The History of Danish Dreams

by Peter Høeg

  It took the sound of someone crying to bring them back to reality and the realization that it was they who were still whimpering. Carl Laurids lay still for no more than a moment. Then he shook himself free of his vacant stupor. Filled with quiet triumph, he rose, dressed, tied his bow tie, combed his hair, picked up his hat and gloves, and walked out of the room without once looking at Amalie. He paid the bill at reception—where the cash for that came from is something to which we will return—and stepped out into the street. Whistling in the dusty summer heat, he left the hotel behind while rationalizing, explaining away, the upheaval into which his life had been thrown over the past few weeks. The result of some minor biological disorder, that’s what it had been—brought about by certain chemical changes—the consequence, he told himself straight, of pent-up lust. So obsessed had he been with this odd Cinderella, this strange little hunk of flesh, that he had neglected his love life. That was why he had been so restless, why his keen powers of perception had been blurred; sexual humors had built up in his blood—here he vaguely recalled an article he had read on the subject—and this had overridden his thought processes. Now, however, he had expended the malignant juices; he was his old self again, fancy-free, unattached, virile. The past was behind him, the future spread before him, he had left that little canary for the last time, without saying goodbye, without so much as a kiss. She’d got her comeuppance, got what she needed of a four-letter word beginning with D. The score between them had been settled, and now he had to move on. Carl Laurids flashed a roguish, carefree smile at a couple of passing housemaids. Of course, she could always come to him if she needed money, he told himself, no problem there. She could always be sure of a bit of pin money if she called at his office looking suitably humble. He wasn’t the type to let an old flame down, dammit—why, he’d subsidize her and her family. When she stood before him, her dark eyes brimming with tears, he’d spread his palms benevolently. “Here you are, pet,” said Carl Laurids. And only as he flung his arms wide did he notice that he was making his way along Vesterbro Street, and that people were standing in huddles watching him because he had been talking out loud and waving his arms about, and that he had gone astray, and that he had no idea where he was going, and that his mind was filled with pictures of Amalie, and that his longing for her was almost suffocating him. He tried to pull himself together, he really tried; all the way into town he tried to convince himself that he would turn off toward Rosengården; that in no circumstances would he continue on toward the King’s New Square—all the time knowing that he could not trust himself. During this stroll, which must have taken about three-quarters of an hour, Carl Laurids learned that the essence of love has as much to do with the loved one’s absence as with her presence. His vain attempts to bring himself under control felt like a physical pain, bringing tears to his eyes and making him wonder whether he had in fact gone mad.

  For the last bit of the way, he had murder in mind. Walking down Strøget—bareheaded because he had unwittingly lost his hat—he pictured how he would place his hands around Amalie’s throat and squeeze the life out of her, thus setting his mind at rest. But this fantasy was ousted immediately thereafter by another in which he avowed his love for her; and this was replaced by a third in which he was reading aloud to her from a French novel—though this last scene grew dim as he tried to remember what it had been like to make love to her. And as he was running up the stairs of the d’Angleterre he realized he could not remember what she looked like naked.

  Having pictured every conceivable scenario for their reunion, he was at first unable to take in that the room was empty. Innumerable, made-up conversations, long since carried to their conclusion in his imagination, still rang in his ears, and it took a thorough search of every room and closet in the suite to convince him that she had gone. All she had left was a note; a stiff white card that she had tucked under the pillow. She had had the nerve to leave it there because she knew that he would not only come back but search high and low for any trace of her. The card’s message was both naïve and haughty. Written with one of the hotel’s rubber pens, it read: “I never want to see you again. Don’t come looking for me, especially not at 17 Dannebrogs Street.”

  A week later they were married.

