The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel

by Høeg, Peter

  She let him in and showed him around the villa, chatting to him all the while about religious matters: opening maneuvers which, however, lasted only for as long as Amalie deemed necessary. In the bedroom, she disrobed him so gently that his garments seemed, to him, to fall off unaided. With the unfastening of the last buttons he fell apart, and Amalie picked him up and took him in her arms. He cried inconsolably while they made love and continued to cry like a child throughout the night. When morning came, he sat in Amalie’s lap in knee-length silk underpants, sucking on a white cloth while she gently rocked him. At that point she could have asked for anything whatsoever; he would have given her everything, but the only thing she asked of him was to be her confidant and financial adviser during these difficult times. Thereafter, she helped him to dress and knew, when he left, that he would always come back.

  Without a moment’s hesitation she then picked up the telephone and told the professor to come. The professor belonged to a noble family whose members had been generals and admirals since the time of Christian IV—and still were. He himself had been a colonel in the Army before opting for a professorship in architecture, and he girded himself with learning and medals and a hoarse bark and boasts about his family’s wealth, along with various other signs of unassailable virility—all of which Amalie had seen right through, despite having met him on only a handful of occasions, at parties given by Carl Laurids to which he lured this coxcomb, this Knight-of-the-Dannebrog-at-such-an-early-age, by pandering to his vanity—by no means a difficult undertaking. On these occasions Amalie had seen past his decorations to the mistreated and hard-pressed mongrel hiding behind the stiff fabric of his uniform and the gold braid. She knew he had noticed her, and she knew that he would come because he remembered her and because, when she spoke to him on the telephone, she had not invited him but given him an order. He arrived as punctually as the stockbroker had done the day before, in full court dress. Without wasting any time on the formalities, Amalie led him to the bedroom, ordered him to take off his uniform, and when he hesitated, slapped his face, hard, several times. At this he broke down; then she made him pull down his trousers and she spanked him. He cried when, after a little while of this, she stopped—“But that’s all you’re getting,” she said, “a few small slaps on that white army bottom,” and then he had to button up. In the drawing room she allowed him to drink half a cup of tea, to help him pull himself together, while she sat opposite him, her face hard and inscrutable. Then she ordered him to leave. She did not get up to show him out, but as he was leaving she told him coldly that his only chance of being allowed to come again lay in taking care of certain urgent expenses for her. From the hallway, through the closed drawing room door, he begged her to let him write her a check, and once he had done so she had the footmen throw him out.

  On the next evening she was visited by an influential government minister and on the next by H. N. Andersen; and since these two men are well-known figures whose memories are protected I will refrain from mentioning here a lot of things that could be divulged, or what Amalie demanded of them. All I will say is that her demands were modest. And so it continued: she made demands, but they were never high.

  On the fifth day—which was the last, this time around—she received the Copenhagen inspector of schools, and from him exacted the promise that when the time came—in other words, in over ten years’ time—he would procure a scholarship for Carsten to one of the most prestigious prep schools in the country.

  Then she went to bed and slept for the first time in five days.

  * * *

  The simplest thing now would be to say that evidently Amalie must have decided to become a prostitute; naturally, that would be simplest, since we all believe we know what that word entails. But in her case this would not be correct; it would be a gross simplification of Amalie’s activities in the years ahead. Beginning with the stockbroker and the professor-colonel, these amounted to a series of moves—let us say business transactions, or let us say amorous transactions—that were a great deal more subtle and complex and difficult to comprehend than ordinary prostitution. Amalie understood her customers, that much can be said here and now; she understood that the stockbroker had to be handled like a frightened child and that the professor had to be denied precisely what he thought he had come for and that the government minister should be allowed to talk, just talk, and that H. N. Andersen wanted her to recount for him fictitious incidents from his youth among the brothels of the East Indies—incidents he could now relive only in this way, with a strange woman and the sough of the Sound in the background. And she gave these men exactly what they needed, without losing one vestige of her own dignity.

