by Peter Høeg
The one who remembered this incident the longest was Anna, but in time even she forgot it.
* * *
At first glance, Adonis’s life during these years in Copenhagen seems to have been sunshine and roses all the way; a sort of cascade of happy coincidences. Which leads me to consider whether fortune might in fact be a sort of river, just like the stream of time. Because in that case the explanation might be that, as a child, Adonis had been swept up by a wave that carried him along and brought him, here in Copenhagen, to his job with the Danish Sugar Refineries—just at the point when he and Anna had spent their last krone. This position was terminated after four days because the factory burned down, only to be immediately supplanted by another, a job that resulted from a crystal-clear and quite absurd stroke of luck: on the night when the fire broke out, Adonis had been sleeping the sleep of the dead in Anna’s arms, and so he did not hear the shouts, and so did not happen to be standing around the factory throughout the night, like the other workers, watching the glowing streams of sugar running like lava onto the hoarfrost on the streets. By the time he arrived for work, everyone had left to face unemployment in the bleak light of the dawning day, and so he was the one who was photographed by the reporters who had turned up to take pictures of the devastation in the light of day. By that time the sugar refinery had been transformed into a gutted stalagmite cavern, the water from the fire brigade hoses having frozen as it ran off the charred ruins of the building and formed huge stalagmites. Adonis was photographed sitting on these, like Aladdin in his cave. His picture appeared on the front pages, above reports in which the journalists more than hinted that he had led the firefighting, while the truth of the matter was that he had arrived too late for everything and had done nothing except steal chunks of caramelized sugar that he managed to break off the sidewalk. As a result of the picture and the newspaper reports the president of the sugar refinery sent a personal letter of thanks to Adonis along with a cash reward and the offer of a job at the new sugar refinery that had been built at the end of Langebro, not far from the area where Anna and Adonis lived. He took the job because it was there, right under his nose, and so as not to disappoint the president, and because he was drawn by the aroma aboard the three refinery ships. These transported the sugar from Cuba in two-hundred-pound sacks that the waves of the North Atlantic ripped apart, dissolving the sugar. It, in turn, dried into a brown crust, hard as marble, that had to be hacked to pieces with picks and drills before once again being shoveled into two-hundred-pound sacks and carried ashore. All of this made for tough, physical labor—which Adonis succeeded in steering clear of. In the tropical heat of the big melting vats, where everyone else had an hourly quota, he was appointed as a sort of foreman, an inspector, walking around at his leisure. And for this there is no explanation other than that fortune’s fan cooled his sweating brow. This same fortune led him, after a week, to leave the factory floor on a sudden impulse just before a copper pipe on the ceiling burst and covered everything in a rain of boiling sugar that forced the refinery to close down for a long while. Adonis did not even have time to pick up his termination papers. Just as he stepped out into the spring sunshine of the street, one of the Carlsberg brewery drays came driving past, and as Adonis closed the door behind him the driver crumpled up, felled by a heart attack. Loathing death, Adonis looked in the opposite direction and started to walk away. But luck was with him. Some passersby yelled at him to lend a hand, and so, to humor them, he jumped up onto the driver’s seat and took the reins. Sitting there, he resembled the onlookers’ picture of the young hero reining in the runaway horses. He sat on, to humor the horses, but it was only because they knew the way and needed no directing that Adonis (who had never driven a horse and cart) arrived that evening at the brewery in Valby, where he was once more hailed as a hero and rescuer. He was offered the dead man’s job on the spot and could do nothing other than accept, since that was what was expected of him.
That is how I see Adonis during these years: on a stalagmite, or on a catwalk or the box of a dray, driving through Copenhagen. He is always aloft; it is interesting to note how he is always to be found on a stage of sorts; he is always spotted by others wherever he happens to be and he is always surrounded by an airy elegance accepted by all those who come into contact with him. Even when working at the sugar refinery or driving a cart for Carlsberg or the ice plant he never ever wears a uniform. He is always dressed in black and white, with a lace cravat that dates from his theater days. If one considers how the rest of Copenhagen, around Adonis, looked in the twenties, then his life during these years truly does deviate from his surroundings. One might even wonder whether Adonis is still in the theater, playing the leading role. These are the years when the journeymen carpenters and smiths and bakers come out on strike. People are dying of starvation where Adonis lives, but he does not seem to notice them. It is as though they are merely part of the scenery, as though they are all extras for a show in which Adonis plays the part of the Happy Worker.
But this is probably not a fair assessment after all. Even for Adonis, life is not nonstop playacting. But it is clear that he manages better than others, even though there is no way of telling why he should. I, at any rate, cannot explain it, but I can see how, every morning, he drives past the long lines of unemployed waiting outside the shipyards in the hope of salvage work—imagine, lining up every morning for the chance of burning out rivets. He drives past the endless processions of protesting workers, who are pushing Denmark in the direction of our own day and age. Cool in summer or swathed in wool in winter, from up on his box he bids good day to the men, waves to the girls, talks to the horses, and radiates contentment.
