The History of Danish Dreams

by Peter Høeg

  The Boy turns out to be a Communist—well, of course he is a Communist—Carsten realizes, to his delight, that the Boy will always push as far out as it is possible to go. But that is not the whole story, that is only the beginning, and in no time he has also told them that he is a freedom fighter and a member of the resistance. With childlike eagerness he shows Carsten and Lubanskij his false identity cards and illegal newssheets and his stolen German Parabellum, so heavy that he has to use both hands to raise it and so big that it looks as though he has a nasty growth under his Icelandic sweater. And of course Lubanskij is not to be outdone; he, too, explores the limits and tells them, contemptuously, about the absent law professors and the legal collaborators and of life as a lawyer—which may be tough and dirty, he says, but it’s realistic. At some point he also tells them how, in ’41 and ’43, the Minister of Justice, Thune Jacobsen, and the head of the Supreme Court, Troels G. Jørgensen, helped the Germans with the unconstitutional arrest of three to four hundred Communists, thus demonstrating that insignificant as the Danish police force might be, it can still carry out a piece of high-quality European workmanship, and Lubanskij says this with a sarcastic little smile, implying that of course this is unspeakably sordid, but that’s life.

  Carsten never forgot this story; through everything else that was said, through Lubanskij’s cheery cynicism, this event sticks in his mind. One of the reasons for this may perhaps be that Lubanskij mentions Louis von Kohl, whom Carsten remembers as one of the men who visited Carl Laurids before he disappeared. At any rate, this story sows the first seeds of doubt in Carsten’s mind concerning eternal justice and the Supreme Court and middle-class values; in some way this tale links up with his lonely days at Sorø Academy after commencement and gives rise to a vague, inexplicable feeling of disappointment.

  During these evening and nocturnal discussions—after the tutorials, in the blacked-out city center—Carsten always sits between the other two. On one side of him is the Boy, all fired up with enthusiasm for Stalin and the millennium and world Communism and Russia’s battle with the Nazis, as he condemns the policy of collaboration and the King and the collaborators. And on the other side of the table Lubanskij is agreeing with him, it’s immoral, damned if it isn’t, but it’s also a realistic picture of life, and what do you say to some coffee and pastries? Carsten never says anything at these meetings, he listens and listens but makes no direct contribution to the conversation—because he has nothing to say. The real world referred to by the Boy and Lubanskij is one he knows of from these meetings and these meetings only. The rest of his life is taken up by work at the Department of Statistics and his messenger job and civil law and meals with Mother and the deep sleep of oblivion. Nor does he feel any need to say anything; he is bewitched by these two impressive individuals, their knowledge, their points of view, their ardor and idealism and cynicism, and at the same time he is overwhelmed by a sense of how little he himself does and is and knows. He feels like some kind of insect, sitting out there in the darkness, seeing the light of the other two burning brightly but without the strength even to flutter anywhere near the lamp. During this time, which seems so short but which must have lasted for a couple of years, Lubanskij and the Boy were his ideals, just as his father and mother and Mr. Raaschou-Nielsen had been; the only difference being that these two lads in the YWCA rooms are tempters of a sort, whose stories and viewpoints seem to call to him and lead him close to limits he would rather not reach.

  During these years, Carsten’s relationships with other people are relationships with role models, since that is how he has been raised. He has been taught to take his cue from ideals. If Amalie had had her way, Carsten’s world would now consist of that handful of people one looks up to—the geniuses—and the many who are to be despised and feared—laborers or tobacconists or those who do nothing at all. But Carsten’s world is not quite so simple. Amalie has not had her way in all things and he cherishes some dreams of tenderness for which she would not have cared—one of which concerns the girl on Sorø Lake, who is neither an ideal nor someone to despise but something else again, something indefinable that is now drawing closer.

