The History of Danish Dreams

by Peter Høeg

  In reality, Carsten’s childhood ought to have been different. If this family had not been as it was, then his childhood ought to have been like that of other children on Strand Drive or on Bred Street or on Søtorvet—in other words, permeated by all the secrets which people kept from one another, and most particularly from the children. This reticence was designed to protect that sensitivity and innocence which would, some years later, lead the Children’s Panel and, hence, Carl Laurids and Amalie’s neighbor the merchant P. Carl Petersen to so thoroughly misjudge young Maria. Carsten’s situation was, however, somewhat different. As a consequence of Carl Laurids’s absences, and his indifference, and as a consequence of Amalie’s fierce love for her child, and her dreamy, untroubled view of the world, during these years, nothing—or almost nothing—was hidden from little Carsten. Amalie utterly ignored the opinion of her friends and the psychiatrists and the general public that the best thing for children is to be kept out of sight, kept out of the way, kept down—apart, of course, from those occasions when they are trotted out in their role as the most important thing in the world, the coming generation. She took Carsten everywhere with her, and since she categorically refused to hand him over to nannies, Carsten saw everything: he saw her friends; sat in on drawing and flower-arranging classes; accompanied her to Fonnesbech’s department store and to the racecourse and to Amalie’s riding lessons at Mattson’s—where Gladys sat with him in her arms so that Amalie need never lose sight of him. During these years, the entertaining at the house on Strand Drive reached new heights. There was a frantic air to these years, as if (and here we are talking with the benefit of hindsight) Carl Laurids, and perhaps also his guests, sensed that while he may be the one who brings them together, whom they lean upon and whom, at this time, they are even trying to have nominated for Parliament, he is also about to leave them. These parties constitute some of Carsten’s earliest memories. He recalled the food and the monocled men and the old women smelling of camphor and cloves and the young matrons—radiant blossoms with women’s faces—and the officers in uniform, complete with saber; no party was complete without a saber. He also sees the servants, the secret matrimonial confrontations in the invisible corridors, the frenzied couplings on the smooth lawns, and the dreadful drunkenness; and that he saw and remembered these things is yet another indication of a fact we have stumbled upon so often before in this context: that children take in a great deal more than we give them credit for. Obviously, all the women kissed the little boy in his lace-collared sailor suit and linen cap, and the men shook his hand; but since he was a child no one really paid any attention to him, and those who did remember anything about him remembered a pale-faced boy with large, pensive eyes. And that is as much as we can possibly discover about these years of Carsten’s life: that he is pale and has large, pensive eyes; and that he never leaves Amalie’s side; and that he sees everything—pretty much everything—apart from his father, Carl Laurids, who is barely glimpsed, because he is so busy; and if he is around, then he is either leaving the house or coming in, or crossing to the grand piano with a glass of champagne for some diva who has just finished singing. Or else it is afternoon and he is kicking Dodo the greyhound out of the way, to get to Amalie that much quicker. But he never notices Carsten. Nor does he notice those big, inquisitive eyes with which, a moment later, Carsten sees his parents’ ever-present, permanently pulsating passion ignite and explode, right there at his feet—on the floor—in broad daylight—in that huge house; which is deserted except for the invisible servants and, of course, himself. And it is now, right now, that Carl Laurids starts to fade away.

  It is now that he stops paying the rent on premises that lay we know not where, and in which he must have wound up his last company—which dealt with we know not what, apart from that sleepy hint that it might have been in the banknote-printing line. Soon Carl Laurids will be gone, never to return; soon I will be left even more alone than before; and even though all that has been taken from me are the partially erased tracks of a long-dead historical character, still I can already feel the loneliness that comes from my never having understood Carl Laurids and from my inability to let go of what I have not understood. All I can do, to catch a last glimpse of him, is open my eyes wide and try to peer into the dwindling light, though it reveals nothing other than those inscrutable photographs of him and the knowledge that, toward the end, the Copenhagen chief of police was a regular visitor to Carl Laurids’s home; and not only the chief of police but also certain foreign gentlemen with whom he conversed in English and German.

  There are many indications that during this period his business dealings hinged upon his many and most diverse contacts rather than on merchandise—apart, that is, from the sporadic deliveries to the villa of certain boxes containing weapons. It was from these boxes, the day before he disappeared, that he took the parts for the machine gun that Carsten helped him to assemble. It seems likely that he was at this time acting as some kind of consultant, promoting the sale of armaments from Scandinavia to certain European powers that were then planning an armed solution to the problem posed by the future. He may also have been acting as a vital link between Danish and European police forces and intelligence services. And at this point it is tempting to say, aha, so that’s what Carl Laurids was up to, that’s what he was aiming at; so he did believe in his own speeches, after all, and now he is going to wind up feeding the flames of the fire from whose ashes the new Europe will rise. But this would be a mistake, because there is nothing to indicate that Carl Laurids was politically active. As far back as Mørkhøj, he had realized that every phoenix rises only to be, a moment later, charred to a crisp—and once reduced to ashes, one species of bird is as good as the next. He would never dream of committing himself. Confronted by the chief of police and the foreigners with the smoldering eyes and voices thick with hopes of the future, he was, as always, courteous, laconic, and totally dispassionate.

