The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (2 page)

Having realized that he had pressing business in his laboratory, the Count then entrusted the management of that time which he had had suspended to his two immediate subordinates. One of these was his secretary, Jacoby, whom the Count had sent for from England because he wrote such a marvelous form of cancellaresca script and because, after two or three or four bottles of wine, he could reel off Latin and Greek toasts and paeans and epitaphs and impromptus, and because he was a walking encyclopedia of the genealogy of the European aristocracy and was possessed of a profound insight into military history and Venetian double-entry bookkeeping. When the Count lost interest in everyday matters, Jacoby took on the keeping of the manor accounts—in which everything, absolutely everything, to do with the self-sufficient running of the estate was converted into Dutch gold ducats (in the Count’s opinion, the only currency worth its salt)—and, most important of all, carried on recording the history and chronicle of events at Mørkhøj. This record was one of the Count’s most vital sources. It confirmed that time had been frozen, was at a standstill, because look, said the Count, this is still, and always will be, year one, and if anyone has any other ideas we’ll have him beheaded.

The other person who enjoyed the Count’s confidence was Carl Laurids’s foster father, the Mørkhøj steward, into whose hands the Count had entrusted the supervision of the medieval agricultural techniques, the stables, the storehouses, the tile works, the farm laborers’ cottages, the manor chapel, the workshops, the grain mill—which was hand-operated because all of the water on Mørkhøj lands was stagnant—and the dairy where, in age-blackened churns, the ever-diminishing milk yield was turned into the estate’s own small, tart cheeses. Then, too, he was the one man who could tell the Mørkhøj employees apart; who kept count of the stableboys and grooms and muckers-out and woodcutters and smallholders and gamekeepers and dairymaids and tradesmen and the pastor and the parish clerk and the eighty-two Polish girls and their
Aufseher
who had wandered onto the estate one day by mistake, while looking for work. They entered at a spot where the wall had collapsed, and once the estate closed around them, they continued to work, eat, sleep, give birth and die and drop to their knees at Mørkhøj, without ever remembering anything at all about the world they had left behind. This says something about how efficiently the Count had succeeded in realizing the dream of the Danish aristocracy and landed gentry, of time standing still with the hand pointing to feudalism and the rights of the few over the many.

At the manor house itself the steward kept an eye—once blue, but now gray with experience and the burden of responsibility—on the housekeepers, on the tally of Mørkhøj linen and lawn, on the kitchen maids and a cuisine that observed the conventions of the seventeenth-century French court. Hence, at evening meals—which the Count partook of aloofly and joylessly—marzipan was served before the roast, which was followed by a fish terrine (made, since nothing else was available, from the muddy flesh of the moat catfish) and candied fruit and smoked meat. The steward also saw to it that two men were constantly assigned to polishing the silver, which, despite the suspension of time, grew tarnished in the drawers and chests, and that butlers and servants and tapsters were chosen from among those of the estate tenants who could still walk upright with ease and who could be trained to balance the gold service, the colored wineglasses, and the dusty, monogrammed jars and bottles from the endless cellars of the manor house.

In addition to this, Carl Laurids’s father was the only person at Mørkhøj who kept in touch with the outside world. It was he who collected letters sent to Mørkhøj from the gate, and brought them to Jacoby, who gave them to the Count—who always considered them so anachronistic. They concerned taxation, and compulsory schooling for the children of the estate tenants, and censuses and parish registers and the necessity of supplying soldiers. All of them concerned the things that Mørkhøj ought to be contributing to society, although the Count knew it was the outside world that ought to be eternally grateful to him. Even so, they made his blood boil. Fired by his indignation, he would dictate replies—in Latin and filled with elegantly turned insults—to Jacoby, in which he pointed out that his people were doing just fine in the black depths of their ignorance and that it was a ridiculous idea to count them because they could no longer be told apart and that he would never dream of supplying soldiers because he had need of every man for the defense of Mørkhøj and who did they think they were, demanding this, that, and the other of him, a man who lived at the center of the world? Jacoby made fair copies of these letters in splendidly convoluted capitals and in as many as fourteen drafts before the Count approved them and signed them and sealed them himself and finally, on the large, deckle-edged envelope, in his own hand, added the words “Virtue above All,” believing thus to have plugged, in fine fashion, the little chinks in his dream, a dream with which we, too, are familiar: the dream of being able to shut oneself off from the state and the world and one’s own time.

