by Peter Høeg
And now she is saying farewell to Carsten. She had picked up his uniform herself, the day before, from the tailor recommended by the headmaster. In his suitcase he also has a winter uniform, again with pocket-less trousers—a style that by this time is already outdated, even at Sorø. Nonetheless, Amalie has opted for these, having been told by the headmaster, “Here we teach young people to get to grips with things; here we teach them that one cannot walk through life with one’s hands in one’s pockets.”
At the last moment Amalie decides that Gladys shall accompany Carsten. “Gladys is coming with you,” she says, “and that’s all there is to it. She’ll drive down with you now and come back with the car in the evening”—the reason for this being that she can then make Carsten’s new bed just the way he likes it, and unpack his suitcase and put his clothes away in his closet and hang up his shirts. The main reason, however, is that Amalie wants, somehow, to prolong this parting and give her boy some substitute for the embrace she can no longer give him, afraid, as she is, of losing all her self-control.
And so Carsten drives out into the world, and, seen from our point of view, it is both too early and too late.
At one point, as they were driving along Roskilde Road, they overtook a green Buick, one of the Copenhagen Police Department’s paddy wagons. Just as the two vehicles drew level, a pale face could be seen behind the bars of one of the tiny windows. It was the face of a girl, at one and the same time calm and wary, and for a few seconds she and Carsten gazed into each other’s eyes. Then the big Hudson had left the police van far behind, and the girl was gone.
It was Maria Jensen. At that point, sitting in the paddy wagon, heading along Roskilde Road, she was fifteen years old, and two years had elapsed since her mother disappeared and the tenement in Christianshavn sank into the ground.
* * *
Often, in my conversations with Maria, I have returned to the question of what her life was like during these two years, but she has never been able to give me a coherent answer. Nonetheless I have been able to figure out that after she turned her back on the vanished tenement, and on her father, and walked into the Copenhagen autumn, her life took roughly the following form: to begin with, she slept in railroad cars and in parks and on stairways, while winter was setting in. She was very close to perishing when she met Sofie, a girl of her own age, who looked like a sylph or a fairy-tale princess until she opened her mouth and gave vent to a voice as raucous as the sound of trains being switched. She introduced Maria into a club life which, until then, Maria had only ever viewed from the outside, while holding her father’s hand. The club meetings at which the two girls stepped out were held in Vesterbro. Cloaked in the anonymity of the legislation governing private clubs and tax dodges, these men-only societies met in some of the scores of cow barns still standing in this part of town. For these meetings, the cows were shooed into adjoining premises or into the barnyard, so that the empty stalls could be pressed into service as the wings for shows performed by young girls—girls like Maria and Sofie, who danced and sang, without a stitch on, to the music of a concertina played by the society chairman, a young man who smelled of Esprit de Valdemar and who, in the intermissions, was wont to fiddle absentmindedly with a blackjack. After the show, a dance was held in a closed-off coach house. The chairman played and the young girl performers accepted invitations to dance until daybreak, or until the police arrived, or until they had found a gentleman who would see them home. Maria and Sofie performed a song that Maria had learned from the whores in Christianshavn as a little girl. It went like this: “Tahiti is paradise on earth, hm hm,” and the girls made the “hm hm” sound by blowing through their noses in imitation of Polynesian wind instruments. They performed in grass skirts and nothing but grass skirts, looking so innocent that even the society members—who had come only because their lust was so hopelessly bound up with a taste for young meat—had tears in their eyes and felt contrite and thought: These two sweet little girls shouldn’t be here, they should be at home with their mother.
