The Quiet Girl - Peter Hoeg

by Peter Høeg

  The African looked at him. He had reached her. Perhaps not with his wisdom. But perhaps with the surprise effect. Her jaw began to drop.

  The man at her feet got to his knees and struck her with the slim barrel of the weapon. Kasper heard her thigh bone break.

  Her eyes grew reddish. As if blood were flowing to the white membrane around the iris. She leaned over. Put her arms around the man beneath her. Lifted him up.

  She began to squeeze him. She held a man of two hundred pounds plus her own weight upright. With a broken thigh bone. Kasper realized that he was listening into the future. That he heard a foretaste of what can happen when Africa soon loses patience and rises up.

  The man's eyes began to bulge out of their sockets. Kasper heard a wrist break. Ernst's fingers were pressed hard on the trigger guard.

  The machine gun went off. The swarm of bullets drew half a heart on the plate-glass window. The window cracked and blew in. It splintered into pieces of glass the size of dinner plates. Just then Kasper heard the wind.

  It had gotten stronger. He had let himself be fooled by the sunshine. By his unfamiliarity with being up so high. It was no ordinary wind. It was a jet stream, an April storm.

  The shattered glass wall swept through the room and pulverized behind Kasper. After the glass, the wind grabbed the furniture, the children, Kain, the African, and threw them against the wall.

  Kasper saw the grand piano rear up as if it wanted to stand on two legs. Then it was tossed across the room and splintered against the wall.

  For a brief time, things were in limbo. During which, Kasper grabbed the two children. He laid them on top of Maximillian and fastened their feet to a pillar.

  Then came the suction; the wind withdrew like a tidal wave after it has struck the coast.

  It created an outward pull, as if an exit door had fallen off a jet plane. Kasper looked for Stina. She was sitting down holding on to a pillar. He saw Kain working his way toward the door.

  The African let go of Ernst. Kasper saw him struggle to get the weapon into position. Saw him realize that his hands no longer obeyed. Then the undertow pulled him backward, slowly at first. He got down on his knees to try to escape the powerful current, without success. He grabbed for a pillar, but his hands weren't strong enough. Then he was sucked out over the sea.

  Above them Kasper heard the helicopter propeller accelerate. He heard the mooring line's snap-lock pop open. Then the wind tore the machine away from the building.

  He did not look up. He looked into his father's face. They were lying next to each other. Maximillian smiled.

  He managed to lift one hand. He stroked Rasper's cheek.

  "I know what you want to say. That it was beautiful. Touching. That I sacrificed myself for you. To atone for some of the mess your mother and I got you into. And you're right. You're damn right."

  He tried to draw a breath. Kasper saw two shades of blood in his father's mouth. The dark-red blood oozing from the vein injuries. And the bright-red blood from his arteries. The latter made a sound like microscopic oxygen bubbles quietly boiling on the fluid's surface.

  "I'm a man with great reserves," whispered Maximillian. "I can afford to agree with you. Just once. Here at the very end."

  Even if his voice was now only the faintest whisper, it was full of life. The way Kasper remembered it from when his father was about forty. Maximillian's body was a silk thread in the universe. But his mind was undiminished.

  "Don't talk. One of the things I liked best was death scenes. Do you remember Basotto? That clown kept coming in and dying over and over again. We almost peed in our pants with laughter. But this now. This will be the last time."

  "Are you really sure about that, Grandpa?"

  It was the little girl who spoke. The dying man focused on her. "Isn't it a little late," he whispered, "to introduce me to my grandchild?"

  "It couldn't be done earlier, unfortunately," said Kasper.

  "You shouldn't be talking," said the girl. "You should think about the fact that you're going to die."

  "What the hell?" said Maximillian.

  She leaned over him. Placed a hand on his chest. And a hand on the top of his head.

  "Bastian," she said.

  The dark-haired boy knelt by Maximillian's head. The two youngsters focused their attention with an intensity that Kasper had never heard in children. Hardly even in adults.

  Kasper gently held his father's body close. He felt something move against his hand, like a small animal. He realized it was his father's heart. The bullets had opened the back of the chest cavity and exposed the pulsating muscle.

  "Really," said the girl, "there's nothing to fear."

  Kasper heard the silence. Beginning from a center between the two children, it spread into a sphere and dissolved all sounds. The storm disappeared. The glass room. The bodies. The present. Denmark. The last thing Kasper saw was his father's face. When consciousness left his eyes and was drawn back into a tunnel. Then everything was gone.

  PART EIGHT

  1

  They drove him to Værløse airfield, the part the air force had kept. To a complex of small barracks half buried in the ground beside a barricaded area riddled with drainage holes and surrounded by signs saying POLLUTED.

  It started to rain as they drove through the town of Jonstrup. The rain continued steadily through the three days they questioned him.

  * * *

  They let him sleep about three hours a day; the time of day was something he guessed at--there was no clock. They gave him nothing to eat, but offered him coffee and juice; he drank only water, just in case they might have put something in the juice and coffee.

