The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (26 page)

There turned out to be many who remembered the old people. The memory of them had passed through the shredder and converter of the new century, the new press, the new memory bank, which transforms and blanches all facts before inflating them with noble gases. Thus the rumors of Ramses and the Princess’s incredible, grasping crimes hung above the marketplaces like swelling hydrogen balloons which could be seen a long way off and which drew the crowds, particularly in the provinces. It was never a thriving business, because Adonis never learned how to make money, not even in a small way. But it aroused interest, interest and a curiosity tinged with fear.

Only we now, so many years later, can detect the pattern guiding this family’s steps in one direction: the footlights. It is as though they must get up there, whether they want to or not. They all end up as performers, even Ramses, who finds himself selling tickets next to the stage, which is itself like art, a pedestal and a platform for the displaying of dreams. And thus, for the first time in his life, Ramses, too, comes in from the cold and joins society. But at the same time the Jensen family’s fate demonstrates that the footlights coincide with the edge of the precipice, just at the point where it is hard to see where solid ground ends and the void begins. To think that Ramses and the Princess’s life—which had been one long series of criminal offenses and one great yearning after darkness—should, still and all, have wound up bringing them into the light. Just imagine!

One evening, Maria was standing in front of the platform, listening to her father sing. When Adonis’s eye fell on her he inserted birdsongs and other little references to the past into his songs. Maria watched him impassively, and afterward, too, when Adonis took her to speak to her grandparents, she seemed entrenched within herself. That same night, Adonis packed up his stage and bundled it and his parents onto a truck, in which he drove himself and his props and Maria and the two old people over to Christianshavn.

That night, while Adonis was singing to Maria, and then packing up; that night, the last residents left the property in Christianshavn. Last to leave were the chickens and the squatters and the sick and the whores and Andreasen the trucker and those children who, like 5,424 others in the country in that year, had been sentenced to compulsory removal from their parents’ custody. They had hidden in the building and stayed there until the last minute, in an attempt to evade the child welfare committee and the official guardians and foster families, but now they were being forced out anyway, because anything is better than death, even in Christianshavn.

It was a clear, moonlit night and Anna was the only one left in the empty building. Naturally, she was working; by the moonlight alone she was running a dustcloth over the wall paneling. She had been working for a long while—I do not know how long, but a very long while—and she kept at it, unflagging. On this night her loneliness was transformed into energy and a sense of how everything is connected. She finished shortly after midnight, by which time the last sounds from outside had faded away and the last irregularity fled the apartment, and Anna was surrounded by the totally clean, microbe-free, and harmonious space for which she had been longing. Stiffly, cautiously, she straightened up and put down the dustcloth. Everything had been accomplished, and all of us who believe that one can never get to the bottom of things have been mistaken and must bow our heads. At that instant, Anna’s spirit condensed and all the voices that had been calling to her from all sides throughout her life fell silent. Gingerly she walked around the rooms, filled with the sense that life was not a battle against impurities but a delicate balancing act in empty space. She had now gained her balance, and while she was balancing, she had the impression that the apartment bore some vague resemblance to the silver-plated cage of her childhood. At that moment the last of the building went under, and the canal flowed past outside Anna’s window. Then she stepped out, through the bars, and set off across the water, along the path of molten silver formed by the moonlight. Past the sleeping boats she went, out toward the sea, feeling nothing but curiosity and sadness. It was not death that Anna wandered into, there is no need to be sad, there was no talk of suicide, no talk of anything other than that Anna wandered off to look for the youth she had never known.

