The History of Danish Dreams

by Peter Høeg

  Carl Laurids had selected his employees with care. Some of the dwarfs were freaks of nature, with tiny bodies, short legs, and great balloon-like heads; others were, in every respect, well proportioned, but only three feet tall; and still others looked like insane scientific experiments. But they were all gifted and exquisitely polite people who spent their days paying impeccably correct calls on one another, or in reading Euclid’s Elements or teaching themselves to dance or to play chamber music on the diminutive instruments Carl Laurids had purchased for them, to help them prepare for their show business debut.

  All the indications are that this debut was a success. By the time the Danish authorities and the stallholders’ association and the newspapers and the rest of the Danish public turned on Carl Laurids’s project, it had attracted attention worldwide, and pictures of the dwarfs with the chivalrous manners had circulated in the international press. Shortly after the Copenhagen city fathers definitively rejected the proposal, Carl Laurids was visited by two men representing a major film company. They came from Hollywood and gave the lie to every one of the widespread 1920s preconceptions of America’s barbarous Western ways. Even in the summer heat they were smartly dressed in jackets and waistcoats, and they spoke in quiet, cultured voices. They spent a whole day in the conservatory, watching the dwarfs through binoculars, and then they left. They must, beyond a shadow of a doubt, have made a deal with Carl Laurids, because, only a week later, he shipped the dwarfs off on the liner Frederik den Ottende, bound for America. Carl Laurids himself accompanied his cargo to the boat—with the black limousine and the dwarfs attracting a fair amount of attention on the wharf; and there were many who cast curious glances after the tall figure in the dark coat who stood alone gazing after the ship. This figure is Carl Laurids, and he is standing on the very spot where Anna and Adonis once stood, dreaming their way to foreign lands. But whether Carl Laurids dreamed there is no way of telling. It may be that he came to the quayside only to make sure that this shipment went without a hitch, and even then he must have been hatching plans for the next consignment.

  This took place two months later and consisted not just of dwarfs but of all manner of freaks. Carl Laurids may have come to a prior arrangement with the two representatives of American culture. Or he may have been acting altogether on his own initiative, trusting solely to his sure instinct for the future—which, this time around, enabled him to anticipate Hollywood’s demand for monsters for the wave of gothic horror movies that was beginning just as Carl Laurids dispatched his third and fourth loads to the Promised Land. These individuals—some of whom would, a few months later, be staring down at Danish audiences from the silver screen, in the guise of reptiles or lepers or test-tube monstrosities or the Hunchback of Notre Dame—had presumably been found by Carl Laurids in the rural areas; in German—and in some cases Danish—hospitals; and in the lunatic asylums of Jutland and the islands. And he must have been extremely quick and extremely discreet, because he left virtually no trail. A handful of institution superintendents recalled him as being a warmhearted humanitarian desirous of adopting some poor handicapped person; still others took him to be some relative appearing out of the blue; but nowhere did anyone quite catch his name. And so no connection was ever actually made between those few complaints and inquiries which, when they did eventually surface, seemed to be scattered, indiscriminate outbursts. Only to us do they form a pattern.

  At a fair guess, Carl Laurids signed up around two hundred individuals, dwarfs included. In putting together his second and third batches of these bizarre actors he had, however, to abandon any thought of intelligence and nice manners. True, in an attempt to increase their value, he did arrange to have his discoveries instructed in the skills most necessary for their future careers: speaking English and eating with a knife and fork; but he soon gave up every effort in that direction. He lodged them in four large army tents he had had erected outside the villa, and employed a team of hefty male nurses to keep them in order.

