The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (47 page)

He had to start work at 7:30 a.m. and finished at 4:00 p.m.—which meant that he could squeeze in yet another job, the day was not yet over, there was still time to roll up his sleeves and do a good job of work before attending night school classes at six o’clock in the city center. And here Carsten did something he knew he would never be able to tell his mother about: he took a job as a messenger. Now,
that
Amalie could never have lived with. She told Carsten what she had once told Carl Laurids, “It is not called
going to work,
we do not know what
work
is, it is called
going to the office.
”

And this is where his law studies start.

They began with the
Filosofikum
—the preliminary examination in basic philosophy that everyone wishing to study at Copenhagen University had to pass. The idea was that this course should provide an insight into the foundations of learning and the Eternal Truths upon which the teaching at Sorø Academy had also been based; and this insight was conveyed to the students—Carsten and a great many of his contemporaries, that is—through the study of formal logic and psychology and, first and foremost, Professor Dr. Harald Høffding’s splendid book
History of Modern Philosophy.
The most recent entries in this book dated from the previous century, thereby emphasizing the view that Carsten had brought with him from Sorø: that the past, and not least the nineteenth century, is better, significantly better, than the present. At the examination, questions were put to him by a professor who persisted in squashing imaginary moths on the desktop throughout, and he was given a question on “The Subconscious,” to which he gave the answer expected of him—neither more nor less than that the Subconscious is like an iceberg with a small section sticking up above the sea and the rest underneath. The professor then nodded benevolently and said, “Thank you, you can go, and be so kind as to close the door behind you, as quickly as you can, to prevent any more of these irritating insects getting in.”

As I said earlier, after commencement students were expected to be capable of discerning the foundations of learning—possibly only far off on the horizon, but intimated nevertheless—and this was also to hold true for Carsten. He thought he could see the law, albeit pretty far off, but looking like the Copenhagen Law Courts: solid, with touches of ancient Greece and Rome about it—and of something else, something that was both terrifying and indestructible—and all based on the eighteenth-century philosopher Montesquieu’s theory that the state is composed of the legislative, the executive, and the judicial bodies—this last, in Denmark, being the law courts, which are one hundred percent autonomous. Carsten considered this autonomy to be a most important concept. Of course, he knew very well that the judicial system was bound up with society, but at the same time he had the distinct feeling that it was above it. And even higher up, he felt, was
jurisprudence,
which bore some resemblance to mathematics and to Latin grammar and classical antiquity, inasmuch as it dealt with eternal truths; he felt, here at the beginning of his academic studies and later on, too, that lawyers, like mathematicians and philosophers, were—let’s not beat about the bush—higher beings, inhabiting a rarefied air in which one became exceptionally clear-sighted and farsighted.

The course of study was designed in such a way as to support this view. It was run by professors who were never seen. Some of the older students said they had once heard from still-older students that they had heard from even older students that once upon a time, in a far distant past, these professors had given lectures in almost empty auditoriums, working their way through dense jungles of legal detail only to discover eventually that there was no chance of ever getting through the syllabus, and that they had, several months back, lost the last of their audience. After that they had withdrawn from reality, away from tiresome, compulsory lecturing and into what Carsten imagined must be an elevated, academic silence, which they only broke in order to do what—guess, no, wrong, not to publish the results of their research: no interesting papers on Danish jurisprudence had been published since the previous century—but to publish bulky, expensive compulsory textbooks in which they conducted blood feuds against one another and by which they secured themselves a large and steady extra income.

