The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (52 page)

And that’s no lie. Back at Amalie’s house on Strand Drive at that very moment, the chief of police is singing a song with a
“Parlez-vous”
refrain and toasting the newborn children whom his hostess has taken herself off to visit. He, too, has his ideas about the children’s future, as do the other guests; and as does Colonel Lunding, who calls the next day with a bunch of flowers and a card inscribed “To two little soldiers from Uncle Lunne”; and Ramses and the Princess and Adonis—wherever they may be—would have had their own hopes; and Carl Laurids perhaps could not have cared less; and Fitz, counsel to the Supreme Court, will be happy just so long as no one ever reads modern literature aloud to them; and Progress and the Welfare State and the 1960s—which are just in the offing—provide no solution; they do not point toward anything other than freedom of choice.

Thus, gathered around the twins’ cribs, we find all the hopes of the poor and the rich and the middle class and those on the nethermost rung. There are hopes pointing backward and hopes pointing forward, all mixed up into such a clamorous chorus of contradictory expectations that I hardly have a moment’s peace in which to say that, at this point in time, in Denmark, so many dreams are making themselves heard that it may no longer be possible to present them through the two-dimensional medium of paper; and that is my problem.

Nevertheless, I will carry on, I will turn a deaf ear to my doubts—well, what else would you have me do? Instead, let me tell you about the success of Carsten’s career, which took off in earnest just before the twins were born, when Fitz called him into his office. The old lawyer’s face gleamed, weary and opalescent, among the brown paneling and brown leather furniture and brown wash drawings, as he announced to Carsten that he was going to retire and that he felt certain that Carsten was now capable of assuming his burden when he relinquished it. Carsten had no idea that Fitz had any sort of life outside of his chambers and the law courts, and so he did not understand what he would retire to, but he did not ask, just as he had no comment to make on being ordered to take over the firm; he simply nodded and obeyed as he had obeyed Carl Laurids and his mother and Raaschou-Nielsen and the professors of law and the army officers.

He was on his way out, and had opened the innermost of the office’s double doors, when Fitz called to him. This time the old man gave his successor a somewhat speculative look before saying, “Carsten, I would like to bequeath my spiritual legacy to you,” and Carsten felt himself start because, for the first time ever, Fitz had used his first name.

The old lawyer held a long and well-considered pause and then he said, “I have summed up my experience of life, and what it amounts to is a dreadful truth, known only to very few, that being that our legal system is the Monte Carlo of justice!”

Carsten stared at him dumbly; then he gave a little bow and left the office. He had not understood his employer’s cryptic farewell remark but had not had the necessary courage to ask him to elaborate upon it. Several times, during the period that followed, he almost brought himself to ask, but still did not dare to; and then, one day, Fitz died in his office, sitting in his office chair, and suddenly it was too late.

That same year Carsten was made a counsel to the Supreme Court, the last occasion on which this ostentatious title was conferred. Carsten had applied for this only because he knew it was what Fitz had wanted; for his own part he was not greatly interested in this or in any other title, and if you were to ask me, “So what was he interested in, then?” the only answer I can safely give is “Work.”

He was the perfect counsel—well, of course he was perfect, since the courtroom proceedings, then as now, constituted a dance; a strict and unvarying sequence of steps that his whole life had been geared toward learning. He was the consummate trial lawyer. With manic and unfailing energy he could prepare his prosecutions and defenses in minutest detail and then wait, with infinite patience, for his turn to come. When it did, he would stand up and start to speak in beautiful, faultless Danish while pacing back and forth across the floor, knowing that he was following this theater’s predetermined plot and making use of whatever modest room for improvisation it afforded—to which end he employed his good looks and his charm and his courtesy and the weight of that civilization which he felt backed him up and gave him cause to hold his head high.

Right from the start he acted for the big companies. It was he who won Faxe Limestone Quarries’ creditable case against the state, and the big trademark suits brought by the American Coca-Cola Company, prior to and during its infiltration of the Danish market. He was also lawyer to the Wealthy—with his schooled discretion and politeness and personal modesty he was better qualified than anyone else to take care of the Really Rich Danes who, their enormous fortunes notwithstanding, were the most delicate of plants where money was concerned, willingly pursuing a lawsuit for years to force some little retailer to take back a pair of shoes and then, after losing their case, needing a diplomat as charming as Carsten to dissolve the glue that kept their small change stuck to the linings of their pockets.

