Havoc

by Havoc (retail) (epub)

  And then, in the silence that followed, Steffensen without rhyme or reason bellowed it out a third time: “Are they lies that I’m telling you?” It was stupid and brutish, like an outlet for ill will and pent-up nerves—a performance that had no place in a room with civilized company.

  “Mother! Mother!” Oluf cried out, moving as close to Johanne as he could. Then he began to cry.

  “Damn it! It’s hard to treat you like a human being,” snarled Sanders, tossing his fork on the table in disgust.

  Oluf screamed again.

  Johanne got up quickly, lifted the boy out of his chair, and carried him into the kitchen. “Now there, now there—” they heard her say while the youngster whimpered.

  But Steffensen only laughed uproariously, as if he might have been an ogre standing by himself at the top of a cliff and hurling rocks over the precipice for his own amusement—a reckless, beastly, and dangerous form of amusement that no one else could understand.

  “It’s a pity about the boy,” Sanders said bitterly.

  “It’s a pity for all mankind,” droned Steffensen with a Strindbergian note of sarcasm. Once more he burst out laughing.

  But Jastrau only leaned over the table and seemed to be listening to what was going on in the kitchen.

  “Hadn’t we better have another Carlsberg?” he asked, reaching down toward the floor where the bottles stood.

  “Yes, you’re a real judge of human nature,” said Steffensen with a grin. He grasped the bottle greedily and poured the beer into his glass so fast that it foamed up and ran over onto the tablecloth.

  “I’m making the coffee because it’s time for me to leave,” Johanne announced from the kitchen.

  “Yes, my wife has to go out to Frederiksberg to see her parents,” Jastrau explained. “By the way, she’s going to stay there tonight, and I guess that’s just as well.”

  Sanders smiled incredulously, and Steffensen raised his glass and muttered, “Skål! His outbursts always had a strange mixture of inarticulateness and double meaning about them.

  “What do you say we go into the living room and have our coffee? Then we can chat a little and smoke before I have to go over to the paper.”

  Jastrau got up, and Sanders politely said thanks for the dinner.

  In the living room they drew the curtains and turned on the lights. In a moment Fru Johanne came with the coffee. She was the same bustling, self-assured housewife that she had been before. She excused herself in the most matter-of-fact fashion for having to leave, and then departed without a trace of animosity. And when, a moment later, they heard the front door close and Johanne’s and Oluf’s footsteps receding down the staircase, Jastrau went to fetch another bottle of port. He had to have one more glass before going over to Dagbladet.

  3

  THREE hours had elapsed.

  During this period Jastrau had been sitting in his office at Dagbladet, an office he shared with the paper’s music critic and two of its illustrious gossip columnists. Tonight, however, he had been able to work in peace. None of his co-workers had shown up to disturb him. The room was off in a corner and a story above the editorial offices where the political writers, the reporters, the cable editor, and the editor-in-chief and the copy editor worked.

  Thus left alone, he had been able to surround himself with darkness. He had turned off the ceiling light. The three other desks with their bright, shellacked surfaces had not been able to distract him. The sight of the three empty armchairs had not increased his feeling of not belonging in the place—a feeling he always had to fight against. And then it had occurred—that intimate contact between the gleam of the desk lamp and the gleam of the white copy paper. A small, radiant cosmos had been created, the brilliance of which had had a hypnotic effect on him, and once more he had succeeded in writing one of those critical articles that seemed to indicate a greater talent than he actually possessed, and that in particular showed a self-discipline of which he was not master—a discipline that he owed solely to the way the paper seemed to stare at him with pupilless, omnipotent eyes.

  The glistening white heaven of a sheet of writing paper.

  Now he was finally finished with his review of H. C. Stefani’s book, Wherefore Hast Thou Forsaken Me?, and he leaned back in his chair. Once more he picked up the paper and read the article through to test the flow of the words. What he really wanted to do was read it aloud. But no—to sit there all alone in the room and engage in a monologue, that he was ashamed to do. Better to mutter the words under his breath, but carefully, to make sure the style would bear scrutiny.