After the show they both danced with great and genuine joy, before allowing some gentleman—who had to be both elderly and well off—to escort them home. They had rented a room together on the outskirts of Vesterbro—lying at the very heart of a series of increasingly murky courtyards, at the end of a black passage—and it was to this that they led their prince for the night. Usually the victim did not notice where they were going, because he was so busy ogling the two little girls, whose innocence seemed to him to shine in the darkness, and trying to figure out whether they realized what all this was about and where it was leading. “How does a sweet little girl like you come to have such a rough voice?” he would ask Sofie as they were leading him through the last of the courtyards. “All the better to tell you how pleased I am that you walked us home,” Sofie would reply as they walked up the stairs. “How does a little flower like you come to have such a firm grip?” he would ask Maria as they were walking along the passage. “All the b-b-better to hold y-y-your hand,” Maria would reply. Then she would close the door behind them, take her police helmet from the chair where it lay, and put it on. Usually it was at this point that she let go of the man’s hand and butted him in the face with the police helmet, snuffing him out like a candle in a draft. But sometimes Sofie would hold her back, because she had become what is termed, in the police reports, physically aroused. In that case, she would let the gentleman undress her, after which she would undress him and take advantage of him while Maria sat silently in the dark, playing with the wallet she had fished from his clothes, waiting for the sign from Sofie to tell her that she could now bend over the stripped man, feel around in the dark for his head, and bash him in the face. Then they would pull off his underclothes, roll him down the stairs, pile him onto a handcart, wheel him out, and dump him in the nearest ditch.
They stopped going to the private-club dances when they realized that they could pick up better-off victims in the city dance halls. So they started to frequent Figaro’s and the Marble Café in Store Kongens Street; started to wear high heels and evening dresses and makeup and learned to steer clear of overzealous officers from the vice squad. Other than that, the drill remained the same: they would lure some elderly gentleman into seeing them back to their room—where they went on living, even though it was like a black hole in the darkness. Once there, they usually knocked him out without any further ado, and took his wallet. In the summer they would also take his clothes and his shoes, then wheel him off on the handcart and throw him into a ditch on the outskirts of town. Only rarely did a victim ever recognize them later, and if such a situation did arise, they could soon shut him up, with Sofie saying, in her gravelly voice, “You do know we’re under age, don’t you?” and Maria stammering softly, “Y-you know what they do with old pigs like you who pester little girls, don’t you? They ch-chop it off, so you’d better piss off.”
During these years they see so much of society’s underside that they begin to doubt whether it has a topside. Thanks to their cunning and hardihood, they succeed in evading the police and the vengeance of their victims and pimps and other prostitutes and the owners of the establishments where they picked up their customers, while still retaining a sort of innocence. When they are alone, or with children of their own age, they behave as what they in fact are: two little girls who would much rather jump rope or play hopscotch or take the streetcar out to Charlottenlund or the train to Hornbœk, to watch the well-to-do and dream about what it must be like to toss a ball about with the rich children in their gardens, or play with them on the beach. And no matter how strange it may seem, Maria remains sexually innocent. Even though she witnesses everything, or almost everything, that Copenhagen has to offer in the way of fornication, still she remains every bit as untouched and virginal as the day she was born, and this she achieves, quite simply, by keeping her distance. When Sofie yields to temptation and makes love with a victim on the bed in which, every night, the girls sleep arm in arm, curled up
like puppies, Maria sits on the floor staring vacantly into the darkness, the sounds of copulation arousing no feelings whatsoever in her. And it is the same story if Sofie brings home one of her beaux—an errand boy or a wrestler or a baker or a schoolboy; Maria vacates the bed and goes down to the courtyard to play hide-and-seek with the other children. She does not appear to have been shocked, not even when Sofie takes her with her to the rooms above the circus building and has intercourse, or something that passes for it, with all twenty-three stableboys one after the other. And while all this is going on, Maria sits in a corner playing with a little puppy, letting it pee on her police helmet while she babbles baby talk to it.
