by Peter Høeg
He did not go straight home after the exam. He felt like a bottle that had been uncorked and is now bubbling over. Now, it might be considered only natural for Carsten to savor this champagne feeling in the company of his friends or at any rate with other newly fledged graduates, but that was not Carsten’s way. Just as in the days after his commencement, this free, floating sensation was something private that he wished to experience alone—filling him, as it did, with inner turmoil. And so, on this his big day, he wended his way through Copenhagen, growing more and more confused, thanks to the sort of postwar anarchy that reigned in the city—with an Englishwomen’s drum corps marching through the streets and a hundred thousand workers demonstrating outside the Parliament buildings at Christiansborg Palace for a forty-hour workweek —forty hours, thought Carsten, hurrying away, forty hours!—when he has been working seventy, no, more like eighty or ninety hours a week. Not that it makes him mad, he simply does not understand it; just as he cannot comprehend the rioting, or the dancing in the Town Hall Square, which he passes a little later—dancing that has lasted from the Liberation until now with no interruptions other than those arising from the occasional police baton charge, one of which happened to occur just as Carsten was passing, forcing him to sidestep the fleeing crowds and all the police officers, our very own boys in blue, who had been away, interned in German concentration camps, and thus in the good books for a year or two, but who were now back, with their shiny buttons and the batons that Carsten just managed to avoid by making for Frederiksberg.
It was evening, almost night, when he arrived at Lorry, that celebrated restaurant complete with private party rooms—and there he ran into a party which was being held by his fellow students and to which he had been invited. He had declined this invitation, fearing that it would be just exactly the kind of party it turned out to be—with a jazz band and hordes of people shouting at the tops of their voices and silent couples collapsing onto tables and chairs and benches and hedges, reminding him that he was all, all alone.
Of course, this was a party for well-bred children from top-drawer families, with (to begin with) drinking in moderation and nice young men in light-colored sweaters and sports jackets who said, “May I kiss you?” and who still, even after five or seven years at the university, had difficulty with brassiere fastenings. But for some reason, the gathering also included another sort of element. No doubt this had something to do with the Liberation and this spring’s short-lived sense of love for our fellowmen, because the party also included workers in oversized suits and factory girls with beads in their hair. And at one point one of these girls stepped up onto the stage and sang a song about far-off Polynesia. It was Maria Jensen.
Later on, she and Carsten danced together. It was the first time in his life that he had ever danced; at school dances he had always managed to glue himself to the wall and stick there, even though there had always been girls tugging in the opposite direction. Now, however, he did not care; now he let go and yielded to Maria, who led him onto the dance floor, and there he discovered that there was no problem, that his body seemed moved by one long, effortless memory of always having danced. Then they clambered over the fence into Frederiksberg Gardens. Behind them the sounds of the party grew muffled and the distant racket of the police assaults on the dancing in the square faded away and the city lights grew more faint. They walked along the gravel paths, past the whispering trees and the filmy patches that Carsten recognized as the ghosts of Danish writers who had wept, in Frederiksberg Gardens, the Danish writers’ lament that says, “Why can’t I have more mistresses? Why can’t I have more money?” But on this night even the ghosts were silent, perhaps on account of Maria’s straightforward way of unhitching the moorings of a little boat and pushing off, so that she and Carsten glided out onto the glittering water. They did not do anything, they merely sat gazing into each other’s eyes until Maria knelt down in the boat, removed his jacket, and pulled down his suspenders. When she unbuttoned his fly Carsten said, “I would like to point out that I am, if I may say so, a classic sexual neurotic.”
He delivered this monstrous remark not without a certain pride, but Maria ignored him and placed her hands on his penis. She eyed it carefully, as though its rigid whiteness afforded her some glimpse of the future, and then she took it in her mouth.
