by Peter Høeg
Then we are left with just one more isolated incident before disaster strikes and everything comes to an end: Maria’s encounter with wealth. She came upon it one spring afternoon when she was roaming around on her own and had thus wound up in a far corner of the courtyard. There she bumped into the owner of this property and of several other properties in Christianshavn and of half of Vesterbro: Andreasen, the owner of a trucking company, a bent, worn-looking man in blue coveralls. By then he had become a legendary figure, and to those who can remember having heard of him he still is. Few had ever seen him, but Maria knew straightaway who he was. He was sitting on the top of the dunghill he had had deposited on this particular section of his property because here, in those backcourt buildings that even he could not rent out, he kept a three-story cow barn, only two stories of which were still above ground. When Maria saw him, she stopped dead in her tracks and for a long, long time she just stood there looking at him while the man on the dunghill returned her gaze. And that is about all there is to say about that meeting. I do not know enough to guess what Maria was feeling and nowhere near enough to know what the trucker felt. There is no reason to believe that Maria sensed the dreadful loneliness of this man, which would later move him to leave his fortune to the local Masonic lodge (to which he had never belonged) merely in order to arouse, in some quarter at least, some emotion other than dislike. As likely as not, Maria has not known, either, that he did not realize that the property was sinking or that that was why the cooped-up cows lowed in complaint more and more often—through the night, too, now. But one thing rooted itself in her memory: on the dunghill, around the trucker, hopped his free-range hens, and in his hands he held one with a broken leg. Now, Maria knew that anyone else would have wrung that hen’s neck. But not the trucker. A dead hen is a loss, not a great loss, but still a loss. Which is why, just then, up on the dunghill, he was fixing a stick he had cut to the hen’s broken leg: a splint to support this leg that would never heal. While the two of them are exchanging glances, his hands automatically finish the job and set the hen free. And just before Maria turns and walks away, the hen runs past her, squawking as it stumbles off into the sunshine. This sticks in Maria’s mind, this picture of the hen with its wooden leg hobbling into the sunshine. It is something she will remember.
Then all we are left with is the end.
It came one spring, in May. Long before this, the residents had begun to leave the tenement. Even these people, who had nowhere else to go, left this property, where only the uppermost floors still remained clear of the earth. It can hardly have been because they knew what was happening. It was still only the children and the sailors and Anna who knew where all of this was leading. But there must have been something in the air, maybe the smell of the mud, the freshwater aroma of decline which, to begin with, merely added a fresh touch of unease to life. Amid this fresh uneasiness the number of suicides rose. People leaped out of windows or hung themselves in the attics, and wherever her rambles took her, Maria encountered the smell of gas from apartments where the residents had switched on their ovens to gas themselves—whole families. And since they could hardly all get their heads in at the same time, Daddy had to support the little ones, and even then it was touch and go. Afterward the gas seeped out into the corridors until someone struck a match, all the apartments in that section were blown sky-high, and the neighbors had to put out the fire themselves, because not even the fire department dared to enter the area. Later on, they began to vacate the tenement: first the squatters, then young married couples with no children—although initially only a handful actually left. Most of the residents still believed that one day, and possibly one of these very days, the building would sail away. They would not admit that the property was sinking; they believed that the street and the sidewalk were closing upon their floor, their windows, because what had been solid ground was now rising in waves; and that this was because the property was about to break free of poverty and depression and unemployment. And indeed a singular sense of optimism did reign in Copenhagen during that month. It was a quiet month for stocks and shares. The newspapers printed pictures of Europe in festive mood, with Mussolini making speeches to thousands of uniformed youths. And over it all arched a clear blue sky. The very fact of the sunshine made it hard to admit that anything could be wrong. Its yellow light fell like glittering confetti, or melted butter, on the solid, enigmatic figure of Stauning as he vacated the building. It did not look as though he was fleeing; he carried a suitcase in one hand, nothing else. And, of course, he left on foot. It was a morning like any other; no one could have known that he would not be coming back. He was followed, at night, by the rats—a broad, dark, living river that momentarily washed over everything and then was gone. Later that same night, the cows broke loose and fled, bellowing, and over the next few days and nights the property slowly emptied.