Eventually they also stop going to dance halls. There came a day when they were seen home by a man of property—what the French would call a rentier—who, having seen through their baby talk to precisely what they were, offered to let them live in his apartment, “with room and board and an allowance in return for your sleeping with me,” he told Sofie, “but we’ll have it put in writing—everything has to be in order.” The girls spent four months in this apartment, which was as big as a barn and dirty as a pigsty, and at the end of that time Sofie was so overwrought that a breakdown looked likely at any minute. It happened in the kitchen where, after having subjected her to certain particularly degrading variations on intercourse, their landlord had demanded that she eat with him. Now he is insisting that she sit before him, naked, while he eats, fully clothed. He is eating white bread; first he spreads it with a thick layer of butter, then he licks the knife; next he spreads it with liver pâté and licks the knife, then he adds a layer of vegetable salad and licks the knife—and then Sofie lunges at him. In the same moment, he has in his hand a little pistol, one he always carries because he has never trusted the girls for a second—or anyone else for that matter. Sofie opens her mouth and screams and, terror-stricken, he shoots her in the throat. Then he just stands there, not moving a muscle, as though he is working something out. He does not try to defend himself when Maria grabs hold of his collar and beats his head against the yellow kitchen tiles: once, and his nose breaks; twice, and his lip splits and several teeth shatter; three times, and his jaw cracks; and four times, and a good many more. Then Maria stammers something at Sofie and takes her in her arms and realizes that she is dead, that yet another person is gone from her, in a life that seems to her to consist of a long line of losses, one after another. Then she empties the cigar box in which the rentier keeps his money and clears out.
The police found her at the Marble Café, where she had been sitting for three days in a row, from morning till night, waiting for them to show up. Those three days had seen a change in her. Her stammer had become so bad that it was almost impossible for them to question her. They took her to the police station and sent for a policewoman. She had a long talk with Maria, after which she said that the girl seemed normal enough, but such a little slip of a thing that she could not possibly be fifteen, as she claimed. Once Maria had stammered out her name, they had unearthed all the vague reports in their files in which the Stutterer was mentioned, but the policewoman—who was regarded as an expert on children, and especially girls—rejected this material with a wave of her hand, saying, “There’s no way this puny girl could be that notorious gang leader—look at her, she couldn’t fight her way out of a paper bag.” And so it was concluded that she could not have beaten up the rentier, who had brought the charges that led to her arrest.
After keeping Maria at the police station for the two days it took before the search for Adonis Jensen was called off, they drove her to Annebjerg reform school in Odsherred, with the policewoman as escort. It was during this journey, through the barred window of the van, that she saw a big white car overtake them, and, for an instant, looked a handsome boy in uniform in the eye—though neither she nor he could have known that they were meant for each other. And by the word “meant” I mean nothing other than that the future will shape itself in such a way that they will, in many ways, turn out to be each other’s destiny.
For the first time, during this drive, Maria realized that she was actually on her way to a home for girls. She had thought, just as I did, that it was bound to be a reformatory and a prison and a sort of school, where brute force and ill-treatment and inhumane practices were the order of the day; where it would be discovered that she had never learned to read and write, and she would be punished; where she would plunge into a coal cellar of misery—and that she could not bear because since Sofie’s death she had grown soft and incoherent.
Her fears were borne out by the manner in which she was received. This home for girls faced onto Nykøbing Fjord, whose waters were black, windswept, and lit by a moon that seemed to Maria to be weeping, all alone in the heavens—and that such a sentimental thought should occur to her says something about how close she had come to the end of her tether. Silhouetted against the night sky, the actual building looked like a vampire’s castle, and Maria was left to wait, alone, in a cold, dark hallway, under a large painting so darkened by age that all that could be discerned of its subjects—men, all of them looking like demonic buccaneers—was the bloodshot eyes gleaming down upon her. After a while Miss Smeck—one of the home’s two headmistresses—appeared. In the dark she seemed tall and pale as a statue. She had been a missionary in China, and she treated Maria to a brief speech in which she described the time she sailed up the Yangtze River alone on a mission for the Society for the Eradication of the Rituals of Primitive Peoples; and how she had met the other headmistress, Miss Ströhm, who had taught her that in our lives, as in our dreams, we are totally and utterly alone. Thereafter she locked Maria—who had not understood one word of her speech—into a solitary-confinement cell in the attic; and there, beside herself with fear, Maria fell asleep.