  He heard the rain on the roof start to play--Bach's cantatas, perhaps. After two days and nights he could hear very clearly the six string quartets that Haydn had written after a ten-year pause. And later, Mozart's six quartets that were a response to Haydn's. By that time Kasper had begun to see his sleeping dreams with open eyes, and he realized that his thoughts about music and the rain were in order to survive. In order to create some coherence in a reality that was falling apart.

  There were three sets of two-person teams, one man and one woman on each team. They must have understood how he related to women; the women were warm and motherly. Every interrogation team uses the contrast between the good and the bad parent; he felt like weeping at the women's breasts, and did twice, while the questioning continued.

  "Why were the children kidnapped?"

  "I don't know," he said. "Could it have had something to do with a ransom, something to do with sex?"

  "You've mentioned clairvoyance."

  "That must be a misunderstanding," he said. "Clairvoyance is superstition, and I'm not superstitious. Do you have that in writing or on tape?"

  "Why did you come back to Denmark?"

  "I'm forty-two years old. I've come home to die in my own nest. Like the elephants, you know. For me, Denmark is an elephant

  cemetery."

  "Why did you cancel your contracts?"

  "I don't have the energy I once had."

  "Where had you met the children before?"

  "I never set eyes on them before."

  "The girl says she had met you before."

  "She remembers incorrectly. That's how it is to be loved and idolized and in the newspaper. Children and adults think they know you. I've suspected you too. Of just wanting to be in the proximity of fame."

  "You were at the convent for the first time in May of last year."

  "I was there for the first time two weeks ago. I went directly from the airport."

  "Why did they come to get you?"

  "Ask them. They're compassionate sisters. Isn't it their job to nurse lost souls?"

  * * *

  After two days and nights the threats began.

  "The woman," they said. "And the child. We can hold them for an unlimited time. The national state of emergency suspends the law."

  "What does that have to do wi
th me?"

  "You will be sent to Spain tomorrow."

  He laughed within himself. Quietly, a private laughter. He no longer felt any anxiety. There is only so much you can take away from a person. After that, the person is free.

  "Kain," said the woman across from him. "What does that name mean to you?"

  "Isn't that something from the Bible?"

  "When did you first meet him?"

  "Could I sit on your lap for a little while?" said Kasper. "To collect my thoughts. Maybe something would come to me."

  * * *

  They had given him a chair with a slanting seat. He kept sliding down. He had heard about that kind of chair--some of the Moroccan performers had been interrogated by the Foreign Legion in Ajaccio, on the island of Corsica. They said that the slanting chair was worse than the beatings. Kasper held out for some hours. Until the middle of Mozart's Dissonance quartet.

  "I need a different chair," he said. "It doesn't have to be an Eames. But it has to be better than this one. Otherwise, I'm going to cause an accident for you."

  They did not react. They didn't believe he had any juice in his batteries. He stood up and tossed the chair with his foot; it hit the

  man across from him in the head.

  The next instant the room was full of people and he was handcuffed with black plastic clamps. But they gave him a better chair.

  "Can the children do anything special?" they had asked.

  "They seemed like talented children," he said. "I'm sure they can shit and beat drums. How about asking them yourself?"

  * * *

  There was an oblong mirror in the room, shimmering, as if coated with oil: a one-way window for identification of suspects. In his case, the money was wasted; he could hear every movement behind the glass. His only complaint was that the glass cut off some of the high frequencies, as damp air does.

  Most of the time he heard Moerk. Sometimes the baroness from Strand Road. Men and women with a tone of authority. Twice he heard someone who was perhaps the foreign minister; he remembered the sound pattern from one of the loges at a gala performance. Or else it was all his imagination. The only thing he was certain about was the rain.

  * * *

  After two days and nights he realized that what they were looking for was not the truth. What they were looking for was a fabrication. Which they and the public would be able to live with.

  "Were the children abused? Was that the reason?"

  He raised his head and looked straight at them.

  "That was the motive," he said. "But they didn't succeed. That, and the money, perhaps. The convent's philanthropic foundation is very well off. Since the beginning of the last century. Donations from upper-class Russian immigrants who came to Denmark fleeing the Revolution."

  He could tell that he had reached them. From then on, he controlled them.

  "What was the woman, the engineer, doing in the tower?"

  "A former friend. I had to use what help I could get."

  "And you yourself?"

  He settled himself on a razor's edge. It was a matter of ensuring Moerk's help. And reassuring the man and woman across from him.

  "The Foreign Ministry's police department contacted me. Because the girl had been my student. A routine questioning. I offered to help them. I hoped it could benefit my court case."

  Their faces were expressionless. But their relief came through clearly.

  * * *

  At some point he must have fainted after all. He had been unaware of the transfer, but he noticed that the room was different; the walls were now yellow, like plasma.

  He lay on a thin mattress. He could hear those who were questioning him, he could understand the questions, but he could not see who was asking them.

  He knew he was experiencing some sort of psychosis. Between the undulating walls human bodies developed animal heads; he realized immediately that people who were thrown in here unexpectedly would lose their minds.

