The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel

by Høeg, Peter

  * * *

  Where did the two young people go after they left Amalie’s? They went to an apartment on the fourth floor of a villa by the Lakes in Copenhagen. It has never been easy finding an apartment in Copenhagen, nor was it any easier in those days. Then, as now, you had to have contacts, and the lease on this apartment was also in the nature of a bribe from one of the numerous law firms who were at this time angling for Carsten. The building was big, grand, and ramshackle and will turn out to be a fateful spot in Maria and Carsten’s life. It was not situated in poverty-stricken Nørrebro, nor yet in the elegant confines of Frederiksberg, but somewhere between the two, and it had not been built in the last century, nor yet in this one, but somewhere at the turn, by a family that was neither aristocratic nor common, well-to-do without being really wealthy. It had been built on a piece of ground with an uncertain future, and it was still standing there, surrounded by tall linden trees and dog shit and a faded three-quarters grandeur. It had a large, neglected garden, thickets of plaster on the ceilings, rot-riddled floors that sagged like hammocks, water pipes that emitted a ghostly hiss, interconnecting rooms, and tall windows—and in the light that pours through these sit Carsten and Maria. The apartment is empty of furniture; they sit in an echo of emptiness and nebulous hopes—well, what happens next? Sunlight streams through the window and for a moment the universe is put on hold: they have not actually moved in yet. They have slept together; they have known each other for several years and they really ought to have been married by now, but they have just not got around to that yet. Carsten has completed his studies and really ought to have found a job, but as yet he has not done so. Maria can clean and cook and generally keep house, even such a bogus spook-ridden box of tricks as this, but she has not made a proper start yet. With respect to this situation, I would choose to say that Carsten and Maria are waiting. They are not waiting for anything in particular—neither for life nor for the future nor for each other—they simply seem to have suspended all progression momentarily; and this waiting time, brief as it may be, is characteristic of this place and this time, in the late 1940s in Copenhagen. Both Carsten and Maria have been aware of this feeling before, but it has never been as strong as now, and this has to do with the fact that something is afoot and that something is, of course, the Welfare State and a freedom that is, at any rate to some degree, greater than ever before in the history of the world. And then there is something else that is hard to explain. Of course Carsten and Maria will marry and have children and work and assume their place on the beaten path—it is still a natural law of sorts—but it is as though, before all this gets under way, they are struck by a certain hesitance. And in the sunlight in the house by the Lakes the reluctant air of these days induces the giddy sensation of falling in love and a faint, faraway, tentative realization that all the old values are disintegrating.

  The next instant this feeling has gone and they have moved in and bought furniture and Carsten has found a job.

  * * *

  Once Carsten graduated, everyone was after him. Of course, they had heard of him long before this, even the professors of law had heard of him, and now everyone wanted to employ him. The Ministry of Justice wanted to employ him, the Foreign Ministry wanted to employ him, as well as all the big law firms, and at the Citadel he met the head of Army Intelligence, that deep-frozen Cold War warrior and later colonel, Lunding—and he, too, wanted to employ him. All of them were, of course, attracted by his astronomically high marks and his incredible diligence and his winning nature—all the promise of a meteoric career that hung around Carsten like a radiant aura. But there was something else, too, something they could never quite put their fingers on—not even wily old Lunding—and that was Carsten’s innocence. There was not one of these individuals or bodies who did not, deep down, feel the earth giving way beneath his feet or sense that a new age was dawning—even for the Danish state system, which had otherwise managed to maintain its dignity and remain well preserved since the days of the absolute monarchy. And so they all dreamed—at night, at any rate, and on the sly—of a phenomenon such as Carsten; of a new generation of civil servants whose belief in the middle-class worldview remained intact.

  Carsten turned down all of them. He shook his head and said no, thank you, and politely shook the outstretched hands before immediately releasing them again; he enjoyed his popularity and the strange waiting period, and then he made his move and accepted a position with Big Fitz.