The letters were handed over to the steward, but Carl Laurids’s father never sent them. Naturally he never sent them. He unsealed them and rewrote them. Carl Laurids’s earliest memories were of his father hunched over the black script on the finely contoured paper, painstakingly writing, his pale face drawn and lined by the weariness of two hundred years and his sight partially ruined by his constantly having to keep an eye on everything and peer through the darkness of the estate, illumined as it was by nothing other than tallow dips and wax tapers. The steward knew there would be no point in mentioning the new moderator lamps and oil lamps to the Count.

I am sure that later, much later, Carl Laurids must have wondered what his father was doing on these nights with his superior’s correspondence, but in those days he looked upon it merely as a natural expression of his father’s omnipotent superintendence of life and death at Mørkhøj. So, at this early stage and with the benefit of hindsight, only you and I realize that the steward wrote to prevent the Mørkhøj house of cards from coming tumbling down.

*   *   *

Before the steward and his wife adopted Carl Laurids, their lives were totally bound up with Mørkhøj. Before that time they could not be said to have done anything other than fulfill their function in the service of the Count, apart, that is, from the small but essential detail of the rewritten letters, and even that constituted an act of obedience. But now here they were, adopting Carl Laurids, who may have been one of the smallholders’ children. That in itself is odd—that a steward should adopt a smallholder’s child—although it can perhaps be explained by the fact that it is hard to tell by looking at a baby how it is going to turn out. But that they did not, subsequently, stop Carl Laurids is something for which I have been unable to come up with any decent explanation.

It turns out that when he adopted Carl Laurids, the steward committed a crime, in that he persuaded Jacoby to record the child’s name in the manor chronicle and keep an account of its age, which was an unheard-of and dangerous breach of the estate’s one-year chronology. This breach made it possible, later on, to determine that Carl Laurids is seven years old when the steward draws up in the manor house yard one morning on a horse now so low-slung that his legs drag along the ground. And there he stays, stock-still, as the day wears on and the horse droops in the midday sun that rises clear of the wall, just for a little while, to cast the fuzzy shadows of the rusty iron spikes across the solitary rider in the tricorn hat and the gauntlets. When he is still there, rooted to that selfsame spot, the next morning, Jacoby makes his way over to him, to discover that he is as dead as a doornail and that rigor mortis is all that keeps him and his horse—which is wedged between his legs—upright.

On the day prior to his death the steward had taken his foster son—Carl Laurids, that is—out of Mørkhøj for the first time. They had driven in a little open carriage to the railroad station in the nearest town, which was Rudkøbing (although I would not have thought it had a railroad station). While Carl Laurids drank in his surroundings with eyes like saucers, the steward stared straight ahead, rigid and impervious to the shouts of the boys who ran along the road behind the carriage, and to the crowd that gathered around them while they waited at the railroad station, and to the town that struck him as being some demented magnification of the handful of low-roofed houses he remembered from his youth, 170 years before.

So there they stand, man and boy, with the little horses—dressed in the clothes of the previous century and utterly alone. And yet only the steward’s hands are shaking; Carl Laurids is quite cool. Then the train pulls in and the horses nearly go berserk. Miss Clarizza has subsequently described how—just as she stepped down onto the platform with her hatboxes and suitcases and trunks and looked, aghast, at the steward in his wig and high-heeled buckled shoes struggling to force the muzzles of the little horses groundward—her eyes met those of Carl Laurids, which were fearless and brimming with a curiosity that knew no bounds.

