The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel

by Høeg, Peter

  When Christoffer drove out to deliver them he saw for the first time, with bemused wonder, all the people hanging around in the café doorways and those who were sitting on the doorsteps and those who were lying on the sidewalks and nearly freezing to death, as though they had always hung about and sat and lain there, and all of them seeing the town ripple before their eyes. The houses outside which the horse stopped so that Christoffer could deliver the paper metamorphosed into thatch-roofed, mud-walled hovels, then wooden shanties—if, that is, they were not burned-out sites turning into churchyards or the overgrown backyards of buildings from the future. Onlookers saw Christoffer’s cart transformed into one of the Old Lady’s automobiles, then to a handcart, and, finally, back to its original form. And all the while Christoffer was throwing the paper—which, according to all accounts, contained nothing but illustrated ditties and nursery rhymes of his own invention because that was what the will had foretold—into mailboxes from which they were never collected because people had taken refuge indoors. There they could watch, through their windows, as their surroundings liquefied and the streets turned to rutted, churned-up tracks, and then to mud-filled mires, and then into a river that forced its way up their steps and over their thresholds before disappearing and leaving instead a path bordered by winter-brown blackberry bushes that grew up beneath the bubbling mailboxes in which Christoffer’s newspaper lay untouched. Night fell just as the sound of the church bells was starting to fade away, since the churches would soon be transformed into cathedrals, which would be replaced by wooden huts, which would dwindle into nothingness. And when everyone was sleeping, except Christoffer and his daughters—who were busily engaged in producing the next edition—the snow came, gently falling straight to earth. The snowflakes were flat and so big that they piled up one atop another, layer upon layer, but at the same time they were so light that they rose like a cloud around Christoffer and the horse and the three girls as they drove off to deliver the paper to the sleeping town. The snow heralded the end.

  No one knows how long the night lasted, or whether it even had a length, but when people woke up it was light and the street rang with bugle calls that made the powdery snow fly up in fine clouds that caught the sunlight glinting off the army now entering the town. They had been summoned by the silence and vague rumors, and because in Denmark, in those days, the cavalry turned up regularly and willingly, and often at just the right moment. It took a whole day and a whole night for all the regiments of hussars and honor guards and royal cavalry and engineers and transportation corps to enter the town, where their tents and kit and horses and gun carriages filled all the streets and squares, leaving only a narrow pathway open. Along this pathway walked the general who had been called in, his face hardened by lack of understanding. A little way behind him walked the Reverend Mr. Cornelius and the mayor and the lawyer and Dr. Mahler, and while these five men are walking slowly through the town, time returns to normal. They come through the slums and past the post office. They make their way down to the harbor, where the ships are covered in white snow against which the dark skins of the foreign seamen show up like black holes. Everywhere, people look at their feet and give the evasive answers that become one of the few traces left of the disaster, once the footprints in the snow have melted away and the dampness has soaked through Christoffer’s newspaper. All that is found when the mailboxes are opened is a greenish-blue mold.

  Around this time, Christoffer is sitting in his office staring vacantly into space. For him, too, the disunited sections of time are reassembling. To me there is something remorseless about this situation, and I, too, stare vacantly into space as the sound of the five men’s footsteps draws nearer. I, too, have a dream of living in a chaotic universe where hours and minutes have no place, just as Christoffer succeeded in doing. I, too, feel like trying to run from time, but it catches up with us all, even with me. Even I cannot dwell any longer on the will to life in Christoffer’s rhymes, because now the steps are coming closer. There is only time enough for me to say that on the paper before him on the desk he has written:

  Die Juristen sind boe Christen

  Die Medizinen sind grosse Schwinen

  Die Theologen sind worse than any of them

  At this moment Katarina, Christoffer’s wife and mother of his children, suffocates during a prolonged bout of coughing and somewhere in the town three accountants raise their insect-like heads from calculations that show that Christoffer has squandered the family fortune; that at some point in the spiral of time he has succeeded in losing everything. So now he is bankrupt and a widower with three young daughters and an obscure responsibility for a murky passage in the history of Rudkøbing. All that remains is the sound of the general’s riding boots on the marble tiles and the dry rasp of the lawyer’s elastic-sided shoes. The men walk through the empty rooms plundered by the servants and, somewhere in the building, they find Christoffer. Much as I might like Christoffer to utter one last line, his lips remain sealed in the face of these five men, these representatives of time and regularity. Amalie is at his side. Wide-eyed she watches the five men, and it is quite clear to her that this is the first time that anyone has entered this house unbidden since the day in the distant past when the Old Lady opened her doors to show off the first water closet in Rudkøbing.

  ANNA BAK

  The fishing village of Lavnœs

  The new Virgin

  1898–1918

  THE THOUGHT THAT Anna Bak should have been chosen to bear the new Messiah first occurred to the people of the fishing village of Lavnœs around the shoemaker’s deathbed. The shoemaker’s soul is the last one in Lavnœs to have been won for the Lord, an event that came about after Anna’s father, Thorvald Bak, the village pastor, had lain in wait all through one lifelessly cold and frosty night behind a tree until the shoemaker appeared, riding home—and lolling drunkenly on his mount—from Rudkøbing. Then, from among the trees, Bak called out, “Dismount, shoemaker. Your Lord wishes to speak to you!”