  There are several conceivable reasons for Carsten’s choosing this particular law firm, one of them being that Fitz was one of Amalie’s friends from the time she was beginning to refer to as the Good Old Days. But the most important reason lies, I believe, elsewhere: in the fact that Fitz’s chambers were like a lighthouse, a bastion, in the current of time. These chambers were situated in a mansion on Sankt Annœ Square, close to the Amalienborg Palace and the royal family, and indeed Fitz was lawyer to the royal family. He was a very old man, the sixth-generation senior partner of a firm weighed down and glossy with distinction and solid tradition. The firm acted as State Counsel, Fitz and his colleagues being the government’s legal advisers and, in their opinion, having conducted every big case of any significance during this century and the end of the previous one. They had administered Lady Danner’s estate and had been instrumental in winning that glorious case, The State vs. Herman Bang, that writer from the gutter—and homosexual to boot—who had on that occasion been convicted of pornography for his novel Generations without Hope. They had conducted the Count at Mørkhøj’s probate case and the celebrated case in which the Burmeister & Wain shipyard tried to get out of paying the engineer who had improved and installed the diesel engine in the world’s first diesel-powered ship, the Selandia. They had seen to the small print in the sale of the Danish West Indies colonies to the United States, and Fitz had personally addressed the court in the open-and-shut case against Norway concerning Denmark’s rights to Greenland, in which it was eventually established at the international level that of course Denmark owns Greenland. The firm took care of legal matters not only for the royal family but also for the proud old Danish aristocracy, added to which Fitz himself sat on the board of Burmeister & Wain, Otto Mønsted Margarine, the Margarine Company, Hirschsprung and Sons Tobacco Company, the Private Insurance Association, and the Trifolium Dairies; and, for his day and age and for Carsten, he represented a happy blend of the best of the old traditions with modern-day big business. The existence of Fitz and his firm, its customers’ titles, its marble mansion and polished brass nameplate, all amounted to one huge affirmation that everything was perfectly in order.

  So Carsten started work at Fitz’s chambers, and at just around the same time the new decade—the fifties, that is—also started. Of this time Carsten and Maria have both said, independently, that it seemed to consist of nothing but Sundays. Now, obviously that cannot be true, but it says something about how this period was peaceful in a way even I can sense, and it makes me think that if I had been living then, I could have said: Come, dear reader, take my hand and let me lead you along the lakes and in through the riotously overgrown, romantic garden and into the grand entranceway with its ground-glass panes etched with elaborate floral designs, and up to the second floor to a Sunday afternoon idyll. The apartment has been beautifully done up because Fitz knows the president of Lysberg, Hansen and Terp. It has been painted, at Carsten’s request, in the same pastel green and terracotta as old Pompeii, with white woodwork, veneered rosewood furniture, pictures on the walls, and books on the shelves—an apartment that breathes like some great beast. Slowly and comfortably it fills its lungs, expanding and contracting and expanding around Carsten where he sits working, enveloped in a cloud of smoke and the delicate aroma of latakia tobacco; and around Maria, who is sitting embroidering—yes, just so: she is sitting embroidering, since that is what she does with her time during these years, when she is not keeping house and cooking and, in every conceivable way, being there for Carsten.
She embroiders and he works and only rarely do they look up, they are concentrating deeply, but they each know that the other is there. On some of these Sundays they take the streetcar or the train out to see Amalie, who seems to have forgiven everything and who, during these years, is growing to look more and more like a big black panther—although, despite dyeing her hair and despite the expertly applied makeup she now has something rather moth-eaten about her. This only serves to reassure Maria, who now feels more relaxed in her mother-in-law’s home than ever before and can sink back into the sofa and enjoy the little chocolate “Sarah Bernhardts” from Rubow’s patisserie. The next day Carsten has to go to work, and when he comes home his dinner is waiting for him, good Danish dishes which, despite whatever else may come along, he still prefers; dishes such as meat balls and pork sausages and chitterlings as only Maria can make them, with just the right little touch of wine vinegar. Afterward they drink coffee and listen to the radio and Carsten has a bit of work to do and, outside, it is summer or winter or something in between but always, in some way, pleasant weather; and, to me, these two young people—who love each other and who have just recently been married at the registry office in Copenhagen Town Hall—seem to combine with their comfortably breathing surroundings to create a unified whole that is apparently very, very harmonious.