No one in the Jensen family really understood what was happening, neither Maria nor Adonis, and not even Anna, because, in one way or another, they were all absent or preoccupied. Those days, Maria rarely came home. She had started sleeping in the railroad yards, in railroad cars and sheds, because the disinfected apartment made her feel ill and because she felt uneasy about the change that had taken place in her mother. Anna had had a revelation. Weighed down by her cleaning—which, instead of helping her get to the bottom of things, seemed continually to wind deeper and deeper into itself, like a labyrinth—she had sought comfort at the whores’ mission meetings. To begin with, she was merely an onlooker, but after a while she was seized by the urge to help and to tend. She helped found an African Mission for the purpose of sending a missionary to the needy black children. To this end, after mission meetings, a collection was taken in a carved and painted figure of a Negro boy with an enormous red mouth, into which the faithful, Anna included, popped their coins. Her revelation came shortly after the founding of this mission. After having given up trying to make the others see that the building was sinking, after having given up everything other than keeping her family suspended, at one of the mission meetings she had received a message from God: a message that made her feel she had been both heard and understood. She had seen paradise. In the twinkling of an eye she had been swept away from that room and had seen Lavnœs and the part of the country around which she had traveled as a child. These manifested themselves to her not as she had viewed them in those days, through the bars of a cage, but as welcoming meadowlands. And on these meadows she saw the forgotten faces of her childhood: Thorvald Bak, and the brethren and the young men who had gazed through the bars of her cage with hungry, wistful expressions, as though they longed to be held captive. All these faces she had seen, and after that she kept coming back to the mission meetings. She did not come to pray. As far as she was concerned, prayers formed a veil of words behind which lay nothing but a resounding emptiness, and this frightened her. What she sought was a repetition of those pictures from her revelation, of the childhood she had never known. And this she was given. She did succeed in seeing the meadowlands again. The second revelation did not manifest itself until long after the first, but thereafter the revelations occurred with increasing regularity. She did not tell anyone about them, partly because there was no chance to, since Adonis and Maria were seldom at home, and partly because her visions were so fragile that words might eradicate them completely. She discovered that her work around the apartment secured them. It was as if her soul consisted of the same smooth surfaces as her walls and floors and kitchen counters and windows. By dint of her incessant cleaning and polishing, the mists disappeared and out of the gloom stepped the golden pictures of those lost days. Maria also appeared in these pictures; not Maria as she looked now, with her knowing eyes and watchful air, but Maria as she had been when she was very little, or at any rate as she had sometimes been: a ball of fluff with no attributes other than beauty and helplessness. That is how she appeared in these visions, which Anna was seeing more and more frequently, and it was to this image that Anna sp
oke when she occasionally saw Maria in reality—never noticing the police helmet that Maria no longer bothered to hide and never noticing her bumps and bruises or the makeup which, now and again, Maria stole or borrowed from one of her girlfriends.
Maria could see that Anna’s journey was now bearing her away, back in time and consequently away from her, Maria. And so she distanced herself from her mother. It scared her to see Anna talking to thin air, to ghosts that only she could see, so Maria withdrew from the hovering apartment and from the property, in which fewer and fewer children were to be seen because they, too, had disappeared—withdrew to the nights in the railroad yards. And it was here that she met Adonis. It happened in a marketplace that had sprung up just on that spot because the city of Copenhagen had imported an Indian village. The importation was the result of its being spring, and of the general interest in the lost colonies and all things foreign. It was sponsored by H. N. Andersen, Maria’s uncle, who wanted the Danish People to experience something of the Orient. He had therefore financed the introduction into the country of this exotic dream: an Indian village, all-inclusive, with elephants and snake charmers and women weaving and men hacking at the earth between the railroad tracks, all smiling those wide, gilt-edged smiles that confirmed what the Danes already knew: that these weird Hottentots enjoyed the most carefree of lives, full of merriment and in tune with nature.
