The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (43 page)

Back in the darkness, the girls sit on, unable to make head or tail of this. For a moment there is silence, and then they start to giggle—all except Maria. She is still thinking about the electrician.

Then comes the soldier.

It is a day in May, one in a never-ending string of bright, humming, warm spring days at Annebjerg, and Maria is watering the roses next to the highway. She has been entrusted with this job because the headmistresses now have complete confidence in her and because she has been at Annebjerg so long that she should be armed against exactly what happens next, which is that a soldier comes walking down the road. His gait is unsteady because he is just about dislocating his neck in his efforts to drink in Maria’s suntanned legs and sun-bleached hair and capable hands and roguish blue eyes, and so on and so forth. For his part, he is fair-haired and blue-eyed and broad-shouldered, dressed in tight white trousers and blue regimental shirt. He is a Marine, looks as though he can hold his own, and in every way resembles the Danish dream of the charming soldier.

But he is German. That may make no difference to Maria—later on, she barely remembered it—but it registered with me: this soldier is German, and it is the first indication Maria receives that, at this point, Denmark has been occupied by Germany for more than a year.

In this instance there is no time to think, no gazing at each other wondering this, that, or the other. What happens is that Maria leaves the watering can where it is and falls into step behind the soldier; then, once they have been walking like this for a while, smiling at nothing in particular, she moves up alongside him. But by then Annebjerg is out of sight; by then they have walked right through Nykøbing and out the other side.

While they are disappearing down the road, without Maria’s ever once turning around, I find myself wondering why she did it; why did she run away, instead of staying at Annebjerg, where she was happy? I mean: both then and later it is obvious that Maria’s dreams of happiness all deal with a life like the one she led at Annebjerg; with a regular sense of security and regular meals and singing and dancing twice a month. So what is it that makes her follow the soldier, in spite of all that?

It would be simple if the answer really were a longing for love. But that answer is too simple; besides which, it does not fit with the actual events. Shortly after her running away—later that same day—Maria and the soldier are sitting on the back of a flatbed truck; he tries to hold her hand but she pulls it away; he tries to kiss her and she turns her ripe red lips away; and then he thinks, this little buttercup, this
Snuggiputzilein,
is obviously asking for the direct approach. So he tries to unbutton her uniform blouse, and before he knows it, he is sprawling in the roadway; before he knows it, he has been ditched, he has gone overboard, and sees the truck disappearing into the distance. So if it was love that Maria was after, then it was certainly not love at any price.

Left alone on the back of the truck, she started to regret the unaccountable impulse that had prompted her to follow the soldier, and that very afternoon she did try to get back to Annebjerg. By this time she had had three years of feeling like a little girl; that is how she looked and how she behaved; no one would have taken Maria Jensen for anything but that. And it was this girlishness that was to lure two lusty farmhands into making a big mistake. They were sitting on a load of hay, alongside Maria, and this load of hay was being drawn by that rarity: a tractor heading in the right direction, away from the setting sun and home to Annebjerg. The two hands had tacitly and cheerfully conspired to rape Maria, all for her bonny blue eyes, and when one of them grabbed hold of her arm and pulled off her skirt, it was the first time in a very, very long while that Maria had been subjected to violence. She reacted instinctively by relaxing and letting things drift, but at the same time her innards contracted into a knot and, for the first time in a very long while, her eyes took on a glazed expression that would have served as a warning to children and adults in Christianshavn. And with that she drifted away from the security of Annebjerg and into the dream of a girl who can take care of herself. As the man forced one of his legs between hers she drove one knee into his crotch, then she put her thumbs to his eyes—which were wide open with astonishment—and pressed. He rolled off her without a sound. She stood up and stepped into the center of the swaying load of hay, and there she took on the other man, who had brown-stained plug-tobacco teeth and a wicked-looking hard-on jutting out of his open fly. A pitchfork had been stuck in the hay and this Maria hauled out. The man circled warily around her. It had dawned on him that he was up against an unusual opponent, but he did not know how unusual and so he miscalculated. Maria feinted a lunge and he was knocked off balance, giving Maria the chance to bend down, pull his trousers down around his ankles, and jump clear before his long, flailing arms could get to her. Now his movements were restricted. The next time Maria feigned an assault he lost his balance altogether, and when, at that same moment, Maria took a menacing step toward him, he toppled backwards and sailed out into space. Aware that the first man had staggered back onto his feet, Maria then pirouetted around and hammered the pitchfork against his chest. The blow sent him flying off the cart. Later, she thanked the friendly tractor driver for the lift and told him that the two hands had jumped off back down the road. The man noticed that her voice seemed to have deepened and that a faraway look had come into her eyes. Maria simply thought that there was no reason to go back to the home, and that she felt like having a look around among all these country bumpkins and that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to be afraid of. Then she starts walking along the highway, toward the sunset and Sorø.

