by Peter Høeg
Despite this strictness and the teachers’ delight in the odd little slap, school for Mads was, on the whole, reprisal-free, inasmuch as he proved to be a bit of a tightrope walker, able to balance on the very narrow path between what was forbidden on the one hand and what was also forbidden on the other hand; and this balancing act of his is reminiscent of his father’s. He was blessed with Carsten’s good manners and intelligence and diligence, and although it cannot be said, as it was of his father, that he was never late for school, I can at least vouch for the fact that he was almost never late; in all of his nine years at the school, with almost no exceptions, he was always on time for morning assembly, at which he sang loud and true in his clear child’s voice, gazed intently upon the great Free School man, educator, and headmaster Frede Bording with large, lustrous eyes, which had nothing to fear because Mads always did as he was told and what was expected of him. He soon learned to read and would read aloud in the sweetest of voices; he had delightful penmanship and a sweet temper; played with the other children without allowing himself to be lured into fights and without crossing the line drawn in red across the playground close to the gate; a line that said: This far and no farther. He was singled out for special mention at parents’ meetings, and twice—in the middle of a school year—he was moved up into a higher class that could do greater justice to his swift powers of comprehension and mature temperament. He was rewarded with little bags of fruit for his nice drawings, and pats on the back of his crew-cut head for his nice singing—and only the fact that he is fair-haired rather than dark and that there is nothing timid about him prevents him from being an exact replica of his father.
Madelene, on the other hand, turned up for her first day at school armed with a kind of contrariness that the teachers misunderstood and interpreted as lack of intelligence; and when they moved Mads up a grade, they moved Madelene down. From the very start, and for all of her time at the school, they viewed her defiance as one long incitement to push her under and to try to prevent her snorkel from breaking the surface. She learned to read and write, but only with reluctance and at a snail’s pace, and when the bell rang she had to be chased out into the playground against her will—only, then, to start a fight or lock herself into the toilets with four other girls or leave the school grounds, even though this was forbidden. All in all, during these years, Madelene seems possessed of a mulish hostility toward authority. Nevertheless, for the first few years, even the most slaphappy teachers, even the headmaster, Mr. Bording himself, hesitated to punish her, because she was a girl and Mads’s sister, and because her father was an influential and well-known man. But she was afforded this protection only until the day when, on one of her rambling expeditions in search of rules to break, she found her way down into the engineering access tunnels running far beneath the school and, once there, lit a fire, partly to disperse the darkness and partly because children and other underdogs have always dreamed of stealing fire from the gods. This then ignited the lagging around the water pipes. Madelene had to cut and run, to escape the poisonous fumes, and on ascending to ground level she was met by the fire department, the headmaster, and the heavy open-handed blows which, to the end of his days, he maintained had done no one any harm.
Thereafter the charmed circle around Madelene was broken. The teachers were convinced that she must be an exception to the golden Danish rule that all little girls of good family with long, curly hair are well behaved—so they let rip and swiped at Madelene whenever they had the chance, they dragged her up to the blackboard and through humiliating inquisitions for which they knew she was not prepared, and then slapped her in the side of her head and sent her back to her desk only to call her back for another couple of swipes—after all, isn’t prevention better than cure?
On winter mornings, Mr. Bording waited in the playground for latecomers, and there he and Madelene encountered each other time after time in the glare of the floodlight that played across the blue-white snow, as she came trotting up, having lost one mitten and left her bag on the bus—fifteen minutes late and still unmoved by the situation, unmoved by the headmaster and the Checkpoint Charlie atmosphere of the deserted playground; and looking just what she was, an underage Gypsy in the snow, taking beatings and detention and reprimands without displaying remorse or anger or anything at all except an air of let’s-just-get-this-over-with.
One could perhaps ask what it meant to this brother and sister to be treated so differently and to find themselves drifting apart, but I do not have the answer to that question. It does not seemed to have mattered greatly to them. During all of this and through everything that follows, they seem to have remained good friends—that is as close as I can come to it, and it may be that that is just what they were, good friends. There was never any suggestion of a particularly deep love between them; they never did realize the sixties dream of love between brothers and sisters, and one of the reasons for this was that from very early on, quickly and in different directions, they both ventured out into unruliness.
For the twins, the school was one of the last places where life was still ordered and predictable. At the school it went without saying that the things in life that really mattered were Christianity and the Danish Song Treasury—sparkling and gleaming in the pages of the Folk High School Songbook—and a culture redolent of the last century. And of course the children had to learn to sit still on their asses for nine years running at school, followed preferably by three years at senior secondary or preferably even longer; of course they had to be rendered knowledgeable and intelligent, and learn to sing on key and fill in the background in their drawings in art lessons; and if, like Madelene, they were disobedient, they should be given a whack in the head, after which they ought to be contrite and set to with renewed diligence and joy—for hadn’t Grundtvig said that the man has never lived who has not had something drummed into his big thick skull that he had no liking for to begin with, so you’d better like this, they told Madelene, because if you don’t we have ways of whetting your appetite.
