by Peter Høeg
"In Madrid," said Kasper, "reporters are waiting for me. I'll show them the bloody bandages. And say I was mistreated by the Danish police. I'll remember to describe you specifically."
He heard faint anxiety awaken in the other man's system--anxiety, and a kind of involuntary admiration. Not for the threat itself, but for the madness behind it.
"I'll make it even worse now," said Kasper. "I'll start banging my head against the wall."
"We'll strap you down," said the officer.
"I'll swallow my tongue."
The officer placed a cordless phone on the table. He left the cell slowly, deep in thought. Kasper dialed. The one number he had never forgotten.
"Yes?"
It was a coarse voice, like crushed rock on a conveyor belt. But still. It was the Blue Lady.
"The police didn't find them," he said. "I'm on my way out of the country. There's nothing more I can do."
"Where are you?"
"At Kastrup."
"We know that. Fieber followed you. Where in the airport?"
"It doesn't matter."
"It's crucial."
"With the immigration police."
"We'll be there in twenty minutes."
"I'll be gone in fifteen," he said. "This place is in the departure area. Nobody can come in here from outside."
She had hung up.
He opened the case, took out the violin, kissed its smooth wood, tuned the strings. The fractured wrist made it almost impossible to use his left hand--he could move his fingers, but there was little strength to summon in the hand itself. He supported the violin against the wall. The "Chaconne" came of its own accord. Where is memory stored? Not in the mind, at any rate, because his did not function. Perhaps in central warehouses.
The music streamed through him, in through his right arm and out through the left one, the way God streams through whirling dervishes. He was drowning in sound. He remembered what Bach had written when he came home after Maria Barbara and two of his children had died: "Dear God, let me never lose my joy."
It was silent all around him. Those being deported listened. The officers listened. The woman's prayer had become wordless, the child's crying had stopped. There was even a divine interval between the arriving and departing planes.
His left wrist wasn't broken. The bow was an extension of his mind. He was in contact with his audience. He was very close to Bach. A brief moment, then it was over. A child screamed. Somebody threw a chair against the wall. One door burst open, another got kicked. Four Hercules airplanes loaded with Tiger tanks went aloft. Still, for that short time, he was completely happy.
Happiness has a timeless character. The moments when our hearts are entirely open we step out of temporal sequence. Stina was with him in the cell, along with the "Chaconne," just as she had been the last night before she disappeared.
2
It had been the same time of night as now. They sat letting the silence take effect while darkness fell. Something important was going on inside her; he didn't know what it was, but he knew he should not interfere. Finally, she rose and went over to stand behind him. He expected that she would put her hands on his head and draw it toward her. His hearing reached out for her; the female abdomen had always sounded to him like a bronze Tibetan singing bowl filled with fruit.
But what happened was something different. She turned on the light, unbuttoned her shirt sleeve, and showed him her arm.
The blue marks had turned yellow.
"It's been a week," she said.
He didn't answer. What could one say?
"It's building up," she said. "You're getting closer and closer to hitting me. Do you have an explanation?"
Her voice was flat. Almost hopeless. He had never heard her like that before.
"I thought love had a fixed shape," he said. "I thought it was feelings that focus on a particular body. A particular heart. A face. A sound. With you, it's different. It's something that opens up. A door. Candidness. Something that helps me grow. And it varies all the time. Your sound always keeps changing. It's like dope. I'm hooked on it. I'm afraid of losing it."
"I can't stand violence," she said. "If it's playful, that's all right. But this wasn't playful. The other times weren't either."
They were silent. He felt he was in free fall.
"Something happened to me in the past," she said. "Someday I'll tell you about it. I just can't stand violence."
He rose from the chair. She was almost exactly the same height as he. He pulled together the parts of himself he could access. At that moment he felt it was all of them.
"It will never happen again," he said.
* * *
Later that night he had danced.
An expansive happiness had been spreading over Rungsted and the surrounding countryside. Nature played the Quartet in C-Major, the culmination of Mozart's series of string quartets dedicated to Haydn. It was also the music Kasper had put on the record player; he could tell that he needed to dance. His earlier sorrow was gone. He was reborn.
Stina sat straight up in bed. He pushed the furniture against the wall and began to take off his pajamas. Slowly, lingeringly, without looking at her. Soon he was completely naked.
He began to warm up, to do plies and breathing exercises. He could hear her breathing become more rapid. He heard her begin to take off her nightclothes; he did not look in her direction. She stepped onto the floor in front of him; he saw right through her. He heard a tone louder than all the others. The sound of her love, and her wildness. Something in her wanted to throw herself at him and tear pieces of raw meat off his bones with her teeth. He was glad no one from the artists' insurance company was present; his policy would have been canceled.
He turned slowly in a circle, as if she did not exist. She let her hands glide over her body, caressed herself.
He squatted down and put on his performance shoes. She walked over to him; her fingers opened her labia in front of his face, gathered a little of the flowing honey and wrote something on her inner thigh. He knew it was the word NOW!
