The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (3 page)

On the day that the steward was moved into the shadows, Miss Clarizza saw Carl Laurids walk up to his father and take a long, hard look at him. After that, she did not see the boy again until, one morning, there he was, sitting at the back of the schoolroom.

I have been unable to discover how and when Carl Laurids caught the Count’s eye or why the latter gave orders for him to take lessons in music and foreign languages from Miss Clarizza, along with his own children. Nevertheless, one day he was there, sitting at the back of the music room, which also did service as a schoolroom and was furnished with little desks fitted with sunken inkwells. Where Miss Clarizza and the three highborn children wore buckled shoes or button boots and frilled shirtfronts or cravats, Carl Laurids was attired in long oiled-leather boots and a shirtfront with a white collar—apparel never previously seen at Mørkhøj. He had walked across the cobbles of the manor house yard from the steward’s quarters in this outfit, and the eyes of the workers had followed him all the way. When he disappeared up the steps of the main building, one of the footmen who still had the power of speech spat on the floor. “Ass-licking little Count!” he said.

But no one ever mentioned the boy’s clothes to his face. To begin with, everyone expected the steward to bend down from his horse and punish the offending party with his riding crop. Later on, however, they stopped being surprised and only Miss Clarizza never forgot the boy’s behavior. It had dawned on her that, in order to come by these clothes, Carl Laurids must have left Mørkhøj—which had always been strictly forbidden to everyone except the steward. That he had done so seemed a sure sign of a peculiarly blind faith in his own worth.

Carl Laurids could now observe these highborn children—who had, until then, shone for him in the glow of untouchable aloofness—at close quarters. From his seat at the back of the schoolroom he discovered that the two countesses, despite several lifetimes of teaching, still could not speak properly, and that the young count, a boy of his own age, guided his slate pencil with both hands. It was then that Carl Laurids perceived his own worth in the light of the obscurantism of these aristocratic offspring. Miss Clarizza would later maintain that it must have been in the music room, during her classes, that Carl Laurids made the observation which was to determine the course of his life: that life was not arranged like the Mørkhøj steps, with set levels; that it ought instead to be regarded more as a slippery social slope; that an unfortunate combination of coincidences had conspired to set him at its midpoint, and that it was, in fact, possible to hang on and climb upward.

It was Carl Laurids’s job, during classes—which were held in the mornings—to close and open the windows and keep the fire going in the big, open grate. For three years he carried out these duties, and in three years he learned, without any effort, to read and write in English, German, and French and to play the piano. He was the most linguistically gifted child Miss Clarizza had ever taught. Initially, she treated him with firmness and condescension, but she soon had to capitulate. In the course of those three years he became the one person at Mørkhøj around whom all her thoughts and hopes revolved, and behind the authoritative mien her face would glow with a quiet joy when she looked across the vacant faces of the Count’s children and into Carl Laurids’s knowing brown eyes and said, “Shut the window, Charlie!”

One day Carl Laurids stayed behind after class to tell her, calmly and politely, that he would no longer be attending to the fire or the ventilation and that in the future, therefore, she was not to mention either the weather or the room temperature when he was present in the class. This was an outrageous request. Had the Count got to hear of it, Carl Laurids’s head would, in all probability, have been forfeit, and Miss Clarizza did indeed stare at him, stunned. Her mouth opened and closed in an attempt to come up with a sufficiently scathing rebuff. Just then Carl Laurids’s hands shot up and carefully adjusted the black velvet ribbon she wore around her neck. At this touch she was overwhelmed by the loneliness of her life at Mørkhøj and by a previously unacknowledged tenderness and by the air of resolve about Carl Laurids, and she threw her arms around him. The schoolroom contained no furniture other than the desks and, not wanting to dirty his trouser knees, Carl Laurids lifted his governess up onto the white grand piano, swept off the open music books in a single gesture, and raised his pitch to hers.

From then on, Miss Clarizza never mentioned the windows or the fire; Carl Laurids considered himself released from his duties. And from then on, the classes were held, according to the seasons, in baking heat or freezing cold.

