The Quiet Girl - Peter Hoeg

by Peter Høeg

  Kain's hair had been trimmed very short. To repair the crew cut on the back of his head. An attempt had been made to remove the henna, but it had not been completely successful.

  Kasper increased his weight on the other man's arm imperceptibly.

  "In the twenties the Russian Orthodox nuns in Denmark get an outstanding leader, Mother Rabia. She must have been what they call an extraordinary mind. She has an idea of training children. She starts among artists. Perhaps because many artist families go to the Orthodox Church. Which has a lay order. Perhaps because after World War One many Eastern European children who had attended convent schools came to Denmark."

  "What did she want to train them to do?"

  "She had the idea that, under certain circumstances, small groups of children and adults could raise global compassion. Send out a signal to the heart. Is that crazy?"

  Kain did not reply. They stopped on a landing by a tall window. The pane was a glass mosaic, the windowsill just above knee height. Kasper knew he could toss the other man out through the window. And they were on the fifth floor. He could hear Kain's mind deliberating over the same thought.

  There were two chairs on the landing. To allow residents of this home for the elderly to rest their degenerating legs if they walked up the stairs.

  "In a little while," said Kasper, "you and I will complete the course of our lives. Perhaps in the same psychiatric nursing home. Sitting in a couple of chairs like these. There we'll meet all the flowers we've trampled. Also the crimes we've committed against children."

  "They weren't kidnapped. The girl came to see me. She offered a deal. I was to find the other eleven children. And bring them here."

  Kasper listened into the other man's system. Perhaps he was telling the truth.

  "What did you get in return?" he asked.

  Kain did not answer.

  "Mother Rabia wasn't successful," said Kasper. "Someone started exploiting the children economically. For money, instead of for compassion."

  "Does it have to be 'instead of? Can't it be 'both . . . and'? I'm very fond of your recording of the solo partitas. For Bach it was 'both . . . and.'"

  They descended another floor, in silence.

  "Everything could end here," said Kasper. "End happily. You bring back the children. And the money."

  Kain laughed quietly.

  "It will end happily anyway."

  "What did the children want?" Kasper asked.

  "The world will discover that. In due time. It has to do with compassion too. It's very beautiful."

  "KlaraMaria had been hit. When she came to see me."

  Kain looked at his right hand. Kasper could hear that the man was shaken somehow.

  "They're extraordinary children," he said. "And it follows that they're also extraordinarily apt to invite a smack in the eye."

  Kasper listened into the resounding tone beside him. Kain was truly moved. In the coherent aspect of himself. The other aspect was pushed to the side for the moment.

  "You and I," said Kain. "We could achieve something together. I've assembled a very special circle of people. Who are my contacts to the children. I have a huge business operation. We could earn money. And help the world go in the right direction. Come and join me."

  The stairwell spiraled down before Kasper's eyes.

  "Think about it," said Kain. "I'll give you my telephone number."

  Kasper automatically held out the lottery ticket. The other man had a kind of magnetism; you couldn't resist him. The ticket was about to be filled up; like the major-minor tonality that could hardly last longer, the dance card was about to be oversubscribed. Kain wrote down his number and handed back the ticket.

  He took out his handkerchief. Wiped his nose.

  "I get emotional easily," he said.

  "I can see that," said Kasper. "Do you cry all the way to the bank too?"

  The other man's sound changed. They stood together at the brink and looked down into the abyss.

  "I operate from a societal point of view. I'm the best thing that's happened to those children in a long time. What happened to the girl was an accident. It will never happen again. All of this is extremely demanding. It's a phenomenon unlike anything the world has ever seen. The children need to be helped. Helped and guided. And I can do that."

  Kasper heard the hole in the other man's system begin to open. The healthy side of his personality got tuned down. And something else took over. He realized he was about to lose control himself.

  "I've listened to many people," he said. "And right now I can hear that you'd be a real find for any madhouse."

  They grabbed each other simultaneously. The door opened. The African stood in the doorway. Behind her stood the stocky man with the hearing aid. Ernst.

