The Quiet Girl - Peter Hoeg

by Peter Høeg

  "I can't live without you," he said. "I'll kill myself!"

  There were about one hundred people in the restaurant. They absorbed some of the sound. Nevertheless, he now had nearly everyone's attention. Three of the waiters plus Leisemeer had almost reached the table. The officers had come to a halt.

  "Well, do it then!" she whispered. "Do it, goddamn it!"

  The champagne in her glass on the table released a cloud of bubbles. He didn't understand that. Krug was made with more than 50 percent old wine. It didn't have the restlessness of modern champagnes. The glass began to dance. The small plates levitated; their liberated contents floated in the air: snails in parsley sauce on small pressed medallions of what looked like spring leeks, pieces of Danish lobster with Serrano ham.

  Then the shaking began.

  Porcelain and glass were swept off the table. People screamed. One of the large front windows cracked, broke into pieces, and fell to the ground in a cascade of pulverized glass.

  He had been flung over the table. Those in the restaurant who had been standing up were now lying down. Except Stina. "It's a sign," he said. "That our fates are bound together. People have always taken earthquakes as a sign."

  She straightened up effortlessly. If he tried to follow her he would end up on the floor. The room was swimming before his eyes. "It's karma," he said. "We were lovers in an earlier life."

  He was grabbed from behind. Leisemeer and the waiters had reached him. The officers were still down on all fours. The way to the exit was open.

  "Take me to the kitchen!" he shouted. "I'll wash dishes. I'll stay till I've paid for everything."

  Leisemeer put his coat around Kasper's shoulders.

  "We have dishwashing machines," he said.

  They led Kasper toward the exit. He caught a glimpse of Stina's down jacket in the coatroom. The waiters formed a circle around him. Leisemeer's lips were by his ear.

  "Half a minute," he whispered. "I'll block their way for half a minute. Now get going."

  Kasper was pushed past Stina's jacket. The dark-haired woman and her companion struggled toward him, past overturned chairs and panicked customers. He put his hand into Stina's pocket, without looking directly at the jacket. Still ten seconds. And he wanted to be prepared.

  "You are witnesses," he shouted. "To my confession. This woman. Whose life I devastated in the past. I had a hidden purpose when I forced her to come to this meeting."

  Leisemeer clapped his hand over Kasper's mouth. It smelled of garlic and sage.

  "I'll make bouillon out of you," whispered the chef.

  The door opened. Kasper's heels left the earth.

  They had pushed him with all their might. A person who hadn't learned falling routines would have broken something. Kasper met the sidewalk with a forward rolling fall. The crowd made room around him.

  Three groups of two men moved toward him. There was no open area between them.

  He stripped off his jacket and shirt; people drew away from him, and the plainclothes policemen were pressed backward. With naked torso and outstretched arms he began moving sideways along the restaurant's broken window. Hundreds of faces stared at him from inside.

  "A penitential pilgrimage," he cried. "Two hundred times around the restaurant! I invoke double pneumonia!"

  He stood in front of the orchestra. A uniformed policeman came toward him, hesitantly. Kasper took a handful of bills from his jacket and threw them in front of the musicians; they were thousand-kroner bills. They fluttered to the ground like mahogany-colored doves. The policeman stopped at the sight of the money.

  A taxi halted at the curb facing Hovedvagt Street. The restaurant door opened. Stina came out and got into the taxi. He reached the vehicle as the door slammed. It was headed in the wrong direction, toward the policemen. But he couldn't control himself.

  He pounded on her door. The window was rolled down.

  "Let's get married," he said. "This is a proposal. I've changed my attitude. I want a family. I want that very much."

  The blow struck him under the cheekbone. It came as a surprise; he hadn't seen her lift her hand. But at any rate she had raised the champagne bottle.

  "Wake up!" she said.

  He held out the postal receipt toward her.

  "What was in the letter?" he asked.

  The taxi pulled away from the curb, accelerated, and was gone.

  He straightened up. People around him were still paralyzed. By the earthquake. By the events. He walked toward the orchestra.

