The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel

by Høeg, Peter

  The next morning the housemaids found her in the room, dead. Her body was stiff and cold, but about the cracked but still full lips there hung a contented smile that made the servants think that she had, at the hour of her death, made a particularly advantageous deal with the Devil himself. That smile was kept in place by the rigor mortis that also made it impossible to pull her body free of the chair. Which is why they had a cover of oak made for it, and buried her sitting up.

  * * *

  It has not been possible for me to reconstruct the events immediately succeeding the Old Lady’s funeral. Once they were over, the people of the town forgot them in the same way that they forgot the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century, and what occurred left no traces other than two extraordinary editions of the newspaper and a series of evasive answers. All we can be sure of is the beginning and the end. The Old Lady’s will was read aloud to Christoffer, Katarina, Amalie, and her sisters in a room that would be used on only one further occasion, after which it apparently ceased to exist. At the instant that the lawyer opened the big brown manila envelope that had been lying in his safe for three years—although he had not the faintest idea how it came to be there—he recognized, to his astonishment, his own handwriting and the Old Lady’s impatient dictation style. And at that same instant all of those present, and the rest of the town, were given a glimpse of eternity. The will was written on fine, almost transparent sheets of rice paper, and as the lawyer read out the date it became evident that this was the final, the definitive list, because this date contained no numbers. Instead, in the lawyer’s neat hand, it said: “From this day and for all time.” From the opening words of the will—which the lawyer read with quavering voice because he both recognized his own handwriting and yet felt sure that he had never written the document before him—both he and the family knew that this was the Old Lady’s most inconsiderate, most arrogant masterpiece: a complete record of the Teander Rabow family history for all time.

  The Old Lady began by stating the date, the hour, and the place for the reading of her will to her vapid son and his ailing wife and her two grandchildren and Amalie, the willful one, and how the townspeople would realize that these precise moments had been predetermined. The lawyer looked up because the thought had suddenly occurred to him that he was reading to a group of waxwork dummies, and only the quick glance Amalie shot at her father made him go on, although he did not understand that this particular glance had not been predicted in the will before him, which otherwise contained detailed notes for every moment of the reading of it.

  There followed a description of the Old Lady’s funeral; a description more deafly earsplitting, more impatient, and more detailed than ever before, and everything was as she said it would be, right down to her despotic and arrogant indications of where, in her funeral sermon, Christoffer’s father-in-law, the dean, would pause, distracted by the memory of the previous night, in the chapel, when he had wanted to unscrew the lid of the coffin in the futile hope that that disagreeable smile would have forsaken her face, never again to haunt his memory. After this came an account of the future of the newspaper, the printing plants, the offices, and the accounts and expansion projects and new acquisitions and investments—being particularly mindful of a new and promising world war—there you are; and here the will was as gracious as though this war were a gift to the bereaved, in their sorrow. Next came a month-by-month recital of the front-line positions, so that, when the time came, the newspaper could be first with the news. This will was a true catalogue of eternity. The Old Lady had not even considered it necessary to exhort her audience to listen and take all her words to heart. Nor was it necessary, since, during the reading, the terse sentences had retained all of her effrontery, to such an extent that now, before her family, she loomed large in the room, a solid specter that made them all sit even more improbably still than usual. Even Amalie stopped glancing at her father as the will set out the family’s private conditions and decreed which parts of the house they could frequent and specified their bedtimes and departures from these and when they might take sleeping drafts and where, under the bed, they could place their chamber pots and how Christoffer was to dress and the way in which his cuffs would fray: a never-ending number of details that were then discussed in greater depth in the footnotes. After having unfolded the course of Katarina’s illness and given a precise description of the last stages of her tuberculosis—during which Christoffer was to carry his wife’s bloody sputum to the public sewer twelve times a day, to prevent the children from being infected—this part of the will closed by predicting that the lawyer would pause at just this point because Katarina would have collapsed in a tearful coughing fit and because the reading could just as well continue another day, since it involved a catalogue of eternity, after all, and eternity does not change from one day to the next. So we can continue, the Old Lady snarled from the rice paper, we can carry on after the twenty-one days of mourning, which will be conducted as previously stated, and that’s that!