  Even Amalie found it hard, during this period, to remain lost in her usual carefree reverie. These people whom Carl Laurids had unearthed were not your average cripples—these were people suffering from water on the brain or rare, incurable growth-retarding illnesses or mad, capricious fits. During the day they wandered around the garden and at night they invaded Amalie’s dreams, until she dispensed with her usual reserve and slept with Carl Laurids, to draw from his presence the strength to convince herself that these wretched creatures were a hallucination. She soon had to stop holding her tea parties in the rooms facing onto the garden; then had to abandon them altogether because, despite their limitations, these cripples could get around with such amazing agility on blocks and crutches and rollers and the stumps of their arms and legs that they could easily give their nurses the slip, and hence could appear at any minute, outside any window and even inside the house—where the reaction they elicited from the assembled ladies was one of both repulsion and irresistible attraction. At one point, Amalie complained to Carl Laurids, and, after looking at her for a moment, he replied, “That’s why I’m going to put them in films, darling; audiences will want to see them again and again, just to make sure that they need never see them anymore.”

  The fact that he actually took Amalie’s question seriously enough to give her an answer—even if it was just this vague remark—is thanks to the transformation that had taken place in their relationship since Carsten’s birth. He was born in May, after a winter in which several of the big financial houses with which Carl Laurids had links had gone into liquidation. With all the feverish rescue operations of the winter months, Amalie’s condition had not registered with Carl Laurids, apart from his noting that she kept him at an even greater distance than usual. And it may be that he did not want to see anything else. To coin a phrase he himself often repeated: people see only what they want to see; and perhaps he had some intuition of what was to come.

  And what was to come came in May, with Carsten’s birth, and tossed Carl Laurids into such hellish agonies of jealousy that here, again, we have confirmed for us the observation that in love—and hence, here, with Amalie—everyone, even Carl Laurids, is only human. The first thing he noticed about his son was the spastic ugliness common to all newborn babies, and this left him cold. But the next thing he noticed about the little boy was the infant’s ruthless craving for its mother; and in this craving, Carl Laurids recognized himself. Despite its being unheard of, despite all warnings from her women friends, and with complete disregard for Carl Laurids’s attempts to forbid it, Amalie insisted on breast-feeding the baby. Deaf to the doctors’ admonitions that it would ruin her figure, she gave free rein to that staggering strength of will previously shown only to her family and Carl Laurids, and put the baby to the breast whenever and wherever necessary. The first time Carl Laurids witnessed this, it made him sick with distaste. In the way his son clutched at Amalie’s swollen breast he saw his own helpless dependence, and when Amalie drew the child to her he saw the unconditional tenderness he had never received in anything but meager doses. At that moment he wanted to leave Amalie, but at the same time he was more powerfully attracted to her than ever before. Meekly he complied with her wish that they should all three sit together in the garden and be quiet; “Be quiet, Carl,” she said if he tried to talk his way out of his misery. Likewise, he had to join them on their long walks along the promenade or through the center of Copenhagen, when Amalie would not let the nanny come but insisted on pushing the baby carriage herself. On these walks where, from a distance, they resembled our common dream of a happy and well-to-do husband and wife, Carl Laurids made one of his life’s most unpleasant discoveries. With his usual keen perception he saw through the contemporary illusion of the baby’s innocence, penetrating to the truth, which was that—from its carriage, or wherever else it might happen to be—this little creature, his son, who still looked to him like an earthworm or a hairless insect, exercised a calculated dominance over Amalie. Helplessly Carl
Laurids realized that the child’s gurgling and inarticulate wails, and its hunger, and its bowel movements were all part of a campaign by which it seized power over his wife and shut him out. On these days with Carsten and Amalie when, the spring sunshine notwithstanding, Carl Laurids shivered in his own isolation, he saw how the child was steering Amalie back toward reality, something only he had ever been able to do. In the face of everything and everyone, apart from Carl Laurids, Amalie had preserved the dreamy air of distraction which had surrounded her since the balloon ascent and which often made the invisible servants, and even her guests and her women friends, wonder whether she really was aware of their presence. Carl Laurids now realized that when she was with the child she radiated an awareness of which he himself had only ever caught glimpses. When she was tending the child, and changing it, and washing it—again regardless of the nanny whom Carl Laurids had employed, who was all but superfluous—she displayed a puzzling and terrifying efficiency; it made him feel as though she were a chasm into which he had never peered.

