The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel

by Høeg, Peter

  As they stood there, facing each other, with the crowd of believers proceeding toward the church, Adonis cast a momentary glance after the cage and Thorvald Bak and the dark-clad men and women. Then he asked, “Won’t they cry when they miss you?” Anna took his hand. “They’d do better to cry for themselves,” she said, and then walked on to the theater with Adonis.

  I have no way of knowing whether it was Love at First Sight. This is of some interest to me, since this particular type of love is said to be something quite special, although to me it seems like an instance of the same sort of illusions in which Anna participated, later that evening, when she helped Adonis make the blue canvas sheeting move. But knowing this is not important. What is important is that, the next day, as Adonis was about to board the train that would carry him away from Rudkøbing, his feet would not budge from the platform. At that precise moment, Amalie’s grandmother’s last will and testament was opened, and the other actors and most other people in the town were struck by the feeling that they were in the hands of some higher power. But there was only one sensation that could make any impact on Adonis at that moment: the knowledge that he had to see Anna Bak again, and soon, preferably immediately. And this although, at that moment, he did not even know her name.

  Part Two

  ADONIS AND ANNA

  The tenement in Christianshavn

  Poverty

  1919–1939

  DURING THE MONTHS that followed, for the first time in his life Adonis experienced that yearning, so prevalent among Danes, to be somewhere other than where he was. Joylessly he carried out his ever more onerous duties. He grew thinner and thinner, his appetite ruined by night after night of witnessing stage romance and the dubious morality of the two ballad operas, all of which he had once enjoyed but which now made him throw up. He fell ill but nevertheless carried on working, his sense of duty to the situation at hand proving stronger than his yearning; as it is with many people, including myself. Had it not been, I would not have had the patience to follow the theater company on its journey through provincial Denmark to that performance during which Adonis—under the blue canvas sheeting, just after the explosion of the steamship Henriette on the seas off Liverpool—might well have succumbed to the fever had he not felt a hand on his brow and, in the darkness, seen Anna’s face close to his own.

  How Anna had found Adonis is a mystery. When the curtain fell and the lights went up, he could see that she was covered with the yellow dust of the highways and that she had walked the soles off her shoes and that she carried an infant in a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. So exhausted was she that she could not speak. But the eyes she turned on him gleamed with the metallic glint of love and of a willpower that brooked no argument: the same willpower that motivated him, the next morning, to ask for his pay. Not wanting to arouse any suspicion, he said he wanted to send his mother embroidered tablecloths and picture postcards of the theater—an excuse thought up by Anna. Immediately thereafter they took the first train out of town, and in so doing, Adonis committed a breach of contract. He himself would never have dared to do such a thing, but Anna knew that they had to run away, because the company would never have accepted her or let her travel with Adonis. Instead, they would have sent her home because she was a child and, more especially, because she was an unmarried mother—the last circumstance being the most damning, since this was precisely what the majority of plays acted out on the stage every evening warned against.

  To keep her happy, Adonis complied with her wishes. He was deeply disturbed and full of wonder, it never having occurred to him that he might possibly be in charge of his own life. Nor was he, since it was Anna’s willpower that carried them, by train, away from the town and the theater, out of childhood and provincial Denmark and into Copenhagen.

  In a sense, the city was waiting for them. This idea of the waiting city is not just an image; it is also a historical fact. In a way, Copenhagen was a fateful city for Anna and Adonis—although that was not evident at this point. When they set foot in it for the first time, they did not even see it. They drove into that mountainous landscape of stone and iron without experiencing any of the usual shock of the country dweller, mainly because Adonis had eyes only for Anna—while she, Anna, looked straight through everything, focusing on what was, for her, their true goal, the spot to which she led Adonis from Central Station. She has never been there before, yet she finds her way down to the harborside, to a windswept quay that just happens to be Langelinie. And here they come to a halt. Here they stand side by side, these two young people with the baby and no luggage to speak of. It is an important spot, this quay. It is the quay of dreams, designed by Adonis’s brother Meldahl and envisaged as a symbol of Denmark—at one and the same time inviting and imposing, adorned with monuments to the past and constructed along elongated modern lines that stretched into the future. By this stone wharf sits the ship Frederik den Ottende, bound for America.