  To begin with, everything went as it should. For one week the newspaper was published with blank white sheets, meant, along with the broad black border that edged them, to remind everyone of the Old Lady—which they did.

  The following week the newspaper printed all the obituaries and poems and blessings and condolences written by important personages in Copenhagen. These letters gave the first clear indication of what a powerful influence the Old Lady had exerted, even over people who had never met her: there were letters from bishops and professors and landowners and company directors and famous surgeons, and a violin sonata composed for the Old Lady by the great violinist and virtuoso member of the Royal Theater orchestra Fini Henriques, and a poem in hexameter stanzas, filling four closely written pages and hailing the Old Lady as the Odysseus of the turbulent waters of politics, written by the country’s Minister of Justice, former counsel to the Supreme Court Peter Alberti, whose political career the Old Lady had at all times supported.

  During the third week the newspaper published the tribute from the town, and for this it expanded to include two extra sections in which everyone who could read and write wept publicly for the town’s patroness, our dear mother and grandmother and mother-in-law, benefactress of the hospitals, protector of the poor, patron saint of the chamber of commerce, angel of the dairies, fairy godmother of the banks, lady bountiful of the fire brigade, good Samaritan of the sanitation department, and among all these tears, besides the sorrow, there was an element of fearful trust, inasmuch as many of these people still found it hard to believe that the Old Lady, remembered by them as a wise woman, was dead. Especially when they heard how warmly and teasingly she had smiled, from her coffin, upon those who came to pay their respects.

  On the following Monday the newspaper was to be published as normal. On that Sunday the journalists got on with their work, suspecting nothing and unaware of the electricity in the air. They wrote their articles, all of which still dealt with the way the town grieved for its lost daughter and mother, and how it would take a while for it to recover from its loss—as predicted in the will, which was also mentioned—and then they went home. And from that moment things started to go wrong: that night they slept a sleep filled with oppressive dreams, and this sleep ran on and on into an endless night that was morning for others in the town. With the result that the journalists did not turn up for work at the time that was, for some, the next day.

  Do not expect me to know what happened to Rudkøbing on that night and in the time that followed. The best I can do is to say that time apparently lost its significance. It is possible that at that very moment, and purely by chance, Rudkøbing passed through one of those points in the universe where time stands still. It is also possible that this confusion arises because I have to rely upon Amalie’s and Christoffer’s memories of what happened. Because in one sense they were, of course, obedient; in one sense they were the Old Lady’s son and grandchild; but they were also rebels, and it is quite likely that
their greatest wish had been to see the Old Lady’s laboriously maintained timing fall apart. If so, then Rudkøbing’s chaotic time was actually Christoffer’s and Amalie’s dream. But if that is the case, then it was a discreet, almost covert dream, since, initially, time administered a severe shock to Christoffer. He was the first to arrive at work, the first to see that something was wrong. He noticed that the journalists had not shown up, and when he opened the morning paper he discovered that it bore a date from a lifetime ago and was filled with articles on people from a bygone age who had died long ago in places that no longer existed. He had risen from his chair to walk over to the printshop when a sudden impulse made him pull back the curtain to see the morning sun coloring the roof of the white house on the other side of the dark courtyard. Instead he saw the stars, and as he walked through the building on his way to the printshop he passed through rooms facing onto the square, where dust particles danced in the winter morning sunlight—yes, we all heard it right, winter morning sunlight. And when nighttime and daytime are present simultaneously, then something is really wrong. Then anyone less well schooled than Christoffer, or less odd, would have quit the place. But not he. He went on to the printshop, which he found deserted apart from four printer’s apprentices, who had suffered no ill effects from this crazy merger of night and day other than some slight headaches.

  The gap between these four men and Christoffer was very wide, one might almost say colossal. It had been part of the Old Lady’s lifework to create the gulf across which her employees and her son, Christoffer Ludwig, now regarded one another. Furthermore, there had never been any need for them to speak to one another, since the Old Lady’s commands rang in all their ears. And so Christoffer circulated among his workers like some solitary sleepwalker, trying to recall whether these unexpected difficulties had been predicted in his mother’s will. Finally he leaned up against a big printing press, looked into the expectant faces, and said, “Gentlemen, you will have to write the newspaper.”

