The History of Danish Dreams

by Peter Høeg

  But it’s no use. And anyway, I have no idea of how to set about building a bridge back into history, but one thing is certain: emotion won’t do it. I will have to relate, quietly and calmly, the state of affairs as it stands: that Adonis was as shaken as I am to this day by this mysterious fatality. After all—even if it is just one huge, jerry-built monument to the pursuit of profit—a whole house does not just start to sink into the ground. That sort of thing happens only abroad and usually in the southern latitudes, as, for example, in Venice, where the boy Adonis made a halfhearted attempt to empty the pockets of gondola-riding tourists in an effort to please his father. But Venice was far away, a city built on pilings and sand, while Christianshavn rested upon something more solid, namely, shit and rubbish from the days of Christian IV.

  We cannot help but wonder, along with Adonis, at the staying power of the residents whose apartments had just, within the last twenty-four hours, been swallowed up by the earth and who have already moved, with their belongings, into the buildings in the rear courtyard or onto the back stairs to join the squatters. In spite of everything, these people preserved exceptional reserves of patience, which enabled them to accept that they were now homeless. So much so that they already appeared to be forgetting they had ever been anything else, as they settled down on the landing to cook over open fires—an arrangement that assured that every day this firetrap of a building continued to exist constituted a miracle.

  For a while the racket made by the squatters drew Anna back to reality. Filled with compassion, she left her cleaning and Adonis and, sadly, Maria, too, to accompany strange men and women and children around Copenhagen as they wandered through the wilderness, begging their way around the unemployment benefit offices and welfare offices and Copenhagen’s Benevolent Society. The supervisors of all these bodies refused them help because it struck them that these supposed paupers asked for money with an obstinacy that seemed alarming; and that this, along with their ragged clothing, appeared to camouflage a secret prosperity and bohemian lifestyle, when the truth was that several of them were close to dying of starvation. And so they had to keep going, on to the Salvation Army and the Women’s Aid Coffee Carts, who fed this strange band with the unnaturally pale girl at their head with coffee and five Danish pastries. The only stone Anna left unturned was that of the Evangelical Mission, because she could not bear the thought of being recognized, but even so the expedition bore no fruit. All they brought home with them were admonitions and more admonitions. That night Anna cried for so long and so inconsolably in Adonis’s arms that she was unable to answer his question about what most surprised him: something which struck him once night had fallen and which prompted him to get out of bed and cross to the window. From there he could see the mirror image of the moon in the canal. Its light, cast on the building walls in the form of restless reflections, revealed that his eyes were not deceiving him, that their apartment was still on the second floor even though the whole building had sunk by one story.

  For a moment Adonis remained standing by the window, looking out at the night and the moonlight while Anna wept softly and despairingly behind him. Then he went back to bed and lay down beside her without asking any questions—questions which it is not even certain that Anna could have answered.

  Through the time that followed, the little apartment would appear to have remained suspended at second-floor level, with Anna never for a minute seeming to be disconcerted by the upper floors sliding past her, although this meant she could never be sure, when she opened the door in the morning to clean under the doormat, whether it would open onto the stairway or the squatters or the whores’ quarters, or onto a corridor she could not remember ever having seen before. She never commented on this, and even if she had she might not have been able to give as much of an explanation as I would offer: that her love of order and her profound and desperate desire to hold her family and her home together kept the apartment hovering like some spotless celestial sphere while everything else sank. Not, of course, that that explains it; that won’t make anyone any the wiser.