  In the course of that one night on which she had said farewell to Carl Laurids, she lost any resemblance to the Madonnas on the walls and slipped away from our dream—and the dream of her own day and age—of a delicate, symbolic woman. In a sense, she continued to look as she had always done; she corresponds in every respect to the ideal of her day, her customers’ ideal and ours, of a beautiful woman: an ideal that calls for shapely hands, soft lips, and regular, delicate features, and so on and so forth. But there is no longer anything the least bit delicate about this woman as a whole, and we must differentiate between Amalie before and Amalie after Carl Laurids’s disappearance. Previously, in her dress, she had followed the daring fashions of the day; she had mastered the art of being both distant and absolutely up to the minute with her bobbed hair, loose-fitting, low-waisted dresses, and boyishly flat chest. But from the night on which Carl Laurids disappeared she altered her appearance. She tied a turban around her hair until it grew long enough to be piled up in elaborate coils; and from then on, she wore only black dresses—not to show that she was in mourning, not to look like a widow, but because black represents solidity and, during these years, it was solidity for which Amalie was reaching out. Her dresses were tight-fitting, clearly delineating her figure and emphasizing to anyone and everyone—including us, whose knowledge of her appearance is gleaned mainly from photographs—that she grew to look more and more like a big, beautiful cat. That was how she received her first customers and, later, the long ranks of those who succeeded them.

  It was to be the case with all of Amalie’s business relationships that her demands were moderate. With most of her clients, she could have asked for anything at all, but did not. She now practiced in her business affairs the same restraint that had become an ideal for her since she decided, after Carl Laurids’s disappearance, to bid farewell to her extravagant ways. Do not expect me to explain this. I am only reporting the truth—even if, as here, it does consist of riddles: riddles such as how Amalie managed to take these steps into reality and, in just five days, ensure that she and her child could stay on Strand Drive and in stylish society, and in comfortable circumstances, when everyone, even I, would have expected her to drop out of the villa and into some humble public office and into another district and out of this tale.

  On the seventh day after Carl Laurids’s disappearance the workmen arrived, and for the week during which they were at work Amalie received no one, absolutely no one. During that period she left her five first clients—who had safeguarded her future—to yearn for her; left her and Carl Laurids’s acquaintances to speculate over just when she would be forced to move out. These workmen were the same foreigners who had, at the beginning of the century, installed her grandmother’s water closet. They were much older now, and spoke with less and less exuberance, but they worked with the same impressive dexterity. It has not been possible to discover where they came from or how Amalie found them; when they were finished she paid them in cash—with H. N. Andersen’s money—and then they vanished.

  Anyone less strong than Amalie would undoubtedly have been tempted to have all traces of Carl Laurids removed. There were other women—who do not come into this story, but whom I mention here because they, like Amalie, felt that they had been abandoned by Carl Laurids—who continued to wallow in the despair
out of which Amalie pulled herself. They burned every picture of Carl Laurids and every present he had given them; they even burned their sheets and made all sorts of excuses to their husbands for cleaning their homes from top to bottom. They did not, however, succeed in cleaning the vanished cynic’s ghostly charm from their hearts, and in the end they went as far as to burn the rugs and the drapes and had the furniture recovered, to get at least a bit of peace. Amalie did not need to do any of this. She put all the photographs of him in a drawer, gave away most of the things he had left behind in his wardrobe to the Salvation Army, and locked up his office, which still held traces of his burning of the last of his papers. Then she set the workmen to work on the task for which she had really engaged them: to make the house into a barred incubator for Carsten.

