The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (28 page)

That night, after she had heard their prayers, Amalie did not fall asleep. Wide awake and alert, she lay there in the dark, between her two sisters and their deep, contented breathing, and allowed the sense of a wasted life to course through her body. Around daybreak her patience deserted her. She got out of bed without making a sound, dressed, and climbed up to the street, from where she could see the odd star glinting above the rooftops. Then she heard a noise in the distance, a heavy rumbling, and out of the gloom trundled a vehicle—a covered wooden cart, drawn by four scraggy horses. Four men accompanied this vehicle—four old-timers—and the entire spectacle was enveloped in a prehistoric stench. The cart pulled up outside the gateway of the building and, without so much as a look at Amalie, three of the men disappeared into the courtyard. They reappeared carrying what looked to Amalie like dark bundles, and it suddenly struck her that they might be robbers, but even as she thought this she knew it was not the case. She stole a little closer to one of the men, and when, just at that moment, she saw something fall from his bundle, something that hit the pavement, she called out, “You dropped something.” The man inclined his face toward her and said, “You can keep it”; and as he did so, Amalie saw that this was her great-grandfather, the Old Lady’s father, the nightman, whom she had never met; and she saw that the burdens the three men toted were, in fact, the building’s latrine buckets. Thanks to this godforsaken part of Copenhagen being one of the few still not provided with sewers—progress having passed it by—their night soil was being collected by an apparition to whom she was related.

Prompted by this encounter, Amalie went in search of Christoffer. He was not in his bed, but she found him in the printshop. He was sitting at a round table, in the narrow circle of light thrown by an electric bulb with a lacquered-paper shade, surrounded by a dense darkness that hid the rest of the room. On one of the first days after they had moved in, Amalie had walked farther and farther into this darkness until the lamp was just a bright spot in the distance, and had then turned back because, instead of walls, she had come upon an infinite space filled with piles of books and the echoes of Christoffer’s anecdotes, and permeated by the dry, acrid scent of paper. Now she caught her father’s eye. “We’re not all cut from the same cloth,” she began, and went on to explain her point of view to her father. She was so sure that he was on her side, that he supported her and would agree with her that their family—or at any rate she and he—was surrounded, here, by underdogs and nonentities, who encircled them like the bars of a prison cell, hindering the development of their own brilliant personalities. And at the same time, these creatures blocked their view of the real people, those burning, uncontrollably crude souls whom she and he, Amalie and Christoffer, would have understood; and who would have understood them, if only they had been able to find one another in this desert of mediocrity that could not even boast a sewer.

Once again, I feel that Christoffer ought to have quashed his daughter’s overblown notions, but he did not, even though he found the idea of complaining utterly absurd. Because, here, in this circle of light, beside the little printing press, Christoffer was content, very content, more content than he had ever been before. So he merely waggled his head as an avowal of his love for Amalie, who was describing to him—Papa—the true state of affairs, which, as she saw it, was that she, who had been born to float, had been cooped up between houses which, with every day that passed, crowded closer together around streets populated by people so common that—and at this point the little girl swore for the first time—it might not be such a bad idea to hang the whole damn lot. All these people ever thought about was eating their fill, stuffing their guts with produce from the butchers’ shops that made the whole area stink of pork crackling. These people believed—and at this point the little girl swore for the second time—that they could damn well guzzle their way into paradise, or down to hell; or else they were so stingy that they believed they could save their way to it, or fight their way out and up by washing other people’s clothes behind windows that were so covered with dust and grime that she, Amalie, could not even see her reflection in them. These people hardly knew what a lavatory was; these people—and at this point she swore for the third time—had nothing but a damn bucket, a bucket, a bucket that had to be emptied by her great-grandfather.

Christoffer regarded his daughter vacantly. He had never understood women and it had never occurred to him that his children might harbor secret hopes. So now, as his youngest daughter presented him with hers, he stared at them, unable to fathom them. That anyone might consider herself to be a cut above her neighbors was beyond him. All his life he had felt that he was inferior to everyone else, and this feeling had stayed with him until those last hectic months when he had edited the
Langeland Times,
and then it had been replaced by the certainty that he had found his niche. All he had grasped was that his daughter had come across the night-soil cart and that this had scared her. He was in a daze—because he had lost all sense of time and had worked the long night through—and the only thing that occurred to him was a song from his youth, which he now proceeded to sing, in a gentle, cracked voice, like an adult lulling a child to sleep:

“The clock strikes ten and from afar

Comes a rumbling that gives you the jitters.