* * *
Maria had arrived in Copenhagen the previous winter, and she had arrived on skis. Until then she had been at Annebjerg. After her meeting with Carsten on Sorø Lake she had made her way back to the home, meek as a lamb. She had been hugged and forgiven; her fair hair had been brushed and her blue eyes had wept, and in an attempt to explain her inexplicable disappearance the two headmistresses had decided that there must be something wrong with her metabolism. So they fattened her up on stout and double cream and then had her operated on for Graves’ disease at Nykøbing County Hospital. After that everyone calmed down; after that the dust settled; and the couple of months when Maria had been away could be referred to as that time when you were ill and had to have an operation. Then all sense of time took off and floated away beneath white fluffy clouds and across yellow wheat fields and roses in the sunshine, and life in the country, where, the occupation notwithstanding, there was butter and cream aplenty. And there Maria looked after the little ones and sang and danced the man’s part in the minuet from Elverhøj and resumed her place as the meek and mild little Danish girl, a happy girl, a proper little gem, and the apple of the headmistresses’ eyes, for a period which must have lasted about four years and which came to an end one Christmas Eve.
It was a Christmas Eve with glazed turkey, golden-brown candied potatoes, a Christmas tree as big as a house, and Miss Smeck’s legendary tales of a Chinese Christmas in a heat that beggared belief; there were little presents for all the girls and later there was candy. Then Maria was taken aside and handed a long, cylindrical paper parcel, and in the parcel was a pair of skis. This is a classic scene: the poor little orphan girl being given a pair of skis by the two good headmistresses; it is moving—even I find it moving. And it might be hard to understand, nowadays—when Christmas is all about spending money we do not have on things we do not need to impress people we do not like—but it was different in those days, at any rate at Annebjerg, where Maria is now crying fit to burst and the headmistresses are also reduced to tears. They were grand skis, made of ash, and they and the headmistresses seemed to be saying to Maria, “You will stay here at Annebjerg forever, you have a mission, you have survived life in the outside world and the viral attacks of sensuality, and now you must stay here and help the weak.” Not that this was said in so many words, but it seemed somehow to hang in the air as Maria donned her outdoor things, because she could not wait to try out her skis. On her way out, almost as an afterthought, she lifted her police helmet—everyone had forgotten whose it was—from the hook on the back of the headmistresses’ office door and put it on, just to keep her head warm.
Outside, it is cold and silent and white with snow—a star-bright, moonlit night. Maria steps out into the snow and she has never skied before, so Christ knows it’s anything but elegant, but she makes headway, she heads away, and soon Annebjerg is nothing but a distant point on the horizon—snow-white even though it is the middle of the night. Maria does not turn around, and she never returns.
She skied all the way to Copenhagen, but don’t ask me how she managed it or why she ran away. All I can say is that there are these two sides to Maria’s character. She is capable of playing the Little Match Girl and her mother’s dream of the perfect daughter for years, but now and again something goes wrong and then the other side appears, her eyes take on a glassy look, she dons her police helmet, lashes out like a prizefighter, and is capable of leaving all she has in this life to shuffle on skis from Nykøbing, Sjœlland, to Copenhagen one hallowed Christmas Eve.
In Copenhagen she became a factory girl. She stayed with friends around and about in the city and in boardinghouses and in single-room occupan
cies—though she never spent more than a few weeks in any one place—and she worked in the Danish Cotton Mills and at Boel and Rasmussen’s chemicals plant and Dumex Pharmaceuticals and in various chocolate factories and at Latichinsky and Son’s soap works, and at an unaccountably large number of other places. The story of the Danish factory girl in the 1940s has not yet been written, and it would be going too far to tell it here, but Maria’s experiences were anything but trivial. She spent these years in a sandstorm of asbestos and in vaporous clouds of grinding oil and alongside conveyor belts where pregnant women struggled to stretch beyond their eight-months-gone stomachs to pack ersatz coffee, or where young girls painting phosphorescent radium fluid onto watch hands kept licking their brushes to keep a point on them, and were eaten up by stomach cancer before they could become engaged—if, that is, they had not been fired for refusing to stick their backsides out far enough for a pinch when the president inspected his troops.
