The History of Danish Dreams: A Novel (33 page)

Amalie seems to have slipped pliantly into this circle of women friends; she seems to have assumed this lifestyle as though it had always been hers. The only thing that set her apart was the easygoing manner in which she accepted everything. Amalie’s friends were ambitious. Their fathers’ and their husbands’ fortunes might have raised them beyond every form of normal, everyday life, and above every kind of financial consideration, but there was scarcely one of them who did not drag around some sort of invisible trunk stuffed with grinding, all-consuming ambition. Raised as they were in the belief that it was unfeminine to work for money, all these ladies from big white houses were passionately absorbed in developing their personalities; in
making
something of themselves; in making their own and their family’s mark on the world. Most of us recognize this dream from our own experience—at least, I do—but for these women in and around Strand Drive in the Copenhagen of the 1920s it takes on a tragic dimension. Not infrequently it pushed them beyond the limits of normal behavior and regard for their own safety, sending them chasing off to Africa to run already insolvent coffee plantations, or spurring them to join the Sudan Mission, or to leave husband and children and travel to Paris to become writers or sculptors—all without ever being able to satisfy the demands they made on themselves.

But not Amalie. At which one might wonder, just a little—at least, I do—because if anyone is predisposed to such ambition it is Amalie, who suffered throughout her adolescence in order to demonstrate her own exceptional worth. But for some reason or other during these years she was very, very content. Whatever she undertook was done with grace, courtesy, and a smile and yet at the same time with the gentle air of distraction that had hung around her since her wedding and that left her only in certain specific situations—to which we shall return. In photographs from those years she bears a quite striking resemblance to the paintings on the walls in her own home. With her loose-fitting dresses and flowing tresses she is like a Raphael angel. Her hands seem flaccid and rather dejected and not at all capable of taking a firm grip on anything, let alone anything as starkly substantial as Carl Laurids must have been. The photographs have almost all been taken in profile, as though she did not want to meet other people face on. She is always gazing upon something or other, dreamy-eyed, in the manner of those contemporary Danish paintings of anemic women in churchyards in southern Europe; always painted against a backdrop of pine trees and gravestones, well into the afternoon at a point when even the light seems filled with a longing for something unattainable.

During these years Amalie’s head was often in the clouds; the photographs do not lie, and this dreamy abstractedness was part of her makeup. On the long afternoons when the house seemed deserted, she could sit for hours in the garden. On such days, pictures of her childhood in Rudkøbing would appear to her and she would see them blend with her present surroundings into a quivering confirmation of the fact that she had always been one of the chosen ones and that, at long last, she had been proved right.

When Carl Laurids came home from work, Amalie was usually there. But he never came upon her right away. He had to pass from room to room searching, in the white light which, owing to the large windows and diaphanous curtains and the proximity of the sea, always pervaded these rooms, regardless of the season. Usually he was so desperate to see her that he simply slipped off his overcoat, dropped his cane, and, still in his hat and boots, began his search. He called her, he shouted, “Daddy’s sweetheart,” and “Where’s my little wife?” and “Yoo-hoo,” in a voice not merely hoarse with impatience but also breathless, because every single day, when he left the office in Rosengården, he started to fear that she would have left him. And this fear drove him to push the limousine to the limit along Strand Drive, to race up the stairs of the house—and not until he was inside did he force himself to slow down.