From the train, besides Miss Clarizza, they collected a grand piano and a royal court photographer complete with his long-legged black instrument. It was Carl Laurids’s foster father who had talked the Count into these acquisitions, by dint of which he believed they could more easily turn their backs on the outside world. By introducing photography to Mørkhøj he believed that it would be easier to prove that time stood still, because now, he said, even though the manor’s resident painter is dead, we can produce a family portrait that can be placed alongside the paintings lining the stairway up to the banqueting hall, since pictures demonstrate, better than anything else, how everything is as it has always been. With the grand piano, which had been ordered from Switzerland, it would finally be possible to drown out the sound of the mechanical mowers and manure spreaders, which filtered across the wall ever more frequently and had been disturbing the Count’s research work ever since the last of the palace musicians, whose playing had always accompanied his work, had collapsed over his instrument. Nevertheless, talking the Count into the photographer and the piano had taken some doing, and both concessions had weighed heavily upon him. And the only reason that he also permitted his steward to advertise for a governess—in newspapers he had heard of but never read—was that, one day, an airplane landed in the grounds of Mørkhøj.

The Count looked at this frail and rickety contraption and recalled, from his youth at the court of Versailles, a similar ungodly experiment involving a large bell filled with hot air. “I remember,” he said out of nowhere, to the person standing next to him—who just happened to be Carl Laurids—“how the sinner was smashed to death on the cobblestones of Paris before he could get close enough to the sun for his craft to burst into flames.” Carl Laurids made no reply. He just kept his eyes on the supernatural insect that had come over Mørkhøj’s wall in a fog of noise, trembled like a bird with a broken wing, given a little dip, and then plummeted earthward like a stone. The pilot survived because the machine fell into the murky lake in the grounds. Under other circumstances he would have been beheaded on the spot, especially after the discovery, the following day, of several catfish floating belly up in the moat—these proud fish having been done to death by the shock wave from the crash. Now, however, the Count looked upon the airplane crash as a natural consequence of all the forces emanating from the Philosopher’s Stone and the center of the world, and thus a divine pat on the back for him and his quest. So he had quarters organized for the pilot and had his leg fractures and internal injuries treated with leeches and by bloodletting and various diuretic agents while he attempted to question him, wanting to find out exactly what his position was when he was pulled downward. He was not able to discover anything, however, since the pilot turned out to be English. The Count himself spoke no English, and Jacoby had forgotten his native tongue two hundred years earlier. After a series of powerful purgatives the pilot’s soul took off and flew back to where it had come from without him and his host, the Count, ever managing to understand each other.

After this episode, the Count gave permission to advertise for a governess who could teach his children modern languages.

On the day of Miss Clarizza’s arrival, the first photograph ever was taken at Mørkhøj. In this picture, which is still in existence, the Count, the Countess, and their three children can be seen standing at the top of the Mørkhøj steps. There is no one on the next step, no one on the one below that, but on the next again stand Jacoby and the steward and his family. Where all the other faces have grown stiff in the knowledge that they are now being captured for eternity, there stands the boy Carl Laurids staring impassively straight into the lens.

The steward died the next day.

*   *   *

The Mørkhøj tenants had always buried their own dead. So, since the Count was busy calculating and Jacoby had long since lost the knack for anything of a practical nature, there was no one to do the needful for the steward’s body. In his initial panic, Jacoby had the rigid rider pulled into the shadows, then tried to enter the death in the manor history. This, however, he had to abandon. The chronology would not allow it, it looked all wrong—the steward standing there in the full flower of his manhood, and then dying the same year. So Jacoby deferred this dilemma. As time went on, the air and the sparse light dried out the steward and his horse and the skin stretched over their skulls, making the animal look ever more intelligent and endowing the steward with an increasingly youthful and alert appearance. Both Jacoby and the Count stuck to their old habit of coming out onto the manor house steps at some point in the course of each day to address a couple of remarks to the steward. This was just as it should be, and that he remained silent was of no matter. They had both long since lost any interest in answers: the Count because, on that day two hundred years ago when his guests left him in front of the gilded railings, he had realized that he had all the answers; Jacoby because writing history had shown him that the truth always takes the form of a question. Besides, the steward had always been a man of few words, and even now, when the only sound he uttered came from the faint whistling of the wind in the shafts of bone sticking out, here and there, through the skin, the common folk still bowed respectfully to the motionless figure in the shadow of the main building every morning on their way to work. And they went on with their work knowing that those sandy-gray eyes were upon them.