by Peter Høeg
During the following days it was brought home to Carsten that he had grown older. On lingering exploratory tours of his childhood home—where everything was coated with a thick but transparent layer of memories—he discovered that it looked just as it had always done, and yet it had changed irrevocably. The villa was still large—it was huge—but still it was much smaller than he remembered; it was still pervaded by the scent of strange flowers, but that scent was no longer the same, because now it reminded him of wood shavings and coal-tar soap in the academy’s frothy communal bath.
What Carsten became aware of during these days was that phenomenon he had already sensed at Sorø, the same phenomenon that had kept him there for an extra week: the relentlessness of time. Anyone else might have seen the white villa in a different light, but Carsten was as he was, and what now confronted him—sighing and wailing, and yet silent and uneasy—was the traces of a bygone time and the pain of knowing that it will never come again, that it had gone, taking with it his childhood. And then and there he began to picture this childhood as a gentle, undulating boat ride across a sea of unconcern. This longing for an imaginary past was to remain with Carsten all his days, transforming, as time went on, into a pale, faint melancholy. The actual, searing pain lasted only for those first few days after his return from Sorø. Thereafter it was replaced by something else: by an odd sense of weightlessness. Although he did not know it, this sense was something Carsten shared with his classmates and with thousands of graduates throughout Denmark. During these very days they were making the discovery that they weighed nothing. They woke up on the morning after their commencement parties convinced that they were dying. They had tombstone hangovers and felt embalmed for eternity by alcohol, and yet they got out of bed, stood upright, their feet planted on the floor, and then it happened: they discovered that they were spry and nimble, not merely in good shape for mummies but alive and kicking and sort of—how shall I put it—free? It was as though there were no responsibilities and no one above them and nothing they had to do; it was as though, all of a sudden, they had grown up, just as one dreams of growing up—reaching out beyond all boundaries, out to freedom—and they were seized by a sense of freedom that pulled upward, in the opposite direction from gravity and parents.
And I am tempted to say that it also pulled in the opposite direction from reality, because this sense of freedom was, of course, nothing but a vacuum—a void, an air pocket, giving a short-lived illusion of floating. For Carsten this illusion was even shorter-lived—shorter than for most of his contemporaries. He seemed almost to be jumping on the spot, straight into the air—taking off, rising, hanging there for a moment, with elevation, and then falling. With so many different forces at work in Denmark in the 1940s, it would be absurd to refer to freedom as anything other than a tiny jump.
He landed in the conservatory, which had been built onto the villa during his absence, and as he entered this glass-walled room filled with flowers, the thought struck him that his mother had had to abase herself and submit to a fate worse than death for this room, and, just in the nick of time, he managed to fend off this thought before reliving, in his mind’s eye, the scenes he had witnessed as a child by peeping into Amalie’s bedroom through Carl Laurids’s spyholes.
Now, it may be that this was precisely why Amalie had arranged to meet him here—to call forth these memories; it may be that she wanted to get him into the right mood by reminding him of the past, since what she wanted to speak to him about was, of course, the future. This set in like some law of gravity that has, just for a moment, been suspended, because that is what Carsten’s future was like, like a law of nature, with room for the odd, minor deviation, but not for anything that could really alter its course. To be sure, it was presented as a choice. Amalie said, “I’m so happy to have my big boy home, it hasn’t been easy, being a woman on her own in the big city”—and here she gestured vaguely in the direction of the conservatory and Carsten’s images of what a woman alone in Copenhagen, Amalie, that is, must have to put up with. “But now it will be easier, just knowing you’re here, just being able to see you every day”—and here she stole a glance at him to see whether he had been entertaining any dreadful ideas of leaving home—“I feel so much easier, just knowing that there will be someone here—Mother’s own boy—to look after me if I should fall ill again,” she says. Carsten remains silent, acquiescent—and then it comes, what all of this has really been leading up to, when Amalie says, “Now, my dear, of course you know that, for centuries, there have always been three choices open to a boy from a good family wanting to make his way in the world: the Army, the Church, and the Civil Service.” Then she looks questioningly at Carsten, but there is no question, he has landed, he has come back down to earth.
He is going to study law, well, of course he is going to study law—and he will start, in a moment, but first there is just one other thing: even now, in July, now he has just left school, one thought has begun to gnaw at him—that he might risk wasting time.
There is something strange and disturbing about this idea of time being as tangible as the real coffee that Carsten could drink, the occupation notwithstanding, because Amalie numbered among her acquaintances a man who had access to everything. But not even that coffee could be wasted—no spills on the white embroidered tablecloth, thank you—but that is hardly as strange as the idea that time should not be wasted. It startles me, this idea—partly because, well, time isn’t a concrete entity, is it?—but mostly because this passionate interest in Carsten’s future does not really appear to be necessary. It does not seem possible to pinpoint any compelling reason for Amalie pushing Carsten and Carsten pushing himself—to study, and complete his studies, and become a great lawyer. It seems to me that Amalie had long since proved she could take care of herself. The villa had a new conservatory, and there were sacks of coffee in the attic, and smoked hams and racks of wine in the cellar, and no sign that she was likely to run short. Nor was there any ethical reason for Carsten to run like a horse at the racetrack. Without anyone but herself being aware of it, Amalie’s status has in fact been altered. She had maintained her coterie of Friends of the Family and had even expanded it. But she never went to bed with her clients now, or at least almost never. Slowly and imperceptibly she had used her power over men to make the path to her bedroom less and less accessible to them, until finally she closed it off altogether. But she had retained her influence; she had become a wise counselor and interlocutor and healing spirit and friend and philosopher—everything except what she had originally been, a shrewd whore.
