The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel

by Høeg, Peter

  He asked around among the residents of the narrow street only to discover that the city’s amnesia had already spread to cover the coal merchant’s. Although it had been there just the day before, only a handful of people could remember it. Anyone else would have despaired, but Adonis was not for one moment daunted. So used was he to propping himself up on his destiny that the only thing that smarted was being told by an old man that the coal and gas for Tivoli had now been rationed, which meant that the enchanted gardens would have to close as early as 11 p.m. On hearing this news, Adonis slumps against the coal merchant’s locked door, and it might be imagined that he is thinking, but he is not. He is waiting for fortune. He is waiting for life to come to him, and at this moment he makes me think of a Trobriand Islander or an Aztec or a Kikuyu waiting for rain. On this morning, as on previous occasions, there is something outlandish about Adonis’s trust.

  There he stands and waits, possibly for an hour, possibly for two, but nothing happens. For a moment the illusion bursts and a hole appears in the dream of Aladdin. Adonis has to cycle home on his black bicycle, and now he is not riding so high as he usually does. Just at this moment he is about to come down to earth among the rest of us. But it is not very long before a new wave lifts him up. Only a quarter of an hour later he is president and co-owner of a bakery that one of his acquaintances and admirers has set up in one of the buildings in the rear courtyard. Here, from now on, he and Adonis turn out genuine Amsterdam spice cookies—speculaas—which they then cart around the markets and sell. In no time, Adonis is flying high once more—and still keeping his hands clean, since it is his partner who makes the cakes. It is Adonis’s job to drive the cart and flash the customers his lucky, golden smiles, just like the one he gave Maria as he drove through the gateway on his new cart the next morning. It was a smile that had forgotten everything and learned nothing.

  It was not long after this that Anna started to clean. This is a historical fact and, no matter what I do, history is history. Nor do I need to excuse anything over which I have no influence, but I do have to say, beware of this “not long after” because it reminds me that time—while establishing a context in an account such as this—seems so unreliable, especially because, when this happened, it was viewed in quite a different light—not least by Anna, who would have maintained that she had always had this need for order. And so it is Maria’s, her daughter’s, time that we relate to, in our belief that not long after this, Anna was seized by her cleaning mania. Although this last word isn’t right either, since there is no reason to believe that Maria ever used it about her mother, or that she so much as knew the word, and it may not even be particularly indicative. Nevertheless, it is the closest I can get. It is the word that best describes how, through year upon year of her childhood, Maria was to see her mother: as a person seized by a mania that forced her to make everything fantastically, spotlessly, totally clean.

  There is no doubt that Anna had always been a tidy person. It had upset her, as a child in Lavnœs, that she was not even allowed to clean her own cage. But her love of order had been nothing out of the ordinary; she had accepted the world as a whole, dirt and all. In order, therefore, to explain how she changed, we must take a look at the day when this transformation took place, that day—again a Sunday, with Adonis somewhere in North Zealand selling his spice cookies—when Anna became aware of a heavy, soggy smell that cut like a knife through the walls and floors of the big tenement, to the second floor, where Anna and Adonis’s apartment was situated. She followed the smell to the ground floor, which housed a dance hall, and then farther down, to the basement rooms occupied by homeless waifs and strays, and still farther down, to the subbasement. This was so deep down that not even the cats ventured into it, and there Anna found dense darkness and a monotonous bubbling sound. By the light of a match she saw that the floor was covered by a layer of pale mud. She assumed that this must have penetrated from the canal outside, until she sensed the floor moving—as only someone of her exceptional sensitivity could have registered it—and realized that the floor had sunk; that this entire enormous tenement was ever so gently descending into the earth and that, in fact, this house was not about to sail off across the sea. Instead, it was in the process of sinking straight down into the mire.