He moved away from her, around the bed, and put on his clown nose. It was a good costume: clown nose, clown shoes, and a hard-on. But one should probably think twice before introducing it in the Benneweis Circus. The quartet flowed into the allegro movement, soaring, triumphant, complex; Mozart alone knew what was up and what was down.
Stina glided across the bed like a leopard but he looked straight through her. He kept hearing her love both as a smooth surface of water and as desire that could have howled with rage.
He put the clown nose on his erection. Looked into her eyes. He sat down on the bed, close to her. When one tries to rouse feminine instincts it's important not to overdo it.
She slid down onto him. He heard the sea. They were about to be swallowed up. Women are better at being swallowed up than men. Their two bodies began to disappear--only his heart remained. His manhood was also his heart; it was his heart pulsing inside her. He heard the fear they each had of losing the other. He heard himself pray: "May SheAlmighty let me stay in this without becoming afraid."
She stopped.
"People never reach each other."
He didn't believe his ears. He still heard her hunger for him, her love, but now a new, utterly unexpected chord had been added.
"No matter how close people get," she said, "they never reach each other. Including us now. Even now, there's a place where each of us is alone."
He had no idea what she was talking about. Femininity is an ocean; even if one has both a life jacket and a preserver, the risk of drowning is overwhelming. He wanted to escape from her. But it wasn't easy; his rigid heart was still inside her, and she was holding tight.
"Do you know the requirements of a chemical analysis?" she said. "It must be comprehensive, free of contradictions, and the simplest possible. That's nice--I love it. Unfortunately, it can't be done. Not even in mathematics."
He pulled free from her and pushed himself back
against the wall. She came after him.
"When you're able to sense another person's smell," she said, "you feel like you're close. Active substances--esters and fatty acids-- dissolve in the skin's fat, get loosened by the evaporation of sweat, and condense again in the open mucous membranes of the nose and mouth. We can sense that moment. And at that moment, when we are fluid and fragrance, we are very close to merging. And we get the feeling it must be possible. It must be possible to rupture the final membrane that separates people. But it doesn't happen. Never. Do you understand?"
This was important for her; it was crucial. Her voice was tense and low, and almost breathless.
"I understand completely," he said. "It's simply a question of finding a partner who is comprehensive and without contradictions. And in the meantime, you'll settle for me."
He crawled over to her and gripped her upper arms. Her sound shifted; it became life-threatening.
"On some level you're a very violent man," she said. "You will control that violence. Or else you will never see me again."
He got up and went out to the entryway. It was the only way to escape from her in two hundred square feet. Unless you crawled into the refrigerator. Nature had given up on Mozart. The wind in the needles of the fir trees sounded like diamonds in a glass.
He was imprisoned in her sound, locked in her fragrance, like the pit in a peach.
She stood in the doorway.
"Loneliness," she said. "Why shouldn't it be allowed here too?"
He did not understand what she meant. He did not understand the mood shift. The sea had changed its appearance again. But at the same time, he could hear all the moods from before. Love, sorrow, desire, disappointment.
He put on his bathrobe. And flip-flops. And went outside.
* * *
He walked a couple of miles along Strand Road, but then it got too cold. So he went into the Rungsted Hotel. The teenage boy at the reception desk possessed the fearlessness and class of the Little Bugler. He showed no sign of disapproval, of either the bathrobe or the flip-flops.
"I've left behind me in the darkness," said Kasper, "a woman who missed her train. I left without my credit card. Can I get a room with an ocean view?"
"Your face," said the boy, "is surely as good as cash."
* * *
He didn't sleep that night; he sat looking out across the water. When morning came, as a sound, not yet as light, he went down to the reception desk. The boy was standing where Kasper had left him.
"The church fathers had a saying," Kasper said. "'Credenti et oranti.' I don't know how much Latin you know; it means, 'Let your prayer guide you.' Last night I watched and prayed, and I have come to the conclusion that in reality the train never leaves. In reality, one way or another, we will spend our whole lives on the railway platform with those we love. What do you say to that?"
"I'm fifteen years old," said the boy. "I absorb the wisdom of life with gratitude. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't appreciate a fiver as a tip. When you transfer the money."
"It will be more than a fiver," said Kasper, "if you'll also call a taxi. And pay for it."
The boy called a taxi.
"They want to know where you're going."
Kasper expected to hear himself say: "Out along Strand Road."
But that wasn't what came out of his mouth.
"Into town," he said. "To the darkest part of Nørrebro."
* * *
Stina's apartment was on Sjælland Street, on the ninth and top floor. He asked the taxi to wait. There were a few drunks on the street; they looked quizzically at his bathrobe and flip-flops.
The building had no elevator, and he climbed the last flights slowly; her sound hovered over everything. He had plumbed the
depths of only a hopelessly small part of her.
He stood for a while outside her door listening to the sleeping building, then his fingers found the key above the door. Inside, he stood for a while again, without turning on a light.
It was one square room plus a small kitchen and bathroom, with sloping white walls, a bay-window seat, and very few pieces of furniture. The furnishing was not only Spartan--it was like a cell. Nevertheless, the room was alive.
Part of the secret was that the few things in the room were placed with precision, like stones in a sand garden. He had worn out more set designers and prop masters than he could remember; only a handful of them had what Stina had. And they, like her, used very few pieces of furniture, few lamps, few props.