  And yet, though Adonis could have asked her, he did not, in part because he was preoccupied with his work. He had started performing again. Compelled by circumstances—it was becoming increasingly difficult to sell anything at all, never mind spice cookies—and driven by his old urge to perform, he left his partner and the cake stall in favor of performing in the marketplaces, just as he had done as a child, on the road with his grandfather. He constructed a small collapsible platform that could sit behind his bicycle seat, and made himself an instrument consisting solely of a tin can across which he had stretched a piece of piano wire. There were pictures on the tin can of ships sailing across silken-smooth seas under blue moons, pictures strangely akin to the songs Adonis sang. He had no idea how he came to recollect these songs. Often they would not spring to mind until he started to sing them. They were songs about desert nomads and jungles and coral islands and love that cannot be but on the other hand might just make it. And they all had melodies capable of moving audiences to tears, so much so that there were times when they had to beg the handsome, dark-haired man—Adonis, that is—to cease his singing, because it is so sad and so beautiful, they wept. Adonis accompanied these images on his instrument, which produced a fine and tremulously wistful tone that detained his listeners (most especially the women) in the square long after Adonis had cycled off, in the hope of finding him and comforting him. They thought he shared the longing that filled their hearts when in actuality it so happened that this melancholy bore not the faintest resemblance to Adonis’s own life, the keynote of which was contentment. And yet there was no hypocrisy in his singing. He took great pleasure in treading the boards once more, and he himself could be brought close to tears when he performed, although these tears arose from his gratitude at having an audience and from the women’s tears of emotion, and not from some private and secret sorrow—although that is what more or less everyone believed. He would never have had the heart to cheat them. Like Ramses, his father, Adonis was uncompromisingly honest, and this sense of right and wrong was what kept him clear of bad company in marketplaces that had altered beyond recognition from when he was a boy. Faced with an increasingly blasé public, the traveling showmen had lost all faith in the possibility of giving pleasure. All that remained of the quick-change artist’s magic was the shock effect. This had now become the sole means of surprise, practiced by confidence tricksters who stood behind little tables spread with green baize and dice and leather cups, awaiting their public with the same studied innocence that the caged Bengal tigers had shown on these same churned-up squares a century before. And yet Adonis never looked back. As far as he was concerned, hindsight barely existed; life, audiences, family—all these lie ahead of you. But it did occur to him that the difference between then and now was that the public had become the enemy, not just of the confidence tricksters but of those showmen who netted more than anyone else because they had grasped that the biggest shock could be derived from the modern age and its technology. So they rode motorcycles around the inside of a big wire-mesh globe decked with brightly colored illustrations of countries and continents. Round and round they would go, vaulting and looping the loop, while reading newspapers or smoking Turkish cigarettes or taunting the spectators. And the audiences wished for nothing more than the liberating crash that would give them their revenge, release the tension, and check this rush around a wall of death that bore such an alarming resemblance to life, inasmuch as once you have started, you have to keep going and can never slacken speed.

  It was not indifference that kept Adonis away from Christianshavn for longer and longer stretches. He was by no means either irresponsible or callous. It was more as though he had become ensnared by his joy in his work and had, after all, sensed, through his optimism, that something was not quite right. In his sterile apartment—the windows of which Anna had now unequivocally nailed shut—he may have sensed a vague, sneaking unease at the way in wh
ich he was defying gravity, along with Anna, the wife whom he sometimes had difficulty in recognizing because of her sadness and her struggle against their decline.

  Adonis is away from home and Anna works. During the spells when she is not working, she stares into the dancing dust particles, trying to take the omens for a future of which she expects only the worst. And so a void opens up between Adonis, slipping away from his family because he has always tried to steer clear of disaster, and Anna, who is becoming lost in the tough battle presented by the here and now and the calamities ahead. And it is in this void that Maria grows up. Without being sentimental about it, I can say that she lacked security, to such an extent that I am amazed by the way she coped and survived and left enough of an impression for me to be able to trace her story, and for her to become a central character in this narrative. It is not a problem when she is small. When she is small, Adonis is riding high on luck; he has a job and comes home every evening. During these years, Anna is as close to being happy as she will ever be. Maria follows her on her tours around the tenement, she helps with the cooking and the laundry, and the only portent I have been able to unearth of the bad years ahead is one particular Sunday when compassion almost tears Anna to bits. This Sunday apart, all three recollect those years as being bathed in endless sunshine, and, they say, the sun even shone on that dreadful Sunday. We just have to look at the newspapers from those years to see that, in a sense, this cannot be true. Those years saw some of the cruelest winters ever. Nevertheless, that is how all three were to picture that time, and this I must respect. Maria saw her earliest childhood as being one endless summer, and that is all that matters here. Once rationing was discontinued, all the nights were bright; even the darkest of them were illuminated by the glow from Copenhagen’s city center and from Tivoli and the dance halls and the reflection of the moon in the canal. The darkness did not fall until later. It is falling now, as Anna starts her cleaning; which was exactly what she had been fearing: that the darkness would settle in the corners.