Adonis never gets drawn into a fight, is never involved in a road accident, never becomes a member of a trade union; and he and Anna never have a quarrel. In one way or another, Adonis is always on the outside. He never holds a position of authority, is never a subordinate; whenever trouble is brewing, his back is already turned as he heads off into the sunlight. His life is like a dream: the dream of the individual hovering above the crowd; and this dream is part of the truth. But at the same time I am quite certain that hovering does not come cheap. It has its price. Although I have no proof, I am sure that Adonis purposely turned his back on trouble, and ran away, thus continuing his parents’ never-ending flight. I imagine Adonis, during these years, as someone constantly having to take very long strides in order to straddle a chasm—not that this mode of walking seems to bother him. Most of the time I am afraid that he is walking with his eyes only half-open, or even closed. He might well be Aladdin, but he is also blind, and this is a disturbing combination; a blind Aladdin perpetually smiling at a world he cannot properly see.
One particular incident brought this home. It took place on a glorious summer’s day, when a young girl with almond-shaped blue eyes tossed a large orange up to Adonis on his box. Naturally, he grabbed for the fruit as it hung in the air like a big orange sun, and when it burst between his fingers like a soap bubble riddled with rot, he recognized the girl. She lived in the same building as he and was married to a syndicalist, a political agitator. Ever since she had tried to persuade him to join a union, Adonis had kept out of her way. He did not want to offend either her or his employers, and he had been shocked by the three skulls nailed to her wall. These, she told him, had belonged to the last three policemen who had forced their way into the building to arrest one of the whores. Now he meets her contemptuous gaze among the crowd, but he does not fly off the handle, he does not stand up, he does not shout at her. Instead he gives a shrug, a little twist, as though dodging something or squeezing himself through some narrow opening, wincing as he does so. Then the memory is gone, the girl is already far behind him, the horses’ hooves are freshly tarred, Adonis is smiling again, and only one single, minor irritation remains, just one tiny detail: the stench of rotten fruit.
* * *
Adonis and Anna named their daughter Maria. The first years of the ch
ild’s life were passed amid the secure alternation of bright days and nights black as pitch: the unreal nocturnal light that had, thanks to the glow from the grand city stores, always hung over this darkly shrouded quarter had been extinguished, because of gas rationing. It was thanks to Anna that the adult Maria knew she had been born into such a darkness, and it was Anna, too, who explained to her daughter that the rationing was a consequence of the World War, something she seemed to know all about without ever having looked at a newspaper or left the neighborhood. Unlike Adonis, who avoided the news because it was almost always bad, or forcing him to speak out against something or other, Anna harbored, behind her quiet reserve, a tremendous curiosity. And it was this that drove her to go roaming through the vast tenement and is responsible for her—like Adonis’s mother, the Princess, and Amalie in Rudkøbing—becoming one of those women whose characters possess a roving streak; a trait that makes it a mistake to imagine that only the men in Danish history are on the move.
That sense of security disappeared from Maria’s life one Sunday morning, when Anna heard a song she did not think she had heard before. This happened while, deep in thought, she was watering a plant with water from an empty port bottle. The first line of the song was about Tahiti, but only after she heard the second line did she realize that it was she herself who was singing. Then she noticed that the plant on the windowsill in front of her was an orchid. She turned around and, for the first time, really saw the prints on the walls of the volcanic landscapes of the Azores, and the travel memoirs by Amundsen and Høeg on top of the closet. Then she stood quite still. All of this Maria had observed from her bed, and it is to form her first memory of her mother, a picture of Anna gazing around in bewilderment, struck by something or other.
Until this moment Anna had been an onlooker. She had roamed around the big building without feeling anything other than curiosity, something I, too, feel for this place. It was a universe within which, if one looked, one would discover every facet—absolutely every facet—of existence. Anna had even attended the whores’ prayer meetings, offshoots of the Evangelical Mission which Thorvald Bak had helped found and which had now also spread to this place. Here Anna was reminded of her childhood, recognizing as she did the Lavnœs mixture of lust and pain and convoluted morality in one of the whores screaming from the rostrum, “So long as I dare to embrace my Saviour and have my hands and can spread my legs, I need never beg or be a burden to anyone.”
Anna never told anyone, but she knew that the word “mission” is crucial here. Even those suffering from the DTs and the wife-beaters and dealers who sold absolutely anything—even they believed they had a mission. There was not one person in that building who was not working for the betterment of the community. Even those with a sneaking aversion to gainful employment, who had pledged their lives to waging war on the police, and who lurked in doorways armed with lead pipes wrapped in newspaper—even they were convinced that it was possible to batter one’s way into a better life. Only on the question of which approach to adopt did they disagree with the union agitators, who were strolling along the path to peace in the company of the cigar sorter and member of Parliament, Minister of Supply and Control Thorvald Stauning, who also lived in this building. They negotiated that path on foot—not least Stauning, who strolled to the ministry every morning and who, when traveling abroad, walked on his own two feet from the station to his hotel, suitcase in hand, while the other members of the government were driven in a carriage. And all of this just goes to show that, on closer inspection, this neglected property in Christianshavn is a place from which hopes take to the air like freed balloons.
