The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel

by Høeg, Peter

  As time went on, the distance between her and other people grew wider and wider and she stopped talking altogether. Before this she had greeted people on her way down to the sea, but, after her duplication, respect placed a circle of emptiness around her and she walked in silence through the village followed by people who rolled on the ground where she had trodden or tried to come past her on the lee side and catch a whiff of the scent that hung around her or spied on her as she shit, then collected her excrement and took it home to keep as a relic.

  For a while, therefore, Anna talked to the sea gulls instead. She spent her days on the beach and taught herself to imitate their cries to perfection. Eventually, however, she became tired of calling across the gray sea. She grew silent and shut herself away in her room, shrinking from all those who dogged her footsteps. Thorvald Bak finally came to the conclusion that his daughter was slow-witted. It was a source of wonder to him that God should have chosen to bestow his great blessing on such an unassuming instrument, but he took comfort in telling himself that it is, after all, the poor in spirit who shall inherit, and so on and so forth.

  Anna was heard to pray for the first time when she was twelve years old. It happened at a mission meeting. By that time the only sound anyone could ever remember hearing her utter had been during the hymn singing that Thorvald Bak had had to forbid, because it induced too much in the way of hemorrhaging and swooning among the congregation. Nevertheless, she now stood up at the mission meeting and prayed. Speechless with amazement, they heard how moving and fluent her prayers were; how they put them in mind of cloudless skies long forgotten, and awoke memories of the funerals and weddings of their past until the hair on their heads stood on end. From then on, Thorvald Bak took her with him on his missionary expeditions to the villages closest to Lavnœs, and during church services he permitted her to pray. She always spoke standing on a tall white-painted stool. Her words flowed like music, and in her almond-shaped eyes the congregation saw tears glinting like pearls in the light from her face. They gurgled, every one of them, with the taste of metal in their mouths before, overcome by tears, face-to-face with this white-clad girl, the scales fell from their eyes and they saw their former lives as a quagmire of iniquity. Then they collapsed, racked by sobs, and beat their heads against the church floor and created scenes of mass hysteria that I would have refused to believe could ever occur in Denmark—in Danish country churches at the beginning of this century—if it were not, however, that evidence does exist: eyewitness accounts and written records and photographs, forcing me to admit that this is precisely what happened. And all the while, Anna Bak surveyed these scenes of pandemonium, though I doubt whether she realized that the screams and the conversions that accompanied them were engendered by her presence.

  In Lavnœs she no longer left her room at all. The congregation had built a round tower for her, from which she could see the sea. It had tall windows and could be seen from every house in the village, so they could all keep her in sight at all times. Thorvald Bak was convinced that his daughter sat in her tower waiting for the Divine Conception. When he took her with him to the mission meetings, even he kept his distance from her, overwhelmed by the thought of what lay in store for her and anxious because, more and more often in recent years, she had made him think of his time in Copenhagen and of his wife’s soul as it winged its way up to the ceiling.

  He received his first warning one evening as he returned from a meeting with other like-minded pastors—one of the meetings that saw the start of that powerful national movement the Danish Evangelical Mission. Anna was sitting opposite him in the boat as they sailed over the flaming carpet of the sunset. Then, with his eyes on his daughter, he becomes aware of something outside of the boat. He turns his head and sees Anna walking beside the boat on the slivers of burnished gold with which the sun has coated the sea. When he calls out to her, she does not come back but walks off toward the sun, continuing until it seems that the darkness will drag her down with it into the sea. Trembling with fear, Thorvald has to grasp the hands of the daughter before him, to convince himself that she is still there and that he has been left with at least one copy of her.