  He sensed that his praying ensured a kind of equanimity. It went on steadily like a deep, musical, automatic acceptance of the lack of structure around him. Prayer is a raft that ferries us safely through divorces, through drunken sprees, psychedelic mushroom trips, grade three interrogations, and even through death, they say.

  Prayer and love. He thought about Stina.

  * * *

  She had been gone for several years. He had tried everything: threats and pressure on the Geodesic Institute, Interpol's missing-persons department, private detectives, lawyers with international contacts. He had put ads in the personals columns of Europe's biggest newspapers. All to no avail.

  One afternoon he had driven out again to Holte, to her parents' home. It was winter; her father was out in the garden cutting fruit trees with a grafting knife. Kasper stood for a while watching the man work. Absorbing his sound. Some of it reminded him of Stina.

  "One shouldn't be too sentimental about love," said Kasper.

  "Most of what people call love, also here in Holte, could just as well be with someone else. Love is a very practical arrangement, as I can hear, and that's fine in its way. But the better that people fit together, and the greater the risks one is willing to take, the fewer options there are. I can't explain it, but it's the same with my profession; I couldn't have been anything very different--there are few or no alternatives. That's how it was with Stina and me. It's like a performance that got interrupted while it was still at the beginning, and twenty-four thousand tickets have been sold in advance, and I have a responsibility to the spectators. The spectators are all those parts of me, and of her, that want to have each other; it's not just the inner prince and princess, but also the inner cripples, the dwarfs, the naughty inner children. They sit waiting because they know it has been decided that this performance should be completed. It was commissioned higher up. I feel that somewhere outside the usual pettiness a contract has been written, and it needs to be fulfilled."

  The man looked up. He had tears in his eyes.

  "There's nothing I can do," he said.

  Kasper had then driven out to see his own father. Maximillian had moved back to the large house in Skodsborg. One should be careful about moving back to places where one has suffered great losses; the house was filled with echoes of Helene Krone.

  They sat in a living room that faced the water; around them were all the right pieces of furniture, the right pictures, the right

  view. Unfortunately, material things are not enough; something needs to breathe life into them, someone needs to blow into the instrument.

  "You've always kept many things secret," said Kasper. "I applaud that wholeheartedly. I have a closed side too; but there's something about Stina--I could always hear that. You know something or other. And you must tell me now."

  Maximillian looked around without finding what he was looking for, a way out. That's one of the disadvantages when you set yourself up expensively but simply; the surroundings no longer offer pretexts and hiding places.

  "The police have a central database, and I looked her up. She spent two years in the women's prison in Horsens. For manslaughter. I couldn't get the details."

  * * *

  He accompanied Kasper to the door.

  "My problem," said Kasper, "is that even if she had killed and devoured a whole family, I'd still love her."

  Maximillian opened the door.

  "I would too," he said.

  Father and son looked out over the snow-covered lawns. Their sounds were related. Very often a particular aspect of loneliness is transmitted from one generation to the next.

  "Nevertheless, we have to live," said Kasper. "I'm about to set my mind to meeting a woman who is more a nurse type. It would be fine if she was a member of the Ethical Council. And did volunteer work in a church congregation."

  "When you find her," said Maximillian, "if she has a mother or older sister, will you give your father a call?"

  * * *

  The baroness from Strand Road brought him out of
the psychosis. Back to a reality that was not much better than where he came from. She took his pulse. Lifted his eyelids and shone a light into his eyes. All the same, it reassured him, in a sense. It was obviously important to them to keep him alive.

  At one point, near the end--although at the time he didn't know that--they left the room. Vivian the Terrible came in. At first he couldn't see her; his sight was poor and his memory too. But he recognized her A-flat major. The depth of the musical key. Its compassion. He remembered how Mozart had often composed for the theater. How he had tuned into the singers. And then written in their specific musical key. For this woman he would have written an aria about a broken heart. In A-flat major.

  He did not understand how she had gained admittance. But if there was anyone who could do that, it was she.

  He knew that he couldn't ask about anything. They were being monitored, as if for a studio recording. He did it anyway.

  "The children and Stina?"

  "They are safe."

  She tried to maintain her mask. But he could dimly see his mirror image in her eyes. He must look like a ghost.

  "Kain and the woman?"

  "Disappeared."

  She had a portable radio with her, which she placed on the table and turned on. Tom Waits sang "Cold Water" from Mule Variations, deep loneliness and deep compassion and deep spiritual longing that hasn't found its way home and probably never will in this life, at 140 decibels in a bunker from World War II. The sound would paralyze all their small condenser microphones.

  She leaned down to him.

  "I've seen the state medical examiner's certificate. Cause of death: heart attack. Shall I get it revised?"

  He shook his head.

  "What will the official story be?" she asked.

  "A compromise. Children kidnapped. A combination of sexual and economic motives. The kidnappers did not succeed."

  "Reality is created by compromises," she said. "That's what human beings can tolerate. Many of my patients prefer to die with the television turned on. Your father and I. We were beyond that. We were headed into unknown territory."

  * * *