  One day the Boy did not turn up for a tutorial. He had never been absent before. He did not come the next day either, or the next again, so a search was conducted and a number of telephone calls made; then his parents turned up at a tutorial, red-eyed from weeping, to ask if anyone knew anything—but he was nowhere to be found, until Carsten happened to remember the name on one of his false identity cards. And then they found him, or, rather, the girl with the plaits found him. She went from hospital to hospital, repeating the name Carsten remembered, until she came to the Nyelands Street first-aid station, where she was told that the Boy had been buried the day before. Thereafter she walked back into town in a kind of trance, walked up to the classroom, and interrupted the lesson to tell them that the Boy was dead.

  It had happened during a liquidation attempt on an informer. The plan had been for the Boy to ring the doorbell and then blast the informer when he opened the door. That would have been the standard method, the sure method, but of course the Boy did not take the direct route; instead he had to make a quick detour around the edge of the abyss, walking up and down outside the informer’s apartment, parading his audacity and his semiautomatic the size of a pumpkin and his belief in world Communism—until the informer opened his window, took leisurely aim, and shot him stone cold dead. The girl’s lips, telling all this, were framed by a set white face that revealed how even she, who had never exchanged one word with the Boy but had for two years kept her back to him, was deeply affected by the influence exerted by people who truly believe in something, who burn for a cause—for their own sakes and for ours. Having unburdened herself by speaking to these people, to whom she had never spoken before but whose hearts she felt must also have been touched by the Boy, she broke down, and then the class broke up. Lubanskij fought his way through the confusion and the sudden sense of fellowship to Carsten’s desk and began to speak, softly and feverishly, about living and dying and religion and this life—which was hard but just; and even though Carsten felt dizzy, as if from loss of blood, still, at some point, Lubanskij’s voice got through to him as it had done so many times before, and it dawned on him that the man before him, this brilliant teacher and tutor and expert on civil law, was in the throes of some kind of breakdown. Sitting there, blubbering, he described, in a manner that was both penitent and gloating, how he had misused his clients’ funds, and why shouldn’t I, he said, I mean it’s all there in the bankbooks, after all, and of course it’s not right, but that’s the way of the world.

  At this point Carsten had to leave. He walked down Store Kannike Lane and through the city center and past the brick shells protecting the monuments, and out and in among bicycles and producer-gas cars and sudden shouts and scattered bursts of firing while his brain whirled like a centrifuge, trying to absorb the fact of the Boy’s death and Lubanskij’s confessions. It is late June 1944, the sun is shining, people around Carsten snarl like animals, the big general strike is just in the offing—but Carsten notices none of this because he has retreated into himself, managing both to be lost in thought and to keep on walking with no idea of where he is going. It would be wrong to say that he is thinking; I would say, rather, that he is looking for something—and I suppose that what he is looking for would best be described as a higher order. To Carsten the Boy’s death, Lubanskij’s confessions, their afternoon discussions, those last days at Sorø, and—even further back—Carl Laurids’s disappearance are all pointing in the same direction: toward a dreadful suspicion that law and order are no longer to be relied upon. Carsten is not looking for religion, or for King and Country—this is 1944, after all—no, he is looking for something else, for Good Middle-Class Common Sense, for the deeply rooted Danish faith that all—or almost all—men want the same things: law and order and a steady job and respect for the Spirit of the People and the Eternal Truths. Carsten does
not picture anyone’s having to initiate these values; it is rather as though he imagines them manifesting spontaneously, as though they ought to crystallize when enlightened people are gathered together—enlightened people like Lubanskij and the Boy, who have let him down this very day by dying a meaningless death and by making meaningless confessions. The thought reduces Carsten to tears, and as he walks, weeping in the June sunshine, across the Town Hall Square—which looks like a bomb crater, because it has been dug up for the building of new air-raid shelters—he becomes, for me, a symbol of how difficult it is to be a good little citizen in Copenhagen in the middle of the twentieth century.