  The wedding was arranged in typical Carl Laurids style. He had brought all of his supple efficiency to bear to ensure that even with so little time to prepare, the setting at least would leave nothing to be desired. And if the whole setup threatened to collapse at any minute, it was not because any of the practicalities had been left to chance. Carl Laurids had obtained all the appropriate documents, including—because Amalie was so young—written consent from Christoffer Ludwig. He had managed to send out invitations to all of the casual acquaintances from his balloon ascent and informed the newspapers, so that his wedding could also serve as an advertisement for his business activities. He had also booked the wedding ceremony; invited Christoffer Ludwig, Amalie’s sisters, and Gumma (and arranged for a cab that could accommodate her tricycle); ordered the floral decorations for the church; and organized the wedding reception right down to the minutest detail. Why, then, did all these plans almost come to nothing? Why does it seem to me like a fluke that this wedding ever took place? Because on the morning of the wedding Amalie kept changing her mind, that’s why, and was forever sending one of her sisters, who were helping her to dress, with notes to Carl Laurids in which she said, “I just can’t go through with this, it’s too big a decision for me to make in such a short time. And what are you really, Carl? No better than an animal, you and that past of yours, which you’ve told me nothing about, no, I just can’t do it, darling, we’ll have to postpone it!”

  Six times in the course of that morning, Carl Laurids drove back and forth between his room at the Hotel Royal—into which he had moved to escape the memories of his own weakness aroused by the d’Angleterre—and always got there to find her humming contentedly. No sooner had he returned to his hotel, however, than another note would arrive to send him racing back to Dannebrogs Street—where Amalie would say, “Of course there’s nothing wrong, sweetheart, my little Laurids, Amalie’s little honeybunch, you know I love you”—until Carl Laurids’s hands were as shaky as they had been in the balloon just after love hit him like a heart attack.

  In the church the bickering continued. At the altar, it was only with reluctance that Amalie said yes; and as they were walking down the aisle they were arguing so heatedly that the ceremony had to be interrupted for a moment while the newlyweds retired to a little room behind the vestry. Here, after Amalie said she had decided that she wanted a divorce, they had sex—brief and brutal—up against the whitewashed wall, before gliding down the aisle to a rather risqué bridal march, blushing and happy as kids.

  The reception was held on Midsummer’s Eve, amid the fake gilding and mirrored opulence of the Nimb Restaurant, overlooking the Tivoli Gardens. In its infinite vulgarity, this establishment conforms perfectly to 1920s parvenu dreams of putting on the ritz. Thus among the 160 guests were two professional teachers of upper-class etiquette, whom Carl Laurids had hired in one of a series of attempts to discover the code of conduct that would profit him best. Apart from these two ladies—who spent the entire evening observing the proprieties and ended up, therefore, speaking only to each other—it was a thoroughly indecorous affair. Entertainment was provided by three songstresses and a pianist from an establishment called Above the Stable in Charlottenlund. This quartet performed both before and after the meal, and their songs and dances filled the restaurant’s private party rooms with just the right reek of the stables for most of the guests, who found self-conscious, cultivated conversation à la Debrett difficult, if not impossible. The twelve-course menu was devised by Carl Laurids’s French chefs from the balloon and consisted of famous dishes from the previous century created at the same time as those unforgettable Parisian vaudeville shows that they so closely resembled, consisting as they did of a thin, appetizing layer masking l
ukewarm obscenity. The first course, Aphrodite Puree, was followed by Siren Shoulders and Casanova Kidneys, then a whole Saddle of Veal à la Eros and Skewered Hearts and Cul de Canard Reine de Saba, and various other dishes which I cannot quite recall, except for those last luscious titbits: Nipples of Venus à la Maxim. To wash it all down there was, as usual, champagne—champagne all the way; and afterward liberal amounts of a Sauternes so sweet that it climbed out of the glass all by itself.

  Carl Laurids had put together this program of entertainment and food for his guests’ sake. To him extravagance was but a tool; he was not an indecorous man. He never told rude jokes in company and never laughed when others did; sex to him was something private, something hush-hush; and if, as now, he exploited it socially, it was because he knew that in this way he could satisfy some need within his guests. One of the truths about Carl Laurids’s character—even here, on his wedding day—is that he is a man equipped with a kind of mental thermometer with which he is constantly and matter-of-factly taking the temperature of his surroundings. Besides which, almost all his attention was focused on the invisible cord connecting him to Amalie. They may have looked relaxed—guests said later that they had been the perfect hosts: Amalie vivacious and charming, Carl Laurids cutting such an imposing and reassuring figure that everyone forgot he was only nineteen years old—but beneath their easy equanimity they were watching each other like two beasts of prey. Between them, binding them together, ran a line taut as a piano wire. When Amalie laughed her silvery, bell-like laugh and leaned over to place an arm on a braided shoulder; and when Carl Laurids lit a cigarette fixed in the end of a long, provocative cigarette holder, these actions were but vicious little tugs on the invisible steel wire linking them across the room.

