by Peter Høeg
* * *
Adonis and the master of masks made their way north to Denmark, and crossed the last border as Adonis’s brother the president was telling the Princess and Ramses about the croaking frogs and calm straits of his homeland. And so, as luck would have it, during these weeks three generations of the same family are all, at one and the same time and unknowingly, converging upon one another and the Danish Summer, which H. N. Andersen pictured as a kindly, motherly woman whom he would not for one moment have connected with the creature sitting before him, chipping at rust—but who was in fact his real mother.
Adonis and the quick-change artist came home to this summer without recognizing it—just as they retained only a vague memory of the country, since both were at a forgetful age. During the suffocating heat of the summer months they tramped the length of Jutland, which the old showman found so densely populated that it left him feeling unable to breathe and which was so rife with mosquitoes that he believed he had seen nothing like it since the malaria-ridden plains of his childhood. Those he had left, once upon a time, to avoid being tormented by the very insomnia that now struck him. And in his wakeful state, the cool pricks of the mosquito stings induced a cold, sweating fever that left him tossing restlessly on his straw pallet, next to Adonis.
Adonis, on the other hand, adjusted quickly and soon reverted to his native tongue. And it was he who realized that it was necessary to shift from one sentimental dream to another: hitherto, on their way through Europe, it was as though Adonis were an apprentice of sorts to his grandfather. Their relationship had resembled our picture, and that of their day and age, of the old man helping the orphaned child—an image they exploited, wherever they appeared, to draw a crowd. This picture now needed to be replaced by another: that other image—also extremely popular—of the child leading the doddering old man. This change took place when Adonis encountered hunger for the first time in his life, and that came about because the quick-change artist, because of his great age, could no longer live up to the expectations of his audiences. In this flat country—Denmark, that is—even the smallest villages through which they passed had heard of the picture palaces. And, from magazines, everyone knew about an art form other than that of the old circus manager: one composed of wistful dramas and pictures of dreamy-eyed young ladies in tasteful states of undress, as opposed to the old showman’s baroque masks, which were not even seen in his own country now and which here, under foreign skies, took on an increasingly aggressive and wicked appearance when confronted with silent audiences who less and less often paid to see them.
For a while they survived because Adonis made up and acted out mawkish romances, or sang tearful and jolly ballads that compensated somewhat for the gestures with which the old showman tried to wring a response from his audiences, whom he had begun to fear, suspecting them, as he did, of being some sort of cold-blooded, two-legged, upstanding salamander, endowed with a power of speech they used only sparingly—just like the ones with which his grandmother had filled the nights of his childhood and which he had thought he would never run into; until now, that is, in these squares and marketplaces. More and more often he had to break off in the middle of a performance, lay his mask aside, and place a hand on one of the bystanders to reassure himself that this man with the leather waistcoat and dead eyes was not some clammy amphibian but a real person. That summer, for the first time, he saw his own age, objectively, in the eyes of these people; a sight that led him to doubt whether he had ever been young. He was seized by the uncertainty that strikes us all sooner or later, and particularly those of us involved in recounting unlikely extracts of the truth. He was no longer sure that he had once actually roamed these parts with his own circus and presented the wonders of the seven seas and wild beasts from far-flung continents and the world’s most beautiful women to these yokels whom he now endeavored to delight by imitating the roars of his long-lost lions and by telling them of his circus princesses—all dead—whose radiant beauty had once had their yokel forebears’ tongues hanging out. Now they did not so much as flicker an eyelid, believing as they did that, in newspapers and books and at the great exhibitions, they had seen all, or at least almost all, there was to see.
The old man gave his last performance in a town of red brick situated on the very same gently sloping hill on which his circus tent had been pitched the night that Ramses first saw the Princess. This was mere chance, and a coincidence that the old showman may well have noted. But he was not, as we are, surprised by it, presumably because, unlike us, he was not aware that, throughout the history of Denmark, parents often go back to the spot where their children became engaged, to die. He performed in a marketplace surrounded by so many spectators that the surrounding countryside was completely hidden from view; to an audience that swelled and swelled he acted out his bittersweet tale of a pig who wanted to go on the stage and sing arias, and the one about a writer who becomes lost in his own books, while his son looks on.
No one laughed.
