The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel

by Høeg, Peter

  The doctor was proved wrong. No matter how absurd it may sound, Amalie’s physical development followed its natural course. She grew to normal height, and going by what happened later, there is reason to believe that if she had not been so alarmingly emaciated, so atrociously thin, she would have looked just like any young girl. Instead she resembled a walking scarecrow with eyes that glowed, deep in their sockets, like carbon arc lamps. At school she was continually having to shift position in her chair because she did not sit, as the others did, on muscle and fat, but right on her protruding bones. Nevertheless she grew at the same rate as other girls of her age, and never, not once, did she succumb to pneumonia or tuberculosis or any of malnutrition’s other faithful companions in the Copenhagen of the early twentieth century. And contrary to all that is reasonable, and in spite of the doctor’s professional standpoint, her first menstrual period also arrived. So copiously did she bleed that it all but killed her—in toying with her own health, she had not foreseen this eventuality. It came at a time when she really could not afford to relinquish anything at all, and certainly not this sudden, unexpected trickle of blood. She told no one about it but stanched it with a cotton rag and accounted for it, to herself, by seeing it as a parallel to Christ’s tears of blood in the garden of Gethsemane.

  If one asks oneself, as I have so often done, why her family did not somehow try to get through to her, then the best answer I can give is that they were suffering from that Danish family syndrome which we all fear: to be, at one and the same time, so close to one another, and yet so far apart, that there is no possibility of helping. Amalie had finally distanced herself from Gumma and from her sisters—against whose puppy fat and, later, mature bodies she usually warmed her chilly, fleshless frame at night—and she had, in a sense, despaired of her father. In order not to founder on her tremendous disappointment over his failure to transform her into Cleopatra or a revolutionary queen or at least into a dazzling success, and over his failure to bring her to a temple or a palace or the barricades—not even to a big white villa on Strand Drive—she had placed him in a drawer in that strange highboy where so many of us hide our dreams. Packed away with him in this drawer were the images of that unfortunate citizen, the total failure, who is neither a proper businessman nor a proper father, nor yet a proper man. Instead he is something of a wimp, a weed, of whom the best that can be said is that he is kind to animals and always wraps up warmly. Such a way of perceiving another human being is always risky; bottom-drawer perceptions are always risky, and in Christoffer Ludwig’s case they did not go nearly far enough, because Amalie had, thereby, overlooked her father’s powerful imagination, his mastery of time, and his great love of the world—all attributes that she, in her fit of pique, had forgotten and was no longer capable of recognizing. Sometimes on sleepless nights she relived their brief collaboration in Rudkøbing. Once again she would see him hunched over his articles or the printing press, or standing beside the big desk in the act of reading his proposal aloud to the Old Lady. Sometimes, when this happened, Amalie would get up and walk across the cold floors and into Christoffer’s bedroom to look at her father. But she always went back to bed deeply disappointed, convinced that her memory must be playing tricks on her, because—lying there in the wan light from the street in his white nightshirt, and with his cat, Mussovsky, spread in slumber across his chest—Christoffer looked like nothing at all. In sleep his features were so slack that to Amalie he looked just like a defenseless baby, and in them she could read nothing other than the grounds for her own disillusionment.

  And so we arrive at the moment when she sees him for the last time, or at any rate the last time in a long while.

  This encounter took place in the printshop. Amalie did not exactly know why she went there; nevertheless she did so, wending her way along a narrow corridor of books, which seemed to have piled up without anyone’s being able to say how they came to be there, and which now made it difficult to gain access to the room with no walls where Christoffer sat, as always, at the round table. Its surface was now hidden under a thick layer of orders to which he had never responded and forms he had never completed and final demands he had never read, and the paper cutouts of mythical creatures that he had recently gone back to producing. The sole aid to timekeeping in the room of this man—who had once upon a time endeavored to pin his life down to a tolerance of less than half a second—was a tear-off calendar displaying a date from two years before. On this occasion, Amalie did not speak to her father; she merely stood there, having her prejudices reinforced. Then she turned and left.

  Walking out of the printshop and down the narrow corridor, she stepped straight into her last day at school. Now, this is a physical impossibility, because her school was situated some way from her home. Nevertheless, even if this does seem likely to be a hallucination brought about by her famished state, still we must respect it because what we are going by here is Amalie’s mind and not the Copenhagen street directory. And so, as I was saying, Amalie stepped straight from her father’s printshop into the school auditorium.

