The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel

by Høeg, Peter

  Carsten never again tries to take her into society, and the episode is soon forgotten because things are happening fast for the family during these years; this unfortunate little incident is put behind them just like Maria’s upbringing and the war and Carsten’s periodic bouts of forgetfulness and Amalie’s anxiety and the seedier parts of Copenhagen, and Colonel Lunding—and now the road ahead does seem to be clear.

  One January day Carsten received a visit. It was a Sunday and he was alone in his chambers on Sankt Annœ Square. He was sitting writing, and around him everything was very still—well, of course, everyone else took Sundays off, but Carsten was covering sheet after sheet of yellow legal paper with his individual, speedy, legible, and somehow attractive and arresting hand. He had had a very busy week, with court sittings and negotiations every day; and the settling, at long last, of the estate of the big ersatz-coffee merchant who had, at one time, taken over Carl Laurids’s factories; and the winding up of some big property deals in which Burmeister & Wain and the state and the Danish Sugar Refineries had swapped around the ownership of half of Christianshavn at their discretion and under Carsten’s guidance. Throughout this week he had managed to grab no more than a few hours’ sleep, and those he had taken while waiting to be called, having long since learned how to sleep standing up with his eyes open and an attentive expression on his face and having also learned to awake from this uncanny sleep—of which only he was aware—totally alert. During this week, when night and day had run together into one, he had seen his wife and children only once, and that had been in court, during the processing of one of those small cases that went hand in hand with the big ones—a damages suit involving a job applicant who had, during an interview for a job, insulted the president of the company and then knocked him down. In a way, such a case was beneath Carsten’s dignity, but he considered it an honor to conduct it and to win it, since, when we protect one company’s or one individual’s legal interests, he said, we are protecting all of them, and we pursue it to the hilt. By this time he had been working nonstop for five days in a row, and still he was smooth-shaven and neatly pressed and in top form. Not until just before the pronouncing of sentence, when the case was as good as closed, did it become obvious that he had been living on nothing but black coffee and willpower. Only then, when the defendant leaned forward and said, “Damn! You look awful, sweetheart,” did he realize that it was Maria and the twins who were sitting there, because once again Maria had gone looking for work with a child on each arm, and had, once again, been rejected.

  Such an experience would have moved most other people to wonder whether a prolonged coffee-only diet provides the right kind of sustenance, and whether once a week in the courtroom is the right time and the right way to see one’s family, but not Carsten. Sitting there on that Sunday, in the empty building, planning for the coming week, which would be even more full and ambitious than the previous one, he felt well content with what he had achieved. You have done your duty, and more, he said to himself, not without a certain satisfaction.

  He had reached the point where going into his own private little dressing room, taking a shower, and putting on a clean shirt and a fresh silk tie did not help him, because he still felt so dirty; and even though he had shaved very thoroughly, the stubble still showed blackly through the transparent skin of his face, and he thought: I’d better go home now.

  It was then that he received his visit. Not from any person, but from his own store of memories, which came pouring in through the double doors to show that they, like Carsten, knew nothing of days off. First to appear was this little episode: there had been a minor case in the court, a trivial matter, a case conducted for the ersatz-coffee manufacturer’s daughter, one of Denmark’s richest women, who owned half of Town Hall Square. The other party was a nanny. The case boiled down to a matter of a few hundred kroner and, said the ersatz-coffee manufacturer’s daughter, the principle of the thing. “I won’t pay,” she had said to Carsten when he tried to dissuade her, it being clear that this paltry amount was the nanny’s obvious due. “We are pursuing this suit on grounds of principle,” she had insisted, and Carsten had pursued it; and even though he pursued it in bottom gear, knowing that they ought to lose the case, he won it anyway.

  Now it came back to visit him. It had been a trifle, and it ought to have been gone and forgotten, it really had no business here in Sankt Annœ Square, but it slunk in anyway, manifesting itself as a scent. Carsten sniffed at the closed doors and windows and caught the scent of ersatz coffee, which does not smell too good at the best of times—but on this Sunday it smelled particularly bad. Carsten opened a window overlooking the statue of Christian X, but the smell just became worse and he began to feel unwell. It occurred to him that he never should have conducted that case, nor, possibly, the case against his own wife. It might even be that cases of this kind ought not to be conducted at all: they marred the picture as a whole, sowed doubt about the justice of the legal system, and nurtured the Monte Carlo idea of Fitz’s bitter legacy, which now, all at once, Carsten thought he understood. Then, just next to him, he heard someone speak, and there was his former friend and intellectual mentor Tyge Lubanskij, tutor and lawyer, and beside him, the Boy with his uncompromising opinions; over by the filing cabinet waited the lonely days at Sorø after the academy closed down; and there was Colonel Lunding, weeping in the kitchen by the Lakes; and the stockbroker, seen through the peepholes in the wall of his mother’s bedroom—until Carsten’s office was full. “I hope there is room for all of you, and you are most welcome, just as long as there is a chair left for me,” he said to the visions and sat down.