He could hear the echo of her bare feet on the floorboards; he could sense some of her fragrance. But on other levels the apartment provided almost no information. A scoured oak desk. A brown Poul Henningsen lamp from the thirties. One chair. A large double bed. A flat file designed for architects and graphic artists, which he'd used to take the measurements for the drawer in the trailer. On the desk, a few writing materials. And two computers. On a low table, two printers. A large bulletin board with maps and charts hung on one wall. Pieces of driftwood lay in various places, wood that had turned black, then silvery gray. Beach rocks. Conch shells. Flowers, orchids--not those found in flower shops, but muted, rare botanical species that he had seen here for the first time. A low shelf held professional books. Hanging on another wall was a rug made of fine black wool with an intricately woven geometric design. No pictures on the walls. No photographs.
She had told him essentially nothing about her past. And he had not asked. They had danced around each other, after an unspoken agreement to avoid those places where the past was archived. And where the future is planned.
It had been a beautiful dance, moving, respectful. The flip side of respect is unnecessary distance. He slid down from the windowseat and opened one of the flat drawers; it was filled with letters.
* * *
One time, they had taken a shower together, here in the apartment; he had gotten out first. She had turned off the water. The drops from the walls and the shower curtain had played Chopin's Prelude in A-Major, drops of passion, oxygen-filled heart blood falling on black marble. She had lathered her palms, thinned the lather with water, and blown a soap bubble from her hands, as large as a coconut.
She put lather on one forearm and held it tight against her body under her left breast, outside her heart. She began to blow. He had never seen anything like it; the bubble was large, twelve inches in diameter, and floated like the sea lions' ball in the circus.
It did not pop. She captured it with the other arm, and now it formed a tube straight across her body. She stretched the tube; its sides curved inward, as if it wanted to expand and deflate simultaneously.
"Dirichlet's theorem," she said, "of minimal surfaces. A very nice proof. When we increase a surface, at the same time it gives way it will try to stretch over the least possible area."
She had come toward him. With the long, concave, shining bubble.
"Everything alive," she said. "And everything dead. Tries simultaneously to expand and hold back. Including love. It's a mystery. How does one go into free fall? And at the same time keep one's hand on the emergency brake?"
She was right next to him. It was as if there were an invisible layer of clear oil on her skin. Water could not stay on it; the film of water contracted and divided into drops, like on a dolphin.
"Is there a solution?" he said.
"Even if there were, you wouldn't want it."
The bubble touched him.
"And you've never wanted it. Even when you were very close to it."
The bubble burst.
It had been just a small mistake. But it had been enough. For a moment her sound had been different. Full of knowledge. He had sensed that she knew something about him. That she must have been inside a space in his system that he hadn't given her permission to enter. And that she must have taken something out of it. It was that memory this night had activated.
* * *
A person with good upbringing doesn't read other people's letters; he hadn't even rea
d Bach's letters that were reprinted in the Groce edition. And he read Kierkegaard's only for academic reasons. But if one is to gain insights into feminine nature one must take advantage of every opportunity.
He lifted out the letters in piles and riffled through them. Someone who has shuffled and dealt cards with a lucky hand throughout a long life can quickly orient himself in a stack of papers.
The first pile was technical letters, Seismic Studies, Lund University, Lund, Sweden; British Geological Survey, Edinburgh. Stacks of letters from the European Mediterranean Seismological Center, EMSC, in Bruyà res-le-Chàtel. UCLA Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. On cheap copy paper. He came to the private letters; there weren't many. Or she kept them somewhere else. Or she didn't keep them. There was a thin bundle of handwritten letters on heavy off-white stationery. They were signed "Mother" or "Your Mother." There was no return address, but "Holte" was written next to the date. He found one envelope with a return address and stuck it in his pocket.
He continued looking. The sound in the room shifted. He knew he was getting close. He listened into several piles organized with large paper clips. There were letters from previous lovers; he shut his hearing hurriedly. Deep down, isn't it totally unacceptable for any woman to have had any lover but you?
Two pages touched his fingers and his hearing like a thorn. They were stapled together; the tiny pieces of metal had stuck him. He separated the pages. They were photocopies. Lie recognized the handwriting. It was his own. Carefully written more than twenty years ago. By a person that in some sense must have been him.
He had known he would find them. That was what he had heard in her voice that day in the shower. It was the sound of these letters.
A third letter was attached. Also handwritten. It was a photocopy of the reply he had received back then. The handwriting of the answer was uneven, slightly wavy. Like the handwriting in Mozart's musical scores had been. When you played Mozart you absolutely had to have a copy of the original; his scores were full of information. The same was true of the handwriting in front of him now.
He should have stopped at that point. But he continued. His fingers found a thicker shape. On a thin piece of paper were what looked like fingerprints, in purple ink. Five fingers, but broader than fingers' normal thickness. The print was protected with a clear adhesive coating and marked national police, cfi. Directly under it lay another printed sheet with numbers and combinations of letters marked crime laboratory. The address was Slotsherrens Road.