  They arrived there an hour before departure time. For an hour they stood watching this huge ship, whose white paint had soaked up the sun of foreign climes, and for that hour they shared the hopes of an entire continent: hopes of log cabins and gold and the endless stretches of highway that had welcomed so many others who had, like themselves, made mistakes and broken the law. Anna had sought out this spot because she knew, instinctively, that it was necessary to put at least an ocean’s width between her and the youth she had never had. That they did not sail on that great ship after all, that, after all, they remained on the quayside as the ship headed seaward like some solid, burnished promise of freedom, was because Adonis held her back.

  At the last moment, just as Anna had finally made up her mind, he remembered something that made him stay where he was, instead of conforming to his nature and tagging along. He was restrained not by any thought but by something seemingly insignificant. It was a picture that kept flickering across his mind, a picture from one of the break-ins he had carried out, as a boy, with his father: a picture of an old man he had glimpsed through the half-open door of a scullery that he and Ramses had come past, laden with coils of rope and a Bible that Ramses had taken to help one of his sons prepare for his confirmation. They may have stopped beside the scullery door because Ramses wanted to show Adonis that not even time itself need be hurried—even here, when they are caught between incarceration and liberty. But what Adonis remembered, standing on the windswept quay next to the great steamship, was the sight, on the white scullery table, of the medieval castle the old man had built out of silver American coins, and the lifelessness of his face as he stared at it. That was what made Adonis detain Anna on the quayside—within sight of the Voyage to America—and then walk briskly away from a harbor that both enticed him and filled him with a fear of all things foreign and of long journeys; a fear with which I, too, am familiar, and which is one of the reasons that I write, here, as concisely as possible and always stick to the facts. It was after this that Anna and Adonis made the acquaintance of Copenhagen.

  They moved into an apartment in Christianshavn, in a building that backed onto a narrow canal. Its front was reached by negotiating a maze of courtyards and buildings in the rear and passages and gateways. The first time they saw this building, its upper stories were lit, high above, by the evening sun, while the blue haze rising off the canal made it seem as though this vast edifice were about to sail off across a sea of fog.

  “It’s a boat,” said Anna.

  And at that moment she was struck by the powerful sense that this place was going to sink. But she said nothing. In order to obtain these two rooms both she and Adonis had had to present themselves at a small and dusty office in an out-of-the-way part of the city, where some menial clerk had made them sign their names to a statement saying that they were not Socialists and that they were and would always remain childless and law-abiding. And all the while he was telling them of his fear that the poor would breed like rats, spill out of those buildings which he had the onerous task of administering,
and plague the city like ghosts rising from their graves.

  This property was situated in a forgotten part of Christianshavn that the police had long since stopped patrolling; where the only street lighting was provided by whale-oil lamps from the previous century—and even those were never lit, because the lamplighters dreaded the narrow streets every bit as much as the policemen. For the first time in his life Adonis had a roof over his head without having broken in and without having to move on the next day; and he was happy, because being in love had numbed his senses and because in the afternoons he could open his door with a key that was not false. Then, together with Anna, he could drown himself in a love through which he could escape his family’s fear of interruptions and exposure and slamming doors.

  Although she would never be able to express what she thought to other people, Anna sensed right from the start that they had moved into some sort of Atlantis. And for me, her insight casts fresh light on the doomed world of the slums—as, for example, with this building. I had always assumed it to be a jerry-built tenement, a study in gray of city depression, inhabited by people whose lives consisted of one long, formless overclouded day—when, in fact, Anna perceived the truth of the matter: this entire community was on the move; all its residents—all the whores and workingmen and children and housewives and those on the dole and small tradesmen and consumptives and dogs and rats—all of them assumed that their home, this rocklike tenement block, might at any moment cut itself adrift and sail off with them across the sea to warmer and happier climes.

  For a time, after they first moved in, Anna and Adonis lived on their love and the money Adonis had drawn from the theater. The money soon ran out because their lovemaking made them gluttonous and led to their buying port and fruit and cake. These they consumed during the brief spells when they got out of bed to look at the sun on the yellow walls of the buildings or the moon over Our Saviour’s Church, just opposite the prison from which Ramses Jensen had once escaped in order to revenge himself on his father: a fact which once again acts as a reminder of how short the distance is between the sins of parents and their children’s love affairs. In due course, Adonis started to work and Anna began to explore her surroundings.

