Havoc

by Havoc (retail) (epub)

  “But my dear Ole, didn’t you understand? I hope you’ve never believed that I wanted to do you any harm. Why should I? If I wanted to review Danish literature, why then—”

  He made a disparaging gesture.

  Jastrau looked him right in the eye for a second. “No, I’ve never understood it.”

  “But, Ole,” Vuldum said gently, “why haven’t you ever said anything about it? Have you really let it trouble you for a whole year? You’re much too suspicious. Frankly, I don’t think you like me.”

  There was an ironic look of understanding in Vuldum’s expression.

  “I do and I don’t,” Jastrau replied, feeling embarrassed.

  “Listen, Ole, I can well understand that, in a way. But now I’d be very interested to know what it is you like about me.”

  Jastrau would have liked to drop the subject. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Oh, well—”

  Vuldum sent him a teasing smile.

  “Do you like this Bolshevik we just saw better than you do me?”

  Jastrau screwed up his eyes in a nervous frown.

  “Yes and no.”

  “Yes, you’ve always had perverse tastes,” Vuldum commented, placing a hand on his shoulder. “And now, you mustn’t be quick at repartee and say that’s why you like me very well after a fashion. But here comes the beer—and it’s the number one waiter himself who’s bringing it. What more could we want? Isn’t it a fine sight to see an older, distinguished-looking gentleman with two such huge glasses of beer—and in a wind, too? Just look at that white hair!”

  “Beer!” Jastrau exclaimed with vehemence. His thoughts were on Steffensen.

  After they had raised their glasses to each other and each had taken a deep draught, Vuldum sat for a long time staring down into his beer.

  “You really ought to be a little more discriminating about whom you associate with, Ole,” he said at last.

  “What are you driving at?” Jastrau snapped.

  “Him—young Stefani.” Vuldum nodded toward the inside of the café.

  “Him? Oh, I tossed him out of the house long ago,” Jastrau said. Nevertheless, at the same time, he felt he was going back on a friend. Why did he always have a bad conscience where this Steffensen was concerned?

  “So you too have discovered that he’s a criminal.”

  “A criminal? Certainly no more so than you or I.”

  Vuldum threw up both of his big white hands in a gesture of innocence.

  “Yes. At any rate, I never passed on a disease to a woman. I don’t know what you’ve done.”

  “What are you saying? Has Steffensen—?”

  “Yes.” Vuldum compressed his lips.

  “Where did you get that bit of information?”

  “From his own father, no less.”

  Jastrau made no reply. He vaguely recalled something—something that tied in with what Vuldum was saying.

  “It was old Stefani himself who told me about it—in a very tolerant manner, I must say. But a thing like that must be hard on a father. He indicated as much when he said to me, ‘Yes—when a father has to admit that his son is a criminal—you understand how I feel,’ and then there was a very significant pause.”

  “I don’t believe it’s true,” Jastrau protested in a low, almost melancholy tone of voice.

  “Even though his father himself told me? It was a servant girl in their own house who was the victim. And when she found it out, she ran away—utterly bewildered, miserable, and sick. Whatever became of her nobody knows. Undoubtedly she went to the dogs. But you know how it is with a girl who’s a servant in a well-to-do household. Nothing is easier than for the son to seduce such a little house-mouse. It’s always that kind who has to be the guinea pig. But what a mean low-down trick! He had just passed his university exam—ugh!” He made a wry face and washed down his disgust with a swig of beer.

  “But I don’t suppose he knew—”

  “Oh, that wasn’t the only thing he did. He was up to a whole series of obnoxious tricks while he was at home in Aarhus. He’s a beast.”

  Vuldum wrinkled his nose and shook his head.

  “I didn’t think you were such a moralist.”

  “No, and I’m not. But there are some things that can be described only as beastly. After all, one has a certain dimly defined sense of values.”

  Jastrau’s lips curled in scorn.

  “But look, Ole, hadn’t we better drink up? I have to go see Father Garhammer and give him this book. Wouldn’t you like to come along? It wouldn’t do either of us any harm to get up where the atmosphere is a bit cleaner.”