  Sobered by terror, standing barefoot in snow that is as loose as powder and burns like poisoned needles, the shoemaker hears the voice of God issuing from the black forest and shattering the frozen branches like glass. He returns to Lavnœs burning with fever and filled with religious visions. A week later he dies of pneumonia with the pastor and the villagers standing by his box bed, where they are afforded wonderful proof of the divine life that has been aroused in the dying man. Nevertheless, his soul is about to slip through their fingers. As his life ebbs away he wavers, appalled by the thought of an eternity without alcohol, and calls for aquavit.

  That is when it happens. All of those present see how the pastor’s daughter, Anna, who is at this time only seven years old, splits into two people. One moment there is just the one Anna, standing next to her father, and the next there is, apart from her, another Anna, who sits down on the edge of the shoemaker’s bed. And at that moment it is as though those present see Anna for the first time. Obviously, they have seen her before and know that she is the pastor’s daughter. But what they now perceive is that this child who has just split herself in two is exceptionally beautiful and that she, quite literally, radiates an innocence that puts them in mind of the Holy Virgin and causes the memory of their former dissolute lives to manifest itself as a metallic taste in their mouths. Then they all understand, without having exchanged a word on the subject, that she has been created for some higher purpose.

  Seemingly oblivious to their stares, Anna places her hand on the shoemaker’s forehead. His craving for alcohol is replaced by a sense of comfort he has not felt since childhood, and then he dies.

  * * *

  Anna’s father, Thorvald Bak, received the word that he was to be the pastor of Lavnœs in a revelation straight from God. It came to him when his mother’s portrait fell off the wall while he—full of loathing for the hollowness of existence—was standing at the washbasin in his room in Copenhagen, rubbing his member with a searing salve supposed to cure him of
syphilis. It was so long now since he had arrived there from Rudkøbing to study theology at the university that he had long since lost his rural accent, and lost sight of his birthplace in the fog of debauchery into which he had plunged. Which was why he listened, feeling nothing in particular, as the girl who lay on his bed read out extracts from the letters from his childhood home which had been arriving, regular as clockwork, at the rate of two a week ever since he left for the city, and which he had stuffed, unopened, into his straw mattress. It was from there that the girl had now pulled them, stained by spillages of spiked coffee and the juices of lovemaking.

  “Your brother’s been made a dean,” said the girl, wrapping herself in the flimsy stuff of her negligee.

  “The Devil looks after his own,” replied Thorvald.

  “Your sister got married,” added the girl and slit open a fresh envelope with one long, grimy nail.

  “I hope she gets eaten up by cancer,” mumbled Thorvald absentmindedly.

  “Your father’s dead,” said the girl and looked up from the sheet of paper.

  “To hell with him,” said Thorvald, and at that instant the watercolor depicting his mother’s features—faded by the tobacco smoke that hung in the room and all the swearwords uttered there—tumbled into the washbasin. As the colors ran together like a dream being wiped away, Thorvald Bak woke to a new life.

  It is difficult for me to comprehend such sudden changes of heart. They remind me, just a little, of virgin births, inasmuch as nothing out of the ordinary seems to have preceded them. Nevertheless, that was how Thorvald Bak viewed his salvation, as a bolt from the blue, striking his life in the capital. And later, when—together with Vilhelm Beck, that great champion of the common cause—he became one of the founders of the Danish Evangelical Mission, this was precisely the sort of conversion for which he campaigned. Now, however, he did not utter a sound. He dropped the salve into the washbasin and his knees slowly gave way under the weight of that blend of arrogance and humility derived from being, at one and the same time, the Lord’s anointed and chosen one and the most contemptible of men. Then, in a vision, he saw the fishing village of Lavnœs, which he had never heard of, even though it lay not that far away from Rudkøbing. What he saw was a cluster of dark houses situated on the boundary between land that was barren as a desert and a sea that surged grayly below a perpetual blanket of storm clouds—and all shrouded in the stench of rotten fish.

  Up until now, Thorvald had attended the university only in order to have a laugh, along with his drinking cronies, at the way in which the professors of theology attempted to establish, on scientific grounds, the falsity of biblical texts while at the same time testifying to their profundity. These days were now at an end. He was about to turn over a new leaf. Filled with the strength of his conviction, he sat his final examinations and passed with top marks, after just one year; a year during which, into the bargain—in the little free time left to him—he had made the rounds of all the taverns where he had previously drunk from the poisonous tankards of sin, in an effort to convert his acquaintances.

