The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (27 page)

His last words were “Eat, drink, and be merry”—and they did not have to be told twice. These words did not seem to shock anyone, apart from us and one of the prostitutes who had been brought up in a religious home. But neither she nor we can help but view this remark as being yet another cool and detached touch of malice on the part of Carl Laurids, who said it knowing full well that he was quoting Christ’s parable of the rich man who decided to eat, drink, and be merry—but whom the Lord warned, tomorrow you die! eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die!

The balloon was equipped with big gas lamps designed to heat the open gondola to room temperature, enclose the guests within a pleasant bell of light, and make them feel that they were floating in a—in all senses of the word—self-sufficient bubble in space. At the last moment, however, just before Carl Laurids lit the lamps, they had a clear view of Copenhagen. Bathed in the rays of the setting sun, as the city was at that moment, it looked like a gold mine—which indeed it was and had proved to be for most of those present. And yet just then every one of them had the feeling that the city was threatening them; that it also had the look of a grave, or a whirlpool, or some huge beast lying in wait, stiff with menace. Then Carl Laurids lit the lamps and invited them to help themselves from the buffet, and they turned toward one another, in relief, feeling that there was no cause for concern when the world and, for that matter, Denmark contained men of Carl Laurids’s caliber, who could mask wild beasts in lobster sauce or cover them with whipped cream or present absolutely anything, anything at all, they thought, on a puff pastry base, even the disturbing fact—which had, until now, been in all their thoughts—that the longshoremen were on strike, despite the eight-hour day, despite the lowering of the voting age, even despite the strike’s having been declared illegal by the permanent arbitration tribunal. One of the members of this tribunal—a representative from the employers’ association—happened to be among those in the gondola; a slightly built fidget of a man who would later that evening confide to his neighbors that he saw himself as an exorcist and that this time he was going to drive out the demons of communism and syndicalism by fining the longshoremen 800,000 kroner—I repeat, eight hundred thousand—many times more than the cost of this balloon trip. But by that time no one was listening to him; up there, as they floated between heaven and earth, all their worries had been thrown overboard along with the first of the balloon’s sandbags.

At the last minute, just before the tall flight of steps leading up to the gondola was rolled away, the last guest arrives—a woman in a white dress, coming toward them across the meadow, fluttering erratically like a leaf caught by the wind. And that is just what she is. She has been caught by the wind, and as she draws nearer, the reason becomes clear: she is thin, alarmingly thin, nothing but skin and bone. And so, weighing next to nothing, she is totally at the mercy of the spring breeze that carries her along, in the direction of Carl Laurids’s searching gaze. She manages to latch on to the steps and, for a split second, hangs there. What she must have seen, at that moment, was those eyes, scrutinizing her from between a flying helmet and a white bow tie. What Carl Laurids saw was a figure reminiscent of the legend, from his childhood, of the White Lady of Mørkhøj. But both must, in addition, have seen something else, because, all at once, Carl Laurids climbs out of the gondola and down the steps, takes her in his arms, and carries her back up the steps, without her offering any resistance. Once they are inside the gondola, the steps are wheeled away and the balloon lifts off. The girl in Carl Laurids’s arms was Amalie Teander, and her search had now led her to him, to no one but him.

*   *   *

To Amalie, the journey she made as a child from Rudkøbing to Copenhagen had become a triumphal procession. It had been paid for by the Reverend Mr. Cornelius and by other members of the family and by a number of other influential townspeople. The official reason was, of course, that they wanted to redeem the family’s good name, and give Christoffer Ludwig the chance to exercise his entrepreneurial skills elsewhere, and let the children have a change of air, blah, blah, blah. But the real reason why so many dipped into their pockets—including the family’s creditors, who were so stingy that the coins stuck to the lining—was that having Christoffer on their doorstep filled them with a sneaking dread. His presence chafed away at the raw patches on their consciences, reminding them of the spate of newspapers issued after the Old Lady’s funeral. It made them distrust one another, and society, and the little hand and the big one, and their own senses. They would not feel safe until Christoffer was out of sight altogether. It was with no faith in their own schemes that they raised funds for him, found him an apartment in Copenhagen, packed up the family’s few belongings—including the printing press that Frederik Teander had won in a card game; the one that had laid the foundations for the white house and the water closets and the Old Lady’s will—and piled the lot onto the back of a truck, one of the first trucks in Denmark. And even while they were helping Christoffer aboard, and after him his three daughters, and finally Gumma and her tricycle, they kept expecting that something dreadful would happen: that their scheme would somehow go to pieces, and that Christoffer would turn out to have yet another couple of daggers up his sleeve.