  Although one could perhaps have looked at it in a different light. We could perhaps have latched on to certain details that shatter the idyll. As, for instance, the fact that, in the entranceway, on the way up the stairs, we pass the door of the ground-floor apartment, which bears a sign that says: THE DANISH STANDARDIZATION BOARD SUBCOMMITTEE FOR THE STANDARDIZATION OF WINDOW ENVELOPES AND PRINTED FORMS—which is in fact a cover for one of Colonel Lunding and Army Intelligence’s electronic surveillance stations. Or we could, in Carsten and Maria’s apartment, have latched on to the disquieting hiss in the water pipes and the muffled sound of distant telex machines and the rotten floorboards that have been known to give way and crash down into the apartment below, thus affording Carsten and Maria baffling glimpses of electronic consoles bristling with large lightbulbs and radio valves, until the army workmen patched up the hole—sealing it off until the building gave way in some fresh spot. One could also point to Carsten and Maria’s wall, on which hung a very large reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica. Not that it is any business of ours what people hang on their walls, and it may be that the young couple have been given this picture as a wedding present and feel that it is interesting and modern, but when all’s said and done, it is a picture of war—with severed limbs and bombs and dead horses and suffering. And that it should be hanging here, in the living room, indicates an odd kind of disregard. But then again, this may be no more than a stray thought, which I cannot back up; and life in the early fifties, here by the Lakes in Copenhagen, was no doubt above all idyllic. And it flows out into a bicycle trip.

  One summer they decided, on the spur of the moment, to load up their two bikes and take off into the countryside and sleep in a tent—although they could just as easily have stayed at a hotel. They started out by riding south. The larks were singing and they rode for a whole day alongside the crumbling ruins of a wall, which happened to be the wall around Mørkhøj; they reached Southern Fyn and, at one point, ate their lunch beside the statue of the great physicist H. C. Ørsted, in the square in Rudkøbing; later they came to the fishing village of Lavnœs, to which a paved road now ran; and they passed through the town with the inn where a vengeful Ramses—Maria’s paternal grandfather, that is—found his father. And from all of these marketplaces and walls and squares and houses the past came rushing out and shouted after them, but it always arrived too late, to find that they had just disappeared around the corner and the past had missed its bus. They did not even notice the spots where old WANTED posters had defied the Danish climate—among the world’s worst—to tell Maria that the hunt had been on all over northern Europe during the previous century for her paternal grandfather or grandmother or great-grandfather. Carsten and Maria did not pull up at one single place to be reminded of the past, because they had no knowledge of it. They had only the vaguest ideas—or none at all—of where their ancestors hailed from, and why, and no town or place-name or buildings or posters could jog their memories. At one point they passed through Sorø, which, as far as I can see, ought to have been vibrant with sweet memories, but all that happened was that Carsten pointed toward the academy entrance and said, “I used to go to school there,” and then they looked into each other’s eyes and laughed lovingly and then they kissed, mmm-wuh! Then off they rode, leaving behind them the town and the academy and the lake and the unanswered question of why it did not even occur to them that this was where they met.

  Riding there, side by side along the country lanes, under the sun and the sky and the larks, and eating liver pâté with cucumber on country bread in the fresh air, they resemble the fifties dream, our dream, of young love; and the only thing that might seem surprising is that their past did not really exist; that they rode through Denmark without any sign of recognition and without visiting one single person and without really seeing anything at all except each other’s eyes and each other’s sun-kissed freckles. And perhaps this says something about the price of that impending freedom which was already making its presence felt; it says something about the fact that the country which this double infatuation cycled through was already a strangely anonymous Denmark. And a moment later their infatuation was no longer doubled but trebled when, on the top of that hill called Himmelbjerget, Mountain to the Heavens, Maria suddenly found herself with something in her hand, something light-colored—her diaphragm—and she drew her hand back and sent the soft rubber disk spinning far off into space. And because, that summer, everything fell into place with such perfect and intimate timing, she became pregnant that very evening.

