The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel

by Høeg, Peter

  They never did find them, because they had already left. Weak from exhaustion, Thorvald Bak had staggered out of the church, protected by those members of the faithful who still had all their wits about them. They had Anna’s cage in tow and were so intent upon reaching the boat that they did not notice the two children, standing closely entwined at a street corner, who pulled apart suddenly just as they passed by. Then, looking as though there was something she had forgotten, Anna glided across to her cage and merged with the girl who rested on the silver plating, worn out by the service. Dawn had broken when their ship left the harbor.

  * * *

  After their return to Lavnœs, Anna resumed her habit of taking long walks, and it was not long before Thorvald Bak realized that she was pregnant and about to fulfill her destiny. He said nothing but let people discover it for themselves. As they did, they formed a guard of honor, which was changed four times a day, to escort Anna through the scorching days and ice-cold nights that persisted throughout the summer.

  She gave birth one night, without warning and without help. Thorvald Bak was the first to see the child. He found some trivial excuse to send home the guard of honor, which had gathered around the bonfire outside the tower. Then he left the building. He pleaded with his God and summoned up all his spiritual strength. Only for one brief moment did he lose his self-control, when, on his way back, he met his housekeeper, her face now moldy with age.

  “Our Savior is a girl,” he said.

  He stayed away until the sun came up. By the time he returned to Anna’s room—where the night chill had already been replaced by intolerable heat—he had regained his strength and the enduring fortitude of his faith. He found the bed vacated and, later, discovered that the mission box was empty. Then, understanding that he would never again see Anna or the child and that all of this must be a punishment for some appalling mistake he had made—without having any idea of what this might have been—he bowed his head toward his housekeeper’s deafness and screamed, “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

  ADONIS JENSEN

  On the run

  Living outside the law

  1838–1918

  RAMSES JENSEN’S entire life turns into one long flight. And at one point, when he is well along in years, this brings him to Rudkøbing.

  One moonless night he unscrews the hinges of a little arched door in the Teander Rabow family home; closes it carefully from the inside; glides across the black-and-white marble floor and up the wide staircase and along the long corridors without making a single sound. He has a peculiar gift for never leaving any traces of himself, a gift that is to make life difficult for the judges and lawyers and prosecutors from the courts of inquiry set up on the few occasions when he is arrested.

  He collects all the items he intends to take on the floor of one large room, finding the things he seeks with instinctive assurance and without at any time being distracted by the house, as it sighs and moans in the night, or by the noises issuing from the bedrooms, where the Old Lady’s snoring sounds like laughter and where Christoffer Ludwig is memorizing his columns of figures in his sleep and where Katarina tosses and turns wakefully in her bed, with her hand on her father’s revolver.

  In the tall chiffoniers his sensitive fingers find bed linens; in the kitchen cupboards, brushes; and elsewhere, down-at-heel shoes. These he chooses, in preference to the embroidered table runners, the bolts of lawn, or the silverware, just as he steers clear of the secret compartments where the jewelry lies in leather cases and where valuable toilet sets, complete with yellowed manicure sticks of silver and ivory, rest in wooden boxes lined with velvet. This seemingly unnecessary restraint arises from his deep and lifelong distrust of wealth.

  Now and again he pauses in his work to consider the ponderous trappings of affluence that the Old Lady has amassed, perhaps fearing that her life would take to the air like a balloon and drift off toward the North Pole: the carved oak cupboards that had been on display at the World Exhibition, the shepherdesses on their epergnes of Meissen porcelain, the suits of armor that line the walls of the room, and the marble busts, in whose gaze Ramses Jensen sees the reflection of his own brooding gravity.

  His character had possessed an introspective side ever since his incarceration—a very long time ago, when he was still a young man—in the new state prison at Horsens, where he had spent one whole year in total isolation. At that time the prison, which had been built according to the American Philadelphia principle, was not yet completed. Ramses had been moved there from one of the Copenhagen houses of correction because the prison warden was eager to put his principles into practice.

  This star-shaped prison complex lay on a windswept stretch of countryside. Every single one of its—empty—cells was equipped with a toilet and running water. The plates of colorless potatoes and iron-hard crusts of bread seemed to edge their way into the cell of their own accord, without any human intervention, and the only person whom Ramses ever saw was the warden, who was a doctor of theology. Each Sunday he held a brief religious service in the prison assembly hall for Ramses, who stood bolt upright during the sermon, strapped into a wooden sentry box, his face covered by a special helmet that left only his eyes exposed. This saved the warden from being distracted by the face that confronted him and Ramses from being hurled back into a life of corruption by seeing his own reflection in the steel prison bars.

