The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (51 page)

One summer they decided, on the spur of the moment, to load up their two bikes and take off into the countryside and sleep in a tent—although they could just as easily have stayed at a hotel. They started out by riding south. The larks were singing and they rode for a whole day alongside the crumbling ruins of a wall, which happened to be the wall around Mørkhøj; they reached Southern Fyn and, at one point, ate their lunch beside the statue of the great physicist H. C. Ørsted, in the square in Rudkøbing; later they came to the fishing village of Lavnœs, to which a paved road now ran; and they passed through the town with the inn where a vengeful Ramses—Maria’s paternal grandfather, that is—found his father. And from all of these marketplaces and walls and squares and houses the past came rushing out and shouted after them, but it always arrived too late, to find that they had just disappeared around the corner and the past had missed its bus. They did not even notice the spots where old
WANTED
posters had defied the Danish climate—among the world’s worst—to tell Maria that the hunt had been on all over northern Europe during the previous century for her paternal grandfather or grandmother or great-grandfather. Carsten and Maria did not pull up at one single place to be reminded of the past, because they had no knowledge of it. They had only the vaguest ideas—or none at all—of where their ancestors hailed from, and why, and no town or place-name or buildings or posters could jog their memories. At one point they passed through Sorø, which, as far as I can see, ought to have been vibrant with sweet memories, but all that happened was that Carsten pointed toward the academy entrance and said, “I used to go to school there,” and then they looked into each other’s eyes and laughed lovingly and then they kissed,
mmm-wuh!
Then off they rode, leaving behind them the town and the academy and the lake and the unanswered question of why it did not even occur to them that this was where they met.

Riding there, side by side along the country lanes, under the sun and the sky and the larks, and eating liver pâté with cucumber on country bread in the fresh air, they resemble the fifties dream, our dream, of young love; and the only thing that might seem surprising is that their past did not really exist; that they rode through Denmark without any sign of recognition and without visiting one single person and without really
seeing
anything at all except each other’s eyes and each other’s sun-kissed freckles. And perhaps this says something about the price of that impending freedom which was already making its presence felt; it says something about the fact that the country which this double infatuation cycled through was already a strangely anonymous Denmark. And a moment later their infatuation was no longer doubled but trebled when, on the top of that hill called Himmelbjerget, Mountain to the Heavens, Maria suddenly found herself with something in her hand, something light-colored—her diaphragm—and she drew her hand back and sent the soft rubber disk spinning far off into space. And because, that summer, everything fell into place with such perfect and intimate timing, she became pregnant that very evening.

Her pregnancy lasted for six years—yes, you heard right, six years—and when I have said to Maria and Carsten, “That can’t be right, it’s impossible, a pregnancy lasts for nine months,” they have said, “Well, have you ever been pregnant?” And although that is no kind of an answer, still it reminds me that what we are talking about here is how they
experienced
the pregnancy, and by their reckoning it lasted six years—six years that saw the advent of the Affluent Society. There came a day—although it may in fact have been several days—when Fitz called Carsten into his office and said, “I would like to warn you about something, I would like to warn you about James Joyce’s novel
Ulysses.
It is one long, scandalous piece of verbal diarrhea—which is why I myself have never read it—and if you, Mr. Mahogany, steer clear of everything in any way associated with this obscene pamphlet, then I predict a golden future for you.” Then he congratulated Carsten on the completion of his three-year apprenticeship, and on being, now, a qualified lawyer; he gave him a raise in salary and invited him to take a seat on the first of a number of boards that would, during these years, bid him welcome; and then he asked him to take over some of the day-to-day running of the firm.

It was just at this time that Maria started working. It is hard to say what made her start, but to begin with, it looked good, resembling as it did the fifties picture of an independent woman who wants equal pay and wears the pants—as Maria did, pants that were let out at the waist to accommodate her stomach. There are various factors to do with her work that can be wondered at: in six years she was taken on at 170 different workplaces and worked nowhere for longer than three weeks. It is almost certain that she worked a few stints as a construction worker, making herself out to be a man and passing the swell of her three-year pregnancy off as a beer belly; and for some weeks she also worked as an attendant in another of those places where the history of Denmark was being written: the public toilets in the Town Hall Square. All of this points out that the story of Maria’s working career is not just that of an energetic young housewife, and that something, somewhere, was not quite right. But getting to the root of what was wrong would be far too laborious a task, and from another and simpler point of view, everything was in order—and it is this point of view I now opt for: Through the fifties the little home by the Lakes continued to sail through an uninterrupted succession of Sundays, during which, somewhere along the way, they buy their first car—a Volkswagen Beetle—and their first vacation home.