Yet, until that Sunday morning, Anna had never herself believed that she had any kind of mission. Now, however, it manifested itself. What struck her first was a definite sense of slipping away. When she looked at the tropical flower and the books and the prints it occurred to her that she and Adonis and Maria were also about to take off, and then two things happened. First, she split up. Before Maria’s eyes she slipped away from herself and spread out in several directions. This disintegration lasted only for an instant, but for that brief space of time Anna was with her child and at the whores’ prayer meeting and among the market stalls and with the women washing clothes in the backyard and in the apartment next door where the carpenter’s wife and children lay in wait armed with cudgels for the man himself, the children’s father, to come home drunk. For a brief moment Anna’s heart bled for all these people, and not just for them but for all the poor of Christianshavn and for all the children of the world and for the strangely pathetic and faded Sunday sunshine on the peeling walls. And at that moment Anna was a symbol. Just as she had beside the shoemaker’s deathbed in Lavnœs, she represented the dream and the story we all share of a mother whose compassion knows no bounds. This is, unfortunately, a fragile dream, for while at that moment on that Sunday everyone else felt Anna’s presence, what Maria felt was that her mother had disappeared, leaving nothing behind her in the room but an impotent figure that left her, Maria, alone. And I am afraid that Maria was right, because how could Anna possibly feel for the entire population of the world without disintegrating, particularly when surrounded by as much misery as now resounded in that room around Maria, with the woman and children beating up the carpenter on the other side of the thin wall while, in other corners of the building, children wailed with hunger and the prostitutes’ clients whined about the going rate? How could she possibly stay whole and protect a child like Maria, who was even now, though still so young, an enigma, inasmuch as even in her cradle she had alternately followed Anna with imploring eyes and gnashed her teeth at her. For Anna this was, of course, an impossibility, so there is no reason to shed tears over Maria. All we can do is wonder at the capacity of all poor children, and especially Maria, to cope and survive. As on that Sunday morning when Anna was dragged away from the room and Maria encountered loneliness for the first time in her life.
Granted, Anna’s disintegration lasted only momentarily. It may be that all the four corners of the earth did not require her presence and her compassion for more than a few minutes, but for Maria the length of time was not important. What mattered to her was the experience itself, the child’s sudden certainty that she had been deserted. She faced the loneliness in silence, staring, without crying, but with an obstinacy totally alien to Anna’s gentleness and Adonis’s acquiescence: a quality that neither of her parents ever truly understood. And thus Maria’s destiny comes to resemble the lot of several others of the children in this tale. Their parents did not understand them either. And perhaps that tells us something about the twentieth century, where things change so rapidly that parents’ experiences are totally and uselessly outdated by the time their children have need of them.
As time went on, Adonis was the one who grew to understand Maria best, because he treated her with the same absentminded cheeriness that he displayed toward everyone else. He showed his tenderness for her in special, gently comic rituals—imitating birdcalls, for instance, while she watched him shaving. After which he would say, “Maria, scoot down and check whether the dogs are peeing on my bike,” at which Maria would walk down the back stairs (where the homeless were, by this time, starting to pitch their tents on the landings) to Adonis’s black bicycle. More often than not, there would be a little clutch of women waiting for Adonis who had seen him on the box of his cart or had sold him something or who had simply, from several streets away and above the noise of the traffic, heard the echo of his laughter. Thereafter they had been drawn along because in Adonis’s slipstream there came an enticing call, as of a distant promise of love and luck and a meaning to existence. And now they were waiting for him—pleading, desperate, eyes heavy with sleep—and Maria had to walk at her father’s side, accompany him outside, to show that he had a family to keep and had to be protected, not least against his own tendency to give in to these pallid faces and red lips. Holding Adonis’s hand, Maria could look so small and so pathetic that
the women made way for them without a word and refrained from pursuing him. Which is why, on such mornings, there was a touch of ceremony about his departures, something reminiscent of a funeral. And now and again they were even accompanied by the chimes of Our Saviour’s Church, which would start up when least expected. They were ringing, too, that morning, when the women had left by the time Adonis came down because Maria had walked straight up to them and said, “Scram! Beat it! Get out!” and they had gone. There had been a brutal air of menace about the little girl which even Adonis, that morning, could sense, but which he had immediately shrugged off. After all, why burden oneself with such worries?
That was the morning on which fortune failed him for the first time. It was not a serious failure, not a real example of misfortune, but it was a hint that good fortune can run out, or at least that whirlpools can occur in the current of luck. He turned up for work to find his place of employment closed down. At that time Adonis was a driver for a coal merchant, in which capacity—among workers who looked like Africans, their skin covered by a fine layer of coal dust—he succeeded in keeping his cravat utterly and perfectly white. It was his job to deliver coal and coke to Tivoli, the last place of amusement to be exempted from fuel rationing because it is just in such dark times that national symbols need to be seen shining brightly. But on this morning, when Adonis had only just had time enough to forget the brutality shown by Maria, the coal merchant’s windows were boarded up, the sign bearing the company’s name had already faded, and unemployment and the generally prevailing poverty were closing in on Adonis.