  On the evening prior to his disappearance—after he and Carsten had assembled the big machine gun—Carl Laurids went for a walk. This was no farewell stroll but a walk he was in the habit of making. Everyone else—including me, I think—would have headed into the countryside, through the budding beech woods, but Carl Laurids walked down to the cold and leaden Sound. He stepped out briskly, past the private beaches and the white bathing tents and stone breakwaters. His movements are loose and easy, and it is evident that this moment of leavetaking—during which most people try to put off what is to come, if only ever so slightly—did not present a problem to Carl Laurids. On his return to the villa he hung up his cane and his straw hat in the vestibule as he always did and went into the drawing room to say good night to Amalie; the only inconsistency here was that he did not stay for a minute, sitting on the chaise longue or standing in the doorway in his usual wearisome but obligatory attempt to gain permission to follow her up to bed. He simply said good night, then turned on his heel and walked down the corridor and out of this story.

  Amalie was only fleetingly surprised by his curtness, and not even later—when she was desperately going over the events of the last few days in her head, trying to come up with some motive for his disappearance—not even then did she understand that this last gesture on his part was, in all probability, a sign that he had succeeded in his greatest and most significant undertaking: to make himself absolutely free of her, the only person he had ever loved.

  * * *

  Then Carl Laurids is gone. Of course, it took time to ascertain that he had mortgaged the house to the hilt, sold all the stocks and shares, emptied all the bank accounts, and taken the car, although all of this was merely a formal confirmation of what the whole world knew by the very next evening. The rumor spread along invisible channels, leaving behind it a dull paralysis that would take many years to turn, very slowly, into pain and loss and wonder and triumph among all those to whom Carl Laurids had been important.

  Amalie had known since early that afternoon. She had been in Copenhagen wi
th Carsten to collect a prince’s outfit which she had forced Carl Laurids into having made up because she had fallen into the habit of calling her son “my little prince.” In the shop, while Carsten was trying on the outfit, Amalie saw the warm spring sunshine change color and grow white and cold. Seized by a sudden feeling of unease, she left immediately, with Carsten in tow. They found the villa empty, and Amalie sat down to wait. After an hour, they heard the outer door. Then she looked at Carsten, sitting opposite her on a large sofa, all forlorn, in white velvet trousers, white velvet jacket, blue cape, white cotton stockings, patent shoes with big buckles, a little sword, and a tin crown on his head.

  “If he doesn’t come now, he’s never coming,” she said.

  They sat perfectly still for a few minutes, until there could be no doubt that it was the wind that had slammed the door.

  Then Amalie said, “He’s left me.”

  The shadows in the grounds lengthened; the rumor of Carl Laurids’s disappearance spread in Copenhagen; Carsten got up and walked softly around the empty rooms with his sleeves dangling over his hands because the tailor had not had the time he needed—and Amalie sat on in the big armchair, staring into space. She sat on as the sun set, sat on right through the night, and while she was sitting there the house held its breath, the invisible servants held their breath, the world held its breath, and we hold ours—because it is so obvious how little Carl Laurids has left her. He has run off with much more than the limousine and the bank accounts and her respectable standing as a married woman and a mother. He has taken her romantic bliss. For when Amalie treated Carl Laurids with distracted disdain, when she played with him and kept him at arm’s length and kept his desire simmering, painful and uncontrollable, it was only because she was sure that she and he were floating in a bubble in eternal space. She had been so sure that there would never, ever, come a moment such as this one, when everything around her seemed to be melting away, even the house. Already, that night—with telepathic clarity—she sensed her husband’s final, heartless mortgaging.

  That night, there are very few of those who know Amalie, and knew Carl Laurids, who have any doubts about how things will turn out. In their opinion, Amalie is, of course, finished; it is not just that she is a woman on her own with a child and the shame and poverty; no, what is worst of all is that she has been abandoned by Carl Laurids Mahogany. That is the most awful thing. Carl Laurids always knew how to get out in time, and who has ever dared to pick up the pieces after him? And so, around Strand Drive and in Gentofte and on Bred Street no one gives much for Amalie’s chances; despite the fact that these people love to gamble, not one bet is taken on whether she will make it or not, because, obviously, she is finished; all that is left for her is a heroic suicide, or a rapid descent into social obscurity. Then they lay their heads on their pillows and switch off their bedside lights.

