that Adonis no longer has the wallet. While still out in the vast square, with his father standing there delightedly nodding and smiling, Adonis had with his free hand slit open his victim’s other pocket, slipped the wallet back, and then sewn up both pockets—all of this while the man was walking past him, and the entire operation executed so dexterously that not even Ramses saw it. This done, Adonis walks over to Ramses, a happy man who has, in actuality, nothing to be happy about except the fact that his son has at least left no trace of himself, other than the two rows of stitches that the coat’s owner will discover and wonder at some months later. These stitches are Adonis’s attempt to repair his youth, in which he—like so many others whose stories we have told—is torn between his own nature and his father and mother’s abstemious obstinacy.
When Adonis was nine years old, he met his grandfather the quick-change artist. They met in Turkey, at one of the garish bazaars that were a nightmare for Ramses. They seemed to hover on a cloud of dust, and, as Adonis moved through them, his fair curls made the women cry and the stall holders presented him with cakes sweetened with blood and honey, just to see him chew, while trade came to a standstill and everyone pushed and shoved to get a look at this divine child.
That was to be the day when Adonis left his parents. Somewhere, amid the canopies and waterskins and dried cheeses, a man stepped out of the dust and the noise to alternately mock and flatter spectators in what was not quite their own language but something like it. During the clamorous applause, the man peeled off his face and Adonis realized that it was a mask, and that under that there was another mask, and then he was sure that this must be his grandfather, of whom he had heard but whom he had never met—if we disregard that time when he was very small and was given his name. To begin with, it was not his standing face-to-face with his grandfather that mattered to Adonis. The crucial factor was the effect the mask had on the audience. During the impudent performance Adonis did not look at his grandfather but at the audience, and here, for the first time, he saw the moisture in the eyes of the veiled women and the shaking hands of the men. I think I can say that it was at this moment that Adonis, who was just a little boy, saw, in a flash of understanding, that his life was bound to masks, and to the theater. I deliberately use the expression “flash of understanding” because that is what it was, and it was the only one of its kind that Adonis would ever experience in a life in which decisive moments were rare and imperceptible transitions the norm. When the old man disappeared into the crowd, followed by the applause, Adonis was right behind him. In a little red-and-white-striped tent he revealed his identity to his grandfather, who answered him in a language Adonis did not understand. Even in the cool peacefulness of the tent, the quick-change artist’s face was so distorted that Adonis wondered whether one of the masks he had been slipping on and off all through his life had finally got the better of him.
It was evening when Ramses and the Princess found Adonis. They had followed the laughter rising from around a little dais where he and his grandfather were staging a piece of improvised comedy that Ramses and the Princess did not understand. Nor would they have recognized their son if the Princess had not glimpsed his hair shining above his mask, just for an instant, when the light from the oil lamps caught it. Once Ramses had had his son pointed out to him and realized that the boy was actually standing on the stage, he suddenly remembered the moment when, as a young boy with a year in prison behind him, he had stood facing his father. Now, too, he yielded to the sense of his own impotence—and left.
That same night he and the Princess headed east. Some sort of melancholy defiance made them move in the opposite direction from the great constellations known to them from the innumerable nights when they had watched over their prodigal sons and their one impossible daughter. They traveled because they wanted never again to have to look their children or the world they left behind in the eye, and because they were driven by their wanderlust. This was something they themselves found harder and harder to understand as, gradually, they wandered farther and farther away from Europe. Their progress turned into a journey through a wilderness of snow-covered mountains and steamy rain forests, where the inhabitants were so poor that it was impossible to rob them. Instead, they showed such hospitality to Ramses and the Princess that they were forced to accept, even though it pained them that, with every free dish of unfamiliar vegetables, their status became ever more clear: namely, that of two increasingly feeble vagabonds, plagued by dysentery, malaria, parasites, and, most of all, the loneliness of these foreign lands and the dream of their homeland that blossomed slowly out of Ramses’ introspection and the Princess’s sorrow. And because of this dream they were childishly delighted when, one day beside the sea, they came upon a trading post flying the Danish flag. They were given a warm welcome by Danes who said that at least Ramses wasn’t a damn Negro or an Arab and that even the Princess looked more like a white person than the natives of this region, whose dirty fingers had cultivated the spices or felled the trees that were shipped back to Denmark via this trading post. The post belonged to the Danish East Asia Company, which most graciously deigned to provide Ramses and the Princess with passage in return for their chipping away rust and splicing ropes and tarring and scrubbing and smearing on red lead. After all, the company had no time for loafers, freeloaders, or stowaways, as Ramses and the Princess learned from the president of the company, H. N. Andersen, who was sailing home on the same ship. He amused himself with these two strange old characters—Ramses and the Princess, that is—because, since they at least spoke his mother tongue, he could explain to them that the company had become what it was only by honoring Duty and Work, the sole true gods, which were to replace the ridiculous idols of the natives in these Hottentot countries. He told Ramses and the Princess (who had until now been under the impression that the world was infinitely vast) that the company had now circumscribed the globe, making it so comprehensible that even Ramses’ limited intelligence could encompass it. At this point he tapped the old housebreaker’s sweaty, rust-covered brow, and Ramses would have wrung his neck if the Princess had not held him back. It had dawned on her, long before
this, that the president was one of their own sons: one who had gone to sea many years before and who had, ever since, made such a good job of camouflaging his origins and upbringing that, as far as everyone was concerned, he was the son of a shipmaster from Nakskov. He had also partially succeeded in himself forgetting where he came from, which was one of the reasons that he at no time recognized his parents. But the Princess remembered him, and understood that his absurd dream of world supremacy was yet one more unfortunate manifestation of the family weakness. For the remainder of the voyage she kept a tight rein on Ramses whenever Andersen visited them, at their work, to tell them of his poor childhood and his parents in their thatch-roofed, cottage-garden idyll in Nakskov—this being just part of the lies about his native land that he had created in order to withstand the dreadful solitude of tropical nights when the wind whistled through the rigging of his ship and he imagined he heard the vicious snarls of the whores on the floating bordellos that he had sent up the rivers of Siam to lay the foundations of his fortune. He had spent a long time away from Europe and more especially from Denmark, which was now, in the transfiguring glow of his memories, rising out of the ocean like the sunken city of Atlantis. He urged the Princess and Ramses to continue with their work while he talked, since idleness is worse than death, worse than syphilis, worse than Negroes, as he explained to his countrymen, his father and mother; to whom he also boasted of how the company understood how best to exploit war, through the transportation of troops and weapons; and all in order to bring glory to the Old Country, as he called it. It was quite evident, from the turns of phrase that he employed, that the feet of this son, too, had long since lost touch with that earth which he maintained could be circumscribed in less, much less, than eighty days.
