by Peter Høeg
The majority of the girls preferred this kind of life; it would be inappropriate and wrong to feel outraged and think: Those poor girls, what a pity there weren’t any boys. The belief that keeping the two sexes apart can do great and irreparable damage belongs to a later date; it was not generally accepted in 1939, and certainly not among the girls at Annebjerg, whose experiences with men had been so unpleasant that they much preferred to be protected.
For Maria Jensen, life during these years could not have been better. She became the headmistresses’ favorite and was in every respect a model pupil. On her very first morning she had handed over her police helmet. She had still had been carrying it when she arrived at Annebjerg because, with the Copenhagen Police Department having long since gone over to new uniforms, Maria’s helmet was regarded as an antique; and since it never occurred to anyone that this fragile, weeping girl-child had once bashed in a colleague’s face in order to get said helmet, she was allowed to keep it. At Annebjerg she gave it to Miss Ströhm, who hung it on a hook in her office, and there it remained, because Maria forgot all about it and never thought of asking for it back. Instead she let her fair hair grow and acquired rosy cheeks and suntanned feet and dazzlingly blue eyes; in every way resembling the headmistresses’ dream—and ours—of a little girl who has been lost and has now been saved. Her voice, when she said grace and morning and evening prayers, was full of conviction—as it was when, at the headmistresses’ request, she led the community singing. After a few days at Annebjerg she had begun to prattle like a preschool child, and now and again she would coyly pretend that she could not speak properly. All in all, it seemed that at Annebjerg—which contained almost everything the tenement in Christianshavn had lacked—Maria relived the childhood she had never had, because Anna had been searching for her childhood instead of looking after her daughter.
Twice a month, the girls entertained one another. These entertainments were held by candlelight, after they had had tea and cake and sung, accompanied by Miss Smeck on the guitar. They danced cotillions, and the minuet from the play Elverhøj, and Maria sang “Tahiti is paradise on earth, hm hm”—a song that went down just as well with her fully dressed in the large drawing room at Annebjerg as it had done with her naked in the cow barns of Vesterbro. Strangely enough, Adonis Jensen was often onstage—far from Annebjerg—on these selfsame evenings; and as the applause swelled around Maria, she was infected by the same stage fever that Adonis was experiencing at that very moment. At such times she felt she was in some way linked to her father. These evenings were the only times she ever thought of her family—or rather, of Adonis—but then she felt so close to him that she could have spoken to him, if she had wanted to.
These evenings were also the only times at Annebjerg that it was considered acceptable and quite in order for the girls to touch one another, that they were actually encouraged to do so—when it came to ballroom dancing. Maria normally took the man’s part, and it was on these evenings that she received her first premonition that things could go wrong.
When I talked to Maria about her time at Annebjerg, she did not speak about premonitions; she stressed what a happy time it had been and how kind everyone had been to each other, and only after a while, once she was well into her story, did she suddenly mention these disturbing details—as, for instance, with those evenings when she sang and danced the man’s part and thought about her father, and when the notion struck her that she was missing something. These feelings of want were few and far between, and when, presently, I mention them in context, it must be remembered that they cropped up as tiny incidents in the happy flow of Maria’s time at Annebjerg: of winter in the warmth of the tiled stoves with spice cakes and snowball fights, of spring and summer rich in roses and sea bathing, and a golden, wistful autumn that tasted of apples. During this time Maria reaches the age of sixteen, then seventeen, then eighteen, and even though she has, in due course, been given a room of her own and three silver badges; even though she is now entrusted with pruning the yellow roses near the road and still prattles like a toddler and now knows Miss Smeck’s anecdotes by heart and would thus seem to have become a part of Annebjerg, still, when all’s said and done, she really is a big girl now.
And then the electrician appears on the scene. He turns up on a day in March—a bitterly cold day but a spring day nonetheless. He is a young man, and young men are not in the habit of visiting Annebjerg—even the police officers and child welfare officers who bring the girls are elderly men, because that is what the headmistresses have stipulated. Nevertheless, this electrician is young, because Annebjerg has not had electricity for very long and the headmistresses have therefore not been able to come to their usual arrangement with his company. In other words, Miss Smeck has not been able to call it, as she usually does, and say, “We would prefer you to send a woman, but if you send a man, then he must be a family man and over fifty years old, otherwise we cannot do business. Now I’ll leave you to think about that. Thank you and goodbye.” Then she would hang up knowing full well that she would get her way.
But the electrical wiring is new, its failure comes as a surprise, and it is the slightly less consistent Miss Ströhm who makes the call; which is why, now, a young man in blue coveralls cycles up to the home. He does not report to anyone, he does not make for the office to check on anything—if he had done, he could have been stopped. Instead he parks his bike, takes his toolbox, and goes straight down to the basement to change the blown fuse—that being all that is wrong. He lights the little paraffin lamp he has brought and sits down in front of the main switch—and then he notices the girls.