  Kain let go of Kasper. Walked around the woman. Kasper shouted. Kain turned around.

  "In two weeks," said Kasper, "I'll come to visit you in jail. And trim your hair."

  4

  Kasper unfolded his wheelchair. Sat down in it. The stocky man just stood there. His nose was bandaged. But with just a thin bandage. Fate must have brought him to the right plastic surgeon. Kasper rode over to him.

  "You and I, Ernst," he said, "we're the strong silent type. Who use roundabout ways to manage things."

  The man walked ahead of him. Out the front gate and down the sidewalk. Kasper wheeled himself alongside. Ernst looked at Kasper's stomach. At the spot where he had seen the bullet enter.

  "I always have my illustrated Bible stuck in the front of my underwear," said Kasper. "It lessened the impact."

  There was no echo in the other man's system. No sense of humor. That makes a clown's job harder. But not less important. "There's a place, "said Kasper, "where the lungs end. And the kidneys and liver and spleen haven't yet begun. It went through there. Next time you should aim a little higher."

  Ernst nodded.

  "I'll remember that," he said. "I will definitely remember that."

  A very small helicopter, like a large fish bowl, was waiting on the bridge at the end of St. Annæ Street. Kasper saw Kain open the window in front of the cockpit and get in. Aske Brodersen was in the pilot's seat.

  The building behind Kasper and Ernst had been a cafe; the windows were broken, but there were still tables and chairs on the sidewalk. The man sat down on a chair.

  "What did you cut them off with?" said Kasper. "The girl's fingers?"

  That was to open the other man's system, and it succeeded. Kasper began to hear him; it was not a pretty sound.

  There was no yielding; what Kasper heard was fearlessness.

  There are two kinds of fearlessness. The first is the fearlessness of lovers, of mystics, the courage from Die Kunst der Fuge. The courage that comes from having opened up completely, totally given of yourself and not held back anything, and now the world streams into you and fills you, and you know that everything is safe and there will never be anything to lose.

  The man's courage was something else. It was what comes from having found the life-giving source and shut it off once and for all, so it’s worthless now. Therefore, even if life is at stake, one is calm, because there isn’t really anything to lose.

  Ernst looked at Kasper.

  “You’re not upset about it,” he said. "I’ll give you that.”

  “Why?” said Kasper. "Why kill her?"

  One of the things that characterize those of us who love danger is our attraction to situations where we have left the farthest outposts of reason behind us and have entrusted our fate to what we call chance.

  "I loved her,” said Ernst. “So l had to do it.”

  The instant the words were spoken Kasper heard the love appear. Not worldly love, not the longing for sex or money--those longings are vague and weak compared to the feeling that resounded for a moment around the man beside him. It was a deep inner longing, a craving for the Divine, that he heard.

  "She had it. And she wouldn’t give it to me. What was I supposed to do?”

/>   For a moment, a world stood open. A continent. In the middle of Overgaden Neden Vandet Street. Beside the abandoned canals and crumbling buildings. The mad world of those who have tasted a little of the great silence, and now cannot get the next drops. Kasper thought about the Savior. At around this time He had been busily preparing for His resurrection and return to earth. After the disciples had betrayed and deserted Him, after He had been tormented and crucified.

  Kasper looked at Ernst. He knew he was listening into aspects of the special feeling a spiritually fulfilled person awakens in her admirers, even if that person is a child.

  Then Kasper heard the other manis sorrow. It was far away, out near the borders of the Milky Way, twelve incarnations in the future. But it was immense; it could easily have enveloped Christianshavn and the whole surrounding area. It was the sorrow of one who has committed an offense against his deepest longing.

  "Please wheel me over to the boat,” Kasper said.

  Ernst stood up, pushed Kasper over to the canal. The African was standing at the bulwark. She and the man watched each other intently, like a cobra and a mongoose. But Kasper could not determine for certain which was which.

  Sister Gloria rolled Kasper onto the boat. She started the motor. Above them the man leaned forward. He cut the air with two fingers.