Only very slowly did it dawn on the school and its teachers and their pupils that this attitude was gradually becoming somewhat antiquated, but there came a time when they began, albeit unwillingly, to see the light; there came a time when the real world began to seep in—because, when all is said and done, this red stone building by the Lakes was not Sorø Academy and this was not the forties but the sixties. And Mads’s answer to this dawning realization that the school was not the world, and that disorder awaited him on the outside, was to push himself to the limit.
He turned to sports, attacking them with manic intensity. First he took up handball and soccer, in both of which his game rapidly improved; but then, once he began to feel that the ball was like a piece of modeling clay that he could pull any which way and send spinning into the goal from the most ridiculous angles, he gave up these games and turned to fencing—because there one is alone and masked, facing one’s opponent who is also alone and masked, and by this time he was beginning to think that the problems life throws our way have to be solved alone. He became a brilliant foilsman, capable, though he was just a child, of presenting a threat to the adults in their own tournaments, with them thinking that they had this overconfident little boy in retreat, until suddenly there would be a parry and a riposte and smack, the light went on, it was touché to Mads, and they had lost to this babe in arms who was now, no doubt, going to get a big hug from Daddy and Mommy, who, they thought, must have come to hold his hand. But there they were wrong; Mads came alone, since at that point both of his parents were in the hospital and his home temporarily dissolved. The only constants in his life were the school and this sport, which he now gave up in order to concentrate on track and field, which he gave up to become a competitive gymnast, until he was lured away by mountaineering and skiing and wound up spending the holidays of his adolescence in places where the Alps take on the look of a gaping maw crammed with teeth—until, one morning on the North Face of the Eiger, he found t
hat he was tired of the wind and the altitude. So he came back home to find some new and incalculable project that would provide him with the illusion that if only he persevered in trying to solve this mystery, then he would, eventually, find the peace for which he was searching.
All of this was of course possible only because Carsten and Maria paid the bills. Beneath all the years of the twins’ unsettled childhood there hung a safety net, which sagged now and again when Carsten was admitted to the sanatorium and the house in the northern suburbs had to be sold off, but if one cannot pay cash one can always borrow, and so in fact there was always money, even for the craziest caprice. And so there was no great problem, either, when Madelene was kicked out of school.
This came about on the day that she hit back; when the school called the police, and she hit the policemen, too—hit them with a brick. Thereafter a meeting was called of the teachers’ council and the parents’ association, where all were reminded of how Madelene had almost burned down the school; and of the summer when, before anyone else, she had gone barefoot at school; and how she had eaten copper sulfate to learn something about chemistry and be registered as sick; and had come to school gaudily dressed and got drunk during school hours and smoked narcotic substances in the toilets and started coming and going as she pleased and unsettled her schoolmates by being photographed naked for an obscene weekly magazine, although she was only thirteen and thus needed her parents’ permission—which she had been given. “And that does not do the school any good either,” said the chairman of the teachers’ council, and went on to add, “We have hesitated to expel her before now, only because we trusted her parents and her brother, but now we have reached the end of our tether.” The next day he told Madelene, “Now you can pick up your bag and go around to all the teachers and thank them for the time you have spent here.” Madelene stared sullenly at him, left the school, and entered the first in a long string of private schools in and around Copenhagen which, over the next few years, she was accepted into and kicked out of, until Carsten and Maria gave up and tried boarding school instead. But the boarding schools could not cope either with her lack of respect for regulations of any kind whatsoever, and they had to ask her to leave, to be on the next train out of there and never show her face again. Finally even the educational authorities shrugged their shoulders and left her to go her own way, in a world where, for the first time in this account—and perhaps the first time in history—the future was not all mapped out and where there was no knowing what the next moment might bring.
The family provided the twins with their only gathering point. It was hard to say in advance where they would gather, since sometimes it was in the affluent surroundings of a villa in Ordrup or Klampenborg or Gentofte and sometimes in the house by the Lakes, and once, when they were all at a low ebb, it was in the fearful cold of a shack on the edge of Amager Common. A full complement was rare, since often Carsten would be missing, or Maria, or both of them—if Madelene was not wallowing around in some distant mire and if Carsten had not gone too far afield on some headstrong hobbyhorse. And sometimes there was more than a full complement because Maria, in an attack of compassion, had invited a dozen poor wretches home with her. But sometimes they were themselves again; sometimes the family really did gather together in a drawing room lit by oil lamps and candles, with Hans Wegner’s chairs and sofas designed by Børge Mogensen and a Golden Age painting that immersed the wall in a deep, sentimental landscape that cannot be dismissed as a romantic lie, any more than this family idyll can be dismissed. There actually were moments when they really did experience Hygge, that particular Danish blend of warmth and coziness and pleasurable feeling, moments when it became a reality. The twins’ lives and those of Carsten and Maria would be incomprehensible and improbable if we did not accept the existence of these evenings, where they are all in the one room with someone reading aloud and someone knitting and with some music from the record player that might be Mahler; or where they just sit looking at one another and the story ceases to rattle on and the room is pervaded by something I am not ashamed to identify as happiness. They truly are happy, and the peace and contentment of these moments fiercely contradicts the persistent rumors that this family had lost all meaning and that it was heading toward its own disintegration.