But no one messed with Maria. During these years she switched jobs every bit as often as she switched her lodgings; whenever she thought a place was starting to smell ugly or the work was too exhausting or too boring or too sordid, she rapped her bosses over the knuckles, demanded her wages, grabbed her coat, and left. And the next day she would start all over again somewhere else. Or she might take a break, during which she would live on next to nothing. She was by no means a dedicated factory girl. Being dedicated and class-conscious and a member of a trade union requires a certain peace of mind, it requires one to stay in one place and get a grip and hang on and believe that this will be worthwhile—but that was not Maria’s way. For us, looking back on it, identifying the labor movement and its history is easy enough, but as far as Maria was concerned there were only good or bad girlfriends, honest men or rogues, an endless succession of workplaces, and the tough, illusion-free egoism that enclosed her like a shell until she met Carsten.
It was not long before this that she had her first affair—with a Russian who had been liberated from a German concentration camp and whom she met at a performance of Russian music and dance in the Copenhagen Sports Club hall. She had gone along because she found the emaciated foreigners attractive and because they excited her curiosity—and perhaps also because they aroused her sympathy. At this show she met a disabled Asian who danced on the stumps of his shot-off legs. He was also missing an arm, and for the few weeks that he spent in Copenhagen he was her lover. Then he and the other refugees disappeared, leaving a chink in her armor and a wild song, heavy with homesickness, in an incomprehensible language.
And then she met Carsten.
On the day after their boat trip in Frederiksberg Gardens he had to report to the draft board, and there he was assigned to the Supply Corps. At first it looked as though his military service might present a problem for him and Maria, but as it turned out, it did not. Because naturally Carsten was first in his class at drill school, which meant that he could choose where he would be stationed, and he chose Copenhagen’s own old Citadel so that he could come home every evening. Nor did he have any problem with his bracing stint of basic training at Høvelte Barracks, because he came home on weekends and because he had not knuckled under as he had feared he might. On the contrary, like more or less all the other conscripts, he found himself enjoying the exercise and the hearty outdoor life and the shared hate of the NCOs and the bluff camaraderie that constitutes the most common of all Danish army buddy dreams: the dream of our common obligation to do our bit for that needless, that stupid, that in all respects absurd military service, which I personally have cheated my way out of by feigning an injured knee but which in Carsten and Maria’s case in fact presented no problem.
Their problem was Amalie Mahogany, Carsten’s mother.
Initially, Carsten did not tell his mother about Maria, and that, I suppose, was quite natural, since he was not sure that the affair would last. But even when it did prove to stand the test of time, he did not say anything, let’s just wait a week or two, or a month or two, he thought, let me just finish my military service—and this he did, but still he said nothing. Obviously, he underwent certain minor changes, but she’ll never notice, he thought, it can be put down to army life and having a law degree; but as time went on, he began to suffer. He grew thinner and paler, dark circles appeared under his eyes, he slept badly, and, worst of all, he caught himself answering back to his mother and at times all but breaking out of his polished decorum to snap at everyone around him, in a fever of exasperation brought on because he and Maria had not as yet spent a whole night together. He had returned home from their first lovers’ tryst in Frederiksberg Gardens before dawn, knowing, as he did, that Amalie would be lying wide awake under the quilts waiting for him and for his examination result, and thereafter he had continued to go home each night, preferably not later than midnight, because Amalie would be lying awake and he was all she had.
Of course, love will always find a way and a time, being not solely a nocturnal pursuit, so—in keeping with Maria’s nomadic existence—the two young people learned a great deal about venetian blinds and keyholes and which sofas creaked and which did not, but it was not the same as being able to stay together all night long. In time, the sleeplessness and the strain began to tell, and then Carsten told his mother.
By then his affair with Maria had been going on for some years and Amalie had known about it all along—of course she had known about it, but she was waging a war she believed she could win by dint of exceedingly long-term planning, and hence she had waited patiently for this moment. She listened to Carsten’s rambling hints and then she said, in a voice that laid a sugar coating over prussic acid and icy polar winds, “But we must invite her to dinner—oh, do let’s invite her to dinner.”
