The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel

by Høeg, Peter

  Over and above this, there was an invisible side to the party, carried on at the invisible side of the house. Although perhaps “invisible” is not the right word, since everyone sees what was going on; everyone sees it anyway: gentlemen and ladies throwing up in the toilets after eating and drinking like pigs; men in evening dress chasing housemaids along the corridors; married couples swapping partners and withdrawing into the empty nurseries—while out by the summer house in the grounds someone is crying as though her heart will break. But this is all par for the course in Copenhagen. Carl Laurids and Amalie’s parties are not debauched, it is not as though they have a bad reputation—quite the contrary. Just now there is an aura of respectability around Carl Laurids—as there has been before and will be again—and these parties simply typify the dreams harbored by certain sections of the Danish upper class just after the First World War. But if we are interested in finding out what made these parties special, we will have to look elsewhere. If we want to know what made them different from so many other parties held along Strand Drive, then we will have to examine a number of details of which very few people, if anyone, were aware at that time. Only because we have so many descriptions of Amalie and Carl Laurids’s house have we been able to reconstruct them; and because I know Carl Laurids so well that I know what to look for. Of course, once again it comes down to cynicism, to the uncanny synthesis with which Carl Laurids observes all the social norms and conventions, abides by all the rules, even as he is looking straight through them; as though he never does anything because he actually needs to do it, but only because it might be worth his while. As, for instance, with a series of tiny, searing breaches of etiquette of which only he and we are aware, but which leave his guests with a vague niggling sensation at the back of their minds and help create a myth about Carl Laurids that will swell and swell, just like his balloon—until the day in 1929 when he suddenly disappears. These breaks with form are, in fact, very small; almost invisible. The house’s mélange of cultural styles, for example, a mix that even by the standards of the day is possibly a mite overdone. It is as though Carl Laurids is saying, “You want culture? Well, that’s what you’ll damn well get. Here’s Greece and the Etruscans and the Far East and Islam and ancient Egypt; that ought to make you feel really secure.” And then there are the toilets, which are situated far too close to the living apartments. Thus, whenever anyone goes in or out, it is impossible not to see the toilet bowls—which Carl Laurids has had painted with rose petals and mounted on small platforms, all to satisfy some obscure wishes on Amalie’s part. Carl Laurids never understands these wishes, but feeling the way he does about Amalie, he nevertheless complies with them. And then there is Amalie’s bedroom, occupying what is really a very exposed position; with its double doors seldom closed, its Arabian Nights–style decor, and the erotic Indian miniatures on its walls clashing fiercely with the Raphael angels and Sistine Madonnas of the ground floor. And all of this the guests see. If it were not that they are but mere details within the greater whole, if Carl Laurids were not such a brilliant host and Amalie such a sparkling hostess, then their guests might have found it all pretty hard to swallow—both with what I have mentioned and a few other bits and pieces. But as things stand, no one apart from us is any the wiser. It never occurs to any of those invited to the house, not even regular visitors, that Carl Laurids occasionally seems like a very shrewd musician fiddling speculatively with the instrument of their souls.

  Only in certain limited areas was Carl Laurids blinded by his love for Amalie. Where all—more or less all—practical considerations were concerned, his perception was crystal clear. Thus he knew right from the start that Amalie would never be capable of running a house. They had been there only a week when he appointed a housekeeper. He chose an African woman who went by the name of Gladys. Her skin was so smooth and shiny and she moved with such easy grace that it was left to her eyes to betray that she was probably more than half a century old. She came from Kenya and had been in service in Lord Delaware’s house and, later, with Baroness Blixen; until, in 1915, she came to Denmark with this lady—later to become such a famous writer. And in Denmark she had remained (but don’t ask me why; I have enough on my plate without trying to discover how Gladys ended up on Strand Drive), and here was Carl Laurids appointing her as his housekeeper. His gray eyes bored straight through the warnings given by his associates and all the talk of how much trouble one always had with servants and how Negroes were so unreliable and how there was no telling what might happen. He saw beyond the way Gladys mixed up Danish with English and her native tongue; homed in on her strength of will and her imperturbable air of authority. On her first day at work, he gathered all the staff—the three gardeners and the chauffeur and the housemaids and chambermaids and the two footmen and the cook and the kitchen maids—in the entrance hall, in front of the big fireplace. Carl Laurids’s wealthy friends would have been surprised if they could have seen and heard him on this occasion. Gone was the affability, the charm, the confidence-inspiring manner; these Carl Laurids had quietly folded up and shelved. With the denizens of the house’s invisible side he adopted another tone of voice, both paternal and threatening and much like the one he had once used with the staff at Mørkhøj. He said, “I have taken on Gladys here as housekeeper. You all know that you must honor me as you would Our Lord, and love my wife as you would Mary, Mother of God. And I tell you now that you must fear Gladys as you would a general. And if anyone here has any remark to make about her being a Negro, then you can go to your rooms now, this instant, and address your remarks to your trunk and then you can carry your trunk out to the driveway and I’ll see to it that you’re picked up by a cab and driven straight to hell—because you’re fired, so get out!”