  He sat on, without moving a muscle, until the cleaners arrived the next morning, and even then he did not move; they had to clean around him. He was still sitting there when the secretaries and the messengers arrived, and then the chief clerks and the other lawyers, and he remained sitting there all day, because no one really dared speak to him.

  In the evening, Maria came to fetch him and take him home. By then his hair was graying and naturally he was unshaven. They had him admitted to Montebello Sanatorium in North Zealand, where he remained for six months.

  * * *

  While Carsten was away, Maria discovered that she and the children were, to all intents and purposes, alone in the world, and this she discovered after she had spent two days sitting gazing out of the window in hopes of a visit from someone, only to find that no one came. The telephone rang once. It was Amalie, and the brief, inane conversation with her mother-in-law left Maria feeling more alone than before. She began to think things over, and it dawned on her that she had no friends—a revelation that is, in a sense, banal, because of course she has no friends; her childhood home has been swallowed up by the earth, and her mother and father have disappeared, and she has grown up in a home for girls and on the street and has had somewhere in the region of 250 different places of employment, and she is married to a man, Carsten, who moves in circles as remote from her as another planet, so there is nothing to wonder at: of course she is alone. And yet, at the same time, it does seem odd, since she has moved around so much and met so many people and most of the time she is forthright and gregarious and sincere, and so still it surprises me that she has not formed just some kind of attachment that might have lasted until this moment when her husband had been admitted to a sanatorium and she was left alone with two children. I believe that this is a significant feature of Denmark and the sixties, this quite natural anonymity which, having paralyzed Maria, now pins her to the sofa. It says something about Denmark and about progress. Without claiming to be able to explain it, still I am inclined to think that it is important, since it is the first time in this account that I have come across someone in want of company—not any company in particular but just any old company.

  If Maria had told someone of her plight—Carsten, for instance (who was in the sanatorium), or Fitz (who was dead) or Amalie (who was not even an option)—no doubt they would have said,
as Miss Smeck had once done, that at heart we are all alone. That, however, is no real comfort but more of a middle-class attempt to lessen the pain of being anonymous. Maria chose to solve her problem in a very different, and radical, fashion. She left home with the twins, who could now walk—at least for short stretches; she took a taxi to Christianshavn and wandered around her old childhood haunts, which had been razed to the ground and built up again using matchbox buildings that looked like monuments raised in honor of the right angle and the idiotic contribution architects have made to the loneliness of the big cities. She kept walking until, in the mouth of a basement entry, she recognized the face of eccentric old Miss Poulsen, who had been living on the street throughout Maria’s childhood—and, in fact, since the turn of the century—and had dedicated her life to feeding the city’s cats. Maria dragged her along with her across the square, where she recognized one of those park-bench tipplers who have been working since the First World War to accustom their bodies to the denaturants in alcohol, and, armed with these two finds, Maria climbed into a taxi and drove back to the villa, where she installed them. The next day she went back to Christianshavn again and came upon two of the sailors she had known as a girl. Then, on the way home, she passed by Central Station, where she picked up an organ-grinder and his wife, and in the days that followed, with a child on each arm, she called on Kofoed’s School for Indigents and the Heaven Express Hostel for Men and the Copenhagen Refuge for Men and the Salvation Army Hostel and invited the homeless back to Charlottenlund.

  They brought fresh color to her cheeks, those days, and she felt fit and well and happy, not least on those long evenings in the big drawing room in front of the blazing fire, when all of her guests gathered for the dinner she had prepared and then made themselves comfortable in Danish designer Hans Wegner’s beautiful chairs and smoked and drank and stared vacantly at the domestic coziness and the paintings and the leather-and-steel grand piano designed by Amalie’s old friend the architect Poul Henningsen.

  If there is anything touching about this scene, it is unintentional—and my depiction of it is less than accurate, since Maria did not act out of charity but simply because she lacked company. She entertained no deeper feelings for her guests, and when they vanished from her life, they vanished without trace. She was having one of her glassy-eyed periods; life seemed to her to be trouble-free. Of course these people must come home with me and taste the fine brandy and the cigars, she thought, but at the same time she was distant and restless and the real reason for her bringing these people to Strand Drive was that at this time she was obsessed by the notion of refurnishing her life that had been coming over her in spells ever since she was a little girl—a notion that masked a deep sense of dread.

  Over the six months of Carsten’s absence, at least fifty people stayed at the villa. One day, Maria came by the house by the Lakes and invited Colonel Lunding’s successor to come over and put the villa’s second floor to whatever use he saw fit, and since Maria was a well-known figure in army circles, her offer was accepted and a couple of new electronic data processors and a sensitive piece of monitoring equipment were installed on the spacious second floor, thus adding an extra, military element to the comings and goings on Strand Drive.

  Only once did Amalie try to stop her daughter-in-law. She pulled a blanket around her shoulders, walked through the little gate in the hedge, strode across the lawn—past the wheelbarrows full of junk and the barrel organ and the Jeeps and the unmarked cars—walked in without knocking and set about speaking her mind. Then she found Miss Poulsen at her side, putting an arm around her shoulders and saying, “You know, the other day I had the runs something awful, I was feeding the cats down by the road and it just started to come. It fair squirted out, I can tell you”—and Amalie had to turn and go home.