Like Fitz, Carsten was family lawyer to the old aristocracy. For the money and—more often—for the prestige and, not infrequently, out of sympathy, he administered the dwindling revenues derived from exploitation in a distant past for old people who had been born and brought up like the Count’s children at Mørkhøj and hence had never learned to look after themselves. Now they sat in empty, debt-ridden, unheated manor houses the length and breadth of Denmark, staring at telephones that they could not figure out how to use because the operators had been replaced by automatic switchboards and the thought of dialing six numbers left them baffled.

The world showered honors on Carsten. He was given the most prestigious cases, was elected to the last of those boards to which he did not already belong, and was mentioned in the press. He was still only in his thirties, and seemed to harbor no doubts, and there was something totally
natural
about his social acceleration. He was well dressed without having to work at it, athletic without training, suntanned without ever seeing the light of day, relaxed although he never took a vacation now, and always, always in command of the situation.

And of course, once again, he became a symbol. His manner was proof that old-fashioned integrity and industry and rectitude could be combined with modern business techniques and modern-day society. In the courtroom the judges were hard put to it to conceal their emotions, and at board meetings hardened company directors and business executives and
éminences grises
and Scrooges regarded him with brimming eyes, and now and again a tear was shed. When Carsten really went to town, when he actually stood up and unfurled his eloquence like a garland and started pacing back and forth across the floor, the old money men would suddenly feel their crusts starting to crack, as the young lawyer unraveled the most complex situation for them, or devised a plan of action that would give one of the labor unions a bloody nose. Then, all at once, they would feel their emotions running away with them, because, they thought, this kid’s a golden boy, he’s a boy wonder, just the kind of young lion that is needed; he’s the guiding star, our insurance policy, he’s the plug in the hole, they thought and blew their emotions into their handkerchiefs. Then Carsten sat down and the meeting could continue in all serenity, now that all doubt had been erased. When the twins were a couple of years old he bought the piece of ground next to Amalie’s villa on Strand Drive and had a big house built of yellow brick. And, with this, the road to the future should have been clear.

Maria falls into line with these developments quite admirably. She has to stop working because she refuses to let anyone else look after the twins; obviously, they could have had four or five nannies looking after them, or been placed in a luxury-level nursery school, but that is quite out of the question. Maria wants to keep the children with her at all times, and since no employer is going to accept that, she has to give up working and stay at home. Although the fact that she never really comes to look upon Strand Drive as “home” proves to be one of the family’s little problems, and she refuses to acquire a driver’s license for the little Mercedes two-seater that Carsten has bought for her, and she will not have servants, she intends to look after this house—which she does not particularly like—herself. Carsten tries to convince her, to no avail—and this obviously has something to do with Maria’s upbringing; she is very, very reluctant to take orders; somewhere in the house, on the back of a door, her police helmet still hangs, and even though Maria never puts it on now, it still acts as a reminder of something.

Nor does anyone ever succeed in making her truly
socially acceptable.
Amalie did try, but after her first attempt, many years before, she had resigned herself to an I’m-lying-in-wait-armed-to-the-teeth attitude toward her daughter-in-law, an attitude that caved in on only a handful of occasions—as, for example, with the birth of the twins. But other people also try to turn Maria into Mrs. Mahogany, wife of the counsel to the Supreme Court, Carsten among them—or at least he makes a few feeble attempts, and on one single, solitary occasion he does manage to coax her into attending a society function, for the first and last time. It is a dinner with roast pheasant and gateau from La Glâce and everyone talking about this wonderful game of golf until Maria, clutching at a fragile straw, leans toward her dinner partner and asks, with a glint in her eye, “And do you play golf, too?” Unfortunately, the man seated next to her is Kristian Mogensen, later to become such a celebrated lawyer. At this point he is young and up-and-coming and he says, “No, my dear lady, not yet.” And so Maria stands up, with a twin on each arm, and then she starts to cry and screams across the table at Carsten, “Why the hell did I have to come here and who are all these boneheads, they talk just like machines, well, we’re off, the twins and I are leaving, and you can stay here and enjoy yourself with your floozies and your gateau and on the way home I’m gonna tramp right across that bloody golf course, so there!” And Maria makes her exit.

