The Quiet Girl - Peter Hoeg

by Peter Høeg

  "We all lose everything anyway," said Kasper. "We have just one option. We can try to lose in a somewhat housebroken manner."

  He was glad that both Franz Fieber and the kneeling father of the child were present. It gave him a sense of having a slightly bigger audience. For these brilliant rejoinders.

  "Look at me," he said. "I don't have an øre. I've lost everything. No wife. No children. My career ended. A deportation order. Wanted by the police in twelve countries. But I'm in the process of cleaning up my life. Can you see that? That somewhere deep within me there's a growing honesty?"

  "I think you look like a bum," she said.

  He drew erect.

  "They brought the children here," she said. "Their condition was good. They're still alive. They're going to be used for something or other. It has to do with the earthquakes. I don't know what."

  Fie adjusted the telescope. On the roof of the Konon building were two davits. On wheels. Behind them, a machine shed.

  "What kind of a business is Konon?"

  "Officially, a financial institution. But they deal only with options."

  "Where is Kain?"

  She shook her head.

  "What about the murder?" she asked.

  "The police believe there is a connection between a series of kidnappings. One of the children has been found. Tortured and strangled."

  He was on his way out. She followed him.

  "I want to make things good. I want to be able to look my child in the eye."

  "Wait until after the baby is born. We who are making a penitential pilgrimage take one step at a time."

  Kasper helped the kneeling man to stand up and get over to the sofa. On the coffee table lay a small stack of typed pages. "What," he asked, "was common to all the births?"

  "They were harmonious. Calmer than the average. And then there was something about the weather."

  She stood close to him.

  "There were rainbows," she said. "In every instance, those who assisted at the birth had seen rainbows. Outside the window. I spoke with them independently of one another. There were rainbows at night too. There are nocturnal rainbow phenomena. Haloes around the moon. White rainbows in the night sky, moonlight reflected in cloud formations."

  He opened the door to the elevator.

  "We must hope there was gold at the end," he said. "Of the rainbows."

  She blocked the door.

  "Those two children," she said, "the boy and the girl--they aren't ordinary children."

  He didn't know what he should say.

  "They were calm," she said. "Not happy. But much too calm. I can't explain it. But it wasn't natural. They should have been depressed."

  He removed her hand from the elevator door, gently.

  "Kain," she said. "He owns the sanatorium. That's where he is. He telephoned from there. Five minutes ago."

  "How do you know where the telephone call came from?"

  "The sound of the large Jacuzzis. I could hear them."

  He caught a sound from her system. Deep, old. As if from a persistent longing.

  "You were born prematurely," he said.

  "In the seventh month. Declared dead. Laid in the rinse room. Where they say I pounded on the lid that had been placed over the tray. When I began as a midwife there was a retiring obstetrician who remembered my case. He called me Rinse Room Lona."

  He couldn't stop his hand. It tore itself loose, floated up, stroked her cheek. Knowing full well that one should be very cautious about caressing pregnant women in front of their husbands.

  "Franz and I," he said, "we're wild about those who want to survive."

  "I'm not the fearful type," she said. "But I'm afraid of him. Of Kain."

  * * *

  Kasper motioned; Franz Fieber pulled the van over at a rest stop. Kasper pointed to the flat metal flask.

  "How about a little more lighter fluid," he said, "for us two bachelors, after our meeting with the young couple in happy circumstances?"

  Franz Fieber poured; the aroma of fresh grapes filled the vehicle. "What does it sound like inside a person who has killed a child?"

  Kasper would have crawled a long way around to avoid the question. But the young man's yellow eyes shone intensely in the dark.

  "Twice in my life," he said, "I've sat across from a person who had killed a child; both were artists. One had run down a child by accident, the other had beaten his child to death. Around each of them there was silence."

  He sensed helplessness. Confronted by great horror and great miracles--the Mass in B-Minor, world wars--we are powerless; there is nothing an individual person can do.

