The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (42 page)

After keeping Maria at the police station for the two days it took before the search for Adonis Jensen was called off, they drove her to Annebjerg reform school in Odsherred, with the policewoman as escort. It was during this journey, through the barred window of the van, that she saw a big white car overtake them, and, for an instant, looked a handsome boy in uniform in the eye—though neither she nor he could have known that they were meant for each other. And by the word “meant” I mean nothing other than that the future will shape itself in such a way that they will, in many ways, turn out to be each other’s destiny.

For the first time, during this drive, Maria realized that she was actually on her way to a home for girls. She had thought, just as I did, that it was bound to be a reformatory and a prison and a sort of school, where brute force and ill-treatment and inhumane practices were the order of the day; where it would be discovered that she had never learned to read and write, and she would be punished; where she would plunge into a coal cellar of misery—and
that
she could not bear because since Sofie’s death she had grown soft and incoherent.

Her fears were borne out by the manner in which she was received. This home for girls faced onto Nykøbing Fjord, whose waters were black, windswept, and lit by a moon that seemed to Maria to be weeping, all alone in the heavens—and that such a sentimental thought should occur to her says something about how close she had come to the end of her tether. Silhouetted against the night sky, the actual building looked like a vampire’s castle, and Maria was left to wait, alone, in a cold, dark hallway, under a large painting so darkened by age that all that could be discerned of its subjects—men, all of them looking like demonic buccaneers—was the bloodshot eyes gleaming down upon her. After a while Miss Smeck—one of the home’s two headmistresses—appeared. In the dark she seemed tall and pale as a statue. She had been a missionary in China, and she treated Maria to a brief speech in which she described the time she sailed up the Yangtze River alone on a mission for the Society for the Eradication of the Rituals of Primitive Peoples; and how she had met the other headmistress, Miss Ströhm, who had taught her that in our lives, as in our dreams, we are totally and utterly alone. Thereafter she locked Maria—who had not understood one word of her speech—into a solitary-confinement cell in the attic; and there, beside herself with fear, Maria fell asleep.

In fact, this reception had been a trick, a ploy, from beginning to end. The home took thirty girls at a time, most of whom arrived foaming at the mouth like lions and fell into the same class as poor dead Sofie—believing that they had seen everything there was to see in this life and harboring no hopes. The two headmistresses thought it expedient to give these girls a shock before leaving them to wake up as Maria did the next day—to a morning as beautiful as Creation.

When she opened her eyes, the sun was shining in through the attic window, the birds were singing, and the distant sky was blue. She got out of bed to find that her door was no longer locked, and when she stepped into the corridor she was handed her uniform. She slipped, first, into this and then into her first day at the home, which was to be more or less like all the others, consisting as it did of ample meals and flag-raising and working in the orchard and the kitchen garden and the rose beds and games on the lawn and community singing and Miss Smeck’s accounts of her years in China.

From her very first day, time lost all meaning for Maria. She forgot how long she had been at the home; she barely remembered which day of the week it was; the future did not exist. Time counted only in terms of the number of days left until she had turned up first for flag-raising and for morning assembly so often that she would be presented with a silver “King’s mark” badge, a defiant symbol of Danish patriotism bearing the monogram of King Christian X. She spent three years at Annebjerg, and for nearly all that time she believed she would stay there forever. To her the home was a paradise over which the two headmistresses kept watch with an authority and love that have something to do with this being 1939 and not forty years earlier—the time from which all the ubiquitous rumors of reformatory callousness stem.

In many ways Annebjerg corresponds to that period’s dream—which is also our dream—of how to treat young girls who have wandered off the straight and narrow; who have sunk into the morass of the city and have neither father nor mother, but who have now been moved to the countryside and given blue blazers and white skirts and raspberries and cream under the acacia tree in the garden. These girls were taken for saltwater dips in the fjord; they weeded the rose beds and fed the twittering birds and inhaled the scent of wheat and, in some way, rediscovered both their fathers and their mothers in the two headmistresses, thus being allowed to be just what most of them were: little girls.