  The Old Lady had always made sure that everyone employed by the family could read and write, for the very reason that she herself had never mastered these skills. But, faced by the white sheets of paper, all that the printer’s apprentices could call to mind was the fragmentary schooling from the distant days of their childhood. When the journalists awoke from their sleep to a light belonging neither to day nor to night, in which the bells of the town’s churches were ringing for morning or evening prayer, they awoke to a paper full of hymn stanzas and quotations from Luther’s catechism and the dates of Danish military victories and the announcement that the great violinist and virtuous member of the royal orchard Fine Henriksen—as the printer’s apprentices put it—would be paying a visit to the town. Here was a mystery that the journalists wanted to have cleared up. On their way to the square they bumped into one another in streets filled with people who were rubbing sleep out of their eyes, or on their way home to bed, or who had just finished eating dinner. Outside the taverns, drinking cronies fought over what time it was, and they had to jump clear of the cobbled roadway so as not to be run down by a coach whose driver had collapsed in a heap on the box, weary with confusion, or trampled by horses whose riders had left them to go in search of some anchor to cling to in their lives. Wherever they went, they were pursued by the echo of the church bells, chiming at one and the same time for all the holy days and religious festivals of the year. This clamor pursued them all the way to the square, which, though it had been morning when they left their homes, lay bathed in moonlight. Beneath the stars, in the chill blue light, the stall holders were selling vegetables that were not in season, and here they met Christoffer Ludwig. He was sitting on the box of the newspaper’s big four-wheeled cart, his eyes were bloodshot with weariness, and the clothes that he had been wearing for a space of time as indeterminate as everything else were covered with a layer of lead dust from the printshop. But his eyes were shining as he—who had never learned to drive a cart—left the horse to find its own way around to the newspaper’s subscribers, delivering the morning’s paper, which he had written and corrected and typeset and made up and printed, folded, and glued all by himself, and if his eyes were shining it was because he was now sure that this was exactly what the will had predicted. He had, in fact, been reminded of the wording once the printers had fallen asleep at the presses after working nonstop through a night that would never come to an end and during which, after having written and printed the paper, they then had to deliver it because all the paperboys, bar one, had joined the frantic commotion on the streets. As he stood alone in the printshop with the sleeping workers, who looked like victims of a fire—slumped, arms poised to lunge, covered with lead dust, scraps of paper, and printing-ink stains—Christoffer’s gloom and doubt were dispersed by a dazzling light and he heard his mother’s voice reading aloud the section of the will which declared that the responsibility now rested on his shoulders.

  Christoffer thought he had better check this. That he succeeded in finding his way back to the room in which the echo of the lawyer’s reading still hung in the air, and the will lay, undisturbed, on the desk, seemed to him like some sort of confirmation, as though his mother had reached out a hand to him. Christoffer wanted, first of all, to count the number of sheets of rice paper, but he never succeeded. As he lifted the white bundle, the paper crumbled into dust between his fingers. He left the room not knowing that he would never find it again and without noticing that there was something very wrong with the furnishings. The tapestries and the rough wooden furniture and the torches on the walls and the chessboard-patterned marble floor belonged not to his own time but to another. For the first time, on his way through the house, he did not look at the clocks, and so he did not notice, either, that they had come to a standstill. Just as he did not hear the housemaids panting as they ran from room to room winding up the precious timepieces to keep them going, while their dinner was sticking to the bottom of the pots in the kitchens, and rooms and windows and doors appeared in the wrong places only to vanish immediately once more.

  Christoffer headed straight for his office, where, all on his own, he copied out the next edition of the newspaper, in accordance with the dictates of the will, as far as his excellent memory had retained them. He did not allow anything to interrupt him, not even the shrieks of the kitchen maids who, turning to look at one another after trying to stir the food in the pots in the soot-blackened kitchens, found that they had all, suddenly, grown terrifyingly old. Now they were tearing along the corridors, colliding with footmen and housemaids whose teeth chattered in their heads because they no longer recognized a house that was now in a constant state of flux. This was demonstrated by the way they ascended spiral staircases and walked through rooms they had never seen before, decorated in styles they had never come across, only to find that the water closets and some of the offices, not to mention their own rooms, had disappeared.