  That very same Sunday she tried to warn the residents. Pale and solemn-faced, with Maria in her arms, she made her rounds to tell them all: to tell the whores and the shopkeepers and Mr. Stauning, Minister of Supply and Control, and all of those who had no vote because they were on the dole. But it was no use; no one believed her. They listened politely to the child-mother with the great dark eyes, but did not take her seriously. After all, who is going to believe a young girl who tells them they are living in a sinking Atlantis, when everyone knows their home is a tenement, a beggars’ stronghold, a workhouse in Christianshavn. The only place where Anna found herself understood was among the sailors in the taverns. They believed her, because they themselves lived right next to the basement and had noticed the fatal freshwater smell of the mud, and because they had lived long in the company of superstition and lies more blatant, considerably more blatant, than the yarn served up to them by this sweet girl, and had thereby got into the habit of believing everyone, including this Madonna.

  Late that night, Anna attempted to warn Adonis. Her worries had at first been forgotten, because he had come home bubbling over with glee from his cookie-selling—an occupation that presented him with the opportunity to perform before an audience again. He had lifted her onto the bed, and wafted the quilt as a reminder of his days as a wave boy, and then they had forgotten everything, absolutely everything, even the child. They had had eyes only for each other, and had stayed awake until dawn. Then Anna had grown grave again and had told Adonis about the building and how it was sinking. But what was he supposed to say to her? The future was not the time for Adonis, who was now, at this very moment, in the Monday sunshine, wallowing in the smell of almonds and speculaas spices and Anna’s nakedness and Maria. So he swept her worries aside with his gaiety. “Don’t worry, little miss,” he said; “today the skies are blue.”

  That was the morning Anna began her cleaning. She started by washing the varnished floor, one floorboard at a time, until it had acquired a deep, reflective sheen. And she carried on from there, quite calmly. Anna never grew frantic; her mania did not lie in hustling and bustling but in keeping at it, cleaning on and on and on, with tenacious thoroughness, until the windows were so gleamingly clear that pigeons flew into them, thinking that there were openings running right through the building, and were killed. And the corners of the rooms sparkled, so white that it seemed as though she had succeeded in polishing away the dark shadows of light itself. But still she cleaned on, with quiet perseverance, on the trail of grime that only her eyes could discern. She followed it out of the apartment and down the stairs, where, gently but firmly, she requested the homeless squatters to move their cardboard boxes and straw pallets while she swept underneath them. Maria and Adonis found themselves, because of her, moving ever more carefully around the small apartment, with its three rooms solemnly marking time, like a hospital waiting to perform some vital operation that required just this obdurately gleaming floor and just this metallic sheen from the shining kitchen walls. Adonis and Maria grew ever more silent, fearing as they did that too much talk or laughter would cause particles to come adrift from the polished surfaces. Anna never scolded them—her cleanliness never took an aggressive turn—but once having put Maria to bed, she would then painstakingly erase every trace of the evening meal and the day’s activity and pack everything away. And all the while Adonis would watch her, unable to fathom this quiet zeal which, in his opinion, made their home look like a family tomb.

  So Maria is the only one who, as time goes by, conceives some notion of what is happening to her mother. Everyone else is filled with admiration for Anna on those afternoons when she is stooped over the big copper kettle in the rear courtyard, wringing out
the sheets with such concentrated, no-nonsense strength that they could be put straight into the linen drawer, without drying, if it were not for their having to bleach in the sun. On such afternoons, the tenement residents hang out of their windows to watch Anna. Her sheets, hung in the sun to bleach, are a symbol, because what is to be bleached is something as intimate as bed linen, an expression of this lovely girl’s managing to realize the dream of the Danish Housewife, who can combine passionate lovemaking with the smell of brown soap. Her apartment forms the frame around a picture representing honesty and passion and neatness, and that despite her youth and the fact that this apartment, this Garden of Eden, is situated in this area, in this infested tenement, just above a dance hall, next to the whores’ corridors, and facing directly onto this courtyard.