There were only two things the two headmistresses dreaded. One was the outside world, which for them began where Annebjerg ended—down by the wicked highway, which only the two oldest and most trusted girls were allowed to go anywhere near, and then only if they had to weed or water the outlying rose beds. In these the two spinster ladies had ordered the planting of roses of the large pale-yellow variety, to make visitors aware that Annebjerg was a house of innocence. Ordinarily, these visitors amounted only to errand “boys” delivering milk and groceries to the home, and
they
were of the same age as the ladies—over fifty, that is. This was tied up with the other thing the two ladies dreaded: the other thing, the only other thing, of which they were afraid was the young girls’ sensuality, which they regarded as an illness on a par with tuberculosis. Not least among all the many functions they believed the house ought to fulfill was that of being a sort of sanatorium, where their little girls could recover from their attacks of sensuality. And to prevent any relapses, two different devices were employed. One was Miss Smeck’s missionary voice, the one in which she had kept time for the rowers going up the Yangtze; the one she now used to say to two girls who were sitting too close together, “What are you two doing, sitting rubbing up against each other like that?” This was a very effective device, if we then add that the two headmistresses were also present in the bathroom every morning, when the big girls washed the little ones; and that they made frequent, unheralded inspections of the dormitories. The other device was a strict curfew—the outside world was absolutely out of bounds. Very few of the girls had any home to go to, but even those who had were rarely given permission to leave Annebjerg. Trips beyond the grounds of the home were few and far between and usually took them to the beach or nearby spots of historical significance, which should, preferably, be deserted, with no other human beings in sight: ruined castles, for instance, or rune stones or ancient burial mounds, which Miss Smeck would use as a springboard for accounts of her time in the tropics, while Miss Ströhm, not unlike a nervous gundog, flitted back and forth along the fringes of their bevy of girls, keeping a sharp eye on the surrounding world, to ensure that it would not show its worst side by sending their way what they dreaded most of all: a man.

The majority of the girls preferred this kind of life; it would be inappropriate and wrong to feel outraged and think: Those poor girls, what a pity there weren’t any boys. The belief that keeping the two sexes apart can do great and irreparable damage belongs to a later date; it was not generally accepted in 1939, and certainly not among the girls at Annebjerg, whose experiences with men had been so unpleasant that they much preferred to be protected.

For Maria Jensen, life during these years could not have been better. She became the headmistresses’ favorite and was in every respect a model pupil. On her very first morning she had handed over her police helmet. She had still had been carrying it when she arrived at Annebjerg because, with the Copenhagen Police Department having long since gone over to new uniforms, Maria’s helmet was regarded as an antique; and since it never occurred to anyone that this fragile, weeping girl-child had once bashed in a colleague’s face in order to get said helmet, she was allowed to keep it. At Annebjerg she gave it to Miss Ströhm, who hung it on a hook in her office, and there it remained, because Maria forgot all about it and never thought of asking for it back. Instead she let her fair hair grow and acquired rosy cheeks and suntanned feet and dazzlingly blue eyes; in every way resembling the headmistresses’ dream—and ours—of a little girl who has been lost and has now been saved. Her voice, when she said grace and morning and evening prayers, was full of conviction—as it was when, at the headmistresses’ request, she led the community singing. After a few days at Annebjerg she had begun to prattle like a preschool child, and now and again she would coyly pretend that she could not speak properly. All in all, it seemed that at Annebjerg—which contained almost everything the tenement in Christianshavn had lacked—Maria relived the childhood she had never had, because Anna had been searching for her childhood instead of looking after her daughter.

Twice a month, the girls entertained one another. These entertainments were held by candlelight, after they had had tea and cake and sung, accompanied by Miss Smeck on the guitar. They danced cotillions, and the minuet from the play
Elverhøj,
and Maria sang “Tahiti is paradise on earth, hm hm”—a song that went down just as well with her fully dressed in the large drawing room at Annebjerg as it had done with her naked in the cow barns of Vesterbro. Strangely enough, Adonis Jensen was often onstage—far from Annebjerg—on these selfsame evenings; and as the applause swelled around Maria, she was infected by the same stage fever that Adonis was experiencing at that very moment. At such times she felt she was in some way linked to her father. These evenings were the only times she ever thought of her family—or rather, of Adonis—but then she felt so close to him that she could have spoken to him, if she had wanted to.