  Jastrau nodded and summoned the waiter. Vuldum made a pretense of fishing in a vest pocket for his brass krone, but Jastrau smiled and shook his head.

  “Thank you very much.” Vuldum got up and bowed politely.

  After Jastrau had paid, they began walking out Vesterbro with the sun and the wind in their eyes.

  “But, look here, shouldn’t you have gone up to the paper?” asked Vuldum, leaning forward at an angle while he kept a firm grip on his stiff hat.

  “Yes.” Jastrau squinted into the sun. “But the books won’t run away. I can get them anytime. Besides, the old man is usually there at this time, and I can’t stand the sight of him any longer. If he had someone to take my place, he’d fire me immediately.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yes, God knows I think so. I’m not a newcomer any more. The paper needs a change. If only I could afford to toss the whole mess right into his face.”

  “That would undeniably be the smartest thing to do,” Vuldum said quietly but earnestly, as if he wished to plant the idea unobtrusively in Jastrau’s mind. “Four or five years—isn’t that about how long you’ve been there? That’s about par for the course. Was your predecessor there any longer than that?”

  “Oh, this feeling of insecurity—it’s enough to make a blithering idiot out of a person,” Jastrau said bitterly. “And then at the same time one is supposed to be a calm impartial critic, and incorruptible as well. What’s more, you make enemies on all sides. It’s worse than being seriously in love with a bitch.”

  They had gotten as far as Stenosgade.

  “See that advertisement for feather cleaning up there?” said Vuldum cryptically, pointing up at a second-story window of a corner building. Behind the window, a mass of feathers was being whirled about constantly so the whole thing resembled a cosmic fog. “What you see there has greater significance for the priests out here than you would think. It suggests the modern scientific view of the world, they say, and then they laugh. You ought to see them. They’re just like boys when they hit on something like that. But then, I don’t imagine you know anything about the Catholic sense of humor. It’s really quite touching.”

  The short street, Stenosgade, created a confusing impression until they stood before the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with its tower and arched gates tapering to a point at the top. Then the street suddenly became readily comprehensible. The red church stood nudged in between the red, monastic-looking residential buildings. At the left were the rectory and school and at the right a private house that obviously had been smitten by its close contact with Catholicism and had been trimmed with a gratuitous spire. The pointed-arch motif seemed to have invested one entire side of the street with an aspect of piety.

  The private Protestant buildings on the other side of the street looked drab by comparison.

  Vuldum went familiarly up the stone steps to the red rectory and rang the doorbell, and through the door panes they saw a humble doorman with stooped shoulders and downcast eyes come trudging toward them to let them in.

  With a saccharine smile, Vuldum asked to see Father Garhammer, and at once he and Jastrau were ushered into the parlor. Jastrau immediately felt disappointed. What had he expected? Something entirely different—bare plaster walls, ascetic furnishings perhaps. But not the oval table and the pink, gold-edged bowl for visiting cards. Certainl
y not the ugly, depressing hat tree that stood in a corner with its hooks bristling, as in a pub. It was all in the most banal mediocre taste, cheap and shabby, and altogether too prosaic for troubled thirsting souls who dreamt of church windows and the fragrance of incense.

  Jastrau sat down, feeling uneasy and oppressed. He felt he was in foreign territory and stared almost with longing at the dark houses across the street, the everyday houses and shops, while Vuldum rummaged through the calling-card bowl, picked up the picture postcards he found there, and read them.

  “A gruesome place this, isn’t it?” he asked Jastrau in a tone of disdain.

  Then the door opened, and in walked little Father Garhammer, wearing a long black Jesuit’s gown with a broad black belt. He seemed a little lopsided and awkward as he turned to face them directly and assumed his air of authority and his smile. He had a small head. His face was swarthy, that of a man from the south, so that the smile on his broad lips was most conspicuous. It was like the smile of a boardinghouse keeper, both cordial and crafty. He kept his head bent slightly forward.