Carl Laurids’s feelings for Miss Clarizza are not known, but there is no doubt that no record of their romance survived. Whenever he left her he forgot all about her, and whenever, urgent with lust, he caught sight of her he was seeing her for the first time. With the result that his advances to her, in the years when he was her lover, retained the furtive, brutal nature of that first time. Miss Clarizza never understood him. It was as though, every time he reached out for her, he posed her the same insoluble riddle and this, together with her loneliness, was what bound her to him. Later, when Carl Laurids had been made the Count’s secretary, he and the governess often met at the noble family’s dinner table, and, more often than not, she was so terrified of his courteous indifference that she could not eat a bite. By this time she had given up making any demands on him, as she had done in the beginning. Then her tearful reproaches had induced a slight puckering around Carl Laurids’s mouth. This had, over the years, hardened into a tiny, permanent line in one corner of his mouth; a little facial tic that he was later to conceal with the waxed mustache he was sporting by the time the world made his acquaintance. From that time onward, Miss Clarizza had grown so afraid of his calmness that she put up, unprotestingly, with his unpredictability.

One day Jacoby disappeared, and when the moat was dragged they found his bones, picked white and clean by the catfish. Nevertheless it was possible to identify them as being his with some degree of certainty, because of the extraordinary joints that had enabled him to produce such incredible flourishes in his handwriting and caused three cardinals, who had been personally acquainted with Ludovici Vicentino, to swear on the Bible that even the master’s script had not been more beautiful. The skeleton’s skull had been crushed, and it was deduced that Jacoby had been murdered.

Not long after this, the Count appointed Carl Laurids as his personal secretary in Jacoby’s place. This appointment seemed only natural and reasonable, since by that time Miss Clarizza had given up trying to teach Carl Laurids anything. He had taught himself Italian and Spanish, and for the past six months Jacoby had been teaching him Latin and calligraphy. And yet there was something not quite right about this appointment. Even in the fossilized numbskulls of Mørkhøj, suspicion of Carl Laurids smoldered. From then on, Miss Clarizza and the noble family and Carl Laurids’s mother were the only ones who did not turn their backs when they saw him. Everyone else sneaked off as he approached, even the red cows with their udders dragging along the ground, and the decrepit horses, and the bald chickens that laid black, inedible eggs; and even the catfish, normally so motionless, slipped down into the mud when he walked across the drawbridge.

Carl Laurids sent Jacoby’s bones to England because the Count had the idea that the English court would raise a monument over the great penman’s earthly remains. But in the winter following the summer of Carl Laurids’s appointment, Jacoby returned to Mørkhøj. Miss Clarizza saw him arrive. He left no tracks in the snow of the driveway and stepped straight through the locked main door. That same evening she saw him sitting opposite Carl Laurids in the office that had once been his own, and after that she often saw them together, although she was never able to ascertain whether Carl Laurids was aware of the phantom’s presence.

It was at this time that Carl Laurids learned about the course of history. Until then, time had meant nothing at Mørkhøj, or to Carl Laurids. All that the watchmen’s song had conveyed was the rhythm of days and nights, which were sort of inside one another, if you see what I mean: before Carl Laurids was made secretary the days at Mørkhøj were not piled on top of one another. It was as though it were, in fact, the same day, or at any rate the same year, that kept coming around again, and so time led nowhere. But now Carl Laurids gained access to the one hundred folios containing the history of Mørkhøj, and there he unearthed the first clues to something that sent him delving into these books with their interminable record of recurrence. That something was transience. He discovered that in the midst of all this apparent regularity there were little things that sank and disappeared, never to return. There is no way of telling what first aroused his suspicions, but when it happened he had some kind of attack of total concentration. Night and day he sat reading in his office, and since, just at this moment, the Count himself was thinking that he was about to hit the bull’s-eye, that he was now standing before the gates of truth, and was therefore seized by a rapturous, unrelenting lust for work, there was no one to disturb Carl Laurids, except for Miss Clarizza. Now and then she tiptoed into his office—although he may not even have noticed—to put fresh candles in the candlesticks and stand for a moment watching him. Now and again, when driven out of their chairs by their zeal, the Count and Carl Laurids would meet on the stairways and in the corridors of the manor amid the suits of armor and faded tapestries, and Miss Clarizza would see them pass each other without lifting their heads—the Count in a black robe and garters with rosettes, Carl Laurids in shirtsleeves and oiled-leather boots. On these occasions Jacoby was usually walking behind Carl Laurids with a somewhat mournful expression on his face and his elegant hands clasped behind his back. As they walked there, it was hard to tell whether they were alive or dead, and hence they resembled our own impression—and that of their contemporaries—that even then, at the beginning of this century, there was a ghostly air about the Danish aristocracy.