They may not have seen much of each other during these years, nor much of that side of life which lay beyond the everyday routine. When they were together in the evenings it was all they could do to stay upright long enough to eat before falling into a deathlike sleep in the big double bed—in which, through all these years, Maria had to lie on her side in a kidney-shaped arrangement of hard pillows that took the weight off her stomach. During this period they also saw less of Amalie, and the only regular contact they had with other people came through Colonel Lunding, who would come up to visit them on the dark winter evenings—red-eyed and pale from lack of sleep—for a glass of milk and a cup of coffee and a good cry. The burly soldier always started off by telling one of his hunting stories, and then he would switch to bemoaning these changed days, and then he would start to cry, and Maria had to draw his grizzled head across her stomach to her breast and dry his tears and wipe his nose, while he wept and said, “Now the Reds are slinging mud at that righteous war in Korea, and those swine have altered the Constitution so that a woman—boo, hoo, hoo—can succeed to the throne, and these days you can’t even damn well arrest people because of their political convictions, how the hell do they expect a man to do his job, and every hour more and more Ivans are pouring over the border, damned if we won’t all end up being infected, I’ll probably end up in the booth voting Communist myself one of these days.” But in Maria’s arms he calmed down, and in the presence of Carsten’s well-dressed amiability and the smell of success and the old days he pulled himself together, brightened up, and managed to gloat over the rebellion in East Germany and say, “Still, it’s an exciting time, what with the crisis in Poland and all, and could I have another glass of milk and I’d better be getting back, duty calls, you have to keep up the morale if you’re going to act immorally.”

Maria and Carsten never really understood what he was talking about. To them events on the international political scene were nothing more than a faint hum from the electronic equipment in the apartment below, and as far as they were concerned, the future of Denmark was safe in the hands of such a sensitive man as Colonel Lunding. Then Maria gave birth.

*   *   *

She gives birth in an expensive private maternity home, and because it happens to be New Year’s Eve, only she and the midwife and a nurse are present. “I’m afraid both the consultant and the doctor on duty have been called out to an emergency,” the nurse apologizes—this emergency being, of course, that they are dead drunk, and not only that, but dead drunk at the home of Amalie Mahogany, who is holding a big New Year’s party. “But don’t you worry, madame,” says the midwife, “we have all the most up-to-date equipment on hand”—as Maria can see for herself, from where she lies in state surrounded by gleaming tiles and glaring spotlights and glittering steel and buzzing autoclaves. As further reassurance, they also have access to countless X rays, since, with Maria’s stomach being so inordinately huge and her pregnancy having lasted for six years, the consultant has taken somewhere between fifteen and twenty good X rays of the fetus, just to be on the safe side, and because he regards the fears held by certain of his colleagues regarding radiation as unscientific old wives’ tales.

And so the midwife knows in advance what is about to happen, which is that Maria gives birth to twins, a dark girl and a fair boy, and—bearing in mind the bombardment of X rays to which the babies have been subjected and also how long she has been pregnant—it is not without some relief that I can report that both babies have the right number of fingers and toes and appear to be healthy and normal.

Maria refuses to be anesthetized; even when she is cut and stitched, the only sound that escapes her is a faint moan, and when the nurse moves in with the mask Maria wags a menacing finger at her and hisses, “Beat it and take that thing with you!” And so all is quiet in the maternity home; the only sounds are Maria’s moans and the faint hum of the apparatus and the gentle rustle of the midwife’s starched gown and, at one point, the wails of the two babies, which subside when they are laid to the breast and a bright-eyed, triumphant Maria gazes into space and thinks: I’ve done it, I’ve given birth.