Sometimes, on such evenings, Amalie is also present, and it says something about the harmony of the moment that this old panther can warm herself alongside the little lambs, Maria and the twins. And Adonis and Ramses and the Princess also put in a brief appearance. Maria herself has found them; for some years they have been living like itinerant prophets, doing the rounds of the provincial fairs to proclaim the blessings of modern electronic technology, presenting slide shows and 16 mm films which avow that in America, only a few years from now, it will be possible to transport everything, almost everything, by television cables. Operating the equipment is Ramses, now an extremely old man, while Adonis performs wistful songs that say, who knows, perhaps we are all electronic signals in a beeping machine controlled by some inscrutable being, and our love no more than an electric whisper in an integrated circuit. And while he is singing and the slides keep changing, the Princess stares fixedly at some point beyond the heads of the spectators, who no longer know that she was once a circus princess and the most notorious female criminal of her day, or that she must by now be more than one hundred and fifty years old.
Maria also makes an attempt to find Christoffer Ludwig, Carsten’s grandfather, whom she has never met, and she actually does track down the apartment on Dannebrogs Street, and the door is open, but she is stopped by the books. By now these form a wall that has closed off the narrow corridors along which Amalie and Carsten found their way, many years before, to Christoffer, and no one is ever quite clear about what became of him and of Gumma and Amalie’s two sisters.
Of course, this peaceful family life was short-lived; before too long the picture would dissolve as Carsten got to his feet because he had some work to prepare and a moment later he could be heard pacing back and forth across the floor above as he presented his plea in a forthcoming case to the walls, saying, for how much longer is the Ministry of Agriculture going to abuse our patience; and Maria had an appointment with her psychiatrist; and Mads had to get up to do 150 push-ups and then retire to prepare himself mentally for the morrow’s 400-meter final; and Madelene had already left. Everyone had left—except Amalie, who sat on alone, deep in thought, because she had happened to pick up a newspaper only to have her eye caught by a picture, a fuzzy portrait of a South American dictatorship assembled around its President. Standing slightly in the background was a man she recognized, even though he was black-haired and sported a gaucho mustache and the features were obliterated by the coarse grain of the picture. There was no doubt, it was Carl Laurids, his eyes boring, with unremitting watchfulness, through the graininess and the filters and the differences of time and place and through Amalie’s pounding heart and out into the future.
At that moment Ramses and the Princess stepped back out into the hullabaloo of the world, back to extolling the virtues of technology and modern times. It was just a short step, because they walked out onto a highway and were run over by a truck, and as they were picking themselves up they were run over again by another truck; once more they tried to get to their feet and this time were run over by a vehicle that might have been a combine harvester, or one of the Army’s armored personnel carriers. And after standing quietly by the side of the road for a moment, Adonis turned and disappeared, because he had always found it hard to face up to the trials and tribulations of life.
Madelene, too, disappeared, at least for a while—for the time it took to have a hand in breaking into a pharmacy and then experimenting with the spoils and plunging into a chemical high from which she emerged much later with a charred taste in her mouth. This she tried to get rid of by allowing herself to be admitted to the hospital, until she grew tired of the mirrors in the locked ward—burnished steel plates with a
filmy surface in which she could not see her face—and discharged herself. Then she sank from view for a while, leaving no trace until she popped up as the representative of a political party which, like so many others, believed that the Welfare State was an evil conspiracy that had to be done away with; and to be better prepared for assisting in this execution she took off to a training camp in Lebanon, from which she returned with freckles and a sunburned nose and ten kilos of plastic explosive that could have wiped out anything and everything, but did not—because now she discovered her most abiding passion, instant gratification. Instant gratification, she told Mads and her parents, instant gratification is the sole enduring principle, she said, and though it sounded vague, it camouflaged an attempt to test the limits of love. These proved to extend a good long way: to men and then women and then children and finally a calf, a beautiful, newborn, dewy-eyed black-and-white calf that shit enormous cow pats all over the fifth-floor apartment in which it lived with Madelene, alongside the loose connections and the forgotten lump of explosive that lay sweating in the sun on the windowsill.
This apartment could be seen from the house by the Lakes, and from there Mads could glance across at it when he was visiting his parents—when they were not in the hospital or at work or living somewhere else or unavailable for some other reason. And he was to glance in the direction of Madelene’s apartment particularly often during the spell when he set himself up as his parents’ servant, wanting to heap coals of fire on his own head and to breathe some meaning into life. He looked after the house by the Lakes, dressed in striped livery and with a napkin over his arm, but this whim did not last long because, at the time that this one overtook him, Mads’s whims were following hard on one another’s heels. After leaving school he had entered the university, only to leave not long afterward because chess was taking up all his time, until that was supplanted by another course of study, and then a third—this last being succeeded by Mads’s apprenticing himself to a joiner. This he gave up in order to study philosophy, and that, in turn, he gave up to write a mathematical thesis, and that, too, he gave up to move back in with his parents in the house by the Lakes, and be, for a little while, a pale and worn-out butler who really only relaxed when all the family was gathered together—and even then only for short spells because it dispersed so quickly.