  Naturally, they then left the house. Passing through boudoirs and living rooms and along the corridors outside Christoffer’s office, they snatched everything that could be stuffed into their pockets or bags, because they knew they would never get what was owed them from this intolerable house where poltergeists ran amok. With trembling hands they cut the pictures out of their frames, rolled up the carpets, and attempted to haul away paperweights and epergnes and silver paper knives because, they reasoned, that lunatic Christoffer Ludwig, who just sits there writing and writing in the midst of this mixed-up time, is never going to need any of it anyway. When Christoffer got to his feet, clutching his completed draft, he crossed rooms that were deserted and empty and bathed in a light that was neither one thing nor the other. In the printshop, all by himself, he printed the newspaper that he was later to throw to the journalists in the square. In the rays of the emerging sun, shivering in the wintry chill, they read a newspaper that contained something of everything the Old Lady would never have countenanced: an apology for, and disclaimer of, the previous edition of the paper, followed
by a résumé of the year’s great international discoveries and sensitive political situations and an article reporting that the country’s Minister of Justice, our very own Mr. Alberti, had been arrested for fraud and that this man, wrote Christoffer, this archetypal modern-day careerist, had never wanted anything for himself except as much as possible in his own capacious pocket, as much as possible on his lapel, and as much as possible on himself in the Official State Yearbook. None of the journalists recognized Christoffer’s voice in the cool, concise language of the newspaper; Christoffer the milksop, the cowed lad who had, apparently, said here, for the first time, exactly what he thought, and about a government minister at that, a good friend of his mother’s. And that is what turns this action into a dream, our dream, Christoffer’s dream—a revolt against those who dictate.

  The journalists gazed hopelessly after him as he drove away. Before going their separate ways they met the mayor and Dr. Mahler and the lawyer and the Reverend Mr. Cornelius, all of whom were in the act of erecting a sundial in the square in the hope of seizing hold of time with a flash through the drifting clouds. Together they kicked open the post office door—which had been so firmly shut that it seemed as though it would never open again—and woke the telegraph operator, who was asleep on a bed of blank forms scattered about the floor, and forced him to telegraph Copenhagen. The reply they received seemed never-ending and its content was lost in the crackle of static—all but the last part, which stated that Christoffer’s last article was nothing but a pack of lies, since the Minister of Justice could be found—supported by the trust of the people and the judicial system and the government—in the Ministry of Justice and in Parliament and in and out of the meetings of the countless boards chaired by him. And always, since the Old Lady’s death, dressed in black. And with that they had to content themselves. On their way home they met Christoffer and the horse, although Christoffer did not see a thing because his thoughts had run on far beyond their own time, preoccupied as he was with carrying out what he believed to be his mother’s last wish. Later, while the journalists and the mayor and the doctor and the lawyer and even the Reverend Mr. Cornelius drank themselves into apathy in a café full of weeping adults and silent children who had given up asking for explanations, Christoffer woke his daughters and took them, oblivious to his wife’s gurgling protests, to the printshop. Once there, he had them proofread his articles and then work the big printing presses. In the meantime, he wrote to the family’s other printing plants and ordered the expansion and the new acquisitions, predicted in the will, which he considered would be necessary in order to fulfill the stream of orders that was, at this moment, during these weird days, pouring into his office. And strange orders they were: for the printing of books by authors as yet unborn, from countries that were not yet nation-states, in languages that as yet boasted no alphabet, and dealing with events several future generations removed. In his letters Christoffer also described where the printers were to set up the big rotary presses which he had ordered from abroad and which were to meet the demand for newspapers described in the will, the contents of which had also been determined. While Amalie, with shining eyes, was making fair copies of her father’s letters and recognizing in them her own dreams of a world in which she and now her father, too, were the celebrated focal points, Christoffer was at the station collecting the photoengraving machine he had ordered from Copenhagen. This arrived with a railroad car full of liquids and bowls and all the equipment necessary for the etching of printing blocks, and Christoffer was able to illustrate that very day’s edition of the newspaper—or was it the next day’s?—with his own drawings, which resembled the creatures he had, once upon a time, cut out of paper. No one except Amalie, who did the proofreading, ever saw these last issues of the paper.