by Peter Høeg
Her words fell on deaf ears. When Christoffer felt his mother’s will crumbling between his fingers, while still hearing her voice continuing to make prognoses, it was the last time in his life that he ever listened properly to anything. He had witnessed the breakdown of clock time and the Old Lady’s vain attempt to determine the future, and this had filled him with a distrust of both plans and memories. And so, although he looked lovingly at his youngest daughter, he was not really paying attention to what Amalie was saying.
What she was trying to convey to Christoffer was her picture of the city. What she expected to find in Copenhagen, Amalie explained, was genuine, heroic poverty. This she pictured as consisting of lines of people slowly tramping on and on to the tune of the funeral marches she had heard played in the houses of Rudkøbing. At their head walked gaunt young men with long, flowing locks. Their eyes were fixed on the horizon, as though, out there, they spied victory over their oppressors, whom Amalie pictured as being doctors and clergymen and lawyers. They were followed by weeping mothers and starving children with smoldering eyes, and over the whole scenario hung a faint pall of smoke from the fires of revolution; a smoke screen which, for a while, hides the last group of people from view. They carry a young woman seated in a basket of linked hands; her features are veiled, but this is obviously the queen of the revolution, a Danish Joan of Arc. She draws nearer, close enough for us, and even for Christoffer, to see who she is: yes, someone known both to him and to us—guess who, well, Amalie, of course. And here she is, sitting in the back of a truck, telling her father how sure she is that some new and regal status awaits her.
Now, at this point, Christoffer could have set his daughter straight, or made some sort of protest, but he did not. Everything other than his own inner peace and warmth had lost all significance. Which is why only we are in a position to shake our heads at the absurd arrogance of this girl who, even now at the age of eleven or twelve, believes that the world, even with all its misery, exists solely for her benefit.
It had not been difficult for Amalie to nurture these clear-cut notions of being one of the elect, growing up, as she did, comfortably distanced from reality, in a hothouse environment that gave her no reason to doubt her fantasy of being an orchid in a world of frogs who never seemed to get around to turning into princes. Her grandmother had always been of the opinion that paupers had only themselves to blame, which is why Amalie had sided with the poor. Gumma had told her wildly exaggerated tales of the Paris Commune and of riots in the big cities, and her reading of French novels had gradually swelled her fantasy even further. All of this had steered her in the direction taken by so many dreams (though it is counter to my own), namely, away from reality and toward a hopeless faith in the People and poverty such as she had never witnessed at close quarters.
What she found in Copenhagen was normal, everyday life. It lay waiting for her between tall houses, in Dannebrogs Street—a narrow street, the nether regions of which lay wrapped in a perpetual chill and a twilight that knew no season. It was here, in this street, that an apartment had been found for Christoffer, and it was here that he opened a small printshop.
Amalie spent just one day searching. For twenty-four hours she roamed the streets of the city, wide-eyed, looking for the barbed wire, the guillotine, the barricades, the Commune, and the gaunt young men. Then she understood. Although “understood” is perhaps not the right word; it might be more correct to say that it dawned on Amalie Teander that Copenhagen could not meet her demands; that these people passing her on the street could not live up to her expectations: they were not dressed in rags; they wore thick gray overcoats. She could not see herself mirrored in their eyes, nor glimpse any reflection of the fires of revolution, when they all kept their eyes on the well-worn paths they followed along the sidewalks; paths that their fathers had trod, and their fathers before them. There was nothing to suggest that they would lift her up and carry her on a basket of hands when they had a hard enough job lugging around their own worries about making ends meet. Amalie had been expecting to live among factory slaves and coal trimmers and chimney sweeps’ boys and firewood gatherers and little match girls. What she found were barbers and shopkeepers and pawnbrokers and tradesmen. And all of these extinguished souls were making their way to cooperages and cigar shops and offices and shops selling caged birds, which they had taken over from their parents, who had taken them over from their parents—whose stories, like the cobblestones and the gray buildings, are lost in the mists of the previous century.