On the square, between the mud-walled huts and surrounded by vendors and snake charmers and bonfires fed by the dung from the holy cows, Maria met her father. Adonis was standing on his stage, singing, and beside him stood a woman. Her hair was coal-black, plaited and oiled and smoothed back over her scalp, like a gleaming helmet. It framed a foreign-looking face of indeterminate age, unlike that of the ancient man sitting at the foot of the platform, his hands trembling with age. These two aged characters were Maria’s grandparents—Ramses Jensen and the Princess. Adonis had come upon them in a railroad car—well, of course, of all places, in a railroad car. It had been parked at Sydhavnen and it belonged to an institution called the Heavenly Express that collected money for the down-and-outs of society and thus, also, for Ramses Jensen and the Princess. When Adonis found them they were cowering together in a corner of a bunk, looking for all the world like the hope cherished by the Danish National Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Danish judicial system, that justice be done and the wages of sin doled out.
We can perhaps detect a certain fatal irony in that these two old people—after having spent their entire lives dreaming of Domestic Bliss around Hearth and Home, while still remaining lifelong fugitives—should end up in a social welfare railroad car; a temporary hut on wheels that might, at any moment, start to roll. But they themselves were not capable of finding this irony amusing, and Adonis certainly was not. He reveled in this reunion, with a simple delight undiminished by all the years since they had last seen one another, years about which Ramses and the Princess had nothing rational to say. After their arrival in Denmark the years had vanished without trace, as though, while they grew slower with age, time traveled faster; as though their life had become a tunnel that sucked up the years into a vacuous darkness. Moreover, Adonis was not curious, so when he received no replies he stopped asking questions and concentrated instead on the matter at hand, on reality, in the shape of the brilliant idea he had just had. He would put his parents on show in the marketplace; he would enrich his little stage and his musical numbers by the addition of these living legends, these museum pieces—and so it was agreed. Adonis had always been able to persuade everyone, or at least nearly everyone, to do anything, and the Princess and Ramses were old. Without comprehending that their life had made a gradual, sinuous turn away from all those incredible, invisible break-ins and had, at long last, been turned upside down, they allowed themselves to be drawn out into the light they had spent all their life avoiding. They became visible in much the same way as they had disappeared when their reluctant renown forced them to flee the country, but now they were not fleeing anywhere; now they met the sunlight and the upturned faces with that patient resignation which, by all accounts, comes with age.
There is a poster from those days, a four-color print, commissioned by Adonis. It shows Adonis himself standing in the background with his arms reaching out in a gesture of embrace. His mouth is open, he is singing, and in the poster he looks like a 175-pounds-lighter, long-haired version of the great tenor Caruso. Beneath him sits his father, Ramses Jensen, selling tickets from a little table. In the poster his hands seem perfectly steady. Right at the front, in the foreground and twice the size of the other two put together, hangs the Princess. She is suspended by one arm, her left, from what looks like a balcony and is gazing intently upon the onlooker. This poster reflected a dream that never became a reality because Adonis had not absorbed the fact that his mother had aged. Ramses was an old man, of that there could be no doubt. His youthful knack of freezing to the spot and becoming absolutely one hundred percent motionless had now been replaced by this feverish trembling which made him appear to be in a hurry or anxious to draw attention to himself, when in reality what he had in mind was the exact opposite. But the Princess was serene; her hair was black, as were her eyes. She had not changed; she looked like the girl of her youth. There was a certain ceramic indestructibility about her, and it was this that led Adonis to believe that she could perform a wall-scaling number. He would build a climbing frame from which she would hang and swing with all the apelike agility of her girlhood. In hopes of this, the poster was printed, but it never amounted to anything other than a splendid depiction of a misunderstanding. The Princess was old and in no fit state to cling to anything except the simplest facets of existence, and even those she took in small portions, one day at a time. Nevertheless, Adonis pasted up the poster and the public did not feel cheated. All the indications are that they were well satisfied with Adonis’s singing and with Ramses’ trembling and with the Princess, who stood at the very front and just gazed out, across their heads, with those black eyes which still, in spite of everything, no matter what, remained as relentlessly bold as when Ramses first saw her, long ago in the previous century.