  A woman was standing at the curb. Pushed forward by the crowd behind her. She was wheeling a bicycle. It was the head of Department H, Asta Borello.

  She stared at his naked torso. As if at a poltergeist.

  To meet her was magnificent synchronicity. Of the sort that Jung says happens only for those who have taken a seven-mile step toward the unknown in their process of individuation.

  He listened to her. Perhaps she was on her way to meet a girlfriend. To go to the theater. She was wearing a skirt. Panty hose. Tall high-heeled leather boots. Nonetheless, she had taken her bicycle. No reason to throw money away and interfere with her savings. On a Good Friday evening.

  "Asta," he said. "Do you have a mobile bailiff business?"

  She tried to get away from him, without success.

  He walked over to the orchestra. Leaned down. Picked up the bills. Took half of them. That still left enough for a thousand for each of the musicians.

  "When you practice charity," he said, "it's important not to overdose."

  At that moment the collective paralysis lifted. People started running toward him.

  If the race had been more than sixteen hundred yards on a welllit artificial-turf track, they would have caught him. But it was a sprinting distance through a black labyrinth.

  He turned into the first open gate, where two cooks were emptying two Leisemeer hearses; an external staircase led up two stories to the roof of a low rear building, and after that came more than a thousand feet of tall hedge that separated the wooden fences and garbage containers of the yards behind the apartment buildings along Ny Øster Street and Ny Adel Street. He crossed Ny Øster Street and Købmager Street; only when he reached the open squares, where people would have spotted someone running, did he start to walk.

  2

  On the surface the city looked like itself, aside from the television crews' vans double-parked in front of the hotels. But the sound picture was different. At first he thought it was because of the barricades. On the way to the restaurant he had seen that the city center was now closed to traffic from the embankments on in; only taxis and buses were allowed through the inner city, perhaps out of fear of new tremors.

  He had always loved the few cities without traffic, first and foremost Venice. One could hear them; the city space took on the sound of people's footsteps and voices. It was the same now. He crossed Gråbrødre Square and five hundred pigeons flew up; their flapping wings made the whole square vibrate. And in Rådhus Square there wasn't a single automobile. He had never heard Vesterbro like this, quiet and solemn.

  Then he felt the silence draw itself together, and the sounds got more dense; he heard a flute theme; it was Actus Tragicus, Bach's only funeral mass. Perhaps it was just imagination, perhaps Bach had captured some of the background music that accompanies every apocalypse. And he had been only twenty-two at the time.

  The traffic on Vesterbro Street closed around him. He turned down a side street toward the old shooting range; he had to find a place to rest. The distances in between were the worst; after four hundred yards anaerobic sprint reserves are used up, and there is still far to go. His heart was beating too fast for the prayer to keep up.

  A woman went in a door leading to a stairway; he reached the door before it closed.

  He stood just inside the entrance until her steps reached an upstairs apartment and a door slammed. Then he started up the stairs; there was no elevator. He continued past the fifth floor and sat down on the upperm
ost step, in front of the attic door. He turned on the hall light and took out the folded piece of letter paper that he had fished out of Stina's pocket.

  It was a fax, signed with unreadable Gothic script and marked BERLIN and EUROPAISCHES MEDITERRANISCHES SEISMOGRAPHISCHES zentrum. He wished he knew more German; he was able to understand Bach's cantata texts, and even then just barely. But the address was legible; it was Stina's name and two locations. One was Hotel Scandinavia, with a room number. The other was "Pylon 5, Copenhagen Harbor."

  He folded the paper and put it back in his pocket. He listened to the building below him. To the sound of family life.

  He had made one last attempt at establishing a real home. It was midway in their relationship, about a month and a half before Stina disappeared. A late autumn night. She fixed dinner for him. He sat and listened. It was like listening to the pauses in Mozart's Adagio in B-Minor. Peaceful, meditative. Completely satisfying,

  "I had a profound insight," he said. "A moment ago. It came like a ringing sound. From deep within me. I saw that you could give up your job."

  She stopped what she was doing.