  Terrified rather than delighted by this miracle, he had a fine gold chain forged for Anna’s neck, and when she left her tower—which he had had fitted with locks—the other end of this chain was always fastened around his wrist. Now, to us this may seem barbaric, but as he himself said when explaining it to Anna, “It’s for your own good.” Where, hitherto, he had taken pleasure in his daughter’s refined silence, now it struck him that perhaps this was, in fact, a bad thing. He tried to get her to give testimony at the mission meetings, to confess her sins. But this proved impossible. Anna’s shining eyes gazed kindlily and guiltlessly upon the faithful, but not a word escaped her lips, and Thorvald Bak eventually came to the conclusion that she was so pure and innocent that she was incapable of even speaking about sin. Nevertheless, she followed the testimonies of the others with interest. Thorvald Bak had divided the faithful into two groups, men and women, whom he had confess separately so that nothing should be concealed but everything brought out in the open. He and Anna were the only ones who listened to both the men and the women as they related how and when they had indulged in one thing and another. Sometimes God’s Spirit would descend into the midst of the faithful, and then men and women would flock together and pour out of the church, led by Thorvald Bak, to continue their meeting in the open air, at the edge of a wood, where they prayed and gave testimony and sang hymns under the gathering storm clouds which, more often than not, attended the inhabitants of Lavnœs. Then, while the rain poured down, they would continue their interminable confessions, by means of which they endeavored to drown out the rain and one another. Finally they would stand thigh-high in mud singing and singing until, humble nonetheless, they sank to their knees as Thorvald Bak or Anna prayed in their behalf.

  After one such meeting, Thorvald Bak and Anna found themselves alone together, for once, after the rejoicing throng had departed, and Anna looked into her father’s face, streaked as it was with rain and mud and strain, and asked, “Why do they confess?”

  Thorvald Bak looked quizzically at his daughter. Hardly ever did she ask him a question.

  “To be cleansed of their sins,” he replied.

  “But behind every sin there’s another one,” said Anna. “It never stops.”

  Thorvald Bak could find no good answer to this crazy notion, but he ordered a silver-plated cage from a goldsmith in Copenhagen—where he would never normally have bought anything—and kept Anna locked up inside it, in an attempt to stifle the elusive element in her nature. Anna put up with this new arrangement without comment. Now she undertook the long sails along the coast on the decks of fishing boats in her shining cage, peering through its bars—although there is no way of determining what she herself was thinking, or whether she had any thoughts at all about a pastor in Denmark in this enlightened age keeping his own child locked up in a cage.

  One night Thorvald Bak’s dead wife, Anna’s mother, came to him in a dream. She appeared in the shape of nothing less than the Angel of the Lord, bathed in the roseate glow of dawn and hovering on white bat wings. Through the taut skin of the wings green veins could be discerned. She scattered the storm clouds that hung around Lavnœs, along with the smell of fish that had returned in the dream, and showed him a town floating on an enormous, luminous crystal of yellow sulfur. Thorvald could see the signs above the taverns and the anonymous doors of the brothels. With Anna at his side he walked into the town. Behind them the song of the angels rose above the chink of bottles, a cross was reflected in the pools of beer on the floors, and the women’s nakedness was draped in white muslin.

  Thorvald awoke from this dream seized by a restlessness he could barely contain until the following Sunday, at which time he told the congregation of his vision.

  “The world is ready,” he said, in a voice that brought flakes of damp plaster tumbling off the wa
lls. Once again he gave them a vivid description of the godlessness of the towns. Surprising himself with his own assurance, he recalled incredible details of his youth in Rudkøbing and in Copenhagen; he described how people lived by stealing from one another; how the nation’s leaders got drunk on government premises and painted blasphemous pictures on the walls with fingers they had dipped in their own excrement; and how the servants of the church kept domestic animals in God’s house and in the churchyard and always wore short boots into which they could shove the hind legs of the sheep and the pigs while having their lustful way with these defenseless creatures. After this sermon, the congregation fetched rakes and axes and scythes, and flintlocks that had belonged to their forefathers and were so eaten away by rust that they fell apart when taken down from the wall. Then they gathered outside the church and insisted that Thorvald Bak, with Anna at his side, should lead a new crusade, with Rudkøbing as its target. That same night they set sail from the small, unprotected harbor at Lavnœs: not, however, before Thorvald Bak had, on the quay, grown uneasy at the sight of their hate and the bloodthirsty note in their voices. Unaccustomed to anything other than prayer, they had now, at the hour of departure, grown brayingly loquacious as they yelled to outdo the wind that had risen at sunset. Thorvald Bak appealed to their compassion and spoke of abused and enfeebled heathen mothers and of their fatherless children who, with the towns so ravaged by the demons of hunger, could never be sure that they would not one day find themselves being boiled up in a pot with onions and devoured. Eventually the faithful were reduced to tears. They threw away their weapons; then they all climbed aboard their boats, the very sails of which were black. Anna’s silver-plated cage was lashed to the deck of the little bark carrying Thorvald Bak. They sailed out of the harbor and the wind howled, louder and louder, seeming to come directly from hell. And the sea swelled up into shifting inky-black mountains of water that towered over the little boats, then broke and crashed down onto the pale upturned faces, sweeping overboard everything that was not lashed down. Then Thorvald Bak woke Anna, who had been sleeping, miraculously sheltered from the icy cascades, with her face tranquil in slumber. As she got to her feet, the turbulent waters subsided, thereby making the dream that faith can remove mountains come true. All through the night—until the moment when the distant city of sin rose out of the sea, just as Thorvald had seen it in his dreams—Bak kept his daughter awake. The strange light around her face lit up the little boats and the dark cowls of their passengers, with their restless eyes and fierce obstinacy.