  But he could hear that the young man's helplessness was greater than his own. And in this lost world does not the person with one eye have a duty to try to help the blind man?

  "There are two types of silence," said Kasper, "or at least that's how it has sounded to me. There is the high silence, the silence behind prayer. The silence when one is close to the Divine. The silence that is the dense, unborn presence of all sounds. And then there is the other silence. Hopelessly far from God. And from other people. The silence of absence. The silence of loneliness."

  He felt the young man's openness. There was contact. Interference. They were very close to each other.

  "I know them," said Franz Fieber. "The two kinds of silence. I know them both."

  "Those two people I sat across from, they were acoustically dead," said Kasper. "Something had gone out of them."

  He grasped the other man's upper arm. If you are going to send a signal through clearly, it's best to have physical contact.

  "But behind their silence, behind the isolation," he added, "they sounded like all other people. Like you and me. So if you and I, if we got in that situation, if the world had withdrawn from us. Or if we had withdrawn from the world. Then it could have been us. It could be us. That's what I thought when I sat across from them. That it could have been me."

  For a moment they were open and candid. For a moment Kasper knew they were both looking into the source of the darkest demonic power, which the great enema syringe gives us all a dose of occasionally. The young man bore it for a moment, but then it became too much.

  "Can't we call the police?"

  "In a minute," said Kasper. "When we've followed our guiding star."

  He drank from the silver-plated flask cap. It may well be that liquor doesn't work as deeply as heartfelt prayer. But it works just as quickly.

  Headlights swept over the bushes; the Jeep passed them at about ninety miles an hour. Franz Fieber stared at him. Only now did Kasper hear that the other man was about to reach his limit.

  "She lied," said Kasper. "When she said they brought the children to her. Now she wants to go in and make things good again. When women in her weight class get excited they believe they are indestructible."

  7

  The driveway to the sanatorium was flanked by two square granite pillars and luxuriant shrubbery. Kasper gave a signal; the van stopped about two hundred feet from the pillars.

  The buildings were constructed above six granite terraces that led down toward the fine old homes in the suburb of Taarbæk. The granite was so dark that at night it looked black. The terraces were lit from below, and on them were stone urns from which tumbled a tropical profusion of flowers and climbing vines that resembled Babylon's hanging gardens--a miracle in April in Denmark, where the final frost nights are still smiling expectantly in the wings.

  "That's for the clients," said Kasper, "the profusion of flowers. To tell them that modern technology has removed all lack of generosity in nature, and there is no reason to get old when every three months you can get a nice shot of Botox for the bags under your eyes."

  "This is not a biblical place," said Franz Fieber.

  Kasper took two double-breasted chef jackets from a coat hook behind the driver's seat and handed one to the young man. "Let's not be too holy," he said. "Can we be sure that the Mother of God would have refused a fac
e-lift and a tooth straightening? If she had been offered the chance."

  The young man put on the chef's jacket. His hands had started to tremble.

  Kasper put his hand on the man's shoulder. Turned him so he could look straight at him.

  "Think about the children. See them before you. Their parents aren't there. They are away from home. They are surrounded by something they don't understand. They're helpless. Can you hear that? When I saw her last, she had been hit. Even those children are helpless, by and large. And they are dependent on you and me. Can you feel that?"

  The young man slumped a little.

  "And in addition to them. Thousands of other children. Equally helpless. Or more so. And within us. In you and me. There are two little boys. Can you hear them? Can you empathize with them? It's a fuel. The only thing that can

  keep one going. Through a whole symphony."

  Franz Fieber stared at him. The moment had nobility. Like Kempff playing the slow movement of Opus 109. In a situation like this, the important thing isn't to be filled with emotion. But to act and go in another direction. Like Beethoven. To try to enhance the sentimentality.

  Kasper gave a signal. The van drove forward. Kasper rolled down the window.

  * * *

  Out of the shrubbery emerged a man in a dark uniform, the same color as the granite. Kasper pointed to the back of the vehicle.