  Vuldum bowed filially and introduced his friend, Editor Ole Jastrau, and Father Garhammer immediately observed, with a noticeable German accent, that he was well acquainted with Jastrau’s articles.

  “We don’t share the same opinions at all,” he said with a touch of irony from which his accent seemed to remove all sting.

  “But sit down now, and tell me what you want,” he said, settling himself in a chair with the air of a lady paying a visit. His broad smile beamed on them like that of a father confessor.

  “Today I merely want to make you a present of a little something I found—a little gift that, incredible though it may seem, consists of the writings of Poul Helgesen. You know, the Danish Catholic of the Reformation period.” Vuldum laid a book with a dark well-worn binding on the table.

  “That’s very kind of you,” replied the priest, opening the book for the sake of appearances. “You really shouldn’t have done it, Herr Vuldum. You’re a good-hearted man.”

  Vuldum lowered his lean ghostly profile in a polite bow.

  “I shall read it with pleasure,” the priest went on. “And the library will be happy to have it, too. It will go into our library, of course.”

  But he quickly raised his dark eyes from the book and looked quizzically at Jastrau.

  Vuldum had noticed the expression on the priest’s face. “Yes,” he said, self-consciously hitching up his trousers, “I brought my friend along so he could see how comfortably you live here. I thought it might do a proponent of progress like him some good.”

  Father Garhammer suddenly drew himself up straight.

  “Do you believe in progress?” he asked, immediately on guard.

  “Well, yes,” Jastrau replied evasively. As he did so, he noticed how Vuldum suddenly seemed to get taller and to stare down at him with a look of compassion. He felt as if he had suddenly been deserted.

  “Then you must also believe that the world order had a beginning in time,” the priest said, speaking rapidly and clearly. He did not smile now. He was awaiting an opponent’s scintillating counterattack.

  “I’ve never concerned myself about the creation of the world,” said Jastrau, laughing. Vuldum sat looking at them indifferently, without saying a word.

  “But you are forced to do just that, Herr Jastrau, if you believe in progress,” Father Garhammer said, obviously relishing the argument.

  Jastrau looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  “Yes, so you are,” the priest went on rapidly, “because if a world order has existed back into infinity, then everything would by now have been brought into being. And in that case, we would now be living in a state of utmost perfection. But I certainly don’t believe that is the situation.” The irony in his tone was evident, and Vuldum smiled knowingly.

  Jastrau cringed.

  “Oh, progress is a superficial problem,” he replied with some irritation. “It really doesn’t interest me. I believe only in change.”

  “Not in the sameness of things?” Garhammer asked with a laugh that indicated surprise.

  “Well, there is something to Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence,” Vuldum broke in, casually disregarding Jastrau as if the observation were something beyond his powers of comprehension.

  “Yes. Hell is an eternal recurrence,” Father Garhammer conceded. Then he turned once more in his chair, like a lady, and looked at Jastrau.

  “So you are not interested in progress, Herr Jastrau. Tell me, then, what are you interested in?”

  It was so unreal, this mode of thinking. And it was as if the unreality spread to their surroundings. The buildings on the other side of the street became gathering rain clouds. The oval table, the visiting-card bowl, and the hat tree seemed like pieces of furniture that had been placed out on the sidewalk by the king’s bailiff. There, in those chairs on the sidewalk, sat Vuldum and Father Garhammer, and suddenly it occurred to Jastrau how feminine they both were. Vuldum tall and relentless, as only a redhead can be, and the priest short and dark, incessantly biting his wide lips and greedy for a new problem without any substance to it—argument for the sake of argument. Weren’t old maids the grimmest and most implacable individuals in the world?

  “I’m really interested only in myself,” Jastrau replied cautiously, avoiding Vuldum’s cold smile. “And consequently, in psychology, too, which is the basis for an understanding of one’s self. Yes, and I’m also interested in how one constructs a real world—finds reality.”

  While Jastrau slowly and with difficulty groped his way forward, a change came over Father Garhammer. He became more friendly and nodded in a paternal manner, as if he wanted to help him along.