  This obstinacy turned to fear as they slipped into Rudkøbing’s huge harbor and its tentacles closed around them, pushing them toward a depravity beyond anything they could ever have imagined, with harborside drinking dens and brothels, and alehouses built like palaces with pillared colonnades and magnificent entrances and towers and spires and bay windows floating on clouds of gleaming copper. Later, when they came ashore, the savage cacophony closed over their heads, split them up, and drew them into a stream of humanity dressed with unbridled extravagance; into streets where Jewish peddlers hawked nails just like those with which the Savior was crucified. Not only that: on display they had a large crucified dummy, resembling the Son of Man, into which one could hammer one’s nails. In these streets animal tamers presented creatures from Noah’s ark: giraffes, hippopotamuses, elephants, and a unique monstrosity: a long-legged, misshapen duckbill platypus—all of these trained to make obscene gestures and to copulate with one another before the very eyes of the spectators. Now here I have to step in to say that I have had a hard time recognizing Rudkøbing, that respectable provincial town, in this, a description drawn from the annals of the Danish Evangelical Mission. Nevertheless, that is what the faithful later remembered having seen.

  As they made their way through the town that evening to the service, which Thorvald Bak’s irresistible powers of persuasion had ensured would be held in the church, they huddled tightly around Anna in her silver-plated cage. This they pushed, on a little handcart, through a darkness constantly rocked by the sound of brawling from the wine cellars; the burbling of the organ music emanating from the theater, which sounded like the gasps of a couple making love; and the screams from the whorehouses as clients were smitten by rare tropical venereal diseases that spread through the body like galloping gangrene. They made their way through a reddish mist that by no means veiled their view. On the contrary, it made every outline stand out with heightened clarity. This mist gave off such a stench of corruption that the people of Lavnœs had to hold their breath, until their lips turned violet and their eyes were bulging out of their sockets; then they were forced to surrender and fill their lungs with a mist that went to their heads, bombarding them with memories of vices that their forefathers had given in to in a far-off century. And then they had to let themselves be drawn after the cage while they tried to catch a glimpse of Anna’s face.

  At a street corner they pass a boy. He is standing leaning against a lamppost, staring vacantly into the mist, immersed in his own innermost visions. What he sees in his mind’s eye is the sea. He has come to town with a traveling theater. As wave boy in that unparalleled stage success Sigurd’s Great Voyage around the World he is responsible for creating convincing waves in the blue sheeting upon which the steamship Mongolia sails. He has stopped for a moment on his way to the theater, and his mind is now filled with wavy patterns. And while he is leaning against this lamppost and his body is swaying gently in tune to the interference of the waves, he looks into a world of unimaginable blueness, and out of the depths of soft, endless, permeable blocks of crystal floats a face. At first this face is but a white ruffle in a chasm of blue, but gradually it comes closer and closer, until it can clearly be seen. It is the face of Anna Bak.

  On seeing the rapt boy, Anna’s first impulse is to pray for him, then to sing, but when she sees the sea in his eyes, she senses that neither prayers nor song would be enough. And so her spirit duplicates itself. While the procession of cowled brothers and sisters is swallowed up by the interplay of light and shade in the streets, together with Thorvald Bak—who has withdrawn into his shell and is committing to memory the hell that he is going to conjure up in his sermon—and the cage in which Anna sits surveying her surroundings, Anna Bak—or, now how else could I put this; at any rate, a different Anna from the one in the cage—glides barefoot across the cobbles and falls into step next to the wave boy on his way to the theater.