  The warden was a brutal and gloomy disciplinarian who firmly believed that his sermons, the strict isolation, and the prison diet of bread, water, and potatoes would direct the prisoner’s gaze inward, toward his own brutality and debasement, and elicit repentance, despair, and a change of heart. He dabbled secretly in the occult, and his sermons were always based on the Book of Revelation, which he considered to be a talismanic text. He was convinced that, as he spoke, his words were converted into magnetic rays that penetrated the prisoners’ cerebral cortices and induced chemical changes in their criminal physiology. So he had acquired the habit during his sermons, when he had said something particularly important, of opening his mouth wide in order to direct his magnetism toward the prisoner.

  Ramses spent his year in prison digging a tunnel from his cell to freedom, and recalling all the crimes he had ever committed. To help him endure the loneliness of the vast prison, he reviewed every one of his burglaries, ridding them of creaking doors and toppled furniture and tricky locks and alert guard dogs, and all the mistakes he had made. Within himself he discovered unexpected powers of recall, and so, once he had perfected all his own crimes, he went on to review those of his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, right down to the last detail. He kept this up through all the long nights, when he could hear the wind outside tearing at the heather. He kept it up during all the sermons, with the warden referring to the creatures from Revelation as symbols of punishment and justice until Ramses reached the point where he was no longer sure what was more real, the great assembly hall filled with delirious visions of the Apocalypse—in the midst of which the warden’s mouth opened and closed like a landed fish gulping for air—or his own dream locks and fantasy rooms, which he negotiated as effortlessly as a dancer before departing, leaving no trace of himself other than his urine. He maintained his forefathers’ practice of emptying his bladder at the scene of the crime, this being the most infallible means of evading detection.

  At the end of a year his tunnel was finished. Unlike those prisoners later to be accommodated in the prison, who would eventually leave it staggering or crawling or feet first, Ramses Jensen strolled to freedom with a back as straight as when he arrived. All that was visible on his bold features was the pallor of his prolonged imprisonment, pride at the skill he had acquired through his imaginary burglaries, and the wrinkles on his forehead, the consequence of so much time spent deep in thought.

  In addition to this, he had had confirmed the distrust of the outside world he had harbored ever since being arrested at the age of
twelve, while burglarizing a mill not far from Copenhagen, together with his father. The twelve policemen who had been lying in wait for him had carried him off, bleeding like a stuck pig, while his father stood by, a passive and indifferent onlooker. Then Ramses heard him laugh his unrestrained rogue’s laugh and understood, in his child’s heart, that his father must have informed on him.

  During his lifetime, Ramses’ father, Caesar Jensen, stole the credit for so many crimes and charitable acts that he can no longer be discerned behind the thirty-five crimes against King and Crown, the seventeen violations of other people’s liberty, the one hundred and forty-four instances of slander, the seventeen murders, the five hundred charges of breach of the peace, and the one thousand and forty-four cases of theft and looting and robbery and threatening behavior of which he was convicted. This sentence was not passed until he was an extremely old man, when he had allowed himself to be caught, after having learned to read and write, so that he could, like the great thief and murderer Ole Kolleroød, with whom he had once shared a cell, scratch the grossly exaggerated story of his life on the walls of his cell. These walls were later taken down and produced in court as admissions of guilt, although this was, in fact, unnecessary. All his life, Caesar Jensen had longed to be in a position where he could confess to this incredible multitude of crimes, which led to his execution’s being postponed for five years—that being the time it took the court to form an overall picture of the offenses to which he had confessed and for which, as one of the judges said, we could have him executed five hundred times over. His execution was witnessed by one thousand of his fellow prisoners. As the iron rings were placed around his neck, he broke out into peals of uncontrollable laughter, and only Ramses (and perhaps you and I) understands that Caesar Jensen’s dying with such arrogance was due, not to that courage ascribed to him by the world, but to his having succeeded in fooling everyone.

  It was impossible for Ramses (just as it is hopeless for us) to uncover the truth behind the extravagant boasts that Caesar Jensen wove around his family history, which—like his dress, which consisted of tight white trousers, boots, a fur-trimmed scarlet, fitted jacket, and a broad-brimmed hat—appeared to have been borrowed from cheap broadsides describing the master criminals of history. Throughout Ramses’ life a gulf was to exist between the man he encountered in the capricious fantasies of the storytellers—a man represented as being his father—and the Caesar Jensen he knew from his childhood, with his petty pilfering and spur-of-the-moment, panic-stricken burglarizing of elderly folk on isolated farms.