  “Yes, that’s a difficult problem indeed,” he said with a pause between every single word. His accent gave a crafty sound to everything he said, but now he was smiling all the while, a little too benevolently and condescendingly.

  “But of course you have science to look to, Herr Jastrau.”

  “Oh, yes.” Jastrau smiled skeptically, and his smile kindled an expression of understanding on the face of the priest, who again nodded encouragingly and went on, “Haven’t you? Yes—that you have. And you also have logic.”

  Jastrau smiled again. He recalled his insuperable struggles with logic as a branch of philosophy. Perhaps ethics was the only aspect of the subject that he had regarded with more contempt.

  “You do have logic, too, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Otherwise one would turn into a fool.”

  Vuldum made no effort to conceal a supercilious yawn. But Father Garhammer nodded like a teacher and went on slowly and earnestly.

  “And so you base your reasoning on axioms that you accept, because your knowledge of facts tells you that these axioms must be correct. Yes, that’s right. And so do we. That’s merely acknowledging the nature of things.”

  Jastrau watched him with a faint, guarded smile.

  “Yes, and now you’re going to confront me with your dogmas—I know it, I know it.”

  “But isn’t it simply the same thing? We accept the dogmas. We don’t understand them any more than we understand the laws of nature. We accept them because our sense of coherence tells us they must be correct. We don’t want to be fools—moral fools, you understand—and I believe that’s a term we can apply to sinners.”

  The priest’s face retained its indulgent smile throughout his remarks.

  “But suppose I don’t acknowledge the validity of logic?” Jastrau objected.

  “Then you’ll remain a fool.”

  The last remark was made with such a strange charm, and the priest looked so much like a nice old aunt as he sat there in his black skullcap with his head roguishly cocked to one side, that both Vuldum and Jastrau had to laugh.

  “Yes, these problems can be very interesting,” Father Garhammer said to himself, suddenly looking from one to the other of them like a pleased child. He was just as surprised at having made a clev
er remark, and just as pleased with himself for having done so, as Jastrau would have been had he unintentionally delivered himself of a syllogism.

  “But it’s logic that’s at fault,” Jastrau said after a short pause.

  “Not my logic, Herr Jastrau,” replied Garhammer. “I’m no fool.” He laughed again, then shook his head and repeated: “No, I’m no fool. Ha ha ha.”

  “In my opinion, we place altogether too much stock in these chess-game rules that we call logic,” protested Jastrau. He could not, like the priest, keep on feeling delighted about how interesting such problems could be.

  But Garhammer was still laughing. “Ha ha! That’s your opinion. But then you’re a fool.” His German accent made the word sound thick and round and good-natured. “Ha ha ha,” he cackled.

  “But isn’t it strange,” he went on, suddenly becoming serious and turning to Vuldum, “that this is what makes it so difficult for us? Catholicism has a hard time holding on to women. It is too logical, and women won’t have anything to do with logic. Isn’t it strange?”

  Vuldum smiled. “And people here in Denmark go around believing that Catholicism means gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”

  “Yes, that’s a big mistake,” said the priest.

  They spoke to each other as if they were better informed than he, and Jastrau felt humbled.

  But then he noticed a crafty gleam in Vuldum’s eyes, and he sat up expectantly.

  “Listen, Father Garhammer, there is something I have often wanted to ask you,” said Vuldum with a faint smile. “Did Jesus ever commit a sin?”

  “No—no, no!” Father Garhammer replied, horrified.

  Jastrau felt his cheeks growing red. Was Vuldum now going to torture him some more? It was that book of Stefani’s that he was referring to. But why? Why? Why tear the legs off flies?

  “I was thinking of the story of the fig tree,” Vuldum went on unmercifully. “Wasn’t that an act of rashness?”

  Jastrau looked at him, distressed and uncomprehending.

  “But the tree bore no fruit,” replied the priest.

  “Perhaps it might have if it had been cared for.”

  “No,” came the decisive answer.