These evenings were also the only times at Annebjerg that it was considered acceptable and quite in order for the girls to touch one another, that they were actually encouraged to do so—when it came to ballroom dancing. Maria normally took the man’s part, and it was on these evenings that she received her first premonition that things could go wrong.

When I talked to Maria about her time at Annebjerg, she did not speak about premonitions; she stressed what a happy time it had been and how kind everyone had been to each other, and only after a while, once she was well into her story, did she suddenly mention these disturbing details—as, for instance, with those evenings when she sang and danced the man’s part and thought about her father, and when the notion struck her that she was missing something. These feelings of want were few and far between, and when, presently, I mention them in context, it must be remembered that they cropped up as tiny incidents in the happy flow of Maria’s time at Annebjerg: of winter in the warmth of the tiled stoves with spice cakes and snowball fights, of spring and summer rich in roses and sea bathing, and a golden, wistful autumn that tasted of apples. During this time Maria reaches the age of sixteen, then seventeen, then eighteen, and even though she has, in due course, been given a room of her own and three silver badges; even though she is now entrusted with pruning the yellow roses near the road and still prattles like a toddler and now knows Miss Smeck’s anecdotes by heart and would thus seem to have become a part of Annebjerg, still, when all’s said and done, she really is a big girl now.

And then the electrician appears on the scene. He turns up on a day in March—a bitterly cold day but a spring day nonetheless. He is a young man, and young men are not in the habit of visiting Annebjerg—even the police officers and child welfare officers who bring the girls are elderly men, because that is what the headmistresses have stipulated. Nevertheless, this electrician is young, because Annebjerg has not had electricity for very long and the headmistresses have therefore not been able to come to their usual arrangement with his company. In other words, Miss Smeck has not been able to call it, as she usually does, and say, “We would prefer you to send a woman, but if you send a man, then he must be a family man and over fifty years old, otherwise we cannot do business. Now I’ll leave you to think about that. Thank you and goodbye.” Then she would hang up knowing full well that she would get her way.

But the electrical wiring is new, its failure comes as a surprise, and it is the slightly less consistent Miss Ströhm who makes the call; which is why, now, a young man in blue coveralls cycles up to the home. He does not report to anyone, he does not make for the office to check on anything—if he had done, he could have been stopped. Instead he parks his bike, takes his toolbox, and goes straight down to the basement to change the blown fuse—that being all that is wrong. He lights the little paraffin lamp he has brought and sits down in front of the main switch—and then he notices the girls.

They are all around him in the darkness, and they do not make a sound. That is what is wrong; that is what makes this moment magical and terrifying for the young man. He knows girls who giggle and girls who shout and girls who turn away in disdain, but never before has he come across girls such as these, who stare without blinking. The girls, too, find the situation surprising; if they hadn’t, they would have acted in a more normal fashion—by running away, or passing some sly remark or looking at the ground—but they have followed him down into the basement and suddenly they are very close to him, closer to a man than they have been in a long time.

I do not know how long this moment lasted. Maria is at the very front, closest to him, and to her it seems like a long time—but not nearly so long as it does to the electrician. All at once he has the impression that these eyes are staring at him in a very
hungry
way, and suddenly, up from the depths of his consciousness, wells the nightmare of his sex: of Valkyries and Amazons and shield-maidens and women who have been without men for a long while and so must, he thinks, be wild with hunger for my body. Then he feels the cold sweat of fear beading under his blue coveralls and, with a gesture taken from another dream—the Westerns at the movie theater in Nykøbing (double bill, Saturday afternoons)—he drops his tools, blows out the paraffin lamp, fights his way through the darkness, stumbles out to his bicycle, and weaves off down the driveway, pursued by the imagined howling of wolves.