  The party was a dazzling success. It escalated in much the same way as the Midsummer’s Eve bonfire on the Tivoli lawn, which the wedding guests could look out onto. That is to say that it ignited immediately, blazed fiercely, reached a ruddy culmination, and then continued to flicker and glow until quenched by a shower of champagne. By then its content had complied both with what Carl Laurids had desired, and to some extent planned for, and with the contemporary dream—which is also our dream—of affluence in the Copenhagen of the 1920s. The speechmaking had gone on and on, continuing right through the night, even after everyone had stopped listening and turned to dancing, or drinking hard, or screeching at one another as they tried to make themselves heard above the jazz band that had by this time taken over from the Stable entertainers. That quartet had disbanded after the three songstresses disappeared into the restaurant’s intimate chambres séparées with three of the male guests. These chambres séparées, too, had been hired by Carl Laurids and were to come in very handy, very handy indeed. At one point a young actress shed her corset and danced barefoot on a table; still later, the two teachers of etiquette—and then Johannes V. Jensen—departed in high dudgeon, refusing to be party to such debauchery. By this the great writer, at any rate, meant something he had accidentally overheard: the pianist from the Stable boasting vociferously about his daily quota of arse—more than any toilet seat in this restaurant on an average Saturday, he said, which remark filled Jensen with such disgust that he had to leave—although not before venting his revulsion on the remnants of the festivities. But by then only Amalie and Carl Laurids were still sober enough to hear him, and they thought he was joking.

  Neither Amalie nor Carl Laurids had drunk much at all, and even if they had, it is doubtful whether they would have become intoxicated. Enveloped in cigar smoke and music and the hubbub of conversation, they perceived everything with exceptional keenness and clarity. In Amalie’s case, one of the reasons for this acute sensibility was that she still believed she was dead. Well, perhaps it is going too far to say she thought she was dead, but neither would it be correct to assert that she knew she was alive. Possibly, I come closest to the truth in believing her to be convinced that those dreams she had been dreaming since her early childhood had now, at long last, taken the place of an inadequate reality. It was this conviction that inspired her nonchalance. She laughed insouciantly at the crude vulgarities of the male guests and sidestepped the women’s curiosity and admiration and envy with a distracted gaiety derived from not really believing they existed. Instead, they seemed to her to materialize within her field of vision so fleetingly that she did not even manage to catch their names. Then they dissolved into a cloud of mist out of which Carl Laurids kept emerging as the only tangible feature; and even he, even Carl Laurids Mahogany, was ever so slightly unreal.

  This gently distrait air about Amalie ruined Carl Laurids’s appetite; it made his world contract until she was all he could see; and it filled him with a wild, childish, reckless desperation which at one point in the evening, when they came face-to-face in one of the deep-set bay windows, prompted him to lean toward her and bark, as though giving an order, “I love you.” It was the first time in his life that Carl Laurids had ever uttered these words, and it goes without saying that even he—even such a cynic as Carl Laurids Mahogany—was hoping for an appropriate reply. But the momentous nature of the moment was lost on Amalie. With pouting, heavy-lidded indifference, she said, “Fetch me a glass of champagne, darling.”

  They left the restaurant just as dawn was breaking, by which time the party had burned itself out. They stopped for a moment in the doorway and scanned all the figures slumped in chairs, or lying across tables, or propped up against one another in corners. Carl Laurids noted, to his satisfaction, that no one was in a fit state to throw rice after their cab. Then he switched off the big chandeliers and they walked together down the stairs, past guests who were no longer capable of recognizing them, out to the waiting car—and away.