At this point Amalie is in an interesting situation. She is twelve years old, but she is faced with the same painful prospect as so many Danes, both before and after her, who have, like her, grown up in the singular belief that God knows we’re not all cut from the same cloth. Her prospect is the prospect of people other than those she had encountered as a child in the bell jar of her conviction that she had been chosen. In there, no one had ever told her that the most obvious place to look for love and recognition is here, right here, close to home—and so it never occurred to her. In her father’s printshop, which was set up in a room that lacked both windows and daylight, and on her wanderings through the streets of Copenhagen, Amalie made a choice she was to abide by for a long, long while. Or at least, that is how it seems to me, although I might be mistaken: perhaps Amalie had no choice, perhaps it is my dream, our dream, of the place of free will in history that makes us imagine that Amalie withdrew into her own contempt through choice. Faced with the painful prospect of ordinary people, this little girl actually chooses to stick to her childhood belief in being chosen, regardless of the fact that no one she meets understands her.
With a forgetfulness that was, to Amalie’s mind, animal-like, Gumma and her sisters had adapted to their new way of life. Within three days they had stopped crying, within a week their plaintive wails had abated, and a month later Amalie noticed how their evening prayers were filled with sincere contentment with their lot. It was just by chance that she happened to overhear their prayers. Even when she was very small, her inner visions had supplanted the usual picture of paradise. Besides which, she had never had much faith in her mother’s insipid accounts of heavenly bliss. Katarina Teander struggled and strove to kindle the faith in her daughters, but, for one thing, her struggles were choked off by fits of coughing, and, for another, Amalie had found that even when her mother spoke of heaven, she seemed to be staring down into her own grave. And so Amalie had decided to trust only her own visions, and had become accustomed to defying every objection and leaving the nursery when her sisters and Gumma were praying—the girls on their knees, with their elbows propped on the bed; Gumma with her hands clasped over the handlebars of her tricycle.
That night, after she had heard their prayers, Amalie did not fall asleep. Wide awake and alert, she lay there in the dark, between her two sisters and their deep, contented breathing, and allowed the sense of a wasted life to course through her body. Around daybreak her patience deserted her. She got out of bed without making a sound, dressed, and climbed up to the street, from where she could see the odd star glinting above the rooftops. Then she heard a noise in the distance, a heavy rumbling, and out of the gloom trundled a vehicle—a covered wooden cart, drawn by four scraggy horses. Four men accompanied this vehicle—four old-timers—and the entire spectacle was enveloped in a prehistoric stench. The cart pulled up outside the gateway of the building and, without so much as a look at Amalie, three of the men disappeared into the courtyard. They reappeared carrying what looked to Amalie like dark bundles, and it suddenly struck her that they might be robbers, but even as she thought this she knew it was not the case. She stole a little closer to one of the men, and when, just at that moment, she saw something fall from his bundle, something that hit the pavement, she called out, “You dropped something.” The man inclined his face toward her and said, “You can keep it”; and as he did so, Amalie saw that this was her great-grandfather, the Old Lady’s father, the nightman, whom she had never me
t; and she saw that the burdens the three men toted were, in fact, the building’s latrine buckets. Thanks to this godforsaken part of Copenhagen being one of the few still not provided with sewers—progress having passed it by—their night soil was being collected by an apparition to whom she was related.
Prompted by this encounter, Amalie went in search of Christoffer. He was not in his bed, but she found him in the printshop. He was sitting at a round table, in the narrow circle of light thrown by an electric bulb with a lacquered-paper shade, surrounded by a dense darkness that hid the rest of the room. On one of the first days after they had moved in, Amalie had walked farther and farther into this darkness until the lamp was just a bright spot in the distance, and had then turned back because, instead of walls, she had come upon an infinite space filled with piles of books and the echoes of Christoffer’s anecdotes, and permeated by the dry, acrid scent of paper. Now she caught her father’s eye. “We’re not all cut from the same cloth,” she began, and went on to explain her point of view to her father. She was so sure that he was on her side, that he supported her and would agree with her that their family—or at any rate she and he—was surrounded, here, by underdogs and nonentities, who encircled them like the bars of a prison cell, hindering the development of their own brilliant personalities. And at the same time, these creatures blocked their view of the real people, those burning, uncontrollably crude souls whom she and he, Amalie and Christoffer, would have understood; and who would have understood them, if only they had been able to find one another in this desert of mediocrity that could not even boast a sewer.