  It was then that Carl Laurids started to tell Amalie about his life. During that spring and summer a breach appeared in his character, and through this crack flowed confessions that would previously have been unthinkable. It might be going too far to say that he talked in order to unburden himself. It is probably closer to the truth to believe that Carl Laurids—discreet, ever-secretive Carl Laurids—was now trying to do what so many other reticent men, both of his own day and later, have tried to do, which is to reach the woman he loved by means of a new, hitherto unseen candor.

  This candor had no effect on Amalie. Why she held Carl Laurids at bay will always remain something of a mystery, but she did not return his confidence. Perhaps she was never aware of it; perhaps she knew that Carl Laurids’s love burned because of and not despite the gulf between them; perhaps a bit of both. Be that as it may, she kept him firmly on the fringes of her relationship with Carsten; which is why, later, she was able to recollect only snippets of what he had said and so was unable, later, to repeat very much of it. Even so, these half-remembered or three-quarters-remembered confessions—which have then been passed on to me at third or sometimes fourth hand—represent vital source material for my account of Carl Laurids’s boyhood at Mørkhøj and for his business activities during the period following the fourth shipment of cripples, that being absolutely his last contribution to the entertainment business.

  That same summer he opened a couple of art galleries in the center of Copenhagen, and because he was so frank with Amalie, we also know how he came by his paintings. To some extent, during these years, Carl Laurids was again running a factory. He had the big garage fitted out as a studio in which, day in, day out, six painters were hard at work. No one knows where these men came from or who they were. The signatures on their pictures were pseudonyms, and I have been unable to discover any evidence of Carl Laurids’s having met them prior to this summer, but by now this missing chapter is not to be wondered at. It is Carl Laurids’s trademark; it is what we keep running up against—just like the high level of expertise we encounter here, in these six men, as we do in all of Carl Laurids’s employees. In no time and doubtless without giving it a second thought, he had snapped up six men—six specialists—who just happened to be stuck in an era to which they did not belong. Every one of these painters possessed an incurable and hopeless love of the nineteenth century. When Carl Laurids took them on, they were pale and undernourished young men in threadbare coats, who thought and painted and starved in the manner of the Golden Age Romantics. Carl Laurids licked them into shape. He provided them with paints and canvases and three square meals a day and a regular wage. In return—in the big garage, which still smelled of lubricating oil and leather upholstery—he set them to painting nude models. During these years an uninterrupted stream of well-built young men and women passed through Carl Laurids’s garage, there to be committed to large-scale canvases. During these same years these paintings were to fulfill the artistic needs of a new moneyed class, whose knowledge of pictures was restricted to childhood memories of cheap religious prints stuck inside the lids of their parents’ dower chests. These members of the nouveaux riches harbored an irrational fear of the wide expanses of bare wall in their big flats on Søtorvet, or their villas in Charlottenlund, but Carl Laurids knew what these people wanted. “They want the usual things,” he said to Amalie, “above all, security and the assurance that there is something—come to that, anything—that will last forever. And that,” he explained, “is what these paintings can give them. Just so long as they aren’t modern and aren’t meant to represent pulverized brains or a world that’s falling apart.” At his behest, his artists painted a warm, rounded reality composed of well-known motifs: women in a state of undress, in their boudoirs or in Turkish baths or by little lakes or in mythological settings. And the only thing that set these pictures apart from those of the previous century was that the painting of physical features—the hair between the legs, for instance—was scrupulously lifelike: not least because Carl Laurids had insisted on precisely this detail. It was he, too, who engaged the nude models and with his own hand composed the traditional-style still lifes that were so popular, arranging freshly shot pheasants and dead-eyed hares on tables alongside expensive porcelain and the latest Mauser rifles—ever so casually disposed. In these arrangements, the timeless country-house atmosphere with which Carl Laurids had grown up was brilliantly combined with the most modern technology.