  "This isn't the usual situation," he said. "It's not a case of an ordinary man making the usual attempt to control a woman. What it's about is that the truly great men--Grock, Beethoven, Schubert-- have needed women who totally developed their talent for providing loving care. Bach as well. Two women. And Jesus: the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. When a man has an artistic or spiritual mission, he needs total female devotion."

  It was a gamble. But one is always willing to take a risk when trying to bring home big prizes.

  She stared at him intently.

  "You mean it," she said. "Ninety percent of you means it."

  She put down the knife. Turned off the stove.

  "I have an insight," she said. "That tonight you'll eat crap."

  He stood up. Grabbed her wrist; squeezed it. Her sound and her look changed. He let go of her. She turned around and left.

  He had known somehow that it was the beginning of the end.

  * * *

  His pulse was becoming manageable again. He heard voices in the yard behind the building: children.

  There is no sound more complex and unfathomable, no sound more individualized, than the human voice. Normally the vocal cords are relaxed within their entire register. But if the volume is increased, the tension and internus activity is also increased, and with that comes a change in pitch; this is how one does Tyrolean yodeling, how gentlemen with fruit stalls offer bananas for sale, how clowns reach the rows farthest back, how children shout, how KlaraMaria had laughed.

  It had been his last performance; he was leaving the next morning, going back to Spain, back to fulfilling the first part of his contract with the Blue Lady. Near the end of his act he heard her laughter-- free, uninhibited, rippling, and with the characteristic raw huskiness of a change in pitch.

  Back in the dressing room, he took off his makeup; there was no time to change clothes. When the finale was over he walked along the edge of the ring in his bathrobe; the audience was leaving, but she still sat there, alone. He sat down beside her.

  "I get happy," she said, "when I see you perform."

  He wished she would keep talking. How do you explain the sweetness of the miracle of a voice"? It was like when a great coloratura soprano hits a note that's clear as a bell; he could have sat listening for hours, a whole lifetime, just to the color of her tone.

  She gazed into the deserted ring.

  "Why did you start to play music?" she asked.

  He listened backward across his childhood; he heard "The Pilgrim's Chorus" from Tannhauser.

  "I was at the Royal Theater," he said. "I was six years old. Sometimes the theater uses artists' children, and I had a role as a child acrobat; we'd had afternoon rehearsals, but I didn't want to go home. I persuaded my mother to wait; I wanted to hear an opera. They performed Tannhauser. The hero is a mama's boy, but even so I'll take you to hear it. We were a small group of children, from the circus and the ballet. We had climbed up to the iron supports of the scenery towers, way out at the edge of the proscenium. There we saw the director of the chorus. He waved the singers forward. There were a hundred. A hundred singers! 'The Pilgrim's Chorus.' The music got louder. It was as if it grew out of the ground. And at the end there came a crescendo. Full force. I almost fell onto the stage. I was blissful. Absolutely blissful. And it wasn't just the chorus; it was the sound of the audience too. I could hear the hair rise on the backs of their necks. And at that moment I felt the decision inside me. Not even a decision. A knowledge. That I wanted to be able to evoke a phenomenon like that. As great a sound. As many tears. Do you understand?"

  She nodded.

  "I told this to my mother in the bus on our way home. She asked if I wanted to sing. 1 said I wanted to play the violin. The next week she brought me a violin. We didn't have any money. Still, she brought me a violin."

  He noticed that she was listening toward the empty ring. He listened with her.

  "All the great clowns have been there," he said. "That's what we hear. I've learned from all of them, those I saw as a child. Crock, August Miehe, Enrico and Erneste Caroli, Buster Larsen, Charlie Rivel. Now they are gone."

  She waited. He nodded toward the tent poles above them.

  "My mother fell," he said. "Her sound is always in there too. And the sound of the great ones she learned from. She walked on a high wire. She danced on a high wire. She learned from the Swedish wire artist Reino. The Australian Con Colleano. Linon, the rope-walking clown from Paris. The truly great ones."

  He tried to smile. The girl did not smile in return.

  "And that's why," she said. "Why you have so few friends."