Amalie could sense this dread and it made her smile. It enhanced her departure from Rudkøbing, a departure already distinguished by the large crowd it attracted, just as on the day when the Old Lady granted the townspeople a peek at her new water closet. It came at just the right time for Amalie, who now realized that these people would never understand her. What she was thinking on that chilly autumn morning, as she sat in the back of the truck, was that she had deigned to be born in their town, she had descended to mingle with them, in all modesty, and had let their mirrors and windowpanes reproduce her image—her ringlets and her doe eyes—in all modesty. But they had let their chance go by, they had been caught napping, and now it’s all over, it’s time to leave, they’ve missed the train, she has left them—together with a radiantly calm and contented Christoffer, Gumma, and her two sisters, who had, here in the triumphal coach, abandoned themselves to numb despair. The previous day, for the first time in their lives, they had had to do their own shopping. They had returned in tears to the Reverend Mr. Cornelius’s parsonage (where the family was staying while the business and their financial situation and their life in general were being straightened out) and asked Christoffer, through their sobs, “Why must we suffer so and where is Mother and where is the white house and where are all the servants?” Christoffer had spread his arms wide—his movements had grown somewhat capricious and spasmodic—and replied, “Easy come, easy go!” This remark did little to quell their tears, and I, too, find it a bit much. How can anyone who has just lost his wife—a bankrupt, who has frittered away a family business built up over two generations—say such a thing? But Amalie was delighted by it. She savored it as she warmed herself with the thought of how she and Christoffer had worked together on the last issues of the newspaper. And so, as the truck drove away from the town, and her two sisters and Gumma curled up like animals and went to sleep, it was to her father that Amalie related her dreams of the future.

Her words fell on deaf ears. When Christoffer felt his mother’s will crumbling between his fingers, while still hearing her voice continuing to make prognoses, it was the last time in his life that he ever listened properly to anything. He had witnessed the breakdown of clock time and the Old Lady’s vain attempt to determine the future, and this had filled him with a distrust of both plans and memories. And so, although he looked lovingly at his youngest daughter, he was not really paying attention to what Amalie was saying.

What she was trying to convey to Christoffer was her picture of the city. What she expected to find in Copenhagen, Amalie explained, was genuine, heroic poverty. This she pictured as consisting of lines of people slowly tramping on and on to the tune of the funeral marches she had heard played in the houses of Rudkøbing. At their head walked gaunt young men with long, flowing locks. Their eyes were fixed on the horizon, as though, out there, they spied victory over their oppressors, whom Amalie pictured as being doctors and clergymen and lawyers. They were followed by weeping mothers and starving children with smoldering eyes, and over the whole scenario hung a faint pall of smoke from the fires of revolution; a smoke screen which, for a while, hides the last group of people from view. They carry a young woman seated in a basket of linked hands; her features are veiled, but this is obviously the queen of the revolution, a Danish Joan of Arc. She draws nearer, close enough for us, and even for Christoffer, to see who she is: yes, someone known both to him and to us—guess who, well, Amalie, of course. And here she is, sitting in the back of a truck, telling her father how sure she is that some new and regal status awaits her.

Now, at this point, Christoffer could have set his daughter straight, or made some sort of protest, but he did not. Everything other than his own inner peace and warmth had lost all significance. Which is why only we are in a position to shake our heads at the absurd arrogance of this girl who, even now at the age of eleven or twelve, believes that the world, even with all its misery, exists solely for her benefit.