By the time Maria and Adonis got there, the building had completely disappeared. It was totally and utterly gone, with not even a chimney sticking up. The moon had set, but in the feeble dawn light the mud shone grayly. The lot was deserted, empty, and incalculably large, and in the empty space above it there still hung a weightless memory of the lost tenement. It was as though it went on living, somewhere else; as though, during the night, some giant had picked it up and hurled it into another dimension—one that occupied the same spot, though on a different plane, as the one where Maria and Adonis stood gazing at the cold gray light of morning; a winter morning in Copenhagen, and the sort of light that is no longer seen but that is the most appropriate for what happens next. Which is, that Adonis looks at Maria. There is no doubt that he wanted her to come with him. After all, he was her father. She could sit in the back of the truck next to her grandparents and the collapsible platform; maybe he could devise a number for her; they could perform together, she and Adonis—wouldn’t that have been beautiful, the dream of father and daughter and grandparents huddling together in the face of 1930s Denmark, after the mother had disappeared, at that. Wouldn’t that have been beautiful. It is how I would like to see things turn out, but it would not have been the truth, and here truth takes precedence over everything, even beauty. What does in fact happen is that Maria turns away. She takes off her police helmet and wipes a brow dampened by the moisture in the air; then she turns away, as though there were no more to this story. But of course there is, there is always a sequel, and most decidedly a sequel to this moment. I am familiar with some of this sequel—the part that follows the progress of Maria’s life—but I know nothing about the immediate aftermath. Whatever happened during that dawn has been forgotten. Maybe they ran, Adonis and Maria; maybe they raced through the narrow, sleeping streets searching for someone—Anna, mother and wife—whom, one assumes, they knew to have vanished, finally and irrevocably. Maybe they even went to the police. It is not unthinkable that Adonis, at any rate, might have done so. Whatever they did, they did not remember it. In their memories, that morning would consist of nothing but the cold and the gray light and the simple fact that Anna had gone, and that gesture of Maria’s. Maria—wiping her brow as she turned away from Adonis Jensen and the silent figures in the truck and made off, through the gradually swelling crowd of sightseers and unemployed workers and message boys and representatives from the child welfare committee and official guardians and newspaper reporters—although these last deemed this event, the sinking of this property, worthy of only the very briefest of mentions.

CARL LAURIDS AND AMALIE

The villa on Strand Drive
Prosperity
1919–1939

CARL LAURIDS AND AMALIE
met one warm day in May 1919 on a meadow next to a racecourse outside Copenhagen, from which Carl Laurids had organized a balloon ascent. Well, naturally, a balloon ascent—nothing less would do. The balloon had been constructed at von Zeppelin’s workshops in Friedrichshafen on the shores of Lake Constance and bore a plaque with the inscription “From one sportsman to another,” signed “Ferdinand”—a detail undoubtedly designed to create the impression that what we are dealing with here is quality goods; a product, what is more, of our mighty neighbor Germany, with whom, now that the war is over, we may share everything, even such new, technical advances as this balloon. Even so, there were several guests who, like me, had their doubts as to whether this flamboyant craft really had been a gift from Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin to Carl Laurids. This was the first they had heard of the latter; they knew even less about him than we do. But there he was, in their midst, wearing white tails and a flying helmet, willingly answering any and all questions, except the key question: Where did he come from and where did he get the money to stage such an extravagant event.

Later on, standing on a improvised podium of champagne cases, Carl Laurids gives a speech that has been preserved in the newspaper reports. It was a speech none of those who heard it would ever forget: elegant, incisive, and yet imbued with that remarkable air of composure so characteristic of everything to which Carl Laurids turns his hand—a quality made that much more difficult to understand by the fact that here, on the grass outside the racecourse, he is but nineteen years of age. He closed his speech by saying that this balloon was a symbol of the new century’s acknowledgment that the lighter a thing is, the faster it will rise into the air. After which he was roundly applauded, his words having touched the hearts of his guests—this collection of speculative businessmen and blushing maidens, all of whom had, during the Great War, amassed fortunes from various forms of tin cans; these writers and politicians and actors who, each in his own fashion, earned their livings from singing the praises of progress and modern technology and who were now watching, enraptured, as the balloon was filled with hydrogen, thereby revealing itself to be, not round, but cigar-shaped and topped by a silver-plated cupola. Seeing the glittering reflection of the afternoon sun on this cupola, one young actress was moved to turn to her neighbor—that great author and subsequent Nobel Prize winner Johannes V. Jensen—point at the huge silken structure rising hesitantly off the ground, and say with a giggle, “It looks like that thing men have between their legs.”

Along the side of the balloon, in large letters, ran the legend “Carl Laurids Mahogany. Import—Export.” This event must have represented a major investment, and no small risk, on Carl Laurids’s part. He may indeed have staked his all on this balloon ascent, which was supposed to secure him goodwill, contacts, and a place in the sun. And hence there is something rather sinister about him on this afternoon. Before, during, and after his speech; during all the backslapping and arm-waving; among all these influential men and lighthearted women—on whom, he must have known, his future depended—his smile and the cordial greetings he dispensed to all and sundry seemed touched by the icy indifference of a man who, even amid such an admiring throng, right in the middle of the most decisive moment of his life, is totally alone.