*   *   *

By this time, Carsten has been at Sorø Academy for two years, and even though it is tempting to get straight to the crux of the matter and describe his first meeting with Maria, that is not how history is written; that would mean succumbing to the temptation to which love will always give rise—and I will not have that laid at my door. So we will have to start with Carsten’s reception at Sorø, two years earlier, on August 15, 1939. On that day, he lined up with all the other academy pupils—in class order, under the supervision of an inspector—before being allowed into the assembly hall. There he stands, along with the other new pupils, shaking in his shoes with apprehension, beneath a coffered ceiling painted with distant stars and with the portraits of former headmasters gazing austerely down upon them from the walls. Here, the headmaster delivers a speech from a raised lectern. This speech is obviously aimed at the new boys, the new little counts and sons of diplomats and customs inspectors and pastors and company directors and sawmill owners and office managers, and in some cases—Carsten’s, for example—of widows. He speaks to the sons of all these people, who do not know one another but who have this in common: that they are bursting with ambition on their children’s behalf, and so have had the choice of sending them to Herlufsholm or the Metropolitan School or Sankt Jørgen’s Gymnasium or Sorø Academy—and have chosen the academy because this place is shrouded in the spirit of history.

And it is this very spirit that the headmaster now touches upon in his speech, which he embarks upon after the singing (accompanied by the music teacher on the piano) of one of Ingemann’s lovely hymns, set to music by the composer Heise, who was once a music teacher at the academy; and after the headmaster has—among the mass of crew-cut heads and boyish faces that he does not normally see very clearly—located Carsten’s. He recognizes him almost immediately, because Carsten has his mother’s eyes, and those eyes are still glowing in the old Latinist’s soul. He flings out a hand in one of those gestures that derive from his being a kind of a god, and from the fact that he is backed up by a cultural tradition that he and the rest of the teaching staff do not believe has altered in three hundred years; one that will, in all probability, last forever—with a few small changes along the way perhaps, but in effect forever. Then he says to the crowd of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys, “Gentlemen, I would like to welcome you to this school. I say ‘Gentlemen’ because, as members of this academy, you are expected to act like gentlemen. You will soon fit in here, if you are at all suited to boarding-school life, and the first thing you will learn is that from now on, no one is going to hold your hand, you will have to fend for yourselves, pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps; if anyone gives you advice you must accept it as a gift, deserving of gratitude.” His eye falls on Carsten, and for a moment he is silent, thinking of Amalie; then he continues: “You can win respect through personal proficiency in the classroom and on the playing field, but, gentlemen, should it be noted that you are flaunting this proficiency, you will discover it will do you no good. Critical as your schoolfellows are, any humbug will soon be exposed, and everyone will come to occupy the position determined by his personal worth; you will grow to love this place, this playground of your boyhood and youth; you will grow to love having such a picturesque setting for your daily routine: this historic site, with Bishop Absalon’s church and its graves; these fine examples of Danish architecture, dating back to the first half of the nineteenth century; these venerable old trees whose age, in the childish imagination, becomes much greater than it actually is.” And here the headmaster again falls silent, overwhelmed by memories of his own youth at the school, a time he always recalls with particular vividness at just such moments as this, when he is welcoming a new intake of students. Finally he continues: “There is boarding-school life itself, cradled on its fundamental affinity with this, the academy—an affinity made all the stronger by the fact that your lives here will be so different, and not without a certain harshness, in the face of which it is so easy to seek comfort and balance in the countryside spread at your feet, a countryside so gentle, so charming, that it seems made to be loved. But what makes this academy quite special, what makes it so utterly splendid and unique and unparalleled in Denmark, is its inner life; it is the spiritual continuity, an uninterrupted line stretching from Bishop Absalon, via Christian IV and Frederik III and Holberg and Heise and Hauch and Ørsted and Ingemann, right up to the present”—and here the headmaster waves an arm in the direction of the teaching staff.