And so a void had been created in the law faculty between the students—standing, or perhaps, rather, crawling, on terra firma—and the faculty professors who set the exams and determined the framework of a jurisprudence which Carsten envisaged as an aerial version of the city courthouse, but which, as far as I can see, was more like a sort of bubble that had cut itself adrift from society in the previous century or perhaps even back in the Middle Ages. Obviously, this void had to be filled, and the individuals who had taken on the task of building a stairway to the temple of justice were the
private tutors.
Even in those days, it was whispered of these individuals (who have long since become creatures of legend) that they were strange shoots on the law’s beautiful tree and to that I would have to say, you’re damned right they were. They were eternal students or former students or lawyers with ailing practices and shady pasts. They were all, each in his own way, a bit peculiar, reminding even the inordinately polite Carsten of exhibits at the Zoological Museum—in the vicinity of which, in the city center, around Store Kannike Lane, their classes were held. But they did have certain things in common, qualities which were not to be mocked and which would have looked good anywhere, even hung on a wall or preserved in alcohol: their incredible memories and their flair and their keenness to earn money. They knew the textbooks backwards, they could talk and talk and rattle off notes at a cracking pace, occasionally saying, “Turn the page,” because they knew that they had moved on to a new page in the textbook. Or they might ask a question along the lines of, “Where do the shutters go up in Civil Law?” and then go on to quote every instance in the thousands of clauses where shutters are put up. But it was not just that they had good memories; they also knew how to run a business, they were traders and hucksters who had rented space in cheap, privately owned premises, expected payment a month in advance, and neglected—with a judicial appreciation of income tax technicalities—to issue receipts. The fierce rivalry that existed among them had elbowed the most inept out into the gloom of the occupation, and those who were left were odd but talented teachers who always sent observers to exams and had a good feel for what would be handed down from on high and thus an almost prophetic talent for predicting exam questions.

One of these tutors—Tyge Lubanskij, who taught civil law—was to become a significant character in Carsten’s life. I do not think the relationship between these two men could be called a friendship; all of Carsten’s relationships with other people were marked by an innate distance and politeness, so it would be more correct to say that he and Lubanskij were acquaintances. This acquaintanceship—which also involved a third party—was struck up early on, during one of the first tutorials on the YWCA premises in Store Kannike Lane, amid the sunshine and sweltering heat of late summer. Seated right in front of Carsten is one of the few female law students, a girl whose hair is parted into two heavy, fair plaits, thus revealing the back of her neck, which is somewhat concave and very distracting. It reminds Carsten of something and diverts his attention from the open book in front of him, in which he has had a bookbinder insert hundreds of blank pages now awaiting notes that are unforthcoming because he has noticed that the girl, although she cannot be said to turn around, occasionally sends him what at this time was known as a “sunbeam glance.” It is at this point, however, that Carsten actually
hears
Lubanskij’s voice for the first time. Now, there is no saying why this should happen right now, but it does, and the girl is forgotten as Carsten becomes captivated by the tutor’s penetrating voice and his brilliant command of the law and the flicker of madness with which, again and again during this lecture, Lubanskij ventured to the limits of legal thought. For the first time ever it occurred to Carsten that even the cleverest of men might not hold the answers to everything, and when the class was over he remained in his seat staring at the blackboard, which the tutor was wiping clean. Then he realized that his neighbor had also kept his seat and, turning, he recognized his former schoolmate the Boy from the Assembly Hall. Carsten stares long and hard at him, wanting to make sure that it really is he and looking for any marks of the awful venereal disease that rumor had once bestowed upon him. But the Boy seems to be healthy, in fine fettle, radiating an air of concentrated zeal, and Carsten feels an odd flutter of pleasure at being so close to this energetic little body and these provocative opinions with which he is as yet unfamiliar but of which he already has some inkling. Shortly after this, Lubanskij sits down beside the two boys and starts to tell them his anecdotes and stories from Copenhagen nightlife and of his contempt for the legal institutions, and somehow or other ersatz coffee and pastries appear (probably paid for by Carsten), and they talk on and on as the summer draws to a close and turns to autumn, then winter, then spring again. Later on, Carsten is to recall these conversations as one long, intoxicating stream of words.