  Not until he had actually entered Tivoli did it dawn on him where he was—but his presence there was no accident, and he, too, was aware of that. There was something about the Old Garden’s neatness and its lovely buildings and the lake and Lumbye’s music that reminded him of his home and of Sorø Academy and of the order he sought. As he walked along the gravel paths and evening fell, he let his loneliness wash over him. He passed the glass hall where young people—clearly not weighed down, as he was, by Weltschmerz—were dancing the jitterbug, and then he gave vent to his tears and to that well-known, that Danish, that standard why-does-nobody-like-me feeling. When my soul is so beautiful, embracing an ocean, he said to himself, and—speaking of oceans—he found himself down by the lake, thus calling attention, all unwittingly, to the strange fact that so many significant events in his life are played out near water. Because as he walks past the tearoom, with its terrace jutting out into the lake like a little peninsula, there she is.

  She was far away, surrounded by mist and protected by a bodyguard of men in blue coveralls, open-necked shirts, rolled-up sleeves, and tattooed forearms, and, to begin with, Carsten just stood there, stock-still. It was the girl from Sorø Lake, she was a long way off, and this time he had no boat and he was sober and unhappy and the men around her are starting to take notice of him, and they are workers, they are obviously workers, he should just keep walking, nobody likes him anyway, the chances he has never had have long been wasted, he might as well slop off with his inner sea. And having thought it through this far, he sets off toward her. He bumps into lampposts designed by Amalie’s friend Poul Henningsen, stumbles down the marble steps, gets in the way of waiters who spill ersatz gateau and glasses of wartime fruit wine over him, steps on a hundred outstretched, ladylike insteps, and totters through a biblical hail of curses. All in all, he goes through hell and high water before he finds himself standing in front of those Dietrich legs. Behind him, the restaurant is in an uproar; disaster approaches, yelling fit to burst; a storm is brewing—but he does not budge, because he knows that he has a grip on something, and that if order and rationality are anywhere to be found in this life, then they have something to do with this girl. So he salutes the tattooed gallants and the waiters and the screaming ladies with a courtesy and firmness completely lacking in condescension or fear or anything at all except a tremendous determination to make a date with this girl. And this he does. “Tomorrow, about the same time, same place, pal,” says the girl. Then the waiters are on him and Carsten is sent flying through the doors to float homeward through la bella notte, drunk with happiness.

  And it is this happiness that brings me to mention this episode here, since there were few truly happy nights in Carsten’s life during these years—and so it ought to be mentioned. But even though Carsten thought, that night, that he had reached the end of the rainbow, it turned out to be nothing but a cobweb of hopes and dreams; and these were blown away the next morning when a series of bombs exploded in Tivoli, flattening the glass hall and the roller coaster and the concert hall—complete with several of Lumbye’s original scores—and catapulting a blazing grand piano across the lake and down into the tearoom, sending it up in flames along with Carsten’s hopes. From the windows of the Department of Statistics he saw the smoke and heard the explosions and gave up any idea of going down there, since obviously you cannot meet a girl in a cordoned-off ruin. Besides which he did not dare, and besides which she’ll never turn up, he thought, but there he was wrong. Maria would meet anyone, anywhere, if it suited her, and she wanted to meet the handsome boy with the center part and the desperate eyes; so she jumped over the barriers and waited in vain for Carsten in the still-smoldering burned-out shell of the tearoom. It was midnight before she gave up and vanished into the dark city.