When Adonis saw the old man’s tears saturating a mask that also depicted the face of an old man, he tried to catch his eye, behind the mask. But there was no eye. He sat where he was, quite still, and perceived that at this moment, in front of this crowd, his grandfather was the loneliest person in the world. And in this loneliness he presented his picture of the country’s first circus manager: himself. The members of the audience usually became involved in this show, but here, in this intolerable country, the old man found no people to participate in the grand finale of his life, only stony faces that reminded him of ancient graven images he had once seen, at the beginning of the previous century, half-buried in the sand, when his parents had taken him to the seaside. Adonis watched his grandfather circulate among the impassive farmers, stepping out jerkily like a timid bird; hidden behind a Harlequin mask and tentatively peddling a show that had been performed when parents of this audience were small. Then he took off his hat and held it out. When, out of pity, one of the farmers tossed a coin into the hat, the old man lifted it out. On finding that he did not recognize it—remembering now only the coins with which he had been paid when he was young—he pulled off his mask. Under it was the pig mask, and under that the mask of an old man, and under that an obscene red monkey, and under that the smooth, expressionless features of a young boy. And with that Adonis’s grandfather disappeared. For beneath this last mask there was nothing but thin air, and this—together with a little heap of dark cloth—was all that was left of the quick-change artist.
The spectators turned and left, without paying. They were so well acquainted with a world where everything disappeared that nothing less than a resurrection would satisfy them. For the rest of that day and all through the long night, Adonis sat on, beside the abandoned masks. And sitting there, with nothing left but memories and his resilient adaptability, he is the forsaken youngest son of the fairy tales who must now set off into the world alone.
As morning approaches, he gets up (not wanting to be in the way of the sunlight), walks across the square, and enters the town theater. Well, of course he enters the theater, and what he is looking for is work—wishing, in no way, to be a burden to anyone—preferably work that keeps him out of sight: a prompter, for instance, if only he could read, or some invisible extra; just as long as he can once more savor the happy upturned faces of the audience and the cheerful tolerance of the theater. He walked through a door fitted with panes of black glass and along corridors as quiet as a hospital. Sweaty men tiptoed past the boy in their stocking feet, without noticing him or his wonderment at the smell of burial and dashed hopes that surrounded him—this last due to the appearance at the theater of a company, on tour from Copenhagen, whose leading lady had announced that she was indisposed and refused to go on. Adonis passed by the door of her dressing room; edged his way around the director and the conductor and the doctor and a playwright, all trying, through the closed door, to persuade the Divine One to give one more performance; to just once more, for her public’
s sake, give herself up to that blend of tearful smiles and madness for which she was adored and for the sake of which audiences had time and again unharnessed the horses from her carriage and themselves pulled her, in it, from the Royal Theater. In the basement—while she was once more screaming, “No, no!” and “Let me die in peace!”—Adonis came across the theater’s stagehands and craftsmen: Italians and burned-out actors whose scars and prison pallor gave them the look of extras in some show, which, from time to time, they actually were. He inquired about work, and when he could see that they thought he was too young, his forehead took on the color of years he had never known and his mouth grew taut from sorrows far removed from his carefree nature and his jaw set with a distaste for life that he would never feel. Then he told them he was eighteen, and looked older as he said it. So they asked him if he could work, and his back bent under loads he had never carried, and they took him on. After a week when he had done nothing but sweep up, they asked him to shift fifty huge bolts of blue canvas, and his cover was blown. He seized hold of a bolt, but it would not budge. Then, when he realized that the stagehands were watching him, he assumed a stoop and started swinging his hands in the air like a veteran and made his voice deeper, but still they could see he was just a boy.
Nevertheless, the theater retained Adonis. The stagehands entertained toward him the same curiosity that has prompted me to tell the story of his fortunes, wanting, as I do, to look behind the roles that Adonis spent his whole life playing in his efforts not to disappoint any living soul, nor, if possible, the dead. In actual fact, there were very few things he asked of life: to share in the joyousness which surrounds all actors—and which he had first discerned surrounding his grandfather in that far-off Turkish bazaar—and at the same time to remain practically invisible and on no account to be in the way. So when the theater gave him the job of wave boy in a tremendously successful play, he felt he had achieved his heart’s desire.
The name of the play was Sigurd’s Great Voyage around the World, and it had been put together by that great poet Holger Drachmann, in one of his innumerable attempts to keep everyone, absolutely everyone, happy.