Then another sound starts to swell, faint but nevertheless quite distinct, the soundproofed door notwithstanding. It sounds like an animal screaming, but it is, in fact, Amalie Mahogany. She has abandoned her guests, having all at once been struck by the feeling that her grandchildren were being born at that very moment. She has not even taken the time to kick the consultant into life, she has simply taken a taxi, and now she is standing outside, and wanting in.

But she does not get in. Maria has said, “I want to be alone, absolutely alone, my husband has to see the babies before anybody else,” saying this in the same voice with which she had waved the ether mask away—a voice that will not take no for an answer. Nevertheless the nurse tells her, “Those noises you can hear, madame, it’s your mother-in-law, she’s very upset, should we let her in?” But Maria shakes her head and hisses, “There must be some mistake, my mother-in-law is not even in Copenhagen, not even in this country, she’s stationed on Greenland, she’s far away, and she would never carry on like that. That woman out there is someone who sometimes shouts at me in the street. Will you please have her removed.”

So Amalie is taken away by the police. After all, this is a private maternity home and they are paying through the nose for Maria’s confinement; besides which, Amalie definitely does not seem normal, and so—regardless of her evening dress and her pearl-embroidered shawl and her furs and her hat and her jewelry—three porters and two police officers shepherd her out onto the street, where she screeches, “Those are my son’s children in there, they’re my grandchildren.” Then, when one of the officers grabs hold of her arm to lead her away, she takes a swipe at him, yelling, “Let go of me, boy, piss off and polish your cuff links before you lay a finger on a real lady!”; after which she is handcuffed and taken to Store Kongens Street police station to spend a wrathful New Year’s Eve in custody.

While all this is going on, Carsten is at work. At this point, holidays no longer exist for him, and today he is working particularly hard, to avoid the thought of blood and slime and pain and all the mystery of womanhood. But he arrives later, some time after midnight, when the birth is over and the twins have been washed and fed and Amalie put behind bars and Maria wheeled away from the abattoir-like delivery room and into a lovely private room. Then they put a call through to him and he turns up, utterly confused, wearing a green loden coat and carrying flowers. He kisses the children and he kisses the children’s mother—his wife, that is—and then he starts to cry, and at that moment the little family has no problems.

But I have. For while the Mahogany family is stronger and more collected than ever before, its history is more confused than ever. Hitherto I have endeavored to make my account exhaustive and keep it simple, and although it has never been easy, it is now more difficult than ever because, at this moment, in and around this maternity home, an overwhelming, bewildering number of pictures of these newborn infants now present themselves.

To all appearances, Carsten and Maria are alone with their children; to all appearances, there is no one else in the world but them, but that in itself is complicated enough. Because, without realizing it, they both have their own ideas about the children. They may, at this moment, be smiling at each other and hugging each other, but Maria feels that, strictly speaking and deep down and at heart, they are her children—wasn’t she the one who threw away her diaphragm that day and hasn’t she carried this sweet burden for six years? Not that Carsten would disagree with her on that point: in a certain, physical sense they
are
her children; as far as everything to do with the metabolism and the nurturing and the screaming is concerned, they are Maria’s, their mother’s; but in another, deeper sense he feels that they are his children—isn’t it primarily he who has to put clothes on their backs and Maria’s, and food in their mouths, and isn’t he the husband? And, he thinks, in a wider, legal sense these two creatures are citizens, responsible adults of the future, and thus, to some extent, they belong to society.

These, therefore, are the divergent dreams of two parents, and if that had been all there was to it, then it would not have been so bad. But in the room next door the midwife is talking to the consultant, who has now put in an appearance; and even though his surroundings still look rather greenish and curved to him, as if viewed through an empty champagne bottle, yet he is in no doubt the twins were born amid examination tables and gas cylinders and respirators and autoclaves and disinfectants; thanks to the X rays and his (and the midwife’s) training; in the secure, white-tile surroundings of the maternity home—and so, naturally, modern medicine can lay claim to their future. And somewhere in Store Kongens Street, the previous generation—Amalie that is—is banging on her cell bars, yelling, “They’re my son’s children and mine, and if you knew what I’ve suffered and sacrificed for that boy, and every one of you will be fired tomorrow, I’m a good friend of the chief of police, you know!”