The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (17 page)

When Adonis was nine years old, he met his grandfather the quick-change artist. They met in Turkey, at one of the garish bazaars that were a nightmare for Ramses. They seemed to hover on a cloud of dust, and, as Adonis moved through them, his fair curls made the women cry and the stall holders presented him with cakes sweetened with blood and honey, just to see him chew, while trade came to a standstill and everyone pushed and shoved to get a look at this divine child.

That was to be the day when Adonis left his parents. Somewhere, amid the canopies and waterskins and dried cheeses, a man stepped out of the dust and the noise to alternately mock and flatter spectators in what was not quite their own language but something like it. During the clamorous applause, the man peeled off his face and Adonis realized that it was a mask, and that under that there was another mask, and then he was sure that this must be his grandfather, of whom he had heard but whom he had never met—if we disregard that time when he was very small and was given his name. To begin with, it was not his standing face-to-face with his grandfather that mattered to Adonis. The crucial factor was the effect the mask had on the audience. During the impudent performance Adonis did not look at his grandfather but at the audience, and here, for the first time, he saw the moisture in the eyes of the veiled women and the shaking hands of the men. I think I can say that it was at this moment that Adonis, who was just a little boy, saw, in a flash of understanding, that his life was bound to masks, and to the theater. I deliberately use the expression “flash of understanding” because that is what it was, and it was the only one of its kind that Adonis would ever experience in a life in which decisive moments were rare and imperceptible transitions the norm. When the old man disappeared into the crowd, followed by the applause, Adonis was right behind him. In a little red-and-white-striped tent he revealed his identity to his grandfather, who answered him in a language Adonis did not understand. Even in the cool peacefulness of the tent, the quick-change artist’s face was so distorted that Adonis wondered whether one of the masks he had been slipping on and off all through his life had finally got the better of him.

It was evening when Ramses and the Princess found Adonis. They had followed the laughter rising from around a little dais where he and his grandfather were staging a piece of improvised comedy that Ramses and the Princess did not understand. Nor would they have recognized their son if the Princess had not glimpsed his hair shining above his mask, just for an instant, when the light from the oil lamps caught it. Once Ramses had had his son pointed out to him and realized that the boy was actually standing on the stage, he suddenly remembered the moment when, as a young boy with a year in prison behind him, he had stood facing his father. Now, too, he yielded to the sense of his own impotence—and left.