  “With a wire cutter," he said.

  5

  The boat passed under the bridge that connected Christianshavn with Arsenal Island. The sea channel had disappeared in gray clouds.

  The African helped Kasper onto the aft thwart and put the tiller in his good hand. She opened a stow space. Pulled out a rain poncho, a sou'wester, work gloves, wristlets, a flat liquid compass. She laid the compass on the thwart; the fog came and went.

  He felt her calmness. He thought about Grock. About his Inez. Who had stayed by him her whole life. Backed him up. Loyal as a lapdog. Brutal as a bodyguard. Solicitous as a nurse.

  Why had he never succeeded himself? In finding the right woman. Gentle. Patient. Loyal. Why were the women in his life Furies? Like his mother. Like Sonja. Like Stina. KlaraMaria. Like Sister Gloria. Women who were slack-line virtuosos. Mechanical experts. Hydrologists. Monster children. Martial-arts nuns with husbands and children.

  A gust of wind opened a corridor in the fog. At the end of the corridor lay what must be Pylon 5. Three-stories of aluminum and wood, rectangular, built on a cement landing platform that had been part of Bornholmer Wharf before the earthquakes. The building was protected against new earthquakes with steel wires, like the guylines on a tent. A forest of antennae and two rotating radar sensors were visible on the roof. Tied up by the platform were two of the navy's low, dull black speedboats.

  Kasper gave Sister Gloria the tiller. Put the wristlet on his healthy hand. Took his violin out of its case. They glided along the bridge piers under Christian the Fourth Bridge.

  "Everything is guarded," she said. "We'll have to turn around."

  He tuned the violin. Lie could suddenly hear what he had to offer women: his motivating force. No woman, of her own free will, steers into the Danish Frogman Corps arrayed only in her indomitable optimism and Partita in E-Major.

  A searchlight went on.

  "May I rest my cast arm against your shoulder?" he asked. He closed his eyes and began to play, all the while speaking to

  calm her.

  "The military loves music," he said. "Some sort of music is always played when people fight. But until now they've chosen the wrong pieces. They should have thought about Bach; they could have avoided bloodshed. Music like I'm playing now leads straight to a cease-fire. To legal mediation rather than lawsuits. We'll be inside shortly."

  He leaned into the music. It opened the heart the way one opens a can of peeled tomatoes. His own heart, the guards' hearts, Stina's. He knew she had come out onto the platform.

  The boat glided along the tires hung on the platform as bumpers. It was quiet all around them; the closeness of the fog and the music created some of the intimacy that can be lacking when one plays outdoors. It gave one the feeling that there was a concert hall extending around the Foreign Ministry, the bridge, the platform, and the National Bank.

  Sister Gloria laid down the aluminum planks. At first there was no life on the platform, then two guards moved, like robots. Kasper was pulled up onto the cement.

  Standing next to Stina was a young man in civilian clothes who had a sound like a brass orchestra. Kasper had heard that sound somewhere before. Stina's eyes were drugged with the music. They stared at him. At the wheelchair. The planks. The plaster cast. The Egyptian bandaging. At Sister Gloria.

  "Five minutes," he whispered. "It's a matter of life and death."

  Slowly, her soul worked its way up to the surface. Then she got her breath.

  "Never!" she said.

  He pulled out of his bandages the receipt for the registered letter that had contained KlaraMaria's drawing. Stina read it. Grabbed for it. It had disappeared.

  He nodded toward Sister Gloria.

  "She's from the Morality Squad," he said. "You can invite me inside. Or we can talk further at police headquarters."

  6

  The elevator was made of Plexiglas. The young man tried to squeeze himself in, but there was only room for four, and the wheelchair took up space for two. Kasper blocked him discreetly, the doors closed, and they sank into the depths. Because of the difference in pressure, all sounds are displaced when one moves downward. It was a normal situation in view of the fact that he was with Stina. With her it had never been very long before one was headed down below or up above the normal range of the register.