She had kept up with her old friends—she still saw the stockbroker and the professor—and she had widened her circle by the addition of such celebrities as that controversial and thus risky acquaintance, the architect and journalist Poul Henningsen. And up until his death in 1942, Prime Minister Stauning would visit Amalie Mahogany to have a rest and to beg for one thing and another, and she denied him nothing apart from the one thing that she never, or almost never, gave to anyone at all now.
But all of this she kept from Carsten. She quite simply did not tell him. Instead she depicted her life as a journey through a vale of tears, and that is what is so strange. Because she is not the only one; at this point in time, Denmark is full of petits bourgeois brandishing whips and frantically chasing their children into the future so that they can have an education and amount to something, to something more than their parents.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I can understand some people having this dream and I think it makes good sense, where the parents are janitors or shoemakers or shipyard workers and can remember hunger and the thirties and the Old Days and stories of the cholera epidemics of the last century, and hence fear the coming of a new Depression; fear that the country and they themselves and their children will sink down into the kind of poverty that Adonis and Anna once knew in Christianshavn. But not everyone, not even the majority, is in that position; most of those who are wielding the whips are peopl
e who, in a sense, are comfortably off and have no trouble making ends meet, people whose minds ought to be so pleasantly free from worries about where the next meal is coming from that there should be room to think beyond a career in the Army or the Church or the Civil Service. But no—they do what Amalie does, more or less what Amalie does, and this I cannot quite understand.
Amalie knew, as only a mother can, how to appeal to Carsten, and this she did by speaking to his guilty conscience and his love for her and his fear of wasting time—and he was all ears. He applied for a student job with the Department of Statistics and was given it on the spot because, statistically, and in every other way, his marks in his final examination had been so exceptionally high, and because he made the sort of confidence-inspiring, orthodox, and at the same time personal impression that can be made only by someone who has from a very early age inhaled the Culture of the Danish Civil Servant.
He had to start work at 7:30 a.m. and finished at 4:00 p.m.—which meant that he could squeeze in yet another job, the day was not yet over, there was still time to roll up his sleeves and do a good job of work before attending night school classes at six o’clock in the city center. And here Carsten did something he knew he would never be able to tell his mother about: he took a job as a messenger. Now, that Amalie could never have lived with. She told Carsten what she had once told Carl Laurids, “It is not called going to work, we do not know what work is, it is called going to the office.”
And this is where his law studies start.
They began with the Filosofikum—the preliminary examination in basic philosophy that everyone wishing to study at Copenhagen University had to pass. The idea was that this course should provide an insight into the foundations of learning and the Eternal Truths upon which the teaching at Sorø Academy had also been based; and this insight was conveyed to the students—Carsten and a great many of his contemporaries, that is—through the study of formal logic and psychology and, first and foremost, Professor Dr. Harald Høffding’s splendid book History of Modern Philosophy. The most recent entries in this book dated from the previous century, thereby emphasizing the view that Carsten had brought with him from Sorø: that the past, and not least the nineteenth century, is better, significantly better, than the present. At the examination, questions were put to him by a professor who persisted in squashing imaginary moths on the desktop throughout, and he was given a question on “The Subconscious,” to which he gave the answer expected of him—neither more nor less than that the Subconscious is like an iceberg with a small section sticking up above the sea and the rest underneath. The professor then nodded benevolently and said, “Thank you, you can go, and be so kind as to close the door behind you, as quickly as you can, to prevent any more of these irritating insects getting in.”
As I said earlier, after commencement students were expected to be capable of discerning the foundations of learning—possibly only far off on the horizon, but intimated nevertheless—and this was also to hold true for Carsten. He thought he could see the law, albeit pretty far off, but looking like the Copenhagen Law Courts: solid, with touches of ancient Greece and Rome about it—and of something else, something that was both terrifying and indestructible—and all based on the eighteenth-century philosopher Montesquieu’s theory that the state is composed of the legislative, the executive, and the judicial bodies—this last, in Denmark, being the law courts, which are one hundred percent autonomous. Carsten considered this autonomy to be a most important concept. Of course, he knew very well that the judicial system was bound up with society, but at the same time he had the distinct feeling that it was above it. And even higher up, he felt, was jurisprudence, which bore some resemblance to mathematics and to Latin grammar and classical antiquity, inasmuch as it dealt with eternal truths; he felt, here at the beginning of his academic studies and later on, too, that lawyers, like mathematicians and philosophers, were—let’s not beat about the bush—higher beings, inhabiting a rarefied air in which one became exceptionally clear-sighted and farsighted.