  Of course, there is no way of knowing how many pictures Carl Laurids sold, but it was a lot—lots and lots—that much, at least, Amalie remembered his saying; so there is little reason to doubt that once again he has struck gold, just as he had done on every other occasions. Nevertheless, one day it was all over. One day Amalie looked out of the window to see that the garage doors were standing open and that the big studio, which had for years been full of canvases, was now completely empty. I doubt whether Amalie has thought much about this. From where she stood, right in the thick of things, I daresay the situation did look just as she described it when replying to inquiries from her women friends: “Carl’s full of ideas; he’s always coming up with something new; I wouldn’t give it a thought; Carl’s work is so boring; the best way to get to know Carl is socially, preferably over a good dinner,” she said. But to the rest of us, standing back from it all, it is quite another story; and I, who am obliged to tell the truth, must now point out that it is very difficult to discover why Carl Laurids acts as he does. Up to this point one could get away with thinking that he is driven by the same motive by which everyone around him thinks they are driven: the wish to accumulate sufficient wealth and build up a business so sound that they can face the future with confidence. But it becomes difficult to maintain this point of view; there are grounds for suspecting that, once again, far too little of the truth is being disclosed. Well, why else would Carl Laurids keep moving on? It is pretty much a foregone conclusion that he could have earned a decent living and supported both his home and his marriage in any one of the areas that he sped through; he would have become a millionaire wherever he was, and for most of the time he probably was a millionaire—if we disregard his financially obscure beginnings around the time of the balloon ascent. And yet he stays only so long in any one place before wiping the slate clean and moving on to something else, and from that to the next thing, and then on to the next—until all the signs are that he is searching for something in particular; that what he wants out of life is something other than money, something else, something that as yet remains a mystery.

  It was at this point that he sold his cars, keeping just one, a limousine convertible, with a cream-colored hood and a capacious trunk; an odd move, and one that coincided with his giving up the offices on Ny Øster Street from which he had been operating ever since the Rosengården days. He had retained one of the painters, a taciturn little man with a profound grasp of graphic techniques. With this man as his sole employee, Carl Laurids now ran a busin
ess about which we know very little, and upon which I do not wish to comment, apart from citing one of Amalie’s recollections. She seems to remember Carl Laurids once telling her—while half-asleep—that he was printing banknotes. She remembers how she—also half-asleep—had felt so happy because she thought he must have been taken on by the National Bank. There is, however, nothing to suggest that this was the case—far from it. It seems certain that Carl Laurids was still his own boss, but apart from that we know nothing, not even where the business was based.

  There are a good number of photographs of Carl Laurids from those days, and even a painting executed by one of his painters; similarly, people who met him during this period remember him clearly to this day. He was tall and slim and broad-shouldered; he had a smooth, fresh complexion; and the gaze he directed at the camera lens was very, very penetrating. People who had known him since he first appeared on the scene have said that the years had not touched him; that when they looked at Carl Laurids they still saw the youth in the white tails and flying helmet, giving an unforgettable speech from a pile of champagne cases. To me, sitting here with the photographs, it does not look quite like that. To me it is obvious, very obvious, that the intervening years can be discerned in Carl Laurids’s face. It is as though that ruthless self-assurance has grown even greater and, with this, the face has grown calmer. But at the same time that little facial tic has spread and can no longer be hidden by his mustache. This tic, which stems from his time at Mørkhøj, has gradually become more marked and has, by this time, started sending sudden quivering spasms across the lower part of his face. But, this apart, I think it is true to say that Carl Laurids’s features do seem remarkably youthful—or perhaps timeless would be closer to the mark. He seems to stand outside, or to one side of, the processes which age his contemporaries and which, for want of a better term, we call the passage of time. Where, during these years, Carl Laurids’s peers seem to be consolidating, he seems to be branching out. While those businessmen who are, in a way, his colleagues—or at any rate his guests and neighbors and admirers—are accumulating most of what life has to offer—or at any rate, cars and paintings and houses and titles and directorships and mistresses and vintage wine, as well as less tangible things such as security and peace of mind and, of course, capital, above all, capital—these are the very things which, during these years, Carl Laurids either cuts himself off from or does not seem to worry about. Thus the only point at which, from a historical point of view, we can pin him down to a normal pattern of behavior is in his relationship with Amalie; and even this point is no longer as constant as it once was, because in the years after Carsten’s birth Carl Laurids is away from home more and more often and for longer and longer periods.