Now, it might be thought that Amalie would have chosen to meet Maria alone—it would surely have been only natural to keep it to just the three of them, she and Carsten and Maria—but no, instead she chose to call upon a phalanx of intellects; she wheeled out the heavy artillery.
This dinner had been planned for two years: seating plan, menu, choice of wine, everything. She said nothing to Carsten, simply telling him to say to Maria that it would be an informal little get-together, and so Maria turned up, in all good faith, with neatly brushed hair, a freshly ironed summer dress, and a little posy of flowers, for what turned out to be Amalie Mahogany’s grandest parade to date. There were flambeaux lining the driveway and gleaming cars and twenty-four guests, including the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Johannes V. Jensen (and his wife); that great authoress Baroness Blixen (unaccompanied); Prime Minister Hedtoft, the man who had—reluctantly, but with a little smile—maneuvered Denmark into NATO; Professor Rubow, a professor of literature and one of Amalie’s Friends of the Family; and Professor Niels Bohr, who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize—no, I beg your pardon: the Nobel Prize in Physics—and nigh on a score of other guests with this in common: that each of them, just like the Baroness and Jensen, considered that he or she was the only truly intelligent person at this party—which every one of them was convinced was being held just for his or her benefit. This evening, however, they are actually all puppets in a masque directed by Amalie, a drama that is one of the most regularly staged productions in Danish history, entitled The Mother-in-Law’s Pulverization of the Undesirable Daughter-in-Law.
Dinner was served in the new conservatory extension, which boasted sixteen green marble pillars and doors of Brazilian rosewood with ivory door handles—all purchased with the money Carsten had earned during his university years in the belief that, by so doing, he was saving his mother from a life of prostitution. Amalie had given Maria Professor Rubow as her dinner partner, and the great scholar talked and talked, leaving Maria, who knew no one except Carsten, isolated amid a sea of French quotations and blasé witticisms, until Amalie presented her. With a wave of her hand she reduced everyone to silence, even the Baroness, and in this charged hush she introduced Maria and forced her to address this gathering of beaux
esprits, thus revealing that she spoke the language of the Christianshavn tenements mixed with a bit of Zealand dialect from Annebjerg and that she was, in fact, a little rambling rose, a lily from the gutter. She was then permitted to sit, until Amalie asked for her comments on the food—how was the saumon, would you care for some more saddle of veal, what do you think of this Sauternes?—until Maria’s stammer became so pronounced that she could not get a reply out.
Carsten held his tongue throughout the meal. Naturally, he wished he could have done something, he wished he could have risen to his feet and pounded on the table, but it was this very table—with its Royal Copenhagen Flora Danica service and crystal glasses and the invisible barbed-wire fences erected by table manners and an age-old dread—that kept him firmly in his seat, while the Baroness told him of a story she was working on, about a dinner that raised its guests up into a new sphere of freedom.
Over coffee and brandy, Amalie stood up and said to Maria, “I understand from my son that you sing, so I have persuaded my friend, the great writer Jacob Paludan, who is a connoisseur and lover of music, to accompany you.” And it seemed now as though Amalie had indeed crushed Maria, because she stood up and walked stiff-legged past the guests and over to the grand piano, to Paludan and the prospect of the vast room. Maria had turned up at this party as a young girl, a nice little shrinking violet, prepared to make a good impression, but now something happened to her; it was as though her eyes swam out of focus, and then she stared in Amalie’s direction and said, hoarsely, but with her stammer more or less under control, “I’ve heard about y-y-you, Amalie, they t-t-talk about y-y-you at Latichinsky and Son’s when they’re wrapping the perfumed soaps, and they say you’re the biggest whore in C-C-Copenhagen.” And with this, Maria stalked out of the room, although she did turn back just for a moment, in the doorway, to meet Carsten’s gaze. He had risen half out of his chair and for a moment he stayed suspended in midair, in a sort of no-man’s-land, or as though he were a piece of scrap iron caught between two magnets. But then, with a jerk, he is on his feet, strides over to Maria, and fulfills all our expectations of how, if things are to turn out as they should, sooner or later a boy has to leave his father and mother and follow his love.
