The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (38 page)

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 learn 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.

These parties worked because, of course, Amalie was the perfect hostess. These days she was never distant, as she had been in Carl Laurids’s day. On the contrary, she exerted such a presence in the room that every single guest felt that he or she had been particularly favored. Not one of the men suspected for a moment that he was not the only man in Amalie’s life. Such was the treatment Amalie accorded her clients—so individual and so sincere—that not one of them ever realized how, no matter what else went into their relationship with her, it all came down to business; it was a matter of survival. Moreover, whether there is anyone else in Amalie’s life, and why she does what she does, are questions to which they give little if any thought during these dinner parties. This is owing to the extent of what we agreed, a little earlier, to call reticence. So all-embracing is this reticence that, on these occasions, the other truth about Amalie—the truth about the bedroom and the professor with his trousers around his ankles, and the stockbroker crying like a baby, and H. N. Andersen’s brothel stories—does not exist; it is in no way whatsoever the truth. As far as the wives are concerned, the manner in which Amalie conducts herself and the good food and the carefully observed protocol make every one of them feel as though she were Amalie’s bosom friend. It never occurs to them that, in any number of ways, Amalie knows more about their marriages than they do themselves. Indeed, on these evenings, it never occurs to Amalie either; she even deceives herself; even to her, on these evenings, her guests are just very good friends.

I would like to suggest a single word to epitomize Amalie’s dinner parties. I know how dangerous such a word can be, that it is an oversimplification; but I have noticed that it is my way of remembering. It is a word that can be used as a sort of heading, a pointer to a more precise explanation. The word I would like to suggest is “consistent.” The way in which her guests and she herself are polite, in which they observe all the many rules of social intercourse, and in which they avoid striking any note other than the right one is just that:
consistent.
I would like to add that this is a social convention, a way of life, that requires a great deal of energy, since one is constantly having to combat any tendency toward inconsistency—and life is full of such tendencies, even in those days.

So in a certain sense, Amalie is a consistent person. With her uncompromising discretion and her will to get on in the world, she is very, very persistent. But it now appears that she did have certain soft spots, a few weaknesses, and it is precisely these that make her story so interesting. If, all along, she had been as strong and intransigent as the people she wants to imitate, then she might have left fewer traces of herself, or at least different traces. But she found it hard to maintain absolute reticence. Somewhere within herself she must have been shaken by the deceit and the struggle to act as if everything were idyllic. And so, now and again, she confided in Carsten.

She did not tell him the truth, or at least not the truth as I see it; she did not present her situation in quite the way that I have done, that is, by admitting that she was a kind of high priestess tending a ritualized hypocrisy that was not actually hypocritical. Instead, she tells Carsten about her lovers as though there were only one. This must have been because she was ashamed; on those quiet evenings with her son the proprieties were there in the bed beside her. She—who bound her clients to her with an invisible rubber band that would, sooner or later, bring them catapulting back to her precisely because she would do anything whatsoever and never feel shame—felt ashamed when faced with her son. When she was confronted by him, her strength deserted her and she told him, not the truth, but her dream of the truth, which was that there was only one man and that he was not her client but her lover.