  I do not know whether, before this, Anna had been afraid of the courtyard, that wide and partially built-upon space surrounded by the walls of the tenement. I do not think she had. I cannot know for sure, but I do not think so. It is, however, a fact that she tried to prevent Maria from playing or even going into the yard. It sounds insignificant, it sounds like a mere detail, but it is important. Because everyone uses the yard—not least all the other children but most of the adults as well. That a mother, Anna, should want to stop her child, Maria, from doing what everyone else does is something that sets Anna apart, not only in her own imagination but for us, too. It proves she is not like the others; some might say she has no business being here at all in that case because her life and her dreams are not typical but unique. In answer, I would say that averages are only ever representative when they appear in statistics. What I, on the other hand, have to look for here is whatever it is that makes the common factors visible. Often this is achieved by just such unique instances as Anna’s forbidding Maria to set foot in the courtyard—an irresistibly tantalizing place, ringing with the sounds from the stands set up by unemployed workers and from the little manufacturing businesses and courtyard singers and peddlers, and from the other children. Anna’s prohibition made no impression; it must have come when Maria was about seven years old, by which time Anna could no longer see her clearly; by that time her maternal solicitude had been reduced to clichés and her Danish dream of protecting Maria from becoming like the other children had already grown hazy. If it had not been so, then she might have noticed the brutality in her daughter that made her, even then, in her own way, worse than the worst of the children from whom Anna endeavored to protect her. And then she might have seen that there were two sides to Maria’s character: a sunlit side of girlish coyness and cheerfulness, much like my, and Anna’s, and, by no means least, Adonis’s dream of the perfect daughter, and then the other side, which is black as a winter morning in Copenhagen in the 1920s and possessed of an exceptionally intelligent and indomitable brutality—the same brutality she had vented that morning when, with a single gesture, she chased her father’s devotees out of the very courtyard from which, shortly afterward, Anna would attempt to keep her away. Anna never saw this side of her daughter, thus joining the ranks of all those parents who have, at some time or another, ceased to understand their children. We cannot blame her for this, we can only note that that was the way of it; that it was not exceptional, neither in this chapter of Denmark’s history nor anywhere else; that it was a recurring motif. Not that it just happened; nothing just happens. There came a point when Anna noticed that Maria no longer obeyed her, and then she realized—perhaps for a fraction of a fraction of a second—that she was looking at Maria as though she were a stranger. Not that she let her daughter go without a fight. There is some indication of convulsive attempts to get through to her; many attempts, all of which failed. As, for example, when Anna sent Maria to school.

  She was somewhere between the ages of seven and nine, that much we know. And in any other part of the city the police would have come to fetch her long since, so that Adonis and Anna could fulfill their obligation to make sure their child received an education. This was an obligation of which Adonis, at any rate, had never heard and which, in fact, carried no weight in this area of Christianshavn, since the police never came here and since children had to earn their living from a very early age. So when Anna sent Maria to school, it was for her, Maria’s, own good. It was an attempt to take care of her daughter—albeit a misguided attempt, because Maria stayed there for only one day. I repeat, one day.

  The school was on the opposite side of the canal. It had the corridors, tiny rooms, and stinking toilets of a barracks and the high ceilings, arched doorways, and dark, Latin-inscribed niches of a Gothic cathedral. Amid these gloomy surroundings, Maria experienced the first morning assembly of her life. To her it seemed a depressing ritual that made the patriotic songs sound like some muted mass, because none of the pupils joined in the singing and the teachers barely did. Instead they muttered the words. More or less everyone muttered the words, even the principal, who stood on a podium under an array of his predecessors’ death masks and the inscription “Under the shadow of thy wings.” In a classroom that was as dark as night because it faced onto a rear courtyard and because lighting was rationed, Maria sat alongside pupils whose heads had all been shaved on account of virulent outbreaks of head lice. This made them look like convicts or novice monks and nuns, bending under the knowledge imparted to them by dusty men and women who had long ago lost touch with the world outside and subsided into the dream world of an outdated tradition. It was a tradition rich in valiant Norse gods, physical violence, vacuous Greek ideals, and the few victories of Denmark’s history—and the countless defeats. And even these they managed to interpret afresh—the cloistered and endlessly repetitive life of the school having opened their eyes to the new, inner, spiritual wealth contained within this succession of military and political disasters.

  Maria immediately sniffed out the weak spot in the reality embraced by these intellectual mentors, and she would have left the school of her own accord. If it had been necessary, she would have got to her feet and left, never to return. But circumstances got ahead of her. In the middle of the lunch break; right in the middle of the inedible grated carrot served up every day by the private benevolent society that also supplied the delousing powder for the bald pates of all these children; amid all the racket of the playground, in which Maria’s menacing stammer could be heard, holding the curiosity of the other children at bay; in the midst of all of this, the school was discreetly appropriated to provide accommodations for the multitude of homeless souls in Copenhagen, a body whose numbers swelled with every day that passed. Maria witnessed the way in which long rows of pupils, and then teachers, had to file out through the gate to make way for the homeless. And here we have a significant moment; with the state and the city forced to close this temple of le
arning and turn it into a hotel, a central station for the homeless. It is a historic moment, but it belongs to a story other than ours, and is mentioned here only because it took place on Maria Jensen’s first day at school, a day cut short because of it, before Maria herself could put an end to it. The only truly interesting item of knowledge she brought home with her was the sight of this long string of children walking and running out through the green gateway carrying their book bags, or just books strapped into a bundle—and behind them the teachers, who seemed to be having difficulty in moving. Like insects found under an overturned stone, they were not really equipped to deal with the light or the street, which boasts no lecterns or tall desks or inscriptions and is almost bereft of elevation.