It could be thunder, it could be a war

Or just a good dose of the skitters.

Here it comes, it’s drawing near

Out of the night; what have we here?

Why! There you have them, clear as clear,

Our trusty chums the old nightmen!”

For a moment, Amalie stared at her father, and in that moment she made her final decision; in that moment all contact was severed and this little girl made the decision which was, for someone of her age, such an unreasonable one: that when it came to finding forests, animals, and worldwide devotion, you had to do it alone.

The next day, Amalie stopped eating. She threw away her school lunch bag, and during the evening meal she watched, intent but passive, as Christoffer Teander and Gumma and her two sisters ate fried salt pork with parsley sauce. The days went on, and still she did not eat a thing. Every morning she made up the sandwiches for her lunch, and then gave them away at school, in order to watch with interest as her classmates polished them off. And every evening she sat at the dinner table, silent and impassive, while her family ate.

Initially, people around her were perturbed. Gumma peered into her eyes and far down into her throat, looking for signs of illness, and at school the teachers approached her desk and felt her forehead, but after a while they left her alone. There was no denying that she grew thinner and thinner, but she was as conscientious as ever and much sweeter and more pleasant. Besides, fasting was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. So the schoolteachers were sure that she ate at home, while Gumma comforted herself with the thought that at least she ate her lunch at school.

Actually, what had happened was that Amalie had decided to starve her way through adolescence. And even though she feels that she is entirely alone, she thereby falls into the same category as a number of other Danes, a category composed mainly of women, and most particularly of young girls who dream that the best way of demonstrating their individuality is to put their skeletons on display. Offhand, this may seem like a crazy idea—I mean, if there is one thing we all have in common it is our bones, and no two things are more alike than a couple of walking skeletons. But on closer inspection, the attraction in starving oneself becomes easier to understand; closer inspection reveals that the starveling is in fact rewarded with a new inner plumpness, and that is what happened to Amalie. After a few days she was overwhelmed by a giddy weightlessness, like an intoxicant that sharpened her hearing and amplified the distant music that had rung in her ears since childhood. And gradually, as the weeks went by, the world around her grew a little vague. Her inner landscapes, on the other hand, grew more and more distinct until finally, one day, after three months of total fasting, when she was on her way to school, they stood out quite clearly. It happened just as Amalie stopped outside a shop—I do not know which one—and just as the clouds were dispersed by the sun of a season that is not clear in my mind because there was a vagueness to the seasons in that part of town, and because Amalie had lost all sense of the weather. Thus the only thing that registered with her was that the sun could now penetrate her closed eyelids and disturb her visions. She lifted her hand up to shade her eyes, and when the sun shone right through the palm of her hand, making her bones stand out like sharply etched silhouettes on one of those modern X-ray pictures, she realized that she was now at death’s door.

She is standing on an edge, the edge before the void, and as she now walks on, mechanically, toward school she is still teetering on the brink of the precipice, unable to decide. She is tempted by that enticing music—it is stronger than ever now—but at the same time it gladdens her to walk like this, lost in her exclusive, blossoming giddiness. And when, a few minutes later, she makes her move, it is back toward life that she turns—with just the shortest, the daintiest of steps—the credit for which must go to the piece of licorice root she most graciously accepts from a girl who sits next to her in class. This girl, whose name she has never bothered to discover, runs a little business in the form of a dish of sugared water in which, for a small fee, she would restore pieces of chewed licorice to their former power and glory. Hence it is this tiny drop of sugared water that for a while brings Amalie Teander back to the classroom, the sun, and life with the rest of us.

From then on, and through the years that follow, she evolves into an artist, a starvation artist. When people in the outside world, or Gumma, or her sisters offer her anything, especially anything to eat, she will as a rule, and quite decidedly, say no, no thank you, I don’t feel like it, take it away. But now and again she will say yes, a very tiny yes. By dint of this alternation between a large number of refusals and a very few acceptances she learns to play upon her body as a musician plays upon his instrument or, to give a more exact representation of her particular megalomania, as a conductor plays upon his orchestra. She becomes an artist who can advance upon death by starvation in little leaps, only at the last minute to backtrack toward life by means of a hard candy or a piece of fruit or just a cup of tea with lemon.