Once again, I feel that Christoffer ought to have quashed his daughter’s overblown notions, but he did not, even though he found the idea of complaining utterly absurd. Because, here, in this circle of light, beside the little printing press, Christoffer was content, very content, more content than he had ever been before. So he merely waggled his head as an avowal of his love for Amalie, who was describing to him—Papa—the true state of affairs, which, as she saw it, was that she, who had been born to float, had been cooped up between houses which, with every day that passed, crowded closer together around streets populated by people so common that—and at this point the little girl swore for the first time—it might not be such a bad idea to hang the whole damn lot. All these people ever thought about was eating their fill, stuffing their guts with produce from the butchers’ shops that made the whole area stink of pork crackling. These people believed—and at this point the little girl swore for the second time—that they could damn well guzzle their way into paradise, or down to hell; or else they were so stingy that they believed they could save their way to it, or fight their way out and up by washing other people’s clothes behind windows that were so covered with dust and grime that she, Amalie, could not even see her reflection in them. These people hardly knew what a lavatory was; these people—and at this point she swore for the third time—had nothing but a damn bucket, a bucket, a bucket that had to be emptied by her great-grandfather.
Christoffer regarded his daughter vacantly. He had never understood women and it had never occurred to him that his children might harbor secret hopes. So now, as his youngest daughter presented him with hers, he stared at them, unable to fathom them. That anyone might consider herself to be a cut above her neighbors was beyond him. All his life he had felt that he was inferior to everyone else, and this feeling had stayed with him until those last hectic months when he had edited the Langeland Times, and then it had been replaced by the certainty that he had found his niche. All he had grasped was that his daughter had come across the night-soil cart and that this had scared her. He was in a daze—because he had lost all sense of time and had worked the long night through—and the only thing that occurred to him was a song from his youth, which he now proceeded to sing, in a gentle, cracked voice, like an adult lulling a child to sleep:
“The clock strikes ten and from afar
Comes a rumbling that gives you the jitters.
It could be thunder, it could be a war
Or just a good dose of the skitters.
Here it comes, it’s drawing near
Out of the night; what have we here?
Why! There you have them, clear as clear,
Our trusty chums the old nightmen!”
For a moment, Amalie stared at her father, and in that moment she made her final decision; in that moment all contact was severed and this little girl made the decision which was, for someone of her age, such an unreasonable one: that when it came to finding forests, animals, and worldwide devotion, you had to do it alone.
The next day, Amalie stopped eating. She threw away her school lunch bag, and during the evening meal she watched, intent but passive, as Christoffer Teander and Gumma and her two sisters ate fried salt pork with parsley sauce. The days went on, and still she did not eat a thing. Every morning she made up the sandwiches for her lunch, and then gave them away at school, in order to watch with interest as her classmates polished them off. And every evening she sat at the dinner table, silent and impassive, while her family ate.
Initially, people around her were perturbed. Gumma peered into her eyes and far down into her throat, looking for signs of illness, and at school the teachers approached her desk and felt her forehead, but after a while they left her alone. There was no denying that she grew thinner and thinner, but she was as conscientious as ever and much sweeter and more pleasant. Besides, fasting was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. So the schoolteachers were sure that she ate at home, while Gumma comforted herself with the thought that at least she ate her lunch at school.