  The first time she attempted to walk all the way around the tenement block she became lost in the maze of courtyards and side streets. Wherever she went, she found ground-floor and basement premises occupied by wine cellars and cafés and dance halls named after strange and exotic places. On the walls of these establishments hung cages containing parrots and geckos brought home by the sailors who sat on the stairways and regarded the young girl impassively. Anna returned their stares fearlessly, thinking, as she did so, that even these men—who had seen the whole world and were sunburned for life—even they retreat into dreams. And Anna was right. The exotic names of the wine cellars helped them recapture the velvety breezes of Beckway and Paramaribo and Bahia and later, in another street, the sudden storms of Tierra del Fuego and the traveling walls of water found along the fortieth parallel, before they were carried off to bed, there to continue their dream of a voyage that never got under way. With her child in her arms, Anna negotiated the long corridors where whores plied their trade. Here, through the open doors, she saw the cheap prints of improbable South Sea islands, passage to which the prostitutes imagined could be bought by selling a love which, since it was Danish, they also knew would probably lead them nowhere but to hell. In all of the little apartments she visited she found the same running in place, the same gazing on some distant goal. In an effort to combat poverty these apartments had been turned into gambling dens or given over to small cottage industries, with families manufacturing gas lighters or clothespins, or writing letters to Freuchen and Amundsen, offering to take part in their next expeditions.

  It seems likely that Anna understood this longing—which no one expects to be fulfilled—because it reminded her of her childhood, and because the poverty around her was like the poverty of Lavnœs. In the midst of her own happiness she would find herself waking in the morning with a feeling that her sympathy for these people—and for herself and Adonis, whose circumstances were, in fact, similar—was about to suck the marrow out of her bones. Such sympathy is something I must handle with care, since it can blur our perception of history. Nevertheless it is vital that we, like Anna, realize that all the residents of this big building believed they were moving toward all four corners of the world at once. This was, however, in no way a consistent dream, because, while wishing themselves far away, they believed that the world around them would, sooner or later, be transformed into the Danish countryside. They all cherished their own or their parents’ or their grandparents’ memories of the region from which they hailed. These memories, which had grown rosier as time went on, prompted them to fill their tiny apartments with potted plants and led them to believe that the frail blades of grass which succeeded in pushing up between the cobblestones were signs that the countryside was making inroads into the city. So they founded cooperative gardening societies on the island of Amager, and there on their little plots of land they grew vegetables which, when brought home, were viewed as signs that now, at long last, the city was shrinking. And only Anna and we who can look at it in retrospect realize that all these onions and potatoes and strawberries signaled the direct opposite.

  And, again, only Anna could pinpoint the moment when she and Adonis merged with the city. One morning, not long after they had moved in, they awoke to the certainty that they had dreamed the same dream, not just as everyone else in the building, but as everyone in Copenhagen. Their dream—like ours—was the dream of the Village. It is undoubtedly sentimental and in all probability it is also false, but it is nevertheless appealing—even to me. On that morning it also wakened Adonis’s brothers—H. N. Andersen of the Danish East Asia Company; Alberti, the former Minister of Justice; and the ghost of Meldahl the architect, who that morning saw his buildings for what they were: heavy façades overlaying rickety skeletons, like fragile dreams of security and dignity; dreams which, on that morning, seemed like a nightmare behind which he wished to see only rivers or islands or one of the ditches where, as a child, he had eaten with Ramses and the Princess. At that moment all of them heard the distant chime of church bells in a silence they had forgotten. At that moment they were brought together, everyone in Copenhagen and—by no means least—these alienated brothers, who would not have greeted one another in the street, not even if they had recognized one another. It might seem hard to believe: that people can be united, in spite of everything, by a common dream, the dream of an idyll that has never existed. But the way I see it, we have reason to feel proud; after all, where else but in Denmark can people ordinarily at loggerheads be united in the dream of a dream with no foundation in reality? One would imagine that of all these dreamers—and they amount, more or less, to the entire population of Copenhagen—a few might have learned something from this yearning for fellowship and the countryside, but that does not seem to be the case. No one, apparently, remembered much of it, and certainly not Meldahl, who could not even remember what his father had once said to him in prison. He never even reached the stage of being amazed, as we are, that he had laid out half of Copenhagen and spent his whole life designing regular buildings in order to circumvent the far side of nature’s irregularity, while all the time fantasizing about gardens. Thus he had dispelled one dream by means of another, which he had then counterbalanced with a third, until it became extremely rare for him to catch sight of reality. Nor did he sight it that morning, when he mopped the sweat from his brow with the lace collar of his burial shirt, touched the cross of the Order of Dannebrog—which he had with him in his coffin—and wondered for whom the bells tolled.