  They passed a communications room, where people wearing headsets were sitting at digital switchboards. The elevator stopped. He let Stina go out first. As Sister Gloria wheeled him forward he stuffed two fingers of a work glove into the groove of the elevator door catch. It would block the electrical contact and delay the young man on the platform. It's good for young people to learn to postpone gratification.

  They went through a small cafeteria; Kasper hastily took a dinner plate from a stack. You never know what you will have use for; haven't we all learned that from "Clumsy Hans"? Everything was quiet behind them, the elevator blocked.

  They entered a beautiful room, large and rectangular like a gymnast's Reuther board, but packed like a spaceship. One wall was covered with flat screens showing ocean surfaces. Another with ten three-foot-square meteorological overview maps. Radar display consoles. Some thirty feet of granite slab holding perhaps fifty seismographs. A dozen barographs, the largest as big as the Danish Class Lottery's revolving drum. Three rows of computer tables. Sitting at the computers were young people with bodies for a tawdry music video and heads for a Ph.D. in Riemannian geometry. The remaining wall had a six-foot by twelve-foot aquarium window opening onto the harbor; the ocean floor was illuminated. In spite of the sludge, Kasper saw schools of fish.

  The room had a dense sound, of ventilators, of megabytes, of swarms of numbers, of murmuring liquid-cooled processors. Kasper had a sudden feeling of joy. He stood in the twenty-first century's answer to the bridge of Captain Nemo's ship. He loved science. And it didn't matter that science did not love him. There can be great depths of love that are not reciprocated.

  Stina looked at his bandages.

  "I've been at a meeting," he said, "with a couple of individuals who have kidnapped KlaraMaria."

  She braced herself against the granite slab.

  "She's been gone for more than two weeks," he said. "The prognosis is poor for little girls who disappear for more than twenty-four hours. So I was wondering if you could help me."

  Stina turned around mechanically and walked ahead of him along the row of monitors. She sat down. The African pushed

  Kasper's wheelchair to face her.

  This was her workplace. There was a bottle of Italian mineral water. A hyacinth in a Pyrex distillation flask; if she had received it as a gift, he didn't want to know from whom. Three s
hort carpenter pencils, sharpened with a knife. Next to them lay the knife that had sharpened them. A basket of braided birch bark for the shavings. A small jar of moisturizing cream..

  It was a desk like all other desks. Ten square feet of laminated wood. Nonetheless, it had an atmosphere that made the visitor want to set up camp. It had her aroma; he breathed it in.

  "We're part of a web," she said. "We have connections to the Seismic Station in Uppsala, to the Institute of Solid Earth Physics in Bergen. To all the NORSAR seismological observatories. The British Geological Survey in Edinburgh. European-Mediterranean Seismological Center stations in Nice and Madrid. We have a seismic station on the Vestvold embankment. Another in the lime mines in Mønsted. Directly beneath us we have a measuring well, twenty-three hundred feet deep, drilled and installed after the first tremors.In it are seventeen hundred sensors. In the next room we have more equipment than San Francisco. RefTek recorders. Meissner seismographs. The army detonates eleven hundred pounds of dynamite for us each week, and the vibration is collected by eight hundred geophones. So we can measure the movement of pressure waves underground. We measure stress fields. Elastic pressure changes in the earth's strata. Local changes in magnetism. Groundwater changes and deformities in a square-yard net that stretches from Dragør to Farum. We have four biologists to observe changes in the behavior of small rodents in the woods around Copenhagen. Testing a Chinese theory--that animals react to earthquakes before they occur. We have a flying squad from GeoForschungsZentrum in Potsdam. I have a hundred assistant geophysicists, engineers, and technicians. They handle six million measurement results each day. Twice a week one of our geodesists with popular appeal appears on all the television channels and talks about the progress we've made toward understanding the situation. About the likelihood of new earthquakes. About the risk that large parts of Copenhagen and Zealand mightneed to be evacuated."

  Someone must have removed the work glove. Kasper heard the elevator go up.