  Two weeks before Carsten came home—in connection with the surveying of the house for the foreclosing—the police put Maria’s guests out of the ground floor and the Army Intelligence officers on the second floor moved their equipment back to the Lakes.

  And Carsten and Maria moved back with them.

  They only intended to stay there temporarily, and in a way that is how it was. When Carsten returned to his family he was also able to settle back into his office chair—the one in which Fitz had died—and he resumed his post as counsel to the Supreme Court and the resolving of delicate matters for the royal family and the Margarine Company and the Danish East Asia Company. He seemed to be his old self again: serene, attentive, and ambitious; and before too long he bought a lovely little mansion in Gentofte and he and Maria and the children moved in. Up there they could enjoy the breeze off the Sound and Maria did not have far to go to get to the job that she had, with her unstinting tenacity, found for herself with Nordic Insulin. And here they stayed until again, one Sunday night, Carsten did not come home and was found by the cleaners on Monday morning sitting in his chair with a face as gray as plaster, grown stiff and motionless as the statue of Holger the Dane awaiting his country’s call in the bowels of Elsinore Castle; petrified by good intentions and overwork and the dawning awareness of how hard it is to carve a career out of the difference between right and wrong and still remain as pure as the driven snow.

  He was taken to Montebello, and the sight of the yellow-painted hospital set in its leafy grounds made him feel as though he were coming home.

  This time the mansion was not sold, even though he was away for the best part of a year; this time the company paid for the house and for the servants who had become necessary shortly after Carsten’s second admission to the sanatorium.

  Up until that point, Maria had always had the strength to reject the idea of help in the house, but one day she began to cry. Without a word to anyone she sat herself down and quietly fell apart at the seams, and out poured a relentless flood of tears that would not be stanched. After three days she was driven to the nursing home where she had once given birth. Here she was met by Amalie’s old friend the radiation specialist, who had, at the time of the twins’ birth, been a gynecologist and obstetrician but had since, because of personal experience and current trends, become more and more involved in psychiatric work. So he had given up his professorship and his consultancy and converted his maternity home into a little private psychiatric hospital. And here he kept Maria for three days, helping her out of her grief and back to a slightly shaken reality with the aid of electric shock treatment—which he regarded as a kind of psychiatric pat on the back—and the help of modern psychiatric drugs, with their mysterious names and surprising and inexplicable side effects.

  By the time she came home from the nursing home a team of servants had moved in and she did not have the strength to throw them out, so they were still there when Carsten came home.

  On his return he and Maria and the twins moved back, for a time, to the house by the Lakes, not because it was strictly necessary but because, for some unaccountable reason, they felt at ease in those uneasy surroundings, resonant as they were with the hum of the city and the deep vibration from the diabolical electronic equipment on the ground floor. Later on, of course, they moved back to Gentofte and the mansion and the servants and the law chambers and the new job that Maria had found, and, of course, they believed that this time it was for good; now they could take it easy—but of course they could not, and although they did not know it, the house by the Lakes was already calling to them again, as Montebello was calling and the radiation voltmeters and straitjackets were calling and the bankruptcy auctions were calling—all because this husband and wife, Carsten and Maria, carry the weight of so many dreams that refuse to amalgamate, and so they are doomed to spend the greater part of their lives swinging between affluence and poverty, stability and disintegration, Gentofte and the house by the Lakes, an average existence and the nursing homes—and it is these swings of the pendulum that form a framework around the twins as they grow.

  * * *

  The twins had not been baptized—Maria had been dead against it
—but they had been named Madelene and Mads. Amalie, who had suggested Madelene, wanted to call the boy Max or Frederik or Ferdinand, but Maria had bared her fangs and said, “Nothing doing, one weird name is enough. He’ll have a good Danish name—Mads”; and thus a compromise was struck that tallied with the children’s looks, which were a kind of genetic compromise, with Mads being fair and Madelene not dark but black and, Maria could tell, the spitting image of the Princess.

  I do not know exactly when they started school—as I have said, now that I’m getting close to my own time, the story is trying to wriggle out of my grasp—but it must have been sometime during the first half of the sixties, and it came at a time when the family was once again living by the Lakes, so the children were enrolled in a nearby school, by the name of Bording’s School, which is still there, towering over the houses around it and casting a shadow far across the lives of present and former pupils.

  Bording’s was a “free school,” which meant that its teachers were freed of the trammels that would, in the ordinary state schools, have restricted their right to whack little children on the head; and so the twins—who had, prior to this, never been struck—found themselves growing up amid liberally administered smacks and modern Danish Grundtvigianism. This meant that the pupils were given no books, thus allowing the teachers to be all the freer in their own, very personal, interpretations of the History of the World and the Creation and Biology and the Norse Myths—which were presented as a justification of the school’s own particular brand of discipline, which dated from Grundtvig’s own day.