  At last he got up and turned off his desk lamp so that the entire room was dark.

  But through the windows, which the evening rain had stippled with long dotted lines, came the flickering lights from the wet square below. They cast a reflection on the ceiling, a restless, animated shimmering like that of an aurora borealis, a blending of the soft glow from the streetcars’ colored lamps and the sharp beams of automobile headlights. The windowpanes emitted a dark luster mixed with a hint of light to the raindrops, and silhouetted against their smooth surface, in reverse, were the letters that spelled DAGBLADET. In the daytime the letters were white; at night they were dark. Only the “A” and the “T” were legible. A puzzling name. You could not read it quickly, but you never tired of trying to do so. Here, however, was a place where he could sit in the darkness and leisurely stuff his pipe. Should he go home now, home to rejoin the other two? His glance fell on a streetcar down in the street. He saw its dark wet roof glide by; it looked like a barge. But he did not want to go home. The Communists had requisitioned his apartment. And then to be ridiculed—ridiculed by those two youngsters! It was enough to make him furious. But take it easy, he told himself. A barge on a river. What was it anyway that happened to a person when he stood looking at a ship or the traffic gliding by? It was like a caress, like having someone reassuringly stroke your back. So take it easy now, Jastrau, take it easy.

  Suddenly from over in the darkness came a knocking at the door. Jastrau hurried over and turned on a floor lamp. He was not, in any event, going to be taken by surprise while engaged in sentimental reverie.

  “Come in.”

  The door opened slowly, and a tall man wearing a smart light-gray overcoat stepped in, raising his derby hat in an affected greeting.

  “Good evening, sir.”

  It was Arne Vuldum, the man of letters and assistant librarian, who was renowned for not having opened a single volume of Danish fiction for the last five years. He wrote the paper’s column on foreign literature.

  As he stood there attired in faultless elegance, he looked like Dante’s most inconceivable paradox—a depraved virgin. It was his mouth, which had such a meager, barren look. But his red hair, which hung in a glossy metallic mass over the left side of his forehead, had an impressive sheen to it, as provoking as sunlight on water, and beneath this strange lighting effect shone a pair of gray, undependable eyes. After being with him, one could never remember for very long how they had looked.

  “Good evening, Vuldum,” Jastrau replied with an evasive politeness.

  “I’m not disturbing you, am I?” asked Vuldum, letting himself sink with an affected air of weariness into the sofa that blocked the sliding-door passage into Dagbladet’s lecture hall.

  “What’s troubling you? Money?” asked Jastrau in a tone of ill-natured sympathy.

  “No, my dear fellow,” sighed Vuldum, carefully placing on the least cluttered of the desks the derby, which the newspapermen had dubbed “St. Peter’s dome” because of his interest in Catholicism. “No, I’m suffering from something worse—syntactical troubles. I’ve just been up in the composing room, reading the proofs of my article again.”

  “It’s strange that it hasn’t been printed yet.”

  Vuldum smiled bitterly.

  “The proofreaders are also quivering with indignation over the paper’s negligence on that score. They’re really worked up—frantic. You see, I drop
in every night and make some changes.”

  “Oh, you’re too finicky.”

  “No, Ole, but I’ve lost my mind,” Vuldum said in all seriousness, removing the indispensable cigarette from his mouth. “And I’ve gotten that way from writing in Danish. Just think how difficult it is to express anything precisely in our language. It doesn’t consist of anything except barbaric bits and fragments that reflect our materialistic culture. It’s completely impossible—like American English.”

  He stared into space, and Jastrau thought he detected the symptoms of a personality in dissolution. The gray eyes seemed fixed on a boundless horizon.

  “But how are things with you, Ole, my friend?” Vuldum asked suddenly, pulling himself together. His cordiality was exaggerated. It might easily have been mistaken for irony.

  “Well, I’ve just finished my review of Stefani’s book.”

  Vuldum sat up attentively. The gray eyes came closer, as if Vuldum wanted to study his expression. But when Jastrau returned his gaze, they shifted and came to rest on his necktie. And there they remained.