  Nevertheless, they all dreamed of Amalie—inconsistent, confusing dreams, only a few of which have been preserved for posterity, and which I will not waste time on here, especially since we have the eyewitness reports of the invisible servants, who put off leaving the house, and Carsten, who spent the whole night sitting on the sofa opposite his mother. Amalie said not one word in the course of that night, and during those first hours—as the sun went down and it grew dark, as she relived her crazy love for Carl Laurids and her longing for him—she resembled everyone else’s picture of her: a frail young woman who calls to mind the dewy Madonnas from the paintings on their walls, and who might at any minute fall apart and dissolve into a pool of tears. Then she would admit to herself that a woman in Denmark in the 1920s is nothing without her man—especially not a fey dreamer like Amalie, whose father has squandered everything, virtually everything, so that she does not even have a fortune to compensate her for the fact that she has been dishonored.

  Then one of the expensive, mortgaged clocks struck midnight, and the first despairing Danish dream of the abandoned wife was supplanted by a new dream, with Amalie’s face turning into a white mask of bitterness as she saw her life as being wasted, her youth misspent, her marriage futile, and Carl Laurids a fiend. In this state she could, right there and then, have killed, and if she had become fixed in this wrath her life could have become the tale of the avenging wife and mother—which might also have been interesting, but that is not what happened; we must stick to the truth. Which is that as the night progressed, Amalie’s face grew increasingly calm and increasingly determined. With the first faint light of dawn she caught sight of Carsten, who had fallen asleep on the sofa across from her; then she drew her legs up underneath her and a strange light came into her eyes. As the first rays of sunshine struck the tops of the trees in the grounds, Dodo the greyhound began to growl menacingly. It had been sleeping on the rug in front of the fireplace and now, having been woken by the sun, it lifted its head and saw Amalie. She was still sitting in the armchair with her legs folded beneath her, looking both alert and relaxed as she stared straight ahead, without blinking. At that moment she looked so much like a big cat that the greyhound did not recognize her, and when she shifted one paw lazily, the dog slunk out of the room. Then Amalie got to her feet, lifted Carsten, and carried him up to his room. As she covered him with the quilt she said, matter-of-factly, “What I am about to do I do for you.”

  That same afternoon she rang the stockbroker at his office and asked him to call on her that evening. She knew he would come, and for the last half hour before the appointed time she watched from the windows of Carl Laurids’s deserted office on the third floor as he paced back and forth, a little way down Strand Drive, referring at brief intervals to his watch, so that he could knock on her door with a punctuality of the kind which her grandmother in Rudkøbing had taught herself and tried to teach her children, but which was, for this man and his family, a two-hundred-year-old matter of course.

  He was a member of a Jewish family that had resided in Copenhagen for several hundred years and that had built up in that city a banking and stockbroking business with the most spotless reputation. Once, shortly after he arrived in Copenhagen, Carl Laurids had visited the tall, narrow building on Gammel Strand to suggest, with his patent assurance, a collaboration. He had been turned down flat by the very man who was now waiting outside his house on Strand Drive, the man who had at that time just assumed leadership of the stockbroking company after twenty years with the Ministry of Finance. At the ministry he had developed an allergy, a dry cough, that would start up whenever he found himself in the same room as an unsound business. Just at the sight of Carl Laurids’s hat coming over the Marble Bridge he started gasping for breath; and when Carl Laurids was standing in his private office his whole body broke out in an itch so unpleasant that—once Carl Laurids had left—he had to loosen all his clothes in order to scratch, an unheard-of act for such a tightly buttoned-up lawyer. Not being one to give up hope, Carl Laurids had invited the stockbroker to his balloon ascent. He had come, quite without knowing why he did so, and it was there that he first laid eyes on Amalie. After that, Carl Laurids kept on issuing invitations to him, presumably to borrow a little luster from his respectability, and the stockbroker had kept on attending the parties on Strand Drive—still without knowing why. He always turned up somberly attired, never danced, drank nothing, ate modestly, and spent the evening sidling from room to room along the walls without any hope of meeting anyone he knew, and making no human contact other than a casual handshake from Carl Laurids.

  What none of the guests knew, and what the stockbroker himself did not realize—what, in all probability, Carl Laurids did not even grasp—Amalie recognized immediately. With his stiff collars and his stiff gaze and his stiff movements, this powerful, prosperous citizen and civil servant was trying to keep at least some sort of grip on himself, to stop himself from breaking down into his basic components—these involving, first and foremost, a powerful craving for Amalie. She knew that this craving was the sole reason for his turning up, year after year, at the hedonistic parties
on Strand Drive and, once there, enduring the loneliness and the dreadful itching and the coughing fits that assailed him when confronted with so many unsavory businesses assembled in one spot. And when he sidled from room to room with his back to the dance floor it was, Amalie knew, solely in order to follow her every move in the wall mirrors. Up till then she had never paid him any attention. She had noted him and added him to her mental list of admirers, but he and she moved in different worlds. Now she raised him up into her reality.