It had not been difficult for Amalie to nurture these clear-cut notions of being one of the elect, growing up, as she did, comfortably distanced from reality, in a hothouse environment that gave her no reason to doubt her fantasy of being an orchid in a world of frogs who never seemed to get around to turning into princes. Her grandmother had always been of the opinion that paupers had only themselves to blame, which is why Amalie had sided with the poor. Gumma had told her wildly exaggerated tales of the Paris Commune and of riots in the big cities, and her reading of French novels had gradually swelled her fantasy even further. All of this had steered her in the direction taken by so many dreams (though it is counter to my own), namely, away from reality and toward a hopeless faith in the People and poverty such as she had never witnessed at close quarters.

What she found in Copenhagen was normal, everyday life. It lay waiting for her between tall houses, in Dannebrogs Street—a narrow street, the nether regions of which lay wrapped in a perpetual chill and a twilight that knew no season. It was here, in this street, that an apartment had been found for Christoffer, and it was here that he opened a small printshop.

Amalie spent just one day searching. For twenty-four hours she roamed the streets of the city, wide-eyed, looking for the barbed wire, the guillotine, the barricades, the Commune, and the gaunt young men. Then she understood. Although “understood” is perhaps not the right word; it might be more correct to say that it dawned on Amalie Teander that Copenhagen could not meet her demands; that these people passing her on the street could not live up to her expectations: they were not dressed in rags; they wore thick gray overcoats. She could not see herself mirrored in their eyes, nor glimpse any reflection of the fires of revolution, when they all kept their eyes on the well-worn paths they followed along the sidewalks; paths that their fathers had trod, and their fathers before them. There was nothing to suggest that they would lift her up and carry her on a basket of hands when they had a hard enough job lugging around their own worries about making ends meet. Amalie had been expecting to live among factory slaves and coal trimmers and chimney sweeps’ boys and firewood gatherers and little match girls. What she found were barbers and shopkeepers and pawnbrokers and tradesmen. And all of these extinguished souls were making their way to cooperages and cigar shops and offices and shops selling caged birds, which they had taken over from their parents, who had taken them over from their parents—whose stories, like the cobblestones and the gray buildings, are lost in the mists of the previous century.

At this point Amalie is in an interesting situation. She is twelve years old, but she is faced with the same painful prospect as so many Danes, both before and after her, who have, like her, grown up in the singular belief that God knows we’re not all cut from the same cloth. Her prospect is the prospect of people other than those she had encountered as a child in the bell jar of her conviction that she had been chosen. In there, no one had ever told her that the most obvious place to look for love and recognition is here, right here, close to home—and so it never occurred to her. In her father’s printshop, which was set up in a room that lacked both windows and daylight, and on her wanderings through the streets of Copenhagen, Amalie made a choice she was to abide by for a long, long while. Or at least, that is how it seems to me, although I might be mistaken: perhaps Amalie had no choice, perhaps it is my dream, our dream, of the place of free will in history that makes us imagine that Amalie withdrew into her own contempt through choice. Faced with the painful prospect of ordinary people, this little girl actually chooses to stick to her childhood belief in being chosen, regardless of the fact that no one she meets understands her.

With a forgetfulness that was, to Amalie’s mind, animal-like, Gumma and her sisters had adapted to their new way of life. Within three days they had stopped crying, within a week their plaintive wails had abated, and a month later Amalie noticed how their evening prayers were filled with sincere contentment with their lot. It was just by chance that she happened to overhear their prayers. Even when she was very small, her inner visions had supplanted the usual picture of paradise. Besides which, she had never had much faith in her mother’s insipid accounts of heavenly bliss. Katarina Teander struggled and strove to kindle the faith in her daughters, but, for one thing, her struggles were choked off by fits of coughing, and, for another, Amalie had found that even when her mother spoke of heaven, she seemed to be staring down into her own grave. And so Amalie had decided to trust only her own visions, and had become accustomed to defying every objection and leaving the nursery when her sisters and Gumma were praying—the girls on their knees, with their elbows propped on the bed; Gumma with her hands clasped over the handlebars of her tricycle.