This piece was an unparalleled compromise. Drachmann had lifted the plot, with some minor alterations, from Around the World in Eighty Days, but it had as its central character Sigurd Jorsalsfar, from the great romantic drama of the same name. The dialogue was taken from several of his own unfinished dramatic works, and he had supplemented the entr’actes with brief episodes from contemporary, and rather risqué, satires, the language of which he had toned down, just as he had made sure that nowhere in the piece did the word “German” appear; this being something which, because of the tense situation in Europe, the Foreign Ministry would never have permitted. To ensure the goodwill of the royal family he had taken out all tavern scenes and any reference to prostitution. To save offending Vigilia, the Society for Moral Rearming, who kept a careful eye on the theater, he had himself written and inserted five uplifting ballads set to modern hymn tunes. In the same way, he found it necessary to cut out Phileas Fogg’s marriage to the widowed Aouda. Instead, he had her die on the pyre alongside her husband. Then, owing to much theatrical intrigue, it was decided that the piece should be directed by a professor of literature who was almost totally blind; that the sets should be designed by a pupil of the Academy of Fine Arts’ principal (Adonis’s secret brother Meldahl), and that the part of the hero, Sigurd the traveler, should be rewritten for a woman, since the theater owed its leading lady a plum role. The piece had been a triumph for the theater. At the premiere, with the next fifty performances and the nationwide tour sold out, the director turned to Drachmann.
“You are a great artist,” he said.
The poet ran his fingers through his hair, which was white and soft as whipped cream, and smiled dementedly. “I’m a great whore,” he said.
It was Adonis’s job every evening, along with seven other boys, to roll out and agitate the blue canvas sheeting that passed for the sea in the scenes that took place on board the steamship Mongolia. This task he performed to everyone’s satisfaction. Without himself being tempted, he watched his fellow wave boys acquiring the same habits as the actors. They drank alcohol and placed themselves at the disposal of older men and women trying to prolong the enchantment of the performance by purchasing brief dominion over these boys, who sold themselves as much from greed as from curiosity—wanting to see the underside of public morality and the dress suits and trains and long gloves. He refrained because he did not want to disappoint his parents, whom, by now, he had difficulty in remembering; and because he believed that the theater was in fact a huge and ingenious machine designed for the ennoblement of mankind. Every evening he enjoyed the transformation that took place in both actors and audience. Every evening alcoholism and hysteria, suicides (contemplated or carried out) and brutal egoism underwent a metamorphosis, to be distilled, every one, into tears and cries of joy and music and cannon fire. And these, like some form of alchemy, made the auditorium weep and shout, or fall silent with quiet nobility, until the only sound to be heard was the tiptoeing of the theater attendants carrying out, on stretchers, those officers who had swooned with emotion at the words “Danes we are, and Danes we shall remain.”
After having taken part in sixty performances in sixty days, Adonis was sure that his life would never be any different. Because of his unobtrusive willingness, which led the director and the stagehands to forget his age, more and more tasks were assigned to him. Every evening, after he had played the last of his increasing number of walk-on parts, he was sent on—by the last train or the last mail coach or, occasionally, on horseback or by bicycle—to the next town to make sure that the local property man had solved the perennially hopeless problem of procuring, free of charge, the antique sofas and majestic chairs and big triumphal arches required for the next day’s performance. In order to fill the theaters and lure the last of the townspeople, and to save anyone’s being disappointed, it had been necessary to expand the repertoire. Holger Drachmann had cut the original play by half—smiling as he did so—to make room for Under Ideology’s Banner, which dealt with the plight of the workers. The bitter message of this piece was then sweetened by the final item on the program, The Corsetiere’s Daughter, which no one could help but be amused by—and everyone was, especially Adonis. It made him weak at the knees every evening, and left him pale-faced and quivering like jelly with joy over the laughter and the applause.