  He didn't believe his own ears.

  "I have a hundred million friends. My public."

  "You think people will always be abandoned. Because your mother left you. But that's wrong. Actually, people are never abandoned."

  It is very difficult for an adult to accept wisdom from a child. He had lost his bearings.

  She took his hand.

  "Is it true?" she asked. "That you'll take me to hear a hundred people singing?"

  The wisdom was gone. Only the child remained.

  He nodded.

  "Everything except the overture," he said. "I'll cover your ears while they play that. There's too much sex in the overture; it ought to be forbidden for children under sixteen."

  A kind of peace settled over him. Love has something to do with peace. He felt at home. Here in the empty tent, in one of the most transient buildings imaginable. He felt a solidarity with the child beside him. A feeling that must be the essence of home and family. She looked up at him obliquely, from lowered eyes.

  "If I have problems sometime," she said, "if things are bad, will you come and help me?"

  She had spoken quickly, casually. But he caught the tone behind the words. It was the most serious thing he had ever heard a child say.

  When people make promises it's always with only a percentage of themselves; he had heard it many times, weddings, confirmations, sworn blood brotherhoods. There is never more than 10 percent of the total persona behind the golden promises, because that is as much of ourselves as we control; it was true of himself as well.

  But not this moment. This moment there was suddenly more. He could hear his body vibrate, like a wind instrument when the embouchure all at once succeeds and a great deal of the energy becomes tone.

  "Always," he said.

  * * *

  The door above him opened. A boy and a girl stood there, perhaps about six years old; they had come through the attic space used for drying laundry. It was their voices he had heard earlier, but he had not heard them arrive. Now they did not move.

  "Who are you?" asked the girl.

  "I'll whisper it to you both," said Kasper, "but only if you don't tell anyone else. I'm Santa Claus."

  The children shook their heads.


  "You don't look like Santa Claus."

  "When spring comes," said Kasper, "then Santa gets his hair cut and his beard shaved off; he has his hair dyed, loses almost ninety pounds, stables the reindeer, and lives in people's drying attics."

  "What about the presents?"

  He felt in his pockets. All he found was money, nothing smaller than a thousand-kroner bill. He gave them that.

  "I mustn't take it," said the boy. "That's what my mother says."

  Kasper stood up.

  "From Santa Claus," he said, "you can take anything. Tell your mother that. Say that Santa is going to come and nibble her earlobe."

  "What about my father?"

  Kasper began heading down toward the earth's surface.

  "Santa Claus will come and nibble him as well."

  "I've got a dog too," said the little girl hopefully.

  "I'm sorry," said Kasper. "Even Santa Claus has to set limits."

  "You don't talk very nice," said the girl.

  Kasper turned toward her.

  "For children to know where the abyss is, and be careful," he said, "you need to take them all the way out and show them the edge."

  He continued down the stairs. The children followed him, hesitantly.

  "Santa Claus?"

  "Yes."

  "Thank you for the money. And Merry Christmas."

  The pitch of their voices changed. They disappeared up toward heaven. In a cascade of laughter. Kasper stepped onto the sidewalk. He began walking.

  3

  Kierkegaard wrote somewhere that if one just goes walking, everything goes well. He should have been along this evening. Behind every pair of approaching headlights he heard one of the police's Ford Mondeos. In every passing drunk he saw a plainclothes officer. He looked for a taxi.

  A green light came toward him in the darkness; green is the color of hope and the heart; it was a taxi. The taxi stopped. It was a Jaguar. The back door opened; Kasper did not move. The traffic was heavy, flowing fast. There was no way an automobile could have followed a pedestrian.

  "They've issued an arrest warrant," said Franz Fieber. "On the police home page. And broadcast a radio description to taxis and Greater Copenhagen Authority buses. If you continue on foot you'll be nabbed in ten minutes. I suggest you get in. One of my drivers has a motorboat in Sweden. He can have it ready in an hour. Ten thousand kroner, which includes his picking up the boat in Malmø. Late tomorrow afternoon you'll be lying low in Umeå."