That same night he and the Princess headed east. Some sort of melancholy defiance made them move in the opposite direction from the great constellations known to them from the innumerable nights when they had watched over their prodigal sons and their one impossible daughter. They traveled because they wanted never again to have to look their children or the world they left behind in the eye, and because they were driven by their wanderlust. This was something they themselves found harder and harder to understand as, gradually, they wandered farther and farther away from Europe. Their progress turned into a journey through a wilderness of snow-covered mountains and steamy rain forests, where the inhabitants were so poor that it was impossible to rob them. Instead, they showed such hospitality to Ramses and the Princess that they were forced to accept, even though it pained them that, with every free dish of unfamiliar vegetables, their status became ever more clear: namely, that of two increasingly feeble vagabonds, plagued by dysentery, malaria, parasites, and, most of all, the loneliness of these foreign lands and the dream of their homeland that blossomed slowly out of Ramses’ introspection and the Princess’s sorrow. And because of this dream they were childishly delighted when, one day beside the sea, they came upon a trading post flying the Danish flag. They were given a warm welcome by Danes who said that at least Ramses wasn’t a damn Negro or an Arab and that even the Princess looked more like a white person than the natives of this region, whose dirty fingers had cultivated the spices or felled the trees that were shipped back to Denmark via this trading post. The post belonged to the Danish East Asia Company, which most graciously deigned to provide Ramses and the Princess with passage in return for their chipping away rust and splicing ropes and tarring and scrubbing and smearing on red lead. After all, the company had no time for loafers, freeloaders, or stowaways, as Ramses and the Princess learned from the president of the company, H. N. Andersen, who was sailing home on the same ship. He amused himself with these two strange old characters—Ramses and the Princess, that is—because, since they at least spoke his mother tongue, he could explain to them that the company had become what it was only by honoring Duty and Work, the sole true gods, which were to replace the ridiculous idols of the natives in these Hottentot countries. He told Ramses and the Princess (who had until now been under the impression that the world was infinitely vast) that the company had now circumscribed the globe, making it so comprehensible that even Ramses’ limited intelligence could encompass it. At this point he tapped the old housebreaker’s sweaty, rust-covered brow, and Ramses would have wrung his neck if the Princess had not held him back. It had dawned on her, long before this, that the president was one of their own sons: one who had gone to sea many years before and who had, ever since, made such a good job of camouflaging his origins and upbringing that, as far as everyone was concerned, he was the son of a shipmaster from Nakskov. He had also partially succeeded in himself forgetting where he came from, which was one of the reasons that he at no time recognized his parents. But the Princess remembered him, and understood that his absurd dream of world supremacy was yet one more unfortunate manifestation of the family weakness. For the remainder of the voyage she kept a tight rein on Ramses whenever Andersen visited them, at their work, to tell them of his poor childhood and his parents in their thatch-roofed, cottage-garden idyll in Nakskov—this being just part of the lies about his native land that he had created in order to withstand the dreadful solitude of tropical nights when the wind whistled through the rigging of his ship and he imagined he heard the vicious snarls of the whores on the floating bordellos that he had sent up the rivers of Siam to lay the foundations of his fortune. He had spent a long time away from Europe and more especially from Denmark, which was now, in the transfiguring glow of his memories, rising out of the ocean like the sunken city of Atlantis. He urged the Princess and Ramses to continue with their work while he talked, since idleness is worse than death, worse than syphilis, worse than Negroes, as he explained to his countrymen, his father and mother; to whom he also boasted of how the company understood how best to exploit war, through the transportation of troops and weapons; and all in order to bring glory to the Old Country, as he called it. It was quite evident, from the turns of phrase that he employed, that the feet of this son, too, had long since lost touch with that earth which he maintained could be circumscribed in less, much less, than eighty days.

*   *   *

Adonis and the master of masks made their way north to Denmark, and crossed the last border as Adonis’s brother the president was telling the Princess and Ramses about the croaking frogs and calm straits of his homeland. And so, as luck would have it, during these weeks three generations of the same family are all, at one and the same time and unknowingly, converging upon one another and the Danish Summer, which H. N. Andersen pictured as a kindly, motherly woman whom he would not for one moment have connected with the creature sitting before him, chipping at rust—but who was in fact his real mother.

Adonis and the quick-change artist came home to this summer without recognizing it—just as they retained only a vague memory of the country, since both were at a forgetful age. During the suffocating heat of the summer months they tramped the length of Jutland, which the old showman found so densely populated that it left him feeling unable to breathe and which was so rife with mosquitoes that he believed he had seen nothing like it since the malaria-ridden plains of his childhood. Those he had left, once upon a time, to avoid being tormented by the very insomnia that now struck him. And in his wakeful state, the cool pricks of the mosquito stings induced a cold, sweating fever that left him tossing restlessly on his straw pallet, next to Adonis.