  No one had any remarks to make, neither then nor later.

  I should warn everyone against imagining that there was anything philanthropic about Carl Laurids’s conduct on this occasion. There is nothing to suggest that he had any particular soft spot for foreigners, or took any special delight in the exotic, or had any desire to challenge the prevailing belief that the farther south from the Alps one traveled, the more inferior were the beings one was likely to meet. Carl Laurids acted in such an unprejudiced manner for one reason only: the usual one, that it was worth his while. With his unerring instinct for his fellowmen he had discerned in Gladys the gifts necessary for running a house such as his, on Strand Drive, firmly, efficiently, economically, and discreetly.

  And so it was. In little or no time the house and its grounds seemed to be running themselves. Carl Laurids could be sure of seeing the staff only twice a month—because he insisted on paying them their wages personally. In fact, so effective was Gladys’s understanding of how to respect and exploit the dividing line between the visible and invisible sides of the house that several days could elapse without even Amalie—who spent a fair bit of time at home—seeing any of the staff except her own maid, the chauffeur, and the footman who served her meals.

  I would like to point out that Amalie is the first woman in the cast of characters to whom we have been introduced who does not need to lift a finger in her home; nor is there anything at all in her life that she has to do. It is tempting to say that here, for the first time, we come across the term “free time.” And yet it can be difficult to say whether Amalie’s time really is free—although I can say what she did with it: the same as her friends from Ordrup and Charlottenlund. Like her, these ladies lived in houses that cleaned themselves and where meals materialized without their having to give them a thought. They attended art classes and music lessons and took courses in the most attractive way of sticking flowers in water. They went riding—in summer, at Matt-son’s stables in the Dyrehaven park; in winter, at the Christiansborg Palace riding school. And always in a body. On second thought, I do not think we can say that these women spent every minute of their days in leisurely pursuits. Of course, it is tempting to get all hot under the collar and say, what are they anyway but a
bunch of upper-class hothouse flowers, all wrapped up in cotton at a time when, in Copenhagen, people are still dying of starvation in the streets and in the tenement where Anna and Adonis have been living for some years. But it would not be fair. There is no doubt that all the riding lessons and tea parties and flower arranging and trips to the races and to Fonnesbech’s department store served several important ends, the most important of which was that these women had a particular task in life: to show the world, and themselves, the true meaning of “femininity.” In those salons and parlors and drawing rooms that others kept clean; in a world where the image of femininity changed from day to day—virtually from one day to the next—it was the heroic duty of these middle-class ladies to take, as it were, lifelong lessons in how to be real women. By frequenting the same riding schools and the same shops as former generations of the well-to-do and by making up bouquets like those created by Hans Christian Andersen, they did their best to exorcise newspaper items on the increasingly outrageous bathing-suit fashions and the fact that more and more women were smoking cigarettes.

  Amalie seems to have slipped pliantly into this circle of women friends; she seems to have assumed this lifestyle as though it had always been hers. The only thing that set her apart was the easygoing manner in which she accepted everything. Amalie’s friends were ambitious. Their fathers’ and their husbands’ fortunes might have raised them beyond every form of normal, everyday life, and above every kind of financial consideration, but there was scarcely one of them who did not drag around some sort of invisible trunk stuffed with grinding, all-consuming ambition. Raised as they were in the belief that it was unfeminine to work for money, all these ladies from big white houses were passionately absorbed in developing their personalities; in making something of themselves; in making their own and their family’s mark on the world. Most of us recognize this dream from our own experience—at least, I do—but for these women in and around Strand Drive in the Copenhagen of the 1920s it takes on a tragic dimension. Not infrequently it pushed them beyond the limits of normal behavior and regard for their own safety, sending them chasing off to Africa to run already insolvent coffee plantations, or spurring them to join the Sudan Mission, or to leave husband and children and travel to Paris to become writers or sculptors—all without ever being able to satisfy the demands they made on themselves.

  But not Amalie. At which one might wonder, just a little—at least, I do—because if anyone is predisposed to such ambition it is Amalie, who suffered throughout her adolescence in order to demonstrate her own exceptional worth. But for some reason or other during these years she was very, very content. Whatever she undertook was done with grace, courtesy, and a smile and yet at the same time with the gentle air of distraction that had hung around her since her wedding and that left her only in certain specific situations—to which we shall return. In photographs from those years she bears a quite striking resemblance to the paintings on the walls in her own home. With her loose-fitting dresses and flowing tresses she is like a Raphael angel. Her hands seem flaccid and rather dejected and not at all capable of taking a firm grip on anything, let alone anything as starkly substantial as Carl Laurids must have been. The photographs have almost all been taken in profile, as though she did not want to meet other people face on. She is always gazing upon something or other, dreamy-eyed, in the manner of those contemporary Danish paintings of anemic women in churchyards in southern Europe; always painted against a backdrop of pine trees and gravestones, well into the afternoon at a point when even the light seems filled with a longing for something unattainable.

