The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (16 page)

As a child, Adonis brought his father and mother much sorrow, through his compassion for mankind. Ramses and the Princess must have become aware of this compassion very early on because, as a baby on his mother’s back, if he saw his father walking off with a piece of canvas or a salami that did not belong to him, he would break into the infant howls that summoned the dogs and armed men whom Ramses had spent a lifetime avoiding but from whom he now had to run, just as he had done when he was young, by wading through streams, up to his waist in water, to cover his tracks. And all the while he struggled to understand how children could be so impossible by nature; why he had never succeeded in getting just one son to follow in his own, invisible, footsteps, which were, instead, now being followed by sheepdogs and men with hunting rifles because of whom he was forced to stay in the water for so long that he contracted pneumonia—an illness that was still plaguing him when they met the Princess’s father, the quick-change artist.

This meeting took place at a cattle market, when the puppets in one of the puppet theaters that had been set up started to shout after Ramses, who had just set foot in the streets for the first time in three weeks. Behind the gilded proscenium of the theater they found the old circus manager, who now spent his life behind puppets. In a voice hoarse from an entire life of bawling out insults, he congratulated Ramses on how well he looked and told them, with some feeling, how, in another part of the country, he had come across tales of his daughter, of whom it was said that she was a witch. Before setting off, on foot, with his theater folded up and strapped to his back, he gave the baby the name of Adonis. So full of authority were the furrows, thick with soot, that age had etched in his face that Ramses accepted the name, even though it reminded him of Caesar Jensen. Nevertheless, he made just one bid to persuade his father-in-law to change his mind, shouting after the departing theater, “Every policeman will remember that name!”

The impresario waved his hat and answered him, without turning around, “It’s an artist’s name. Women will never forget it!”

And thus he left Ramses and the Princess to hopes and expectations that were kept alive when Adonis proved, as he grew, to be the obedient child of whom every parent dreams. He became as stealthy as Ramses and as nimble as the Princess. With his instinct for soothing all living things, he sweet-talked the cows in the fields while Ramses milked them, and then helped his father to carry home the milk, to the extent that Ramses was able to harbor a fragile hope, which he preserved by never really putting Adonis to the test. And so his hope remained unthwarted until the night when he broke into the Teander Rabow family home—which is where we began this chapter. For when Ramses tore his eyes away from the marble busts in the Old Lady’s house in Rudkøbing in Langeland, he discovered that his sack, which lay on the floor, was now so flat that it could only be full of emptiness and nothing but emptiness. Beside it, in the moonlight, stood Adonis. It was quite clear, there was no denying, that the boy—his own son—must have broken in after his father and crept through the house even more silently than Ramses himself; in fact, with such extraordinary stealth that the boy’s presence actually muffled the house’s own natural sounds. Thus, even Katarina dozed—although her finger did not leave the trigger. Thereafter, Adonis had put back everything; thereafter, he had stolen from his own father and put the worthless fabrics and brushes and shoes back where they came from, while his old father was staring at statues as old as himself, recalling that past in which he had supported a family so large that the precise number of children escaped him—though they had all let him down by becoming important and immoderate men with strange names and extravagant dreams of changing the world, and had left him and the Princess, his heart’s darling, alone with the fragile hope that now, before God, had been most decidedly shattered, now that Adonis had abused his gifts and dealt his father this blow. Even now Ramses, who, since his youth, had never spoken during a break-in, merely inclined his head silently toward the empty sack on the dark floor, lit by a white moon. And it was Adonis who broke the silence.

“These things don’t belong to you, Father,” he said.

Ramses raised his hand as though to hit him, but was held back by the feeling that some higher form of justice does exist, a feeling he had acquired from living outside the laws of man. Instead the outrage he felt in his heart found its way to his lips. “You young whippersnapper,” he hissed, “you’d see your own parents lying in the streets with their bones picked clean before you’d spare them a crust.” The sound of his voice carried to Katarina, who woke up and fired her pistol at the door, believing that her husband or her mother-in-law, or more likely both of them, were trying to take her by surprise. Then Ramses and Adonis made a run for it. Ramses was so shaken that he crashed into tables and chairs and stools. He became separated from his son and was unable to regain his bat-like sense for finding his way in the dark. At one point a door yielded to his weight and sent him into the arms of a police chief who had spent his whole life chasing him. This police chief arrested Ramses personally, even though he was befuddled by rumors that the King wanted to pardon him, and by all the tall stories about his magnanimity.