  At various times in Amalie’s life it happens that she walks in upon a party in celebration of something or other, although always just a little on the late side. And so it is on this occasion as she enters the auditorium and quietly finds her place among all the other people. At first she understands nothing. She has not eaten for three days, which is why she catches only very brief flashes of what is going on around her. These flashes seem to show her what she is used to seeing: the principal making a speech, the students singing, and the teacher walking along the rows to pull the hair of those not singing clearly—although of course she bypasses Amalie. No one pulls Amalie’s hair. Then something begins to filter through to her: she sees that the flag is flying outside and it dawns on her that it is springtime. Then she enters into the situation and realizes that this is the last day of school; that all these children sitting here in front of her are waiting to receive their diplomas, waiting for their predictable futures to overtake them. Amalie knows how they picture these futures. She knows that these girls have built themselves flimsy, illogical dreams out of cheap romances: dreams that leave only one question unanswered, that being whether the man who comes to carry them off will be a doctor or a lawyer. This knowledge makes Amalie smile superciliously, here amid this assembly of red-cheeked, shiny-eyed, white-clad girls, her contemporaries. She delights in her splendid insight into what awaits these country bumpkins: the Institute for Domestic Servants, factory work, apprenticeships to tobacconists, and a life of interminable grayness.

  And then she hears her own name. The headmistress calls it out, and a moment later the summons comes again. Amalie focuses with some difficulty on the stout figure of the principal, Lady So-and-so, who is standing in front of a large picture depicting Delling opening the gates of morning, and realizes that it is she who is being referred to, that she is a hairsbreadth away from having to walk up to the podium and receive something or other. She is never quite sure what. It might be a prize for diligence, or a reward for keeping quiet, or for being so well behaved year in, year out, or for top marks in the school-leaving exam. Amalie has no chance to hear what it might be because, just at that moment, she sees herself and her own contempt from the outside. All at once her image of herself as something ethereal and unique—as someone at death’s door, rendered transparent by their own inner life—crumbles away, and instead she sees a dreadfully thin girl, sitting in the midst of this blithe company, sniggering and mocking her companions with a smile that is idiotic, condescending, and full of the smug conviction that she is something quite special, because she has starved herself and because she thinks she has seen through the banality of existence.

  This clarity lasted only for an instant, but in that instant Amalie was overwhelmed by self-loathing. She was called to the podium, but by then she was gone. She had disappeared so swiftly and discreetly that no one had noticed, not even the girl sitting next to her who passed her hand two o
r three times through the air above the chair Amalie had vacated to make sure that they were not simply overlooking her because she had grown even thinner and more transparent. But sure enough, Amalie had left the hall. The moment that she had seen this vision of herself as a fool, she had walked out of the hall and into that picture representing the last day at school as being somehow special, a red-letter day; as being a time for rebellion or clarification, or for making decisions such as the one Amalie has now made—which is that she wants to die.

  Without touching up the impartial picture I am here attempting to paint of Amalie, I still cannot help but wonder, again, that something as elusive as unfulfilled, grandiose ambitions can drive someone like Amalie to the kind of despair that now moved her to lean into the wind and surrender herself: a despair there was now every reason to take seriously. Previously, Amalie had been acting out some sort of tragedy in which she had endeavored to carve out a place for herself in life and to extort admiration and sympathy from the outside world. But now she had given up; now she no longer believed that all of this could lead anywhere. And if she occasionally checked her dash through the city by grabbing hold of streetcar stops or railings along the way, it was not in an effort to stay upright but solely in order to be quite sure she would have time to appreciate fully how it felt to die.

  The city seemed to her to be deserted. As life was departing from her, as the toes of her shoes were being dragged along the pavement and, at times, lifted free of it, she perceived Copenhagen to be devoid of life. There was no traffic in the streets; houses and stores stood empty; the statues seemed more animated than anything else. As the wind swept Amalie through the outskirts of the city and out of it altogether, she instinctively saw the grim irony in that she, who had, ever since she was just a little girl, pictured herself wallowing for life in a sort of bubble bath of other people’s admiration, should die, at the age of seventeen, with no one looking on.

  Now, it cannot be the case that the city was deserted. This notion must be put down to hallucinations arising from Amalie’s weakened state. From anyone else’s point of view, Copenhagen was jam-packed with cars and bicycles and pedestrians and horse-drawn vehicles, many of which now had to brake and veer around her as she was carried through the streets like a withered leaf. She got in the way of a march of girls her own age demonstrating for the right of women to join the ministry, and a hansom cab driven by Adonis Jensen—although that is only mentioned here as an interesting coincidence. The passengers of the cab, all of them attired in frock coats and top hats, had just returned from the big peace conference in Paris, at which they had represented Denmark. Among their number, strange as it may seem, was H. N. Andersen, privy counselor and Adonis’s secret brother. The two brothers did not recognize each other on this occasion either.

  At this point Amalie lost consciousness, and all her actions thereafter were carried out as though in her sleep.