They are all around him in the darkness, and they do not make a sound. That is what is wrong; that is what makes this moment magical and terrifying for the young man. He knows girls who giggle and girls who shout and girls who turn away in disdain, but never before has he come across girls such as these, who stare without blinking. The girls, too, find the situation surprising; if they hadn’t, they would have acted in a more normal fashion—by running away, or passing some sly remark or looking at the ground—but they have followed him down into the basement and suddenly they are very close to him, closer to a man than they have been in a long time.
I do not know how long this moment lasted. Maria is at the very front, closest to him, and to her it seems like a long time—but not nearly so long as it does to the electrician. All at once he has the impression that these eyes are staring at him in a very hungry way, and suddenly, up from the depths of his consciousness, wells the nightmare of his sex: of Valkyries and Amazons and shield-maidens and women who have been without men for a long while and so must, he thinks, be wild with hunger for my body. Then he feels the cold sweat of fear beading under his blue coveralls and, with a gesture taken from another dream—the Westerns at the movie theater in Nykøbing (double bill, Saturday afternoons)—he drops his tools, blows out the paraffin lamp, fights his way through the darkness, stumbles out to his bicycle, and weaves off down the driveway, pursued by the imagined howling of wolves.
Back in the darkness, the girls sit on, unable to make head or tail of this. For a moment there is silence, and then they start to giggle—all except Maria. She is still thinking about the electrician.
Then comes the soldier.
It is a day in May, one in a never-ending string of bright, humming, warm spring days at Annebjerg, and Maria is watering the roses next to the highway. She has been entrusted with this job because the headmistresses now have complete confidence in her and because she has been at Annebjerg so long that she should be armed against exactly what happens next, which is that a soldier comes walking down the road. His gait is unsteady because he is just about dislocating his neck in his efforts to drink in Maria’s suntanned legs and sun-bleached hair and capable hands and roguish blue eyes, and so on and so forth. For his part, he is fair-haired and blue-eyed and broad-shouldered, dressed in tight white trousers and blue regimental shirt. He is a Marine, looks as though he can hold hi
s own, and in every way resembles the Danish dream of the charming soldier.
But he is German. That may make no difference to Maria—later on, she barely remembered it—but it registered with me: this soldier is German, and it is the first indication Maria receives that, at this point, Denmark has been occupied by Germany for more than a year.
In this instance there is no time to think, no gazing at each other wondering this, that, or the other. What happens is that Maria leaves the watering can where it is and falls into step behind the soldier; then, once they have been walking like this for a while, smiling at nothing in particular, she moves up alongside him. But by then Annebjerg is out of sight; by then they have walked right through Nykøbing and out the other side.
While they are disappearing down the road, without Maria’s ever once turning around, I find myself wondering why she did it; why did she run away, instead of staying at Annebjerg, where she was happy? I mean: both then and later it is obvious that Maria’s dreams of happiness all deal with a life like the one she led at Annebjerg; with a regular sense of security and regular meals and singing and dancing twice a month. So what is it that makes her follow the soldier, in spite of all that?
It would be simple if the answer really were a longing for love. But that answer is too simple; besides which, it does not fit with the actual events. Shortly after her running away—later that same day—Maria and the soldier are sitting on the back of a flatbed truck; he tries to hold her hand but she pulls it away; he tries to kiss her and she turns her ripe red lips away; and then he thinks, this little buttercup, this Snuggiputzilein, is obviously asking for the direct approach. So he tries to unbutton her uniform blouse, and before he knows it, he is sprawling in the roadway; before he knows it, he has been ditched, he has gone overboard, and sees the truck disappearing into the distance. So if it was love that Maria was after, then it was certainly not love at any price.
Left alone on the back of the truck, she started to regret the unaccountable impulse that had prompted her to follow the soldier, and that very afternoon she did try to get back to Annebjerg. By this time she had had three years of feeling like a little girl; that is how she looked and how she behaved; no one would have taken Maria Jensen for anything but that. And it was this girlishness that was to lure two lusty farmhands into making a big mistake. They were sitting on a load of hay, alongside Maria, and this load of hay was being drawn by that rarity: a tractor heading in the right direction, away from the setting sun and home to Annebjerg. The two hands had tacitly and cheerfully conspired to rape Maria, all for her bonny blue eyes, and when one of them grabbed hold of her arm and pulled off her skirt, it was the first time in a very, very long while that Maria had been subjected to violence. She reacted instinctively by relaxing and letting things drift, but at the same time her innards contracted into a knot and, for the first time in a very long while, her eyes took on a glazed expression that would have served as a warning to children and adults in Christianshavn. And with that she drifted away from the security of Annebjerg and into the dream of a girl who can take care of herself. As the man forced one of his legs between hers she drove one knee into his crotch, then she put her thumbs to his eyes—which were wide open with astonishment—and pressed. He rolled off her without a sound. She stood up and stepped into the center of the swaying load of hay, and there she took on the other man, who had brown-stained plug-tobacco teeth and a wicked-looking hard-on jutting out of his open fly. A pitchfork had been stuck in the hay and this Maria hauled out. The man circled warily around her. It had dawned on him that he was up against an unusual opponent, but he did not know how unusual and so he miscalculated. Maria feinted a lunge and he was knocked off balance, giving Maria the chance to bend down, pull his trousers down around his ankles, and jump clear before his long, flailing arms could get to her. Now his movements were restricted. The next time Maria feigned an assault he lost his balance altogether, and when, at that same moment, Maria took a menacing step toward him, he toppled backwards and sailed out into space. Aware that the first man had staggered back onto his feet, Maria then pirouetted around and hammered the pitchfork against his chest. The blow sent him flying off the cart. Later, she thanked the friendly tractor driver for the lift and told him that the two hands had jumped off back down the road. The man noticed that her voice seemed to have deepened and that a faraway look had come into her eyes. Maria simply thought that there was no reason to go back to the home, and that she felt like having a look around among all these country bumpkins and that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to be afraid of. Then she starts walking along the highway, toward the sunset and Sorø.