  Only Maria noticed that Anna’s calm tenacity did not derive from her having found her place in the scheme of things; that she had, on the contrary, set herself in motion. The only time Maria said anything to her mother was on that previously mentioned occasion when Anna was down on her hands and knees, methodically cleaning the wall paneling with alcohol. Seen through Maria’s eyes, she was like a scientist, an ardent zoologist, and even to me it is obvious that she is not a woman who has resigned herself to anything but she has set herself a goal. This goal is the lamentable petit-bourgeois dream, doomed in advance, of getting to the bottom of things and exterminating the last, the very last, microbe. At this point, Maria was five years old, but already, her stammer notwithstanding, she possessed a command of language to which neither Anna nor Adonis would ever aspire. And so, when she had asked about the g-g-glass, Anna had paused, once she had given her feeble reply, and tried to remember what this exchange of words reminded her of—to no avail. This was the last time Maria broached the subject, feeling as she did that there was no point. And she was probably right, because, from then on, Anna grew more and more grim. Even though she told Adonis that she was simply changing her tactics, that she was now going to roll up her sleeves so this can be a nice home and we’ll be able to say we may be poor, but we are honest and we keep a very, very clean house.

  And although Anna sounded plausible and convincing, it was a mania. Because she now borrowed the doctor’s magnifying glass, which enabled her to peer down into a fresh hell. One day, when Maria came up from the courtyard for a bite to eat, she found the door locked and sealed with gummed paper. Anna was fumigating the apartment, using gas pest-control cartridges. The place was barely aired before she sealed it again and burned some yellow powder on a plate on the kitchen floor. This filled the rooms with a smoke that defied every airing, hung beneath the disinfected ceilings for weeks, and forced the family to sleep with the squatters on the landings, and even there it stung the throat dreadfully.

  After seventeen days they were able to move back into the apartment—seventeen being the precise number Anna had been able to predict, because she had started taking omens. In so doing, she punctures the myth that the city of Copenhagen, now a good way over the threshold of our enlightened century, is a place where religion and superstition have been exorcised, and where the only temple that exists is raised to progress. Because Anna was not alone in her superstition. While she was arriving at the number seventeen by surveying the movements of the birds in the blue sky above the courtyard, Privy Counselor H. N. Andersen was taking omens from how long it took his staff to turn their faces toward the wall when they met him in the corridors of the Danish East Asia Company. Meldahl, too, had taken the omens; and in Christianshavn, Stauning was determining certain areas of government policy by the progress of his cigar smoke toward the blackened ceilings. So Anna was not alone, but she felt as though she were, and therefore said nothing. Which is why it was only to herself that she predicted the seventeen days they lived on the stairway landing and the poverty that was closing in on the family, now that Adonis was finding it increasingly difficult to dispose of his cookies.

  Adonis registered Anna’s new anxiety as an increased attentiveness to daily trivia. He noticed how in the mornings she woke early and lay quite still with her anxious eyes wide open, waiting to hear what the very first sound from the menacing courtyard would be; and how in the midst of making a meal she would stiffen and just stand there, watching the dust that persisted in dancing in the sunbeams, despite all her cleaning. Once, when he asked her if she was afraid of something, she looked at him with eyes that were pitying, sorrowful, and triumphant, all at once.

  “We’re sliding into the mud,” she said.

  After that, Adonis leaves her in peace, does not press her. He would do anything to keep the shadows away from those beautiful eyes. Instead he pats her cheek, the portion of her anatomy that seems to suit the occasion; a pat of the housewife’s cheek turning the whole thing into a bee in Anna’s bonnet, the odd notion of a woman weighed down by poverty and work.

  To me it is like a photograph: Adonis patting Anna on the cheek. But in that same moment he draws his hand back and his smile stiffens. Although, strictly speaking, it may not be in that same moment but a week or a month or six months later. But from where I am standing, it looks as though he draws his hand back in that same moment and, for an instant, turns solemn, realizing as he does that the building in which he lives, his child’s home, the frame around his love and those long afternoons of fluid lovemaking, is sinking.