  "There's a steaming-hot steak in the back. Saddle of veal à la Count Metternich. It must still be a hundred and forty degrees when it's served to Kain. Delay me three minutes and you'll be out in the cold."

  The tropical shrubbery swallowed the man.

  * * *

  They walked through a reception area with curved walls like the Salle Pleyel, then through a waiting room with acoustics like Mantzius Hall. Past the infirmary section, where you would have to listen very carefully to discover that you were in a hospital. There wasn't a single room where you could not have recorded your next piece of chamber music without further ado.

  But it wasn't chamber music that the walls reflected. It was confusion and perplexity, in people who hope, but can't seriously believe, that at a cosmetic clinic you can come just a hairsbreadth closer to the meaning of everything.

  They entered a room with a sloping floor, like an amphitheater; on the steps some fifty women lay or sat in front of a large fireplace. They were all wearing white bathrobes.

  A woman came through a door in a cloud of steam. She had red hair and green eyes and a white smock and a bundle of fresh birch boughs in her hand; she had to be the sauna master. She had a tone of grace and authority that made Kasper wish he had time and opportunity to pull down his trousers and ask for twelve blows with the birch boughs on his bare bottom.

  "What are you doing?" the woman asked.

  "We're enjoying the acoustics," said Kasper. "My heart bleeds for the poor. But my ears love Brazilian rosewood. And five inches of acoustic headroom."

  "You're in the women's section."

  "We're here professionally. We left our sexuality outside the door."

  He heard her sound soften up.

  "It's not well disciplined," she said. "Your sexuality. A little of it has slipped in with you."

  Kasper held out the tray he had taken from the van.

  "Have a canapé. Forget the rabbit diet. Trust the natural regulation of your appetite."

  The woman took one of the small puff pastries. Kasper offered some to those sitting around him too.

  "I wonder where Kain is," he said.

  "He's going to have his hair cut. By Heidi."

  Kasper followed her glance. Through a large window he could see a glass summerhouse built on a granite platform that seemed to sway in the air. Through the glass he saw green plants and hairstylist chairs. A man was sitting in one of the chairs.

  Kasper leaned toward the red-haired woman.

  "Some people would think that a relationship like yours and mine, which may be the beginning of a lifelong friendship, should not be spoiled by money. I don't agree. A few kroner can give an internal accompaniment to the natural harmony of two hearts."

  He handed the woman four thousand-kroner bills.

  "If you delay Heidi just ten minutes. Kain and I went to dancing school together. Happy memories. Which we'd like to have a chance to refresh for ten minutes alone. He always danced the woman's part."

  The woman folded the bills.

  "Will you stop in on your way back?"

  Kasper looked at Franz Fieber. The young man's face was bathed in a thin layer of perspiration. Maybe it was the warmth from the sauna. Part of the secret of love is concentration and setting voluntary limits.

  "In the next incarnation," he said.

  He looked out across the women. The room's acoustics were a small version of the Carl Nielsen Hall. The sound of fifty women was like the caress of a warm breeze. He could speak to the whole group without raising his voice.

  "The heart of every person emits a sound," he said. "It has a wonderful ring, but unfortunately we dampen it. Right now all of you sound marvelous. There isn't a single one of you for whom Franz and I wouldn't break our clerical vows. If you just listened ten minutes each day. To your heart. And let go of the tension that keeps the wave front from spreading. My God, you would sound like Bach."

  The women stared at him. He put down the canapés. Took off the chef's hat. Bowed. Walked backward out the door.

  * * *

  Franz Fieber was right behind him. His voice shook.

  "We're on a mission. We're going to rescue children. We're trespassing. And you're acting like an idiot."

  They crossed a recital hall with a Steinway The summerhouse was just ahead of them.

  "Wait outside," said Kasper. "In case the women have followed us."

  * * *

  He walked into the room. Its walls were all glass. Outside the wall at one end lay the swimming pool, shining like a blue jewel. Behind the pool was a decline of about a hundred feet that sloped down toward the lights of Taarbæk. Behind the lights, the sea. Kasper pulled the long white drapes on the windows.