  The truth, as the rest of the world saw it, was that Caesar Jensen personified the romantic dream of a criminal; that his career represented the culmination of a long line of arch-rogues who had, down through the generations, spit on the executioner and egged on the six horses that were still not powerful enough to tear them limb from limb; and who, after their funerals, continued to throw the soil off their graves until at last they succeeded in creating someone like Caesar Jensen. Throughout his life, on his interminable travels, Ramses came across his father in legends of the poor man’s protector, the intrepid adversary of the rich Caesar Jensen, the cosmopolitan, who had known the Italian Meomartino and the gallant Ròsza. At one point it dawned on him that even the rolls of all the penal judgments in the land hailed Caesar Jensen as a thievish and theatrical messiah, and that he, Ramses, was the only one to see through all the contradictory tales of the seducer, the solitary and fiercely religious avenger—a man who washed his bloody hands in the stream of his own pious tears every Sunday in church, and taught in several Sunday schools—and see his father as he had actually been: a cynical little thief who confessed to everyone else’s murders, real or invented, but never to his own sexual offenses; a man whose only grand crime lay in the sum total and quality of all the lies he told in court in order to go down in history as the most infamous criminal of the century.

  Late in his life, Ramses visited Copenhagen one last time. One night, in the light from the gas lamps that had, in his old age, made his housebreaking a more and more risky business—he caught sight of his father’s name calling out to him from a poster hanging right next to WANTED posters offering prodigious sums for information leading to his own apprehension. The poster carrying Caesar Jensen’s name was an advertisement for a play. So, for the first and only time, Ramses attended a performance at the Royal Theater, dressed in an evening suit he had stolen from a house just a few hours earlier, along with a cane and money for the cab that drove him to the theater. There he saw his father’s life staged as a ballet. The King and Queen were also present for this performance, in which Caesar Jensen’s seventeen false murders and one hundred and forty-four undeserved instances of slander and one thousand and forty-four phony thefts had undergone a metamorphosis: one whereby they were resurrected in a tragic tale of unrequited love and unfortunate—and fatal—misunderstandings, acted out against a backdrop of dewy forests and ancient burial mounds; all of this lit by a stage moon beneath which a hollow-eyed, effeminate boy danced the part of Caesar Jensen. Even though Ramses found the theater and the crowds repellent, that evening he understood that this was what his father had always dreamed of. History had come around in a semicircle, transforming those crimes about which Caesar Jensen had so painstakingly lied into deeds of national renown, their fame transmitted by word of mouth across the length and breadth of the country. They were reenacted before full houses in the finest theater in the land, bathed in the light which Ramses had shunned all his life and surrounded by the sartorial elegance of which Caesar Jensen had always been so fond.

  There was one other thing that Ramses noted, prior to his disappearance into the darkness, just before the interval: in the gilded tableaux on the stage and in the tears of the weeping violins he recognized the same sentimental faith he had detected in his father, at their last meeting. This did not take place until some years after the burglary at the mill, Ramses’ arrest, and the ensuing court case, during which he had been accused of several of his own break-ins plus a good number of his father’s, as well as those for which his father was by then starting to take credit, and those of his dead forefathers. Ramses kept his mouth shut, because he had never been to school and did not understand the language of the court. His silence was therefore taken as an admission of guilt, and he was sentenced to eight years’ hard labor, since no one believed that he was only twelve years old. The eight policemen who had arrested him had displayed in court the cracked skulls and broken arms and smashed kneecaps he had inflicted upon them with his left hand while with his right keeping a tight grip on the two-hundred-pound flour sack with which he had been about to make his getaway.

  He spent two years in Christianshavn prison, making wood chips for textile dyeing and lending substance to our picture of the innocent but pensive child by gazing through his barred window, wondering at his fate. Until one of the women held in the female section of the prison—who were hoisted up into the cell, every night, through a gap in the loose floorboards—let Ramses see that she had a revolver. Up until then he had only ever regarded women with the elusive curiosity of a child, and the sound of prison lovemaking had never previously disturbed his slumber, but that night he lay awake, and stole for the first time in two years. The next day, just around midday, he rose from the wood-chip table, shoved the barrel of the revolver into the mouth of the guard on duty, and slipped from our picture of the innocent child into our vision—and that of all fairy tales—of a mettlesome youth as he forced the guard to let him out into a little yard behind the prison, from which, after a hazardous climb, he escaped into the crowded streets. For two months he searched for Caesar Jensen. The latter’s notoriety, which had doubled and redoubled, kept leading Ramses on wild-goose chases. That he did, nevertheless, track him down was thanks to his habit of always following up the least fanciful of all the tall stories until, one night—all the significant events in the story of Ramses’ life take place at night—in an inn near Holbœk, he kicked dow
n the door of his father’s room.