Carl Laurids began by reading backwards through the history of Mørkhøj, back to the erection of the wall and beyond, further back than anyone had ever read before, back to the great Paracelsus’ visit, and to the founding of the estate, to that year when one of the Count’s distant forefathers had kicked a rock out of the wall in the prison in which he had been incarcerated for lese majesty and had then fulfilled the sacred oath he had taken by walking in the direction of Rome for three days with the rock under his arm and, on the spot where he halted, laying the foundations for the church around which his new manor would be built. During his reading, Carl Laurids had registered so many changes, so many events that had taken place and were now, irrevocably, past, that he felt confident that time was a fact. It was from this point that he began his reconstruction of Mørkhøj’s history. In dazzling flashes of clarity he understood what was hidden behind all those inky deletions with which Jacoby had masked Mørkhøj’s original chronology. He re-created those moments at which the Count had resigned from all official posts and honorary political duties in order to devote himself wholeheartedly to proving that Mørkhøj stood at the center of a timeless world. He calculated his way to the date of the party at which the Count had presented his discovery to the world and had been let down. And after months of hollow-cheeked industry he drew up the chronology of Mørkhøj since the day the clocks were stopped. With this accomplished, Carl Laurids felt that the future had planted, on his forehead, the kiss that would awaken him fully from Mørkhøj’s sleep of yesteryear, which he now knew to have lasted for exactly two hundred years. He was, at this time, eighteen years old and had been the Count’s secretary for three years. He also knew that for the rest of the world the year was 1918.

It was at this point that the Count summoned Carl Laurids. The old man had been weakened by his work and thwarted expectations. In order to restore his vigor he had had himself bled six times in quick succession. Initially, these tapping operations had no effect, but shortly thereafter he was struck by a serious case of blood poisoning and septic fever, which led to a paralysis that spread upward from his abdomen. This is the usual direction taken by such things in Denmark—always upward from the abdomen, especially with elderly men suffering face-to-face with young men like Carl Laurids. Granted, he is not the Count’s son, but still the situation strikes me as symbolic: the Count lying on his sickbed paralyzed below the waist, and Carl Laurids sitting on the edge of his bed—man of the new era. And what is he doing? He is reading aloud. The paralysis has also weakened the Count’s sight, and when this occurs he is gripped by mistrust of his own memory. So he sends for Carl Laurids, to read the history of Mørkhøj to him and refresh his memory on certain points, such as what the great Paracelsus had said.

The bed in which the Count lay while Carl Laurids read to him had been set up in the laboratory under the big hole in the roof through which the Count’s machines were directed toward the celestial equator. Now Carl Laurids began to read backwards, from the day when the Count’s guests took their leave of him. But instead of reading exactly what was there on the page, he read with his own discovery of the law of change constantly in mind. During the readings, which went on week after week, he and the Count became closer to each other than they had ever been. What brought them together was the one crucial question—one that is also of interest to the rest of us—of whether time really does exist, and it was with a sense of fellowship not normally found between master and servant that they made their way together through the distances that had erased the great Paracelsus’ words when he was carried up from the cellars where he had whiled away the time with tokay and three whores from Copenhagen, and had lifted his head from the stretcher and said damned if this wasn’t the center of the world.