  The man in the chair was not turned toward the view; he was turned toward his own reflection in a large mirror. He wore a white dressing gown, and his skin still glowed from the dry-air bath. Kasper took a comb and a hairdresser's scissors from the shelf under the mirror.

  The man's eyes in the mirror fell on Kasper. Noted the white jacket. The interest in his eyes turned off.

  That's where we humans make a mistake. We don't see the utterly amazing when it comes to us disguised as the ordinary.

  "Heidi has been delayed a few minutes," said Kasper.

  He positioned himself behind the man.

  He was about Rasper's age. He had the body of an athlete. Or a circus artist.

  Out of view of the man in the mirror, Kasper lifted the hair on the back of his head with the tooth edge of the comb. And cut off the tuft close to the scalp.

  He opened his hearing for the other man's sound.

  He heard his relationship to the physical world. Those were the deep tones, the frequencies that set most mass in motion.

  He heard money, more than he had ever heard before. He heard real estate. Cars. He heard the future. Golden economic virtualities.

  He heard the man's sexuality. It was more than interesting. Masculine, with a strong feminine overtone. He would have been able to get any woman. And most men.

  Kasper heard the man's emotional register; it was broad, nuanced, and explosive. Very light and very dark, evenly divided, as in the case of Mozart.

  He heard his heart. It was a large sound. Generous. Warm.

  He heard the higher frequencies. Inventiveness. Intuition. Spirituality. They were rich sounds; the man vibrated with inner life.

  Tuft after tuft Kasper gathered the hair at the back of the man's head. And smoothly, very satisfactorily, in view of the fact it was the first time he had cut another person's hair, he gave the finely curved back of the head a crew
cut.

  Josef Kain's eyes in the mirror were vacant. He didn't see himself. He was looking inward.

  Then Kasper heard the hole. It was a form of internal acoustic shadow. An area in the man's system where the sound was dead. Somewhere between the heart and the solar plexus.

  He put down the scissors. On a shelf behind the chair was a plastic holder with a variety of colored pastes. He opened one of them. It was henna. Ten years before it became common, Helene Krone had used henna to paint Moorish swirls on the tops of her strong feet once every six months.

  Kasper found a small brush. Slowly and carefully, still out of view of the mirror, he began applying a thin layer of the red coloring to the crew-cut head.

  "I cut Wilhelm Kempff's hair," he said. "In the early seventies. When I was still a young comet at beauty school. He told me about Hitler. He had met him in '44. At the Berghof, Hitler's home in the Alps. Eva Braun had gotten Kempff together with Furtwångler. And the great pianist Walter Gieseking. To plan a concert that would please the Führer. It never came to anything. But they put together the repertoire. Hitler's favorite pieces of music. Something from Lehà¡r's operettas. A couple of Strauss's lieder. 'The Badenweiler March.' 'Donkey Serenade.' Excerpts from Die Meistersinger. Kempff was able to listen to Hitler's system. He told me the man's personality was all right as far as that goes. Small, but all right. But there was a hole somewhere. And destructive collective noise streamed through that hole. Do you understand? There are no evil personalities. A personality always has a basically sympathetic sound. It's those places where there are holes in our humanity, where we don't resonate, that are dangerous. Where we feel we're serving a higher cause. There we must ask ourselves if the cause really is higher. There we become possessed. In other cultures they call it demons. We don't have a good word for it. But I can hear it. It's the noise of war. Collective fury."

  The man's eyes in the mirror rested on Kasper.

  "Who the hell are you?" he said.

  The voice was as black as a night sky. Soft as five hundred square yards of costume velvet.

  Kasper picked up a hand mirror from the shelf. Let the man see the back of his head.

  Josef Kain went rigid. Hitler would also have lost his composure. If he had seen himself with a crew cut and a henna tint. Kain's jaw began to drop. His sound opened. Kasper spoke into the openness.