He always found her where least expected, on a landing, or in an alcove, or in a room that had been closed up, or on a bench in a far corner of the garden. She always looked at him in faint surprise, as if to say “Is that really you, Carl Laurids? How funny.” This reception never failed to have its effect. Even though it was a ritual which, in this aspect of their marriage, was as recurrent a feature as the white light and mealtimes, Amalie never once failed to provoke Carl Laurids with her apparent indifference. Disappointment having taken the wind out of his sails, he would stand there, unable so much as to kiss her forehead; and by the time he had regained his composure she was already moving away from him, whispering, almost to herself, “Actually I’m quite tired; it’s been a terribly long day.” Carl Laurids would follow her, although he dared not run, perhaps because she said, “I really do have a beastly headache, but tell me about your day anyway.” He cannot answer her, his mouth is dry from the emotions that assail him, and so instead, slowly, he follows Amalie, who has suddenly vanished, only to appear behind a pillar or a dumbwaiter or calling to him from the floor above—but always keeping a wall or a flower arrangement or a balustrade between herself and him. On these afternoons they are like actors privately rehearsing an assignation scene, and this image is perhaps one part of the truth. As this cruel game of peekaboo progresses, Amalie is possessed by an almost pantherlike presence, and Carl Laurids by increasing desperation—until, somewhere, he catches up with her. As a rule, a struggle now ensues, in the course of which Carl Laurids is always taken aback by the discovery that his wife’s delicate constitution and all her gaucherie are merely affectations disguising a strength as great as his own. For what seems to Carl Laurids an interminable length of time they reel around the vast rooms, with the mirrors multiplying their clinches, transporting them to other rooms, other floors, in a series of reflected pictures that seem to embrace the entire house. And it is clear from these pictures that if Carl Laurids finally manages to rip the black silk underwear to shreds, it is only because, suddenly, at this stage, Amalie is on his side and herself strips off the fabric. Then she digs her teeth into him, and they sink to the floor and roll out of range of the mirrors.

The relief afforded to Carl Laurids by their lovemaking was very, very short-lived. By the time he came to, Amalie had risen, adjusted her clothes, and already taken herself off, so that he had to go looking for her. And by the time he found her, her face had already clammed up again, grown distant and brittle. This filled him with rage—white-hot but impotent. Meekly he had to make a tour of the rose beds with her, or drink tea with her while a voice within him screamed that only a moment ago they had been rolling around on the floor, dammit; a moment ago she had lost all self-control and clawed him to her. And now … what the devil had become of it all, what had become of her voracity … here, in the conservatory, where once again she resembled a nun, a schoolgirl? Once again she had abandoned him to memories he found himself struggling to credit, memories that compelled him, the next day and the next again, to reenact dreamlike chase scenes from which he woke alone, sprawled on the parquet floor with his trousers around his ankles, robbed of that sense of being in control which he had managed to sustain from first thing in the morning until this agonizing moment.

Amalie did not help him. For a while, in the early days, he had tried to make her acknowledge her desires, to no avail. Without ever losing her temper, she would skirt the subject, avoid answering, feel unwell, and say, “Carl, I honestly don’t think this is something we can discuss; please don’t refer to it again.” Only once did he succeed in eliciting some sort of response. It happened one afternoon after they had made love on the big landing between the ground and second floors, when Carl woke up feeling more alone than ever before. He had come across Amalie sitting on a sofa, petting Dodo, her fawn-colored greyhound, with a tenderness that made him see red with jealousy. Unable to control himself, he kicked the dog away, hauled Amalie off the sofa, and yelled at her, “Do you realize you grunt like a pig when we do it!” Without a moment’s hesitation, Amalie dealt him a blow that burst his left eardrum and sent him flying into the grand piano. Then she left the room, leaving Carl Laurids smiling sheepishly, because this very haze of pain in which he found himself simply confirmed that he was right.

But his triumph was short-lived, since Amalie never again lost her temper. From then on, she was prepared, both for his direct demands and for the veiled and unexpected effronteries by which he tried to get her to talk about sex.