  Before this, Amalie had never worried about Carsten, regarding him, as she did, as a child of the gods. In her world—which I have never understood and which she does not appear to have had a clear grasp of, either—Carsten was a kind of small Achilles. So convinced was she that he was not of this world, that he was on a plane above it, that she let him do whatever he liked; let him fall and burn himself and bump himself and cut himself; and laughed at his tears and kissed his scratches, saying, “There, now, Mama’s kiss will make you all better, my lamb,” and was sure that it really would. But from one day to the next, after Carl Laurids disappeared, she grew afraid that something might happen to Carsten; and this would prove to be a lifelong fear. When she rang the stockbroker, and thereby stepped into reality herself, she got it into her head that she must have pulled Carsten down to earth with her and that he was no longer invulnerable. That, at any rate, is part of the explanation for her seeming, all at once, to see the white villa as a landscape fraught with deathtraps for a sensitive child such as Carsten. It seemed to her, now, that the windows yawned vacantly onto an abyss into which Carsten might plummet at any minute, so she had the workmen put up grilles; first on the second-floor windows; then on the ground-floor windows, because she thought they were also too high; and then on the basement windows, to protect him against kidnappers. She started to heed the doctors’ warnings against too much sunlight and had heavy drapes hung over the barred windows; then she had the sharpest and most dangerous-looking dragons’ heads cut off the furniture and the doors to the back stairs locked so that he would not tumble down them. With all this done, there came a day when she thought she heard the cutlery rattling aggressively in its drawers—so she had all of the knives replaced by a special type with rounded tips and then had all of the drawers and cupboards containing the kitchen utensils fitted with padlocks. By the time the workmen were finished, the house had been altered beyond recognition. For years, after they had left it, only very few changes were made; so we know, from the eyewitness accounts and from the photographs, just how it looked. In these photographs the rooms are unrecognizable—these cannot be the suites that Carl Laurids had decorated so provocatively and with such aplomb, we tell ourselves. But they are, and if you look very closely you will be able to recognize one piece of furniture after another, until it dawns on everyone—just as it dawned on me—that the change has been wrought by the new gloom behind the heavy drapes and by certain details that Amalie herself arranged with a sure touch. The only thing she asked the workmen to do—other than the grilles on the windows—was to paint over the Dionysian excesses on the walls of the garden pavilions. Everything else she attended to herself; which meant that she first of all removed the Indian miniatures from her own bedroom, partly because she did not want to scare her clients and partly because they reminded her of what she had had with Carl Laurids, which she knew would never come again. Then she moved certain of the most naked modern paintings out of the drawing room into less-frequented rooms; hoisted a large, crude chandelier made out of old bayonets farther up, and shifted some of the improper lifesize bronze figures into the corners of the rooms, out of view. The weird modern chrome and ebonite lamps in organic shapes that Carl Laurids had brought back from his trips abroad, or received as gifts from his American contacts, she shoved to the back of the shelves—and with these and some other minor alterations she changed the house completely. Just two months later, she gave her first dinner party. If I were to describe the entertaining done during Carl Laurids’s time in one word, then the word that comes to mind is “loose.” Everything about Carl Laurids’s parties was loose: the number of invited guests was loosely estimated; their titles were loose, and their fortunes and their conversations and their connections and rules for how one ought, in general, to behave; so that the party was like a large, brightly colored, unpredictable creature that pulsated: now screeching and ferocious, now muttering and cautious.

  Amalie’s first parties, and all those that came after them, were very different. On the first occasion, she invited twelve people—six married couples; on subsequent occasions she again invited twelve, or sometimes eight, and on rare occasions twenty-four people. The guests were, that first time and thereafter, officers in the Army and heads of government departments and commodores and judges and professors and company directors and undersecretaries, with now and again a politician, and now and again a writer—almost all of whom had wives who could sew and cook and run a household with a firm hand. These people regarded themselves as the very flower of Danish Officialdom and pillars of the Danish State System. They arrived on time, somberly dressed; they ate sparingly, drank little or nothing at all, and conversed quietly on the chances of avoiding pneumonia by sprinkling powdered sulfur in one’s socks in the morning, and on the lovely plaster casts of Greek antiquities in the National Art Museum. After dinner, the men sat together in one group and the women in another; there was never any dancing at these parties, and at eleven o’clock everyone left—everyone, without exception.