  * * *

  Not counting that time when the two cars drew level on Roskilde Road, Carsten and Maria have now met twice, and there will of course be a third meeting, something which they themselves never wondered at but which does surprise me. After all, who would believe that this historic romance could resemble all those folktale romances in which everything comes in threes. And who would believe that the opportunity for this third meeting would present itself, when such a meeting must, at any rate from a statistical point of view, have seemed unlikely, now that Carsten—who no longer had the Boy or the Girl from Sorø Lake to call to him from way out there, where reality begins—had stuck his head in the sand, buried himself in his books, and worked his way to safety through his studies and on Strand Drive and at the Department of Statistics. He no longer raised his head when Lubanskij paraded his wry wit just for him, having woken up to the fact that the tutor was a mermaid whose song, now woeful, now triumphant, lured one into whirlpools and unlawfulness and death and mutilation and love wasted and the smoke from the blaze fed by Lumbye’s scores. The only memory Carsten retained of the last year of occupation was of the clause-infested terrain of his studies. He spent his days in a kind of invisible tunnel which he carried with him wherever he went and which he could, at any time, draw his head into. He rose in the mornings and went to work at the Department of Statistics; blind to everything, he rode his messenger bike past bonfires in Isted Street, through battles between agitators and the private security guards and past the news of the invasion; then he went to tutorials and covered his blank inserted pages with meticulous notes; and after that he went home to bed, with nothing to show for the day but a small bouquet of legal curiosities.

  I started out with the notion that the occupation must have been a significant time both for Carsten and for Danish Dreams; and again and again in my conversations with Carsten I have tried to find out what he remembered, until, eventually, I have had to accept, resign myself to, and admit that, for Carsten, the occupation was no more or less than a few scattered observations that left no lasting impression—not even of the Liberation, of Friday, May 4, when he had a tutorial in the late afternoon as usual. When the newscaster on the radio announced that Germany had capitulated, Lubanskij was expounding a particularly tortuous legal case involving a man who let his dog out by lowering it to the street from the fifth floor in a basket. While the noise outside swelled and the streets filled with people, Lubanskij explained that if this man were to do the same thing with his neighbor’s dog and if that dog were then to jump out at the third floor and be mashed to a pulp, then this man would be held responsible. Shots were fired into the air outside and most of the students had left the room, but the tutor talked on, even when only Carsten was left. At one point, outside, a streetcar went past the windows: a streetcar that the crowd had derailed and was now pulling along Store Kannike Lane—but these two, Lubanskij and Carsten, could not see the streetcar for fragmentary points of Roman law, even though Maria was sitting on its roof. She saw Carsten, but Carsten did not see her, and the next instant she had been pulled on down the street and Carsten understood perfectly what diligentiam quam in suis rebus meant but had no idea that Denmark was free, or at least to some extent free; nor that the love of his life had ridden past outside the window on the roof of a streetcar.

  In June, Carsten graduated as a bachelor of law—magna cum laude, a dream of a degree, awarded on only a very few occasions this century: before Carsten, to a couple of walking legal encyclopedias—now professors—and, some years after Carsten, to a jovial if rather reserved b
oy by the name of Mogens Glistrup.

  Amalie was not on hand to congratulate her son. Paralyzed with fright at the thought that he might be awarded anything less than the very best degree, she had, for the first time in her life, got drunk on a full bottle of sweet Madeira from the century before, and had then locked herself away in her bedroom, where she had drawn the drapes, climbed into bed fully clothed, and pulled the quilt over her head. But still she could not rest—not even in the darkness and her sticky, cloying drunken stupor—when ahead of her all she could see was the disgrace and the humiliation if her little pet should let her down by only getting a first-class degree.

  But of course Carsten did not let her down. Quietly, and without any exultation, his upbringing and his years at the academy and his university studies and his mother’s hopes for him reached their culmination on the actual day of his final examination, when it was proved that he knew his four thousand closely written inserted pages of notes absolutely by heart and, furthermore, that he was possessed of a rare breadth of legal vision and that all these demonstrations of diligence and innate brilliance went hand in hand with a most proper respect for and academic humility toward his professors. At critical moments, when these soap-bubble balloon captains—who had descended from their remote medieval heights to set exams based on textbooks they themselves had written—began to feel that the toothy smile of the boy facing them was just a little too wide and that his view of the subject matter was just a little too lighthearted, then, just like that, Carsten could capitulate, bow his head, draw in his horns, and the appropriate beads of anxious sweat would break out on the bridge of his nose, convincing the two professors that the voice they heard—his, Carsten’s—came to them from the dust and the depths of humility and altogether from far, far, far beneath them—and so, naturally, he graduated magna cum laude.