Adonis, on the other hand, adjusted quickly and soon reverted to his native tongue. And it was he who realized that it was necessary to shift from one sentimental dream to another: hitherto, on their way through Europe, it was as though Adonis were an apprentice of sorts to his grandfather. Their relationship had resembled our picture, and that of their day and age, of the old man helping the orphaned child—an image they exploited, wherever they appeared, to draw a crowd. This picture now needed to be replaced by another: that other image—also extremely popular—of the child leading the doddering old man. This change took place when Adonis encountered hunger for the first time in his life, and that came about because the quick-change artist, because of his great age, could no longer live up to the expectations of his audiences. In this flat country—Denmark, that is—even the smallest villages through which they passed had heard of the picture palaces. And, from magazines, everyone knew about an art form other than that of the old circus manager: one composed of wistful dramas and pictures of dreamy-eyed young ladies in tasteful states of undress, as opposed to the old showman’s baroque masks, which were not even seen in his own country now and which here, under foreign skies, took on an increasingly aggressive and wicked appearance when confronted with silent audiences who less and less often paid to see them.

For a while they survived because Adonis made up and acted out mawkish romances, or sang tearful and jolly ballads that compensated somewhat for the gestures with which the old showman tried to wring a response from his audiences, whom he had begun to fear, suspecting them, as he did, of being some sort of cold-blooded, two-legged, upstanding salamander, endowed with a power of speech they used only sparingly—just like the ones with which his grandmother had filled the nights of his childhood and which he had thought he would never run into; until now, that is, in these squares and marketplaces. More and more often he had to break off in the middle of a performance, lay his mask aside, and place a hand on one of the bystanders to reassure himself that this man with the leather waistcoat and dead eyes was not some clammy amphibian but a real person. That summer, for the first time, he saw his own age, objectively, in the eyes of these people; a sight that led him to doubt whether he had ever been young. He was seized by the uncertainty that strikes us all sooner or later, and particularly those of us involved in recounting unlikely extracts of the truth. He was no longer sure that he had once actually roamed these parts with his own circus and presented the wonders of the seven seas and wild beasts from far-flung continents and the world’s most beautiful women to these yokels whom he now endeavored to delight by imitating the roars of his long-lost lions and by telling them of his circus princesses—all dead—whose radiant beauty had once had their yokel forebears’ tongues hanging out. Now they did not so much as flicker an eyelid, believing as they did that, in newspapers and books and at the great exhibitions, they had seen all, or at least almost all, there was to see.

The old man gave his last performance in a town of red brick situated on the very same gently sloping hill on which his circus tent had been pitched the night that Ramses first saw the Princess. This was mere chance, and a coincidence that the old showman may well have noted. But he was not, as we are, surprised by it, presumably because, unlike us, he was not aware that, throughout the history of Denmark, parents often go back to the spot where their children became engaged, to die. He performed in a marketplace surrounded by so many spectators that the surrounding countryside was completely hidden from view; to an audience that swelled and swelled he acted out his bittersweet tale of a pig who wanted to go on the stage and sing arias, and the one about a writer who becomes lost in his own books, while his son looks on.

No one laughed.

When Adonis saw the old man’s tears saturating a mask that also depicted the face of an old man, he tried to catch his eye, behind the mask. But there was no eye. He sat where he was, quite still, and perceived that at this moment, in front of this crowd, his grandfather was the loneliest person in the world. And in this loneliness he presented his picture of the country’s first circus manager: himself. The members of the audience usually became involved in this show, but here, in this intolerable country, the old man found no people to participate in the grand finale of his life, only stony faces that reminded him of ancient graven images he had once seen, at the beginning of the previous century, half-buried in the sand, when his parents had taken him to the seaside. Adonis watched his grandfather circulate among the impassive farmers, stepping out jerkily like a timid bird; hidden behind a Harlequin mask and tentatively peddling a show that had been performed when parents of this audience were small. Then he took off his hat and held it out. When, out of pity, one of the farmers tossed a coin into the hat, the old man lifted it out. On finding that he did not recognize it—remembering now only the coins with which he had been paid when he was young—he pulled off his mask. Under it was the pig mask, and under that the mask of an old man, and under that an obscene red monkey, and under that the smooth, expressionless features of a young boy. And with that Adonis’s grandfather disappeared. For beneath this last mask there was nothing but thin air, and this—together with a little heap of dark cloth—was all that was left of the quick-change artist.