  * * *

  The house into which they moved had belonged to a bankrupt estate that Carl Laurids had taken over a year earlier. A large white villa with a black-glazed tile roof, it overlooked the fishing village of Skovshoved; lying about halfway between the large residence of Queen Louise, the Queen Mother, and coffee merchant P. Carl Petersen’s mansion.

  It was a big house. Even for the area around Skovshoved it was immense, with its balconies and sculleries, its garage and chauffeur’s apartment and stylish, asymmetrical garden. And of course it had been designed by Meldahl—who else?

  Carl Laurids had planned the decor. The large drawing room with the big bow windows overlooking the Sound was called the Hellas room. Here homage was paid to ancient Greece with two large pillars decorated with grapes and vine leaves—all in imitation marble—and an ornate stucco ceiling on which the flora of Greece bloomed in white plaster. The library evoked memories of far-off China, with its black bookshelves and blanc de chine paintwork and lacquered folding doors and fine porcelain—acquired, one way and another, through Carl Laurids’s connections with H. N. Andersen and the Danish East Asia Company. The dining room, still on the ground floor, was decorated in the Moorish style with sweeping arches painted on the walls and a marble floor worked in the same pattern as the Court of Lions in the Alhambra. Then there was the billiard room with its wood paneling and hunting prints and, on the walls, rifles that had never fired a shot—supposedly reminiscent of an English country house; and the smoking room, which harked back to ancient Egypt. All these rooms were open to view, filled with guests, at the countless parties given by Carl Laurids and Amalie; and since they were also photographed, we can, today, reconstruct them right down to the position of every little knickknack. In addition, some of the second floor was on view to guests—but there the line was drawn; that was as much as anyone saw, so far and no farther.

  The fact is that the house was sharply divided into the visible side, of which we have spoken, and the invisible—the toilets and bathrooms and kitchens and the tiny servants’ rooms and the long corridors and empty nurseries and, most invisible of all, Carl Laurids’s office, which lay on the third floor and which he cleaned himself because he would not even allow the chambermaids to enter it.
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  Carl Laurids designed his home in this fashion to suit the taste of the upper-class circles in which he moved. The people he met there had a need of such vast rooms; rooms designed for flaunting, in which they were surrounded by the treasures of good, solid civilizations—reminders that their lives really did have substance, and that history was on their side. They also had a need for someone—in this case, Carl Laurids—to keep the doors closed on everything to do with the preparation of food and excretion and hygiene and servants and cleaning. Everyone knew very well that these things were there—after all, their own homes were arranged in similar fashion—but no one ever mentioned them, since they had all entered into that unspoken European upper-class convention of living in a world divided into what they could see and what they pretended they did not see.

  All of the many, many functions for which Amalie and Carl Laurids’s house was to provide the setting had, like the house, their visible and their invisible sides. The visible proceedings were conducted in the dining room, drawing room, billiard room, and smoking room. And what did they involve? Has any reader wondered about that? What went on at these parties, with all these nobles and army officers and high-ranking civil servants and parvenus and famous artists? Well, they were not, as one might expect, discussing business. These people kept their work and their private lives strictly separate. As they said, we don’t get together to talk shop but to enjoy ourselves. And that is precisely what the visible side of Carl Laurids’s gatherings was about: it was about enjoying oneself; about getting the feel of one other. Across the green baize of the card tables and over cognac and liqueurs and across the big Steinway, these men and women feel their way toward one another. They reenact the convoluted rituals of middle-class culture, designed to foster that heartfelt, tingling sense of belonging; combined with the realization—and the impression—that at least we here on the inside, we who have come in from the cold, stand united. There, outside, glint the lights of Copenhagen, and this year alone the longshoremen have been out on strike, and the bricklayers, and the federation of unskilled workers, and the deckhands—and that is just between Carl Laurids and Amalie’s getting married in June and their throwing their first party here at the end of July. And in the northeast, beyond Sweden—which they can, of course, see from here—the Bolsheviks are committing their atrocities; and then there’s the war they have just come through, and the political situation on the domestic front, with the Social Democrats now forming the second largest party. All of which is just awful. Ah yes, but it is out there.