  In the sermon he gave on graduating from the theological college, Thorvald took hell as his subject. He spoke before the bishop and several professors of theology who had come, drawn by the rumors of this young graduate who preached with all the remorselessness of a Jesuit. His sermon made a powerful impression on those who heard it. It caused distant church bells to peal and the organ pipes to sigh darkly and the inside of the church to smell of red-hot iron filings and singed linen. None of those in attendance would ever forget the way in which Thorvald Bak had, at one stage, worked his way up onto the edge of the pulpit, where he had then hunkered down, hovering like a big bird of prey, and said, quite softly, “Hell shall be the coals under the boilers of faith!”

  As soon as his sermon was over, Thorvald asked the bishop to procure him the incumbency of Lavnœs. The old man hunted fruitlessly through the registers for this benefice and finally discovered it hidden away among the lost causes—those where the solution had now been left in God’s hands. He saw that there had been no pastor there for many years and that the post had been occupied by thirty different incumbents in the past hundred years. The dreary climate and the village’s stubborn ungodliness had dragged every new pastor to the bottom in a maelstrom of melancholy and alcohol in which he forgot to send his reports to the ministry and, before too long, was not even in a fit state to seek his own dismissal.

  When the bishop asked the advice of the dean regarding Thorvald’s request, the latter replied, “If we don’t get rid of him now, he’s going to become another Ignatius Loyola.”

  Thorvald Bak paid a farewell visit to the bishop, to thank him for the post and for the wagon with which the ministry had supplied him, wanting to make sure that he would reach Lavnœs, where the idea of building a road had been abandoned. It would only be washed away by the sudden floods, covered by the dreadful snowstorms that struck the town even in the late spring, or made impassable by chasms left by the earth’s apocalyptic subsidences. When the bishop asked Thorvald why he had applied for this particular post, the young pastor replied with pride, “Because these are the very souls that I have heard screaming in hell.”

  The bishop recalled Thorvald’s sermon and shook his head wearily. “God created heaven,” he said. “Hell is the work of man.”

  Unyielding, Thorvald shook his superior’s hand.

  Prior to his departure from Copenhagen, Thorvald Bak married. He had met his wife a year earlier at a revival meeting that he himself had arranged. She was the closemouthed daughter of a middle-class family, ten years his senior, under whose pale skin the veins gleamed greenly. As a young girl she had considered becoming a nun, and Thorvald became betrothed to her because her skinny frame and chronic cough appealed to those feelings of compassion for humanity as a whole that his faith had aroused in him, and because he was sure that—consisting as she did of so much soul and so little body—she would not upset his equanimity. He discovered, immediately after their betrothal, that in this he was mistaken. First her big dark eyes started appearing in his dreams; then her whole form invaded his nights. These were already short, because of his studying and pastoral work, and now they were passed in wakefulness, as his conscience tormented him—until he found peace in the knowledge that the Lord had chosen him by punishing him. During the time remaining before their wedding it was possible for him to take her hand without losing his self-control—after months of shivering in his shoes at the mere thought of being in the same town as her. He had come to terms with the thought of having, for the rest of his life, to suffer a passionless marriage. On his wedding night, however, he discovered that his wife’s embraces were as passionate as her blessings. When, for a moment in the bed, he brought time to a standstill, stopped moving, and supported himself on his arms to see the glow in her eyes, she said, in a voice both loving and enticing, “Descend to me and let the Lord’s will be done!” That night, Thorvald Bak realized that she loved him both as a man and as a soldier of the Lord, and when, a week later, sitting atop the wagon, she saw Lavnœs emerging out of the damp mist and said, “You would think we were going down into the Kingdom of the Dead,” Thorvald Bak answered proudly, “We’ll be fine, my love. It won’t be the first time a warrior returned victorious from hell!”

  * * *

  At the time that Thorvald Bak arrived in Lavnœs, the village comprised around eighty stone-walled houses roofed with three-foot-thick layers of seaweed, these being the only materials capable of withstanding the flood tides, torrential downpours, snowstorms, and droughts that succeeded one another, regardless of the seasons, with senseless, interminable monotony. In this capricious climate, where fishing was a difficult and risky business and it was almost impossible to grow anything, the people survived, faint from malnutrition, on a diet consisting mainly of aquavit and potatoes, and worn out by deficiency diseases and the raging epidemics that returned again and again to the village even after they had been eradica
ted from the rest of the country. In Lavnœs, cut off from the outside world by fog and wind, the stench of fish and incredible poverty, the course of the year had evolved into a series of celebrations. At these gatherings, drunken villagers tried, through the snatches of song handed down to them and well-worn tales into which the raging elements penetrated deeper and deeper, to hang on to a hope long since swamped by a seemingly never-ending poverty. And, in fact, the inhabitants were able to endure such conditions only because of their pigheadedness and the notion they had formed that Lavnœs was surrounded by a host of legendary monsters. They had but the haziest notion of how these creatures looked, but they associated them with the towers, far off on the horizon, and with the high wall, a corner of which could be glimpsed on a hill high above Lavnœs and which was, in fact, the manor of Mørkhøj—although no one now remembered this.