  * * *

  And here I have to pause for a moment. From this point onward certain problems arise in writing Maria’s story: I would like to depict her as a coherent individual—well, in one sense or another we are all coherent—but this proves to be impossible. It has something to do with the writing of history. History is always an invention; it is a fairy tale built upon certain clues. The clues are not the problem, not even in Maria’s case, where they consist of what Anna and Adonis remembered and what Maria herself remembered, together with the school register, then the police reports, and later the files of the child welfare committee, and later still other pieces of information—to all of which we will return. These clues are pretty well established; most of them can literally be laid on the desktop for anyone to handle. But these, unfortunately, do not constitute history. History consists of the links between them, and it is this that presents the problem. And the link is especially opaque when, as here, we are dealing with the History of Dreams, because the only thing that anyone—and that includes me—can use to fill in the gaps between history’s clues is themselves. In the case of Maria Jensen, the problem becomes pressing because it is not possible—at least not for me—to cover all the gaps, not even roughly. We know that she was between seven and nine years of age when Anna sent her to school, and now some of the clues do point in one direction: Anna and Adonis did not remember anything except that she continued to go to school. To them Maria was our little blue-eyed, fair-haired girl, who has grown up surrounded by a haze of pet names, and who runs to meet her father and takes his hand while they stand gazing into the brightly lit rooms of the Cape Horn, and who—when she is very small—follows her mother everywhere, first with her eyes and then on her little legs, and who is, in every way, a little angel with whom no fault can be found other than that she can at times be a bit quiet, not moody, but quiet in a way that left her parents with the feeling that they did not really understand her. Being a model child, she is also predictable, which is why Anna is able to foresee her fate. And it bears all the marks of the twenties’ dream of a small girl’s future. Maria would float through life. If it became necessary for her to work, for a little while, then it would be in a confectionery store in some distant, pure white part of town, and there she would meet the man in her life, whom Anna, strange as it may seem, pictured on horseback—an equestrian statue coated with a respectable verdigris of courtesy and honorable intentions. That was the extent of Anna’s dream, particularly in the days before she embarked upon her cleaning, and it should be noted that this impression of Anna is, in all probability, absolutely correct. It is part of the truth. But it is scarcely the whole truth. Because, while a girl—Maria—is growing up in a family that is, all things considered, a model family; while her mother and father are watching her floating around the silent, spotless rooms like some tiny genius or a fairy or a skinny Baroque angel; while all this is going on, letters are being written. There are letters from Maria’s school to the Children’s Panel and from the Children’s Panel to the Child Welfare Services, and a succession of interesting police reports are completed. All of these I have been able to see, and they are now lying before me, on the desk. Ostensibly, they have nothing to do with Maria. They refer to a group of children between the ages of ten and eighteen, probably resident in Christianshavn, probably all from the same tenement block, who are totally out of control. They are all truants, given to smoking cigarettes and roaming the streets. Furthermore, the police reports describe countless infringements of the penal code. It has not been possible for me to have a word with any of the individuals who then belonged to this group. I have been able to follow them just so far—up to their last spell of detention, from which they are never again released into moral depravity but are taken into care. From this point, however, their trails diverge. Some were put into reform schools, while others fell under paragraph 62 of the poor law, underwent compulsory sterilization, and were then assigned to the Department for the Education of the Subnormal. Still others were sent to prison, but all have disappeared, all trace of them has been lost. Which means we have no witnesses. There is no possibility of starting up a conversation that might shed some light on the part played by Maria. All I can say is that the reports in front of me speak of a girl nicknamed the Stutterer, a girl whose real name and family circumstances were never established although she was arrested several times and on one solitary occasion brought before the Children’s Panel. Of her, the forms state that she appeared to occupy a leading position in this bunch of depraved, neglected, unkempt children; that she had headed the band’s sorties into other properties on Christianshavn, as well as its shoplifting expeditions and retaliatory attacks upon the police. In a letter to the Children’s Panel, Police Chief Jespersen writes that the girl is probably about fifteen years old but looks younger, that she is slight of stature, and that she has blue eyes. We cannot know for sure whether this was Maria; all we know is that Maria did not go to school. Every morning she picked up her packed lunch and her books, set off down the back stairs, and disappeared into the light and the day, not to return until late in the afternoon, and sometimes even later. She did not go to school, this we know. There is no doubt that she skipped school, but we can only guess where she spent the time. And this guess is supported by the reports and files.