  This dawned on him when he discovered that the dance hall, which was situated under the family’s apartment, had disappeared. The place was called Cape Horn, a name selected by its proprietor, former heavyweight wrestling champion of the world Søren M. Jensen, because it reminded him of the pictures of palm-fringed lagoons that had adorned the walls of a dressing room from his youth. It was there that the great Bech Olsen had predicted that he would one day open a tavern, because wrestling and bars went hand in hand. Later, when he learned the truth from sailors who had sailed around the real Cape Horn and who still, a lifetime later, remembered that rocky coastline as an iron-gray skull, battered by gales and set amid a boiling sea, he kept the name anyway because he felt the very sound of it contained a bitter longing well suited to the place. During the day it was a bar and wine cellar, with gambling in the dimly lit premises to the rear, where well-groomed men from distant parts of town accepted bets. On Fridays and Saturdays, Søren M. Jensen cleaned the place up and opened his doors for workingmen’s club dances, and on those evenings the place had, to all appearances, undergone a transformation. Then violins, flutes, and pianos replaced the sailors’ crude songs because, even in this poor district and even within the workingmen’s own organizations, there existed a strict moral code which demanded that parents accompany their daughters to the Cape Horn and come to fetch them—all because they sensed something that we, at a later date, can clearly see: that virtue was a sort of shell around these young people, and that it could crack and burst open, with the result that Adonis, on those increasingly more frequent evenings when he came home late, was in danger of tripping over couples lying on the stairways or on the ground itself. Later, when these lovers were married to each other, or to someone else, or found themselves alone, this moral code would be reconstituted among most of them until the shell re-formed and could be passed on to the next generation. To me, all of this is downright incomprehensible, but right now, on these summer nights when Maria is running to meet Adonis, the Cape Horn possesses an atmosphere akin to that of a Roman orgy or a Renaissance ball. Adonis and Maria stand together in front of this radiant palace, reveling in the chandeliers and the red plush and the unbridled laughter, which Maria will never forget. And then there is the seductive music, which also rises to the apartment above, to Anna, who is smiling sweetly but abstractedly, because by now she no longer knows what kind of a place she has beneath her feet.

  From one day to the next, the place vanished. One morning Adonis said hello as usual to the heavyweight wrestler. The latter was sitting on a low stool in the sunshine, and the tavern’s bow windows and faded sunshades and the peeling yello
w frontage and the sign with the palm trees all still looked as they always did, more or less as they always did—with the possible exception of the entrance, which Adonis later remembered was in fact sitting remarkably low. The next day no trace remained of the heavyweight wrestler or the dimly lit premises or the bookmakers or the palms. They had all completely disappeared.

  At first Adonis thought that the frontage had been redone, that during the night the Cape Horn had undergone one of those panic-stricken alterations attributable to poverty and competition, but then he realized this could not be the case because it was not just the Cape Horn that had gone but the other wine cellars, too—the Palermo and the Cape of Good Hope and the Barony Café—leaving nothing behind but the sign that had hung over the brothel, bearing the name Batam Grande in yellow letters on a green ground, and the marble rollers from electric mangles that had been rescued from the laundry and set up on the sidewalk.

  There Adonis stands, surveying all this, and I have a feeling that I am expecting something of him. It is as though the time has come to recognize that his luck has all but run out and that it is not possible to survive in the Copenhagen of the 1920s on the conviction that everything comes to him who waits, because the only thing that will come, automatically and without fail, is dismal wretchedness. At the same time, I know very well why I am thinking such thoughts. My own sentimentality is running away with me, making me cry out across the endless number of years and across all the barriers that separate me from Adonis, not least the barrier between life and death, “Dammit, man! Pull yourself together. Try to remember that you have a wife who’s being swallowed up by a mania that makes her clean and clean as though she were an attendant in a bathhouse, and a daughter who has developed a brutal nature unlike that of any of the lawbreakers in your family. It’s time for you to listen to Anna’s predictions now, because this is the last call, the final act, because your home is sinking straight into the earth!”