  Jastrau felt as if he were being strangled.

  “It would interest me to know what you had to say about his religious aspirin,” Vuldum said softly.

  “Aspirin?”

  “Yes. You know he’s licensed as a pharmacist in Aarhus.”

  “Well, the lucky fool!” Jastrau exclaimed, swiveling around in his chair. Then he added, “There’s always somebody who knows how to make a go of things.”

  “Didn’t you know?” Vuldum sounded surprised. “You’ll never be a real journalist. You have no private life of your own, and you don’t know anything about anyone else’s. But now let me have the pleasure of listening to your review of St. Stefani.”

  “Well, all right.” Jastrau reached for the sheets on his desk and turned his back toward the floor lamp so that the light, coming over his shoulder, fell on the review. The tone of his voice was even and mild, but it would have required only a slight nuance to transform it into one of savagery.

  As he sat there in the twilight, Vuldum made a nervous gesture with his large white hands, unconsciously tapping an unlighted cigarette against his palm, a gesture that became more and more subdued as he became absorbed in Jastrau’s train of thought.

  Jastrau began reading: “Since Herr H. C. Stefani has ventured to offer the opinion that Jesus Christ so thoroughly assumed the attributes of a mortal man that he not only let himself be carried away by fear of death—as when he exclaimed on the cross, ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’—but also was not above manifesting the taint of original sin—as when in a fit of nervous rage he not only permitted himself to invoke a curse on the fig tree but drove the money changers out of the temple with a whip—why, then, has Herr Stefani not carried his conclusion further? Why has he not paid more attention to the psychological tensions inherent in the paradoxical concept of a being at once divine and human that is the most puzzling thing about the character of Jesus and assumed that Jesus now and then might conceivably have been aroused by the sight of a beautiful woman?”

  “There is something attractive about Christianity, even though a person is so unfortunate as to have no religion himself,” interrupted Vuldum, drawling his words. Jastrau raised his head and smiled; he recognized the attempt to imitate Editor Iversen’s manner of speaking. Vuldum went on: “And I can’t understand why you, Jastrau, can’t refrain from baiting the clergy. It’s no longer fashionable, you know.” Vuldum stroked his upper lip and spat into the wastebasket, which fortunately stood close to the sofa.

  “As a matter of fact, there are many good among the clergy,” he continued, still imitating the chief.

  “Do you really think he’ll take it that way?” Jastrau asked with a trace of excitement.

  “Who can tell?” replied Vuldum, smiling maliciously and resuming his own manner of speech. “Anyhow, Stefani deserves it. There is nothing that nibs me the wrong way so much as these modern interpretations of Jesus. They are a reflection of the democratic need to get on terms of intimacy with the Divinity, and they won’t stop until they’ve managed to catch their God in flagrante. Incidentally, you’ve hinted at that very well.”

  “Do you think I’ll get in trouble for it?”

  Vuldum’s glance rested on him for a fleeting moment. “After all, you’re not under censorship here on this old, free-thinking paper,” he replied, making light of the question.

  “No, I don’t mean that.”

  “What then?”

  “Well, you know what I mean. Someone calls on the telephone—an anonymous subscriber calls up the old man to tell him what he thinks of his filthy newspaper. Then for a couple of weeks he greets me with a blank look whenever I run into him.”

  “Is that so?” asked Vuldum, again imitating Editor Iversen.

  “Or an anonymous letter comes in the mail. Or, worse yet, a couple of subscription cancellations.”

  “Really? Do you mean it?” Vuldum inquired in the same lackadaisical tone of voice.

  “And then the glass bell closes down over me and the air is pumped out. You can’t preserve your personal opinions in a vacuum, you know.”

  “No, my dear Jastrau,” Vuldum continued without altering his tone, “that I really didn’t know. That’s really big news. Have we had anything about it in the paper?”

  Jastrau smiled and mulishly went on talking. He had to get it off his chest.