The Boy turns out to be a Communist—well, of course he is a Communist—Carsten realizes, to his delight, that the Boy will always push as far out as it is possible to go. But that is not the whole story, that is only the beginning, and in no time he has also told them that he is a freedom fighter and a member of the resistance. With childlike eagerness he shows Carsten and Lubanskij his false identity cards and illegal newssheets and his stolen German Parabellum, so heavy that he has to use both hands to raise it and so big that it looks as though he has a nasty growth under his Icelandic sweater. And of course Lubanskij is not to be outdone; he, too, explores the limits and tells them, contemptuously, about the absent law professors and the legal collaborators and of life as a lawyer—which may be tough and dirty, he says, but it’s realistic. At some point he also tells them how, in ’41 and ’43, the Minister of Justice, Thune Jacobsen, and the head of the Supreme Court, Troels G. Jørgensen, helped the Germans with the unconstitutional arrest of three to four hundred Communists, thus demonstrating that insignificant as the Danish police force might be, it can still carry out a piece of high-quality European workmanship, and Lubanskij says this with a sarcastic little smile, implying that of course this is unspeakably sordid, but that’s life.

Carsten never forgot this story; through everything else that was said, through Lubanskij’s cheery cynicism, this event sticks in his mind. One of the reasons for this may perhaps be that Lubanskij mentions Louis von Kohl, whom Carsten remembers as one of the men who visited Carl Laurids before he disappeared. At any rate, this story sows the first seeds of doubt in Carsten’s mind concerning eternal justice and the Supreme Court and middle-class values; in some way this tale links up with his lonely days at Sorø Academy after commencement and gives rise to a vague, inexplicable feeling of disappointment.

During these evening and nocturnal discussions—after the tutorials, in the blacked-out city center—Carsten always sits between the other two. On one side of him is the Boy, all fired up with enthusiasm for Stalin and the millennium and world Communism and Russia’s battle with the Nazis, as he condemns the policy of collaboration and the King and the collaborators. And on the other side of the table Lubanskij is agreeing with him, it’s immoral, damned if it isn’t, but it’s also a realistic picture of life, and what do you say to some coffee and pastries? Carsten never
says
anything at these meetings, he listens and listens but makes no direct contribution to the conversation—because he has nothing to say. The real world referred to by the Boy and Lubanskij is one he knows of from these meetings and these meetings only. The rest of his life is taken up by work at the Department of Statistics and his messenger job and civil law and meals with Mother and the deep sleep of oblivion. Nor does he feel any need to say anything; he is bewitched by these two impressive individuals, their knowledge, their points of view, their ardor and idealism and cynicism, and at the same time he is overwhelmed by a sense of how little he himself does and is and knows. He feels like some kind of insect, sitting out there in the darkness, seeing the light of the other two burning brightly but without the strength even to flutter anywhere near the lamp. During this time, which seems so short but which must have lasted for a couple of years, Lubanskij and the Boy were his ideals, just as his father and mother and Mr. Raaschou-Nielsen had been; the only difference being that these two lads in the YWCA rooms are tempters of a sort, whose stories and viewpoints seem to call to him and lead him close to limits he would rather not reach.

During these years, Carsten’s relationships with other people are relationships with role models, since that is how he has been raised. He has been taught to take his cue from ideals. If Amalie had had her way, Carsten’s world would now consist of that handful of people one looks up to—the geniuses—and the many who are to be despised and feared—laborers or tobacconists or those who do nothing at all. But Carsten’s world is not quite so simple. Amalie has not had her way in all things and he cherishes some dreams of tenderness for which she would not have cared—one of which concerns the girl on Sorø Lake, who is neither an ideal nor someone to despise but something else again, something indefinable that is now drawing closer.

One day the Boy did not turn up for a tutorial. He had never been absent before. He did not come the next day either, or the next again, so a search was conducted and a number of telephone calls made; then his parents turned up at a tutorial, red-eyed from weeping, to ask if anyone knew anything—but he was nowhere to be found, until Carsten happened to remember the name on one of his false identity cards. And then they found him, or, rather, the girl with the plaits found him. She went from hospital to hospital, repeating the name Carsten remembered, until she came to the Nyelands Street first-aid station, where she was told that the Boy had been buried the day before. Thereafter she walked back into town in a kind of trance, walked up to the classroom, and interrupted the lesson to tell them that the Boy was dead.