  One might wonder at Amalie’s giving these dinner parties. At the time of the first she had—at least to the best of my knowledge—between ten and fifteen regular clients whom she herself referred to as Friends of the Family and whom she allowed to visit her once or, at the most, twice a month. And the amazing thing is that it is these very men and their wives who constitute the core of the social circle that she builds up over these years. Why, I have asked myself, was it necessary for Amalie, who was otherwise so discreet, to run such a risk as this must have involved: taking on the role of hostess, thereby bringing herself into the public eye, and then, as if that were not enough, putting her clients around the same table, along with their wives? The answer has to be that she herself wished to be a part of this company. She had been let down twice in her life, first by her father—who had lost everything thanks to his need to rebel—and then by Carl Laurids, with his lack of respect for anything whatsoever; both of whom were men who had challenged some of the fundamental values in life. Now Amalie turned to face these values and their servants, these buttoned-up men and quiet women—but she was not content merely to meet them in her bedroom. Her wish, for her son and for herself, was that he and she should also be respectable and share in the traditions of these people. And at first glance this wish seems incredible; how can Amalie be both courtesan and healing spirit for these men—drying their tears and giving them satisfaction or spanking them or bathing them or talking harshly to them—and then sitting with them, shortly afterward, around the dinner table, amid all that polite conversation and good taste? How can she? Because both she and her guests are schooled, primed, utterly perfect, flawless exponents of a particular type of behavior: one that forms an important part of the Story of Danish Dreams; one that is usually called the art of reticence. Carsten notices it for the first time at Amalie’s first dinner party. He also sits down to this dinner, to this one and all the others—Amalie insisted upon it, even though she knew it was a breach of a protocol that was, in all other respects, followed to the letter. That she would not yield on this point is, of course, because these dinner parties are held for his sake, since she means him to draw nourishment from the presence of these people, and lear
n from them, and perhaps become, first of all, like them and, later, even better—preferably even better. Amalie’s ambitions are at this point extremely far-reaching, and that is why Carsten attends these dinners. He is only five years old, but nevertheless, like many children, he is extremely sentient. Though unable to put what he experiences into words, he has immediately perceived that this party is not like the ones he is used to; he notes the composure and the dark colors and observes (to his disappointment) that the women are fully clothed, and that there is no music. Later he also notices something else. At some point during the dinner, when he has long since given up trying to follow the conversation, he senses a tension, senses that the very furniture, in this room and the others, is trying to stay absolutely still: the grand piano does not resound to the conversation as it usually does and only a very few sounds penetrate from outside—and all because these people, none of whom he knows, are surrounded by a force field of suppressed energy. Vibrating beneath the dark surface and their table manners and the disciplined gestures there is a tremendous pent-up power, which forms an intrinsic part of these people and of the truth about Danish Officialdom, and which disguises itself with dark clothing, restraint, and well-considered remarks. Only on the thin outer crust of Amalie’s parties is there anything banal. Beneath this crust power surges. While her guests discuss the excellent warming qualities of angora and the merits of sulfur powder and how the Copenhagen museums have so many lovely plaster figures, what they are in actuality discussing is the big questions in life: love and money and religion and life and death—only it is hard to catch this because they speak so softly. While keeping within the bounds of Society and making sure that no one could hold them responsible for anything whatsoever, because they have spoken so obtusely and with such tremendous discretion, they carry on conversations in which dramas no less intense than those of Carl Laurids are played out. And this Carsten understands. Not on that first occasion, I grant you—at that point he is still too small and merely senses the tension in the room. But as time goes on, within a few years, he is old enough to grasp what is actually being said, and to recover from his first feelings of confusion, which stem from, among other things, the command over time possessed by these people. Their ancestors once served in the bureaucracy of the absolute monarchy, and, what with family tradition and their own endeavors, they have become so proficient in subjecting themselves to King and Country and Duty and God and Morality that they can speak of seventeenth-century imbroglios as though they themselves had been responsible for their outcome, and of events far into the future—such as their own retirement or their children’s retirement—as if they were just around the corner. This is also why the men are now able to forget where they actually are: in a house decorated with a wild extravagance that is toned down only perfunctorily by the drapes; a house in which, at other times, they were received in very different ways, before being led to the bedroom, where their tears or wails or cries of joy or grunts reveal something about the price of forgoing the unpredictable, personal side of life in favor of Duty.