There turned out to be many who remembered the old people. The memory of them had passed through the shredder and converter of the new century, the new press, the new memory bank, which transforms and blanches all facts before inflating them with noble gases. Thus the rumors of Ramses and the Princess’s incredible, grasping crimes hung above the marketplaces like swelling hydrogen balloons which could be seen a long way off and which drew the crowds, particularly in the provinces. It was never a thriving business, because Adonis never learned how to make money, not even in a small way. But it aroused interest, interest and a curiosity tinged with fear.
Only we now, so many years later, can detect the pattern guiding this family’s steps in one direction: the footlights. It is as though they must get up there, whether they want to or not. They all end up as performers, even Ramses, who finds himself selling tickets next to the stage, which is itself like art, a pedestal and a platform for the displaying of dreams. And thus, for the first time in his life, Ramses, too, comes in from the cold and joins society. But at the same time the Jensen family’s fate demonstrates that the footlights coincide with the edge of the precipice, just at the point where it is hard to see where solid ground ends and the void begins. To think that Ramses and the Princess’s life—which had been one long series of criminal offenses and one great yearning after darkness—should, still and all, have wound up bringing them into the light. Just imagine!
One evening, Maria was standing in front of the platform, listening to her father sing. When Adonis’s eye fell on her he inserted birdsongs and other little references to the past into his songs. Maria watched him impassively, and afterward, too, when Adonis took her to speak to her grandparents, she seemed entrenched within herself. That same night, Adonis packed up his stage and bundled it and his parents onto a truck, in which he drove himself and his props
and Maria and the two old people over to Christianshavn.
That night, while Adonis was singing to Maria, and then packing up; that night, the last residents left the property in Christianshavn. Last to leave were the chickens and the squatters and the sick and the whores and Andreasen the trucker and those children who, like 5,424 others in the country in that year, had been sentenced to compulsory removal from their parents’ custody. They had hidden in the building and stayed there until the last minute, in an attempt to evade the child welfare committee and the official guardians and foster families, but now they were being forced out anyway, because anything is better than death, even in Christianshavn.
It was a clear, moonlit night and Anna was the only one left in the empty building. Naturally, she was working; by the moonlight alone she was running a dustcloth over the wall paneling. She had been working for a long while—I do not know how long, but a very long while—and she kept at it, unflagging. On this night her loneliness was transformed into energy and a sense of how everything is connected. She finished shortly after midnight, by which time the last sounds from outside had faded away and the last irregularity fled the apartment, and Anna was surrounded by the totally clean, microbe-free, and harmonious space for which she had been longing. Stiffly, cautiously, she straightened up and put down the dustcloth. Everything had been accomplished, and all of us who believe that one can never get to the bottom of things have been mistaken and must bow our heads. At that instant, Anna’s spirit condensed and all the voices that had been calling to her from all sides throughout her life fell silent. Gingerly she walked around the rooms, filled with the sense that life was not a battle against impurities but a delicate balancing act in empty space. She had now gained her balance, and while she was balancing, she had the impression that the apartment bore some vague resemblance to the silver-plated cage of her childhood. At that moment the last of the building went under, and the canal flowed past outside Anna’s window. Then she stepped out, through the bars, and set off across the water, along the path of molten silver formed by the moonlight. Past the sleeping boats she went, out toward the sea, feeling nothing but curiosity and sadness. It was not death that Anna wandered into, there is no need to be sad, there was no talk of suicide, no talk of anything other than that Anna wandered off to look for the youth she had never known.