  “Everything is run so leniently—and so brutally—up here. You watch your step, and then—”

  “Watch your step? Yes, hee hee, I can remember one time in Rangoon—” Still the mimicked accents of the widely traveled editor.

  Now Jastrau felt his thoughts congealing, as if he were about to become ill-tempered. Why should he sit there and make a confession? Vuldum was only toying with him, teasing him, imitating Editor Iversen. So he broke it off, and in a firm, monotonous voice concluded the reading of his article:

  “By his lack of consistency, H. C. Stefani has in our opinion succeeded only in belittling the Saviour’s character. From a psychological point of view, therefore, his book may well be stamped as blasphemy.”

  “That will make Stefani happy,” exulted Vuldum. “Ha! Vengeance awaits him! And he has a son who wants to be a poet. That’s what you might call the Lord’s punishment. He’ll be stricken for his iniquities. But how he does deserve it!”

  “A son? I don’t know him.”

  “No, you don’t keep up with things—as I remarked before. But like all the other old radicals, whether they’re religious or not, he has a son who’s a Communist, and who detests his father. Yes—vengeance awaits him.” The gloating Vuldum raised a clenched fist.

  “Stefani—a Communist named Stefani?”

  “No, as a Marxist form of protest against his father, the idiot calls himself Steffensen. Stefan Steffensen—it sounds like a proletarian marching song. Can’t you hear it?”

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” exclaimed Jastrau, letting the papers fall on the desk. “Then he’s the one who with Sanders is sitting and waiting at my apartment.” And now he understood. The telephone conversation. Yes, Stefani was certainly looking out for himself. He really would like to write the review himself. A trace of a smile crossed Jastrau’s face, then disappeared.

  “Well, I declare—do you associate with such people?” Vuldum asked in a tone of disdain. “I’m surprised.”

  “I don’t associate with them. Otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  Vuldum’s eyes lit up. “So that’s it—you’ve no place to go.” There was a moment’s pause. “Then you must do me the honor of letting me buy you a drink.”

  Vuldum rose and extended his hand with an air of exaggerated hospitality.

  “But only one—I can’t afford more. It’s so seldom that you run across a married man away from home in the evening.”

  Suddenly he laid a hand uneasily on Jastrau’s shoulder.

  “But what about your wife? You don�
�t mean to say—”

  “She’s with her parents.”

  “Well, thank God for that! Otherwise I’d be terribly concerned. You can’t just let your womenfolk be subjected to any kind of company.”

  Jastrau cast a sidelong glance at him. Was he being sarcastic? No, the weary, harried face was serious, the lips tightly drawn.

  “It doesn’t pay to have anything to do with that sort, let me tell you. What prompted those two gentlemen to pay you a visit?”

  “Oh, nothing of any importance,” replied Jastrau.

  “All right—it’s not that I’m being curious. But now why don’t you run up to the composing room with your article, and then we’ll go over to Des Artistes. I just have to phone Father Garhammer to break an appointment, then I’ll be ready.”

  Jastrau quickly took out his fountain pen and wrote some instructions for the printer in a top corner of the numbered sheets. “Book page,” he noted, “10 pt. leaded.” For the headline, “The Man Jesus,” he indicated “Cheltenham 24 pt.” Then he gathered up the sheets and went out in the hallway to get the elevator. Vuldum had already gone to the telephone to ask the operator, in an amorous voice, for the number of the Catholic church.

  When Jastrau came back, Vuldum had finished his call.

  “So now perhaps we can go,” he said.

  “Yes,” Jastrau answered, crumpling up the sheets of his rough draft and tossing them into the wastebasket.

  They went out together.

  But Vuldum was never in a hurry. He always sauntered along, even though he might be catching a streetcar or going to keep an overdue appointment. And so they walked down the dark stairway past the editorial room.

  “Ah—how I like this building,” said Vuldum, taking a deep breath. “It’s like a home, you might say—a regular home. This is where the paper lives. Don’t you feel it too?”

  On the floor below he had to stop before the plate-glass window in the door and peer into the editorial room. He had to stop to enjoy the view. Jastrau let himself be smitten with the same infection.