For the first time, in his marriage to Amalie, Carl Laurids was forced to bide his time. Before this, he had found that he could always have his way, and that he could have it here and now, without delay. That the world was too slow and fuddled and full of woolly-headed objections made it possible for a young person such as himself to cut right through to the heart of the matter and get exactly what he was after; and the realization of this fact had turned into a rash and dangerous impatience. If, as often happened, he felt hungry between the meals served so punctually by Gladys, then he expected to be fed, on the double; he should just have to snap his fingers for someone to appear, to whom Carl Laurids would say, “I’d like lobster in mayonnaise, or asparagus with creamed butter, or strawberries and cream, or that porridge with cracklings that I used to have as a boy. Get it for me and make sure that it tastes just the way it did when my mother made it.” Or he would suddenly take a notion to go riding and demand that his horse be saddled and outside the door in five minutes—“Five minutes!” he would yell—even though the horses were stabled over at Mattson’s and it would take at least two hours to fetch them. Or else he insisted on going sailing—“Have the boat taken out of the boathouse and rigged up, I’ll be down in fifteen minutes,” he would say, even though he knew that it would take much longer, and twenty minutes later he had changed his mind and forgotten all about it. If, that is, he did not stride down to the little jetty he had had built out from the house’s private beach and bawl, “What the hell are you doing, holding some sort of Bolshevik meeting, what the devil do you think I pay you for?” He was incapable of waiting; the one big discovery he had made at Mørkhøj had been precisely this: that there was absolutely no reason why one should not reach out and grab whatever one wanted, then and there. Now, however, Amalie was forcing him to forgo.

There were days when she would not see him at all; when she took to her bed and kept the door of her bedroom locked, and would not even come down to meals but left him to sit alone, first seething with rage, then alternately concerned for her health and speechless with mortification, until wolf-like restlessness drove him from the house. She usually put in an appearance eventually—although, often as not, in the guise of a convalescent, complete with ice packs, a feeble voice, and a deathly pallor that Carl Laurids suspected of being the work of a powder puff. During such spells he did not dare to lay a finger on her. While terrified that she would die in his arms of a frailty he did not actually believe in, he was also terrified of the strength he always sensed in her, even when she brought him close to tears by describing her ailments and insisting that she was dying.

Toward the end of such spells of sexual starvation it seemed to Carl Laurids that wherever he turned, he saw nothing but pictures of Madonnas and religion and chamber music and Dodo the sexless greyhound and Amalie’s pale face and unwelcoming body under the orthopedic corset she never wore except at these times. And then he felt as though the world were an insipid stage set closing in around him.

At such moments he occasionally wished that he could have visited a brothel, or found solace in alcohol, or turned to one of the women from his former life. But it was impossible; that way was now closed to Carl Laurids. Ever since the moment in the balloon when Amalie turned her face away from him he had had no peace, not even in his dreams: Amalie’s image was immediately superimposed upon every erotic fantasy, even more so during those periods when she held him at bay.

At such times he was visited by a jealousy which, in brief, hideous glimpses, showed him, as it shows us, that there were still some factors in his life and in his own character that had not been brought under control. At such moments he feared she kept him at arm’s length because she had taken a lover; so he had her followed for weeks by four discreet, smartly dressed gentlemen usually employed by him to take care of difficult debt-collection cases. Their reports revealed nothing except that there were no men in Amalie’s life besides Carl Laurids—and that, in a sense, was the worst thing they could have disclosed, since now there was no lover for him to kill. Then he turned his morbid suspicions upon Amalie’s mental activities. She dreams of someone else, he thought; she’s living in a fantasy world of unspeakable excesses—and he had peepholes bored in the walls of her bedroom so that he could spy on her features while she slept and, if possible, intercept snatches of whatever she might say in her sleep. He saw nothing except her sleep-smoothed Madonna face and heard nothing except her slow, regular breathing, which made him grind his teeth in fury and desire, remembering as he did how rapid and urgent her breathing could become when they were together.

Having drilled a hole through to her bathroom that allowed him to spy on her nakedness, he came as close as he ever would to going mad. The general view held by the upper-class circles of his day was that women had no sex drive to speak of—this he knew. And until now he had filed away this scientific truth as just another illustration of the dunghill of misapprehension and humbug upon which society reposed and which made it so easy for him to forge ahead. With his eye to the peephole, he now reconsidered this assertion. Eyes pinned on Amalie as she passed a large sponge over her naked limbs, he began to doubt his own past. In desperation, he attempted to reassess his sexual experiences, from the forbidden couplings with Miss Clarizza on the white grand piano to his lonely awakening on the parquet floor. Maybe those women never really felt like it, he thought, maybe they only did it for my sake, and didn’t get nearly so much pleasure from it as I did, and now she’s washing between her legs. And it all became too much for him and he had to turn away.