* * *
By this time, Carsten has been at Sorø Academy for two years, and even though it is tempting to get straight to the crux of the matter and describe his first meeting with Maria, that is not how history is written; that would mean succumbing to the temptation to which love will always give rise—and I will not have that laid at my door. So we will have to start with Carsten’s reception at Sorø, two years earlier, on August 15, 1939. On that day, he lined up with all the other academy pupils—in class order, under the supervision of an inspector—before being allowed into the assembly hall. There he stands, along with the other new pupils, shaking in his shoes with apprehension, beneath a coffered ceiling painted with distant stars and with the portraits of former headmasters gazing austerely down upon them from the walls. Here, the headmaster delivers a speech from a raised lectern. This speech is obviously aimed at the new boys, the new little counts and sons of diplomats and customs inspectors and pastors and company directors and sawmill owners and office managers, and in some cases—Carsten’s, for example—of widows. He speaks to the sons of all these people, who do not know one another but who have this in common: that they are bursting with ambition on their children’s behalf, and so have had the choice of sending them to Herlufsholm or the Metropolitan School or Sankt Jørgen’s Gymnasium or Sorø Academy—and have chosen the academy because this place is shrouded in the spirit of history.
And it is this very spirit that the headmaster now touches upon in his speech, which he embarks upon after the singing (accompanied by the music teacher on the piano) of one of Ingemann’s lovely hymns, set to music by the composer Heise, who was once a music teacher at the academy; and after the headmaster has—among the mass of crew-cut heads and boyish faces that he does not normally see very clearly—located Carsten’s. He recognizes him almost immediately, because Carsten has his mother’s eyes, and those eyes are still glowing in the old Latinist’s soul. He flings out a hand in one of those gestures that derive from his being a kind of a god, and from the fact that he is backed up by a cultural tradition that he and the rest of the teaching staff do not believe has altered in three hundred years; one that will, in all probability, last forever—with a few small changes along the way perhaps, but in effect forever. Then he says to the crowd of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys, “Gentlemen, I would like to welcome you to this school. I say ‘Gentlemen’ because, as members of this academy, you are expected to act like gentlemen. You will soon fit in here, if you are at all suited to boarding-school life, and the first thing you will learn is that from now on, no one is going to hold your hand, you will have to fend for yourselves, pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps; if anyone gives you advice you must accept it as a gift, deserving of gratitude.” His eye falls on Carsten, and for a moment he is silent, thinking of Amalie; then he continues: “You can win respect through personal proficiency in the classroom and on the playing field, but, gentlemen, should it be noted that you are flaunting this proficiency, you will discover it will do you no good. Critical as your schoolfellows are, any humbug will soon be exposed, and everyone will come to occupy the position determined by his personal worth; you will grow to love this place, this playground of your boyhood and youth; you will grow to love having such a picturesque setting for your daily routine: this historic site, with Bishop Absalon’s church and its gr
aves; these fine examples of Danish architecture, dating back to the first half of the nineteenth century; these venerable old trees whose age, in the childish imagination, becomes much greater than it actually is.” And here the headmaster again falls silent, overwhelmed by memories of his own youth at the school, a time he always recalls with particular vividness at just such moments as this, when he is welcoming a new intake of students. Finally he continues: “There is boarding-school life itself, cradled on its fundamental affinity with this, the academy—an affinity made all the stronger by the fact that your lives here will be so different, and not without a certain harshness, in the face of which it is so easy to seek comfort and balance in the countryside spread at your feet, a countryside so gentle, so charming, that it seems made to be loved. But what makes this academy quite special, what makes it so utterly splendid and unique and unparalleled in Denmark, is its inner life; it is the spiritual continuity, an uninterrupted line stretching from Bishop Absalon, via Christian IV and Frederik III and Holberg and Heise and Hauch and Ørsted and Ingemann, right up to the present”—and here the headmaster waves an arm in the direction of the teaching staff.