Carsten never again tries to take her into society, and the episode is soon forgotten because things are happening fast for the family during these years; this unfortunate little incident is put behind them just like Maria’s upbringing and the war and Carsten’s periodic bouts of forgetfulness and Amalie’s anxiety and the seedier parts of Copenhagen, and Colonel Lunding—and now the road ahead does seem to be clear.

One January day Carsten received a visit. It was a Sunday and he was alone in his chambers on Sankt Annœ Square. He was sitting writing, and around him everything was very still—well, of course, everyone else took Sundays off, but Carsten was covering sheet after sheet of yellow legal paper with his individual, speedy, legible, and somehow attractive and arresting hand. He had had a very busy week, with court sittings and negotiations every day; and the settling, at long last, of the estate of the big ersatz-coffee merchant who had, at one time, taken over Carl Laurids’s factories; and the winding up of some big property deals in which Burmeister & Wain and the state and the Danish Sugar Refineries had swapped around the ownership of half of Christianshavn at their discretion and under Carsten’s guidance. Throughout this week he had managed to grab no more than a few hours’ sleep, and those he had taken while waiting to be called, having long since learned how to sleep standing up with his eyes open and an attentive expression on his face and having also learned to awake from this uncanny sleep—of which only he was aware—totally alert. During this week, when night and day had run together into one, he had seen his wife and children only once, and that had been in court, during the processing of one of those small cases that went hand in hand with the big ones—a damages suit involving a job applicant who had, during an interview for a job, insulted the president of the company and then knocked him down. In a way, such a case was beneath Carsten’s dignity, but he considered it an honor to conduct it and to win it, since, when we protect one company’s or one individual’s legal interests, he said, we are protecting all of them, and we pursue it to the hilt. By this time he had been working nonstop for five days in a row, and still he was smooth-shaven and neatly pressed and in top form. Not until just before the pronouncing of sentence, when the case was as good as closed, did it become obvious that he had been living on nothing but black coffee and willpower. Only then, when the defendant leaned forward and said, “Damn! You look awful, sweetheart,” did he realize that it was Maria and the twins who were sitting there, because once again Maria had gone looking for work with a child on each arm, and had, once again, been rejected.

Such an experience would have moved most other people to wonder whether a prolonged coffee-only diet provides the right kind of sustenance, and whether once a week in the courtroom is the right time and the right way to see one’s family, but not Carsten. Sitting there on that Sunday, in the empty building, planning for the coming week, which would be even more full and ambitious than the previous one, he felt well content with what he had achieved. You have done your duty, and more, he said to himself, not without a certain satisfaction.

He had reached the point where going into his own private little dressing room, taking a shower, and putting on a clean shirt and a fresh silk tie did not help him, because he still felt so dirty; and even though he had shaved very thoroughly, the stubble still showed blackly through the transparent skin of his face, and he thought: I’d better go home now.

It was then that he received his visit. Not from any person, but from his own store of memories, which came pouring in through the double doors to show that they, like Carsten, knew nothing of days off. First to appear was this little episode: there had been a minor case in the court, a trivial matter, a case conducted for the ersatz-coffee manufacturer’s daughter, one of Denmark’s richest women, who owned half of Town Hall Square. The other party was a nanny. The case boiled down to a matter of a few hundred kroner and, said the ersatz-coffee manufacturer’s daughter,
the principle of the thing.
“I
won’t
pay,” she had said to Carsten when he tried to dissuade her, it being clear that this paltry amount was the nanny’s obvious due. “We are pursuing this suit on grounds of principle,” she had insisted, and Carsten had pursued it; and even though he pursued it in bottom gear, knowing that they ought to lose the case, he won it anyway.