  Her pregnancy lasted for six years—yes, you heard right, six years—and when I have said to Maria and Carsten, “That can’t be right, it’s impossible, a pregnancy lasts for nine months,” they have said, “Well, have you ever been pregnant?” And although that is no kind of an answer, still it reminds me that what we are talking about here is how they experienced the pregnancy, and by their reckoning it lasted six years—six years that saw the advent of the Affluent Society. There came a day—although it may in fact have been several days—when Fitz called Carsten into his office and said, “I would like to warn you about something, I would like to warn you about James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. It is one long, scandalous piece of verbal diarrhea—which is why I myself have never read it—and if you, Mr. Mahogany, steer clear of everything in any way associated with this obscene pamphlet, then I predict a golden future for you.” Then he congratulated Carsten on the completion of his three-year apprenticeship, and on being, now, a qualified lawyer; he gave him a raise in salary and invited him to take a seat on the first of a number of boards that would, during these years, bid him welcome; and then he asked him to take over some of the day-to-day running of the firm.

  It was just at this time that Maria started working. It is hard to say what made her start, but to begin with, it looked good, resembling as it did the fifties picture of an independent woman who wants equal pay and wears the pants—as Maria did, pants that were let out at the waist to accommodate her stomach. There are various factors to do with her work that can be wondered at: in six years she was taken on at 170 different workplaces and worked nowhere for longer than three weeks. It is almost certain that she worked a few stints as a construction worker, making herself out to be a man and passing the swell of her three-year pregnancy off as a beer belly; and for some weeks she also worked as an attendant in another of those places where the history of Denmark was being written: the public toilets in the Town Hall Square. All of this points out that the story of Maria’s working career is not just that of an energetic young housewife, and that something, somewhere, was not quite right. But getting to the root of what was wrong would be far too laborious a ta
sk, and from another and simpler point of view, everything was in order—and it is this point of view I now opt for: Through the fifties the little home by the Lakes continued to sail through an uninterrupted succession of Sundays, during which, somewhere along the way, they buy their first car—a Volkswagen Beetle—and their first vacation home.

  They may not have seen much of each other during these years, nor much of that side of life which lay beyond the everyday routine. When they were together in the evenings it was all they could do to stay upright long enough to eat before falling into a deathlike sleep in the big double bed—in which, through all these years, Maria had to lie on her side in a kidney-shaped arrangement of hard pillows that took the weight off her stomach. During this period they also saw less of Amalie, and the only regular contact they had with other people came through Colonel Lunding, who would come up to visit them on the dark winter evenings—red-eyed and pale from lack of sleep—for a glass of milk and a cup of coffee and a good cry. The burly soldier always started off by telling one of his hunting stories, and then he would switch to bemoaning these changed days, and then he would start to cry, and Maria had to draw his grizzled head across her stomach to her breast and dry his tears and wipe his nose, while he wept and said, “Now the Reds are slinging mud at that righteous war in Korea, and those swine have altered the Constitution so that a woman—boo, hoo, hoo—can succeed to the throne, and these days you can’t even damn well arrest people because of their political convictions, how the hell do they expect a man to do his job, and every hour more and more Ivans are pouring over the border, damned if we won’t all end up being infected, I’ll probably end up in the booth voting Communist myself one of these days.” But in Maria’s arms he calmed down, and in the presence of Carsten’s well-dressed amiability and the smell of success and the old days he pulled himself together, brightened up, and managed to gloat over the rebellion in East Germany and say, “Still, it’s an exciting time, what with the crisis in Poland and all, and could I have another glass of milk and I’d better be getting back, duty calls, you have to keep up the morale if you’re going to act immorally.”