During the two months of his imprisonment, Ramses never uttered a single word but remained as silent as in his youth. He was transferred to Copenhagen and placed in the same cell as the Princess. She had turned herself in to be close to her husband and to show her contempt for the authorities, who were now trying to make this stay in prison as pleasant as possible for these two celebrated criminals by decorating their cell like a bridal suite, fearing, as they did, the couple’s influential sponsors, who were, of course, their sons. Three times daily they were served meals from a fine restaurant, and they were visited by pastors and journalists and lawyers whom Ramses detested.

In this elegantly appointed cell, at one point, they were also visited by their children, and even Ramses could no longer fail to see how well things had gone for them. They had become mathematicians and doctors and lawyers and prophets of doom and inventors. They had tried to forget their upbringing by shoring up their wavering times with morality or with brilliant machines or with legislation that Ramses had never respected or understood. Moreover, he could never quite understand how they had managed to secure his pardon. Nor, when it came right down to it, did he show any sign of recognizing these tall, self-assured men wearing the clothes and symbols of power. He accepted that they were his sons only because the Princess said so, and all her life she had been right. One after another they approached him in the cell to receive his thanks for a favor he had never asked of them. He looked in wonder at these penguins, whose strides had grown short, stiff, and measured from their regular visits to ministries and courts of law, and at his only daughter, who, like her brothers, wanted to change the world. In her the Princess’s courage and urge to scandalize her contemporaries had developed into an urge to change the world by improving the status of women, as she explained proudly to Ramses. And while she was speaking, he was shaking his head and wondering if he was losing his mind. He refused to understand the woman who now stood before him dressed provocatively in loose-fitting clothing; who was not only an agricultural consultant but also a horse trader and member of the jockey club
and
smoked cigars, not only here in front of her parents but out in the streets, too—to shock people.

Ramses shut himself out from the world (if, indeed, one is prepared to accept the possibility of putting oneself even further out of touch than he already was). He forbade the Princess to read aloud from the newspapers delivered to their cell in the days before their pardon was granted. In these they could read their own story, illustrated with etchings that portrayed them in a transfigured, mythological light, dressed as some royal couple from a distant and legendary age
à la
Regnar Lodbrog, against a backdrop of misty mountains and dusky blue fjords. Only once did he speak to anyone in that stream of visitors—when he recognized Meldahl, the oldest of his sons, now architect to the Danish court and a Knight Commander of the Order of Dannebrog. He had also, as it happens, designed the out-of-the-way house in which Adonis was conceived, and had succeeded in creating for himself a totally watertight past, to the extent that no one now knew that he was Ramses and the Princess’s son. Ramses saw the Dannebrog Cross on the breast of his tailcoat, and in his eyes he glimpsed the reflection of all the villas and churches and lunatic asylums and prisons and palaces that he had designed, and whose building he had supervised; all the buildings in which, in granite and slate and sandstone and plaster and stucco, he had endeavored to express his desire to forget his childhood. And yet here it was, facing him, in the shape of his own father, who was imprisoned in a prison he himself had built, with a façade camouflaged to resemble a Swiss chalet. Ramses turned away from him in anger, and the architect extended his hands in a helpless gesture, unable to understand what was happening. “You have built walls,” Ramses said tonelessly. Meldahl left without saying anything, and they only ever saw him on one other occasion. That was when he returned with Adonis, who had given himself up and tried to claim responsibility for his father’s break-ins, and now the authorities were at a loss as to what to do with him.

That same night, not wanting to hear the result of the petition for mercy, Ramses and the Princess broke out of prison with that hopeless child—Adonis, that is. They did not, however, manage to slip out of town unseen. Around daybreak, a group of journalists, who had been waiting in the street for just such a turn of events, spotted them driving north. In the press the next day, their departure was presented as a triumphal procession: the grand old man and illustrious war hero making his dignified exit. The family had been captured for posterity in etchings that depicted them smiling and waving as they left the town by way of Søtorvet—a square designed by Meldahl along Parisian lines. In the background, barely discernible, were the churches and ministries and hospitals—also Meldahl’s work—frequented by the sons of Ramses and the Princess; those pillars of society who would, not long after this, be sending telegrams of homage and condolence to Rudkøbing, on the occasion of the Old Lady’s death. That event occurred just as the coachman lashed the horses with his whip and the coach trundled past the journalists’ faces. Ramses shook his fist at them until he could no longer see them.