Right from the start, Carl Laurids had had the confidence of his guests. He may even have gained it in the days before he met them for the first time. There is reason for believing that he had already won them over with the invitations he sent out. At first these had elicited chilly smiles: who was this stranger by the name of Mahogany who had the temerity to send invitations to them? Nevertheless, they eventually accepted, thanks to the handwritten invitations, and that surname, Mahogany (recently assumed by Carl Laurids), and to the words “Import—Export”; none of which betokened anything other than precisely that self-assured ruthlessness for which they were all searching and which they had now found in this boy in his white tie and tails, and his flying helmet.

None of those who were present that afternoon had believed in Carl Laurids. They were not really interested in knowing whether the balloon truly was a gift from von Zeppelin, or what Carl Laurids’s airy fortune derived from, or who his family really were. They were interested in something quite different, namely, that very ruthlessness, that overweening belief in oneself, and, perhaps above all else, that coldness about Carl Laurids which every one of them could sense and which filled them with the hope that here, on the champagne cases, was a man who could protect them against the fear which is part of the history of that spring day. Nor were they disappointed, because, from his podium, Carl Laurids let his composure fall upon them like a gentle shower of rain and it was obvious that he understood them; he knew whom he had invited and who had turned up: everyone in Copenhagen and its suburbs who was not afraid to run a risk and whose wealth, like Carl Laurids’s—if it did, in fact, exist—was founded on luck and love, or on property speculation; on absolutely anything other than strong family connections or a sound business or a good education. And even those in the crowd who might possibly have had one of these advantages were, notwithstanding, afraid.

It is not easy for me to describe the fear lurking inside these people. It has no definite form—in the way that, for instance, Carl Laurids’s balloon has; it is diffuse yet complex; besides which, it lay camouflaged beneath liberally rouged feminine cheeks and tall black moleskin hats and beneath Johannes V. Jensen’s view of history, which he is in the act of enlarging upon to the young actress; the gist of his theory being that when the last Ice Age swept down across Scandinavia, all those people who were small and dark traveled south and became Negroes—not to put too fine a point on it,
Negroes
—and those who were tall and broad-shouldered and blue-eyed and had hair on their chest headed north to become forefathers to us, who can, without exaggeration, be called the master race and who dare to take risks.

The disquiet that afternoon was caused, among other things, by things outside Denmark going from bad to worse—particularly in Russia—and Germany’s not having as yet signed the peace treaty that would safeguard Danish exports and provide all the Danes with just a smidgen of security; give them a breathing space—right here—after having made their fortunes to the distant musical accompaniment of the shellfire, with the stench of the blood from the trenches in their nostrils. All of that they wanted merely to forget, along with their impoverished beginnings. And it was this forgetfulness which Carl Laurids dispensed to them that day. In the double-testicle-shaped gondola suspended beneath the balloon he had arranged for the serving of a lavish repast, concocted by two French chefs—two international celebrities at whom he fired instructions in authoritative French. The menu consisted of exotic dishes from the remotest colonies, from the very places where wars raged and revolts were staged; from the flashpoints, the sources of all the threats. These dishes were devised and derived from large, dangerous animals, as a way of showing everyone that they could relax; and that is exactly what Carl Laurids said as the last moorings were cast off. He invited them to relax and enjoy this meal;
enjoyment
is the name of the game on this balloon trip. Now, things might be looking pretty ominous on the international front—that he would be the first to admit—but we have plenty of reason to feel well pleased, he said, and to let our hair down, because we have tamed technology, tamed the forces of nature. With the result that I am able to serve giant crabs from Madagascar and elephant consommé and fillets of bear masked with lobster sauce, and an entire stuffed boa constrictor served in its own skin with a Negro warrior in its mouth, a Negro warrior whom it was in the very act of swallowing at the moment of its death, at the second it succumbed to a rifle bullet—a well-aimed shot that also killed the Negro, the kind of shot that will always occur and redeem the situation, said Carl Laurids. And as for the wine, ladies and gentlemen, it’s champagne, champagne all the way.