There are a good many teachers, and at first glance, standing there along the end wall of the hall, they look like a collection of powerful eccentrics. Despite the summer heat, they wear threadbare alpaca coats, or jackets and waistcoats, or stiff collars and lorgnettes and pince-nez or lightly tinted spectacles; some are wearing white coats, to demonstrate their connection with the sciences, and some sport bushy beards and sideburns grown in emulation of dead scientific heroes—but all of them stare straight ahead, looking very, very serious. The seriousness of their gaze fills the new students with respect, and that is the intention. If, however, one looks more carefully (as do some of the older boys) something else becomes apparent, something more; then other truths emerge from behind these formidable façades and one realizes that there is something rather worn and shabby about these men and that their eyes, which look neither to right nor to left, harbor no small measure of madness. And all of this betrays the fact that these custodians of the Spirit of the People are also something other, something more, than awe-inspiring sages; that they are, in fact, poorly paid clerks in the dream factory that is Sorø Academy. The dreams manufactured here are those the headmaster has given such an excellent account of in his speech: the ideal of Spartan boarding-school hardiness and the ideal of brilliant Athenian-style scholarship and the ideal of an ardent, tremulously fragile love of Nature. And a good, hard look will reveal that the teachers’ lineup in the hall underlines this line of thought: closest to the headmaster we have Cultivation and Tradition and the National Spirit—in other words, the famous Plato scholar whom the students call “Meph” (short for Mephistopheles), who likes little boys and who, on a daily basis, boxes a good number—actually, a very large number—of ears, this being the only physical contact permitted at the academy between teachers and pupils. Then we have the French teacher “Don” (short for Don Juan, because of his foppishness and his great interest in little girls), then come all the other philologists and scientists, several of whom have written textbooks or distinguished themselves in the field of research. Now they are distinguishing themselves in human terms by their jumble of neurotic idiosyncrasies, epitomized by the students in such short and significantly compact nicknames as “Gnasher” and “Doggo” and “Slobby”: names with which Carsten and the other new pupils are not as yet familiar but which they will get to know. Around this group of men, whom the headmaster has just described as having a direct link with Bishop Absalon’s day, a space has been left, a bare stretch of floorboard, unoccupied because this bare section is meant to mark the gap and the drop in prestige that brings us to those stocky, barrel-chested men standing with their arms folded; men called Møller and Thomsen and Sprakkesen. These men are the PE and woodwork teachers and they have no nicknames, perhaps because their madness is so obvious that there is no need to draw attention to it. These are the school Spartans, men full of enthusiasm for the physical culture of the ancient world and for the English public-school spirit. It is they who, with unflagging energy, will take the lead in the cricket matches and gymnastics sessions; and in the year-round dips in Sorø Lake, which will inflict unaccountable and agonizing rheumatic twinges upon many of the young people gathered in the assembly hall, before they have even graduated. These men despise the rest of the academy teaching staff, considering them to be weaklings; and so the naked floorboards that separate the two groups of teachers also manifest the school’s picture of the division between body and soul.