On two occasions during these years, the district medical officer visited the school to examine the girls. Amalie was the first to be seen, since their names were called according to their ranking in class: in other words, by their cleverness. Amalie’s position at the head of her class had never been threatened, partly because she was a quick learner and partly because her teachers interpreted her giddy air of distraction as a sign of quiet intelligence. Consequently, both they and her classmates treated her with a respect and a consideration that were not without a trace of fear, all of which suited Amalie perfectly, when she was in a fit state to perceive it. When the doctor put his stethoscope to her chest and heard her bones grating against each other at the joints, he had her admitted to the hospital. In a white hospital room Amalie’s hallucinations merged with reality, to the point where she believed that the room, the bed, and the two nurses were all a part of her own true paradise. As a reward for their efforts she allowed them to talk her into eating more than she normally did, until her weight increase caused them to lose interest in her. Then she left the hospital. Some years later, when the doctor wanted to admit her again, she said no—a pure and simple no—with the same authority as that with which she declined food. The doctor did not dare to argue with her. Instead he explained, in a long letter to Christoffer Ludwig, that from a professional standpoint his daughter was as good as dead. He made the mistake of giving the letter to Amalie herself to take home. That same afternoon she threw the letter away because she was in the middle of an interesting experiment and did not wish to be disturbed. This experiment consisted of an investigation into whether it was possible to survive on half a cup of strong black coffee per day. She also threw it away because it predicted that her growth would be stunted and her development inhibited. And so we and Amalie are the only ones ever to learn its content.

The doctor was proved wrong. No matter how absurd it may sound, Amalie’s physical development followed its natural course. She grew to normal height, and going by what happened later, there is reason to believe that if she had not been so alarmingly emaciated, so atrociously thin, she would have looked just like any young girl. Instead she resembled a walking scarecrow with eyes that glowed, deep in their sockets, like carbon arc lamps. At school she was continually having to shift position in her chair because she did not sit, as the others did, on muscle and fat, but right on her protruding bones. Nevertheless she grew at the same rate as other girls of her age, and never, not once, did she succumb to pneumonia or tuberculosis or any of malnutrition’s other faithful companions in the Copenhagen of the early twentieth century. And contrary to all that is reasonable, and in spite of the doctor’s professional standpoint, her first menstrual period also arrived. So copiously did she bleed that it all but killed her—in toying with her own health, she had not foreseen this eventuality. It came at a time when she really could not afford to relinquish anything at all, and certainly not this sudden, unexpected trickle of blood. She told no one about it but stanched it with a cotton rag and accounted for it, to herself, by seeing it as a parallel to Christ’s tears of blood in the garden of Gethsemane.

If one asks oneself, as I have so often done, why her family did not somehow try to get through to her, then the best answer I can give is that they were suffering from that Danish family syndrome which we all fear: to be, at one and the same time, so close to one another, and yet so far apart, that there is no possibility of helping. Amalie had finally distanced herself from Gumma and from her sisters—against whose puppy fat and, later, mature bodies she usually warmed her chilly, fleshless frame at night—and she had, in a sense, despaired of her father. In order not to founder on her tremendous disappointment over his failure to transform her into Cleopatra or a revolutionary queen or at least into a dazzling success, and over his failure to bring her to a temple or a palace or the barricades—not even to a big white villa on Strand Drive—she had placed him in a drawer in that strange highboy where so many of us hide our dreams. Packed away with him in this drawer were the images of that unfortunate citizen, the total failure, who is neither a proper businessman nor a proper father, nor yet a proper man. Instead he is something of a wimp, a weed, of whom the best that can be said is that he is kind to animals and always wraps up warmly. Such a way of perceiving another human being is always risky; bottom-drawer perceptions are always risky, and in Christoffer Ludwig’s case they did not go nearly far enough, because Amalie had, thereby, overlooked her father’s powerful imagination, his mastery of time, and his great love of the world—all attributes that she, in her fit of pique, had forgotten and was no longer capable of recognizing. Sometimes on sleepless nights she relived their brief collaboration in Rudkøbing. Once again she would see him hunched over his articles or the printing press, or standing beside the big desk in the act of reading his proposal aloud to the Old Lady. Sometimes, when this happened, Amalie would get up and walk across the cold floors and into Christoffer’s bedroom to look at her father. But she always went back to bed deeply disappointed, convinced that her memory must be playing tricks on her, because—lying there in the wan light from the street in his white nightshirt, and with his cat, Mussovsky, spread in slumber across his chest—Christoffer looked like nothing at all. In sleep his features were so slack that to Amalie he looked just like a defenseless baby, and in them she could read nothing other than the grounds for her own disillusionment.