In fact, this reception had been a trick, a ploy, from beginning to end. The home took thirty girls at a time, most of whom arrived foaming at the mouth like lions and fell into the same class as poor dead Sofie—believing that they had seen everything there was to see in this life and harboring no hopes. The two headmistresses thought it expedient to give these girls a shock before leaving them to wake up as Maria did the next day—to a morning as beautiful as Creation.
When she opened her eyes, the sun was shining in through the attic window, the birds were singing, and the distant sky was blue. She got out of bed to find that her door was no longer locked, and when she stepped into the corridor she was handed her uniform. She slipped, first, into this and then into her first day at the home, which was to be more or less like all the others, consisting as it did of ample meals and flag-raising and working in the orchard and the kitchen garden and the rose beds and games on the lawn and community singing and Miss Smeck’s accounts of her years in China.
From her very first day, time lost all meaning for Maria. She forgot how long she had been at the home; she barely remembered which day of the week it was; the future did not exist. Time counted only in terms of the number of days left until she had turned up first for flag-raising and for morning assembly so often that she would be presented with a silver “King’s mark” badge, a defiant symbol of Danish patriotism bearing the monogram of King Christian X. She spent three years at Annebjerg, and for nearly all that time she believed she would stay there forever. To her the home was a paradise over which the two headmistresses kept watch with an authority and love that have something to do with this being 1939 and not forty years earlier—the time from which all the ubiquitous rumors of reformatory callousness stem.
In many ways Annebjerg corresponds to that period’s dream—which is also our dream—of how to treat young girls who have wandered off the straight and narrow; who have sunk into the morass of the city and have neither father nor mother, but who have now been moved to the countryside and given blue blazers and white skirts and raspberries and cream under the acacia tree in the garden. These girls were taken for saltwater dips in the fjord; they weeded the rose beds and fed the twittering birds
and inhaled the scent of wheat and, in some way, rediscovered both their fathers and their mothers in the two headmistresses, thus being allowed to be just what most of them were: little girls.
There were only two things the two headmistresses dreaded. One was the outside world, which for them began where Annebjerg ended—down by the wicked highway, which only the two oldest and most trusted girls were allowed to go anywhere near, and then only if they had to weed or water the outlying rose beds. In these the two spinster ladies had ordered the planting of roses of the large pale-yellow variety, to make visitors aware that Annebjerg was a house of innocence. Ordinarily, these visitors amounted only to errand “boys” delivering milk and groceries to the home, and they were of the same age as the ladies—over fifty, that is. This was tied up with the other thing the two ladies dreaded: the other thing, the only other thing, of which they were afraid was the young girls’ sensuality, which they regarded as an illness on a par with tuberculosis. Not least among all the many functions they believed the house ought to fulfill was that of being a sort of sanatorium, where their little girls could recover from their attacks of sensuality. And to prevent any relapses, two different devices were employed. One was Miss Smeck’s missionary voice, the one in which she had kept time for the rowers going up the Yangtze; the one she now used to say to two girls who were sitting too close together, “What are you two doing, sitting rubbing up against each other like that?” This was a very effective device, if we then add that the two headmistresses were also present in the bathroom every morning, when the big girls washed the little ones; and that they made frequent, unheralded inspections of the dormitories. The other device was a strict curfew—the outside world was absolutely out of bounds. Very few of the girls had any home to go to, but even those who had were rarely given permission to leave Annebjerg. Trips beyond the grounds of the home were few and far between and usually took them to the beach or nearby spots of historical significance, which should, preferably, be deserted, with no other human beings in sight: ruined castles, for instance, or rune stones or ancient burial mounds, which Miss Smeck would use as a springboard for accounts of her time in the tropics, while Miss Ströhm, not unlike a nervous gundog, flitted back and forth along the fringes of their bevy of girls, keeping a sharp eye on the surrounding world, to ensure that it would not show its worst side by sending their way what they dreaded most of all: a man.