For the first few months, Ramses and the Princess traveled southward. On their way through Europe they put one after another border behind them in an attempt to elude this modern age in which criminals were looked upon as heroes, where they ran the risk of at any moment finding their long and arduous lives screeching at them from cabarets and vaudeville shows in big cities, and where the Princess recognized her sons’ names on the works in bookshop windows—works of scientific research into the criminal physiognomy and the prison system and agriculture and the development of machines. The racket from these last, which she and Ramses abhorred, constituted one of their reasons for making a definite decision to keep to the country areas. They traveled south because they wanted to get away and because the Princess retained a vague memory, from the stories of her childhood, of shady countries like pleasant gardens. Instead, on foot and in uncomfortable stagecoaches, they passed through regions bathed in a dry and all-revealing sunlight in which garrulousness and the tendency to exaggerate, from which they had fled, seemed to flourish like a tropical flower. Here the dust still held the imprint of footsteps from the time when their sons had traveled through Europe on grand tours, paid for by the state they would later come to support or try to overthrow, but at any rate to change—by transplanting what they had seen on their travels into Danish soil. And this explains why Ramses felt as though, everywhere he looked, he saw prisons: because when he designed his prisons, Meldahl had drawn inspiration from the Italian villas and Greek temples and Turkish mosques in the towns through which his parents were now passing. And it was in such places that they met the hardy revolutionaries whose ideas had fallen upon the embers smoldering inside their son the Socialist, ideas that had transformed his nagging dissatisfaction into the gasoline blaze that would send him to prison and then exile him to America. In fact, he was on the point of departure just as Ramses and the Princess were traveling past wretchedness the likes of which they had never seen and which they still did not see because, now and for the rest of their lives, they lived in the belief that the world around them was the best of possible worlds and that everyone ought to keep to the place allotted him—everyone except themselves, since they were under the singular obligation to remain eternally on the move.

Before giving up all hope of understanding Adonis, the only child left to them, Ramses tried to teach him, in various European capitals, the art of picking people’s pockets and of appropriating brass-bound leather suitcases in intolerable railroad stations. Adonis mastered every new trick so quickly that Ramses—who was looking for anything, the slightest hint, that his son might become a criminal, like his father—told himself that the boy picked up everything as if by some sort of intellectual theft, inasmuch as he could, with one swipe, appropriate foreign vocabularies and grammar and win the confidence of foreigners with his blue eyes—which could turn almost green with goodwill. Such skills, together with his carefree nature, make him seem, to us, like another Aladdin. And that is how he would have seemed to his parents if it had not been for his honesty, which was inclined to manifest itself in baroque fashion for as long as Ramses kept on trying to overcome it and make his son understand that the world had to be met with skepticism and distrust and a permananent state of readiness. Sometimes, because Ramses insists, Adonis complies with his wishes, as when, in the square in front of St. Peter’s in Rome, he slits open the coat pocket of a passing gentleman with a razor, grabs his fat wallet as it falls out, and then laughs, proudly and happily, at his father, who is hidden in the crowd, observing his son. Naturally, Ramses is proud, but his pleasure does not last for long. When they return to their
pensione
it becomes apparent that Adonis no longer has the wallet. While still out in the vast square, with his father standing there delightedly nodding and smiling, Adonis had with his free hand slit open his victim’s other pocket, slipped the wallet back, and then sewn up both pockets—all of this while the man was walking past him, and the entire operation executed so dexterously that not even Ramses saw it. This done, Adonis walks over to Ramses, a happy man who has, in actuality, nothing to be happy about except the fact that his son has at least left no trace of himself, other than the two rows of stitches that the coat’s owner will discover and wonder at some months later. These stitches are Adonis’s attempt to repair his youth, in which he—like so many others whose stories we have told—is torn between his own nature and his father and mother’s abstemious obstinacy.