  During these years Amalie’s head was often in the clouds; the photographs do not lie, and this dreamy abstractedness was part of her makeup. On the long afternoons when the house seemed deserted, she could sit for hours in the garden. On such days, pictures of her childhood in Rudkøbing would appear to her and she would see them blend with her present surroundings into a quivering confirmation of the fact that she had always been one of the chosen ones and that, at long last, she had been proved right.

  When Carl Laurids came home from work, Amalie was usually there. But he never came upon her right away. He had to pass from room to room searching, in the white light which, owing to the large windows and diaphanous curtains and the proximity of the sea, always pervaded these rooms, regardless of the season. Usually he was so desperate to see her that he simply slipped off his overcoat, dropped his cane, and, still in his hat and boots, began his search. He called her, he shouted, “Daddy’s sweetheart,” and “Where’s my little wife?” and “Yoo-hoo,” in a voice not merely hoarse with impatience but also breathless, because every single day, when he left the office in Rosengården, he started to fear that she would have left him. And this fear drove him to push the limousine to the limit along Strand Drive, to race up the stairs of the house—and not until he was inside did he force himself to slow down.

  He always found her where least expected, on a landing, or in an alcove, or in a room that had been closed up, or on a bench in a far corner of the garden. She always looked at him in faint surprise, as if to say “Is that really you, Carl Laurids? How funny.” This reception never failed to have its effect. Even though it was a ritual which, in this aspect of their marriage, was as recurrent a feature as the white light and mealtimes, Amalie never once failed to provoke Carl Laurids with her apparent indifference. Disappointment having taken the wind out of his sails, he would stand there, unable so much as to kiss her forehead; and by the time he had regained his composure she was already moving away from him, whispering, almost to herself, “Actually I’m quite tired; it’s been a terribly long day.” Carl Laurids would follow her, although he dared not run, perhaps because she said, “I really do have a beastly headache, but tell me about your day anyway.” He cannot answer her, his mouth is dry from the emotions that assail him, and so instead, slowly, he follows Amalie, who has suddenly vanished, only to appear behind a pillar or a dumbwaiter or calling to him from the floor above—but always keeping a wall or a flower arrangement or a balustrade between herself and him. On these afternoons they are like actors privately rehearsing an assignation scene, and this image is perhaps one part of the truth. As this cruel game of peekaboo progresses, Amalie is possessed by an almost pantherlike presence, and Carl Laurids by increasing desperation—until, somewhere, he catches up with her. As a rule, a struggle now ensues, in the course of which Carl Laurids is always taken aback by the discovery that his wife’s delicate constitution and all her gaucherie are merely affectations disguising a strength as great as his own. For what seems to Carl Laurids an interminable length of time they reel around the vast rooms, with the mirrors multiplying their clinches, transporting them to other rooms, other floors, in a series of reflected pictures that seem to embrace the entire house. And it is clear from these pictures that if Carl Laurids finally manages to rip the black silk underwear to shreds, it is only because, suddenly, at this stage, Amalie is on his side and herself strips off the fabric. Then she digs her teeth into him, and they sink to the floor and roll out of range of the mirrors.

  The relief afforded to Carl Laurids by their lovemaking was very, very short-lived. By the time he came to, Amalie had risen, adjusted her clothes, and already taken herself off, so that he had to go looking for her. And by the time he found her, her face had already clammed up again, grown distant and brittle. This filled him with rage—white-hot but impotent. Meekly he had to make a tour of the rose beds with her, or drink tea with her while a voice within him screamed that only a moment ago they had been rolling around on the floor, dammit; a moment ago she had lost all self-control and clawed him to her. And now … what the devil had become of it all, what had become of her voracity … here, in the conservatory, where once again she resembled a nun, a schoolgirl? Once again she had abandoned him to memories he found himself struggling to credit, memories that compelled him, the next day and the next again, to reenact dreamlike chase scenes from which he woke alone, sprawled on t
he parquet floor with his trousers around his ankles, robbed of that sense of being in control which he had managed to sustain from first thing in the morning until this agonizing moment.

  Amalie did not help him. For a while, in the early days, he had tried to make her acknowledge her desires, to no avail. Without ever losing her temper, she would skirt the subject, avoid answering, feel unwell, and say, “Carl, I honestly don’t think this is something we can discuss; please don’t refer to it again.” Only once did he succeed in eliciting some sort of response. It happened one afternoon after they had made love on the big landing between the ground and second floors, when Carl woke up feeling more alone than ever before. He had come across Amalie sitting on a sofa, petting Dodo, her fawn-colored greyhound, with a tenderness that made him see red with jealousy. Unable to control himself, he kicked the dog away, hauled Amalie off the sofa, and yelled at her, “Do you realize you grunt like a pig when we do it!” Without a moment’s hesitation, Amalie dealt him a blow that burst his left eardrum and sent him flying into the grand piano. Then she left the room, leaving Carl Laurids smiling sheepishly, because this very haze of pain in which he found himself simply confirmed that he was right.