  * * *

  When she awoke she was lying down, and Carl Laurids was leaning over her. He had forced a few drops of brandy between her bloodless lips, and this spirit was now running through her veins like a river of molten metal. She studied him carefully, then turned her head away dismissively, closed her eyes, and fainted once more. When the brandy seared her mouth for a second time she opened her eyes, and this time took a look at her surroundings. The gondola was bathed in golden light. The last rays of the setting sun had tinted the sea dark red, and on the shining horizon she could see the misty silhouette of Copenhagen rising like distant blue mountains. In the darkness beyond Carl Laurids’s face she could just make out the huge form of the balloon, moving gently in the evening breeze. The whole craft seemed to be swimming through the ether. Six musicians dressed all in white were standing on a dais, playing waltzes, and it occurred to Amalie that she must be dead. At long last, and more by accident than by design, she had crossed over to the other side, which she had, until now, only ever beheld from afar. She thought she recognized the music playing around her and the scent of food fried in butter and the flashing of the women’s jewelry and Carl Laurids’s soothing touch and the taste of brandy. At long last she had died and at long last she had entered that paradise which she had spent her whole life gazing upon and which was—one hundred percent—her due.

  Carl Laurids did not sit with her for long. He had other things to see to. He had lifted her on board on the spur of the moment, on a whim. He was the sort of person who could afford to trust his intuition and give in to playful impulses because chance was never allowed to gain the upper hand in a life he was convinced he ran with forethought and common sense. Which is why he administered some brandy to Amalie and watched as she closed her eyes coyly and swooned; and why he called her back to life once more and stared, with a smile on his lips, at her thinness and listened with half an ear to her disjointed story of water closets and rare beasts and a long journey and distant purple forests. Then he asked one of the waiters to keep an eye on her and went back to his guests.

  He was under the impression, when he turned away from Amalie, that he had forgotten her. Without the slightest suspicion of what lay in store for him, he circulated among his guests, greeting this one and that, immersing himself in the warmth and the enjoyment evinced by these businessmen dancing or chatting to the prostitutes; and the representative of the employers’ association divulging the names of leading syndicalists whose arrest was in the offing; and Johannes V. Jensen, the writer, who was warning the young actress against the threat from homosexuals, while his right hand was struggling to prevent his left from feeling its way up the tight jersey trousers of the young waiters. Nodding and smiling to right and left, Carl Laurids stepped up onto the dais, in front of the musicians—not to interrupt the festivities but rather to give them an added boost; to show that he was still monitoring the proceedings and that they could all abandon themselves to one another and the food and the champagne and the music and the feeling of simply floating. And at that moment he felt a sudden pain in the left side of his chest. At first he was convinced he had been shot, and while he was reeling and trying to regain his balance he fumbled under his tailcoat for the little snub-nosed revolver he always carried. Only then, as his hand ran across his shirtfront and his fingers told him that it was as dry, white, and stiff as when he had put it on, did he realize that the pain and trembling were caused, not by any outside agency, but by the beating of his own heart. He managed to get off the dais without anyone noticing anything untoward. He found a glass of champagne on a table and drained it while cold-bloodedly registering how his hands shook uncontrollably and the wine tasted like water. Not since his childhood bouts of scarlet fever and measles had Carl Laurids ever been sick, and since he was quite convinced that his willpower and self-confidence formed an impenetrable armored shield around him, he came to the conclusion that one of his guests had succeeded in poisoning him, and that the poison had now reached his heart. With his hand on the butt of his revolver, he embarked upon a slow progress from one huddle of guests to the next, looking for a pair of shifty, and obviously guilty, eyes—so that he might have the chance to avenge himself, here on the deck of the gondola, before the poison devoured him from within and felled him like an overcooked vegetable at the height of his popularity.

  During these moments when the fear of death has Carl Laurids in its clutches, he looks like an animal. Hunched up, making no attempt to conceal the revolver that he cleans and oils and loads with small, evil-looking lead projectiles every morning—including this morning—he moves from group to group looking for his murderer, only to find nothing other than frenzied gaiety unfolding like a flower. At this moment I am tempted to say, there you are, now Carl Laurids is showing his real self, now his thin shell of humanity has cracked and he is reduced to nothing but a mass of instinct; now the cynic displays his true nature, consisting of fear and hate in equal parts. And that is precisely what the writer Johannes V. Jensen is thinking. He is the only person in the gondola who is sober enough to see that someth
ing is wrong with Carl Laurids. Furthermore, all those trashy novels he had written in his youth had given plenty of practice in the study of human nature, helped by a handful of crude theories that he now employs in explaining to the young actress, damned if we’re not going to see some action now, see, there’s the beast, there’s your instinctive, bloodthirsty proletarian, and with a giant club of a revolver in his hand; now all the parasites and petty hucksters will be wiped off the face of the earth, because here’s someone looking for revenge, and that someone is Carl Laurids.