At no time does he appear to have been offended by the contradictions of the theater. At every single performance he allowed himself to be taken in by the illusions without ever being distracted by the odd furniture, or the local crop of extras who took to the stage in clogs and fell into the orchestra pit, or all the weird houses in which they played. Often it would be a gymnasium or a barn where nailed-up oil lamps swung above the steamship Mongolia and a blue sea which the actions of the wave boys brought so convincingly to life that spectators in the front rows gathered up their skirts and lifted their button boots off the floor so as not to get them wet. To Adonis, the scent of the theater represented the truth, even though it was the scent of powder and escaping gas and the tarred rope used for the wigs, and of dust from the wings, and of the benzine with which Adonis himself had removed the stains from the leading lady’s gloves and crinoline gowns. And all of this acts as a reminder, to me, that Denmark is not, as is said, a land devoid of passion. Quite the contrary: it is the most unhinged place in the history of the world. What other culture has ever embraced a contradiction as false as that which existed between the actresses’ conduct in the wings—where Adonis sponged their fancy dress, with them fondling him and whispering that they would teach him something about life, and he wriggling, eel-like, out of reach—and their stage roles, in which they played sensitive, quietly touching young girls with a fine, pure poetry that prompted their admirers and co-actors to brave the smell of benzine in their dressing rooms and shower rose petals down their partia
lly exposed cleavages? What other culture, I ask you, can boast such an absurd moral standard?
In one of those flashes of memory to do with his grandfather that Adonis had retained, the old man had said, “Life, my boy, is a journey from one square or marketplace to the next, and the most one can hope for is that just once in every place, God will descend and possess the actor.” Adonis was too cautious to believe in divine beings, but he had not taken exception to these words of wisdom. He had grown up with his parents’ paradoxical view of honesty, and he had learned to live amid apparently irreconcilable contradictions. Now he felt that, after all, his grandfather had been right. His own life, too, had taken the form of open spaces. And in his mind these had merged with the theaters, which grew steadily in number, after the director managed to have his grant renewed and extended the tour to the point at which Adonis would meet Anna.
* * *
To Anna and Adonis, their meeting was like a miracle; one which, later on, they would never grow tired of mulling over and calling to mind. They were convinced that it had, in some way, been planned, foreseen, arranged—and it is a tempting thought. Like Adonis and Anna, we, too, have a need to believe in some higher purpose, or at least in the possibility of some quite-out-of-the-ordinary coincidence. Unfortunately, this is not possible. In fact, it turns out on closer investigation that Adonis’s and Anna’s paths had crossed many times before they met, and that Adonis had on several occasions performed in a town where Anna’s father was preaching, with his daughter sitting beside the pulpit. The only miracle we can discern is that they did not meet each other earlier—although this can possibly be explained by Thorvald Bak’s having steered clear of the theater, which he regarded as a den of iniquity; an attitude fostered by his distorted memories of the vaudeville shows he had seen in Copenhagen as a young man. These were the only theatrical presentations he had ever witnessed, and he now looked back upon them as a sequence of tableaux populated by wine-soused maidens and horned monsters. For his part, the theater’s director dreaded Bak’s Evangelical Mission. So the two men never met and thus never became aware of what is so obvious to us: that, in fact, these two—the preacher and the impresario—each in his own way wanted the same things. The pastor also wanted to entertain his audience, and wooed them with promises of illusions and anecdotes and baroque dialogue; and the director was also a missionary, anxious to spread the word of the Eternal Art to the very tiniest of hamlets. Part of the truth about the director and all the rest of that traveling theater—by which, for a time, Adonis was totally absorbed—was that they all dreamed of opening their audience’s eyes to a nobler, a finer, view of the world so that, one day, theaters might be built on the ruins of these barns and outhouses where they now performed; and that it might be possible to fill these theaters with a literary and enlightened public, with the same good taste as the citizens of Copenhagen: a public for whom it would no longer be necessary to perform these ghastly histrionic potpourris reminiscent of exotic beasts. Driven by this dream, and by the perennial financial problems that form another part of the truth, the theater and Adonis traveled the length and breadth of the country, playing anywhere they could, anywhere at all, since art must not scorn humble surroundings. And on these travels, their path—which follows the meandering railroad tracks and which I am now laboriously retracing—crosses any number of times with that of Thorvald Bak. On several occasions he has been on the same train, and sat only a few cars ahead of Adonis’s compartment, with Anna by his side and her chain in his hand. But not until Rudkøbing were all the elements in place: the elements of a situation that would under any circumstances have arisen. Only then did Adonis come out onto the street for a moment, to be alone; and that because he, who had always traveled on land, had happened to think of the sea—a thought that had long filled Anna’s life, because the sea reminds the captive that imprisonment need not last forever; and because no Danes can ever shake themselves free of the sea around Denmark—not even Adonis and Anna. And now we have reached the moment when they stand face-to-face on the street in Rudkøbing.