  The religious missionary movement of which Thorvald Bak was to become co-founder—the Danish Evangelical Mission, that is—was henceforth to celebrate the anniversary of Thorvald Bak’s sermon in Rudkøbing church as one of its most significant founding dates. And in later years he himself always remembered his speech as being one of the most miraculously inspired he had ever given. Even in the shadow cast by subsequent disasters it would always shine in his memory as a mysterious sign from heaven. Likewise, Anna never forgot her night at the theater. From her place in the wings she, who was so fond of the sea, was moved to tears by the sight of those scandalous theatrical illusions and by the cavernous auditorium in which white shirtfronts and coquettish bosoms, powdered and bare, floated like small icebergs on a sea of black tailcoats and satin gowns. Lifting his eyes from the pulpit at that same moment, Thorvald Bak looked out upon a packed church. Rumors of the cowled fishermen and their fiery faith had spread, and people had flocked to see the child sacrifices, the speaking in tongues, the laying on of hands, and the transcendental frenzies of which they had heard; if, that is, they had not simply bumped into the fearful procession and then tagged along with it. Others had been lured by the sight of the actors’ parade and rumors of the incomparable stage production of Sigurd’s Great Voyage around the World in which the Princess Aouda appeared, to all intents and purposes, naked; a fact which Anna was, to her delight, having confirmed at that same moment—seeing the near-naked beauty being painted brown as a native and wound in her skimpy shroud. Paupers off the street had followed Thorv
ald Bak into the church believing that they had joined some gala procession, and the steadily swelling throng had been joined by seamen from the foreign ships anchored in the harbor. Before him Thorvald Bak now beheld more sin than he had encountered in his entire life, and he would, at that moment, have lost his composure if Anna’s face, at his side, had not begun to radiate a white light, even as, at the theater, she was watching the playacting seamen and remembering the bones she had collected on the beach at Lavnœs. The white light from the face of the Anna in the church intensified, and Thorvald Bak began to speak. While Anna took the wave boy’s hand and the dramatization of Sigurd’s Great Voyage around the World proclaimed the triumph of civilization and modern transportation methods over time, Thorvald Bak spoke of his audience’s journey into the wilderness of depravity. So penetrating and clear were his words that they were not apprehended as sounds but turned into images in the mind of each individual: pictures representing a cavalcade of the sins of his or her particular life, bathed in the white light emanating from Anna. And they all had to close their eyes. Meanwhile, at the theater, Anna was aware of the wave boy’s closeness and how he smelled of fresh-baked bread. She looked up at the blue sheeting as it was lowered over them like a starry sky, and at that moment Thorvald Bak was speaking of the liberation of death, in such a way that everyone heard the tolling bell and the oration from his or her own funeral. By the time he was telling them how it was possible, while still on this side of death, to face up to life and salvation and carry the faith to others, Anna had learned how to let the graceful undulations ripple across her body; undulations that created the amazing impression of the stormy sea on which the explosion of the steamship Henriette raised a pillar of flame and tossed pieces of wreckage all over the stage. The actors then swam through them while water was poured on them from up in the flies, making their skin, by the time they were rescued, as wet as the faces of Thorvald Bak’s congregation while they screamed at him that he must tell them the truth about life and he lifted his hands to still them and said, “The world awaits us.” While, under the blue sheeting, Anna edged closer to the wave boy, and there was not one person in the church who did not understand Thorvald Bak’s words; even the flock of Brazilian sailors who had brought their whores along dropped to their knees and beat their curly heads upon the church floor and, in their remorse, tried in vain to remember how many murders they had committed. These men were later to form the nucleus of the Seamen’s Mission, which spread from the town to some of the remotest corners of the earth and which was, in time, to make the Evangelical Mission one of the Danish dreams that would encircle the globe. When Anna, her face close to the boy’s and her fingers in his curly hair, gave in to the irresistible urge to see what lay behind things and unbuttoned his trousers, the intensity of the atmosphere in the church shattered the stained-glass windows and carved doors and forced the crowd out into the streets, where groups of people roamed for the rest of the night, singing songs of praise while searching for Thorvald Bak and the divine girl, of whom their only clear memory was a bitter taste in the mouth that gradually faded.