Actually, what had happened was that Amalie had decided to starve her way through adolescence. And even though she feels that she is entirely alone, she thereby falls into the same category as a number of other Danes, a category composed mainly of women, and most particularly of young girls who dream that the best way of demonstrating their individuality is to put their skeletons on display. Offhand, this may seem like a crazy idea—I mean, if there is one thing we all have in common it is our bones, and no two things are more alike than a couple of walking skeletons. But on closer inspection, the attraction in starving oneself becomes easier to understand; closer inspection reveals that the starveling is in fact rewarded with a new inner plumpness, and that is what happened to Amalie. After a few days she was overwhelmed by a giddy weightlessness, like an intoxicant that sharpened her hearing and amplified the distant music that had rung in her ears since childhood. And gradually, as the weeks went by, the world around her grew a little vague. Her inner landscapes, on the other hand, grew more and more distinct until finally, one day, after three months of total fasting, when she was on her way to school, they stood out quite clearly. It happened just as Amalie stopped outside a shop—I do not know which one—and just as the clouds were dispersed by the sun of a season that is not clear in my mind because there was a vagueness to the seasons in that part of town, and because Amalie had lost all sense of the weather. Thus the only thing that registered with her was that the sun could now penetrate her closed eyelids and disturb her visions. She lifted her hand up to shade her eyes, and when the sun shone right through the palm of her hand, making her bones stand out like sharply etched silhouettes on one of those modern X-ray pictures, she realized that she was now at death’s door.
She is standing on an edge, the edge before the void, and as she now walks on, mechanically, toward school she is still teetering on the brink of the precipice, unable to decide. She is tempted by that enticing music—it is stronger than ever now—but at the same time it gladdens her to walk like this, lost in her exclusive, blossoming giddiness. And when, a few minutes later, she makes her move, it is back toward life that she turns—with just the shortest, the daintiest of steps—the credit for which must go to the piece of licorice root she most graciously accepts from a girl who sits next to her in class. This girl, whose name she has never bothered to discover, runs a little business in the form of a
dish of sugared water in which, for a small fee, she would restore pieces of chewed licorice to their former power and glory. Hence it is this tiny drop of sugared water that for a while brings Amalie Teander back to the classroom, the sun, and life with the rest of us.
From then on, and through the years that follow, she evolves into an artist, a starvation artist. When people in the outside world, or Gumma, or her sisters offer her anything, especially anything to eat, she will as a rule, and quite decidedly, say no, no thank you, I don’t feel like it, take it away. But now and again she will say yes, a very tiny yes. By dint of this alternation between a large number of refusals and a very few acceptances she learns to play upon her body as a musician plays upon his instrument or, to give a more exact representation of her particular megalomania, as a conductor plays upon his orchestra. She becomes an artist who can advance upon death by starvation in little leaps, only at the last minute to backtrack toward life by means of a hard candy or a piece of fruit or just a cup of tea with lemon.
On two occasions during these years, the district medical officer visited the school to examine the girls. Amalie was the first to be seen, since their names were called according to their ranking in class: in other words, by their cleverness. Amalie’s position at the head of her class had never been threatened, partly because she was a quick learner and partly because her teachers interpreted her giddy air of distraction as a sign of quiet intelligence. Consequently, both they and her classmates treated her with a respect and a consideration that were not without a trace of fear, all of which suited Amalie perfectly, when she was in a fit state to perceive it. When the doctor put his stethoscope to her chest and heard her bones grating against each other at the joints, he had her admitted to the hospital. In a white hospital room Amalie’s hallucinations merged with reality, to the point where she believed that the room, the bed, and the two nurses were all a part of her own true paradise. As a reward for their efforts she allowed them to talk her into eating more than she normally did, until her weight increase caused them to lose interest in her. Then she left the hospital. Some years later, when the doctor wanted to admit her again, she said no—a pure and simple no—with the same authority as that with which she declined food. The doctor did not dare to argue with her. Instead he explained, in a long letter to Christoffer Ludwig, that from a professional standpoint his daughter was as good as dead. He made the mistake of giving the letter to Amalie herself to take home. That same afternoon she threw the letter away because she was in the middle of an interesting experiment and did not wish to be disturbed. This experiment consisted of an investigation into whether it was possible to survive on half a cup of strong black coffee per day. She also threw it away because it predicted that her growth would be stunted and her development inhibited. And so we and Amalie are the only ones ever to learn its content.