The course of study was designed in such a way as to support this view. It was run by professors who were never seen. Some of the older students said they had once heard from still-older students that they had heard from even older students that once upon a time, in a far distant past, these professors had given lectures in almost empty auditoriums, working their way through dense jungles of legal detail only to discover eventually that there was no chance of ever getting through the syllabus, and that they had, several months back, lost the last of their audience. After that they had withdrawn from reality, away from tiresome, compulsory lecturing and into what Carsten imagined must be an elevated, academic silence, which they only broke in order to do what—guess, no, wrong, not to publish the results of their research: no interesting papers on Danish jurisprudence had been published since the previous century—but to publish bulky, expensive compulsory textbooks in which they conducted blood feuds against one another and by which they secured themselves a large and steady extra income.
And so a void had been created in the law faculty between the students—standing, or perhaps, rather, crawling, on terra firma—and the faculty professors who set the exams and determined the framework of a jurisprudence which Carsten envisaged as an aerial version of the city courthouse, but which, as far as I can see, was more like a sort of bubble that had cut itself adrift from society in the previous century or perhaps even back in the Middle Ages. Obviously, this void had to be filled, and the individuals who had taken on the task of building a stairway to the temple of justice were the private tutors. Even in those days, it was whispered of these individuals (who have long since become creatures of legend) that they were strange shoots on the law’s beautiful tree and to that I would have to say, you’re damned right they were. They were eternal students or former students or lawyers with ailing practices and shady pasts. They were all, each in his own way, a bit peculiar, reminding even the inordinately polite Carsten of exhibits at the Zoological Museum—in the vicinity of which, in the city center, around Store Kannike Lane, their classes were held. But they did have certain things in common, qualities which were not to be mocked and which would have looked good anywhere, even hung on a wall or preserved in alcohol: their incredible memories and their flair and their keenness to earn money. They knew the textbooks backwards, they could talk and talk and rattle off notes at a cracking pace, occasionally saying, “Turn the page,” because they knew that they had moved on to a new page in the textbook. Or they might ask a question along the lines of, “Where do the shutters go up in Civil Law?” and then go on to quote every instance in the thousands of clauses where shutters are put up. But it was not just that they had good memories; they also knew how to run a business, they were traders and hucksters who had rented space in cheap, privately owned premises, expected payment a month in advance, and neglected—with a judicial appreciation of income tax technicalities—to issue receipts. The fierce rivalry that existed among them had elbowed the most inept out into the gloom of the occupation, and those who were left were odd but talented teachers who always sent observers to exams and had a good feel for what would be handed down from on high and thus an almost prophetic talent for predicting exam questions.
One of these tutors—Tyge Lubanskij, who taught civil law—was to become a significant character in Carsten’s life. I do not think the relationship between these two men could be called a friendship; all of Carsten’s relationships with other people were marked by an innate distance and politeness, so it would be more correct to say that he and Lubanskij were acquaintances. This acquaintanceship—which also involved a third party—was struck up early on, during one of the first tutorials on the YWCA premises in Store Kannike Lane, amid the sunshine and sweltering heat of late summer. Seated right in front of Carsten is one of the few female law students, a girl whose hair is parted into two heavy, fair plaits, thus revealing the back of her neck, which is somewhat concave and very distracting. It reminds Carste
n of something and diverts his attention from the open book in front of him, in which he has had a bookbinder insert hundreds of blank pages now awaiting notes that are unforthcoming because he has noticed that the girl, although she cannot be said to turn around, occasionally sends him what at this time was known as a “sunbeam glance.” It is at this point, however, that Carsten actually hears Lubanskij’s voice for the first time. Now, there is no saying why this should happen right now, but it does, and the girl is forgotten as Carsten becomes captivated by the tutor’s penetrating voice and his brilliant command of the law and the flicker of madness with which, again and again during this lecture, Lubanskij ventured to the limits of legal thought. For the first time ever it occurred to Carsten that even the cleverest of men might not hold the answers to everything, and when the class was over he remained in his seat staring at the blackboard, which the tutor was wiping clean. Then he realized that his neighbor had also kept his seat and, turning, he recognized his former schoolmate the Boy from the Assembly Hall. Carsten stares long and hard at him, wanting to make sure that it really is he and looking for any marks of the awful venereal disease that rumor had once bestowed upon him. But the Boy seems to be healthy, in fine fettle, radiating an air of concentrated zeal, and Carsten feels an odd flutter of pleasure at being so close to this energetic little body and these provocative opinions with which he is as yet unfamiliar but of which he already has some inkling. Shortly after this, Lubanskij sits down beside the two boys and starts to tell them his anecdotes and stories from Copenhagen nightlife and of his contempt for the legal institutions, and somehow or other ersatz coffee and pastries appear (probably paid for by Carsten), and they talk on and on as the summer draws to a close and turns to autumn, then winter, then spring again. Later on, Carsten is to recall these conversations as one long, intoxicating stream of words.
